Critical Pet Studies

This book defines and argues for a Critical Pet Studies that challenges conventional narratives about human-pet relationships. Bringing together critical theoretical understandings of human-pet relationships and empirical research on them, this book investigates three sites of inquiry: the construction of animals-as-pet-commodities, multispecies cohabitation, and multispecies resistance. This sociological analysis of human-pet entanglements firmly situates them in a broader structural context that enables the categorisation of animals as ‘Pet’.

Drawing on over 60 qualitative interviews with 'owners' and stakeholders involved in housing and supporting pet-owning humans, and species-inclusive observation, the author demonstrates that unequal power relations become evident when nonhuman animals are centred in research that concerns them. Committed to the activist-scholarship agenda, this book offers a fruitful contribution to multispecies scholarship and human animal studies more broadly. It moves beyond previously depoliticised and human-centric explorations of human-pet relations, and challenges the reader to re-imagine companionship with other animals.