Animals at Work: Identity, politics and culture in work with animals [ebook ed.] 9004249338, 9789004249332

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Animals at Work

Human-Animal Studies Series Editor

Kenneth Shapiro

Animals & Society Institute, USA Editorial Board

Ralph Acampora

Hofstra University, USA

Clifton Flynn

University of South Carolina, USA

Hilda Kean

Ruskin College, Oxford, UK

Randy Malamud

Georgia State University, USA

Gail Melson

Purdue University, USA

VOLUME 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/has

Animals at Work Identity, politics and culture in work with animals By

Lindsay Hamilton Nik Taylor

Leiden • boston 2013

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4226 ISBN 978-90-04-23582-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24933-2 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... To the Reader ....................................................................................................

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Part One

Understanding Human-Animal Interactions Chapter One Humans and Other Animals ...........................................

3

Chapter Two Why Work with Animals? ...............................................

15

Part Two

Boundaries, Partitions and Distinctions Chapter Three Farm Animal, Vets and the Transformation of  ‘Muck’ .............................................................................................................

37

Chapter Four Slaughter Workers and the Making of Meat ............

63

Part Three

Getting Close to Animals Chapter Five Shelter Workers and the Construction of ‘Animal  Personhood’ ..................................................................................................

91

Chapter Six Wildlife Presenters, Performance and the Animal  ‘Actor’ .............................................................................................................. 113 Chapter Seven Small Animal Vets and the Crafting of  Intimacy ......................................................................................................... 139

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contents Part Four

Reflections Chapter Eight Ethnography and Animals ............................................ 165 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 181 Index .................................................................................................................... 193

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank all the participants that took part in the fieldwork and general qualitative research that led to this book. They would also like to thank the staff at Keele Management School and Flinders University for their support and interest in this research project and its applications to contemporary research and practice. In personal terms, Lindsay Hamilton would like to extend her thanks to Professors Mihaela Kelemen (Keele University), Paul Willis (Princeton University) and Research Fellow, Dr Barry Schofield (Keele University) for their extensive comments and insights into earlier versions of (several) of this book’s chapters. She would also like to extend thanks to Professor Darren McCabe (Lancaster) for his guidance on matters of writing and reading, and for sharing his expertise in the field of Organizational Sociology. Thanks also to the many students at Keele Management School and the Royal Veterinary College, University of London for their interest in the themes and debates that have arisen in the course of producing this book and for their keen and intelligent feedback. Lindsay owes deep personal gratitude to her husband James for his tireless energy, intellectual enthusiasm and patience during the writing of this book. Nik Taylor would like to thank Dr Tania Signal (CQUniversity) for being a sounding board for ideas, as well as being willing to have research they have conducted together make its way into this book. As always, Nik extends deepest thanks to the furry folk in her life who help maintain her interest in all things non-human animal and make it all worthwhile.

TO THE READER This book is about animals and the people who work with them. It is a book based largely on ethnographic data drawn from numerous places where humans interact with animals in their daily lives and consider it to be work. It is also a book about identity, or more specifically, how humans in the process of working with animals forge their own identities and those of the animals that they interact with. There is no assumption of fixed, static identity here—on behalf of the humans or the animals. In contrast there is a central argument throughout this book that identities are, in fact, fluid and intermittent; created by the very contexts that they are performed in. More about this later. Suffice to say here that we are interested in the contextual and performative nature of identities, human and animal alike. First, a quick note on terminology. We are well aware that there is a power imbalance in many (if not all) relationships between human and other animals and that this is reflected in the language we use to describe both ourselves and animal ‘others’. However, for the sake of simplicity we often refer to (non-human) ‘animals’ as a category, and we often talk of ‘pets’ instead of companion animals. Likewise, we also switch between internationally recognizable terms such as animal ‘shelter’ and the more colloquial British word, ‘sanctuary’, ‘veterinarian’ and the more usual British, ‘veterinary surgeon’, ‘slaughterhouse’ and ‘abattoir’ and so on. In the main this is to make the book more accessible to a wide range of readers, especially those who are not familiar with the new developments and arguments of animal studies. For those wishing to locate this book in those studies more rigorously, we recommend starting with Joan Dunayer’s Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Dunayer, 2001) and The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, edited by Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007). Both volumes offer a wealth of historical, philosophical and theoretical context to compliment this book. Why animals? That’s a big question with no easy answer. Both authors have an interest in human-animal relationships and both authors are proponents of ethnographic and qualitative methodologies within the social sciences. Both authors have considerable experience in studying—and indeed working with—those who work with animals on a regular basis

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and the idea for this book came out of that shared experience. We wanted to write about the ‘hows’ of daily life in working with animals, especially how people manage their daily experiences with animals within the context of work, and the ways in which these humans and animals interact in practice. We wanted to assess how the categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are created, maintained and in some cases threatened or questioned. There is no doubt that academic interest in animals is growing. In the last two decades alone we have seen a veritable explosion of humananimal-studies (HAS) courses and scholarship (Shapiro and Demello, 2010). A large section of this work, however, has been quantitative and has occurred with limited samples (for example addressing particular groups and their attitudes to animals). By contrast, ethnographic work on humans and the animals that they interact with is still relatively rare (for exceptions see, for example, Alger and Alger, 2003; Sanders 1993, 1994, 2006; McAllister Groves, 1996; and Wilkie, 2010). The ethnographic work which does exist, however, points to deep and meaningful relationships with animals in certain contexts such as the relationship between police officers and the K9 dogs they work with (Sanders, 2006), or the interactions between humans and the companion animals that share their lives (for example, Irvine, 2004). Other ethnographic work points to the various ways in which humans seek to distance themselves from the animals they work with, such as those who care for laboratory animals (McAllister Groves, 1996) or for farm animals (Wilkie, 2010). These partitions and distinctions set up a whole host of fascinating debates about who ‘we’ as humans are. The one factor common to all of this work, however, is its stress on the complex relationships between humans and other animals. Gone are the beliefs that animals do not matter to humans, to society and to structures and organizations. Instead, in place of these beliefs, is a growing catalogue of work that points to the opposite—to the very importance of animals in individuals’ lives and in the lives of different societies and cultures. For example, twenty years ago Beck and Katcher (1996) pointed out the medical and health benefits to humans who share their lives with companion animals, an idea that has been taken up with gusto, developed and redefined in numerous innovative ways in the intervening two decades. On a more political note, Murray points out how capitalism itself was founded on the back of “hooves, paws and claws”, that is, on the back of largely unrecognized labour by various animal species (Murray, 2011). In short, then, animals do matter—personally, institutionally, historically and socially. This is the subject matter of the current book. We look at how



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animals matter to those who work with them. In particular we address the myriad ways in which humans create their own identities through their interactions with other animals. We also address the ways in which humans create animal identities through that very same interaction and, above all, we focus on the places of designated work and organization where this occurs. In doing so, we refer back to the underlying principle that the symbolic and physical distance between ourselves and other animals is malleable and adjustable. The first two case studies of our book, for example, look at the ways in which humans distance themselves both practically and symbolically from other animals through the adoption of various strategies on the farm and in the slaughterhouse. We ask what processes humans engage in to maintain their sense of ontological superiority; the ways they feel they know what is ‘going on’ when they are at work. Chapter Three’s examination of farm animal veterinarians, for example, discusses the ways in which they conduct their daily routines with animal patients and considers the ubiquitous presence of farmyard ‘muck’ to theorise how, in spite of their apparently ‘dirty work’ with cows, they manage to keep themselves professionally ‘clean’ as surgeons. The vets are particularly expert at inserting a sense of distance between themselves and their patients to remain unpolluted by animal ‘mess’ like faeces and blood, so that while they may spend much of their working life “covered in shit” they still manage to resist the social stigma that accrues to many others working with ‘dirt’, animal bodies and death. These cultural transformations—both of the physical and symbolic biproducts of animal interaction—prompted our investigation of the slaughterhouse in Chapter Four. We felt that for those employed to work there, it would be more difficult to transform and resist the stigma accruing from animal bodily ‘mess’ like blood and bad odours. In this space, workers are engaged in powerful transformations to turn live animals into dead meat. On the production line, the slaughtered remains take the place of living animals and the human workers, although actively involved in the process of killing, are nonetheless able to create a sense of detachment even though they labour within this visceral and bloody environment. It seems that they use that sense of detachment to resist and distance themselves from the taint of death, and indeed the idea that they are working with animals at all. Both vets and slaughter-workers manage their exposure to death and animal ‘mess’ in very different ways, yet both enact and experience a feeling of distance between themselves and animal ‘others’ which means that

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in their own very different experiences of work, they are able to remain ‘unpolluted’ by their contact with ‘blood and guts’. This occurs in rather different ways, however such that vets draw upon their professional, social and educational capital to maintain their own representational—if not physical—purity while slaughterers turn to alternate coping strategies, such as the tacit agreement over various cultural norms and rules, to successfully distance themselves from their work and the animal bodies with which they interact. The way in which these tacit rules operate ensures that they are able to routinize and normalize the process of animal death in such a way that the (assumed) gulf between human and animal becomes embedded; a taken-for-granted reality that is reinforced by various little tasks and repertoires. We theorize how these cultural performances and acts of distancing are done and consider their significance for the way we think of human relations with other animals more broadly. From Chapters Five to Seven, by contrast, we look at a series of different workplaces to illuminate some of the points of symbolic closeness that are enacted when animals and humans come together. In Chapter Five’s discussion of the animal rescue shelter (sanctuary), for example, we notice that taken-for-granted categories of human and non-human are purposefully disassembled by those who work there. Whereas the farm veterinarians and the slaughter-workers insert distance between themselves and other animals, volunteers and employees of the shelter bring animals close to them to enhance the self-esteem and ethical capital of those involved in the work of ‘rescuing’ animals. This chapter takes a close-up view of the shelter, a space where workers and volunteers appear to have quite sophisticated techniques for coping with what often appear to be demeaning duties like clearing up excreta. For them, the presence of ‘unwanted’ or ‘abandoned’ animals provides a symbolic crutch that is particularly important to compensate for the view that others may have of them as poorly paid, low status workers. We contrast this with a further case study in Chapter Six, where we interview wildlife television presenters (i.e. the human celebrities who introduce and narrate wildlife documentaries) to consider how and why media representations of other species are put together in a practical sense. In listening to the presenters, we argue that animal-human divisions are consciously and purposefully manipulated during the filming process. Ultimately, this is a practice whereby wild animals are brought into the human world through the television screen. The technology of the TV screen fosters a sense of intimacy which, intriguingly, need not involve a viewer’s physical closeness to wild animals. But in order to produce that



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experience of closeness, however, TV presenters need to invoke a whole range of dramatic performances, drawing upon their own emotions and feelings about animals in the process. While wildlife presenting may seem glamorous and exciting, then, it also relies upon ‘deep acting’ techniques that can jeopardize the sense of ontological security that other ‘animal experts’ like academics and vets might enjoy in their professional lives. The analysis of ‘deep acting’ to mediate a sense of intimacy between humans and other species is extended by Chapter Seven’s investigation of the small-animal veterinary clinic. This is a place where ‘pet-owners’, clinicians, and not least animals themselves, mix together in ways which reflect the uncertain identities of all three groups. Here we observe what happens when animal-human distance is subsumed and disguised by both the client and the vet during the process of enacting professional care for animals. For the vet, there is a clear professional (and usually a financial) incentive for making these intimacies possible. We urge readers to consider these different ‘case studies’—and indeed the more philosophical chapters of the book—as short stories. We think that they can be read and re-read in any order. So too, they can be interpreted through a number of alternative theoretical lenses, some of which are in evidence throughout the book and some of which are not. We believe that each of these stories relate in some way to a number of disciplines and add something new to Human-Animal Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Organization Theory. While we both have clear, and often differing, political and philosophical views on many of the issues raised throughout this book, uppermost in our minds while writing was the aim to encourage readers to adopt Spinoza’s guideline, “Do not deplore, do not laugh, do not hate—understand.” Lindsay Hamilton, Keele University and Nik Taylor, Flinders University

PART ONE

UNDERSTANDING HUMAN-ANIMAL INTERACTIONS

CHAPTER ONE

HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS Persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sense of being perceived. Erving Goffman, 1963: 17

One of the main assumptions of this book is that the identities of humans and other animals are constructed in ‘messy’ and multiple ways, and we approach this ‘mess’ from a broadly social constructionist perspective. This is a perspective which stresses the performative or emergent nature of social life, social categories and meanings. Instead of seeing identity as a singular object each individual owns throughout the course of their life, it points to the multiple identities that an individual has at any time, as well as to the contextual nature of such identities. In short, then, we argue that identities are manufactured—through interaction—at a local level in different contexts (Collins, 1989). Thus, the vets and the wildlife television presenters in our book may well see themselves as animal advocates while they are at work, but they also have other roles—sister, mother, friend, business associate and so on—at other times. These roles may, or may not, have anything to do with other animals. Likewise, those working in the slaughterhouse might choose not to define themselves as working with animals at all, since their daily routines involve the processing of ‘dead meat’ on the factory floor rather than interacting meaningfully or emotionally with living, breathing ‘others’. In line with current thinking about identity construction we do not seek to evaluate which one of these multiple identities is more ‘real’ or more ‘truthful’, instead we address how different identities come to be produced. How, for example, do TV presenters, veterinarians and shelterworkers forge identities for themselves as animal advocates? What are the complex steps, interactions and negotiations needed for this? In turn, how do they manufacture identities for the animals that they come into contact with? After all, these constructed identities are often different from those attributed by other social groups and actors to such species. So, for

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example, shelter-workers may see apparently aggressive dogs as those which are in need of more care and attention rather than animals to be afraid of. Equally, they may see all of their animal charges as deserving ‘pets in waiting’ that simply require the ‘right’ home. This may well go against the institutional ethos or the opinions of those who do not work with shelter animals. How, then, do workers create and maintain these alternate identities and meanings in their own distinctive groups? This is a question that we pose in a number of settings. It is usual when TV presenters are making wildlife documentaries that they enact the role of the ‘animal expert’ (Mackay, 1997; Mills, 2010). But what are the steps involved in creating that performance? What are the ‘tricks of the trade’ that they use to produce an identity both for themselves and for the wild and untamed animals that they show on screen? More importantly perhaps, how long do these performances last? What happens ‘backstage’ when presenters are off-camera? The answers are far from clear-cut. Intriguingly, in the course of writing this book, we have noted that within large groups such as the veterinary profession, behaviours and identities are neither fixed nor homogenous, and we cannot make simple generalizations about how such professions work as a whole. In Chapter Three, for example, we explore why there is occasional tension and competition between the vets that deal with cattle and those dealing with ‘small animals’ or ‘pets’. Clearly, both groups conceive of their professional identities in somewhat different terms. Yet, even within the same practice, there are divisions and partitions between the vets and their administrative colleagues. Dominant and subordinate factions such as these continue to ‘fight it out’ in a number of social interactions. In the slaughterhouse too, there are different experiences of work between those on the shop-floor production line and the meat hygiene inspectors, and it is evident that tensions and conflicts arise periodically between these factions. So we cannot simply categorize ‘vet work’ or ‘meat work’ as distinctive occupational wholes. Nor can we state that certain animal jobs are ‘dirty’ or ‘clean’ in straightforward ways. These are just some of the issues that open up when starting from the point that identity is not easily fixed but is shifting, mutable and above all manufactured in local settings. Lines of Demarcation More often than not when humans are involved in the production of both their own and other animal identities, they are involved in boundary work. To do such work involves the “drawing and blurring of lines of



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demarcation between humans and animals” (Arluke and Sanders, 1996: 133). One of our main arguments in this book is that the perceived ‘clean’ lines of demarcation between humans and other animals do not always exist in practice, and where they do exist it is often because of the hard work that some humans exert to maintain them. So, for example, in farm veterinary surgeon vernacular, animals are clearly delineated as ‘other’ to humans. They often refer to their daily routines by the illnesses, diseases and conditions that they have treated, rather than by the individual cows, sheep or pigs that they have come into contact with. This is understandable when considering the large number of animals that they see each day but it is also interesting because speaking of animals as ‘cases’ rather than individuals serves to ‘de-personalize’ and demarcate the differences between the vet and patient. The ways in which this boundary work is described relies on technical and scientific language rather than emotional or sensing words, suggesting that it is often specific forms of discourse that reinforce the identity work done in organizations. In turn this kind of boundary work exists at the same time as—and sometimes because of—boundary work being done between humans. So, we see small-animal vets work hard to maintain their epistemic and scientific privilege by establishing their professional knowledge as superior to, and different from, the lay-knowledge of their human clients. Without that creative manoeuvre, their capacity to charge animal ‘owners’ for their services and advice would certainly diminish (Lowe, 2009). So, while farm vets patrol certain distances between the species when they are on their daily rounds, other workers (like small-animal vets, for example) seem to be less comfortable with such boundaries. There are multiple ways in which the assumed lines of demarcation between humans and animals are contested through daily practice, as in the case of animal shelter workers, for example, a group for whom it is important to share values and meanings about animals in their care. Through joint labour, they constitute the animals they care for as ‘deserving’. Such labour serves to offer them a sense of moral justification through the creation of a sense of ‘personhood’ for these animals. This is something that is, again, reinforced and re-inscribed through the operation of discourse and the performance of certain forms of identity. Throughout this book, then, we begin to investigate the myriad ways in which animals are drawn into proximity with, or distanced from, humans at work. Theoretically, we follow the starting points of Goffman and other social constructionists like Hochschild to address how identity is performed, staged and managed (Goffman, 1967, 1983; Hochschild, 1983). This

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approach stresses the contextual and interactive nature of the production of self. What is crucial to us in the current work is that this approach allows ‘room’ for animals. Goffman started from the idea that there was an ‘interaction order’ in society which began, at its most basic, with the social situation. He argued that to bring an occasion to life required the presentation of ourselves in ways which made sense to others, followed certain social scripts and allowed for a mutually recognized understanding and interaction. Goffman argued that in doing this we painstakingly construct our own identities and those of others around us. But we don’t do this alone. Instead our identities are the outcomes of what he termed ‘joint ceremonial labour’ (Goffman, 1967: 84–85). Importantly, Goffman did not limit this interaction to language alone. Instead he argued that non-verbal interchanges could have the system requirements which are necessary to interaction. In other words, there’s nothing in principle to exclude animals from this interaction at the outset. Interaction takes place when two individuals are co-present with one another, be they human or animal. Language and Interaction Many interactions between humans and animals meet this criterion. For example, Weider (Weider, 1980) explains how the human-animal interaction in a primate laboratory depends upon a mutually perceived otherness wherein chimpers (the technicians who work with the animals) are acutely aware of the chimps, and vice versa. It is precisely this mutual awareness which Weider argues mediates their interactions. He is arguing that the chimpers see chimp behaviour during chimp-chimper interactions as motivationally manifest and not as the result of instinct. In other words, the world shared by chimper and chimpanzee is essentially an intersubjective one based on mutual perceptions of ‘mindedness’. This resonates with our findings that, for example, the world shared by animal shelter staff and their animal charges is a mutual one. In the shelter, interactions between humans and animals are based on a sense of mutual understanding and a construction of the ‘personhood’ and ‘mindedness’ of the shelter animals. At other times, such as on the set of the wildlife documentary, the upper hand seems to lie with human meaning-makers who cast animals in certain roles and give them characteristics that they are almost certainly unaware of. After all, television is itself a human technology. Intellectually, then, this book starts from a broadly social constructionist perspective; that is, we assume that animal and human identities are forged through mutual interactions in which the dynamics of power are



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often uncertain. This goes beyond traditional social constructionist theories in two crucial ways, however. The first is that there is an assumption that the things, the entities, involved in interaction are not limited to the merely human. In this respect the book is philosophically post-humanist and takes daily practices as the cue for empirical questions to be answered by examining the many ways in which animals figure in social life rather than seeking to stipulate what animals are, or how they should be treated. In essence this allows us to avoid over-simplifying these social relations and makes room to treat humans and animals alike as social ‘actors’ and even as workers, both of which are socially significant. Thus, we follow the line of Hughes and Sharrock who argue that social actors are “conscious beings whose activities have meaning for them and others” (Hughes and Sharrock, 1997: 137). Given that this is the case, actors are able to define and redefine the limits of their membership; that is, who might constitute a legitimate member of their family and a legitimate focus for human concern and affection. So, for example, when animal shelter staff accept ‘unwanted’ animals as legitimately deserving of attention we do not question their philosophical point of view here. Similarly, in observing the workings of the veterinary surgery we do not challenge ‘pet owners’ about their deeply emotional attachments to their animals. Nor do we undermine the fact that veterinarians often appear to support this connection when they speak about (and even to) their patients. Whether these are performances for the benefit of humans, animals or both, we do not address the supposed rights and wrongs of such behaviours or beliefs, instead we address precisely how and why it is that the animal becomes constructed as a deserving focus for human affection. In doing so, we ask what this tells us about both animal and human identity and how this sense of animal ‘deservedness’ is achieved. We are also attentive, throughout this process, to the role that power plays in such interactions. We accept that very often the cards are all held by the humans who, through the creation of certain animal identities are also able to define their treatment, such as on the farm where live animals become transcribed into ‘stock’ and ultimately to ‘meat’. Drawing on some of Hochschild’s basic arguments (1983), we are sensitive to the ways in which people feel and think about animals as a motivation for the ways that they act towards them. As such, we bear this in mind as a further concern throughout the rest of this book as we analyze the ways in which animal and human identities are constructed and performed. The second crucial way in which this book goes beyond traditional social constructionist theory is that we avoid the traditional assumption

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of duality. That is, we make no claims about, or attempt to index, what an animal really is and nor do we seek to compare the constructions of animals with this supposed ‘reality’. We try to avoid the human tendency to taxonomize, describe and define animals in their ‘otherness’. Instead we trace the ways in which animal (and human) identities are performed and are the outcome of vastly complex and ‘messy’ interactions and situations. Throughout all of this we pay particular attention to the power games inherent in such performances. The post-humanist turn in the social sciences offers several interesting ideas here, particularly in terms of methodological approaches. With the insistence that social life, relationships, and meanings are not fixed but emergent, multiple, mobile, and performative, post-human scholars have begun advocating new methodologies which allow an accounting for the ‘other-than-human’ within them. For example, post-humanist approaches have been useful in opening up social scientific studies of various humanmaterial interactions from computers and cat-flaps to bridge structures (example Bijker and Law, 1992). In terms of studying human-animal relationships this facilitates the opening up of new areas of enquiry which can include animals but also points towards the use of different methods by which to study them and their relations with humans. These methods need not underscore the old order or the old power games and discourses by silencing animals from the very outset by, for example, expecting those who participate in certain research projects to have the ability to write by filling out questionnaires. For the most part, the methods suggested by those working within the post-human and post-structural template are ethnographic. Generally, these involve ‘thick description’ and a stress on fluidity and mobility as well as performativity. The argument is that if life is ‘messy’, mobile, and in constant flux then the methods that purport to study it have to respond to this and be able to evoke the ‘messiness’ as it emerges, to be mobile methods themselves (see for example, Buscher and Urry, 2009). Our chosen methods embrace this and reflect that we recognize that any humananimal research forms a part of the ways in which animals become known to us (for more on this see Law, 2009). This is particularly important if our chosen methods silence animals—or at least silence the animal part of the human-animal relationship. With their stress on both numerical and textual methods, the traditional social sciences have done exactly this and have silenced or written out animals altogether.



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Writing about Human-Animal Interactions The methods used throughout the studies that constitute the current book are qualitative, and (with the exception of Chapter Six) are ethnographic. This qualitative approach is designed to include and take account of nonhuman animals more readily. We utilize years of extensive ethnographic work conducted by both authors across a range of settings—veterinary surgeries, animal shelters, farms, slaughterhouses, for example, to get an ‘inside track’ into the interactions between species. We have attempted to modify our basic approach to take account of unusual environments and have occasionally adapted our method to better suit the participants. We were unable to watch the filming of wildlife documentaries in situ, for example, so used a series of carefully structured interviews with wildlife presenters instead. In choosing alternative qualitative research methods such as these, we have been able to investigate multiple sites where humans and animals meet. The traditional purpose of ethnography, however, has been to study and write about people in their natural setting by directly interacting with them. It is a method designed to get inside their distinctive life-worlds and see how words, ideas and objects are exchanged in a practical sense. This usually takes the form of participant observation, where the researcher actually gets involved with whatever it is that their participants are doing. This strategy lies at the heart of our research method. But in carrying out research in human-animal settings, we have adapted this to take better account of the non-humans that are present on the scene. In the slaughterhouse, for example, we took special notice of the areas of the factory where the birds were still alive, noting details about the ways in which they were moved, inspected and accounted for by people. This seemingly minor aspect of the slaughterhouse could easily have been subsumed by turning our attention to the extensive and highly mechanized production process, or by focusing upon the ways that humans on the production line handled the apparent monotony of factory life. We observed and participated in a variety of workplaces and entered into semi-structured interviews with many of their employees. Participants were selected on the basis of their availability and the levels of access that we were able to negotiate. And there were several who appeared to develop an interest in talking to us—often at length—about their experiences of work. They became ‘key participants’ in our research. These ‘key participants’ became good sources of information and enabled us to

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‘test out’ the ideas that we developed during the observation phase of the fieldwork. In other words, developing good relationships with particular individuals helped us to triangulate our ‘data’ and enabled us to go beyond surface appearances and get access to some of the hidden detail, the context, and the ‘messy’ emotions of the field (Denzin, 1989). This was of particular importance when thinking about the ways that organizations sometimes had the appearance of smooth co-operation but on closer examination exhibited tensions, rivalries and factional behaviour ‘below the surface’, something we explore in Chapter Three. To offer some practical background of the sort of creative methodological work that we have engaged in to get access to such ‘thick description’, the data from the slaughterhouse was collected jointly. One of us (LH) conducted observational data collection and work-shadowing with meat inspectors in four British abattoirs which included a poultry plant and three ‘red meat’ or large-animal slaughterhouses. The other author (NT) conducted the non-observational part of the data collection, including several hundreds of hours of interviews. We looked for themes and trends arising from the field notes taken in situ at the production plants, sharing our ideas and comparing our opinions. This dual analysis grew out of our very different attitudes towards the meat factory and its particular forms of work (something we return to in Chapter Four). To write Chapter Five’s analysis of animal shelters, by contrast, we drew on the specific experiences of just one of us (NT), a researcher who has worked in shelters for close to two decades, both as an ethnographer and a volunteer. The majority of the data used in that chapter was collected during three years of field research at two sanctuaries. The researcher visited the sanctuaries on average twice a week spending between three and five hours observing, interacting, and often helping with the routine business of the sanctuary. As with our other periods of time in the field, a detailed set of field notes was kept wherever possible and completed at the end of each day. For this section of the book, interviews were tape-recorded with a number of staff from five other animal sanctuaries and welfare organizations, bringing the total number of animal sanctuaries accessed to seven. The researcher also attended the monthly public meetings of one of these animal sanctuaries for six months to help get a feel for what was actually happening at the sanctuary. Interestingly, they often became forums for shelter workers to air their grievances together. Access was easily gained to four of the shelter organizations because the researcher had worked at one of them for five years and thus had ‘inside’ contacts. She approached the other three ‘cold’ because she knew about them indirectly. This formal



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data was supplemented by additional experiences gained from working in animal shelters in the UK and Australia over the past twenty years. So, some of the data was ‘retrospective’ while other research was conducted ‘on the hoof’. At the same time, one of us (LH) spent almost eight years with vets and on farms. Four years of this was devoted exclusively to the gathering of field data for this book. In the period of official data gathering, field notes were collected by shadowing eleven individual farm vets on their daily rounds, spending up to eight hours every day observing and talking to farmers and the veterinary support workers too. The researcher also spent two years with vets in a small-animal practice, usually to observe the interactions between pet owners, clinicians and nurses. In addition to these observations, the researcher joined in social events and evening meetings that arose from these various workplaces, attended their parties and was often invited to continue semi-structured interviews with participants in their homes. Even in these more apparently relaxed periods, a ‘quick and dirty’ running log of brief notes was always kept and later transcribed into more formal field notes (Van Maanen, 1988). Interpreting Field Data Interpreting our findings was challenging, not least because we aimed to include animals by giving them more ‘space’ within our ethnographic descriptions of the organizations where we had spent time. What made this so difficult was that our interpretations and representations of the field relied heavily upon human forms of language. Words reflect, stand for and symbolize the different ways in which the world is socially constructed and experienced by actors like those who we spoke to or observed. Animals, of course, do not use human forms of language and cannot be interviewed. This meant that for much of the time, we relied upon our observation and physical participation with non-human animals, rather than verbal interaction with those animals. For us, this suggests that we need to do further work to re-think and develop our methods to evolve ethnography towards a more liberal and post-human agenda (Tyler, 1986). A second complication to the interpretation of our data was that despite sharing the same language as our human participants, we continued to be surprised by the contradictions, paradoxes and differences that we sometimes observed between their verbal accounts and their actions. And while our participants could often be observed acting and speaking

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in similar ways within certain organizations, even this did not always give rise to their uniformity. So we found that accounts were often ‘messy’ or evoked tensions between different identities and different contexts. When we entered the field, then, we had to be careful to avoid assuming that work culture determined who our participants were in an absolute sense. We began to expect that our participants would demonstrate intermittent and ‘patchy’ attachments to their organizational identities and tried to resist treating our data as ‘proof’ of strong cultural connections that bound people together with any sort of permanence. What we did find surprising, however, was that people often shared and became accustomed to each other’s interpretations of animals, the development of shared meanings and values about other species. We were often startled when patterns of shared values appeared from the data. Sometimes this emerged from distinctive sub-groups within the organization. One example is found in Chapter Three where we explore the relationships between vets and their administrators at the farm animal practice. At certain times, they appeared to exhibit rather different ideas about the relative value of their own forms of work, yet both groups shared a collective sense of doing ‘social good’ when considering the significance of farm animals for the practice as a whole. This became a binding mechanism that helped to keep the organization together. Very often, however, it seemed that meanings about and with animals were implied rather than explicitly stated. So we focused on more than simply ‘what was said’ and looked instead to a wider possibility of interpreting behaviours, expressions—both verbal and non-verbal—as well as the artefacts of everyday work. We watched how these cultural forms circulated in the various settings of doing that work and it quickly became clear that our method should be sensitive to these implicit effects. In following this tack, we looked for commonalities and patterns of repetition in the ways that animals came to be physically, verbally and tacitly understood by those we observed. Ethnographic approaches to the study of social life lead, then, to rich and detailed data which lends itself readily to the study of human-animal worlds, in part because the point of view of the animal is not amenable to more structured forms of enquiry. While we make no claims to be Ethologists, or to understand animal behaviour at that level, we were keen to allow our human participants to make claims to do so if they chose. So claims regarding their unique understandings of individual animals— whether it be their behaviour, their ‘mindedness’, their personalities or other apparent features—became a clear feature of the data we gathered.



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We feel that this is a particular strength of a book which aims to document and capture precisely what it is that gets done when humans work with animals. We return to this in more detail in Chapter Eight, where we consider how ethnography can work to help us to do that. Our field work spans several sites where animals and humans could be observed working together and while we spent several years in some field sites (the vets’ practice, the rescue shelter) we spent much less time in others (the slaughterhouse). It is well documented that multi-locale ethnographies such as ours can pose a particular set of problems for fieldworkers (Hannerz, 1996 and 2003; Marcus, 1998). It can sometimes be difficult to excavate deeply and extensively in any one place, something we discovered with the wildlife TV presenters. Comprehensive data gathering from many aspects of cultural life is not always possible. According to George Marcus, one of the first researchers to grapple with the practical challenges of multi-locale ethnography, ethnographers should seek to mitigate the potential problems of depth by contextualizing the variety of different experiences and discourses in terms of the sorts of wider wholes in which the connections and their effects are taking place (Marcus, 1998). He proposes that fieldworkers should trace connections across multiple sites of research by choosing particular thematic strands and developing them theoretically. Helpfully, Marcus claims that one does not need to spend years at any one site in order to plot such themes between very different groups of people, spaces and locales. This is something we have tried to put into practice by returning time and again to our central theme; that is, a consideration of the ways that distance and proximity are negotiated between the species. We selected our sites in accordance with our preliminary research design. Put simply, we wanted to understand why and how people work with animals. In the choice of this particular problematic, we were then able to target specific places within our chosen sites where such meetings between humans and other animals were taking place; the vet’s consulting room or the production line in the chicken factory, for example. In our case, this multi-site approach proved an advantage in arranging our findings. For us, it was the thematic direction of our research that mattered most, not trawling massive amounts of field data from each site we visited. To that end we occasionally made a ‘quick raid’ on some field sites, notably the ‘red meat’ cattle abattoirs, to gain answers to specific questions; puzzles that were usually thrown up by an analysis of the original data from the longer periods of ethnography. Broadly following Marcus’s advice, our pragmatic method helped us to decide upon the themes and

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chapters for this book—selecting what appeared to us to be emergent connections or disconnections. In summary, then, this book is about the work that humans do with animals both on a practical and on a theoretical level. We return to questions of method and theory in Chapter Eight when we consider what a multi-species ethnography might look like. But for our immediate purposes, we are interested in the forms that this literal work with animals takes across a variety of settings and, on a constructionist level, we are interested in how this work builds, maintains and challenges both human and animal identities. These are the main interests that our next chapter investigates.

CHAPTER TWO

WHY WORK WITH ANIMALS? Work is the modern English of the noun weorc, (old English) and the verb wyrcan (old English). As our most general word for doing something, and for something done, its range of applications has of course been enormous. Raymond Williams, 1976: 281

As humans we spend the majority of our waking lives in some sort of employment, and what we do as work is often fundamental to our identities. Upon meeting new people for the first time, for example, we often ask them what they do for a living, assuming that this will tell us something significant about them. Of course, work is often simply a ‘means to many ends’ as organization scholar Nick Rumens puts it, a practical way of generating financial security for ourselves and our families (Rumens, 2011). But for many people, work is also about doing meaningful labour, generating value that goes beyond what Baldamus (1967) called the wageeffort ‘bargain’ to seek out positive and meaningful experiences and interactions. So what happens when the work in question involves non-human species? What effect does the presence of animals have on the experiences and the interactions of human work? Does employment become less about financial reward and venture into deeper concerns of ethical and spiritual fulfilment? This chapter is about questions such as these. Here, we build on the ideas of identity that we outlined in Chapter One to add weight to our argument that humans—in the processes of doing varied forms of work—make use of animals to generate value, but we note that ‘value’ for these individuals has a broad application. Sometimes this boils down to a process of manipulating animals to make money, and is something which often rests upon the insertion of categorical boundaries to deliberately set the species apart. As several scholars have already pointed out, at times animals might be considered workers or even ‘slaves’ to human economic production and capital exchange (Spiegel, 1996; Murray, 2011). At other times, however, the divisions between humans and other species are much less apparent. We have noted, for example, that people sometimes bring animals into intimate bodily and

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emotional contact to carve out a sense of worth from what might otherwise constitute a mundane series of routines and repetitions, thus turning work into a more richly meaningful and value-creating experience. Whatever the motivation for employment—be it explicitly economic or otherwise—it seems common to all the settings that we have studied that acts and rituals of meaning-making are deployed to help humans make sense of their many and varied experiences of working with animals. Working and Organizing Cultural theorist, Raymond Williams rightly points out that work is more than simply a noun but is also a verb, a word that describes doing something as well as something done. For some time now, scholars of Organization Studies and the social sciences more generally have taken a similarly process-based view of work (Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes, 2005; Hernes, 2010). John Law, for example, calls for a greater application of a ‘sociology of verbs’ to make more intellectual capital from the routines, the processes and the material productions of working life (1994). Theorists from various disciplines have attempted to answer this call to action. Organizational scholar Barbara Czarniawska, for example, claims that it is by studying the verbs—the doings of everyday life—that we best decipher how organizations are able to produce their own distinctive cultural values (Czarniawska, 2008). Likewise, Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes (2005) see working life as a ‘permanent non-rational movement’ which for them implies that ‘organization can never be rationally defined’ (2005: 147). It is the unpredictability of the processes involved in organizing that mean we consider work to be a continual, dynamic and ‘messy’ state of affairs. With that in mind, this book takes a special interest in the ways that organizations seek to impose order on the ‘mess’ of the world and thereby influence (if not always control) the way that workplace cultures develop. This is something which enables workers to locate and make sense of their own identities within their organizational environments. The empirical investigations that we have carried out in the process of writing this book have been designed to illuminate how the presence of non-humans becomes central in these individual and collective acts of meaning-making. Our approach is to consider work as a continual series of doings, represented and re-coded in creative ways by those involved, not as a repetitive sequence of meaningless or routine tasks that serve simply to generate economic benefits. In other words we are interested in how work culture is formed from interactions with animals and,



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specifically, how such cultures help workers to engage in meaningful performances to create common world-views, ethics and values that sometimes reflect (and sometimes resist) the official corporate line (Thompson and van den Broek, 2010; Wright, 1994). It is unsatisfactory to claim that those working with animals do so from a simple desire to be in paid employment. In many cases that we have examined—notably the rescue shelter—work is done on a purely voluntary basis. Here, the rewards of employment are not financial but reach into more symbolic and ethical domains of value creation. In the research that led to this book, we also observed that in other forms of employment, even something as apparently unpleasant as being covered in ‘messy’ animal bi-products like blood, excrement and pus could be useful in the creation of workplace values and that an engagement with, what many would consider to be ‘dirty work’, helped many groups to build a distinctive sense of common purpose (Hamilton, 2007; Hughes, 1964; Meara, 1974). This means that even ‘dirty’ jobs with animals can become profoundly symbolic and highly useful in the creation and maintenance of both individual identities and shared values (Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990; Kreiner, Ashforth and Sluss, 2006). Sometimes even the most purulent and visceral animal ‘muck’ can form a powerful bonding agent in this process, something that we explore in the following chapter. Non-human animals, and even their bodily products, perform a highly significant role in the orientation of workplace identity and culture whether they are aware of it or not. They become meaningful to people by representing their values; embodying the ethos that brings people to work and keeps them coming back every day. Even when wages are low, such as in the meat processing plant, or even absent as in the rescue shelter, it is the collective performance of shared workplace values—whether formal, informal or a ‘messy’ mixture of the two—that matters immensely in holding such organizations together. Surprisingly few theorists have attempted to explain the significance of non-humans in these varied and complex processes of cultural organization. This is why we have focused our research efforts on the talk, the humour and the power struggles, in short, the practicalities of work, to explain why some humans choose to spend their lives working with animals. Working Between Intimacy and Distance In some workplaces, animals acquire only the most basic recognition by humans and so can often appear to be little more than stimulus-response

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automatons; the ‘things’ and ‘material objects’ that people use to get the job done. This is something that we observed in the slaughterhouse where workers and their managers considered chickens to be little more than ‘whole bird products’. But our relationships with animals are often more complex than this and, as we have already suggested, sometimes apparently rigid boundaries between the species become blurred. In the animal rescue shelter, for example, workers routinely ‘personalize’ their charges to create a sense of closeness between the human carer and the animal that is being cared for. This adds value to a job that is, in financial terms at least, rather poorly rewarded. These enactments of intimacy also occur in environments where one might expect non-humans to be treated more explicitly as objects rather than work colleagues, the scientist’s laboratory for example (McAllister Groves, 1996). In the domestic sphere, however, it is less surprising to note that the bonds between animals and their owners are generally experienced with a similar form of closeness to human family relationships (Kurdek, 2008). In common with our experience of different working environments, however, even such apparently simple relationships as those between humans and their ‘pets’ cannot be easily generalized. For example, animal-person categories might completely disappear when owners deliberately anthropomorphize animals and ascribe human traits and feelings to them (Daston and Mitman, 2005). Such forms of emotional attachment often bring about a whole set of distinctive problems, not least that animal repertoires of behaviour might be misinterpreted as evidence of human-like qualities, desires or emotions (Lockwood, 1983; Mullan and Marvin, 1998). This is an observation that our veterinary interviewees supported and claimed to find especially disturbing in their daily contact with animals and their keepers. The recent phenomenon of the ‘monkey baby’ is a somewhat extreme example of this sort of anthropomorphic intimacy. As part of a trend that has recently become popular in the United States, self-styled ‘primate parents’ purchase monkeys and give them their own bedrooms, human toys and games, a seat at the dinner-table, clothes, prams and even cosmetics. In a recent British documentary film that observed several of these pet owners (“My Monkey Baby”, Channel Four, 2009), the narrator suggested that this was abnormal, cruel and even un-natural behaviour for both human and monkey participants and that, ultimately, this could not be thought of as real family life. The implication was that in deliberately deconstructing human-animal boundaries, a profoundly unwholesome animal-human relationship was produced. For these pet owners, however,



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this experience of domestic life seemed to be entirely normal and natural. The transgression of human-animal categories was something they appeared to celebrate rather than hide. Their use of language seemed to bear this out and as one interviewee claimed of his monkey: “She’s my daughter, one hundred per cent”. Our observation of different attitudes towards animals, from both ends of the distance-intimacy spectrum, gives us the grounds to challenge many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the relative status of animals and humans. It permits us to consider the range of distinctions between different species as a product of human work and cultural life, rather than as rational or inherently truthful ways of regarding different animals. So how can social scientists like us begin to understand the range and the emotional complexity of such—occasionally bizarre—relationships between the species? Why are some species treated with the emotional attachment of family members while others are vigilantly and extensively rejected from human homes and workplaces? What approaches can we take to theorize the very different experiences that people have with animals? These are issues that this chapter seeks to address. It is already well documented that the ‘social acceptability’ of animals varies dramatically between individuals, groups and organizations. Cockroaches and sewer-rats, for example, are widely regarded as vermin and are almost universally excluded from the bond of human intimacy extended to more ‘acceptable’ animals such as dogs and cats. Yet within general norms like these, there are a whole host of different cultural interpretations and taboos that mediate individual human interactions with animals. In a recent British legal case, for example, a Muslim taxi driver was fined by the courts for refusing to allow a guide dog into his cab on the grounds that it was ritually unclean and posed an unacceptable affront to his religious beliefs (RNIB, 2010). Clearly, the situation was interpreted very differently by the non-Muslim dog handler to whom the act of exclusion seemed unjustifiable. In the light of such headline cases, it is often tempting to lapse into stereotypical ways of thinking about human-animal interactions like the common myth that the British are a nation of animal-lovers, or that all vets love animals. Even a cursory examination of the variety of human-animal interactions shows that human cultures are diverse and fragmented. People draw upon the relative values of different families, religious groupings and organizations. Within these diverse life-worlds are multiple—and often competing—ways of understanding animals and their role in society. Just as the taxi driver’s personal and religious identity

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seemed to conflict with his public identity, the competing meanings that are attributed to animals sometimes throw up unexpected tensions and conflicts just as they often create paradoxes for individual sense-making. Consider, for example, the contradiction that consumers often choose to ignore the realities of meat production in order to enjoy eating it. From our own research, we are now familiar with the work that goes on ‘behind the scenes’ of the slaughterhouse but one of us remains a meat-eater while the other abstains from animal products. In considering some of these puzzles, we can expose a whole host of apparently arbitrary distinctions and categories. Why, for instance, do humans choose to eat some animals (sheep, cows, chickens, for example) but not others? Why, when so many other carnivores consume carrion or ‘road-kill’, do most of us find the idea of doing so profoundly distasteful? Why in some cultural groups are certain animals regarded as acceptable food while other species remain taboo? In organizations where humans and animals interact we see spaces where ideas about animals are often shared and reproduced. In these spaces animals can become powerful motifs for orientating particular values and cultural practices. We have noticed, for example, how meat inspectors in the chicken factory ‘de-personalize’ and anonymize birds by calling them ‘units’ and ‘products’. Chickens are reduced to the basic components of the factory’s daily ‘kill programme’. Of course, if humans are to commodify, farm and eat animals and their products then distancing manoeuvres become more necessary for intellectual survival. Putting animals to work as ‘livestock’, for example, implies a need for fluidity in the way that they are classified and reclassified; from wild to tame, as producers rather than pets, and in many cases from living animals into edible meat. Certain groups—slaughter-workers, particularly—are highly skilled in making these transformations appear seamless and rational. They are adept at managing distance between themselves and animal ‘others’ by labelling chickens as ‘products’ and, in doing that, are able to cope with (or avoid) the experience of emotional pain that would normally be associated with killing a living being. These value-laden labels are useful ‘codes’ that tell us something about the distinctive organizational milieu from which they emerge. These paradoxes and puzzles of cultural meaning-making are not always arbitrary although they are sometimes confusing to outsiders. That categories applied to animals shift, almost magically, to allow humans to perform such subtle tricks is taken as a starting point in this book, allowing us to investigate both how and why this occurs. We argue that it is



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the assemblage and maintenance of shared meanings about and with animals in workplace settings that helps human actors to structure, amplify and make sense of their own human relations. Such a significant process of managing the more symbolic elements of inter-species relations is a research area that is deserving of close academic scrutiny but has often been overlooked in organizational and even in Human-Animal Studies (with some notable exceptions, for example, Taylor and Signal, 2011). This is why we aimed to investigate a number of settings where such interactions could be observed at first hand. Thus, one of the main principles outlined in this book is that by studying what it means to work with animals, it is also possible to excavate the profound philosophical issues surrounding being a person (and this can apply to non-human animals) and what it means to belong. Identity, Belonging and Cultural Networks Being human involves the construction of a meaningful identity in ways that matter and lend meaning to life. Exploring the manifold reasons why and how this happens has been a mainstay of Sociology for many years. Emile Durkheim, for example, looked to the idea of society as a uniting force, bringing people together through practices of ordering and organizing: For a society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the movements which they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms of itself (Durkheim, 1968: 254)

For Durkheim, the idea of being in a social group produced and strengthened a very real sense of belonging. Dislocation from social groups had serious physical effects, he argued, ranging from depression and a sense of hopelessness (or anomie) to suicide. For Durkheim, the formation of social—and particularly work—groups constituted a powerful organizing basis upon which to draw the otherwise disparate mass of human agents together. More recently, and in more specifically organizational terms, research has shown how people may be drawn together in the sharing of certain values, something that helps them to orientate their own identities and enable them to form bonds with other people. The repeated routines of working life can help individuals to translate, perform and embed identities in their wider social spaces. In certain settings, like the abattoir,

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these unifying bonds can be strong enough to make tight-knit groups particularly ‘wary in their dealings with outsiders’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999: 424). As Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) have argued, it is often the case that ‘dirty workers’ such as those in the meat production industry are able to mitigate the experience of sharing ‘distasteful’ or ‘stigmatized’ work by developing strong work cultures to shield them from broader social misgivings about their engagements with aspects of life considered taboo, such as death. This is something which has been supported by studies in a number of similarly ‘dirty’ and marginalized occupations including funeral and mortician services (Thompson, 1991), sex work (Selmi, 2012) and, in the light of recent financial events, even banking (Stanley and Mackenzie Davey, 2012). Whether their shared values are in line with managerial goals or, conversely, grow strong from a collective sense of resistance against them, groups of workers often rely upon the organizing and unifying effects of ‘team culture’ for their impetus (Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990). Even within the same organization, however, there are likely to be factions and divisions between differently qualified workers, for example (Latimer, 2004; Robertson, 1996; Wicks, 1998), between genders (Hawkins, 2009) and, almost universally, between management and workers (Knights and McCabe, 2000). Sometimes, as we have already pointed out, divisions may also appear to exist between species when they are thrown together by the configuration of their organization. For outsiders, however, many of these symbolic—but often quite subjective—demarcations are difficult to discern and understand. To appreciate the complexity inherent in much organizational life, it is important to consider how individual humans might choose to adapt their identities to orientate themselves more closely with their peer-groups (Hawkins, 2009). One way of understanding this is by exploring the concept that relationships are part of ‘networks’ that are populated by objects, words and texts (Law, 2004). It is not enough for managers to put people together and hope that they will become a team because for teamwork to flourish, actors must also begin to share values, meanings and a sense of their own distinction from other groups and other organizations (Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990; Cooper, 1992 and 2005; Vallas, 2003). Networks become useful as a means of creating group identities by helping those involved to garner value from their connections with materials, technologies and other artefacts (Hernes, 2010; Latour and Woolgar, 1988; Law, 2004). Yet, we do not suggest here that networks are easily controlled by managers,



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or that they are a simple tool for exerting managerial control. In the complex web of organizational life, human relations might just as easily be cemented by a collective sense of resistance against the corporate line (Knights and McCabe, 2000). In whatever circumstances ‘Actor-Networks’ like these are formed and stabilized, identities are enacted in conjunction with a variety of objects and other people to give actors a sense of security, the comfortable feeling of belonging to a cultural grouping, or the confidence to believe that they know what is going on (Mol, 2005). Thus, the Actor-Network is often the connecting glue that keeps the organization from collapse while, at other times, it may just as easily become the expression of collective resistance against management. A key assumption of Actor-Network Theory (otherwise known as ‘ANT’ and later as ‘ANT and after’) has been that connections create actors which, by extension, means that identities are performed into being. Often this takes place through the enactment of routines and duties of work (Hassard and Alcadipani, 2010). Other theorists within this broad family argue that it is actually the other way around, that actors create the connections that in turn form and structure the organization (Powell and Dimaggio, 1991). Barbara Czarniawska (2008) moots a further alternative which she describes as ‘action nets’. Action nets rest upon a less straightforward sequence of organizing which is sometimes successful and sometimes not, depending on the context and its varied political and social possibilities (Czarniawska, 2008). Czarniawska takes a constructivist view in which actors are broadly formed by their actions so, for example, one becomes a vet when one qualifies and performs surgery upon animals. All of the Actor-Networkers, however, have in common the starting point that it is not the noun that matters here but the verb (Law, 2004). In other words, by doing certain types of work, connections are made between and among actions, objects, people and texts. If, what Czarniawska calls the ‘loose couplings’ between them can be stabilized a strong organizational culture is forged. There are several advantages of taking an Actor-Network view of organization. Most importantly, from our perspective, Actor-Network approaches work from an ontology of becoming rather than assuming that entities can be defined in terms of ‘pre-given competencies and capabilities’ (Hernes, 2010). In other words, this style of thinking borrows from pragmatist and constructionist philosophical positions to stress the formative (and the performative) over the finished, the fixed and the static. As the philosopher, William James (1909) describes:

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chapter two What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buds and burgeons, changes and creates. (William James, (1909) A Pluralistic Universe)

To ‘put ourselves in the making’ is a helpful philosophical basis for our own practice of studying human-animal work. This is especially important given that our methods of participant observation and interview rely upon being in the field with those actors and materials to ‘thickly describe’ their significance and the ways that they inter-relate (Denzin, 1989; Geertz, 1993). In the small-animal veterinary surgery, for example, veterinarians and nurses bond together through a motivation to support a close and mutually beneficial relationship between ‘pet owners’ and their animals. This takes place every day with a variety of enactments, props, talk and texts including medical equipment, test results and printouts. The veterinary practice is never ‘finished’ because new actors, new props and more importantly, new animals visit the site to interact with its members. In spaces like this, we can see how human and material entities work together to inform and give direction to the cultural whole. Here, crucially, non-human animals have a major significance as ‘actors’ in the network. Where contemporary Actor-Network Theory has limitations for the study of organizations—and particularly human-animal interactions within organizations—is its need to focus on value creation at the local, rather than social level. This is because the ANT family of theory tends to take a flattened view of cultural networks, where solidity and cohesion depends on the strength of linkages between actors and the meanings that they place on a variety of objects and materials (Hernes, 2010). Even in the most recent scholarship within this theoretical framework, limited attention is paid to the suggestion that there may be bigger factors of hegemonic power at stake, issues that lie behind the discourses, processes, objects and texts which are found in micro-worlds like organizations. It is pre-disposed to local connections (much like our own methods of interview and ethnography) but is not easily applied to consider the ways that broader social structures might, at times, infiltrate or influence local actors within those local networks. This leaves us with both



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a political and a philosophical difficulty because one of our main goals is to challenge certain traditional views about animals, particularly the widespread notion that they are inferior to humans or, at worst, ‘things’. It is also highly problematic for those, like us, studying relationships where one set of agents tends to have much more cultural and structural power than the other. Animal Workers We take this political challenge a step further and call for the animals involved in places like farms, slaughterhouses, rescue shelters and veterinary surgeries to be regarded as workers. We prefer not to see animals solely as a backdrop to shed light on exclusively human forms of work, identity and cultural meaning-making but instead wish to begin a process of understanding and taking account of the special and very different forms of agency that animals have. And ANT offers a particularly valuable starting point here. Its core principle of ‘symmetry between human and material actors’ (Hernes, 2010), allows, with minor adaptation, the inclusion of animals within the broad category of ‘actors’. The approach that we suggest flies in the face of accepted wisdom on the subject of animal and human interaction (although this is subject to concerted challenge within the emerging discipline of Human-Animal Studies). But ours is not an easy argument to make because the assumption that there is an inherent difference between ‘man’ and ‘beast’ has carried weight for thousands of years. As early as the fourth century BC, for example, Aristotle had developed a hierarchical series of categories that ordered the species—from insects to humans—into a vast chain of life. Aristotle’s extensive experiments convinced him that the more basic life forms at the lower end of the chain only had the potential to survive and reproduce whereas humans, which he placed at the top of the scale, possessed added powers of thought, reason and sensitivity. In Aristotle’s view, humans possessed a rational soul but animals did not. This basic principle has been reproduced in countless philosophical, religious and scientific arguments since then. The seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher, Rene Descartes, for example, proposed a similar distinction between humans and other animals. For him, animals were little more than decorative automatons. ‘Doubtless when the swallows come in spring’ he writes, ‘they operate like clocks’ (reproduced by Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007: 502).

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Descartes reasoned that animals had the physical capability, but not the inclination, for speech, which he took as an indication of their lack of conscious thought. In short, animals possessed a brain but lacked a mind which made them act instinctively rather than rationally. It has been the dominance of ideas like these that has reinforced symbolic boundaries between humanity and the rest of nature, ideas that have only recently been shaken by theories of evolution, adaptation and genomics (Twine, 2007; Weatherall, 2011). In common with critical studies of science and technology or STS (for example, Latour and Woolgar, 1988) and the approaches taken in Human-Animal Studies (for example, Morgan and Cole, 2011), we reject the assumed power that has informed and reproduced so many of the categorizations and symbolic differences between the species. It is understandable that boundaries help humans to pragmatically make sense of the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), but we wish to take a more ‘messy’ post-humanist view of identity and culture. Our goal is to focus on the mutuality and the co-productive capacities of animal-human interaction. Taking this tack involves an acceptance of equality between humans and animals but how does this fit our view of organizations and networks? Given that humans and animals do not share common languages, how can we take account of the very different forms of agency that humans and other species possess? Can we really call animals workers if they are not aware that they inhabit or add value to human organizations, and can we even assume this lack of awareness? We don’t claim to have easy answers to these weighty questions, not least because clarity is almost impossible to achieve when dealing with ‘messy’ issues of meaningmaking, culture and interaction (Law, 2004). In fact, a clear boundary demarcation between culture, actor and object is almost impossible to define (Tilley, 2001). And attempts to do so are usually ideological and in the case of human-animal relations often represent attempts to maintain the superiority of ‘the human’ vis-a-vis ‘the animal’. All objects, actors and texts form a part of the cultural network in ways that are co-creative and mutually interactive so that even something as apparently mundane as a stethoscope or a bale of hay might become significant as part of an organization’s culture and its meaning-making practices. Equally, these things might lose their significance altogether if circumstances change. We must return, then, to the point—and its attendant philosophical and moral difficulties—that animals are not ‘produced artefacts’ and do not fall neatly into definitional categories of ‘material’ or ‘human’.



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Mutual Interaction and Production In many of the workplaces that we spent time, we noted that organizational culture was forged through mutual interactions with animals. This supports our view of Actor-Networks as ‘messy’ patchworks of things and living entities involved in interaction and cultural production. This argument has already been put forward in a number of settings where species ‘work together’ such as the primate laboratory (Weider, 1980), the animal rescue shelter (Taylor, 2010) and the horse-racing yard (Cassidy, 2002), spaces where humans and animals often demonstrate a degree of mutual regard (and awareness) that mediates their non-verbal interactions to create a unique inter-subjective experience (Weider, 1980). Likewise, in our observations of the farm animal vets at work, there often appeared to be a great affinity between humans and animals, exhibited most explicitly in the subtle ways the vets used their own human senses of touch, smell and sight to diagnose and understand problems, a process that one farm vet described as his clinical ‘sixth sense’. The manner in which vets interacted with and spoke about animals in their care—cattle particularly—suggests that they had immense empathy and respect for their unique, non-human life-worlds. Interestingly, while the vets often got very close to them during their examinations, they also maintained a level of professional distance from their charges that helped them to maintain their ontological sense of scientific ‘objectivity’ (Mol, 2005). Taking a post-human view of such interactions means that it is right for animals to remain outside the scope of ‘things’ (Russell, 2007). We consider that culture is a context in which objects, actors (of various species) and values might feasibly be considered to ‘work together’ but the fact that animals do not speak to us in our language does not imply that they should automatically become ‘objects’. Instead, it seems logical to us to treat both human and animal identities as being derived from different and non-verbal registers that shift and move, at times operating discretely from one another but at other times directly overlapping or clashing. We must look to the creative and cultural ways in which human and animal identities are ‘in the becoming’ (Cooper and Law, 1995). To do so, we call for an adaptation to our theoretical framework under a new banner, one which we have tentatively named ‘Animal-Network Theory’.

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chapter two Animal-Network Theory

Current perspectives of Organizational Studies and even Actor-Network Theory have yet to take account of both human and animal actors in a way that we think is appropriate. Traditional ANT, for example, has often insisted upon the extension of agency to objects, artefacts and non-human species, yet this has not been extended to fully account for the politics of multi-species organizing; that is, the complex ways in which human and animal actors gain or lose power at work and the implications of this for both species. And very little ANT literature to date has taken the animal’s part in theorizing the operation of power at work. Nor does the existing ANT literature take sufficient account of the ways that human discourse often seems to take priority over animal forms of agency. For example, in Michel Callon’s (1986) ANT discussion of the scallops of St. Brieuc Bay, he describes a species motivated by survival in the face of intensifying fishing methods. Callon stipulates that he does not read the conduct of the scallops as evidence for greater agency or reflexivity than may previously have been accorded to them, but rather that “The only thing that counts is the definition of their conduct by the various actors identified.” Scallops are considered to have a degree of presence (and even agency) but this is limited by the dominance and definitions of the human actors involved: “If the scallops want to survive, if [the] scientific colleagues hope to advance knowledge on this subject, if the fishermen hope to preserve their long-time economic interests, then [the researchers] must: 1) know the answers to the question: how do scallops anchor? and 2) recognize that their alliance around this question can benefit each of them” (Callon, 1986: 220). In common with Callon’s account of the fishing community of St. Brieuc, we have found from our own observation work that human voices and texts often get privileged over the freedoms of animal others (Latimer, 2004). Likewise, material objects that work within particular networks often help to ‘extend’ and legitimize the power of these discourses by physically and materially prioritizing certain groups over others (be they human or otherwise). We have also noted that in much of the existing Actor-Network material, while this is carefully reported and considered, this generally goes unchallenged. Sometimes, however, the effects of such powerful human ‘moves’ have deeply significant outcomes for animals (Latimer, 2004). In the chicken factory, for example, discourses of production and commoditization tangibly and physically privilege the power of one species over another (Torres, 2007). This is tracked and reinforced by



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observing the ways that material objects break down the process of killing into a highly mechanized system of control that will turn the animal body into meat. At other times, on the vet’s daily farm rounds for instance, it is a discourse of ‘professional care’ rather than slaughter that serves as the impetus for animals to be moved, restrained, treated and given physical attention. Whatever the motivation, however, it seems that all ‘animal workers’ are manipulated in some way to help humans make sense of the world and derive value from their place within it. We think that power lies at the heart of these interactions, whether in a slaughterhouse or the somewhat leafier setting of a farm. As George Orwell wrote, “all animals are equal” but in practice some animals are “more equal than others” (Orwell, 1987: 52). This has not been taken into account by the ANT literature to the extent that we would wish. We think that there is an ethical imperative for humans to examine the mechanisms and technologies by which working life with other species is managed, the ways in which power is worked out both discursively and practically. We want to find out how animals— whether being cared for, killed, observed or rescued—become integral in these distinctively human processes of organization and what this means for the animals involved. The task of Animal-Network Theory, then, is to help us to make sense of some of these tricky questions and to foreground the ways hierarchies get ‘done’ through the operation of language and objects within networks. Essentially, then, we are asking for ANT to take its arguments regarding the equality of all components of the network to its logical, moral, conclusion. Epistemologically we may argue for equality but this does not necessarily generate ontological equality. In some ways what we are asking of ANT is impossible to realize. We are essentially proposing that structural considerations of power be re-inserted into an approach which seeks to prioritize agency over structure; indeed which seeks to collapse such binaristic thinking altogether. However, it is our contention that ANT’s radicalism (so far as Human-Animal Studies is concerned) lies in its willingness to break down subject-object binaries. The epistemologically level playing field which results from this style of thinking allows us to include animals as equals within the network. But recognition of the unequal power relations between humans and other animals is crucial. The ontological barrenness of ANT approaches actually has the potential to further damage other animals by placing them on the same level as inanimate objects. What precludes this, of course, is the fact that humans are also assumed to be on this same level. However, it is an inescapable norm of modern social life that humans do make decisions

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for other animals and do act in ways that directly affect animal lives. Far from urging ANT to shore up traditional claims of human ‘exemptionalism’ we are instead asking for an acknowledgment that while humans and other animals can be considered as equals in the intellectual exercise of social theory, the lived reality for millions of animals is vastly different. We take this standpoint from a basic desire to see animals accorded greater physical and symbolic equality within human society. The Collapse of Boundaries We argue that human attempts to create order and develop boundaries of distinction are challenged by the lived realities of organizational life. This is a philosophical approach that we share with other (more traditional) Actor-Network accounts. Latour and Woolgar’s (1988) ethnography of laboratory scientists, for example, showed how scientists were implicated in the process of knowledge production; a process that, on the face of it at least relied upon the routine reporting of experiments and their findings. Latour and Woolgar argued that much of the ‘mess’ of these everyday routines of work in the laboratory was, in fact, edited to leave behind a cleaned-up version of the world; a sanitized space from which the creative hand of the scientist was erased. This was a studied performance of professional laboratory life in which science was not simply reported but practically constructed. Scientists tried to insert boundaries between themselves and the work that they produced; they even tried to remain invisible. In practice, however, their creative influences were always implicated in their laboratory productions and the boundaries became blurred and ‘messy’ (Law, 2004). We agree with Latour and Woolgar (1988) that nothing is ever organized but only ever organizing. Workplaces and their members resist being tidy micro-cultures that function with Cartesian predictability, even where the productions of such work are inanimate, as in the laboratory (Delbridge, 1998; Ditton, 1979; Latour, 1996). The performances of actors do not follow robotic patterns, but instead are often occasional and shortlived. Multiple alliances and cultural groupings are possible and—as we observed—members may dip into a variety of possible identities in the course of their daily lives. Some of these identities might be more stable than others. So just as animal identities are in a continual process of being formed and re-formed by those that work with them, human actors never resolve or permanently fix their own working identities into one singular



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form or another. Thus, workplaces often exist in the vague spaces between thinking and doing, between tension and outright resistance (Knights and McCabe, 2000) or more alarming perhaps, in a void that sometimes teeters between order and outright chaos (Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes, 2005). So how is it possible for workplaces to be unfinished, chaotic, political and contested while simultaneously managing to exist? What stops organizations from collapsing under the sheer weight of individualism and self-interest? One of the many possible answers to these dilemmas, we argue, lies in examining the work of collective and multiple acts of meaning-making which cement the relations between individuals at least some, or even all, of the time that they are at work (Hawkins, 2009). We believe that the timing of human identity performances is often highly significant to the maintenance of such networks. Since we argue that affiliations and loyalties to various social and organizational cultures are intermittent and patchy rather than permanently fixed in place, this means that enactments of individual identity are always weighed against other demands for the individual to join in with the group, to follow protocols or to toe the corporate line. So, human identity is informed and shaped by ‘messy’ political negotiation with and against several competing allegiances. People can comfortably continue to occupy apparently conflicting territories, so the slaughter-worker can also be a devoted dog owner just as the passionate animal rescuer might swat flies and trap mice. Different identity performances need to be managed at different times and in different settings to produce a number of social effects. These negotiations and performances are just some of the practical, pragmatic ways in which humans may satisfy the multiple forms of belonging necessary to navigating their identity. Curiously, then, working identities often bleed imperceptibly into ‘other selves’ and the most personal elements of lived experience (Goffman, 1961 and 1963; Hochschild, 1979 and 1983). In gathering the results of our investigation, it has become increasingly clear to us that there is nothing inherently natural about our identities, our social relations or our beliefs about animals. Animals—and the meanings that we overlay them with—are socially constructed by the varied ways in which we relate to them. Whether handled, cured, saved, displayed or farmed, animals are living and breathing props in a carefully choreographed performance of work, taking on characteristics and qualities that often reflect the deep-seated needs and desires of their handlers rather than any innate ‘essences’. As such, they constitute an especially powerful symbolic resource, arguably more so than many of the other trappings that humans adopt in their identity work. A pen, for example,

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is unlikely to provoke the same emotional reaction in a shelter worker as a neglected cat. This is why animals are often of profound relevance in helping humans to draw significance from work. But seeing animals as mere props in human lives denies their individuality and agency and it is here that we think Animal-Network Theory has something to add. It recognizes the inherently social production of animal identities as a sense-making process while allowing us to consider the structural, political and ideological aspects of such constructions. A Return to the Social Descartes held that human life was ultimately superior to animal in its cultural and moral sophistication but, as we have already suggested, this is a form of imperialism that we want to disavow. In the first instance, we do this by suggesting a return to the original etymology of the word ‘social’. The Latin definition of social means simply the opposite of alone or individual, the primary meaning of society being companionship or fellowship (Czarniawska, 2008; Williams, 1976). A socius, then, is a companion or colleague—or more precisely in our reading of the word—a fellow meaning-maker who adds to the collective creation of values that are essential for cultures to be both contrived and performed. Following Animal-Network Theory, it is essential that our understanding of this meeting place must include both human and animal others and that simply because they are not human does not reduce animals to the status of ‘things’. At the same time, we acknowledge that there are differences between ‘animalhood’ and ‘personhood’. Not all species are the same. Yet the potential differences between the two are not reducible to self-evident biological contrasts between skin and fur, teeth and fangs. Nor are the apparent differences dependent upon diverse capacities for thought, reason and feeling. The most pressing difference between the species lies ultimately within the symbolic and representational power of humans. As a species, we have the authority not only to present ourselves but to design new identities, to attach ourselves to values and to join new groups that share those values. In some workplaces, such as the rescue shelter, this process brings humans into close proximity with animals and work life seeps into the private emotional space of the inner self. In other places, however, it can involve a symbolic detachment from animals. But boundaries like these can shift, overlap and even disappear when humans require a dif-



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ferent performance to be enacted. This points to a fundamental difference between human and animal agency and is evident in our different forms of freedom to communicate, to perform, enact and to react during the experiences of our lives. Humans have the special ability to carve out highly sophisticated cultural worlds and represent these worlds to outsiders. They are capable of particularly unique and subtle forms of discourse. Yet, it is not that humans can and do talk that interests us, rather it is what they say when they do. Animals don’t speak, nor do they read, but they do have their own unique forms of communication and expression. Unfortunately, these are often subsumed by the ways that verbal interactions continue to dominate our relations with animals. One of the ways that we can think about this is to consider animals as the unwitting ‘bearers’ of human culture. When farmers freeze brand their cattle, for example, they physically mark them out as members of the herd. Animals carry the stamp or the imprint of the human culture that has marked them out. In this process of ‘marking out’, animals join a collection—a network—of other actors and materials that help humans to make sense of their everyday work and its experiences. The idea that all workers enter a process of cultural ‘marking’ is crucial to understanding the place of the animal in the workplace, and more specifically, why it is that people so often choose to work with them. Whatever their reasons, it is clear that both individual and collective value-creation plays a fundamental role in helping to organize and mediate their social experiences. One of the key objectives of the field research which led to this book has been to help the reader to get an inside track into these experiences. The problem is that, like all other ethnographies, we have no direct access to the private life-worlds of our participants or indeed to the variety and complexity of all the meanings that they create in order to furnish those worlds. We have even less access to the private world of animals. So we, as ethnographers, can never be certain if identity and work cultures really work exactly as we suppose. Even sharing a language with fellow human beings does not mean that we can necessarily ‘hot wire’ the words as uttered to their hidden, often deeply personal meanings and emotions. We deal with representations but not with reality. What we can observe from our fieldwork, however, are the diverse ways in which actors become physically and actively moved by work. We can watch how some people seem to be affected—bodily, emotionally, and verbally—by the display or presence of animals. As Organizational Sociologist Rolland Munro claims, “Something comes over them. People do things, not just out of cognitively

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understanding rules, or instructions, but because they feel emotionally committed to something” (Munro, 1998 and 2009: 21). While we must live with a degree of uncertainty in the doing of ethnography, we can at least test out our findings and theories by listening to and observing how people react and are in turn moved by working with animals (Latimer, 2004). This lies at the heart of several of the ethnographic case studies which follow, and it is to these workplaces that we now turn.

PART TWO

BOUNDARIES, PARTITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

CHAPTER THREE

FARM ANIMAL, VETS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ‘MUCK’ As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: It exists in the eye of the beholder. Mary Douglas, [1966] 1991: 2

Being a farm veterinary surgeon is what many people would think of as a ‘dirty job’ because it involves close-up bodily examinations, surgery and other ‘messy’ procedures on the farm. Such work brings vets into almost continuous contact with a broad range of ‘animal mess’—slurry, sludge, blood, pus, mucous, and an array of biological tissues—in short, the whole panoply of agricultural detritus. So it is common for vets to find themselves in a whole host of situations where they must demonstrate a tolerance for what others would find unacceptably polluting ‘mess’. Yet, there’s more to it than simply ‘rolling up their sleeves’ to get the job done. In fact, while their everyday work is physically demanding and often ‘mucky’, it is also highly technical and scientific, relying upon the latest research in fields as diverse as engineering, animal husbandry, biology, computing, pharmacology and genetics. As Rural Economist Philip Lowe points out, vets may only charge for this stock of expertise, however, if they can successfully mediate the relationship between their knowledge, their farmer clients and, of course, the living bodies of farm animals (Lowe, 2009). Our emphasis throughout this chapter is the analysis of ‘muck’ as a cultural and professional resource and it involves a slightly different emphasis from other, more animal-focused chapters in this book. In contrast to later chapters, here the animal product of ‘muck’ is presented as a token of human culture and forms the starting point for the description and analysis of this organization. It also represents a connecting theme that helps to strengthen the Animal-Network of vets, farmers, cows and a range of material objects. While the vets treat ‘muck’ as a ubiquitous and mundane aspect of their daily working lives, it also has special significance that goes beyond its obvious material qualities. In fact, it provides a focus for their shared values and enables them to develop a strong group culture. This chapter explains why and how the vets make use of this cultural material. In doing this, it is the symbolic interpretation of ‘muck’ rather than its innate physical qualities that interests us here.

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chapter three The Materials of Veterinary Life

Within the broad Actor-Network family of research, there has always been a strong interest in the materials and practices of scientific workplaces (Latour, 1996; Latour and Woolgar, 1988; Law, 2004 and 2007; Mol, 2005). But surprisingly little ethnographic attention has so far been paid to the profession of veterinary medicine from Actor-Network or even HumanAnimal Studies perspectives. Several of the existing studies of veterinary work have focused upon relationships and emotions, the politics of pet ownership, for example (Hickrod and Schmitt, 1982), the enactment of care (Katcher and Rosenberg, 1979; Serpell, 1996) and the ways in which vets labour to maintain (or disassemble) the human-animal divide (see, for example, Chapter Seven of this book). The majority of the research on vets, however, has tended to foreground the politics of food production (Henry, Baillie and Rushton, 2012; Lowe, 2009) and the human-animal relationships involved (Law, 2007; Sanders, 2010) at the cost of issues that we think have critical importance, namely, the significance of material substances like blood, ‘muck’ and pus in mediating human-animal relations and workplace culture. In the last chapter, we suggested that for some people who work with animals, physical work with ‘dirt’ can become a powerful symbolic resource, a bonding substance that actually helps workers to unite together (Meara, 1974). We found this general principle to be useful when considering the shared values of the farm animal vets that we observed. Intriguingly, however, the vets that we interviewed did not describe their engagements with animal ‘muck’ as evidence of doing ‘dirty work’ and, in fact, they wholeheartedly resisted that description. They were not only able to tolerate the presence of ‘muck’, mud and other detritus but they also appeared to regard farm substances like excreta and blood as emblems of their highly technical skills and, of course, their highly developed sense of professional membership and belonging. Given the richness of this identity work, it is surprising that even within the Organization Studies literature, where discussions of ‘dirty work’ are more developed, very few accounts have given space to the possible paradoxes between power, status and ‘filth’. Accounts of ‘obviously’ dirty jobs such as coal-mining, fishing and kitchen work (see for example Dennis et al., 1956; Tunstall, 1962; Inkson, 1979; Fine, 1996) are more common but these have tended to focus on the somewhat predictable correlation between ‘dirty work’ and diminished occupational status (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999; Kreiner, Ashforth and Sluss, 2006). One notable exception,



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however, is to be found in the contribution made by Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) in their ethnography of slaughterhouse workers. Their study demonstrated the effects of what we commonly assume to be pollutants (such as blood) on occupational identity (Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990). Their findings suggested that despite their obvious association with death, the slaughter-men (all of their participants were male) were able to draw on the presence of animal blood to embody a heroic—and distinctively masculine—identity which acted as a form of resistance to the potential social stigma of their work. “Younger men”, they write, “were sometimes observed splashing the visible parts of their chests with blood before leaving the plant for the day” (1990: 5). The obvious ambiguities in the potential meanings of animal ‘mess’ among the slaughter-men offers us a useful comparison for examining the way the vets also use ‘muck’ as part of their own practices of meaning making. Like the slaughter-men, we noted that the vets also seemed to wear their ‘muck’ stains as a badge of honour and professional pride, evoking comparisons with the dung-smeared natives that Anthropologist Mary Douglas cited in her study of the Havik (1991). This tribe’s ceremonial cleansing rituals involved being anointed with cow dung which, for them, represented a potent symbol of status. Just as Douglas exposed the cultural mutability of ‘mess’ to reveal the relative pollution taboos of such tribes, the idea of symbolic shifts between cleanliness and contamination is something which has a direct relevance here. It is developed in what follows to consider how the ‘mess’ derived from other species contributes positively to distinctively human forms of meaning-making and identity work. At the Veterinary Practice The research that underpins this chapter aimed to address the shortage of close-grained research into farm vets, ‘dirt’ and the regulation of social interactions. In doing so, it explores findings from a four-year ethnographic study of a British farm veterinary practice. This is a rapidly growing owner-managed business that has taken advantage of the recent decline in ‘mixed’ veterinary practice (Lowe, 2009; Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons/Institute for Employment Studies, 2010) to offer a specialist ‘farm animal only’ service. This chapter draws on observational research including two hundred interviews, some formal but most informal, with eleven veterinary surgeons. Observations were conducted both

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in the practice and at twelve of the hundred and fifty farms that made up the business’s client-base. Six of the vets that were interviewed were owners and directors of the practice and therefore had a degree of managerial authority over the other vets that worked there as well as the ten (non-veterinary) administrative staff members. When considering the data, however, we felt that any implicit hierarchy between the employed (assistant) vets and the directors did not appear to be particularly prominent; in other words, it seemed that membership to the British Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons forged a sense of collective professional regard that supplanted the usual conventions of boss and worker. Thus, one of our main findings of the research as a whole was that professional, veterinary membership was of major significance in the way that the organization’s culture was configured. At the time of the fieldwork, all the vets were male and their shared masculinity appeared to augment their sense of collective regard and team work. By contrast, there seemed to be a degree of disparity between the organizational status of vets and administrators which was amplified by the apparent split between the genders. The division between professional and non-veterinary workers contributed to the ways in which tensions occasionally broke through the surface of this usually co-operative and calm workplace, a finding that has resonance with other medical settings where workers are multi-disciplinary (Latimer, 2004) or divided by hierarchy and professional qualifications (Wicks, 1998). These issues play an important part in this chapter, firstly to contextualize the issues surrounding the particularities of the Animal-Network between vets and farm animals and secondly, to explore how the substance of ‘muck’ worked within human relationships. The aim of the fieldwork was to gather first-hand information about these issues in what qualitative data specialist, David Silverman calls a ‘naturally occurring way’ (Silverman, 1993: 111). For us this meant employing ‘an array of interpretive techniques’ so as ‘to describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the frequency’ (Van Maanen, 1979: 520) of events and issues as they emerged throughout the fieldwork. Following in the ethnographic tradition, the concern was to generally ‘immerse’ ourselves in the culture of the organization and to get inside ‘the ways of thinking and behaviour’ that moulded the experiences of its actors (Bate, 1997: 1155). As we have done elsewhere, we shared this work so that one of us took the lead in the data collection (in this case, LH) while the interpretation of themes and patterns was shared



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between us. And as with the majority of our other chapters, this approach often relied upon physical experiences of the field to give us ‘a corporeal knowledge’ of the ways that things worked practically (Bourdieu, 1999: 135). The representation of these ‘corporeal’ fieldwork experiences in this chapter is an attempt to ‘thickly describe’ the context, its characteristics and tensions (Geertz, 1973 and 1993). Structuring the Animal-Network Our main aim was to explore how animal ‘muck’ got its unique significance in this setting, how it helped the vets to structure their experience of clinical work with animals and how, by extension, it helped them to mediate the relations with each other and their non-clinical support staff. This network relied upon both human and animal ‘actors’ as well as a whole host of materials for coherence and structure. Surgical and farm equipment, clothing, and various other everyday objects worked together with those actors as a form of cultural display (Tilley, 2001). Interestingly, although the vets spent large amounts of time in physical proximity with animals, they were also able to maintain a degree of scientific and professional detachment from them. Through symbolic acts of distancing, they managed to avoid the stigma traditionally associated with what Everett Hughes described as ‘dirty work’ and thus differentiated themselves from non-veterinary employees, and even other vets from outside the practice, to build an exclusive sense of esteem (Hughes, 1971: 343). ‘Muck’ worked here in several unexpectedly complex ways, then, not least to ‘purify’ the distinctions between vets, animal patients and those outside their elite group. The apparent paradox between the vets doing ‘dirty’ and physical work and their professional medical status became apparent rather early in the fieldwork. Watching the vets restrain their charges held significance for us as observers because these interactions seemed to symbolize a primitive, pre-cultural power relationship between ‘man’ and ‘beast’ as the following extract from fieldnotes suggests: A black and white cow, being led by the herdsman, ambles towards us. She has a slight limp which I see the vet has noticed. The farmer is talking to us about the cow and says that the animal exhibits signs of pain in the leg, that the skin is hot to the touch. Rowan [the vet] asks the farmer to lead the cow into the crush [chute or stock] where she is gated in. The cow’s head is poking through the bars at the front and she seems to panic, making three attempts to kick out. The vet is pleased to have got her into the crush:

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chapter three ‘she can’t kick through these’ [he touches the bars, smiling] ‘we’ve all been kicked at one time or other and it really hurts’ he chuckles ‘especially when they catch you off-guard’. The cow seems to settle down and begins to look round more calmly. The vet lifts her back leg, securing it with ropes to the bars. She is subdued. Rowan feels the hoof, prodding it to test the cow’s reaction and find out where the pain is most acute. He makes some general recommendations to the farmer about the animal’s bedding and while he talks he begins to shave away slivers of hoof with a sharp, curved knife. The cow remains passive. A layer of hoof is removed, the shavings white on the muddy floor. Some thick white pus trickles out through a small hole in the base of the hoof, and Rowan washes this area carefully. An injection of anti-biotic is given, the leg is bandaged and the cow is released. She strolls calmly away in the direction of the herd.

This was a typical interaction between the vets and their patients and it became clear that a sort of negotiation was underway to bring objects (like the knife) and actors (the cow and her hoof) under his professional command. But the power between human and non-human agents was not always ‘one-way’. The threat of animal resistance needed careful and consistent management through (non-verbal) negotiation and a variety of objects like the crush to enable vets to ‘move’ and ‘position’ them for treatment (Latimer, 2004). Judging and managing interactions like these forms a large part of what it means to be an experienced professional (Lowe, 2009) and is especially important to farm vets since they need to acquire sufficient control to get to grips with large and heavy animals (Sanders, 2010). And, in contrast to the human hospital where medical professionals deal with much smaller human bodies, there can be no verbal negotiation or discussion between the species. Here, by contrast, the cow must be physically overpowered in order for the enactment of care to be made explicit through things like knives, bandages and medicines. Yet a useful comparison can be drawn between the interactions of the hospital and the farmyard. This initial observation from the field, for example, echoes Latimer’s (2004) study of inter-disciplinary work relationships in the human hospital, a space where the movements of objects track the flow of power from consultant to patient to show how the ‘extension’ of discourse works between medical practitioners and the recipients of care. Although the operation of linguistic discourse makes the hospital a more ‘subtle’ social environment with less obvious emphasis upon physical domination, the cow’s body is brought into alignment through similarly material ‘moves’; she is harnessed, positioned and (sometimes rather forcibly) brought into alignment with medical knowledge to receive the necessary care. As to how the vets acquire the confidence to put their knowledge to practical effect,



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we must take a closer look at the methods and enactments by which they develop a sense of ontological security. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example from the field. Working with Raw Materials One of the vets, “Rowan” had been called out to visit a calf with diarrhoea at a nearby farm and after a short examination of the animal had decided to take a sample of faeces to test at the practice laboratory. He had taken a small quantity of sample from the calf by filling one of the fingers of an arm-length glove with liquid ‘muck’, the aim being to test this for evidence of disease. He claimed that he had felt ‘perfectly happy’ to collect the sample from the calf, and had not been affected by its smell or consistency. This was, after all, an everyday activity and taking samples from animals was something he did very frequently. When he returned to the practice he took the sample into the laboratory and snipped the tip of the glove’s finger to squeeze out its contents into a Petri dish. Rowan explained that as he had peered into the dish he had felt an unexpectedly violent feeling of disgust: Rowan: It’s laughable really I suppose, but I was looking at this thing in the dish and I felt repulsed by this neat little turd that I had created. I had to mess it up; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to carry on, I’d have been sick.

Rowan explained that he had disturbed the sample with his finger to redesign its appearance which enabled him to destroy the traces of what— to him—presented an unwelcome reminder of small animal excreta. It turned back into a clinical sample. Physically sickened by the impression that he was inspecting a ‘little turd’, the vet’s finger turned this substance from something repugnant into something altogether more acceptable. The ‘muck’, a commonplace enough object in his working life, thus became a shapeless laboratory sample which was stripped of negative meaning and re-interpreted as something which better suited his lived sense of self. This example demonstrates how a powerful sense of self can transform something apparently disgusting as a ‘turd’ into a material that is far more appropriate, in this case a laboratory ‘sample’. What many people from outside the veterinary profession might not appreciate is the subtle reasoning that gives one form of material—in this case animal excreta—such apparent superiority over another. For those who work very intimately with the ‘raw materials’ of cattle bodies and their productions, however, it is eminently understandable that ‘calf muck’

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has a legitimate scientific presence in the laboratory while ‘cat turds’ do not (Douglas, 1991). It is the vet’s desire to preserve his attachment to ‘the right materials’, those appropriate to being a professional farm clinician, and guard against the onslaught of both a physical and a symbolic taint that makes him stir the sample. By extension, it seems that the ‘value’ attributed to the laboratory sample is accentuated by its nature, as bovine faeces rather than cat faeces. Even the method of collecting the sample (by glove rather than test-tube) seems to suggest an affinity with rugged, agricultural work at this moment while in the laboratory, by contrast, a more precise and scientific persona is shifted into place to help him to conduct the experiment. Interestingly, then, the origin of that sample—the farm animal itself— adds something distinctive to the way that this material gets its characteristics and becomes meaningful at that precise cultural moment. Its symbolic attachment to the calf (rather than the cat) worked to create a particular effect upon Rowan, a sense of worth and ‘acceptability’ that enabled him to perform his professional role more easily (Goffman, 1967). These actions highlight the intrinsic mutability of material objects—in this case, calf excreta—to hold different and contested meanings depending upon who is working with those materials and the nature of the performances involved in that work. This was a clear example of the sorts of distancing that the vets seemed powerfully able to perform. While they made practical use of some forms of ‘muck’ they necessarily, and simultaneously, made other forms of ‘mess’ disappear altogether. Interestingly, however, what had become a ‘clean sample’ became ‘mess’ again when it was finally discarded in the bin and the office staff took over the cleaning routine at the end of the working day. For the administrator in question, it had been a rather unwelcome discovery: Carol, Administrator: [speaking to fellow administrators] I’ve just been into the lab, right, and you wouldn’t believe the stink in there. Rowan’s had a muck sample on the counter and has just chucked it on the top of the bin. The bin was full and stinking anyway, so he’s just ledged it on top. It’s disgusting. Why is it always us who have to deal with the fact that they make such a mess?

The once-transformed laboratory sample turned back into something altogether more polluting: ‘it’s disgusting’, the administrator claims. This was an alteration that appeared to work in tandem with the shift of duty between the professional scientist and the administrator whose job it had become to deal with the ‘mess’ of the leftover laboratory material.



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Managing the Support Team It seemed to us that the vets’ tacit appreciation of managing animals— applied through physical rather than discursive negotiations—did not always prepare them adequately for an appreciation of the delicate human politics of the organization. The practice office was a space where they relied upon discussion and narrative rather than physical force to establish their authority and, consequently, the negotiation of their human relations was far less clear-cut than the ‘raw’ power struggles that we often observed taking place on the farmyard. While language (and arguably gender) played a more important role in the ways that the vets negotiated with their support staff in the practice, it seemed significant that in these relationships the vets also drew upon a much more subtle command of ‘things’ to exert control (Latimer, 2004). Even everyday objects like surgical knives and laboratory samples became cultural artefacts that helped them to maintain some distinctions between themselves and others. As an apparently ‘non-veterinary’ chore, cleaning the laboratory at the end of the working day was doubly tainted; that is, both physically and symbolically stigmatized by its association with lower-status, and in this case ‘feminine’ work (Kreiner et al., 2006). The materials in question had, by this time, resumed their mundane and insignificant status to the vet, reshaped by his finger to perform that symbolic work of transformation, but the sample remained just as repellently meaningful to the administrator who was tasked with the job of clearing it away. The vets were unaffected by such apparently negative readings because they could control the ways that the ‘raw materials’ of their work were presented and represented (Douglas, 1991). This interpretive power was derived from their superior professional expertise (Muzio et al., 2008) and, of course, their elevated organizational status (Knights and McCabe, 2000). That status was based not only on their experience of doing high value and scientific forms of work, but their collective team culture; a culture that they occasionally described with particularly gendered language: Denver: We are basically a team of lads and we want to be part of a winning team rather than singular, isolated units just doing our work every day. We can be intimidating as a bunch of strong personalities when we’re all together, but our farmers like the idea of us being a team; it’s an important part of our image.

Being in what this vet described as the ‘winning team’ seemed to reward the vets in ways that generated value, meaning and collective esteem, above that which they accrued from their superior professional and

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educational capital (Bourdieu, 1984; Hawkins, 2009). By contrast, the administration team had little chance to access the materials of the ‘winning team’. In fact, when they were not engaged in paperwork and other desk duties, they appeared to experience a sense of doing ‘dirty work’. Separated from any financial or moral value that might have accumulated to others engaged in the clinical care of animals (Taylor, 2010), they resorted to complaining when the vets were out on their rounds. During these office discussions, they expressed a sense of detachment from the scientific professionalism of their employers, something which seemed to be heightened by the obvious gender differences in the practice (Muzio et al., 2008; Knights and McCabe, 2000). Paradoxically, then, it seemed that what was more ‘polluting’ to the personal dignity of the administrators was the segregation from what many would regard as the vets much physically ‘dirtier’ and more physically demanding work with animals on the farm (Sanders, 2010). The importance of this argument is crucial in generating some ideas about human interactions as well as the nature of the Animal-Network here. It prompts us to ask how and why human (as well as inter-species) distinctions were produced and reinforced by the vets when they were at work. These are puzzling questions that we can begin to answer by looking further at the practical ways in which vets carry out their work. The Art of Diagnosis Most veterinary investigations actually commence with remote observation rather than an immediate engagement with ‘muck’, blood and ‘mess’. In fact, when examining species with which they were less familiar (such as chickens, for example), the vets would often resist taking a hands-on approach at all and worked from a more theoretical perspective. In their interactions with large animals like cattle, however, their senses were indispensable to the rituals of clinical examination. The standard veterinary textbooks recommend that good farm vets should start an examination by taking in a view from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail (Jackson and Cockroft, 2002). The vets mediate their gaze, switching between a distant and a close-up view, to obtain an insight into aspects of the cow’s biology. This is the way that clinical abnormalities are identified and given a name. Without even touching the animal, it is possible for vets to uti-



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lize visual diagnoses to explain what is going on inside. This is a process of making visible what is actually invisible. In one vet’s description, this exceeds the bounds of logic by turning diagnosis into an art form: Rowan: The art of veterinary practice is applying the science and judging how to use specialized knowledge, but it’s also about having a sort of sixth sense appreciation of animals. Some vets are really logical . . . you know, they’ll apply formulae and percentages . . . like this animal has so much percent of surviving the operation, for example. The art of veterinary science is to go beyond this logical approach to a certain extent.

The vets often referred to their own ability to see more and further than animal owners and they treated the sharpness of their senses as a form of professional know-how which was attributable to their superior training and insight: LH: Can you give me an example of how you make use of your senses in your everyday routine? Tim: I use all of them. Smell, hearing . . . they are very important. Cows hide their symptoms very well . . . because they are historically a species that has been preyed upon. Anything like bleeding or an injury is hidden from sight because it’s a sign of weakness that could mean a predator is more likely to attack them. Vets should really use this to their advantage, looking for subtlety by keeping a distance. You might look at, maybe, the way the animal walks or is holding itself. This is a classic method of looking for symptoms that is often missed by the farmer.

As the veterinary gaze finds its limitations, however, the vets then draw on other sensory powers to reinforce or challenge their original diagnoses. Vets typically make assessments from the array of smells, sights and sounds; smelling the cow’s breath, feeling around the mouth, squirting some milk from a teat, smelling or feeling the texture of excreta, squeezing, flicking, listening to and palpating the cow’s body. These are all rituals that they commonly perform. And when it comes to assessing an animal’s physical condition, the appearance and smells of its excrement are usually of vital significance. The size or unusual shape of faeces, their consistency, texture or odour, are all good indicators of poor health. So it is the ‘rectal’ examination that more than any other characterizes the visceral quality of the vet’s diagnostic powers. This technique of probing and palpation yields rich insights into reproductive and digestive health, and performed tens of times a day on dairy farms, arguably constitutes the most expressive representation of the vet’s close-up physical relationship with the cows in their care as Denver explained:

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Working from the nose to the tail, the vet’s clinical examination pares down the ‘mess’ of the cow’s body, translating its smells, ‘muck’, and foulsmelling fluids into ‘clean’ scientific discourse. This routine brings into the open that which is usually buried; it is the pursuit of objective ‘truth’ and the privileging of scientific reason over animal ‘mess’. In a similar way to Latour’s observations of the laboratory scientists actively constructing scientific ‘facts’, the vets appeared to be engaged in a similar practice of sanitizing and editing the ‘mess’ of their sensory examinations in their diagnoses of bovine diseases, an obvious example of their powerful transformative capabilities (Latour and Woolgar, 1988). Unlike human physicians who usually favour remote forms of investigation such as endoscopy or X-Ray, it is the vet’s own body that becomes the most valuable professional instrument on the farm and constitutes an astonishing connection between the somatic and the scientific. Conjoined by the warm, moist, living ‘mess’ of the cow’s body, the vet is inextricably attached to the animal’s most intimate organs; the human body becomes a scientific instrument. Yet, this is done in a way that allows the vets to acquire the apparent professional distance of a laboratory scientist. How, then, do vets perform the distancing manoeuvre of being connected bodily to the animal while, as scientists, remaining professionally detached? Distance through Humour One way in which this distance is created and managed is through humour. Take, for instance, this vet’s version of how he carries out close range examination of a cow: Mac: We’re being shat on and pissed on all the time . . . all the time [laughing]. It’s a filthy job really, you get shit everywhere. You get filthy when you



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spend your time with your arm up cow’s arses [laughing]. Particularly when something’s got scours [diarrhoea] like this wee bugger has [holding up a faecal sample inside a knotted polythene glove]. And I don’t always wear gloves for rectal exams, not very often anyway . . . because it’s hard to feel anything due to the lack of mobility in your hand and finger movements. I never wear gloves for calvings or removing cleansings [placenta] for that reason, it’s very hard to wear gloves. They’re very restrictive and make it hard to sense what’s going on. You get absolutely covered in stinking, horrible stuff but I use my hands a lot . . . I poke my fingers in anywhere to see what’s going on . . . poke my fingers in their eyes, their teeth, I pull anything out with my fingers.

What is remarkable here is Mac’s readiness to tolerate, laugh at and perhaps even boast about working so intimately with repugnant bodily ‘mess’ like excreta, placenta, broken bones and rotten teeth. The primal, almost ‘pre-cultural’ sensations of using naked, un-gloved hands to feel inside the cow’s interior spaces lend an instinctive, primitive quality to his tactile explorations. As these graphic descriptions illustrate, when the vets talked about their daily work they frequently found humour in their seeming preoccupation with such forms of diagnosis. By sharing a joke, the vets were able to draw upon ‘mess’ as a distancing mechanism that symbolically, if not physically, separated them from their animal patients. Similar distancing tactics have been observed in other ‘dirty jobs’ where humour works regulate the space between ‘inner self’ and the work itself (Sanders, 2004). On their return to the office after their daily rounds, the researcher often heard the vets laugh about indulging in ‘rectal tourism’, an in-joke implying that they had spent the working day on the road, literally touring the rectums of the cattle under their care. It was a witticism that was evidently part of the daily banter among the vets but it raised little comic interest among the non-veterinary administrators who were often listening from their desks. Jokes such as these suggested an intimate familiarity between the vets which not only enhanced their collective professional identity, but actively preserved their sense of scientific detachment. This worked in two ways, firstly to reiterate the (already) explicit hierarchies between veterinary and non-veterinary workers, as well as to reclassify ‘muck’ from ‘dirty’ to ‘clean’ by legitimating the vet’s prestige as a travelling expert, metaphorically feeling his way around the countryside signposted by the cow’s most pungent bodily products. While cow ‘muck’ was a source of shared value and humour, however, there remained a clearly demarcated hierarchy which categorized ‘good’ ‘muck’ from ‘bad’.

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In parallel with Douglas’s observation that cultural groups select substances as pollution to ‘impose system on an inherently untidy experience’ (1991: 13), the farm vets created their own shared set of taboos and codes of purity to incorporate—rather than expunge—the ‘muck’ and ‘mess’ of the farm into their professional identities, something which Bob made clear: Bob: Ruminant faeces are not in the same class as mono-gastric [single stomached animal] faeces. In fact, cow ‘muck’ is of a different character and nature to pig, human, cat and dog waste. Cow ‘muck’ is no worse than a muddy puddle and if I fell over in slurry, it stinks and sure . . . I don’t particularly like it but it’s not that much worse than a muddy puddle. When I’m doing a rectal, cow shit doesn’t disturb me.

This is no straightforward categorization between the ‘muck’ of planteaters and carnivores, but demonstrates the subtlety with which the vets manipulated their perceptions about the sorts of biological ‘mess’ that are polluting and those that were deemed to be tolerable. Even working in the slurry and the stench of the farmyard did not dull their sensitivity towards what they regarded as repellent forms of ‘mess’, which is surprising given the stoic pragmatism they showed towards cow ‘muck’, blood and bad smells. The other vets appeared to share Bob’s categorization of ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ faeces. Tim even claimed that “there is nothing worse than a cat poo”, a sentiment that was reinforced by our observation of Rowan at work in the laboratory with the Petri dish ‘turd’. So while the vets could joke about cow shit, other forms of ‘muck’ crossed the boundary of bodily pollution. This was a shift that required an ontological reclassification; a movement in which cow ‘muck’ was neutralized by the compensating value of their professional identities. It is understandable that the sorts of clinical work that vets do is liable to promote a sense of tolerance to particular types of ‘muck’, something which colours their sense of professional identity, particularly when it is expressed through shared humour. But, as we have already suggested, this sensibility was also articulated in their relations with other people, and particularly their administrative co-workers. How, then, did the vets’ collective tolerance of certain types of excreta give them status in the organization? And how did their apparent ‘taxonomy of pollution’ relate to and produce meanings about working with different animal species? As



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part of a series of informal interviews on this subject, several of the vets described their experiences before they specialized in farm surgery, drawing on a period of their professional lives in which they were still developing their specialist interests. While newly qualified, many of them had worked in mixed practices treating pets as well as farm animals. Mac told us about the conflicts that sometimes emerged between vets engaged in these different specialisms. It sounded as though ideas of pollution were expressed very differently. In the following story, Mac described an incident of conflict between himself and his employer, a pet specialist who prided himself on spotless hygiene in the operating theatre. Mac had been out on a farm visit and had not cleaned the cow ‘muck’ from his hands before touching a cat waiting on the examination table. Offended by the obvious signs of ‘dirty’ cattle work his boss gave him an official disciplinary warning: Mac: I came back from the farm and I was rushing because there was a queue in the waiting room so I didn’t scrub up. I was looking at this cat when the senior partner came in and he gave me such a telling off. But small animal vets often fall out with the farm boys because they have to dress up more and farm vets are working in shite and get totally covered in it. Small animal practice is all about making the pet owner think their animal is getting the best care and pet owners don’t want to see the real ‘mess’ of what’s going on in vet work, they want everything to look clean and hygienic. When they come back for their beloved pet, it’s like the vet has had to gift wrap it, present it like a finished product . . . you know.

This extract alerts us to power relationships and to possible instabilities in the social construction of the veterinary profession as a whole. Punished for being dirty and for transgressing a symbolic boundary between the ‘mucky’ farmyard and the gleaming operating theatre, Mac’s story throws the hierarchies of this workplace into sharp focus. In quite explicit ways, then, Mac was able to construct meaning about being a cow vet by ‘othering’ himself from small animal practice, pet owners and even “beloved pets” themselves. With echoes of Ackroyd and Crowdy’s (1990) slaughtermen and their paradoxical desire to resist stigma by marking themselves out with blood on their way home from work, Mac appeared to be equally proud of his ‘muck’-stained skin, pleased to have undermined the small animal vet’s performance by introducing the real ‘mess’ of vet work into the pristine consulting room (Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990). Here, ‘muck’ was used deliberately as ‘muck’ to make a subtle point about different identities.

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At times such as these the vets seemed keen to associate themselves with tough and ostensibly masculine forms of labour. The ambiguous signs of ‘muck’ and blood became a badge of courage that symbolized physical masculine heroism, motifs that were associated with large animals and the ‘rough’ working conditions of the farmyard. So small animal vets were often spoken of in derogatory ways for trying to conceal the ‘real work’ of animal surgery and treatment by deliberately hiding the inevitable blood, ‘muck’ and bad smells ‘behind the scenes’. There were no female farm vets at the practice, however, and it was difficult to know whether a more mixed gender environment would have mitigated those forms of expression. It is interesting to note, however, that the farm vets’ occasional jibes about small animal vets would have had an implicitly gendered aspect because, judging by recent statistics (RCVS, 2010), this is a professional sub-group that has a significantly higher proportion of females than the male-dominated farm sector. Vying for professional one-upmanship with small animal vets was characteristic of the ways in which the self-styled ‘farm boys’ spoke about themselves. It helped them to develop a distinctive collective identity, one which relied upon expert medical knowledge as well as tacit and shared interpretations of the substances and productions of their animal patients. In doing that, hierarchies were not only implicit between professional specialisms; that is, between small and large animal vets, but between ‘worthwhile’ food-producing animals and those that were domestic human companions or ‘pets’. Food-producing animals like cattle and pigs comprised the ‘serious’ side of veterinary business while ‘pet’ animals demanded a wholly different professional repertoire, a less rugged—and arguably less masculine—form of performance management. Adopting different performances with different animals was a compromise that they were not prepared to make, even when face-to-face with concerned animal owners or irate employers. The Right to Bear ‘Muck’ What was more unusual were the ways in which the vets used ‘muck’ to reinforce the already obvious status gaps between themselves and their non-veterinary employees. The presence of cow ‘muck’ and blood on their skin made their administrative subordinates (all too pungently) aware



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of the vets’ ‘superior’ status ultimately based, of course, on their surgical knowledge and healing abilities. This manifested most obviously and paradoxically as the right to bear ‘muck’, an enactment that put them both symbolically and powerfully in charge of the organization. Watching the vets return to the practice office smeared in excreta, blood and mucous was like observing a sporting team returning from the pitch. Just as Mac had described his own experiences of the small animal surgery ‘muck’ seemed, once again, to mark the farm vets out as a special group. With their skin soiled with the characteristic green-brown of cattle dung, the vets were demarcating themselves as a powerful elite. They could have easily washed such stains away on their arrival back at the office but rarely did, perhaps because the ‘muck’ on their skin underlined the skill and sensuousness of their expertise on the farmyard. ‘Anointed’ by these visible signs of ‘real work’ the vets felt able to hand over the responsibility of cleaning up waste products such as used coffee cups and clinical samples from the laboratory just as they could confidently hand over bundles of dung-smeared cash and cheques for the weekly ‘banking run’ to their (female) accountant. This is how the vets displayed the signs of physical mastery over nature’s ‘mess’ and also, simultaneously, over their employees. For the farm vets, ‘muck’, blood, mucous, and pus were tacit symbols of power within the office, and acted as a physical ‘trophy’ that positioned them perceptibly above the status of the female office workers. The administrators became a ‘captive’ audience to this performance in which ‘muck’ was blatantly flaunted as an emblem of expertise. Although we have already noted that the administrators disliked and often complained about their experience with ‘dirty work’, it seemed clear that the vets also attempted to impose their acceptance of cow dung upon these workers. It seemed important that they should learn to acquire a tolerance for the ‘miasmatic’ smells and sights of farm work. Yet, the women in the office often vocalized a strong resistance to the presence of ‘muck’ in their office, something that the vets were occasionally dismayed by: Mac: I think they are a pair of whining bitches. They might not be used to working in these conditions, not like us. We spend our lives up to our armpits in shit. And we’re all used to it here, the smells, getting a bit of shit on the carpet, you know? They think they’re working in a bank or something. They were complaining because there is a bit of a leak in the ceiling and it looks a bit dirty, they even worked overtime to do some cleaning. But they have to make a big fuss over it all. I think they’re going to be nightmares to work with.

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Paradoxically, though, while the vets insisted that the administrators ought to acquire a tolerance to such ‘mess’, at other times they grumbled that the office staff were untidy and needed to “take a pride in their surroundings.” The vets even disparaged the administrators for being prepared to “work in filth”, a powerfully loaded term instilled with the vets’ own ideas of acceptable and unacceptable office ‘dirt’. One such incident involved the vets Tim and Andrew enacting a theatrical display of doing vacuum cleaning, grinning at each other and giving each other thumbsup signs in a playful attempt at organizational ‘role-reversal’. By doing so, these vets reinforced their distaste for ‘low-status’ forms of mundane office ‘mess’. Office ‘muck’ was something that they wanted to be sanitized by office staff. Likewise, when the vets returned from their farm calls with dirty and used equipment, it became the job of their support staff to clean and sanitize these objects. This was a segregation of duty that the vets were careful to reinforce. Tim: We have an area inside the back door where the girls know that the kits need cleaning. They get everything out, wash and autoclave the drapes [sterile cloths] and wash all the tools. But they just throw the sharps [blades and needles] in the sharps bucket, we never re-use scalpel blades.

For a group of professionals who spent so much of their working lives coated in the physical bi-products of farm animal patients, it appeared paradoxical that they created a symbolic distance between themselves and their support workers by drawing such a clear boundary between surgical and non-surgical work in this way. The vets expressed that handling blood and other bodily productions when conducting surgery on the farmyard was not considered to be ‘dirty work’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999) perhaps because it was mitigated by the practical skill of wielding precision tools to enact highly skilled care. By the time that the support workers came to handle the tools of such work, however, they had become ‘pollutants’, matter out of place in an otherwise orderly clinical setting (Douglas, 1991). After conducting the surgery and discarding the scalpel blade, the vet does not want to touch it again: ‘the girls know that the kits need cleaning’. The act of handling and disposing of the blade becomes the responsibility of the non-veterinary worker. Thus, a material that has, up to that point, been a marker of surgical prowess suddenly turns to rubbish in their hands. When the pristine scalpel is wrapped in its neat paper envelope and becomes attached to the bodily doing of professional veterinary



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work, it is symbolically ‘cleaner’ than the ‘mess’ of the used blade which, by being discarded, is both physically moved and symbolically transformed to become contaminated clinical waste. The vet does not want to touch ‘the materiality of his work’ again (Game, 1991: 118). The ways that scalpel blades and various other surgical objects were used, discarded and ‘commanded’ (Latimer, 2004) highlighted the very separate labour processes involved in the business, thus rendering any implicit hierarchies of the organization more self-evident (Muzio et al., 2008). This symbolic shift tracked the physical movement from the ‘clean’, or the high status side of work, to what the support staff felt was the ‘dirty’ and low-status side of the job, making clear the spatial and symbolic separation between vets and the team that they sometimes referred to (in somewhat priestly language) as their ‘lay’ workers. Unsurprisingly, the process of cleaning surgical toolkits that came into the practice in this way was a job that the support workers seemed to dislike and, to avoid one person doing more than was strictly necessary, they took turns to do it. In contrast to the ways that the vets spoke about their own involvement in the process, this work was perceived by the support team to be ‘dirty’ and ‘smelly’ as there was often a mixture of blood and disinfectant at the bottom of the boxes. Apart from the perceived unpleasantness involved in this task, this was a job that from the administrators’ point of view, at least, magnified the status division between themselves and the vets. As one support worker claimed: Anne, Administration team leader: It’s very much a case of us and them now in this business. We’re the ones who clean up after them, help them to do their job.

This was a sentiment that was echoed by other administrators, particularly in the ways that they discussed the idea of ‘cleaning up after the vets’. Tension surrounding the division of labour continuously threatened to overflow into more outright forms of dispute at the practice, but rarely did; something which this case study shares with several others (for example, Wicks, 1998 and Hawkins, 2009). Perhaps the economic imperative, that is, the ‘effort bargain’ between wages and work enabled the office staff to feel partially compensated for the apparent sense of inequality that they sometimes expressed (Baldamus, 1967). Perhaps the economic aspects of the work helped them to manage the sense that they were ‘outside’ the veterinary elite and gave them a collective coping mechanism, rather than a basis for outright resistance (Hawkins, 2009; Strangleman and Roberts, 1999; Knights and McCabe, 2000).

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Even so, the atmosphere of politeness and camaraderie that informed the everyday culture of Dairyland occasionally ‘slipped’ to reveal somewhat more precarious relationships that were based on what the vets sometimes assumed were ‘obvious’ divisions of knowledge and authority: Rowan: I think that employing female support staff is easier. Vets are the fee earners . . . it’s an obvious division. I’d feel happier to be the breadwinner of the business and that puts you in a superior position. LH: You mention the word breadwinner there. Do you think that’s a good word to use here? Doesn’t that have overtones of a domestic relationship? Rowan: Yeah . . . we pull in the fees. It is a bit like a domestic relationship . . . but it works.

The vet makes an assumption here that the professional and even the gendered differences between veterinary bosses and support workers are ‘natural’ boundaries that help this culture to function: ‘It is a bit like a domestic relationship . . . but it works’. This was in stark contrast to the ways that the support workers framed their own experiences of work. While they seemed to accept that the vets ‘pulled in the fees’ by acting as professional ‘breadwinners’, they were appalled by the sense that they had become ‘office wives’ that looked after the vets and their discarded ‘things’ (Benet, 1972; Game, 1991). Anne, Administration team leader: They need us to support them to do their work I suppose but it’s totally split along male/ female lines. Why is it always us who have to carry the vets about, make sure that they have everything they need, clean up their used coffee cups or their kits? It’s unfair.

Distance through Domesticity In the conversations that we had with the office administrators, they seemed aggrieved by the hierarchies in the business. They described their role as one of skilled communication and planning, involving much more than simply tidying up the ‘mess’ created by their employers: Beryl: I went in the lab on Friday and there was shit all over the floor, you know piles of rubbish and the bins were full. The vets make such a mess, they are such filthy sods. They have no respect for us at all, even though we are all busy answering phones, booking in calls, they still expect us to chase round tidying it all up.

Despite the vets returning to the practice from their farm duties with upper arms, clothes, faces smeared in ‘muck’, their coercion of the female



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office staff into a routine of dusting, vacuuming and washing up, effectively tried to clean up what they (very often) had defiled. The office staff equated this with a lack of respect for their different (albeit non-clinical) occupational skills. Although the vets expected the administrators to accept, and perhaps be impressed by the blood and the smells that they brought in on their skin and clothes, they were nonetheless expected to police the boundaries of hygiene and conventionality. ‘Muck’ was something these women had to tolerate if they wanted to fit in, yet it was also something they had to be prepared to expunge as part of the daily routine of office work. In the following extract from an e-mail sent from a vet to the female office staff, it is clear how such contradictory tropes were articulated by the vets as an attempt to impose managerial control: Andrew’s e-mail to the office staff: Girls, Why do I get the impression that because I am not happy with the appearance of the practice that you are all in a mood? I do appreciate how busy you all are, however, this is my practice and if I think it looks scruffy then I am entitled to my opinion surely? I am probably the only vet who would notice a dead elephant rotting in the corner and I agree that it must be very disheartening chasing round after some very untidy vets. Because we are out most of the day, we do rely on you to at least maintain some pride in what clients and reps see when they come in. If you need help, advice etc . . . lifting, cleaning etc . . . then just ask me. We are all a damn good team and so why can we not communicate better? If any of you strongly believe that I was wrong to think the practice did not look acceptable then feel free to confront me. Agreed, we are all responsible but I just ask for you to look around once in a while. For example, if I don’t say anything, I know that bottle of pink drench and the equine guard on the front desk will stand there for eternity. Again, tell me if I am wrong. Please do not take offence, moaning is my prerogative. You/ we all work bloody hard and if you have any thoughts or ideas then talk to me. Someone who thought he was helping you, Andrew

In response to this message, the administrators came to rely on the language of gender to embody their own forms of resistance and made it clear that the office was not a space where they would willingly choose to reproduce traditional, feminized norms of domestic cleanliness. In fact, they often spoke about their desire to serve farmers and, ultimately, to contribute towards the care of farm animals as motivations for choosing to work there. Several said they had always wanted to train as vets but had never had the opportunity to do so.

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It was paradoxical that while the vets sometimes chose to embrace— and capitalize upon—a series of ‘domestic’ values like cleanliness and pride, it was clear that this had to be disconnected from ostensibly ‘female’ emotions, “moods” and other sensitivities that might otherwise be attached to those domestic repertoires. The apparent family-values of this organization only stretched as far as domestic labour while emotion (of the sort more freely expressed at home, or even in the small animal surgery) was unacceptable and warranted a written response. Having little formal professional status and almost no structural authority to fall back on, however, the administrators frequently resorted to their femininity as ‘gender capital’ in order to find strength to articulate their annoyances: Anne: After Andrew sent the e-mail we were seriously pissed off in here and I sent one back which pretty much summed up how we all felt. Of course, then I was accused of being aggressive, they had me in the meeting room, four partners . . . they basically said I’d got to sort out some kind of cleaning. It was a shit sandwich, you know they start off saying something positive like they think you’re doing a great job, then you get bollocked, then they finish on something smarmy like, ‘we really appreciate what you do for us’. I think they’ve got me over a barrel. The thing is, the vets walk shit in, spill their coffee or whatever but they never clean it up. My point is; why is it always the women who are expected to clean up here? The vets always go quiet when I ask that. They just wander in with muddy boots on and they get shit all over the carpet. But that’s OK because “the girls” will clean it up [sarcastically].

Clearly there were two forms of ‘shit’ at work here; the vet’s footprints were only acceptable office dirt when the vet was present, attached to them even. As soon as the vet’s body was physically detached from the ‘muck’ left on the carpet, the footprint was culturally transubstantiated back into a form of polluting impurity, the management of which was both metaphorically and physically transferred to the female office staff. It was, therefore, the proximity of the vet to the ‘muck’ that determined who took ownership of it and assumed the power to interpret its potential meanings. This is how ‘dirt’ became a political artefact in the office, rather than simply the ever-present residue of working with animals. In this light, we regard the cultural work that vets do with ‘muck’ as powerfully transformative, particularly if the presence of their own footprints can be turned into meaningful and potent symbols. What is remarkable here are not the hierarchies, divisions and resistant practices that emerged in this workplace—things that are expected in almost every organization on some level—but that power could be mediated through such seemingly culture-neutral and primeval substances as



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animal excreta. Whether they were wading through ankle-deep slurry on a farm or asking that the used coffee cups were cleared away from an office desk, the vets artfully rearranged their sense of professional taxonomy by re-ordering and re-coding the ‘mess’ according to their immediate needs and cultural circumstances. It was in the exploitation of the many dimensions of this paradox, the implicit contradiction in the interpretation of the same physical substance that allowed vets to insert boundaries between themselves and a variety of other actors. As one vet put it; his colleagues were specialists in ‘muck and magic’, they were a ‘rough and ready’ team that was prepared to work in tough, physical conditions to get the job done. At the same time he hinted at the double meaning of ‘muck’. It was, of course, a form of ubiquitous detritus that came from a working life spent on the farm but it also allowed them to construct and patrol a series of boundaries between themselves and others, whether those others were human or animal. It is through observing manoevres of ‘othering’ like these that allows us to show why farm animal vets are such a powerful—and interesting—group of meaning-makers. They create a life-world and furnish it with a host of values, experiences and materials that draw upon, make sense of and ‘other’ less desirable metaphors and symbols. This is how a distinctively veterinary network is formed and managed. Does this mean, though, that their cow patients are simply reduced to things in this network of human meaning-making? Are they just ‘livestock’, the unwitting repositories for the vet’s routine enactments on the farm? Certainly some writers think so and see the veterinary profession as a group complicit with the sort of animal exploitation inherent in contemporary farming; an example of the unmediated human dominion that continues to be exerted over nature (Murphy, 1995). While vets claim that some farm animals really do live “nasty, brutish and short” lives (Cudworth, 2008; Mason and Finelli, 2007), the vets that were interviewed here rejected the assumption that agriculture was universally exploitative. In fact, they dismissed the term “factory farming” altogether: Denver: We don’t know any factory farmers; it is a ridiculous nonsense word. Andrew: Our dairy cows could not survive in the wild and it’s ridiculous to suggest they should be let free. They would just die. And the countryside itself would go to ruin if fields were left un-grazed . . . left to go wild. That is something which activists very often misunderstand.

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These vets were explicit in their view that the majority of the farmers with whom they worked were intelligent and welfare-conscious; characteristics that they felt were vital to the long-term future of the agricultural economy and the countryside as a national resource. This was another example of a specific form of value-creation, yet a further illustration of some potent rituals of cultural purification in practice. Just as they could turn their ‘mucky’ footprints from clean to dirty, the vets would use deliberate choices of language to down-play discourses of animal exploitation by emphasizing the rights of farmers. In interviews with the press, in radio and television and at public meetings, the vets side-lined any suggestion that contemporary farming methods were brutal or exploitative, and instead produced an account of the rural landscape as a powerhouse of production with animals at the heart of the system. These animals were spoken of as an amorphous ‘herd’ but were rarely ‘personalized’ or individualized except when the vets spoke to each other about medical anomalies and curious cases. Cows were never named, then, but they were numbered. This was something that could have compromised a simple view of farm vets as ‘carers’. Yet, the vets were unanimous in laying claim to a deep ethical motivation to promote good farming skills, practical training for farmers that would enable greater welfare standards to be enjoyed by the cattle in their care. The vets regarded this as a political agenda that needed to be supported and extended in the way that their workplace was managed. Thus, placing value upon the principles of good care—both for farmers and animals—became a fundamental component of the practice mission statement and was one of the (apparently few) subjects on which vets and their administrative staff seemed to share values. Angie: I came here (to work as an administrator) during the foot and mouth outbreak and it was quite a shock to be dealing with all the new movement licenses and the new paperwork that the ministry (DEFRA) had brought out. But it was important to us lot to try and look after the farmers. We could see they were devastated because they used to come in (to the reception) a lot. In a lot of cases it was quite rewarding to help as much as possible.

Concern for farmers and their ‘beasts’ often served to break the tension in the office, interrupting and punctuating the occasionally long periods of complaining that the administrators engaged in while the vets were out. Sharing values surrounding the importance of farmer and animal care was, therefore, an important aspect of the practice’s survival; something which helped to address and ameliorate the tensions that were sometimes



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experienced in the organization. In other words, in spite of the partitions and boundaries that sometimes emerged between vets and workers in this space, a sense of collective value was generated through attachment to the Animal-Network; an imagined (and sometimes literal) connection between cows, farmers and the human members of the practice. At the same time, however, the vets continued to produce and patrol some careful divisions to distance themselves from other occupational groups in the rural economy, farm labourers, ‘knacker-men’ and slaughterers in particular, individuals who were often considered to be working in ‘muck’ but without the apparent ‘magic’ of the vets’ superior educational and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984): Rowan: The slaughterhouse is my idea of hell on earth; the smells, the lighting, the noise. And the kind of men you get working there are a breed apart. Tim: There used to be a chap who worked at (a local slaughterhouse) that used to drive out and shoot cows that were fallen stock . . . that the farmers needed to send off. His number plate said ‘The Terminator’ [laughing]. That tells you something about the sort of people that we come across.

While farm vets and their staff are professionally involved in meat and dairy production, then, it is a system from which they continue to remain ‘untarnished’ when there is talk of animal rights problems, cruelty or exploitation. Instead they are able to draw on their educational and social prestige to embody the role of experts and this is how they may confidently speak of themselves as ‘carers’. As we argued in the last chapter, it is often over-simplistic to talk of exploitation done by humans to animals. Cattle can resist by kicking out and they can behave in erratic and unpredictable ways that makes contact difficult and sometimes even impossible. In common with the ways that office staff were occasionally resistant, there is often a degree of indeterminacy in settling the relations between different actors be they human or otherwise. Power is not simply one-way. We consider there to be a need for a more process-based view of such workplaces in which human-animal relations are conceived of as negotiated and “in the becoming” (Cooper and Law, 1995). As part of that, we suggest that a consideration of ‘othering’ and ‘distancing’ is more apposite to developing a social scientific way of understanding the ways that discourses surrounding farming and food are articulated. But where does this leave the farm animal, as a sentient creature in its own right? Are they ‘living food’, mere products in a chain of becoming meat? Are they wholly unaware that the vets’ main tasks

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are to heal them, keep them healthy or to enable them to die a dignified death? These are complex and emotive debates opening up far more questions than we can answer here. Our next chapter, however, looks more carefully at animals as they exist in relation to human food production and it is from an ethnographic observation of the slaughterhouse that we bring these tricky questions into sharper focus.

CHAPTER FOUR

SLAUGHTER WORKERS AND THE MAKING OF MEAT They use everything about the hog except the squeal. Upton Sinclair, [1906] 2002: 2

For those who choose to eat meat, the death of other animals is a necessary part of life. However, in much of the modern world, the brute facts of animal death are hidden from us by industrial levels of production, bureaucracy and organization. The fact that meat comes from animals is very easily forgotten during shopping trips to the supermarket, spaces where bright lights and endless refrigerators seem to defer any sense of attachment between living animals and portion-sized packs of meat. The combination of industrial scale food production alongside other factors like religious and cultural norms, and even the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest may help to account for the lack of emotions expressed about, and the silence surrounding, the killing of millions of animals each day. But what of those whose job it is to minister this death—how do they feel and talk about it? In this chapter, we seek to understand animal death through the eyes of those who are specifically employed to manage it. Organizational scholar, Gibson Burrell, argues that “all organizations are involved in death, partly because all organizations are involved in life itself and there is always the presence of death amidst life.” For Burrell, when humans organize they draw upon what he terms a ‘death-suppressing impulse’ to exert control over the world around them. In doing that, however, “we tend to forget that to organize is to kill” (Burrell, 1997: 150). In this chapter, the notion that ‘to organize is to kill’ is apparent in a literal sense for the function of slaughterhouses is to do precisely that—to kill (McCabe and Hamilton, 2012). If it is the case that in the modern world death is hidden from us then it seems appropriate for Sociologists and other commentators to subject death and the discourses surrounding it to scrutiny. A recently televised documentary on slaughterhouses called ‘A Bloody Business’ shown in Australia by the current affairs show ‘Four Corners’ attempted to do so by providing a graphic account of what happens to some animals in Indonesian abattoirs (May, 2011). It became clear from blog, chat-room and

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television coverage that viewing audiences were shocked and emotionally traumatized by what they saw. Many people even claimed that they had stopped eating meat as a result, and the public interest in this documentary gave form to a huge political campaign by pressure groups such as Animals Australia and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). This political activism led to a short-term ban on live animal exports from Australia to Indonesia and, at the time of writing (September, 2012) the effects are still being felt as the issue of live exports continues to have a significant media presence in Australia and elsewhere. Making the Strange More Familiar In a straightforward way, publicizing what happens in abattoirs is a powerful way to encourage humans to reflect upon their treatment of other species, a point often made by the philosopher, Peter Singer. Recent successful attempts by policy-makers in a number of regions in the United States to ban undercover recording of slaughterhouses (the so-called ‘Ag-gag’ Bills) suggests that many more share his view and are concerned by the potential backlash and social stigma that their work accrues. But slaughterhouses and the practices involved in meat production are important for considering significant issues, for example, the links between human identity and food; a debate that Carol Adams frames in terms of gender and ‘the sexual politics of meat’ (Adams, 1990). It is also helpful to consider ways in which meat can add dimension to issues of racism and ethnic differentiation (Gouveia and Juska, 2002; LeDuff, 2003) as well as considerations of modernity, work and capitalism (example Young Lee, 2008). Thinking about meat work even sheds light on the links between meat production and violence to people (Fitzgerald, Kalof and Dietz, 2007; Fitzgerald, 2010; Richards, Signal and Taylor, forthcoming). These are just some of the intriguing issues that emerge from the slaughterhouse. There are also obvious interests for scholars of Organization Theory at the slaughterhouse, and according to Burrell “the metaphor of the abattoir is very strong in its suggestiveness for the organizational world” (Burrell, 1997: 149). But it is a mistake to assume that slaughterhouses can be thought of as factories like any other. They deal with a unique product, one which turns from living to dead, unlike environments where conventional and—more importantly—inanimate items are handled; cars (Beynon, 1984; Danford, 1998), steel (McLoughlin et al., 2005) or aircraft



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(Bensman and Gerver, 1963) to name just a few examples. Even in the majority of our food industries, the products tend not to be alive (Ditton’s (1979) study of bread baking is just one example). This means that we cannot rely upon the existing ethnographic and qualitative research that has been conducted with factory workers more generally for our insights here because in many of these cases, the products have also tended to be inanimate (Burawoy, 1979; Roy, 1960). The organization of large scale animal death is something that is unique to the slaughterhouse. Yet many of the existing studies of slaughterhouses (and meat packaging plants) overlook animals in their eagerness to turn their attention to human problems such as the tendency to capitalize upon the lower expectation of ‘foreign’ workers and the monotony of the labour process, for example. The fact that slaughterhouses are somewhere where animals go to die at human and robotic ‘hands’ is often sublimated by attention to such human concerns over globalization, the political economy and the oppression of workers. Gouveia and Juska’s (2002) study for example, links the ways in which meat production and consumption are distanced from each other in the contemporary United States. They argue that plant owners seek to control both nature and their workers and, throughout a critique of those practices Gouveia and Juska treat the meat industry and meat production as simply ‘any’ industry and ‘any’ job. Despite such intriguing insights, there’s no real recognition here that meatworkers and meat production facilities are different. Yet we have no other industries that routinize and normalize death in such a way. Slaughterhouses are far from being ‘just’ another industry, they are places where humans labour over animal carcasses and, in certain tasks, labour to transform the living animal from live to dead meat. This has consequences, and potentially serious consequences, for those who work in such environments and within the general community. For example, Fitzgerald, Kalof and Dietz (2007) examined arrest rates across communities comparing those where a large animal abattoir was present with those where a large-scale manufacturing plant, with similar sized workforce and demographic factors, was present. They discovered increases in arrests for violent crime only in the communities surrounding meat works. They concluded that the unique and violent nature of the work involved had a deleterious effect on employees (Fitzgerald et al., 2007). Whether we accept this as evidence of a causal relationship, such research seems to suggest that the specific and potentially violent nature of work in slaughterhouses has serious consequences for those working

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within their walls. This informs our interest in finding out what makes them ‘tick’. We need to take account of the highly unusual nature of the labour process, however, because treating these industries like any other does a disservice to the humans involved in them and extends the secrecy surrounding meat production. In common with a number of contemporary authors, we seek to overturn and question some of the assumptions and ideologies that continue to permeate meat production. We think that exposing the workings of the killing floor is the best way to foster a broader discussion of the politics involved. Organizing Death While there is growing interest in such politics, we feel there’s something missing in much of the emerging literature on food and specifically meat production (Eisnitz, 2007). We believe that something to be inherently sociological. While there are occasionally graphic descriptions of cruelty to animals and people in many of these contemporary works, there is a tendency for accounts to rely upon description for their content and when they are not descriptive, there is an inclination to focus upon economics and globalization. While we wholeheartedly agree that there’s a macro-economic analysis needed here—that slaughtering animals creates financial profit, and answers a market demand for food—we also feel that there’s more to it than that. Even when they focus on the treatment of the animals, meta-theoretical analyses of slaughterhouses often miss the minutiae of daily life. This is as you would expect from a macro-theoretical point of view but to us, as ethnographers, the devil’s in the details (Hamilton and Taylor, 2012). The details tell us how it is that individual humans can do what they do to individual animals, how the “peculiar relationship” to animals exists in a vague state somewhere “between meat and mercy” and how that relationship is embedded in a whole host of daily practices, routines and repetitions (Eder, 1996: 147). The details tell us how people (and possibly even animals) cope, or do not cope. Perhaps some would argue that the slaughterhouse is an odd choice of location to investigate human relationships with other animals given that this is the end point of those relationships, the place where the animals are killed. It may also seem an odd choice of subject for an author (NT) who has been a lifelong advocate of animal liberation and who takes care to shun all animal products in line with this ethical standpoint. So why, then, did we find ourselves so intrigued by the slaughterhouse and the



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goings on there? This is a question complicated enormously by the fact that one of us (LH) is a confirmed meat-eater with a very different perspective on the politics and ethics of food production; a person whose life is quite closely embedded in the farming community. How, then, did we work around and with those deep-seated and profound personal differences to construct just one narrative account of the slaughterhouse and its members? These are questions that we have both reflected upon at length and while the answers are yet to become completely clear, we can boil them down to at least four distinctive rationales. The first two reasons are both political and are closely connected to each other. Billions of animals end their lives each year in slaughterhouses so, in rather basic ways, it matters that sociologists like us take an interest in what we humans do there and, particularly, how we do it. Secondly, we need to ‘see’ what happens in slaughterhouses by drawing upon any and all research methods at our disposal to report on those observations. The next two reasons are more sociological in nature. On the one hand, we are intrigued by the cultural and symbolic disconnection between live animals and meat on the dinner plate. This is part of what Gary Francione refers to as the ‘moral schizophrenia’ that humans display towards other animals when he points out the paradox between our selection of some animals as ‘pets’—animals that share our lives and sometimes even our beds—while rearing others in organized conditions simply to kill them for the dining table (Francione, 2008). And on the other hand, as sociologists we are interested in power—how it manifests socially and culturally and how some groups take, keep and manage power over others. The slaughterhouse, an organization where humans routinely take animal lives, is the ultimate expression of human power over other animals. Yet even this process is not as simple as it seems. The vets that we interviewed and observed in the last chapter commented that the majority of the farm cattle that they visited on a routine basis would cease to exist at all without the economic demand for milk and meat. They claimed there was nothing inherently ‘natural’ about keeping beef and dairy cattle in the way that some philosophers and activists supposed. Likewise, many of the slaughterhouse workers that we interviewed said that they lived with companion animals that they ‘loved’ and cared for as “part of the family”. One of the meat inspectors we work-shadowed in the chicken factory kept his own chickens in the back garden of his house; animals that he said he could never eat because “it just wouldn’t be right”. Another meat inspector stated that he hated animal cruelty and

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told us about his efforts to save a sick lamb that he had found during a recent countryside ramble. Paradoxically, these were participants who worked in a meat-production environment where the killing of animals was not only routine but was managed on a vast scale. Even so, many of those we interviewed spoke confidently and passionately about their respect and even love for a whole variety non-human life. We were interested in how and why this was possible in a place where supposedly clear lines of demarcation existed between humans and animals. Life and Death at the Slaughterhouse Listening to workers such as these shows how difficult it is to aggregate species together or apart as neat and independent categories. In other words, we are not able to talk simply of ‘man’ versus ‘nature’ or ‘human’ versus ‘animal’ in this chapter because those very terms are contested and troubled by our participants. It seems that participants are able to move and redraw the boundaries to suit the work they are doing at the time. So the symbolic operation and motility of concepts of ‘self ’ and ‘other’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’, as well as the construction of division between ‘work’ and ‘home’ is something which needs subtle attention. After all, these are complex human acts of meaning-formation which require complicated manoevres of spacing between humans and the variety of other species encountered in daily life. The size and nature of those spaces change to reflect the different symbolic and literal work being done. An analysis of why and how this occurs is important for those interested in work and identity, just as it is important for those interested in more philosophical questions of inter-species relations and the development of networks between them. Yet slaughterhouses have always been part of the underworld of animal production and what actually occurs in them is rarely seen by outsiders, let alone by social science researchers. Perhaps meat production is distasteful and hard for many of us to watch. While much popular attention is given over to forms of ‘cruel behaviour’ directed at (certain) animals, for example in the recent interest in human-animal violence links in interpersonal relationships (see for example, Taylor and Signal, 2008), the everyday killing of animals for food and other products is often overlooked and ignored. As a result, the cultural taboo which exists regarding the ways (and the ‘whys’) of killing animals remains intact. Our task in this chapter is to ‘lift the lid’ on this underworld, to bring our observations into



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mainstream discussion and to make sense of our own different perspectives on meat. The numbers of animals slaughtered for food are staggering. Almost ten billion animals are killed for food in the United States each year (Williams and DeMello, 2007: 14). The United States Department of Agriculture confirms this statistic and reports that 10,153 million (that’s over ten billion) land animals were raised and killed for food in the United States in 2010. In Australia meat consumption is similarly high and statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics report that in August of 2011 the number of livestock slaughtered were: cattle—639,830; calves—116,018; sheep— 348,127; lambs—1,593,041, and pigs—415,296. In the United Kingdom, data from Compassion in World Farming (cited in Cudworth, 2011) shows annual animal slaughter numbers to be around 3.3 million cattle; 35000 calves; 15.7 million pigs; 17.1 million sheep; and over 800 million chickens. Global figures are even more staggering and equate to approximately 50 billion chickens and 1.3 billion pigs (Cudworth, 2011). In periods of concern regarding public health, the slaughter statistics often rise even further. In an attempt to control the cattle disease Bovine Spongiform Encelopathy (or BSE) in the United Kingdom over five million cows were culled between April 1996 and October 2001. In 2000, during the Foot and Mouth crisis in Britain, 4,230,786 animals were killed and burned (Law, 2007). Despite such well publicized incidents of animal disease, global meat consumption is increasing. Cudworth points out that across the world, meat production has more than doubled since the 1980’s and that in the global South it has tripled (Cudworth, 2011: 106). Our own interest in slaughtering is not with the grand-scale of global food production and consumption, but relates to a more philosophical question; in short, how is it possible that so many people across the world are able to persevere with the symbolic segregation of animals from meat while others find they cannot? This question is part of a bigger project which addresses macro-theoretical issues pertaining to human–animal relations. These include, but are not limited to, understanding the operation of the global political economy, considering the kinds of dominant cultural discourse that Melanie Joy refers to as ‘carnism’ (Joy, 2009); that is, the hegemonic normalization of meat-eating and, of course, participating in the debates over animal welfare and abuse. The slaughterhouse is a particularly apt place to comment upon a number of these difficult social questions.

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chapter four The Slaughterhouse Rules

The title of this section borrows from a novel, John Irving’s The Cider-House Rules. One part of Irving’s book is a consideration of racial relationships in 1950’s America. The ‘cider house rules’ are the rules that the (white) farm owners leave on the wall of the cider house where the (black) transient labourers stay for the cider season each year. The rules are menial and include the prohibition of smoking while in bed, for example; rules which serve to clearly delineate the differences between the farm owners and their employees, the farm labourers. As such they are a symbolic reminder of the racial divisions and segregations that were commonplace at the time the book was written. We noticed a parallel between the ‘cider-house rules’ and ‘the slaughterhouse rules’ so we have chosen this literary metaphor to characterize the efforts of slaughter-workers and meat inspectors to maintain a distance between human and animal at work. The way in which these tacit rules operated ensured that the workers were able to routinize and normalize the process of animal death in such a way that the taken-for-granted gulf between human and animal became embedded; an assumed reality that was enacted daily in numerous little tasks and repertoires. But what were these practices? What did they look like? And how did they affect us as observers? Our methods were unusual here, reflecting that we both felt differently about those questions. One of us (LH) conducted the observational data collection and work-shadowing with meat inspectors in four British abattoirs; one was an enormous poultry plant, and the other three were smaller family-run ‘red meat’ or large animal slaughterhouses. The other author (NT) conducted the nonobservational part of the data collection and the interviews and looked for themes and trends arising from the fieldnotes taken in situ at the production plants. In common with our other research, we then shared the task of interpreting and coming to terms with the broad collection of ‘data’, looking for trends and selecting the most important cultural ‘moments’. This rather unorthodox method is how we chose to navigate the emotional tension that the meat production process provoked in each of us, and has given us (somewhat unexpectedly) far more complex ideas on the ways that distance, boundaries and identities work, both on the human and animal level. We turn now to the practices and processes that made up that work and to a brief extract from the fieldnotes, a first-person account of the ‘killing floor’ at the chicken factory:



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It is five thirty in the morning and I am waiting at the factory gates of “Drumstick Limited” (anonymized). Terry, a manager from the meat inspectors’ office comes to meet me at the door and we go straight in to the building through a pair of glass doors. In the lobby, I am greeted by a friendly receptionist, asked to sign in, and given some white rubber wellington boots, white hat and hairnet and a white cotton coat to wear. It’s a modern space with potted palm trees, thick carpet and a large pine reception counter, the front of which is decorated with three large photographs of chicken-based meals—a plate of roast chicken, a bowl of chicken curry, and a basket of fried chicken and French fries. A large plastic “Drumstick’s” logo—a cartoon image incorporating green fields and trees—is mounted on the wall behind the counter. Terry takes me up to the meat inspection office where I put on the protective clothing. After changing, and chatting to the meat inspectors, I head down to the lairage with Terry. The lairage is a vast open space at the start of the production line. This is where the chickens enter the slaughterhouse. Here, I see twenty yellow plastic crates of identically small, white birds. These birds are alive but quiet. They have been delivered by a huge articulated lorry, and another one is reversing into the lairage, making a loud beeping noise to warn the workers that are milling about. A vet is standing by to examine the birds for signs of disease or stress. She is wearing a white coat, hairnet, rubber boots and holds a clipboard. She seems to be recording details from each of the crates, looking into the gaps to see whether the birds appear to be in good physical condition. After she has conducted this investigation, the crates are robotically loaded onto a conveyor belt, travelling towards a small stainless steel cubicle. This, I am told, is the gas chamber. We walk out of the lairage and into the production line where the now dead chickens are beginning to emerge from the gas chamber. Still in the yellow baskets or “modules”, they are scooped out individually by a small team of “hangers on”. These workers shackle or ‘hang on’ the lifeless chickens to the slowly moving production line. The birds have been gassed with a lethal cocktail of Argon and Nitrogen; a mixture so potent that they are dead within seconds. It is a fast and silent process; neither the chicken nor the hangers on make a sound. It is a chilling experience for an ethnographer, made so not only by the explicit presence of death in this part of the factory but by the apparent tedium with which dead birds are pegged out. No emotions are displayed and there is no observable reaction to the emergence of the dead birds from the gas chamber. The production line transports the birds from what is referred to as the ‘dirty’ side of the factory—the lairage and the killing floor—to the ‘clean’ post-mortem zone where not only the ‘meat’ but the feathers, feet, head and innards will be removed, sorted and packaged for sale.

Unlike the ‘red meat’ or large animal abattoirs that were visited, the poultry production process involved hardly any direct handling of animals and very limited cutting or skilled butchery work. The chicken factory

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relied upon a series of highly technical machines to carry out much of the preparation work. The first of these machines was the “neck cutter”, a sharp automated blade that removed the heads from the (dead) chickens. When this machine broke down, a slaughter-worker would perform the task manually. This was the only individual in the plant to have the job title of “slaughterman”. The decapitated birds then passed over a vast rectangular steel tank where their blood drained out and was collected. The blood vat was the size of a small swimming pool and while it was not brim full of liquid, the smell and sight of so much clotting blood was intense. There were no operatives here and the only sound was the metallic clanking of the production line as it transported the birds swiftly into the next zone of the factory. The (now headless and bloodless) birds began to look far less like animals and more like meat as they progressed into the next section of the factory—the “scald tank”. This is where the birds had their feathers removed. They were first submerged in hot water (approximately fifty two degrees) to open the pores. The fieldworker recorded that in this steamy atmosphere, a smell is produced that is “unsettlingly reminiscent of cooked chicken”. Passing into the “plumpers”, the birds were de-feathered by rotating rubber ‘fingers’ and the feathers were collected in a hopper beneath the plumpers. This was just one of several by-products that the factory collected to sell separately. The de-feathered birds passed into the next room where they were inspected by the State officials (Food Standards Agency meat inspectors) for colour, quality and any other obvious defects. Any blemishes or signs of disease meant that a proportion of these birds would be discarded yet this did not seem to be something that factory owners supervised or monitored closely. Meat inspectors claimed that this was because of the very low unit cost of individual birds. The speed of the production line meant that inspectors viewed approximately three birds per second. Yet each inspection seemed to be conducted in a careful and thorough way, an intensity of work that the inspectors felt was only possible by taking regular breaks away from the line. The birds that passed the inspection process were conveyed into the ‘evisceration room’; a series of machines that remove and gather together the internal organs. The chicken and its (now separate) intestines, lungs and heart had to be viewed together by the next group of inspectors, located in an adjacent room. More birds were removed from the production line at this inspection point; some were unshackled for a closer look (then replaced) while others got thrown away or put to one side for a later inspection by the official veterinary surgeon (or OV). Overall, the process



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of slaughtering was remarkably ‘clean’ and there was little evidence of workers revelling in the gore by ‘wearing dirty clothes and splashing blood on their chests’ as Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990: 12) found. Following this inspection, the internal organs were picked off the line by a small team of approximately twenty operatives. Gizzards, hearts, feet and livers were hand trimmed and sorted into large steel bins. In the offal sorting room, the fluorescent lighting was dazzling and the operatives worked at steel tables in clinical silence. This was one of the few places where a small amount of chicken blood and other body parts had gathered on the floor. When the steel sorting bins were full of gizzards, hearts or livers, they were wheeled into the packing department where they were inspected again. The offal was then sorted and measured into plastic trays ready to be weighed, boxed, labelled, refrigerated and, finally, despatched. The eviscerated whole chickens then moved onto the final parts of the process—the trussing and refrigeration stations. Trussing was rather more female-dominated than the other parts of the factory and this was where workers ‘dressed’ the birds ready for packaging. This work involved tucking the wings of the birds under their body and tying the legs together with elastic. The experienced fingers of the women on the line moved quickly and the birds soon resembled supermarket products. The trussers were the last group in the production process at this plant because they did not produce any “added value” chicken products such as bread-crumbed portions or ‘nuggets’ which would have needed further processes of cutting and cooking. Indeed, there was very little handling or ‘butchery’ involved at any point in the production process and it was almost entirely mechanized. At this point, the trussed birds were inspected again, graded and weighed. Finally, the fieldworker was shown into the cooling room. Here the birds were refrigerated in a vast chiller where they were suspended from the ceiling several layers deep. They slowly travelled a continual loop so that all could be seen moving at once. During the fieldwork, this was one of the most visually disturbing and fascinating parts of experience as the fieldnotes suggested: Standing beneath the chickens as they travelled above is like viewing an optical illusion, and provokes a sense of awe similar to standing beneath the dome of a great gothic cathedral. The experience of being inside the refrigerator is emblematic of the production line itself; cold, clinical, bloodless and somewhat eerie.

The experience of observing the processing of chickens from “animal to edible” produced a whole host of unexpected emotions in the observer, ranging from amusement to discomfort and even awe (Vialles, 1994).

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This mixture of emotions was echoed in fieldwork at the red meat plant. Although the animals that were killed were much larger (and fewer), the process was similarly systematic and organized. The cattle waited (seemingly quite peacefully) in a straw bedded pen, then were walked through a gate and along a ‘race’ or corridor made of galvanized bars to the stunning chamber. At this point, the cattle could not see those in front of them and were not exposed to the vision of slaughter workers using the ‘captive bolt gun’ to stun other animals. After being stunned, they were hung by their back legs and winched through a chain mail curtain to a waiting team of men, each trained to dismember and butcher different parts of the animal. The efficiency of these systems and even the apparent lack of obvious suffering or pain on the part of the animal was somewhat unexpected. In fact, the fieldworker (in this case, LH) had been extremely nervous at the red meat plant, expecting rather more emotional pain than was experienced at Drumstick. The quietness, the calm and the (relative) lack of violence led to a feeling of methodological unease (and not least, a sense of personal relief ). Perhaps this unease helps us both to empathize with consumers, and perhaps other social scientists, who do not wish to know where their meat actually comes from. Perhaps the unexpected sense of relief at the red meat plant arose from a better understanding of the apparent challenges faced by the human workers involved in meat production. Or maybe experiences of the chicken factory had ‘numbed’ us to the explicit acts of killing that were later observed at the red meat abattoirs? It is difficult to comment upon such emotive and subjective issues, even from firsthand experience. To probe this further, we now consider how silence and denial function to tranquilize, or at least defer, the usual sense of discomfort when we talk about meat and its origins in the slaughterhouse. Silence and Denial Utilizing the work of Stanley Cohen, Deirdre Wicks (2011) points out that denial is “the maintenance of social worlds in which an undesirable situation, event, condition or phenomenon is unrecognized, ignored or made to seem normal” (2011: 188). By this she is pointing out that the slaughter of animals which occurs in such large numbers has to be culturally normalized in order to become acceptable. In other words, it is the very invisibility of slaughter that makes it palatable. Wicks is not alone here. The Anthropologist, Noelie Vialles (1994) argues that during the nineteenth century



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there was a shift in public sensibilities towards the killing of animals for meat (and towards death more generally) which resulted in slaughter work being ‘banished’ from the city to the outskirts. Along with this banishment came various technological inventions which allowed larger scale slaughtering at the same time as facilitating its invisibility. As a result, those who worked in abattoirs became “condemned to an existence on the fringes of urban and rural society” (Vialles, 1994: 27). For Vialles this led to slaughterhouse workers being both ignored and reviled, subject to a liminal existence which has continued into present times. Arguably this liminality enables other forms of oppression to manifest themselves for the workers involved (see also, Fitzgerald, 2010). Indeed, several authors have pointed to the human suffering endemic to slaughterhouse work (Bull and Broadway, 2003; Eisnitz, 2007) as well as its intersections with gendered and racialized discrimination (Cudworth, 2011; Le Duff, 2003) which gives way to alienation among workers and further contributes to their poor working conditions. Authors have also been quick to point out that the repetitive nature of slaughterhouse work coupled with a modern cultural sensibility which dictates a need to “render invisible what used to be a bloody spectacle” (Vialles, 1994: 66) leads to a “lack of identification with one’s job”. This means that what outsiders might think of as “distressing features of production line work, here constitute on the contrary a prerequisite for ‘getting used to it’ ” (Vialles, 1994: 51). Some have argued that it is not surprising, then, that this kind of human suffering gives rise to animal suffering. Indeed, Jocelyne Porcher (2011) argues that animals and humans share in a physical and mental suffering as a result of modern intensive farming practices which include, but are not limited to, the slaughterhouse. How is it then that those who work within slaughterhouses are able to cope with this? What are the processes and methods used by those working in the meat industry to simultaneously make palatable their own role in animal deaths and maintain the invisibility and liminality of their work with meat? Later in this book we will see that language plays a key part in how we bring animals into proximity and even intimacy with ourselves. Language is a powerful tool that can turn animals from objects into subjects. Similarly language can be used to maintain the object status of animals, to maintain hierarchical species relationships (Yates, 2010). We will demonstrate in the next chapter, for example, that the pure categories of human and animal are co-operatively disassembled by shelter workers in their interactions with, and discussions of, their shelter animal charges. Given

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the power that language has to bring animals close to humans it is not surprising that it also works in reverse; that is, the way we talk about animals or animal parts also serves to re-inscribe those pure categories and keep animals at a comfortable distance. In other words, animal bodies are literally and figuratively disassembled while at the same time the categories of human and of animal are underwritten and collectively and constantly purified to maintain a sense of distance from the ‘othered’ animal. This purification operates at a discursive level both culturally and locally. Culturally it can be found in the ways in which animal parts are generically termed ‘meat’, how the specificities of the animal-that-was are over-written by the individual’s right to choose healthy meat, or lean meat or tasty and juicy meat, not healthy cow parts, or lean pig parts. In this way, then, the real animal, the whole animal-that-was becomes what Adams (1990) refers to as the “absent referent”: Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal . . . to keep something from being seen as having been someone (Adams, 1990: 13).

The ways in which cultures ‘talk about’ animals both reflects and creates the reality of their lives, or their deaths as in the current case. This is all well and good for the consumer who has the luxury of divorcing his or her dinner plate from the reality of the animal body grown on the ‘factory farm’ purely to satisfy human appetites. Those who work in the slaughterhouse, however, for whom the absent referent is not so absent, do not necessarily have this choice. They have to adopt an entirely different set of mechanisms to make sense of what some would say is sense-less killing. Distancing through Production One of the ways in which slaughter workers are able to take some control over the distance between lived self and what might be called a ‘killing self ’ is done is by drawing upon technical and economic language to describe both the animals and the processes by which they are killed. In the chicken factory, for example, nobody spoke about ‘dead chickens’ but instead “whole-bird products”. In the red meat abattoirs, cow parts became “pieces of beef”. Descriptive words like “tender”, “delicious” and “restaurant quality” replaced words that would have described those



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same cows when alive in the lairage. Vialles (1994) argues that the kind of literal matter that is processed in slaughterhouses is in dire need of figurative containment, that there’s a need to linguistically disembody or de-animalize the living creature as s/he processes through the slaughterhouse from the entrance where s/he is still a living (and whole) being to the exit where s/he leaves as a series of pre-packaged meat parts fit for human consumption (1994: 61). One of the ways this was achieved by those in our sample was to discuss animals as products from the very beginning. In other words, our participants discussed yield and output, and by doing so the animals lost any ‘personality’ or ‘individuality’. The whole animals were displaced by a variety of technological and economic jargon. The jargon served as a reminder of the animal’s primary purpose in the slaughterhouse; that is, to become a financially viable product. Moreover, the workers in the factories seemed aware of the hypocritical attitudes modern western cultures hold towards slaughterhouses: we expect clean, healthy and above all, tasty meat but don’t particularly want to think about where it comes from (Mol, 2007; Morgan and Cole, 2011). One of the meat inspectors we spoke to described how this impacted upon his life outside the plant: Bill: I had someone [a mechanic] come and look at the car just recently. We were chatting and as soon as I told him what I did for a living, his attitude was very cold. He went very abrupt and couldn’t get away quick enough. He’d got leather shoes on but he obviously didn’t like it, the line of work I’m in, I said to [my wife] afterwards that he’d gone really weird.

As another of the meat inspectors at Drumstick explained, “meat is a big industry, it’s about production, and yet we don’t really seem that proud of it”. Given the contrast in fortunes between this apparently profitable business and the swathe of closures in the banking and finance sector in recent years, this was perhaps an understandable irritation. Bloodless Efficiency at the Slaughterhouse Qualitative academic interest in slaughterhouses is becoming more apparent (see, for example, Gouveia and Juska, 2002; Vialles, 1994; Young Lee, 2008), but as Young Lee (2008) explains, interest in the slaughterhouse “has been largely relegated to technical reports that reduce the killing process to an engineering problem, correspondingly evaluating its work through measurable facts and statistics” (2008: 1). We found this attitude to be mirrored in those slaughterhouse workers and meat inspectors

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that we spoke to. Countless times we were told how much ‘output’ each enterprise had. As one inspector explained while lamenting the fact that white meat production was boring and repetitive compared to red meat production: It’s just chicken, chicken, chicken, at a rate of ten thousand an hour so that works out at three a second. They can do seven hundred and fifty thousand a week. They are aiming to do one hundred and forty thousand a day by the end of the year.

Later, we are told “they are processing at least seven thousand birds a day”. This comment was made in the context of a discussion regarding plant efficacy, a discussion which seems to have no bearing on the real, live (and dead) chickens that the worker is referring to. Instead, there’s almost a reverence for the efficiency of the machine and of the technology housed within it, as he went on to say: This place more or less runs itself because it’s so automated. Unless they get a breakdown and the line stops, then the only staff they need in there are the staff that get the birds off the line.

Inherent in such talk is the normalization of a form of ‘violence’. This was echoed in our experiences at the large-animal slaughterhouse. At one red meat plant for instance one employee explained that, “I also work in the packing department, getting today’s kill ready for the shop,” when ‘today’s kill’ referred to several cows who had just been killed. While somewhat unusual in that this participant used the term ‘kill’, the work she was doing with dead animals was presented to us as routine and non-violent. The same participant also told us she thought women could do any of the jobs that the men did but she often worked in the lairage while the men worked the killing floor. This was, she thought, because “women are softer and kinder with the animals, especially calves and sheep, and they have a way of getting them to do everything calmly.” The idea of a gendered connection with animals by drawing upon supposed ‘feminine skills’ by facilitating a calm death for them is an interesting example of how violence was normalized and, in the eyes of some of the workers at least, removed altogether from the experience of slaughter-work. According to Smith-Harris (2004) “the violence explicit in the language used to describe human relationships with other animals, including animal food industries, science, and hunting, represents the power of dominant human groups and their hegemonic control over perceptions of other animals in particular ‘socially approved’ ways (2004: 12). Of course, it is



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often the case in the slaughterhouse that neither the behaviour nor the language used is explicitly violent. Nonetheless, we use the word violence here to refer to something intrinsically violent being done to animals; they are killed. Yet the absence of violent terminology in descriptions of those processes is remarkable. In many ways, the tendency to fall back on technological and economic terminology seemed to be a common response to this. It is a technique by which the focus of attention is shifted from something violent and potentially cruel towards something different; something productive and valuable. This is why animals are not killed; instead, units are processed. One way of looking at this is that the contempt in the words that disparage animals ‘legitimates their oppression’ as well as fostering exploitation and abuse (Dunayer, 2001 in Smith-Harris, 2004: 14). In the same way then, we can begin to think about the methods by which discussing animals as ‘units’ and their deaths as ‘processing’ contributes to the ideological obfuscation of them as embodied subjects who we can reasonably assume to have an instinctive (if not reflexive) desire to remain living. Language is used here to sanitize and justify their deaths. This is how we can observe acts of symbolic distancing—an almost seamless disaggregation of ‘us’ from ‘them’ arising from a rationalist economic imperative. Thus, “Drumstick Limited” is an industry to be proud of, rather than an obvious source for social stigma when off-duty. This clinical, economically rational approach towards the slaughter of tens of thousands of animals on a weekly basis also had a similar distancing effect on the fieldworker who wrote that “the whole process from life to death—or more precisely from chicken to shop-ready ‘whole bird product’ takes only minutes. I am amazed by the volume, the speed, the efficiency and above-all the ‘inhumanity’ of the process. Yet my over-riding feeling is one of relief; I have seen it all from start to finish and am not appalled, shocked or disgusted but impressed beyond words by the way in which this process is managed.” Perhaps this was the ethnographers own way of coping with the potential stigma that might otherwise be attached to observing death in other, less industrial, contexts. It was something that helped us both to empathize with those working on the production line. One of the meatworkers expressed this fascination with efficiency— with a bloodless, sterile arena where life is converted to death in a matter of seconds: “It’s the efficiency of the machinery . . . how can it work that quick? Apart from the guys hanging on which is manual, there is

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very little labour here.” This stress on efficiency routinely traverses the linguistic domains of both economics and technology. At “Drumstick”, we were told that the technology was so well integrated that the chickens who may have had some localized disease or illness were thrown away whole instead of being trimmed because the “unit costs are so low” so it’s more economically efficient to lose the whole bird than have it taken from the packing line to be checked and trimmed. Indeed, the productivity of the plant is so highly prized that the ethnographer was told that if she was going to faint she had to ‘fall away from the birds’ so it didn’t interfere with production. Similarly some of the workers who we spoke to demonstrated a sense of awe, and possibly pride, in the technology and machinery they worked with. One worker seemed especially proud that “Drumstick’s” processing plant “cost fifteen million pounds and used the most up to date gas chamber technology because it is an awful lot quicker”. The scale, size and sheer numbers of animals processed through the various plants seemed to be of particular interest to those we spoke to. We were told that “Drumstick” could process “ten and a half thousand birds per hour” and when we asked about routines followed, about the actual work done by the humans at the production line, we were told by one worker that: The lairage is big, like, you can get four or five artic’s [juggernaut trucks] in there now but you can imagine the throughput that is coming through . . . it soon gets stacked up. . . . There is so much production here it is a problem for any kind of breakdown, because they are dealing with such massive numbers of birds, it means you can’t break the chain. Because these birds are in the process of being reared from chick to thirty days so they are in a process . . . and you can’t stop it and you can’t just switch it off. They are coming through at a rate of five thousand every twenty minutes. These birds have got to be processed you see?

Similarly there was an element whereby the processes and the machinery seemed to be invested with a life of their own. This further served to reduce human complicity in the killing. In essence, humans were seen as secondary to the needs of the machinery and the imbued drive for profit that dominated the entire system. This was evidenced by individual comments made by those working in the slaughterhouse as well as the notices and memos that were sent around the factory by management. Ironically, it seemed that the machine needed animals more than it needed humans. In no uncertain terms, we were told that the needs of the machine come first. In a rather Orwellian and Foucauldian sense, then, these words resonated with both of us:



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Today’s kill was planned some time ago. Is it twenty one days for an egg to hatch? So they have the twenty one days wait for the egg to hatch then either thirty or fifty odd days on the farm which means that there is just over two months of planning for today’s kill. The knock-on effects of these plans are hundreds of thousands of pounds. In this plant they do about a million a week because they have two lines running.

Constructing and Deconstructing Animals Animal Theorist, Arran Stibbe points out that one of the outcomes of scientific and technological discourse surrounding animal killings is to “insert ideological assumptions that nonetheless construct [animals] in a negative way” (2003: 379). He explains that the ways in which we talk about animals and the reflection of this in industry manuals and industry-speak ‘reflects and propagates’ industry discourse. Moreover, in his discussion of the ways in which pigs are constructed within pork industry technical language and industry manuals, he argues that technological industry-speak often metaphorically reconstructs pigs as inanimate objects. This is clearly echoed here when we see workers discussing animals as units or hear them lauding the efficacy of the machinery and how it enables them to process massive volumes of ‘product’ in such a short time-frame. Furthermore, Stibbe points out that there are several occurrences within the pig industry where “the distinction between living animals and meat products becomes blurred”. Again, referring to live animals by their body parts or by their economic output serves in much the same way. Stibbe concludes that “language is as important as the technology because language plays a central role in the design, construction and everyday operation of the farm” (Stibbe, 2003: 385). Indeed, it would seem that language about the technology itself plays a similar role. This stress on the positives of the various technologies used in the slaughterhouse echoes Jocelyne Porcher’s arguments that from the nineteenth century onwards industrial and intensified systems: reduced the multiple rationales of work with animals to a single one: the technical-economic rationale. The other work rationales, particularly the relational rationale, have been repressed. Affectivity repression consists in dismissing feelings as well as aesthetic and moral concerns, in fact everything that makes sense in the work relationship with animals (Porcher, 2011: 5).

This gives further insight into the ways in which reliance upon the technological, rational discourses that frame the actual killing of animals seem

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to become almost the logical outcome of the operating of the machinery. Again, this serves as a neat distancing technique which not only absolves the individual humans concerned of any guilt over who specifically did the killing but also subsumes any concern for the individual animals within a technological and rational discourse which has little room for emotions. As Porcher points out, “Such soft violence, for example killing animals with machines to gas or electrocute pigs instead of striking them, that hides its real nature is all the more deadly (2011: 5)”. Managing Death Meatworkers and hygiene inspectors drew upon the particular technologies used to actually kill the animals to provide a source of pride. This was a literal and symbolic mechanism to create and maintain distance from the animals killed. Vialles (1994) points out that there is a necessary ellipsis between live animals, their actual slaughter/death and the meat on the plate. Furthermore, she argues that one of the ways we achieve such an ellipsis, at least for the slaughterhouse workers, is to confuse the moment of death so that the ambiguity of the animal—not ‘quite an animal and not yet meat’—is translated into an ambiguous moment of death (Vialles, 1994: 37). She argues that through the use of stunning we deliberately create distance from any one person and the animal’s moment of death; we create a “supremely delicate dissociation between individual acts and between individual actors.” In other words, we create a process whereby animals are stunned insensate, as though they are almost dead, they feel nothing and so the moment of death might well be at stunning or at bleeding. Either way, there’s enough obfuscation that the ‘killer’ becomes anonymous, lost in the carefully crafted processing of animals. The meatworkers we talked to clearly held this attitude, and we were told countless times that the gas chamber is kinder to chickens “because it’s instant”. Our participants all echoed some of the meat inspector’s comments that, “I think as long as they are stunned, they’re not going to feel anything.” As one of the vets we talked to explained, “when an animal is stunned its brain has been switched off, so it’s acceptable to kill it.” So, we have several discourses in evidence throughout discussions of animal death and slaughterhouse work—animals are merely numbers, their value is purely economic, the ways in which we kill them should be humane (both for the animal and because this increases productivity by being more efficient) and there’s a confusion apparent at the point of



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death which ensures that the humans are not responsible for the animals’ death. Instead, it is the machinery, the process that kills. This is helpful to those employed within the system because it serves to limit their contamination from the materiality of death and killing. This process was about instilling confusion about those ‘distasteful’ acts at the same time as creating some sense of security in the doing of ‘good work’ that was both profitable and highly efficient. As one meat inspector explained to us: With a gas kill, however, it’s not as unreliable and even if they miss the neck cutter it’s not bad because they’re dead anyway. Gas killing is better anyway because the chickens are not getting stressed by being handled and they are not moving when they are being hung up so it’s a lot easier.

This clearly conflates technological and economic rationalization for animal death as much as it details precisely how no one person is ‘really’ responsible for that specific act of killing. While embodied, whole, animals were largely removed from concern by a general emphasis on routines, cleanliness, productivity and technology, animal welfare as a discourse was often mentioned to us by the participants. This was often raised when discussing the gas chamber. We were told numerous times that the gas chamber was better for animals because it was quick, efficient, and the animals were not queuing up with an awareness of what was to come, “it’s better for the welfare to do it this way, we’re talking less than seconds from start to finish”. Several of our participants directly contrasted what was done at the slaughterhouses we visited with what occurs during kosher and halal slaughtering processes. These methods of killing seemed to serve as the epitome of how not to kill an animal humanely. One of the staff vets told us: I did spend three days supervising some kosher killing . . . that was very rough. A barbaric process. Not good. I think normal humane stunning is acceptable but not ritual slaughter . . . I have been in meat all my life and I still don’t get used to it. . . . . there is pain and it [the animal] thrashes about. They argue that it doesn’t feel it because it’s over so quickly but I don’t think that’s correct.

Similarly, one of the meat inspectors told us that he also regarded Kosher killing as ‘barbaric’ and that “anybody else would be taken to court for cruelty, such as if they don’t stun ‘em right.” Again, much of this was contingent upon the idea of stunning; that, if you stun an animal first so they ‘can’t feel’ their death, their welfare needs have been met. One of the staff vets explained to us, that “they do not make any sound during the stun and so they imagine that the cow in front has just gone to have its hooves

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trimmed or something” and another vet said that for veterinary students coming to see the plant for the first time, “the gas chamber is a bit of an anti-climax because the birds just go in and come out.” The bloodless, soundless stunning of an animal, then, is one way in which those who work with animals make palatable the incredibly large number of deaths they see, and are a part of, every day. Many of those we spoke to displayed attachments to certain animals. So working with animal death did not prevent them from professing to be animal lovers. One of the meat inspectors who we interviewed used notions of animal welfare and wellbeing to explain that, “I love all animals; I am an animal lover definitely.” Aware of the perceived incongruity of such a statement he went on to explain: People think you can’t be an animal lover if you see them dead all day long but half the time with animals, and horses particularly, they are better dead because people don’t look after them properly. When they arrive at the horse abattoir they have been neglected terribly and erm . . . I would rather see them dead because I don’t like cruelty. I hate anything in pain.

This was a puzzling incongruity that served to demonstrate how difficult manoevres of ‘othering’ and distance were in practice, particularly for those working on the production line; something which would again confound any desire we might have had to metaphorically ‘clean up’ the experience of the abattoir. Discourses of Meat Fraser (2001) critiques the ‘simplistic portrayals’ used by those debating animal agriculture and food production and describes the tendency for opinions to polarize between the ‘neo-traditionalist’ camp, whose members use overly simplistic, emotive and positive images of animal stewardship to defend modern agricultural systems against those espousing the ‘New Perception’ of those who criticize modern animal agriculture and the ways in which issues of animal welfare and environmental wellbeing are simplified. He argues that these two polarized positions have led to “a propaganda battle involving two emotive, oversimplified, and totally contradictory portrayals” (Fraser, 2001: 637). Given that this is often the case with public discourse regarding animal agriculture it is worth exploring in greater detail, and by considering the viewpoints of those within that world.



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Ethnography helps counter such simplistic portrayals by addressing meaning-making at a micro level. In turn this feeds back into a macrolevel analysis; that is, by allowing a consideration of the ways in which discourse and animal subjectivity operates at the local level to manufacture the consent of those working with animals and those consuming them (see, for example Stibbe, 2001 and 2003). In short, then, we think that the ethnographic details are important—they reveal to us the working of the hegemonic order at its macro level and make room for a subtler, more nuanced reading of what actually occurs. This helps us to avoid the binaries that centre around discussion of what should occur. The idea of discourse is that knowledge and power are both produced by, and operate through, certain ways of talking about, framing and seeing a particular issue. Thus, if meat-eating is, as Cudworth (2011) and Joy (2009) both argue, culturally normalized then this can be tracked to the operation of certain discourses. We can glimpse how this works by looking at the ways in which meat is symbolized ‘out there’ in public spaces. So, for example, restaurants are assumed to sell meat-based dishes while those that do not have to visibly designate themselves as different to the norm, as ‘vegetarian restaurants’. Other cultural tropes regarding the normality of meat in human lives exist in multiple other spaces. In fact, there are far too many of them to present an exhaustive list but other examples include the idea that there is a link between virulent masculinity and meat consumption (see, Adams, 1990 for more on this), the idea that meat-eating is a necessary part of a healthy human diet, and the idea that vegetarian and vegan lifestyles are ‘freakish’ and ‘difficult’ (see, for example, Cole and Morgan, 2011). These are matters that bring a vast number of philosophical and ethical issues to mind. Throughout all these examples, language plays a crucial part in the formation of particular discourses. After all, it is through language that most human communication occurs. But discourses are more than just words. They are irrevocably linked to institutions and to practices which constantly create and re-create and, perhaps most importantly, confirm particular issues and ideas as normal. In turn this is linked to the production of power, in large part because it is difficult to contest anything that is considered socially normal and ‘natural’. Discourse operates at all levels of human-animal relationships but is particularly evident in the ways in which we think about meat production and meat eating. It comes as no surprise then that the use of particular language in the meat processing industries forms a part of the ideas we take for granted about meat

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production and consumption. By extension, it’s no surprise that language is used in particular ways in the slaughterhouse by those who routinely kill and supervise the killing of animals. According to Nibert (2002: 219 and 2003), “language is yet another powerful force that both reflects and conditions human perceptions and attitudes towards devalued humans and other animals”. It is beyond the scope of the current chapter to address the ways in which the devaluation (or marginalization) of human slaughterhouse workers occurs, and is mirrored by certain uses of language. What we have attempted, however, is to shed light upon the use of language by slaughterhouse workers to demonstrate the existence of a particular discourse and ideology which legitimates the rendering of live animal bodies into processed meat packages. This goes beyond mere language use and finds itself expressed in material and technological organization as well. Following the arguments of Law and others it is also instructive to address the material and spatial formations in the slaughterhouse; after all nothing is ‘simply social’ (Law, 2007: 4). Instead social life comes out of our interactions with all manner of things—social, cultural, symbolic, technical, material and spatial. This is very much the case in the slaughterhouse where there is a particular set of movements through spaces and technologies that accompany the symbolic and literal shift from whole animal into meat parts. To put it another way, as animals progress through the slaughterhouse they do so bodily as well as symbolically and to suggest that this only occurs at the discursive level is to misconstrue the fact that materiality and embodiment matters here. Animal bodies move, and are moved, through a spatial-technological quagmire. This entanglement plays an important role in what literally happens in the slaughterhouse as well as contributing to the symbolic shifts and manoeuvres that allow animals to be ‘processed’ in palatable ways. We argued earlier, following Vialles (1994) that there is a deliberate obfuscation of the point of animal death, a smokescreen which helps mediate any one individual’s sense of guilt in the process. Importantly, technology, space and movement play an important part in deferring the act of killing from the moment of death. It is worth just pausing here for a moment to consider this technology from a different point of view. Technology (and the science which allows it) is often viewed as neutral, as the outcome of objective science and knowledge simply being put into play. Meatworkers certainly seemed to do so when they spoke about the processes involved in turning live chickens into whole bird products, for



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example. Yet scholars from science and technology studies have argued convincingly that this is not the case—that these objects and processes have a social side, or at least a social consequence (example Bijker and Law, 1992). The view that such scholars share considers objects to be a reflection and a constituent of a particular culture. Following this line of thought, then, the technologies employed in the slaughterhouse—the massive, convoluted, expensive machines whose primary aim is efficient killing in large quantities, reflect certain sensibilities about animals and their place in our culture and their relationship to humans. Clearly, these machines reflect a cultural sensibility that it is acceptable to eat animals. This, after all, this is their primary purpose; to render whole animals into edible parts. But machines also reflect other sensibilities—efficiency and rationality for a start. In turn these are subsumed under an economic imperative. The machines are not just about killing animals but about killing them quickly and effectively with as much efficiency as possible to maximize profit. This is done in ways which hopefully take into account the safety of humans, although this clearly a happy coincidence and not the driving force behind the technologies. This was made clear to us when observing the machines in the chicken factory. On one day that we were conducting observations, there had been a problem with the gas mix for the gas chamber and so the line had reverted back to electric stun methods. We were told this wasn’t a problem because “they can run at the same speed whichever”. The problem it did bring, however, was that it was more difficult—and potentially dangerous—for the staff because animals could potentially move which might cause accidents whereas with a “gas kill . . . the things aren’t moving”. The technology—the material, technical objects of the slaughterhouse— tell us something about the culture in which they are employed. Animals are food, food is profit, the safety of humans matters but is secondary to the efficiency of the technology and so on. Analysing the symbolic at the expense of the material (or vice versa) only tells half of the story. We have argued throughout this chapter that those who work with animal flesh and body parts, and who are involved in the process of rendering live animals to consumable flesh, draw on a variety of both symbolic and material strategies to maintain their distance from their work and the animals it involves. We leave judgment of rights and wrongs to the reader. And while we consider the slaughterhouse to be a place where boundary work produces divisions between the species, clearly not all human relations with other animals require, or are based upon, distancing techniques. In fact,

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many of them are based on (and result in) close or even intimate relations. The idea that proximity can be created and managed by people is an engaging one, especially since we have spent the last two chapters of this book investigating segregations and partitions between the species. It is this idea of symbolic or physical proximity with animals that we focus upon in the following section of the book.

PART THREE

GETTING CLOSE TO ANIMALS

CHAPTER FIVE

SHELTER WORKERS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ‘ANIMAL PERSONHOOD’ Darwin has shown that we are animals; but—as humanists never tire of preaching—how we live is ‘up to us’. Unlike any other animal, we are told, we are free to live as we choose. John Gray, 2002: 152

Consider the terms, human and animal. Both these definitions imply homogenous categories made up of various forms, of course, but they are often used to evoke fundamental and profound differences in their basic characteristics. And even though few would argue that we humans are all the same, Sociologists and theorists of many other stripes continue to assume some connection at a deep level conferred by membership of the same species. Animals, by contrast, tend to be lumped together as a single category despite huge differences across the many—often radically different—species. The only thing this varied group has in common is that it is not human. Worryingly there is an embedded and taken-for-granted inferiority attached to being other-than-human. This negative assumption only exists because the positive assumption of humanity’s inherent abilities to speak, to be free, and to ‘live as we choose’ continues to carry so much symbolic weight. The ‘pure’ categories of human and animal and their clear lines of demarcation are not actually so clear in practice. As we have noticed in our fieldwork, animals are presented and re-presented to bring about various cultural effects. In the last chapters we examined some of the distancing manoeuvres enacted by vets and slaughter-workers to ensure that the categories of human and animal remained symbolically, if not always physically, discrete. Our main argument here was that these enactments of separation were constructed and performed to ensure that the experience of work—sometimes even visceral, ‘dirty’ and distasteful work with animal bodies—was managed successfully and made meaningful. We now turn our attention to a different form of interaction between humans and animals. Here, we investigate the idea of proximity; that is, the ways that the clearly formed distinctions and categories that we examined in the last section of the book are sometimes challenged, ‘messed up’ and

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partially deconstructed by those at work with animals. The slaughterworkers, for example, were able to reconsider animals as meat in order to cope with the act of killing, and furthermore, to build collective esteem against the potential stigma associated with their work. In practice—in fact, through practices—the boundaries between human and animal are constantly made, challenged, unmade and remade. For animals, however, the deck is often stacked against them from the start precisely because they are held to occupy a clear category, distinct from humans. They are not human and thus not persons. It is this indistinct—yet subordinate—status that serves to justify the many uses and abuses we humans often inflict upon them. Such apparent abuse of animals is a conceptual starting point for the ethnography we explore in this chapter because it is from this rather worrying social problem that shelter workers take their motivational impetus. We focus upon these workers in this chapter and observe the ways in which they make use of the concept of abuse as a crux for their own distinctive forms of work; rescue, caring and the giving of sanctuary to animals. Normative Humanity Despite many recent attempts to think beyond the Enlightenment project’s notion of rationalized individualism, such thinking still remains prevalent in many of the ways that individuals and groups continue to hold on to beliefs about what it is to be ‘normal’. Yet it has generally become more commonplace to accept that there is no one universal norm for personhood. Cultural, racial, sexual, and gender differences, for example, have been made more visible and arguably more transparent in the wake of global population change fostering a more radical mixing of the contextual differences between people. That said, however, there remains in many social groupings—not least workplaces—certain fundamental assumptions that continue to underpin the idea of what is ‘normal’. What is striking here is that humanity—or human-ness—is always present; arguably the most powerful of all the social norms. The effects of making such assumptions of normality are usually that powerful narratives of inclusion and exclusion are created and put into practice. In-groups are formed to distinguish between those who fit these norms and by contrast those who do not fit, conform or assimilate. In other words, we create meaningful boundaries and based on these boundaries decide who or what can be given certain ‘things’ such as rights,

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 93 considerations, treatments and so on. We erect these categories and create checklists that tell us which side of that boundary a person or a ‘thing’ or an ‘animal’, or a ‘non-person’ belongs. And these boundaries are policed more or less rigorously depending on how important they are to the individuals in question. Species boundary maintenance is important not necessarily because animals are of practical significance to us; quite to the contrary, it is because they speak—or rather are assumed to speak— directly to what humanity is, or isn’t. So we create and police boundaries based on ideas of what constitutes firstly humanity itself and secondly, what constitutes the ‘normal’ person. To do this we need an idea of what personhood is, and what it isn’t. This can be seen most fundamentally when we consider the divides created and maintained between humans and animals. Assumptions of any kind—in this case the difference between human and animal—are always exclusionary; formed by a list of specific characteristics one needs to meet to be considered ‘in’. In the process of ‘rescuing’ and ‘caring’, however, the animal shelter workers artfully and deliberately unmade some of these norms of personhood to bring value and meaning to the animals under their care and to their own experience of work. In short, they brought animals into proximity to challenge who should be part of the traditional ‘in-group’ of human society. Animal Shelter Life The data that is presented here was gathered over a period of three years (with retrospective details from a much longer period in the field) and comes primarily from conducting ethnographies of two main animal shelters. The researcher (NT) routinely worked in both settings. This involved working alongside other shelter employees and volunteers on a daily basis carrying out practical duties of care for the animals, mainly dogs. This involved cleaning the kennels, answering the telephone and other more general administrative work. One of the most engaging experiences of this fieldwork, however, was in finding new homes for the animals currently at the shelter; a process that fellow workers called ‘re-homing’. Data was gathered officially throughout this process with the aid of various field notebooks but was also gathered unofficially in that it was sometimes difficult to separate ‘background’ information from ‘official’ information gained during the process of fieldwork. In addition to the participant observation conducted in the shelters, data was also gathered from

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various key participants—those interested in the research and willing to share their time through interviews. These were often shelter workers as well as those who worked in ‘thrift’ shops attached to the shelters and those employed at an administrative level for associated animal charities. Staff from several other animal shelters were also interviewed throughout the three year period, to test out the theories and ideas developing from the main field sites. We then considered thematic patterns and interpretations from this substantial collection of ‘raw data’. What connected all of the shelter organizations that were investigated was the practice of caring, be it for unwanted, abandoned or lost companion animals. The main animals sheltered were dogs and cats although smaller animals were fairly common, including rabbits, rats and gerbils. In the larger sanctuaries goats, pigs and horses were sometimes cared for, although due to limitations of space they were relatively few in number. The organizations that were studied could be loosely divided into three different categories: firstly, those in which individuals worked from home with no premises for the animals. These shelters were typically very small and were supported by only one or two volunteers who were often family members. Secondly, there were larger ‘structured’ sanctuaries which had premises and a larger number of paid staff and volunteers who helped to run it. Thirdly, there were specialist shelter organizations that were engaged in the ‘rescue’ and care of specific pedigree breeds of animal. It is important to discuss some of these differences here to situate the values that were developed by those employed in these sites. Individually Run Welfare Centres Individuals managing these centres did not have approved premises for their animals but instead relied on a paper-based system whereby they would advertize in the local press for what they regarded as ‘good’ homes. They would then take the details of people who called wanting to adopt a cat or dog and try to match them to the people who wanted to surrender their animals. Thus no animals were generally held on site and instead the centre used a team of volunteer drivers to bring the potential adopter together with their chosen animal. The potential adopter was evaluated by the driver and the animal was either handed over to begin a new life in that home, or if the adopter was deemed unsuitable, the animal would be returned to the original owner until another potential match was lined up.

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 95 Larger, Structured Organizations The second category of sanctuary comprised much larger and more formally ‘structured’ organizations which tended to be registered charities. They typically processed between 600 and 1500 animals each year, and employed between 10 and 30 members of staff. In order to adopt an animal from this kind of sanctuary, members of the public had to visit in person and pass through a verbal screening interview aimed at assessing their suitability. Dependent upon the outcome of this initial interview they would either be invited to take an animal away immediately or informed that a worker would come to visit them within the next few days for a “home visit”. Such home visits were generally used when the worker who performed the screening interview was unsure about the potential adopter and wanted to gather further information to ensure that a ‘good home’ could be provided to the animal. Breed Specific Shelters These sanctuaries were often the local off-shoots of national canine breed organizations. In the UK, for example, many pedigree breed associations have their own rescue societies that dedicate their time and resources to giving advice about one specific breed to members of the public. This appeared to include giving advice over the telephone on problem behaviour, nutrition and exercise and so on. Most of these breed specific shelters were affiliated to national charities which operated by way of local branches, taking responsibility for the collection and delivery of animals in their immediate areas. These shelters worked slightly differently to the other organizations so far described, although their re-homing policies were largely similar. Everything revolved around a centralized headquarters that would take calls from the public with problem animals, or conversely from those who wanted to adopt an animal. This national centre would then contact the local operator to go and evaluate the problem ‘on the ground’. One of the main tasks of these organizations was to re-home unwanted or problematic animals, vetting potential owners carefully. The national headquarters only passed on the details of potential owners to their local organizer if they were happy with the initial descriptions of the caller and the apparent suitability of the home. The idea of the ‘good home’ was a connecting discourse which would be repeated many times by the workers at all of these different shelter sites.

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chapter five Keeping Animals Close

The shelter workers that were observed and spoken to as part of this ethnographic study uniformly reiterated that the animals they cared for mattered. Despite frequent challenges from the general public regarding the status of these often ‘dirty’, ‘diseased’, ‘unwanted’, and ‘abandoned’ animals, shelter workers continued to emphasize their importance and value and were rarely willing to compromise the standards that they would accept from potential adopters. Thus shelter workers sought to bring these animals into close proximity with humans by adopting a specific form of language—and a specific set of meanings—that conferred special status upon these apparently unwanted animals. The shelter workers adopted various means to create, transcribe and enact these meanings. Most notably, they created a specialist discourse to describe the animals in their care. This was often reiterated in the ways they described their experiences of work and the ways they discussed their motivations for working at the shelter. Through language, the shelter staff constantly challenged the taken-for-granted meanings surrounding ‘rejected’ animals by re-defining ‘unwanted’ and ‘stray’ animals into ‘pets-in-waiting.’ Thus animals were more positively re-coded; a move that served a secondary but equally significant purpose to buttress the sense of purpose and moral goodness that shelter workers wished to derive from their own everyday work. So this linguistic play served to justify the fervour with which they approached their day-to-day experiences. More subtly still, their shared meanings expressed through language also challenged the taken-for-granted, hegemonic, divide between humans and animals. One of the most important ways in which this subtle re-coding was done was through the creation of ‘personhood’ for the animals in question. The idea that personhood can be created for those unable to establish it for themselves, is one which has been developed in the study of the severely mentally impaired (Bogdan and Taylor, 1989), small children, and even unborn babies (Kaye, 1982). For example, in speaking for their children and interpreting their noises as intentional communication, parents “accord the infant psychological consciousness and, to the extent that they attribute distinctive intentions, motives, and psychological propensities to her or him, a unique self as well” (Cahill, 1998: 139). Parents often enlist the help of others in this process of creating a “unique self ” for their babies; and turn to “the interactional labors of others” to enlist wider social conventions and norms in their enactments of parenthood (Cahill,

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 97 1998: 139). In the same way, companion animal owners often strive to attribute personhood to their animals, giving these animals a personality with distinctive characteristics of their own. So pets can take on unique selves too; selves that are attributed and amplified by their human carers and, in many settings, such as the vet’s practice, reiterated, legitimated and affirmed by other humans too. While as a general rule non-human animals are culturally defined as a homogenous group that are relegated to the social category of “nonpersons”, companion animals, however, are often viewed differently, at least by their owners who impute personalities and other attributions of ‘mind’ to them (Sanders, 1995: 196). Other animals, by contrast, remain mere “sentient commodities”—a view that farmers often hold of their livestock (Wilkie, 2005). Such species are often regarded in strictly utilitarian terms (Kellert, 1980; Taylor and Signal, 2006). This was something that we noted in the chicken factory, too. It is customary that these animals are not granted personhood. Yet as Sanders argues, many human-companion animal relationships are characterized by an emotional intensity in which people see the animals with whom they share their everyday lives as unique, emotional, reciprocating, and as thoughtful ‘friends’ or ‘family members’ (Sanders, 1995: 197). Animals here are not regarded as mindless, objectified, nonpersons as dairy cows or chickens might sometimes be. Instead, certain aspects of their pet’s behaviour may be anthropomorphized; that is, interpreted within distinctively human cultural registers. For example, Sanders noted that dog owners often interpreted certain aspects of their dogs’ behaviour as a deliberate attempt to manipulate the owner into giving the dog something he or she wanted, thus imputing motive and mindedness to their animals and granting their relationships with them a fundamental intersubjectivity (Sanders, 1993). In the sanctuaries, there were a number of different techniques used by the staff, both consciously and unconsciously, to ensure that the animals under their care were taken seriously. The great majority of these techniques were based on their collective efforts to attribute personhood, personality and mindedness to the animals in the shelter (and to a lesser extent to animals more generally). As a direct corollary of this attribution of personhood to these animals, shelter workers tried to ensure that their own jobs as carers and custodians were taken seriously too. So how was this subtle manoevre carried out? Through what technologies and techniques did this attribution of personhood get practically enacted?

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chapter five Naming the Animal

Without exception, all of the animals which were brought to the sanctuaries either already had a name or were named by the staff. The names generally followed conventional naming techniques for companion animals by utilizing names typically given to humans—such as Sam and Jessie for example. Similarly, names which reflected a particular characteristic (either physical or psychological) of that animal, such as Spot, Scruffy, and Tyson (a dog who liked to fight), were often used. The process of naming was crucial to establish both a degree of individuality as well as a distinctive biography and, in so doing, these techniques helped to establish a unique personality for animals at the shelter. Hickrod and Schmidt (1982) argue that the very practice of naming an animal turns it into an “interactional object” (Hickrod and Schmidt, 1982: 60–61) which forms the basis of any social interaction. Conversely, in her investigation of the lack of naming rituals among scientists who work with laboratory animals, Phillips (1994) argues that “proper names are linked to the social emergence of personality, which engenders a matrix of ideas and behaviours unique to one individual” (Philips, 1994: 123) and which, importantly, leads directly to a sense of responsibility for those named. It is understandable, then, that those workers performing distancing techniques to insert boundaries between themselves and animals would choose not to give a name. Intriguingly, Philips points out that the animal technicians and scientists that she interviewed in her study, while not necessarily making a link between naming animals and caring for them, clearly expected her to (Philips, 1994). Philips also points out that in order to ‘achieve’ an individual personality for an animal through naming, the collaborative efforts of both speaker and audience are needed. This was evidenced at the sanctuaries when young, nameless, animals were brought in. Traditionally the humans who were surrendering animals to the sanctuary were subjected to an ‘entry interview’ whereby the staff attempted to gather as much information as possible from them regarding the vagaries of that particular animal with the idea of being able to place them, appropriately, into a new home. Very young animals were often brought in to the shelter without names. Immediately upon receipt of young animals, one staff member would take them to settle into their kennel or cattery and another staff member would talk to the ‘surrenderers’; that is, the people who were giving the animal up. It was common, after the surrenderers had left, for us to witness exchanges between both staff regarding

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 99 the naming of the new animals. Here, it was usual to find that the first member of staff would have already chosen a name (from just a few moments interaction with the animals). If the staff member who was conducting the interview with the surrenderers had also chosen a name for the animal, this was invariably over-ruled by the first staff member’s choice. The name attributed by the first staff member was often regarded as superior as it had been based upon a closer interaction and observation of the animal’s ‘true personality’ and, therefore, more appropriate. A different approach to naming was evident in the state-run shelter for lost dogs. Here shelter workers did not name the animals as they were brought in. Instead they assigned them a number. In this shelter, they operated a seven day waiting period wherein the animal had seven days to be claimed by an owner and if he or she was not then they were put up for sale. Thereafter they were held between one and two weeks dependent upon the assessment of their ‘homeability’ and—if not yet claimed or purchased—then they were destroyed. The staff of the non-council shelters frowned upon the council’s lost dogs home because workers there did not attempt to re-home their animals. And because they sold them, apparently making little attempt to screen those wanting a dog, the process was criticized heavily. Interestingly, however, it was the lack of naming for new animals which was seen as emblematic of the detrimental way this home was apparently run: Sarah (Volunteer): I worked there for a few weeks but just couldn’t hack it. There were so many dogs and so many of them were killed, you know. And I couldn’t do with the damn numbering system. I mean an 8 week old pup isn’t number 3033, he’s Fred, you know? They number them so we don’t get close to them cos if you do it’s just too hard when they’re killed, and you know they will be cos there’s just too many of them.

The symbolic importance of naming an animal was further underlined because shelter workers never referred to an animal as ‘it’. And those engaged in re-homing animals did not like a prospective adopter to refer to an animal as ‘it’ either. When asked what she looked for in prospective homes for rescued animals, one sanctuary worker explained that amongst other things: Melissa (employed worker): One of the things I really hate is when they start asking me about ‘it,’ you know about the dog or cat that they want and they’re asking ‘is it friendly,’ ‘does it like kids.’ I know it’s a little thing but it really put me off them and they have to work harder then to convince me they are good enough for one of our animals. I mean, these are our babies, you know, they are never an ‘it’.

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All those involved in sanctuary life took their roles as ‘caretakers’ of the ‘pets-in-waiting’ extremely seriously. They felt, generally, that they did a good job under hard circumstances, not least because they were paid little and some worked on a purely voluntary basis. There was an element of moral zealousness—a feeling of activism perhaps—among the staff who saw themselves as a ‘voice-for-the-voiceless.’ As such they often tried to ‘speak for’ the animals on two levels. Firstly, in interaction situations they literally ‘spoke for’ the animals as familial allies, and secondly, on a more structural level they spoke for the political rights and welfare of individual animals. A requisite part of this was the assumption of care that all workers had towards the animals. The animals were seen as their ‘charges,’ as disempowered others who needed protecting: Melissa: It’s our fault in the first place, I mean we domesticated them and now we can’t even take care of them. It should be our duty to do that at least seeing as though we did this to them in the first place. . . . . right now there are about 300 of them being destroyed on a weekly basis because we aren’t dealing with what we’ve done so . . . At least here I can be sure that this dog or this cat which can’t survive on its own gets to live out the rest of its life in plush surroundings. It’s the least we can do.

These animals were seen in ways which went beyond traditional conceptions of animals as ‘non-persons,’ instead they became ‘potential family members’. Their apparent domestication was seen as a starting point from which this transition between animal and human categories was managed. The moral and familial assumption of care that the workers had towards the animals was often most pronounced during ‘homing’ situations or in discussions of ‘homing’ situations after the fact. Homing the Animal Homing refers to the placement of a shelter animal into a new home. Unsurprisingly, the shelter staff who we spoke to considered this to be one of the most important jobs they did and, as a result, it was taken seriously and the process conducted with some passion. Members of the public who got in contact with the hope of adopting an animal would either phone the sanctuary first or simply turn up during its opening times. Shelter staff claimed that they preferred to be able to talk to prospective families on the telephone prior to a visit so that they could ensure only those who came from potentially ‘good homes’ would actually come to the shelter premises in person. There was a practical as well as a symbolic reason for this.

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 101 On the one hand, this telephone screening process served as a mechanism for reducing confrontation with members of the public. Workers felt that applicants from ‘undesirable’ homes would have to be turned away and this was problematic because it often resulted in confrontations and tension. This situation typically arose when the beliefs and discourses of the shelter staff and those of the potential owner clashed. So the telephone also served to shield the shelter workers from the unwelcome gaze of the unsuitable family—those individuals who espoused a different set of values and beliefs regarding the role of the animal in their home. Those who successfully negotiated the telephone interview, on the other hand, would then be invited to the shelter to meet the animals. Members of the public were not allowed to view the animals without a staff member present, which was presented to them in terms of safety. In reality, however, having a staff member accompany prospective adopters as they wandered round the shelter was a way to informally interview them and to watch how they interacted with the animals which was a strong consideration when deciding if they came from a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ home. If the prospective family successfully passed this ‘good home’ test they were then formally interviewed by a member of staff who would ascertain to what extent they were a good fit with the animal they had chosen. On the basis of this interview, those individuals from ‘suitable’ homes would then be invited to adopt an animal, while those from apparently ‘unsuitable’ homes would be turned away. Where suitability was difficult to ascertain during the interview process, shelter workers would schedule a home visit so that a volunteer would go and look around their home and continue to interview them further. The seriousness with which the shelter staff conducted the homing process was made especially visible in their collective ‘rites of initiation’— that is, the memorable occasions at which they had made mistakes in the re-homing process. These incidents passed into a sort of shelter-lore which was routinely shared with newcomers as a kind of cautionary talecum-learning technique. It was commonly assumed that until a member of staff had completed their first erroneous ‘homing’ they were not fully fledged ‘homers’. Sending an animal to a ‘bad home’ thus became something to be wary of and an experience to avoid at all costs. Staff learned from each other about what constituted the ‘bad home’, particularly during periods when they shared their own experiences of homing. Perhaps because of the angst that the process of homing often caused, and not least because of the folklore of bad homings, it was taken to be one of the most serious aspects of a worker’s life in the shelter. It was a central point

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of their work identity. Some staff members did not wish to take on the responsibility of re-homing, as was explained by one worker: Emma (volunteer): I must say I never felt confident enough to take a homing from beginning to end. . . . I don’t have enough confidence or experience . . . . . It’s too much of a responsibility and I worry too much all the time whether I made the right decision, I’d rather let someone else do it instead.

Those who did re-home regularly approached it with near fanatical levels of zeal and often took pride in turning down applicants from places that they felt were ‘bad’ homes. As one worker explained about their manager, “she’s a really good homer, she turns down well over half the idiots who come here.” Given that the ‘business’ of the sanctuary was to re-home animals and given that a successful re-homing was cause for much celebration it is somewhat contradictory to view a member of staff as good at their job because of their high rejection rates. When seen from the perspective of those who work at such sanctuaries, however, those who see their jobs as ‘protecting’ animals from bad homes it begins to make more sense. As one volunteer explained: People with a bad history, they’re turned down . . . People who have given animals away in the past. One of the first questions we ask here and on the home visit is whether they’ve had animals before and what happened to them. It puts you in an awkward situation sometimes, you know, when they’ve recently lost an animal and they start crying on you but that’s generally a good sign, that they loved their previous animal enough. Then there’s others who’ve got the cheek to turn up here wanting to adopt an animal when they’ve given their last couple of animals away for pathetic reasons and they expect us to let them have one of our dogs. It’s a joke.

Further evidence of the enactment of this particular form of care was the shared confidence in the system of conducting home visits. The potential new ‘owners’ were told, on occasions such as this, that it was standard practice to check their home prior to releasing the animal although it was something they reserved for those who the shelter staff were unsure of. This technique had a dual purpose according to the staff members. As well as giving staff members more opportunity to evaluate the potential home it was also seen as a way of ‘weeding out’ further ‘bad’ homes. Not only would shelter staff be able to see for themselves the conditions that these people lived in but it was generally felt that those who came from ‘bad’ homes would balk at the idea of a home visit. Those potential owners who came from ‘good’ homes, on the other hand, were believed to be more open and honest; those who would welcome the idea of a staff visit to their house.

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 103 One sanctuary manager explained that if sufficient time and resources were available, the organization would have made home checks mandatory in all cases. As it was, they could only afford to check on those they were unsure of or wished to deliberately ‘put off ’. The shelter manager, however, reserved the right to check on any animal once homed. This caused a significant amount of dissent with those who sat on the managerial board, the Sanctuary Committee, and other stakeholders who did not play a role in the day-to-day management of the shelter. The board members considered this to be an illegal act on behalf of the manager, especially if she removed animals she thought were not being treated well. Further tensions were apparent when the manager occasionally chose to ignore them, and expressed the opinion that this was a right, as part of the ethical conduct of ‘doing the job well’. One worker explained this tension particularly well, in this instance not because the manager had made an unsuitable visit but because the manager had been seen to turn a ‘blind eye’ to the homing of a so-called problem dog: Tammy (employed worker): We had this dog who was a real problem to home so one day when no one else was here he [a worker who was subsequently asked to leave] homed him to these people. We were all a bit suspicious so I decided to go and check on [the dog]. It was the worst home you can possibly imagine and there’s no way these people came off as a good home on the day he spoke to them either. He just wanted to get rid of [the dog] cos he wasn’t an easy dog. Not long after he was back with us he bit one of the workers really badly and the decision was made to put him down. No one agreed with this decision. The Committee had decided based on the manager’s report on [the dog’s] behaviour that he was un-homeable. None of us agreed. A few people left over this one—I was nearly one of them. You can’t work in a place where a good dog gets put down just cos the manager doesn’t care.

The homing ritual was performed to see whether the interested persons would make a good home for the animals they chose. To do this, the manager asked not only about the potential family’s history of pet-keeping but also about their lifestyle. They were asked where they lived, the sort of accommodation it was, whether there was access to a garden or yard (which had to be fully fenced in the case of those who wanted to adopt a dog), whether there were children in the household, and whether there would be someone at home during the day. Yet while these rituals followed the same pattern each time, all those interviewed who were concerned with homing animals believed that there was no single formula for successfully placing an animal in a new home. All argued that they simply “got a feel” for a person and that this “gut reaction” was instrumental in

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whether the prospective owner was given an animal. Hence, there were many cases where prospective owners had answered all the questions “correctly” and yet the manager was still uneasy with them. In this case, a home visit was also recommended. The distinction between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ home was a form of shared knowledge by those working at the sanctuary and constituted a form of occupational know-how or ‘rescue-craft’. If they felt comfortable with the person, if the person had apparently cared for their previous animal and treated the animal well, physical, financial, or familial circumstances seemed not to matter: Melissa: I’m not working off the basis that all rich people look after dogs properly, that isn’t the case. I’m looking at how much heart and soul there is in the situation, how long the dog is going to be left . . . It’s like an adoption situation, by the time you’ve got there and had a cup of tea with them you’ve got a very good idea about what they want and then you’re making a decision whether you think you want them to have one of your dogs and you can tell within a good home visit how well you think your dogs will be looked after.

And again: Tammy: I’ve had a lot of calls off [the local council estate considered to be undesirable] and this is how you can typecast people wrongly, I was very reluctant to go and vet a house on [this estate] and you know on the three occasions the houses were absolutely gorgeous, lovely people. . . . All three that rang were suitable and I’ve had people ring from areas where they’ve got everything going for them and yet I wouldn’t leave a dog there.

All involved in homing animals made reference to whether they would be ‘comfortable’ leaving their own companion animal with the prospective new home. It was a sort of ‘sixth sense’ that they shared with the farm animal vets that we described in Chapter Three whose diagnostic rituals also relied upon subtle, sensory means of establishing the ‘right’ thing to do for animals. If shelter staff felt they would leave their own pets with the prospective adopter, then it was considered ‘good’ enough for the sanctuary animals. One homing officer explained, “once you think ‘I would be happy to leave my dogs with these people’ then you’ve got the right answer.” What seemed most important was whether the animal would be treated as one of the family. As one interviewee explained, “you’re looking to see whether you think the cat will be happy here and if it will be treated the way you’d treat it, like one of us really.” And again, as another participant elaborated, “You want them to spoil their pet and treat it like one of them.” The apparent corollary of this was that those who did not

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 105 want to adopt an animal to be part of the human family were considered to be bad homes. One “homer” told the researcher: I went to see a house recently that wanted a young cat and it turned out they wanted her as a mouser and I thought there’s no way they’re getting her. I actually had her in my car and they’d seen her and I had to make loads of stuff up about that not being the cat for them . . . but they didn’t care whether they got that cat or any cat they just wanted a cat and any would do and that’s not a good sign. It’s obvious then that they want a cat for other reasons than just wanting a cat—as a pet I mean, and that’s not on.

Paradoxically, then, while the sanctuary animals unwittingly assisted these workers to enact rituals of care at work, the explicit usage of this cat as a working ‘mouser’ was frowned upon and led to a rejection. Perhaps some forms of work—hidden in the passionate, emotional labour of the sanctuary—were superior to other, more explicit labours such as ‘mousing’. It is interesting to speculate whether seeing this situation through the eyes of the cat—or even a differently trained or qualified human—might yield a very different outcome. The Value of Family Workers also expected that the whole family would participate in the decision to adopt an animal and that all the family would come to the sanctuary to choose their new animal. If members of the family were not present, they would be asked to come back another day when everyone could be there. It was assumed that the decision to adopt an animal was such a serious one that the whole family would be considered as part of the homing work. The length of time given to this process was also a factor, with those who had spent a longer time deciding on pet ownership being given priority over those who had spent a short time on the decision to adopt. As one animal re-homer explained, “I sometimes feel as if they woke up that morning and thought ‘I’m bored, I know—let’s get a dog,’ and it’s not enough, it’s a big commitment, and it should take a lot of thought and family discussion.” So families and their cohesion were important, too, in the establishment of a home’s ‘goodness’ or otherwise. The perception of goodness extended rather further than the animal’s immediate physical needs, then, and entered the territory of ‘family values’. Sanctuary staff spent a great deal of time interacting with the public who they generally viewed in very negative terms. Excuses the public gave for surrendering their pets, as well as their experiences of the worst

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potential homes to be vetted were the source of much hilarity in the privacy of the offices. One sanctuary had a “top three reasons for getting rid of your pet” chart on display in the office away from the sight of the public. The reasons were (a) human pregnancy and concern for the baby; (b) asthma or allergies to the animal; and (c) poor behaviour by the animal. These reasons were, however, seen more as a top three excuses on behalf of the owners. In general these were taken as being lies or, in the case of poor behaviour by the animal, were seen as being the fault of the owner in the first place. As part of this set of values it was often suggested, for example, that dogs who chewed furniture did so because they were starved of human company and not exercised enough. One staff member recounted: Emily (volunteer): I couldn’t believe the flimsy excuses people gave for getting rid of their pets—my wife’s pregnant, we’re moving house, we work ten hours a day and he’s wrecking the house—what do you expect when you leave a dog all day?

This skepticism often led to an acquiescent, “nothing shocks me any more” attitude on behalf of the sanctuary staff when conducting their home checks. Yet when faced with “cruelty cases” they were usually very emotional and angry, although they often seemed resigned, almost as though they expected all members of the public to treat their pets badly. The sanctuary staff studied in this fieldwork bore a resemblance to those studied elsewhere in this regard. Frommer and Arluke (1999) pointed out that the shelter staff they studied often adopted negative attitudes toward the public, blaming them for surrendering their animals. This was a common occurrence in the sanctuaries studied here, where staff considered the reasons the public gave for relinquishing their animal trivial, flimsy and often untrue. One staff member explained: Stacy: One thing this job did teach me was that you can’t rely on these stereo­typical judgments—it’s weird really because on the one hand I am telling myself not to judge—whether they come off a council estate or have a nice home and so on—while all the time I am judging—whether their children are well behaved or they seem like responsible people. It’s very difficult to explain how you get this feeling about them, like I said at first you think that everyone who comes to an animal sanctuary comes for the right motives but you soon learn.

The shelter workers saw their animals as individuals, with very real personalities, who were owed a duty of care by the staff that looked after them. And in addition to the practice of giving the animals names, they often ‘achieved’ the personality of the animal under their care by giving them narratives and biographies which served, in turn, to justify their own

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 107 zealous approach to their jobs. A key component of this was the a priori assumption of personality that was given to these animals. All the animals in the sanctuaries that we visited were assumed to have ‘personalities’. One staff member when discussing re-homing a particularly boisterous spaniel dog explained that “we’ve got to bear in mind the individual dog. Grover here hates cats [‘don’t you boy’ to the dog] and he hates kids. I often wonder what happened to him to make him this way but he won’t tell me will you lad [to the dog]?” And again, the family who had chosen a cat as a ‘mouser’ were described unfavourably by the staff member in terms of the cat’s apparent ‘softness’ and inability to cope with killing, “Halfway through the interview it’s clear to me they wanted her as a mouser and I thought ‘no way; this girl won’t cope; she’s too soft to be killing things all day for a living’ so I made my excuses and got out of there with her as soon as I could.” A further way in which their ‘a priori’ assumption of animal personality could even be seen in the paperwork the staff completed during the adoption process. This paperwork was something that we, as ethnographers, felt was just as important as the observational and verbal accounts that we collated. During an interview with a pet owner who was giving up an animal to the shelter, for example, the staff member would ask the surrenderer to describe the animal’s personality for the records. At times this request was met with silence or a blank look so the interviewer prompted them by saying such things as “Is she easy-going? Does she like kids? Is she highly strung? Does she like new people?” and so on. If the surrenderer was unable to answer such questions or answered only briefly this was taken as yet further evidence that they constituted a ‘bad home’ or ‘bad person’ which was the assumption that shelter staff seemed to share. In fact, every member of the public who surrendered an animal—no matter what the reason—was regarded with the same degree of disgust. Perhaps for the volunteers and paid workers, contact with such apparently ‘undesirable’ humans represented the real ‘dirty work’ of shelter life. This is curious, particularly since their routine work brought them into contact with a whole host of more conventionally polluting materials such as excreta, ‘dirt’ and sometimes even dead animals. Establishing ‘Personhood’ The personality of an animal is inextricably interwoven with their biography and the naming practices that shelter staff engage in. Their deemed personality, their name and biography are all constitutive components of

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their ‘personhood.’ One further way in which this was created was in the fierce protective stance many of the staff took towards their charges. One example of this was the distaste that staff members had for those who wanted to ‘buy’ an animal as opposed to ‘adopting’ one. When explaining how she ‘got a feel’ for potential new homes straight away one staff member said: A good example is when they phone up and the first question they ask is ‘have you got any dogs for sale?’ I know some of this is ignorance about what we do but it definitely puts you off and usually with good reason. When I first started doing this I wasn’t so cynical and thought other members of staff were totally over the top . . .but I soon learned not to trust what most people say to you, and I realized that if their first interest was price then their first concern wasn’t the dog, they didn’t want them for the right reasons.

What is especially interesting here is the hint that the personalizing process was something to be learned by new entrants into shelter work. To begin with, this person had found her colleagues ‘over the top’ but soon realized—from their shared discourses about the public perhaps—that most people could not be trusted to have the same moral code towards animals as the staff of the shelter. In this way, collective organizational values are seen to take precedence once again over those of the ‘ignorant’ general public who frustratingly for the shelter staff, seem not to understand the significance of animals in the same way. So the ethos of the shelter, its sense of collective value in rescue work, was re-inscribed and reproduced by inducting new recruits into particular ways of seeing animals. This ‘rescue-craft’ tainted the ways in which members of the public were considered but also had ramifications for the animals involved. The personhood of animals was also established in the way that sanctuary workers laboured together to create ‘good’ animals. Their belief system stressed that the abuse, cruelty or abandonment of pets was never the fault of the animal, but that blame rested upon the human owner. In this way animals were perceived as never being intrinsically ‘bad’ but instead were perceived to have been ‘made that way’ by their errant owners. For example, one worker explained the following about a dog that had actually bitten three members of staff, one of them quite seriously: Sharon (volunteer): We had a guy bring a dog in who was snapping and biting at everyone. We couldn’t handle him he was way too dangerous. We ended up putting him down then later we found out he’d belonged to this druggie who fed him drugs. No wonder he was so aggressive. We only found this out after we’d destroyed him. People like that really make me mad. If he’d have told us when he brought the dog in we would have worked

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 109 with the dog and sorted him out. His anger wasn’t his fault it was his stupid owner feeding him drugs.

If there is no such thing as an intrinsically ‘bad’ animal, of course, then all the blame for aggressive, violent animal behaviour may be comfortably shifted to the owner. It was a belief that was collectively held by shelter workers, despite evidence to the contrary. Another staff member at the same shelter recounted the following: We had a dog who bounced around five or six homes with each one of them bringing him back cos he chewed and wrecked things. Well you have to start wondering at this point. We’d be pretty unlucky to have six bad homes on the run so you have to ask whether it’s the dog. We were thinking about getting him into training classes when this woman came along and fell in love with him. We warned her about him but she still wanted him. Anyway three months later we go and see them and what do you know he was completely happy and very well behaved. Maybe we did just have a real bad run of bad luck with the wrong personality match up between this dog and those six homes.

In this way, the “technologies of person production,” which Cahill and Eggleston refer to as the construction and compilation of ‘socially credible’ information about ‘persons’ come to stand for a fact or the truth about animals and their predispositions (1994: 141). This ‘person production’ was evidenced in the shelter workers interactional labour aimed at achieving ‘good’ animals. Just as Margolin argued (1994, cited in Cahill and Eggleston, 1994: 144), when investigating the staff of a gifted childrens’ centre, a “flattering file person [was] waiting to be hung on them there” (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994: 144). So too, the shelter workers approached each animal with a ‘flattering file person’ to attach to them and thus explain their ‘unruly’ behaviour. In the shelter, the epistemology of work implied the inherent goodness of animals in their care, and workers would create a number of different narratives—usually involving the negligence or cruelty of owners—to ensure that this daily discourse remained secure. Goffman pointed out that certain social environments such as psychological institutions, or ‘asylums’, limit the ability for individuals to achieve the status of ‘personhood’. He argued that this was done by preventing them from acting in ways appropriate to the performance of personhood (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994). It may be, however, that the collective meaning-makings of those employed in animal sanctuaries operate in reverse to this by making the shelter a place where any animal will automatically be able to achieve personhood, largely by the fact that a ‘flattering file person’ automatically awaits them, no matter what their behaviour.

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So how did these values and positions impact upon those who worked at sanctuaries? Why, when the challenges of shelter life seemed substantial, did individuals continue to come forward as volunteers? These questions were made more puzzling when we considered the volatile atmosphere at many of the shelters we visited, something which meant that staff sometimes came to blows and left the organization altogether. Alger and Alger’s (2003) study of Whiskers, a cat shelter in the United States, found that there was a high turnover of staff within the shelter, largely because internal tensions and differences were so common (Alger and Alger, 2003: 29–30). When emotions ran high, as they often appeared to do, the staff at the sanctuaries studied here were also prone to internal arguments. This led to a high staff turnover—many citing the differences of opinion as a main cause of their leaving work. In some cases, conflicts emerged most strongly between those working in the shelter, and the board or committee members who managed the organization apparently from a distance. Alger and Alger (2003) paid close attention to the tensions and differences in their study at Whiskers, and particularly the conflicts between those working “on the ground”—the cleaners and animal feeders—and the Board Officers. By ‘being there’ and ‘hanging around’ we followed this approach in our fieldwork. This tension was prevalent in the British sanctuaries that we studied too and ultimately led, in one case, to the removal of one manager who apparently refused to toe the organizational line. His disagreements with those at the board level were frequent. But this manager failed too in his desire to gain the support of the staff of the shelter, many claiming that he was removed from his post because he was not “in it for the right reasons”. In the opinion of one interviewee, this manager was largely disinterested by the welfare of the animals. So the emotional and ethical devotion to animals was seen as a paramount pre-requisite in the eyes of the volunteers at the sanctuaries in Britain, just as it was at the US shelter that Alger and Alger had studied. Interestingly, while at times the staff criticized each other for expressing different values and motives for their work at the sanctuary, their shared commitment to the process of caring was something that usually prevented conflicts from getting out of hand. As Alger and Alger noted in the US, “even when conflicts arose between officers and other volunteers, their commitment to the cats kept many volunteers on the job” (Alger and

shelter workers & the construction of ‘animal personhood’ 111 Alger, 2003: 52). So the performance of care and rescue helped to bond employees together, acting as a vital cultural ‘glue’ to hold together the multiple and often disparate factions that might otherwise have developed in these spaces. Animals forged a link in the network between actors to resolve (albeit temporarily) the experience of conflict. The volunteers Alger and Alger studied shared a view that if people were “in it for the animals” other discrepancies could be overlooked. Their volunteers perceived the organizational culture of Whiskers to be “committed to life at all costs”; a uniting discourse that connected workers together. So too, the ethical commitment to animal life formed the major source of their occupational esteem. As many worked in an unpaid capacity, it was the feeling of doing ‘good’ work rather than money or structural authority that gave them reward within these organizations. Those studied here—working on behalf of, and with, animals— subscribed to a clearly delineated world-view, an ontological perspective that broke down the world into “good-for-the-animals” and “bad-for-theanimals”. This simple dichotomy applied to all actors and material artefacts involved in their working environment and took precedence over everything else, even personal feelings and friendships with others. The life-world that was thus created at these sanctuaries was furnished with a selection of moral codes and values that, in turn, justified the hard and often ‘dirty’ work that the shelter staff did on a daily basis: nothing was ‘bad’ work as it was all recoded as ‘good’ for the animals. This helps to explain why managers who did not share this set of values were resisted so actively. So too, the processes of doing work—and particularly the rituals of homing—became a source of pride and ethical capital in what might otherwise have become a mundane routine of administration, cleaning and feeding. The most salient aspect of the workplace culture of the sanctuary, however, was the creative way in which ‘personhood’ was applied to the animals under their care. Through language, naming, the construction of back-stories and biographies, and through a highly emotive culture of blame and stigma applied ruthlessly to members of the public, animal shelter staff deftly challenged the assumptions that unwanted animals were cast-offs—‘merely’ animals. In so doing, they successfully transformed such animals from unwanted ‘rejects’ to ‘pets-in-waiting’; the potential family member to the ‘right’ or ‘good’ home. That ‘goodness’ was determined with and through some subjective and occasionally questionable criterion seemed less important to them than the zealous fervour

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with which they selected successful adopters. In so doing, their own forms of labour were affirmed and made meaningful—part of an heroic act of rescue in which creatures of all kinds were given a chance of survival. These workers offered an embedded critique of the hegemonic division between human and animal categories in their day to day proximity with animals. Bringing animals close to them, especially by applying human behaviours and thought patterns to their charges, necessarily involved a partial dis-assemblage of human-animal categories. It was something that produced a very distinctive Animal-Network and gave the humans involved the ‘ethical license’ to make a number of judgments, assertions and rules about those outside the shelter. Crucially, then, the performance of ‘proximity’ involved a degree of symbolic labour. But the relationship between carer and animal resisted falling into outright intimacy by this very process of care. Caring was a way of ensuring that the animal—seen typically as a victim of human greed or neglect—was transformed and re-coded into a potential member of a ‘good’ family, but they were not regarded as the pets of the shelter staff themselves. The business of caring was serious work; meaningful, emotive and ethically charged, but work nonetheless. By charging this work with such strong emotion, the shelter staff conferred upon themselves the added sense of pride that they were making a meaningful difference to the lives of animals. That animals were artfully reclassified as ‘important’ meant that their work acquired an extra patina of social status and meaning. We continue this investigation of the ways in which humans construct and classify animals in the next chapter where we address the ways in which wildlife TV presenters create certain narratives about animals. In particular, we pick up on the theme of ‘proximity’ in asking how it is that wild animals come to be ‘known’ to us through the different ways they are presented in wildlife documentaries. We attend to the different ways animal and human identities are embroiled in re-positioning wild, at-adistance animals, as intimates whose trials and tribulations we follow avidly from the safety of our living rooms.

CHAPTER SIX

WILDLIFE PRESENTERS, PERFORMANCE AND THE ANIMAL ‘ACTOR’ It may seem that a television naturalist immediately knows the name and detailed behaviour of every animal he happens to encounter. It is not, of course, like that. Research teams have helped him select the animals which he goes to film, and field scientists who have studied the animal in question, have primed him with information, some of which may well as yet be unpublished. And after he has seen the animal in question and he seeks to write some account of what he has seen his companions will help to sort out his observations and share his deductions. David Attenborough, 2002: 310

Playing with orang-utans, swimming with dolphins and tracking packs of wild dogs through the bush are just some of the enviable tasks that make up a day’s work for those employed by TV companies as wildlife presenters. Their proximity to exotic species makes this one of the most desirable forms of work with animals that we have described in this book. This stands in stark contrast to the forms of labour that we explored in the last chapter, a place where ‘dirty work’, contact with ‘undesirable’ members of the public and poor pay often made working life more challenging for those employed to care for other animals. By contrast, TV presenters enjoy a privileged and well-paid status, working in wild and exotic places that the majority of viewers will never get the chance to visit. They tend to be portrayed as adventurer-scientists, rugged and charismatic individuals who are able to adapt to hostile environments like rainforests and jungles to get close to animals. This chapter considers how such interactions are managed in a practical sense. We argue that animal-human divisions are consciously and purposefully manipulated during the filming process to give the viewer a sense of intimacy with wild animals, something which relies upon a whole range of distinctive practices and performances. Understanding and exploring these practical skills is the main task of this chapter. Unlike the rescue shelter where caring for abandoned and unwanted pets involves a constant struggle to raise the profile of the organization (and the plight of individual animals), wildlife presenters like the two that

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we interviewed are usually able to command massive audiences and thus have an immense impact upon public awareness of animal issues. This offers them the privilege to speak to literally millions of viewers. But this impact is underpinned by ‘serious’ work, a vast amount of unseen emotional and physical labour that is often made particularly difficult by the level of unpredictability involved in living and working with wild animals. From speaking to wildlife presenters it was apparent that when working on location, they often took personal risks to get the best shots, putting themselves in dangerous situations to say their ‘pieces to camera’. They were routinely exposed to extreme climates, tropical diseases and a whole host of species that had the potential to harm—and even kill—human beings. But they also ran the risk of coming into conflict with indigenous people and their (very different) political and cultural values, something which exposed the film-making team to the tricky and contested territory between global conservation and local economics. The apparent rewards of being in the public eye, and the glamour associated with foreign travel and contact with wildlife, make media work like this extremely competitive. But in a situation where there is significantly more ‘talent’ than there are presenting jobs, individuals can find themselves out of work for many months and sometimes even years. Coupled with the uncertainties of life on the film set, the financial risks of getting (or not getting) work make this an unpredictable form of employment. How, then, did presenters cope with such inherent risks and uncertainties? Why did they seem so keen to acquire more work when the rewards of doing so were difficult to predict? Of course, there are a variety of interesting potential answers to these questions. For some presenters, it’s because they have a deep passion for ecology and species preservation and want to broadcast this to inspire others. For other presenters, it’s about education and raising awareness of animal issues. But in all cases, they need to have a deep interest in broadcasting, performing and making wild animals ‘known’ by giving ‘factual’ accounts of their lives to the viewing public. In doing that, we noted that presenters often drew upon ‘deep acting’ techniques to inspire a sense of closeness between viewers and animals. By sharing their human emotions, presenters were able to draw audiences ‘behind the scenes’ of their work. While this strategy seemed to be popular with the viewers and producers, however, it was sometimes difficult for presenters to hang onto a clear idea of ‘who they were’. In other words, the work itself seemed to jeopardize the sense of ontological security that other ‘animal experts’ like academics and vets were able to enjoy in their professional lives (see Chapter Three, for example). It



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not only blurred professional distinctions between being an expert and being an actor, but sometimes also distorted the supposed distinctions between human presenters and animal subjects. While wildlife presenting may seem glamorous and exciting, then, it also relies upon a range of skills and dramatic impulses that go beyond the straightforward ‘transmission’ of information to viewers. These often have far-reaching consequences for those involved. Presenting Animals Drawing on our observations of presenters at work, we investigate a peculiar paradox—that they draw upon distinctively human qualities of emotion, speech and body language to dramatize animal lives. In seeking to account for that, we document and explore the ways in which off-camera and on-camera performances overlap; the ways that personal emotions relate to presenting performances. But we acknowledge that this is a uniquely human matter because for animals there can be no reflection upon the supposed performative ‘space’ between back-stage and oncamera selves. After all, TV is a human construction made possible by human technology (Goffman, 1981). Animals, by contrast, have only the lived experience of day-to-day existence whether they are feeding, fighting or engaged in any number of ‘natural’ activities and, as the presenters we interviewed explained, they rarely make filming easy. Wholly oblivious to the audience (and sometimes even the filming equipment that surrounds them), animals are often unpredictable, uncontainable and exist in life-worlds that are almost entirely inaccessible from human registers of interpretation. These are deep and philosophical issues but they have practical impacts upon the day-to-day organization of the filming process, its budgets and deadlines. ‘Factual’ TV presenting involves a difficult balance. On the one hand, natural history presenters bear a weight of responsibility to select the most appropriate ‘facts’ to get the audience’s attention but, on the other, they must also represent the animal as accurately as possible, while taking account of the difficulties inherent in getting close to them (Gardner and Young, 1981). This is no easy task. The aim is to amuse and affect viewers with carefully selected information and editorial techniques. Sometimes, this is done in creative ways such that they furnish animals with ‘personalities’, often seeking out visual strategies to show how they are like us. This is a strategy they share with those who work in the rescue shelter who

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draw upon similar techniques to find new homes for the ‘pets-in-waiting’ at the sanctuary. At other times, however, different animal characteristics are highlighted to make different analytic points on screen. More cynical media commentators have called this an exploitative process of ‘viewer commodification’ in which storylines are ‘made to fit’ certain agendas and narratives (Nichols, 1991: 11). Whether one takes this view or not, however, it is clear that visual images like those presented in wildlife documentaries have a profound effect upon the sorts of things that viewers believe about animals, and ultimately, the ways that they think about their relationships with other species. This is something which gives TV presenters a great deal of power; the power to tell us what animals are really like. It is unsurprising, then, that our participants took this job extremely seriously, rather than treating it as a straightforward form of entertainment. We spoke to two British wildlife presenters, both particularly wellknown for working with primates. Our methods for doing so were necessarily different from our approaches in other settings and a major reason for this was attributable to the unusual nature of their work. In contrast to the other chapters of the book, our research methods here were largely interview-based because our participants were filming on two separate locations for several months during the research period (one in South Africa and the other in Malaysia). This meant that several of the initial interviews were conducted by telephone. Having developed a good acquaintance with both presenters during the telephone sessions, the main researcher (in this case, LH) interviewed them face-to-face in their homes, at social functions and by attending lectures and various other public appearances. Twelve shorter and less structured meetings were conducted in person. The telephone interviews tended to be longer (just over three hours each) and were formally structured, largely because of the difficulties of talking ‘naturally’ without the subtle visual clues or facial expressions that we came to rely upon in face-to-face meetings. We also gathered ‘desk data’ from radio, newspaper and magazine interviews, television reviews and the presenters’ own blogs, books and websites. Clearly this was not the sort of information that we could turn to for many of our less famous participants. We watched their television programmes (several times) and listened to their voice-overs. We also read many of their correspondences with fans by taking up the offer to see private e-mails and messages on social media accounts. This was a varied and, at times, rather experimental form of data gathering which has given us a different angle than more traditionally ethnographic approaches used



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elsewhere. Taking this approach enabled us to ‘get close’ to our participants, without having to be on location. While this method was quite different from the fieldwork we conducted elsewhere, then, we became convinced of its importance for shedding light on a particularly dense range of research topics. We asked deliberately open questions like: What makes a good presenter? What does it feel like to be on set with animals? What do you get out of this experience? From listening to their (extensive and frank) replies, we realized that the role of TV presenter could not be easily likened to other more straightforwardly organizational occupations such as shelter workers or veterinary surgeons. Because production teams usually only worked with the presenters for the duration of the filming, there seemed to be few opportunities for the development of long-standing friendships and a very limited scope for the presenters to experience a common sense of purpose or value with those around them. These were highly individualistic characters, then, who had worked hard to differentiate themselves from other presenters in order to carve out a niche for themselves in this crowded and competitive field. These were major reasons why survey-based methods or even ethnography would have yielded less interesting findings. The following section of this chapter examines some of the close-grained detail from our interviews and is organized thematically from an edited selection of transcribed data. We then take a more theoretical viewpoint in the concluding section, where we consider the implications of presenting work for questions of identity, technology and the Animal-Network. The ‘Talent’: Brendon Blaze and Heather Rayne “Brendon Blaze” and “Heather Rayne” were highly-trained professional scientists and in initial interviews it was very clear that they did not consider themselves to be performing artists or actors in the usual sense. They also appeared resentful that producers and agents sometimes adopted the ‘media shorthand’ of calling them ‘the talent’ rather than calling them by name. For them, this seemed to suggest that their in-depth specialist knowledge about wildlife was less important on set than their status as the outward ‘faces’ of the TV show, a feeling that sometimes brought them into conflict with their producers. Our (male) participant was a qualified veterinary surgeon who had presented ten ‘prime-time’ natural history series while continuing to work part-time in a small-animal practice. To preserve his anonymity, we have called him Brendon Blaze. By contrast,

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our second (female) participant had worked for ten years as an academic primatologist and thus, coming into TV somewhat later, had presented two natural history series. We have anonymized her as Heather Rayne. Both were attractive, sporty, slim and in their early thirties. Both of our participants expressed a keen desire to do more filming and yet also seemed reluctant to use their existing celebrity status to acquire such work. Likewise, they were wholly disinterested by more general forms of media work such as quiz show appearances. Clearly, then, they were not attracted by the supposed benefits of television fame in a more general sense and were only interested in presenting with wildlife. Both interviewees expressed a clear motivation to politicize the challenges facing animals in the wild and at times seemed willing to compromise their normally substantial fees in order to pursue that agenda: Brendon: A great presenter is someone who wants to talk about animals, the sorts of challenges that they face in the wild, the problems they have . . . the problems that humans create. It’s about lifting the lid on a hidden world to make these issues known. For example, I love doing TV interviews when they have some conservation or veterinary story. It pays very little (or sometimes it doesn’t pay at all) but it’s nice to be able to give an opinion on a subject that you care about really passionately. Of course, there are many ways to communicate to the masses, radio, internet, TV. I just enjoy all these experiences.

In terms of their ability to get presenting work, Brendon was emphatic that his career in television had been a lucky break rather than stemming from a deep-seated desire to be famous: Brendon: I just happened to be at the right uni to feature in a docu-soap called ‘University Vets’ and then a show called ‘Vets at Work’ (anonymized). That got me noticed. Lots of professional people appear on TV for all sorts of reasons, interviewed as experts, asked for opinions, and if they fare well then they’re asked again and then when a programme maker is looking for a presenter they may get the nod. Lots of academics and professionals find themselves in a presenting role this way. Of course, having a professional vocation outside TV gives you the benefit of ‘having a proper job’.

Heather, by contrast, stressed her academic and professional credentials, skills that she felt set her apart from other presenters: Heather: The production team I worked with wanted an academic and went round interviewing primatologists in universities all over the world. They gave candidates a screen test where they were put on the spot and expected to talk about monkeys. But the camera can effect a huge change in personality and some people just froze up. I did to begin with. But I



wildlife presenters, performance and the animal ‘actor’ 119 began to choose my facts very carefully and tried to think “what will get their interest?”

It was interesting that in both accounts, the presenters highlighted their professional capital as scientists while downplaying the notion that they had been selected for TV on the basis of physical attractiveness or charisma. In fact, despite their high media profiles, they often seemed to resist the suggestion that they were celebrities: Brendon: On the set, we presenters are often referred to simply as the talent. The talent is the main presenter, the person that has the starring role in the documentary if you like. But it’s horrible if they don’t call you by your name, you can become just like a commodity to them. On my last project in Canada, for example, the team were amazed that I wanted to help them carry the boxes of gear off the boat. I had simply started to pass the boxes onto the quayside and some of them were heavy because they had all the filming equipment in. They said that they had never worked on a set where the talent got stuck into the manual chores like I did. I was quite shocked by that, if I’m honest.

This was a first glimpse of the complexity of identity performances at work; the presenters were ‘serious’ scientists and educators, anchored by a wealth of professional epistemology and expertise, yet they were also expected to behave as performing ‘talent’. Clearly, this was an occasionally uneasy sensation for these presenters and something which compromised the adoption of a straightforward work identity. In short, then, the presenters had to adopt a range of different performances for different occasions, whether they were speaking to the camera, helping behind the scenes or engaged in routine work away from the media spotlight. This presented a compromise to their ontological security and was something which they seemed to find unsettling and destabilizing at times. It was understandable that, as professionally trained scientists, arguably more familiar with organizational environments where their practical skills and academic knowledge took priority over their looks, charisma or their ‘likeability’, our participants were reluctant to engage explicitly with the idea that they were involved in creative or dramatic acts of representation. Instead, they referred back to a sense of their professional capital as educators to buttress their self-esteem and ontological security in the face of the complex and ambiguous demands upon their identity, something that was summed up nicely by Heather when she said, “during filming, I was worried about being a presenter and kept thinking, I’m not a presenter, I’m an academic.” Clearly it was difficult to categorize her own

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identity in simple or straightforward ways, let alone understand how the many millions of viewers at home might perceive her. Performing Identities and Emotions The idea that individuals inhabit multiple performative roles at work has already been examined quite extensively in a wide range of workplaces, from serious settings like funeral parlours (Barley, 1991) to more ostensibly light-hearted places like airlines (Hochschild, 1983), hotels (Rosen, 2000), theme parks (Van Maanen, 1991) and the media (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2009a and 2009b). Several of these studies are particularly useful in contextualising the present chapter. In John Van Maanen’s ethnographic study of Disneyland, for example, employees balance a ‘production’ of smiles against the operational need to get customers through the rides as quickly as possible. The outward-facing work persona of each ride operator relies upon the successful acting of manufactured pleasure such that the theme park becomes a ‘smile factory’ (Van Maanen, 1991; Watson, 1994). Here, while actors might produce realistic performances when they are at work, there is no warrant to assume that there is anything inherently ‘real’ about them (Fineman, 1993). So the performance does not create that actor in an absolute sense which is why, at Disneyland, the smile only lasts as long as it is needed when ride operators are on duty (Van Maanen, 1991). For Erving Goffman, this sort of performative process is key to understanding the ways in which identity is displayed and adapted to suit the specific requirements of the social setting in question. For Goffman, this is a process in which a person’s demeanour works in tandem with their cultural context to produce an appropriate form of behaviour (Goffman, 1963 and 1971). It also suggests that actors may ‘switch off ’ their work self to retreat ‘back-stage’ when they are in other surroundings that require little or no performative energy. While this might constitute a convincing argument in a number of situations, like theme parks or hotels for example, it seemed that rather more complex performances were required by the TV presenters. Unlike Van Maanen’s Disneyland ride operators, the presenters that we spoke to expressed a range of deeply held values and emotions alongside their more contrived ‘surface’ enactments. This work guided and formed their identities in a profound sense and meant that there was a close correspondence between their dramatic on-screen personalities



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and their private ‘selves’; that is, the domain that Goffman conceives of as ‘back-stage’. This was a finding that our interviews brought to the fore: Heather: In wildlife documentary now, there’s a move away from the scripted style of a few years back. Instead they want a real presenter, a natural presenter. That’s why they need scientists because talking off the top of your head relies on a detailed expertise of knowledge that other presenters don’t have.

Something which informed the crossover between ‘scripted selves’ and ‘real selves’ was the experience of doing valuable—and in this case scientific— work with animals, in other words, ‘a detailed expertise of knowledge’. Our participants saw presenting as an important educational and conservational medium, a way of popularizing scientific understandings of animal behaviour and the environment. So for them, being a presenter was about mediating public and scientific knowledges rather than being famous. It was a professional vocation, a calling that gave them at least a partial sense of ‘who they were’ and provided them with a sense of moral contribution to the ‘social good’. In this regard, presenting held much in common with the volunteers at the animal shelter where a sense of moral duty was cited as a main motivating factor for work with animals. It seemed that presenting wildlife documentaries was not just a job or even a form of acting, but appeared to be a ‘natural’ and expressive form of their attachment to science and conservation, carving out an identity which did not rely entirely on celebrity but hinged on a moral and epistemic privilege to speak for animals. As Brendon explained, “I am typical of a lot of factual presenters in that I have a profession that links me to the subject material.” This expertise was derived from their connection to a deeply ingrained, ontological experience of being a ‘real’ scientist, for at least some of the time that they were on set. Findings like these prompted us to question Goffman’s concept of the ‘back-stage’ self. It seemed that a deeper form of performance management was at stake, one which went beyond the adoption of certain mannerisms and facial expressions and entered into the realm of ‘lived’ feelings. In short, the presenters were involved in ‘deep acting’, a condition in which the actor lives and experiences the world as the created character. It was certainly difficult for us, as interviewers and TV viewers, to distinguish between the operation of different personas at times (Hochschild, 1979). Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu frames this particular issue by describing it in terms of the actor’s ‘habitus’. One becomes so embedded within a

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particular context that one’s emotions, speech and even bodily movements come to bear the physical imprint of that distinctive social milieu: One’s bearing [tenue] is immediately perceived by others . . . as a symbol of one’s economic and social standing. Indeed, bodily hexis is above all a social signum. (Bourdieu, 2004: 588)

A presenter’s manner or demeanour, their bearing or ‘hexis’, can evoke profound dramatic effects when highlighted by the camera. Yet we did not assume that the presenters’ performances on camera always demonstrated such deep-seated attachments to their social standing. In fact, taking any of their displays to be evidence of a sort of permanent identity was problematized by watching episodes of their TV shows. We noted that words, movements and facial expressions were often exaggerated beyond the conventions of ‘normal’ interaction, something they were open about in interview: Heather: When I’m doing my piece to camera, I put the emphasis on words differently from when I am speaking normally . . . talking to my friends or whatever. By controlling the way you speak, you’re trying to get the audience to take note of what you’re saying.

Our participants heightened particular behaviours to slip into a variety of roles, whether emphasizing their scientific expertise or by adopting more intimate, casual forms of speech. So the identity performance worked in tandem with the speech, emotions and movements that presenters felt were important at that particular moment of filming. This had a tactical motive in many cases. ‘Controlling the way you speak’ was clearly important when trying to get people to ‘take note’ but we also noticed that impressions were also managed through body language, emotional display, and of course, interaction with animals. Yet while these techniques usually relied upon the adoption of a contrived or exaggerated manner of some sort, we found that we could not easily de-code them as dramatic ‘surface acting’ performances. At times, such enactments seemed to be rather more deeply embedded in the lived ‘hexis’ of presenting life (Bourdieu, 2004). It seemed that we, as observers, could not approach presenting work either as straightforward ‘acting’ or fixed, permanent and lived forms of ‘hexis’ reproduced as “factual television”. To consider some of the reasons for the apparently ‘messy’ overlap between different selves, we turn to the TV series Treetop Adventures, which was presented by Heather Rayne.



wildlife presenters, performance and the animal ‘actor’ 123 Treetop Adventures: Life in the Jungle

As our participants both specialized in primate documentaries, it was common for them to be filming in jungles and rainforests and this is where they were for some of the time that we interviewed them by telephone. During six weeks of filming the series, Treetop Adventures, Heather lived in a tree house in an African jungle some thirty feet from the floor. The reason for that was practical as well as aesthetic; the elephants that roamed the area were, in fact, extremely hostile to the camera crew and their equipment. From the producer’s point of view, however, tree-houses and camp-fires were also good visual tools to create the jungle ambience for the audience. In one episode Heather was filmed as she danced around the campfire. She moved expressively to the tribal drums, apparently oblivious to the audience. But, as she later explained, this was not simply a moment of her lived experience captured on tape, her bodily ‘hexis’, but also functioned as a visual (and political) narrative to reassure the audience that she was keen to assimilate with local people and their ostensibly ‘primitive’ customs (Fairhurst and Sarr, 1996). Thinking about the overlap between the internal experience and the outward performance, the image of Heather’s dancing also reveals something important about her ‘deep personality’ (Bourdieu, 2004: 589). It is inevitable that because she was being filmed, she was almost certainly aware of the image that others—both present and distant—were forming of her. The apparently personal, expressive and ‘free’ experience of dancing became a social signum in an already complex presentation (Bourdieu, 2004). At the same time, however, there seemed to be something living, spontaneous and joyful in this experience. Crucially, it was the photographic technology—a connecting agent—that mediated this reflective intimacy between performance and the experience of ‘self ’ (Latour, 1986). This was just a small example of the sort of ‘messy’ but significant image management that was underway. Our participants usually spent at least two months a year on location. They claimed that travel to exotic filming destinations was the central attraction of the job and something that gave it a glamorous, adventurous quality. It allowed them the chance to see primates at close-range, interact with them and learn more about habitats. In fact, both presenters described this as an intimate process of ‘becoming a temporary insider’. It seemed to be closely related to the experience that anthropologists refer to as ‘going native’. Curiously, however, while both Brendon and Heather

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spoke about the need to adopt (or at least to tolerate) local customs like dancing during the filming process, they also referred to a need to remain scientifically detached for the purpose of observing and reporting on film. To help them to experience this close-distance in a practical sense, they relied upon producers and directors as well as a host of technicians behind-the-scenes—the personnel our participants referred to as fixers. The fixers were employed to mediate the relationship between the presenters and the locals, mapping and navigating some of the inevitable tensions that arose from cultural differences. In practical terms, they were responsible for making camp, preparing living accommodation and setting up the equipment for filming. This was how the setting and its artefacts were assembled (Goffman, 1967) and it is how the presenters were able to feel ‘at home’ in an otherwise inhospitable habitat where they were ‘out of place’ (Douglas, 1991). Interestingly, the fixers would often recruit temporary labour from the indigenous population to locate selected species of wild animals for the purposes of filming: Heather: There are loads of people, we call them fixers, who set up the cameras, translate for you, and get the camp ready for the presenters. They make sure that you can live there. Then there are natives, the indigenous population who will often be employed to help us get certain shots. You naively come out to the jungle as a film-maker but you get a lot of help to get the best shots and to set up a home. We come to rely upon the indigenous people because there’s a real time issue in that we often need to get the shots in a matter of weeks or even days.

In discussing Treetop Adventures, Heather said that film crews often had lengthy waits for their chosen species of ape to appear in shot. Yet in her presentation to camera, she tried to down-play the laborious planning and waiting that was so necessary. Instead she enacted surprise and excitement as though the animals had been an unexpected discovery. Giving little hint of the film crew’s tedious wait or the fact that they had relied upon the specialized knowledge of local ‘natives’ to track these animals down, presenters would visibly enact the role of ‘animal experts’ to capture the audience’s imagination. Interestingly, however, in their ‘pieces to camera’, both presenters made the point that it was often the economic activities of ‘natives’ that was causing the decimation of indigenous habitats in which their chosen species lived. This was a paradox that they felt a personal need to resolve and something that they reflected upon openly in interviews: Heather: I was chosen to present this series because of my professional experience as a conservation project manager. I had people management



wildlife presenters, performance and the animal ‘actor’ 125 skills from this experience and I was also chosen because as an academic I was used to running educational workshops and knew how to train indigenous people to do different jobs in conservation.

Here, Heather begins by constructing (or reiterating) her identity as a professional conservation manager which legitimates and underscores her right to speak on these issues (Thornborrow, 2001). And in considering the implications of this statement, it seems that the performance of living in the jungle rests upon the enactment of moral as well as ‘factual’ credibility, where the TV camera bears witness to the doing of some sort of ‘social good’ in tribal communities (Tolson, 2001). Perhaps this was an attempt to privilege and legitimate western scientific discourses over the quaint, innocent or even child-like customs of indigenous people. Or perhaps education—and more instrumentally, training—could reconcile the ostensibly dissonant interests between ‘man’ and ‘nature’. However we interpret comments such as these, they certainly open the way for discussion (and critique) of neo-colonialism and its attendant issues (­McGehee and Andereck, 2009; Palacios, 2010). It seemed that acting as animal advocates sometimes involved speaking out against the behaviours and cultural norms of fellow humans, something which had far-reaching political implications. Whatever the personal politics involved, in presenting this series Heather created positions for its participants whose contributions were framed by their status in the storyline (Cashmore, 2006; Chapman, 2009; Chreim, 2006). In this case, the identity attributed to the group she calls, ‘indigenous people’ emerges as a result of difference; they are not scientists, they do not have expert status and are thereby defined by their lack of formal knowledge. Yet, little is made of the vital but informal ‘inside information’ that such local people have. A British newspaper’s review of Treetop Adventures following the first episode drew a rather uncomfortable parallel between the aggression of the hostile jungle elephants and the frosty attitudes of local chiefs that the film crew had encountered in Africa. It was suggested that the aggressive elephants may have had ‘the right idea’ about the incoming group of westerners and their technologies. Yet, any supposed power imbalances between presenters and natives are easily over-simplified by such accounts and Heather told us several disturbing anecdotes that destabilized what she described as the myth that presenters and conservationists were inherently ‘good’ or that ‘natives’ were ‘innocent’ and ‘exploited’. She recounted some hair-raising stories from inside the TV community which made us question our own

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assumptions about a number of (very famous) film makers. While it would be unwise to repeat such personal tales from behind-the-scenes, it became apparent that just as there were no simple delineations between on and off camera personas, we could not easily differentiate between the ethics and cultural implications of various methods of presenting, or between the identities of those involved. ‘If it Roars you Leave’: Unpredictable Subjects More often than not, the most unpredictable element of life on the set of the natural history film is the wild animal itself. For the presenters, this unpredictability can lead to delay, expense and some anxiety about getting their own performances right: Heather: Everything is worse when you involve wild animals because they don’t know what you’re doing filming them. You’re not filming something predictable. You can’t predict exactly what they are going to do, you can’t time where they are going to be and when. You can wait days to get the right shot and the animals might not turn up, the annual migration might be late. Sometimes this makes the production very costly. You’re wasting time, which makes the producers very stressed out, but there’s nothing that you can do about that problem so you just have to get everything you can in that time frame. So you can imagine what an art it is to be able to deliver your lines clearly, concisely and in a way that the director likes during the take. An animal might be right behind you and you have one shot at getting it right. There are nerves because you might forget what you’re going to say and of course, you’re dealing with other things in the environment, walking through undergrowth and talking to camera at the same time.

In interviews, the participants explained that animals could cause havoc for the film crew. Completely unaware of human work schedules, human budgets and human story-telling, they would frequently wander in and out of shot during filming, something made more unnerving by their occasionally terrifying behaviours. As Brendon explained, “I have learned that if it roars you leave.” The unpredictability of their ‘subject matter’ led to difficulties for the presenters who—despite these numerous distractions and worries—were also trying to perform their ‘pieces to camera’. Brendon: We’re trying to get that ‘creep up’ feeling captured on film so that the audience can really imagine that interaction, the experience of being in the jungle with that animal. For that reason it’s quite important to get shots of us running or creeping through the undergrowth. It also means you often have to edit out some of the boring but necessary stuff that we do behind



wildlife presenters, performance and the animal ‘actor’ 127 the scenes. But the filming of animals and presenters has to be in real time and it’s that truthfulness which makes it so hard to get good shots with both the human and the animal in. The ultimate goal of any documentary like ours is to get what we call a two shot. The two shot is where the presenter and the animal are captured together.

The “two-shot” was a filming strategy that both presenters regarded as essential for good television but because of the animate nature of their subjects, such visual techniques were often difficult to plan. Wild animals do not lend themselves to physical contact or predictability, nor do they actively participate in being filmed. In cases where it is difficult to get close to them, or difficult to interact with them, presenters seek an identification between the audience and particular animals based on something else. They expressed this as a need to be ‘natural’. The height of skill appeared to be the ability to speak confidently without a script, the capacity to ‘ramble’ in an elegant and exciting way. This was a style that the presenters spoke of as ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ and a departure from old-fashioned scripted styles in which the presenter would read long tracts of prose, often as a voice-over to graphic cinematography. Their more contemporary approaches were designed to deconstruct the literal and metaphoric distance between expert and audience and to be more conversational. Yet even the most natural ‘ramblings’ had to be underpinned by serious academic expertise if they were to have any impact upon the viewers: Heather: In my first documentary, I was given a paragraph of chat that I had to remember, and they were things I would never have said. It didn’t reflect my [regional] accent at all. I’d do about fifteen takes because it really wasn’t natural. That shoot took six months. And then, at the end of it, I started to get my confidence. I got to know how TV works. I got the courage to ask for the producers to give me bullet points rather than a script. I asked for them to let me ramble on and for me they were easily the best bits. It’s how I would say it. The accuracy and the content were the same but I found scripts too hard—too much like acting. The most recent documentary I made, the crew were far more natural and actually they dismissed the scripted approach as old-fashioned. They wanted an organic experience. They were very good, they wanted me to feel relaxed so it was like being in the forest with a bunch of mates and because it was less prescribed I came across as far more natural. The production company had experience of making anthropology films so it was tribal stuff that was their genre. This was their first animal documentary so they relied on me to be the only expert there. With the move away from scripts, it’s becoming easier to tell apart the documentaries which rely upon scripts and those which are natural. Saying that, however, I take an active role in overseeing the credibility of

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While it was clearly important to be an expert on animals, being a ‘natural presenter’ also relied on rather more human traits and emotions to bring animals to the fore. Heather considered a calculated use of emotional display to be a particularly important technique that would not only encourage audiences to be enthusiastic about wildlife but would “endear” her to the viewers: Heather: Another thing which is important is endearment, trying to endear yourself to the viewer. This is done by showing your human side. One trick that I learned is to turn and look at the camera. When you’re being filmed, you might be looking at a monkey and chasing it through the forest. As you’re running, you turn your head back to the camera and smile cheekily and say something like “oh my God” or “come on . . . come on” as though you’re encouraging the audience to run with you through that forest after the animal. You are drawing that person out of their seat.

Interestingly, here she speaks of the importance of being human to mediate the emotional display. Meanwhile, the animal seems to literally and metaphorically disappear into the background. Brendon echoed these comments by emphasizing the need for human qualities in the presenting performance: Brendon: The presenter must show their face, they need to show their reaction to the animal and share it. It gives a human quality that diverts the viewer from the academic style. That’s because audiences want to experience the animal for themselves, to feel as though they are running, as though they are wet and miserable in the jungle, elated, excited or sad. It’s emotions more than facts that people want.

Why, then, were highlighting human qualities so important in presenting stories about animals? How were human emotions manipulated to create particular narrative effects? The opening titles of Brendon’s most recent TV series, “Monkey Sanctuary” (anonymized) were a helpful visual clue. Monkey Sanctuary: Human Emotions and Primate Lives During the brief introduction at the beginning of each episode of Monkey Sanctuary, the camera zoomed in on a small hairy monkey hand clutching a human hand. This image was, of course, a carefully choreographed snapshot of the human-animal bond and a visual device that acknowledges



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the vast disparities between the two ‘actors’ while making clear the ethical agenda of the show. All the episodes of this series followed a similar storyline that centred on the day-to-day running of a monkey sanctuary in Malaysia and a selected group of the primates that lived there. The message of each episode reiterated a central storyline, that the monkeys were being harmed by poaching, logging and other detrimental human activities. When we spoke to Brendon, he claimed that he had “never worked on a programme that had such an emotional impact on people before” something that a subsequent newspaper review seemed to support: When they wheeled on a wheelbarrow full of baby [monkeys] in disposable nappies, you could probably hear the audience reaction coming through the window, a strange collective moo of delight. They are clinging neediness in a fur coat, and the refuge where “Monkey Sanctuary” is largely filmed oozes a reciprocal affection and tenderness . . . (reference withheld).

Conservation messages were presented tactically by drawing upon the carefully choreographed ‘cuteness’ of these monkeys, a filming strategy which underlined the innocent and needy qualities of the young primates. It seemed that these were not wild animals at all, but vulnerable infants. And all of the main monkey ‘characters’ were named by the sanctuary workers, a practice that helped the film-making team to identify them on screen and, of course, to reiterate their human-like qualities. This effect was amplified by showing them in a variety of different scenarios. In the ‘nursery class’, for example, volunteer carers blew soap bubbles for infant monkeys and the cameras zoomed in to show their apparent rapture. Another episode followed a young monkey on his first day at forest school and the filming showed him learning various jungle techniques like climbing and foraging in the tree canopy for food. These were narrative tactics designed to foreground the vulnerability of the ‘child-like’ monkeys, many of whom apparently needed to be trained in the behaviours and survival techniques of their wild counterparts. Here, the careful and calculated use of anthropomorphism was employed to challenge the damaging acts of exploitation of humans over other species. Yet many critics would argue that representing monkeys as ‘babies’ could also be considered as a cynical act of exploitation. For Brendon, however, it became attractive as a technique of constructing the presenting narrative, foregrounding his deep emotions about the monkeys. In describing his experience of presenting this show, however, he felt that his usual sense of scientific, veterinary detachment was compromised and became difficult to rationalize:

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chapter six Brendon: When you are filming out there for a long time, it is possible to get overly attached to an individual animal and it’s a huge problem. I got really attached to a little monkey while I was there, we just clicked really. I took a real interest in him. That had rarely happened to me before in my work as a vet, except with my pets at home really. But to do the job properly, you really can’t look at conservation from the point of view of the individual animal because this can cloud your professional judgment about the issues at large. The connection can be too strong between individuals.

It seemed that Brendon’s investment in the storyline carried emotional impacts that went far beyond his surface performance (Mumby and Putnam, 1992 and 1993). Drawing out the human qualities of the monkeys prompted real feelings, emotions and attachments not simply acted performances. Brendon continued to speak about his favourite monkey with some affection for a number of weeks after he had returned home, and it seemed that the experience had a lasting effect upon him. The producers of Monkey Sanctuary were undoubtedly aware that this depth of attachment would make the filming process even more exciting for viewers watching remotely from their homes. In one episode when one of the monkeys died as a result of an illegal poaching incident, for example, Brendon was filmed in close-up as a single tear rolled down his cheek. It was clearly a sad moment for him but one which was nonetheless conceived of as a dramatic opportunity by the camera crew. It seemed to us that such techniques pointed to an ‘economy of feelings’ where financial value was attached to the emotional labour of the presenters and the animals involved in their storylines (Vincent, 2011). Behind the Scenes: The Human Story In considering there to be a somewhat ‘messy’ overlap between profound human emotion and work here, it was interesting to note the ways that this was played out on screen. Both presenters revealed that the performance of humanity was an occasionally disconcerting mixture between storytelling and ‘going about the process of living’. Yet, this was a compromise to their scientific integrity that they seemed happy to make because it enabled them to demonstrate the passion they showed for conservation; living in basic jungle accommodation and risking their personal comfort and safety by getting close to wild animals. They felt that the political issues that surrounded conservation could be better represented by candid cinematography and by showing ‘real’ emotions on camera. But it was clear from our interviews that this made the experience extremely taxing



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for presenters for whom there was already significant pressure to be spontaneous, natural, educational, expertly scientific, fun and charismatic. It appeared, then, that in these documentaries, there was no back-stage region at all (Goffman, 1971) since even off-guard moments relied upon the performance (and a degree of exploitation) of ‘being human’. The filming process compromised a clear division between on-camera and off-camera performances, turning even the most private regions of the self into public events. The performance never ended. Yet the presenters seemed uncomfortable when we suggested that they were engaging in creative performances of story-telling, or even the suggestion that they were being exploited as a ‘bodily resource’ of the filming process. As far as they were concerned, their work was educational, scientific and they dealt only in ‘facts’, albeit a selected few that were deemed the most exciting or thought-provoking. LH: Would you describe your job as a creative one? Is this a performance of sorts? Brendon: We are not allowed to lie on film. The crew might film a sequence of animals and that’s fine but if the presenter was not there, for whatever reason, the film crew are not allowed to lie, that is, they are not allowed to go back and film the presenter crouching in the bushes as though they are watching the sequence. That is not allowed, although they used to do this a lot many years ago. Their filming equipment was probably not as advanced, to be fair. Nowadays, you can’t pretend that you were there when you weren’t.

The idea that performance was equated with ‘lying’ was curious, and served to underline that even the most ambiguous and complex forms of identity work can simply ‘feel right’ when one is ontologically and physically entangled in that habitus (Bourdieu, 1984 and 1998). The mingling of on-camera and back-stage identities seemed to be further exploited by the programme-makers’ decision to include behind-the-scenes footage in these two documentary series. The backstage sections of storyline were often inserted at the end of each episode, lasted approximately five minutes and captured personal and intimate moments from life in the jungle: Heather: TV is now looking for new angles to cover, people want the human story. They want the picture behind the camera, to get the personal side of the documentary. It’s more than just putting someone in front of the camera; it’s about helping the viewer to experience things. Viewers now want to know how we do the job we do. How do presenters live in these conditions?

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Showing behind-the-scenes footage meant that even ‘off camera’ moments had to be conceived of as dramatic opportunities for presentation. The indirect nature of the relationship between viewer and animal meant that there was perhaps an added demand for such reflexive episodes: Brendon: The interesting thing is that the feedback from the public says that they want to know how such people make a life for themselves in the jungle. How do presenters go about the process of living? How do we take a shit in the forest? How do we get up trees to get these shots? Many of the contemporary shows will now have five minutes at the end of the programme that shows the ‘making of ’ that episode. This is very interesting because what you see is the cameraman filming one sequence and talking about how they did it. Viewers are fascinated by the technology, the equipment, the people that helped to put the show together.

When presenters ‘put a show together’, they create, pass and send messages and symbols to viewers about animals that have a whole host of effects (Lash, 1999). We agree with the position of Actor-Network thinkers like Latour, however, that pure ‘factual’ representation is an impossible task, even when ostensibly ‘behind the scenes’ footage is shown as a form of confessional narrative (Latour and Woolgar, 1988). Despite such candid moments, there are only created messages and techniques for sending them. Here—in the realm of TV production—it is that ‘sending’ that holds the creative potential to ‘construct’ wild animals and ‘native’ people, or at least our ideas about what they are like. It is particularly curious that the transmission of stories about animals relies upon human emotions, routines and even bodily ablutions to keep audiences tuned in. However factual the presenters felt that their performances were, it seemed that there was an ever-present risk that their messages could be misinterpreted by viewers. It became clear that the facts that they wished to transmit were sometimes ‘lost in translation’. This was yet a further complication to understanding the work of presenting as simply ‘giving the facts’ about animals and put them in a difficult position when fans considered themselves to be intimate friends rather than strangers. Heather: They sometimes come up to you, they think they know you. It can be quite odd, they have seen you for a few weeks on TV but you’ve literally no idea who they are.

Brendon, in particular, had suffered undesirable contact from fans in the form of e-mails, letters, gifts and even episodes of ‘stalking’ behaviour. Brendon: This one girl started e-mailing me all the time. At first I would reply because she was asking questions about animals which was alright.



wildlife presenters, performance and the animal ‘actor’ 133 She said she was training to be a vet. I began to realize she wasn’t a student. But then she would get nasty when I didn’t reply and in the end I got a letter, supposedly from a friend, to say that this girl had killed herself because I had ignored her so much. That started getting a bit creepy. But the next week the supposedly dead girl was e-mailing me again and imploring me to get in touch.

Clearly, the sort of heartfelt and personal forms of display that they engaged in could have unpredictable and—in some cases—quite terrifying personal consequences for the presenters. It seemed that certain ‘fans’ did not read the TV performance as intended, and instead perceived themselves as an integral part of a supposed conversation between presenter, animal and audience (Dickey, 1993). When the presenters vocalized intimate values and emotions alongside their more contrived ‘surface’ enactments, they allowed others to glimpse their most private thoughts. While in everyday social settings, shared norms regulate many of our perceptions about what to feel and how to express those feelings, in presenting a television show, however, things are rather less easy to manage or to predict (Drew and Wootton, 1988). The sorts of cues we can expect from others simply aren’t there to help us to structure and amplify our performances. The difficulty of managing relationships ‘through the screen’ was something which concerned both Heather and Brendon. Sometimes it made them wary of pursuing further work in the public eye. Yet, they both seemed determined to continue their careers in presenting and cited the experience of getting close to exotic species as a main factor in motivating them to accept the apparent risks and uncertainties involved in this work. To understand the implications of such findings, we now turn a closer eye to the powerful objects involved in such work; the materials and the mediums by which the presenters brought animals to life. Technology and Networks In making a documentary, the camera mediates a whole variety of messages between animals, presenters, fixers, natives, camera crews, producers and eventually the viewers at home. Filming, then, is not simply about transmission of facts about animals (as much as our participants insist that it is), nor is it simply about educating others about conservation. Instead we are dealing with a sophisticated process of “sorting” which, as we discussed in Chapter Two, is reminiscent of traditional ways of understanding

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human beings as “classifying animals” in both potential readings of that phrase (see for example, Bourdieu, 1999; Durkheim, 1968; Latour, 1993; Mauss, 2006). For Actor-Network scholars, this (human) work of ‘purification’ involves what Latour calls a process of “civilizing the hybrids” by placing them forcibly into either a category of society or nature (Latour, 1986). Sanitizing and purifying the ‘mess’ of lived experience is how TV images and stories get their power (DuGay, 1997). On the film set, stories told about individual animals rely upon certain techniques to do this sort of organizing work. Producing a natural history film often involves trying to craft and sustain certain separations, to protect audiences from what presenters often regard as irrelevant, boring or extraneous material to maintain their interest. This also involves deleting the traces of hours of labour on the part of fixers, indigenous guides and the presenters themselves. Inevitably, such acts of editing are about creating a distinction between the presenter as expert and the audience as passive receivers of facts. But as we have noticed, intended and even unintended categorizations like these tend to collapse. This is observable when fans believe themselves to be an integral part of the conversation and send intimate or explicit letters to those in the public eye, for example. In holding this view, we can trace the Animal-Network through the creation of the documentary film. It is a network that is made up of all sorts of actors with different forms of agency. Yet these are not neatly brought into alignment, moved into place and displayed because as we have discussed, animals, audiences, natives can ‘bite back’ at various times. They resist efforts to sort them, to tell stories about them, with them and to them. For the presenters, then, to exert complete control over these storylines—and these networks of animal ‘actors’—is perhaps an impossible challenge. This is why we consider this to be an unpredictable and uncertain form of work, and one which carries multiple and strenuous demands upon the identity work of all those involved, both human and animal. When fans insist that they intimately ‘know’ the presenters on screen, when animals evade the cameras, damage the equipment or roar at presenters and frighten them away, straightforward acts of coding and ordering become impossible to hold onto in practical circumstances. This puts presenters in a difficult and challenging position—both professionally and personally. They have to develop a professional craft for dealing with it, whether it is physical (walking and talking at the same time or looking back at the camera as they run through the undergrowth, for example)



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or more performative (being visibly upset on camera, endearing oneself or dancing at the fireside, for example). Interestingly, while the ‘subject matter’ here is ostensibly the wild animal, it seems that very often human elements like these take centre stage. This means that a whole range of (usually) private bodily functions and emotions become public artefacts within their own meta-narratives and suggests that presenting is not quite the glamorous and exotic job that it might sometimes appear to be. The ways in which the footage is put together, however, is designed to disguise that indeterminacy. But where does this leave wild animals? How do they figure in our understandings of narrative and meta-narrative? Is it possible to treat them as animal actors in such environments? Do they have any form of voice of their own? In Chapter Two, we discussed the ways in which traditional scholarship has often classified and taxonomized the species and that, as a consequence, animals have often been reduced to objects or things. Bruno Latour argues that the tendency to create and reinforce such dualisms has presented us with a problem, not least because it leads to a tendency to ignore the rights, the autonomy and the agency of non-humans. By describing an animal as a thing, we may justify a whole range of mistreatments and mis-representations that would not be deemed appropriate to fellow humans. Parting from dualism, then, Latour insists that we must instead recognize that with the traditional insistence on divisions, classifications and boundaries we have never been modern (Latour, 1993). Latour’s challenge has had an enormous impact upon the way that Sociologists have considered human relationships with non-humans (see, for example, Haraway, 1995). And it has become increasingly acceptable to consider the view that non-humans have a form of agency, and with that agency, a right to speak for themselves (Latour, 1993; Spivak, 1998). This innovation has been useful for considering a range of human-materialanimal interactions in a whole host of peculiar local settings whether riding a horse, for example (Thompson, 1999 and 2004) or fishing for Scallops (Callon, 1986). Here, we have tried to create a space where it might feasibly be extended to the processes of documentary making. Multiple possibilities for analysis of such places emerge when one starts from the point of view that distinctions between subject-object, and by extension between human and animal, should not be taken-for-granted or wittingly perpetuated. In fact, we can and should challenge those pseudo-modern categories and binaries if we are to accord the rights to speak and represent to non-humans (Spivak, 1998). But how does this work in natural history film where the power so often lies within human capacities for discourse

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and technology? Even those who are philosophically sympathetic to the idea of non-humans as agents have often overlooked such questions. Few have examined the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of non-human agency in the workplace, and fewer still have considered how such practicalities operate in TV and media settings. Perhaps this is because the presence of other animals poses a specific set of difficulties. We have already argued that it is unsatisfactory to think of animals as ‘objects’, but we must also recognize that when they come to inhabit human organizations they are not usually accorded full subject status and often come to exist somewhere in between. In everyday life animals do not ‘speak out’ to represent themselves in ways we can easily decode. How then, might we think about their rights to exercise agency and representative autonomy? After all, they do not make their own TV shows. This is a difficult and abstract question and, unsurprisingly, has been largely ignored in the existing literature on wildlife film-making which has emerged from the natural sciences, Ethology and animal behaviour research rather than Philosophy, Cultural Studies, or Sociology. Social Theorists, for example, are usually more interested in broader analyses of ‘mass media’, the cultural phenomenon of celebrity, for example, or the politics of representing sub-cultures and tribes (Butler Breese, 2010; Cashmore, 2006; Castells, 2009; Powdermaker, 1950; Rojek, 2012; Skuse, 1999; Worth and Adair, 1997) rather than the individual experience or representation of certain actors, be they human or otherwise. By talking to Brendon Blaze and Heather Rayne, however, we have tried to shed light on the ways in which human discourses and human voices continue to speak for the animal. But we do not suggest that this is an easy relationship to theorize; power exercised by people over animals in straightforward ways. There is a profound need to demonstrate the ways in which many assumed dichotomies collapse in practical situations like the documentary film set. While we accept that the very concepts of mass media; the technologies and the work involved are distinctively human matters—human machines for doing human representation—we feel there’s a pressing need to consider the meaningful presence of ‘other actors’ in these contexts too, to see the work that they are wittingly or unwittingly prompted to do. We accept that, in a pragmatic sense, animals cannot ‘speak for themselves’ on TV. They can’t present a ‘piece to camera’ nor does it seem likely that they can comprehend such complex imagery as the ‘two shot’ or the reflective idea of ‘behind the scenes footage’. So human presenters act for the animal, they become the voice of



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the animal and in so doing they inevitably help to create that animal. But when humans work with animals we have often observed that ‘something comes over them’ and here that ‘something’ is not always about scientific rationality, about portraying the ‘facts’, but is about emotional attachment. It is this which makes it difficult to discern presenting from ‘back stage’ or ‘off camera’ selves. We take a ‘messier’ approach to identity and discourse so that we can better understand how realities are manufactured by people for animals, and at the same time, made by animals for people. This means we cannot assume that power works in simple ways either; exercised from humans to other animals like a one-way street. At the same time, we must accept that we can’t ask animals how they feel about being filmed. Our methods are implicated by the limitations of our own species. What we can do, however, is look at the unusual relationship between human-animal identities by exploring the ways in which human presenters perform and experience their work. The tangled ‘mess’ involved in the work of presenting has relevance to a number of intellectual fields; from Management and Organization Studies to Sociology, Cultural and Human-Animal Studies. There are questions regarding the matters of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), front stage and back stage selves and the nature of identity performances more generally (Goffman, 1963) as well as questions of power, subjectivity and the operation of language. We do not claim to have resolved these issues, but we have attempted to show just how difficult they are to decide upon when faced with the practical settings in which animals and humans are at work together. This challenges us to think about what being a human means, what is relevant in the performance of self in any workplace, and to what extent those performances can be commodified by business without them being undermined. These are issues that we investigate in a different context in the chapter which follows, a workplace where small-animal veterinary surgeons become embroiled in the rather more intimate and immediate relationship between ‘pet’ and ‘owner’.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

SMALL ANIMAL VETS AND THE CRAFTING OF INTIMACY Humans tend to locate personhood in animals that show themselves to be responsive to them. In other words, human engagements with animals begin not from a state of ontological separation but from a state of pre-existing interconnection. John Knight (2005: 10)

We have seen in Chapters Three and Four how it is that certain people who work with animals are able to distance themselves both from the animals and from the work they do through various mechanisms. It may be the use of technical and economic language that performs this task, something we observed in the slaughterhouse. Alternatively, in some instances, the humans who work with animals actually counter the hegemonic ideologies which hold that there is an insurmountable difference between humans and other species by constructing the personhood of animals. This is something we have noted both in the contexts of TV presenting and shelter work. This chapter addresses how the creation of animal personhood extends into emotional intimacy. To do this, we draw upon a further workplace, the small animal veterinary practice. This chapter draws on ethnographic data from a number of veterinary surgeries throughout the UK and Australia where both authors spent time conducting participant observation. This was over a period of two years (for LH in the UK) and three years (for NT, two years in the UK and one year in Australia). This time was spent observing interactions between veterinarians, nurses, and human and animal clients. This was supplemented by over two hundred interviews with small animal practice veterinarians in both countries. Using this data we assess how veterinarians labour at the human-animal divide in the course of their daily work. This labour is somewhat contradictory in that it sometimes takes the form of denying the traditional human-animal divide by assuming that companion animals are ‘a part of the family’, and at other times necessitates a distancing from the animal and their human counterpart in order to manage a professional countenance when faced with difficult diagnoses and the giving of bad news to humans about their animals. At times when difficult decisions have to be made with the human guardian about the future of their companion animal, vets take a vital role in mediating

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scientific knowledge, the practicalities of care and the emotional pain of those involved. At one and the same time, then, veterinarians are involved in both crafting intimacy and maintaining distance. Entering the Field: “Fur and Family” Our main group of participants was taken from one research site, a smallanimal surgery in a small English town and we have called this organization “Fur and Family”. This practice was on a busy shopping street, sandwiched between a hairdresser’s and a video rental shop so there were always people walking by the windows and looking inside. The large windows displayed various offers and deals to passers-by. Big coloured letters in the right hand window spelled out the “free senior health check” on offer while in the left window a large picture of a flea indicated a “flea check drive” that the vet nurses had organized. The following is an extract from the fieldnotes, and helps to set the scene: Stepping inside the practice, the first thing that a visitor notices is the strong smell of surgical disinfectant, it hangs in the air and afterwards I notice it has permeated my clothes and my notebook. It is not unpleasant but very clinical smelling. The reception desk is located a few steps inside the front door and is cluttered with promotional leaflets, free dog treats and other pictures and signs advertising dog food. The two receptionists are wearing pale blue surgical ‘scrubs’ emblazoned with the practice logo, and they smile warmly at me. It is a large, welcoming and clean environment with a waiting area and displays of pet food along the walls. The vets’ consulting rooms are opposite the bank of waiting room chairs and later that day, during the clinic, the vets emerge periodically from these doors to call out the animal’s name.

We spoke to the practice owners, the veterinary nurses and the receptionists that they employed. It was a busy practice with a large client base of ‘pet owners’. The main species that the vets treated were cats and dogs, although smaller mammals like rabbits were also common visitors. Clinical consultations were conducted in the mornings between eight o’clock and twelve noon and then in the afternoons between two o’clock and closing time at eight o’clock in the evening. A small hospital wing, where animals would wait for treatment and recover from surgery, was located at the rear of the practice building behind the consulting rooms. This was a noisy space where animals were usually whining, barking or making other noises. It smelled strongly of disinfectant and ‘wet dogs’. The consulting rooms, which opened from the bright and cheerfully designed waiting



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room, were small and furnished simply with a computer and examination table. The surgery, testing and X-ray facilities were at the back of the building and were not accessible from the public areas. These spaces had a more industrial feeling as there were stainless steel tables along with various surgical implements and machines. It was immaculately clean with little of the clutter that we had noted in the large animal veterinary practice. We had free access to all these spaces and were even allowed to watch the surgical procedures after “scrubbing in”—that is, washing our skin with disinfectant and wearing protective clothing. The researcher entered into casual chat with the nurses and receptionists and felt it was important to appear willing to help with practical work. Much like the sanctuary, this involved cleaning of some sort and much of it seemed mundane and repetitive. Yet this presented a good opportunity to listen to the staff and to hear their opinions on various clients and vets. All the members of the non-veterinary team were young females so it was relatively easy for the (female) researcher to infiltrate this group. The practice day started at 8 o’clock when the head receptionist opened the surgery, flicked the lights on and picked up the post. She then began tidying the children’s toys in the waiting room, putting the radio on in the hospital wing and making drinks. Meanwhile, the veterinary nurses took their coats off before beginning the process of mopping the floors, cleaning the consulting rooms and preparing the operating theatres. They periodically visited the reception counter to look at the schedule of appointments so that they could plan for the number of hospital cages that were needed. The vets arrived slightly later and sat in their tiny office, located just behind the reception. They chatted amiably about various cases and discussed the call-outs that they had been to during the night. The waiting room soon began to get busier as pets and their owners arrived. The consulting started shortly after 8.30 a.m. and the first consultation of the day was a small terrier bitch called Scrappy. Scrappy was in the surgery for one of the ‘free senior health checks’ advertized in the window. The following extract from fieldnotes explains how this very typical consultation was managed by the vet: The vet starts the consultation by asking the owner some basic questions about Scrappy, “I note she’s a little bit heavier at the moment, shall we call that her winter weight? What food is she on?” He also asks the owner questions about when her last injections were done, her general health and her activity levels. The client seems very animated and is keen to talk about the dog, giving long answers that the vet expertly (but gently) cuts short. He

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chapter seven suggests that the dog needs a vaccine booster he picks up one of the dog’s paws for closer inspection and squeezes the ‘toes’. The dog yelps and vet says, “be brave sweetheart, be brave.” It seems a rather tender moment. The vet then performs a flea check by scratching Scrappy’s back onto a sheet of wet paper. He scrutinizes the paper for tiny red dots as this is the sign of an infestation. The dog has fleas and the vet seems delighted. At this point he is able to squeeze on some flea treatment. The dog is picked up by the owner who looks sheepish and says rather guiltily, “I feel terrible now. I never noticed.” The owner goes back to reception to sign some forms and to pay for the flea treatment. The vet sprays the consulting table and wipes it down before entering information to the computer and asking a vet nurse to bring some coffee. The vet then adds a little cardboard flea to his ‘number of flea cases this week chart’ displayed on the wall. It has been a successful consultation. The vets were experts at keeping their consultations brief and it was soon time for the next appointment. The vet nurse brought the coffee, and he took a hasty drink from his mug. He opened the consulting room door and shouted the next pet’s name. Mini is a small, slim black labrador. She has floppy black ears and big eyes. Her owner is a tall, imposing lady wearing country-style clothes, tweed and a headscarf. She puts Mini onto the table, she says the dog is a “dreadful coward” and the dog duly starts to shake and shows signs of distress. Another candidate for the ‘free senior health drive’, Mini is given a thorough physical check, fleas, nails, teeth, eyes (with an ophthalmoscope) and heart (with a stethoscope). She, like the vet’s first patient, has fleas. This time, the vet takes more care to explain about the treatment he is giving to Mini. The owner seems horrified, “will they be everywhere in the house?” “Must she be kept outside then?” “Where do you suppose she caught them?” The vet explains with well-rehearsed ease that treating the dog today will “turn her into a flea killing machine, so let her go everywhere because she is going to take the treatment all around the house to kill those fleas off and make sure they don’t come back. There’s no need for sprays and other harsh chemicals these days.” Mini’s owner thanks the vet and leaves rather hurriedly, clutching the flea medicine. Again, he is apparently delighted and puts another cardboard flea on his chart.

These are just two of the (two hundred) consultations that we observed, but they give us some initial ideas as to the nature of the relationship that is cultivated between veterinarian, pet owner and animal at the surgery. We see examples of veterinarians carefully managing human client emotions by framing medical issues in lay terms—the dog is ‘heavy’ with her ‘winter weight’; she isn’t fat or clinically obese. We see how the vet assumes the individuality of the animal in question and responds using emotional language (“sweetheart”) which serves to display the vet’s apparent fondness for animals, which many human clients see as a prerequisite for being a ‘good’ vet. We return to these ideas later in the chapter,



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but first we examine just a few of the theories that exist to explain the relationships between ‘pets’ and ‘owners’. Many have tried to theorize why it is that humans ‘keep’ companion animals or ‘pets’ in the first place. Yet, as Serpell (1996) notes, most of these theories are not particularly flattering towards the humans involved. In fact, “the exact nature of these prejudices varies from person to person, but all of them essentially boil down to a vague notion that there is something strange, perverse or wasteful about displaying sentimental affection for animals” (Serpell, 1996: xiv). Interestingly, as we noted in our own observations of life at “Fur and Family”, veterinarians are expert in responding to and contributing to the “sentimental affection” of owners towards their pets, and they do so by developing a range of distinctive performances and behaviours. Animals as Family The most popular and enduring theories about why humans might choose to share their lives with companion animals tend to be psychological in origin and veer towards the idea that these animals represent children in a number of ways. Stephen Gould, for example, argues that our positive and emotional responses to our companion animals, and particularly to younger animals is due to the fact that we are “fooled by an evolved response to our own babies, and transfer our reactions to the same set of features in other animals” (Gould, 1979: 35). Ideas such as these combined with the documented research that many owners do, in fact, treat their pets like children, in the way that they talk to them, care for them, feed them, groom them and sometimes dress them, have spawned the ‘substitute child theory’. There is no shortage of evidence for theories which suggest that owners do in fact treat their pets like substitute children (Rynearson, 1980). For example, Schwarz et al. (2007) argue that because households with younger children are less likely to have companion animals it suggests that the animals can and do act in the capacity of a substitute relationship. Similarly, in one of the key early texts in Human-Animal Studies, Beck and Katcher assert that, “pets are not just usually any member of the family” indeed, they are “children, a designation partly reflecting the realities of our treatment of pets” (1996: 41). While Beck and Katcher hint at the broader relations between humans and companion animals, much of the literature which puts forth the idea that companion animals are

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substitute children rarely takes such a scopic view and instead tends to give the impression that humans who see their pets as substitute children are somehow, themselves, deficient and slightly pathological (or at the very least, somewhat peculiar). This becomes a story about what those individuals are lacking in their human-human relationships (for example Archer, 1997; Kurdek, 2008; Marks et al., 1994). Moreover, such research often assumes a ‘need’ to nurture inherent in humans; a need which is filled by companion animals when functional human-human relationships are missing (for a good review see Basten, 2009). Such assumptions, however, often overlook the fact that animal companions may offer something entirely different to that of human companions and, in that sense, the relationship may not be substitutive at all. It can be just a different form of family (for example Flynn, 2000). Whether they are treated as children or whether they fulfill other roles within the human group, one thing is clear, for many people who live with pets, these animals are well and truly ‘one of the family’. In one of the earliest pieces of Human-Animal Studies research, Hickrod and Schmitt (1982) studied a number of dog experts, held conversations with ten ‘dog lovers’, gained opinions from the elderly via a social worker and administered a questionnaire to investigate the relationships between people and their pets. They concluded that “pets are depicted as being like family members. Pets are almost human” (1982: 59) in that they are treated like a family member in many domestic settings. There are many ways in which the acceptance of pets as family members is evidenced. The ascription of human names to them is just one example. Beck and Katcher point out that “having a name is the essence of being an individual and being a person” (Beck and Katcher, 1996: 11) and is something that we have theorized in a number of places already. The naming of any animal affirms his or her individuality. This also happens in reverse. When people do not name animals, they are perhaps less likely to ascribe personhood to them (Philips, 1994). Naming an animal leads to the assumption of a history, of a biography, of personhood; in short, of agency. And in turn, this leads directly to a sense of responsibility for those named—something that we have seen in Chapter Five’s discussion of the ways that animal shelter workers’ construct personhood for their animal charges. We saw this again in the last chapter when monkeys were named and thereby ‘created’ through the filming of wildlife documentaries. One only has to consider that animal shelter staff in ‘no kill’ shelters name their animals while those in shelters that euthanize animals at the end of a (short, usually seven day) holding period number their charges to see the power that naming, or not naming, an animal can have.



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This is the power to either bring animals closer or to distance them from the humans who care for them. Hickrod and Schmitt claim that naming a pet “gives the pet an identity and makes it amenable to discussion”. So the naming of an animal is crucial in the determination of them as a family member as “once named, the pet can be talked about in the same way as a family member” (Hickrod and Schmitt, 1982: 61). This is seen regularly in the veterinary consultation. Vets use animal names whenever possible. Alternatively they use language that suggests proximity and intimacy— “sweetheart” for example. Yet it is not simply naming that brings animals close to us. We, as humans, have a tendency to talk to animals in our care. Almost all respondents (some 99%) asked by Beck and Katcher claimed that they talked frequently to their pets (1996: 14). Likewise, we feed them at the same time as we feed ourselves and often feed them from our own hands, and, we often celebrate their birthdays and include them in holidays for example. Many owners even sleep with their pets, either in the same bed or at least in the same room; we care for their health as we would another family member, take them to the ‘doctor’ when they are sick and take care of them at home when they are unwell. We have ritualized ways of dealing with their deaths. All these behaviours tell us something about the ways in which humans enjoy intimate emotional contact with these non-human family members, and many of them are in evidence in the veterinary surgery. Take the following, for example: Vet: Oh dear, who’s not feeling well today then? [Directed to a dog on the table]. Hmmm, let’s see . . . [Looks over at the owner] She’s looking pretty unhappy isn’t she? Owner: Yes, she’s been like this since last night. I was going to leave it another day but she won’t even walk and you know how she loves her walk. Vet: [Approaching and stroking the dog gently] Yes we know how you love your walks don’t we Spud? Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, then, darling?

Throughout this interaction we see the vet assuming personality for Spud—she is a dog who likes walks, who can ‘tell’ the vet what is wrong with her, and she is an individual with a name. From just this short extract it is clear that the humans in the room are ‘normalizing’ the assumption that this dog is in a close relationship with them both. Given that pet animals have a close proximity to humans and that they are treated as family members, it is not that big a leap to begin theorizing about them as substitute family members, and particularly as childsubstitutes. Yet on the whole, our society tends to “denigrate and trivialize

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the emotional importance of animals for adults” (Katcher and Rosenberg, 1979: 890). Media accounts often stress the excessive behaviour of some pet owners and some make the assumption that animals simply aren’t worth excess. In turn, this feeds into the idea that companion animal ownership is something of an oddity and that there is something wrong (deviant even) with people who care too deeply for animals. According to Serpell: This view of pet-keeping as a ‘gratuitous perversion’ of natural behaviour has been reiterated time and again throughout history and, nowadays, is most often expressed either by means of caricatures of post-menopausal women and poodles or by a general tendency to regard people’s relationships with their animal companions as absurd, sentimental and somewhat pathetic. . . . . . Some appear to believe that pet owners are somehow socially inadequate and that they use their pets . . . as artificial and ultimately detrimental substitutes for reality. Others view the relationship as merely an excuse for playful domination. Others refer to its ‘essentially sexual nature’ and still others regard it as . . . contributing indirectly to the ‘oppression and physical or psychological annihilation of human beings’ (Serpell, 1996: 25).

This stereotypical view is, however, an inadequate explanation of the popularity of pet-keeping. According to the American Pet Products Association 2011–2012 National Pet Owners Survey, some 62% of U.S. households own a pet, which equates to 72.9 million homes. Approximately fifty billion US Dollars are spent on pets annually in the US, with US$14.11 billion of this being spent on veterinary care. The picture is similarly high for the UK with almost 1 in 2 households containing a pet; some 12 million households (46%). In Australia, 63% of households include a companion animal and many people living with ‘pets’ consider them to be ‘family members’ (estimates vary between 75–90%). The pet animal industry contributes approximately AUD$4.74 billion to the economy each year (Australian Companion Animal Council, 2012). The vets in our study were aware that animals were members of the family. They were also well aware of the scale and scope of pet ownership within their communities. This was, after all, vital strategic knowledge for maintaining the health of their businesses. But when asked whether a certain owner who was notorious for treating her dog like a child presented any particular problem, one vet explained to us, using empathetic language: That’s fine by me. I understand how pets quickly become a big part of the family. I don’t feel strongly either way—from a veterinary point of view the animal’s welfare benefits. The owner is taking comfort from having a focus for their affection and it is nice to see that compassion. They are no doubt



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happier for the company if they don’t have close family or children to care for. However the downside is that these are the clients who struggle with bereavement when the animal dies.

Interestingly, this particular vet also brings up the idea of the substitute child theory but goes on to caution that overly humanizing animals can be detrimental to their health, If you’ve owned a pet yourself you consider them ‘part of the family’. However, animals are not children and many are harmed by over kindness. I try to encourage a balance.

Clearly the vets that we spoke to were aware of the subtle needs of pet owners and understood that the animals with which they lived provided companionship. Wider research has shown that this companionship brings with it some clear health benefits for humans (see Beck and Katcher, 1996), something that the vets also acknowledged. It stands to reason then, that caring for the health of a companion animal is important to the human who chooses to live with them. It also stands to reason that given their status as a family member, pet owners have certain expectations regarding how their animal will be treated by their veterinarian. In turn this means that the veterinarian is expected to act in certain ways and that not meeting these expectations will result in conflict and a loss of business. The vets we spoke to were acutely aware of this. One explained to us that her work involved a careful negotiation where she had to keep both animal and human client happy, “My job seems to be making the pet and the owner happy, one without the other doesn’t really work.” She went on to explain that unless she could satisfy both human and animal needs, then there were potentially serious consequences for the business. Minding Animals In 1993, Sanders and Arluke castigated the social science community for ignoring animals as an area of study and posited the reason for this as: Sociology’s phonocentric emphasis upon verbal facility and language utilization as key factors determining the ability to engage in both intra-and inter-subjective social activities. To a lesser degree, this reticence may result from the false belief that in advanced industrial societies, animals occupy a far less important place than they do in preindustrial worlds (Sanders and Arluke, 1993: 377–378).

Sanders and Arluke argued that, due to a traditional conception of ‘mind’ within the social sciences, a notion which is dependent on understanding

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the position of those with whom we are interacting, animals had largely been excluded from the remit of study. For the most part, this was because the conception of ‘mind’ was (and still is in many cases) strictly limited to human animals. Non-human animals, by contrast, have usually been assumed to lack the necessary tools upon which the concept rests. Given that animals are usually seen as lacking in this regard, they are assumed to be unable to take the role of the social other and are often believed to be incapable of being minded interactants in a social situation. In an attempt to deconstruct this concept of mind and its attendant ideology, Sanders and Arluke argued that: This alleged ‘understanding’ of the ‘life-world’ of non-human animals is . . . derived more from anthropocentric ideology than from systematically derived data or the thoughtful examination of analysts’ personal experiences (if such exists) with non-human animals. . . . . Once one acquires sympathetic understanding of those who are studied through the process of interacting directly with them, the ‘alien’ behaviour comes to be seen as commonplace and eminently reasonable (Sanders and Arluke, 1993: 379).

They pointed out that there is considerable evidence that the animals with whom humans interact do, in fact, take the role of the other in some rudimentary fashion, and exhibit behaviour which shows an intention to achieve goals and so on. For example, Sanders (1993) outlines the ways in which animal caretakers attribute ‘mindedness’ to their canine companions and there is a growing body of work which supports this argument (see, for example Taylor 2007). Sanders argues that Mead’s conception of animals as immediately situated and responding reflexively to external stimuli has led to the social scientific ignorance of routine human-animal relationships. In turn, this has led to the exclusion of “the routine encounters of people with their non-human companions from all but the most cursory of examinations” (Mead, 1934; Sanders, 1993: 206). He further goes on to point out that within conventional thinking, humans interact with animals as objects and that any alternative interpretation of the interaction between them is open to the charge of anthropomorphism. Sanders claims that this way of thinking about human-animal interaction is misguided in that “caretakers of companion animals and others who live in everyday situations entailing frequent and intimate interaction with nonhuman animals . . . consistently see animals as subjective actors and define interactions with them as being ‘authentic’ and reciprocal exchanges” (Sanders, 1993: 206). From his own ethnographic work among humans and dogs, Sanders argues that companion animal owners are engaged in a constant process



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of identity construction whereby “they routinely used their day-to-day experience with their dogs to define their animals as minded social actors and as having, at least, a ‘person-like’ status” (Sanders, 1993: 211). He points out that the owners do not literally see their pets as human, nor do they see them as ‘pretend’ people or ‘people in disguise’, but that they are more than objects and that they are “authentically social” (Sanders, 1993: 212). We saw this regularly at “Fur and Family” and elsewhere. Clients, for example, regularly told the vet that their animals communicated with them and were clear that they displayed agency and mindedness when doing so. Discussing a young dog who had been to the surgery several times for antibiotics following infected scratches on his ears and stomach, one owner said, He’s so willful, you know. We run down in the park and he gets a scent of something and off he goes, deliberately deaf. Whatever he’s found the last few times has taken him near some barbed wire and he scratches himself on it. Won’t listen to me that he shouldn’t go down there. And when he comes back, he’s so happy and he can’t wait to tell me all about what he’s just been doing.

For this owner it is entirely natural to assume that his dog is communicating with him when ‘telling’ him all about his chase. He also considers his dog to be minded enough to know the rules and to deliberately break them, becoming ‘deliberately deaf ’. For certain individuals, such anthropomorphism would suggest an inability to distinguish between human and animal traits. But we think it’s more complex than that. Sanders and Arluke (1993, and later, Arluke and Sanders, 1996) were among the first to point out that animals are a part of social life and that human-animal exchanges can be addressed from the standpoint of the conventional social sciences. However, they also pointed out that the few scholars who had addressed human-animal relationships had done so by attempting to “build an understanding of the human actor’s orientation toward the animal-as-other.” For them, what was ‘strikingly absent’ in the few human-animal studies at that point was “any attempt to capture the perspectives of animals themselves” (Sanders and Arluke, 1993: 378). We share their concerns and acknowledge that the methods applied to such social scenarios have been limited. While there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in human-animal relations it is fair to say that this criticism can still be leveled at the majority of it. We have been at pains to point out throughout this book that new ethnographic methodologies might be developed to allow a different kind of insight into human-animal relations (a point we take up in

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more detail in Chapter Eight) and we believe that the veterinary practice is one good place to consider this. The veterinary practice is of particular interest because it is situated at the heart of the human-companion animal nexus and yet is further complicated by the triadic human-client, animal-client, veterinary professional relationship (Sanders, 2010). Into the Surgery: Studying the Animal-Network The veterinary practice is perhaps unique in that it allows the study of human-human and human-animal interactions at the same time (AtwoodHarvey, 2005; Sanders, 1994 and 1995). Moreover, it allows the study of imbalanced interactions; arguably the veterinarian has more cultural capital and certainly has more epistemic authority (Hamilton, 2007) than the companion animal guardian. Similarly both humans have more power and more say over what happens to the animal in question. In fact it has been argued that the human client and veterinarian collude to cast the animal as the ‘virtual patient’ (Gregory and Keto, 1991, cited in Sanders, 1994b: 60). Given the complicated, multi-faceted and inter-twined constructions that occur in the veterinary practice, then, ethnography allows us to investigate more nuanced aspects of this interaction. How we relate to animals, and nature in general, is driven not only by changes in society and culture but also by advances in scientific ‘knowledge’ (Benbow, 2004). In the veterinary surgery, social and cultural beliefs regarding the place of animals come face-to-face with a scientifically trained professional. This means the veterinary surgery is a unique place to investigate the entanglements of human and animal, as well as nature and culture, science and emotion. In particular, it allows us consider how the idea of intimacy—how the constitution of animal as a deserving family member—is produced, re-produced and sometimes challenged as well as being entangled among other issues such as professionalism and claims to epistemic authority. The professional claims of vets are based on a specific range of scientific knowledge, something which makes the surgery an ideal place to investigate performative identity work. And the vets we talked to and worked with were well aware of the performative nature of their work (although they did not talk about it in such terms); of the need to maintain their professional identity while at the same time managing the emotions of their human clients, and in some cases their own feelings. It is the presence of a human client that requires this performance. Again, this points



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to the importance of the human client-animal-veterinarian network as a focus of investigation. Sociologists have long pointed out that issues deemed ‘private’ are actually very public (Mills, 1959). This was something we tried to develop in the last chapter, of course, when we considered the ways that ‘off camera’ moments and emotions were treated as performances; “the human element” of the wildlife documentary. It has not been until the last few decades, however, that social scientists have started to talk about the realm of ‘intimacy’ in these emotional displays. Hochschild (1979, 1983) paved the way for Sociologists interested in intimate emotions by demonstrating that emotions were publicly achieved and managed; that, contrary to the modernist project’s relegation of emotion to an internal (and thus unknowable) state, emotion is actually social and subject to management (1979). Hochschild (1983) distinguished between ‘emotion work’ and ‘emotion labour’; work being the internal self-management of emotions, and labour being outward displays intended to manage the emotions of others. Utilizing a symbolic interactionist perspective that drew heavily on the work of Goffman, she argued that Sociologists could begin to study individual displays of emotions. In seeing the ‘self as emotion manager’ (Hochschild, 1979: 555) actors could challenge ‘the impression that social factors pervade only the social skin, the tried-for outer experiences of the individual’ (1979: 558). Emotion work and labour have since been investigated in a number of different occupational environments; in police and detective work, for example, (Ehrlich Martin, 1999; Stenross and Kleinman, 1989) and even sex work (Sanders, 2004). Emotion has also been investigated in various groups such as wheelchair users in public (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994) and domestic care settings (Himmelweit, 1999). Emotion work and emotion management have also started to come under focus in Human-Animal Studies; in animal shelters, for example (Arluke, 1994), and in terms of coping with specific animal issues like euthanasia (Arluke, 1991) re-homing cared for animals (Roemer, 2005) and in the handling of working animals like police dogs (Sanders, 2006). In terms of emotion management within the veterinary surgery specifically, previous work has addressed the ways in which vets must manage (human) client emotions (Sanders, 1994a, 1995) as well as using the veterinary surgery as a venue to investigate the maintenance of the fragile emotional order between relative strangers; that is, the veterinarian and the human client, in the face of loss of a companion animal (Swabe, 1994).

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What much of this work has shown is that the fragile “interaction order” (Goffman, 1983), the realm of structured interactions between humans, is troubled by the insertion of a non-human animal; a being about whom there are considerable moral, ethical and attitudinal ambiguities. This is further complicated by the existence of a conflict between the apparently seperate regions of ‘facts’ and ‘emotions’; between the assumed rationality of the point-of-view of the veterinarian and the assumed emotionality of the human client. Thus we often see tension between the belief by most human clients that their animal is a member of the family—and thus a legitimate recipient of emotions—and the need for the veterinary professional to receive ‘rational’ and logical information from those clients in order to treat their animal. We also see evidence of considerable ‘emotion work’ throughout the day-to-day work of veterinary professionals. This is often brought into relief when animals die, and particularly when it is the vet’s job to euthanize that animal and ‘stage a good death’. Yet it is also evidenced in routine practice consultations which may include problems that are morally ambiguous (see, for example Atwood-Harvey, 2005). Speaking to and Speaking for Animals When humans and animals meet in the veterinary surgery (and indeed in other places) there is a need for the human to speak for the animal. For Arluke and Sanders this kind of ‘interlocution’ occurs when the more powerful interactant determines and presents what the weaker interactant means (Arluke and Sanders, 1996). In other words, there is a need for the human guardian to translate the animal’s symptoms in a meaningful way to the veterinarian. In turn, the veterinarian then has to make sense of the symptoms and, usually with the aid of a physical examination, reach a conclusion regarding the animal’s health. They then translate this back to the human guardian. This is a process that makes use of bodily signs and symptoms to de-code and re-code the animal’s ailments. Whether the animal in question is a pet or a farm animal, this process is similar across the profession (see Chapter Three). The only ‘speaking’ that the animal does occurs through his or her behaviour and both human parties are involved in a process of making sense of this. Yet both vet and human client assume the animal can ‘speak’ through his or her body language and symptoms, as with one vet who usually started routine consultations by approaching the animal and saying “so, what have you got to tell me today then?” At first glance while



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this may seem an objective, scientific endeavour—to assess the symptoms and consider a course of treatment, for the veterinarian, however, it is executed in a rather un-scientific way. Successful puzzle-solving also requires a whole series of interactions with the animal and, not least, a systematized knowledge of how animals work. We usually think of this as a highly technical and scientific approach. It is a familiarity with these technical workings which helps veterinarians to detect symptoms— those subjective experiences of bodily illness such as discomfort, pain, distress—that might later manifest in signs; the objective smells, sounds and sights of disease. Subjective symptoms only become objective signs, however, if they can be decoded correctly. Veterinarians are experts at doing so but in the process, they treat biological signs as both a signifier and a thing signified. This is a philosophical and linguistic conundrum that has been investigated in a number of medical and professional settings (Gabbay, 2004). For clinicians such as these, signs are value-free codes that their professional training allows them to de-code (King, 1982; Saussure, 1986). Any ‘gaps’ in their knowledge—such as the animals actual experience of pain—are closed by drawing upon their professional epistemology. But we think that there are subjective social factors at play here too, just as there are ‘objective’ and scientific factors. These include the management of human emotions (those of the human client and in some circumstances the vet’s own emotions) in order to elicit information, or what vets call “case histories”. In our field notes we noted that human clients were often quite excited to be at the vets and seemed to relish talking to others who were—or at least appeared to be—as interested in their animal as they were. But this often presented problems for the vets who have to find (usually gentle) ways to cut short the conversation and steer the client back to ‘the facts’. This requires a certain amount of social tact, which some of our participants openly admitted they did not have. Female vet: I went into this job to work with animals; I find the people that come with them hard work. Some days I want to scream at them in frustration, I don’t want to know how many times he peed on his walk, I want to know his symptoms.

Our vets were aware that the human owners had particular expectations and explained to us that these could, at times, be excessively demanding:

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chapter seven Male vet: They want me to like their pet as much as they do. It’s not a reasonable expectation. I do love animals, don’t get me wrong, it’s why I’m here, but I see a lot of them every day and not all of them stand out as individuals to me. I can’t remember their birthdays without checking the card, or remember their personality traits unless told.

The vets we spoke to were also aware that not meeting these expectations might well lead to the loss of a client and of potential revenue. So vets clearly recognized a need to talk to animals, something that constitutes a vital aspect of their performance for both the animals and the humans involved. When asked how important speaking to animals was, one vet explained that there is a financial incentive in talking to animals as it demonstrated to the human guardian that the vet has an affection for animals in general and for this animal in particular, “I’m sure that if they didn’t think I cared for their animal that they would go elsewhere for treatment.” Similarly a different vet explained to us that the human owners responded positively when seeing affection from the vet towards their animals. At the same time, another vet explained to us that human clients “don’t take kindly to you getting the name or gender of their pet wrong.” In fact, the individual identity of the companion animal is so strong that we observed one vet become acutely embarrassed when she referred to two female animals as ‘he’. Following the first instance with one particular animal, the vet simply laughed a little to disguise the social ‘gaff ’ of getting the gender wrong. When this was followed closely by her referring to the other bitch in the consulting room as a ‘good boy’ she felt the need to address this directly by stooping to look underneath the dog and saying “Sorry, she’s just so gung-ho in her attitude that I always think of her as a he.” Not only did the vet feel the need to address the assignation of the wrong gender to these animals, she did so in such a way that she referred to the individual personality of the animal in question. When asked about it later, she explained to us that this was a deliberate tactic, I see so many dogs in a day, at the end of the day I don’t know if I’m coming or going and I defaulted to ‘he’. I really shouldn’t because they (the humans) get shitty about it and I’ve found the best way to deal with that, to head them off before they start, is to show you know their dog really, in other ways.

Vets are also aware of the need to acknowledge the bond between their human clients and their animal companions. Referring to them as family members was a common technique as in the case of one vet who, when expecting a consultation with one dog and one human but seeing two humans and two dogs arrive said “oh, you’ve brought the whole



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family . . . not much of a trip out though is it?” Another vet, when seeing a dog in early January asked, “and how was her Christmas?” There seemed to be an expectation by the vets that the animals they saw would be, by and large, considered as family members. They seemed amply aware that clients usually expected them to recognize this. A Tale of Two Roles The vets we studied were adept at moving between two dominant discourses. In the ‘front stage’ area (Goffman, 1983) where they interacted with human guardians and their animal charges they acknowledged that animals were usually deemed to be members of the family and that emotions could run high and feelings deep. This was exacerbated when dealing with issues surrounding the end of the animal’s life. When chatting about the downside of the job with one veterinarian he explained that euthanasia was always a difficult issue to address with the human guardian because of the emotions involved. Similarly, we observed another vet in the ‘backstage’ area clearly very upset after putting an elderly animal to sleep. When talking about it later she explained that it was one aspect of the job that she had really strong, and mixed, feelings about. On the one hand she was happy to be able to put sick and sore animals out of their apparent misery but on the other, she found it hard to manage her own emotions in front of the client, “I’m OK until they cry then I feel myself tear up and I hate it. I don’t want to make it worse for them by crying with them but on the other hand I think it does them good to know that this stuff gets to me.” This vet was clearly aware that her role as a professional who should remain objective and unemotional conflicted with her own personal feelings as well as with the perceived needs of the client. Supporting this observation, Sanders points out that managing euthanasia is one of the most problematic aspects of practice as identified by veterinarians themselves because they often see a ‘problematic’ patient as “one that is going to die” (Sanders, 1994: 55). The emotional management that occurs in the veterinary practice, specifically around death, often involves a softening of traditional rules governing the display of emotions in public. While the vet quoted above felt that displaying her emotions openly led to a loss of professional face, another identified that it was only during euthanasia encounters that they were happy to show—and receive—emotions that were normally hidden.

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chapter seven Male vet: I give bad news all the time. I do it like normal; I give them the technical information about the disease or whatever and then talk to them about what they can expect over the next few weeks, months or whatever. This is all fine by me, it doesn’t really touch me and I think in response to that they . . . well, they tend to respond in the same way. But it’s a different story when I come to put that animal down for them. They cry, I cry. If I’ve known them and their animal a long time I might hug them. I give them tissues. I usually need some for myself. I have a spiel about leaving them alone with the body afterwards to make their peace but often it’s just as much for me to go into the back room and right myself so I can deal with the questions and payment afterwards.

It is clear here that this vet uses a professional script to help manage an emotional situation, a useful mechanism through which to insert some distance between self and other. As Atwood-Harvey (2005) points out “scripts provide employees with another way to detach themselves from the professional role.” It is clear throughout these examples that the rules governing emotional displays in public may legitimately be broken in certain circumstances. In such circumstances entirely new rules are put in place for that interaction only. Thus, the death encounter and specifically the moment of euthanasia was clearly something different. The usual repairing of broken social rules governing the public display of emotions did not factor for this vet who was happy in this instance, and only in this instance, to allow a rupture in conventional norms and share a deeply emotional and intimate moment with his human client (and possibly even with his animal client too). We also found that vets openly discussed their conflicting roles with each other and with us. One vet referred to her need to adopt ‘clientspeak’, a form of communication based on how her clients approached animals as opposed to how she did. She explained that her primary role was to look after the animal’s welfare and that her ideas of animal welfare sometimes conflicted with her clients’ ideas. She phrased this in terms of ‘logic’—she appreciated clients who were more logical in their approach, whether this be in their explanations of their animal’s symptoms, their acceptance of her diagnosis and treatment plan or in the questions that they asked her. We were explicitly told that “clients who are logical tend to give a clearer history.” This need for ‘client speak’ is perhaps due to a different approach to animals that results from a scientific training which prioritizes discourses of logic and rationality at the cost of empathy towards animals. Yet our experiences showed that small animal practice vets did have empathy for animals. What we noted, however, was that their professional approach was often more utilitarian than most animal guardians



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would be comfortable with (see, for example, Paul and Podberscek, 2000). This may be a response to a need for a more detached attitude in order to cope with the daily realities of veterinary practice, and may parallel that emotional disconnect which happens to medical students. Why Work as a Vet? The motivations given by veterinarians for entering the profession were often around “a love of animals”. But the experiences of work often challenged that simple emotional or moral impulse. Negotiating tricky moral terrain is endemic to the profession; possibly more so than in the human medical profession because of the ambiguous status of animals (Hazel, Signal and Taylor, 2011). One vet was aware of this tiered approach when he explained to us that he was “able to give all this advice to clients about putting their elderly dog down or whatever” but couldn’t “take it myself. My old girl [referring to his elderly dog] is seventeen and I’ve probably kept her hanging on a few months too long now but I can’t bring myself to do it, so I can understand when clients walk out of the door with an animal that has no hope and shouldn’t be going home with them so what can I do?” The vets we spoke to also made it clear that the human-human relationship was an important consideration for them when conducting their examination and deciding on the treatment for the animal. One vet told us that being able to work well with the human guardian often dictated the success of the consultation, “a large part of the job is working with owners. If you cannot communicate with the owner you won’t get the right treatment for their pet.” Similarly, another vet pointed to the entanglement of human and animal as being a routine part of her daily life: Female vet: I don’t think it is one or the other, but both. My job seems to be making the pet and the owner happy.

We concluded that for many of the vets we questioned, interacting with people appeared to be a further motivation for working in this ostensibly animal-centred profession. Veterinarians were routinely involved in making judgments about their clients—both human and animal. At times, this was experienced as a challenge—a puzzle or management dilemma. However, we noted that these judgments differed according to species. Humans were often considered to be ‘bad’—bad owners, bad humans—while their companion

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animals were rarely considered to be intrinsically ‘bad.’ A discussion that we observed during the fieldwork between two non-veterinarian visitors to the practice and two practicing veterinarians demonstrated this point: Non-vet A: How many (aggressive dogs) do you get? Vet A: Hmm . . . A lot I suppose (looks to vet B) . . . at least one attempt per day. Vet B: (nods) Yes, definitely one a day. Non-Vet A: One aggressive dog a day? [Vet A and Vet B laugh together] Vet A: No, no, way more than that. I meant one attempted dog bite per day. Non-Vet B: That many? Vet B: Easily. Non-Vet A: Wow, didn’t realize there were that many aggressive dogs out there. Vet A: There aren’t. They’re stressed, fed up, hate being poked. A natural reaction really, you just wish the owners would tell you. Non-vet B: The owners don’t warn you and ask you to muzzle the dogs first? Vet A: Hardly. Vet B: Some do . . . Vet A: But not many. They think it’s our fault, as if we should be better with them or something, as if we know animals well enough to be able to avoid bites. Vet B: Yes, when it’s them that are the problem, for not telling us, you know. Can’t hardly blame the dog, I’d be grumpy too under those circumstances but owners should just, you know, should just tell us if it’s likely to happen. It’s like they don’t want to admit to it, like it means there’s something wrong with them or their dog.

We noted earlier in this book that animal shelter workers also categorize potential animal owners into good and bad homes as a way of disavowing the idea that there is any such thing as an intrinsically ‘bad’ animal (Taylor, 2004). The vets we studied did the same thing regarding aggression in dogs. Moreover, they explicitly linked the owner’s refusal to acknowledge their dogs potential for aggression with shame; shame that their animal might behave badly. A slightly different sense of shame was also noted in the discovery of fleas in a number of veterinary consultations; a feeling of



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guilt that derived from a failure to detect the dog’s ailment. The negotiation of these emotions was a challenge for everyone involved. Our observations of shame have parallels with Sanders’s work on the development of ‘excusing tactics’ for animals in public. Sanders studied a community of dog walkers to see how companion canines affected public interaction between human strangers. This community met at regular times daily to exercise their animals and, generally speaking, the animals played together while the humans talked together, usually about matters concerning their dogs. One of the observations from this study was that owners had a medley of excusing tactics for their animals should they misbehave and that these tactics, combined with the animals behaviour, determined whether they would be accepted into the new group. So the performance of shame served to regulate membership to the ingroup. When a new animal and owner approached the group they were welcomed cautiously and, if the animal ‘misbehaved’ by fighting, for example, then their acceptance into the group would largely depend on the owner’s ‘excusing tactics’ and, of course, the dog’s future behaviour (Sanders, 1990). Following Goffman, Sanders (1990) argues that such groups of dogs and owners constitute a collective identity called a ‘with.’ This identity is established and maintained by the use of ‘tie-signs’ such as calling the dog by name, touching the dog, and maintaining eye contact with the dog. The fact that the dog and owner are a ‘with’ means that the owner, who is seen as the most capable of the unit, is held responsible for the dogs behaviour. This means that the owner must keep the dog ‘under control’, that is, within the behavioural boundaries expected by others. Failing to do so, they themselves run the risk of having their social status downgraded to ‘irresponsible owner.’ Sanders calls the mechanisms that owners use to ‘repair interaction’ in circumstances when the animal misbehaves ‘excusing tactics,’ and he claims that there are seven of them. The most common is ‘situating.’ This is where the owner excuses their animal’s behaviour because the animal is in a strange situation. The second tactic is ‘justifying.’ This involves placing the blame for the dog’s behaviour on a third party, for example, by arguing that their actions made the dog nervous and therefore made him/her misbehave. A third tactic used by owners is ‘redefining’ which necessitates the owner recasting misbehaviour in a positive light, such as the animal’s high intelligence. Fourthly, owners may utilize ‘behavioural quasi-theorizing.’ This is a commonplace explanation for the dog’s behaviour based on his/her species, such as ‘that’s the way dogs are.’ ‘Processual emphasis’ is the fifth tactic

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Sanders found owners to use. This is when owners stress that they are in the process of teaching their dog its social manners and the problematic behaviour in question is currently being ‘worked on.’ ‘Demonstrative disciplining’ is another tactic open to owners which, according to Sanders, allows the human to acknowledge the misbehaviour of the dog while demonstrating their desire to re-assert control, an acting out of their shame or disappointment in public. The last excusing tactic outlined by Sanders is ‘unlinking.’ He sees this as the last resort. It is where the owner acknowledges that the dog is ‘out of control’ and thereby publicly dissolves the human-animal ‘with.’ Sanders concludes that excusing tactics are a necessary part of the human-animal interaction in public because owners very often need to repair human interactions which have been tested by their animal’s misbehaviour: A person’s public identity is a social construction based on such cues as appearance, manner, speech patterns, and, who one is with. Especially when a person’s public associate has less apparent power and is expected to be under the control of a more competent member of the ‘with’, the misbehaviour of the associate has negative impact on the identity of the controlling member. Faced with the disruption of their public identity due to the infractions of the other, people engage in various social maneuvers to regain their ‘face’ (Sanders, 1998: 14).

This makes it clear that human-animal interactions are also social interactions which speak to the heart of identity. When a veterinarian is brought into this mix, and brings other issues such as epistemic authority and the need to manage public emotions, it results in a sociologically rich environment. This, for some vets at least, is an attractive part of the job—the range of social and animal interactions being an aspect of the work which helps it to maintain its variety and challenge. In part, this challenge rests upon the contested place of animals in social life. The close relationship between owners and their pets often leads to a rejection of hegemonic beliefs about the human-animal binary. Owners and veterinarians are often involved in interaction work which constitutes the animal as a legitimate member of the family. In turn this determines that the animal has particular ‘rights’ in the way s/he is treated. Veterinarians are cognizant of this and of the need to show their awareness of it to their human clients. As such they have various strategies they draw on such as asking about an animal’s Christmas or telling clients an anecdote about their own pet. However, veterinarians remain in a precarious



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position due to their own training which often “entails an emotional distancing” (Atwood-Harvey, 2005: 317) as a pre-requisite for ‘good science’. As a consequence, they bring a certain type of rationality to their encounters with their clients, one which often asserts itself in order to repair instances where the emotional rules of the interaction order are broken. This ‘rational’ and ‘logical’ approach gives them a mechanism whereby they can maintain professional control in the consultation setting. As a profession, vets are also increasingly in the position of having to defend their work, or at least their epistemic authority and veterinary work may well be devalued by some as it involves medical interaction with animals, not humans. The increasing feminization of the small animal veterinary profession alongside social and cultural changes which have led to shifts in the status of companion animals means that small animal veterinary work is often seen as ‘caring’ work rather than ‘science work’. As a consequence, its status is devalued, certainly compared to the (male) environment of large animal veterinary practice (as in Chapter Three). It is no wonder, then, that throughout our work with small animal veterinarians we saw myriad instances where the vets tried to re-assert their epistemic and professional authority through recourse to discourses of rationality. Framing rationality within their specialist medical narratives gives veterinarians the social power to advise animal owners about what is really going on. Their certainty in the presentation of ‘facts’ is buttressed by an array of materials including the bodily parts and representations of animals themselves; in the form of test results, x-rays and other forms of diagnosis. These materials are often persuasive enough to convince animal owners to believe their reading of reality over the alternatives. Add to all of this the precarious and ambiguous attitudes our cultures have towards animals in general, and we can see how the veterinary clinic proves to be of huge sociological significance as a site where human-animal-material networks are created and maintained. Despite the fact that when we interact with our animals we often attribute either, or both, the status of ‘person’ or of ‘family member’ to them, we are reconfirming their status as a different species. As a result, our interaction with veterinary professionals is affected by this. The veterinarian brings to this interaction a different point of view, one determined not just by their own interactions with animals but by their scientific training which on occasion stands in opposition to the perceived emotional ways in which their human clients interact with their animals. Nowhere is this

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more apparent than when veterinarians have to euthanize a loved companion animal. In contrast to those who work in slaughterhouses as outlined in Chapter Four; places where humans construct animals as objects and thus “worthy of death”, vets and their human clients are engaged in constructing animals as subjects and as “worthy of life” (Sanders, 1994). This is linked to, and often predicated upon the construction of said animals as persons, as legitimate recipients of human emotion. Personhood is, then, an “elemental social designation that may be acquired or forfeited, given or taken away. It is a matter of social identity that determines how a being is treated, the rights and freedoms he/she/it possesses, and even whether and under what conditions the being is allowed to live” (Sanders, 1994: 210). Thus, whether the animal is defined as an ‘object’ or instead as a sentient ‘subject’ determines the way in which they are treated by both owner and veterinarian. As we have seen throughout this book, in different settings, humans labour at the human-animal division in myriad ways. They accept it, confirm it, create it and challenge it from moment to moment. In the small animal veterinary surgery, through a series of complex emotional management strategies, veterinarians are involved in the crafting of both intimacy and distance. This involves complex maneouvres which, often at one and the same time, confirm and challenge the binary distinctions of animals as subjects and objects. But we can only glimpse such subtle and nuanced performances by being there in the thick of it, that is, by adopting an ethnographic approach to this work. This allows the detailed excavation of such behaviour and performance. But how does ethnography do this? How does it help us to get ‘inside’ these behaviours and performances? What is it about this particular research method that allows us to re-think and reflect upon our relationships with humans and other animals? These are the questions that our next chapter considers.

PART FOUR

REFLECTIONS

CHAPTER EIGHT

ETHNOGRAPHY AND ANIMALS Social agents are not academic sociologists or organized in obedient seminar groupings, so their practices of sense-making require some digging-out, some interpretation—the further exercise of an ethnographic imagination. Paul Willis, 2000: xii

Throughout this book we have been keen to stress the value of ethnography as a method for studying human-animal intersections. We believe that ethnographic methods allow for a fluid conception of culture; that social life is made up of collective acts of meaning-making which stabilize and cement human relations. Of course, these relations are conducted and mediated through language, whether it is treating animals as objects such as the “whole bird products” in the chicken factory, as subjects such as in the making of wildlife films, or even as ‘persons’ as in the rescue shelter and the small animal veterinary surgery. Ethnography is well suited to a close-up view of the continual and ‘messy’ processes that produce and re-produce cultural meanings like these and is especially attuned to the objects, materials and symbolic artefacts that help bring them to life. The technique of participant observation means that the researcher gets physically involved with whatever work their participants are doing to consider new insights which can then generate new thinking, or at least add to existing discourses and theories. In turn this allows ethnographers to show how the micro-politics of seemingly mundane everyday life often feed into, and reflect, the macro-politics and structures of wider society. But in making and theorizing these connections, we need to think of the actors involved. What are their perspectives? What pre-suppositions do they bring to new situations and new workplaces? How do they define the relevant issues? What are their opinions of those who make labels, categories, images and often futures about and for them? The task of ethnography is to figure out how to get answers to these questions which means gaining access to their lived cultures and daily meaning-making: understanding a bit about the ‘hows’ as well as the ‘whys’ of their unique circumstances and knowledges.

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It is a cornerstone of our thinking that lived cultures are at least in part about problem solving for the experienced pressures and problems of being at work more generally, whether this means interacting with other people or interacting with other species (for general examples, see Braverman, 1974; Burrell, 1997; Chreim, 2006). This ‘solving’ is often done at the collective rather than the individualistic level and—as we have shown— is exhibited through the use of symbols and rituals and the attribution of meanings to artefacts and expressive forms (see, for example, the extensive ethnographic work provided by Hall, 1997 and 1980 and Willis, 1978, 2000 and 2010). This is not always a matter of cognitive or abstract thought but is just as much about how people treat the things and objects around them. In keeping with our interest in developing and understanding human-animal networks, we find that these things, the artefacts and ritual practices of a lived cultural realm, also need examination and analysis as well as the discourses and the actions in those settings. These are local matters that required a close-grained local view. This is the value of situated research; it picks up the detail and seeks to render it understandable by making the familiar strange (and the strange familiar). A wholly different set of ethnographic challenges are presented when the local spaces to be investigated include animals. The actors in the field are not all ‘like us’ and do not belong to human society in straightforward ways. Like other methods, then, ethnography faces a challenge when the culture in question includes humans and other animals. How can this method take account of such others? In spaces like abattoirs, laboratories and farms should we—as ethnographers—consider animals to be ‘things’, ‘artefacts’, ‘agents’ or even ‘co-workers’? The majority of traditional symbolic interactionists have taken the position that language is a prerequisite for symbolic interaction, however, and thus have largely ignored a-lingual animals altogether. Traditional research methods like these are often unable to capture many of the nuances and much of the ambivalence that exists when human and other animals meet. Similarly, capturing the subjective perspective of animals is difficult and this is the case whether you are an Ethologist or a social scientist. Some argue that this is completely impossible for humans. Certainly, animals do not talk or write about what is going on in their lives nor do they wittingly contribute to the research process (for a notable exception see Bradshaw et al., 2009). They are perhaps even less cognizant of the ethnographic study of such work. This means that abattoirs, animal rescue shelters, stables, veterinary surgeries and multiple other workplaces which have animals in common add an extra layer



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of complication for researchers. These settings often have cultures which draw upon a wholly different set of meanings, values and discourses from organizations which don’t include animals. And we have shown throughout this book that this is because animals perform a highly significant role in the orientation of identity and culture for humans. They often become meaningful to people by representing their values or by offering something that is perceived of as lacking in human society. Even when wages are low, such as in the slaughterhouse, or even absent as in the case of voluntary shelter work, it is the collective performance of shared workplace values through animals that often matters to the humans who work there. Yet very few ethnographers have attempted to explain the cultural significance of animals beyond philosophical considerations of the appropriate ‘place’ of animals. To explain the significance of other animals was one of the central aims of this book and one which could not have been achieved without ethnographic methods. In this concluding chapter we reflect openly on some of the issues that have arisen as a result of ten collective years of ethnography with humans and animals. Reflections from the Field The main issues affecting our ability to ‘do justice’ to human-animal work are methodological, epistemological and ontological and they often overlap. We make no attempt to purify the distinctions between these research ‘problems’. In fact, as we have done several times already, we try to re-introduce some ‘mess’ into the apparent order that governs much of the thought surrounding who ‘we’ are as humans and who ‘they’ are as animal-others. We offer this chapter as a reflection on our fieldwork so that readers can consider these questions for themselves. As with all good ethnography we don’t profess to offer answers, merely to give food for further thought. In contemporary western societies much human-animal interaction is mediated and structured through some kind of organization; taking our pets to the veterinary clinic (Sanders, 1994 and 1995), visiting zoos (Mullan and Marvin, 1998) working on farms (Inkson, 1979), adopting or surrendering animals to shelters (Frommer and Arluke, 1999), and even turning living animals into meat (Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990; Vialles, 1994). In a relatively straightforward way then, ethnography is eminently suitable for the investigation of human-animal interaction and can be done by exploring the organizational processes and rituals of those who mediate modern

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interaction with nature and animals. This has been done successfully, if not extensively, over the last couple of decades and has led to some rich and detailed accounts of the lives of those who regularly work with animals. Much of this work has offered insights into the ways in which animal lives and bodies are produced through the work-in-interaction that occurs in various settings (Alger and Alger, 2003; McAllister Groves, 1996; Philips, 1994; Sanders, 2006; Taylor, 2010). This is a fundamental reason why the authors have spent so much of their time expanding upon the existing literature—and the notion of post-humanism more generally—by doing ethnography in veterinary surgeries, farms, animal shelters, and in meat packing and production plants. What has emerged from observing the complex relations in these settings is that social performances are complicated when the actors belong to different species. In fact, it is these apparent differences—and the symbolic attachments that participants display towards categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’—that require our ethnographic attention. And, in common with other social settings it is the negotiation of power which often mediates human and animal relations. Yet power is invisible. Ethnographers may only look for its effects in the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that people speak and behave. In the chapter on shelter workers, for example, we outlined how it is that in their relationships with non-humans, workers sometimes brought animals into proximity; that is, intimate bodily and emotional contact. In other workplaces, however, categorical boundaries were inserted to deliberately set the species apart—particularly in the slaughterhouse and on the farm. These boundaries were created and maintained through the use of a particular kind of language, and through jokes and a host of other practical acts of meaning-making. Subtle signifiers were attached to even the most mundane routines. Thus apparently meaning-less duties and repetitions seemed to become highly meaning-full components of a carefully orchestrated collective performance. One of the ways that we can think about this is to consider animals as the unwitting ‘bearers’ of human culture, part of the networks that help humans to order and make sense of work. Ethnographers can glimpse the effects of the integrating powers of such cultural networks by observing what happens when workers engage in performances and routines (Wacquant, 1993). Even something as apparently mundane as washing the fur of a long neglected cat or dog becomes useful in the creation of a common work ethos at the animal shelter (Taylor, 2010). Likewise the constant presence of animal ‘muck’, blood and pus on the farmyard helps many veterinary surgeons to develop a distinctive



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sense of common purpose and symbolic value (Hamilton, 2007). Our fieldwork points to the finding that it is not always a straightforward desire to care for other species that motivates people to work with animals. Instead, a range of unexpected meanings can be drawn from the interaction with other species and sometimes even the most apparently purulent and visceral artefact of animal ‘dirt’ can form a powerful bonding agent in this process. It is unsatisfactory, then, to claim that those working with animals do so from a simple desire to be in paid employment. In many cases that we have examined—notably the rescue shelter and the TV documentary—much of that work is often done on a purely voluntary basis. Here the rewards of doing such work are not financial but reach into more symbolic and ethical domains of value creation (Irvine, 2004; Taylor, 2010). Conversely, in the abattoir the extensive and sophisticated mechanization of the shopfloor makes it difficult for workers to relate to the ‘products’ as animals at all. The repetitive and robotic nature of these jobs disconnects those on the production line—even at the killing end— from the idea that they are dealing with bodies. In turn this is reflected in the utilitarian and economic language that permeates slaughterhouse culture. There is of course, a wealth of ethnographic material of relevance here for those interested in work more generally. While we have chosen to consider work around and with animals as our main theoretical focus, others may well see the scope for thinking about other equally important matters in a number of our case-studies; the continuing organizational significance of shop-floor culture, for example, or the relationships between gender identity and emotion, the operation of working-class resistance, and the ideological and epistemological dominance of middle-class professional capital. A number of our studies show up the collective elements of being at work, the animal shelter, for example, but they also show up the internal divisions, partitions and contradictions that characterize workplace relations in a more general sense, between farm and small-animal vets and between farm vets and their administrators, for example. In the process of observing some of these cultural politics at work we have become increasingly attuned to the fact that the ‘point of view’ of the worker or indeed the animal is not amenable to simple or structured forms of qualitative enquiry. Given that they do not speak, it is especially problematic to treat nonhuman animals as cognizant, knowing agents. But to the extent that they perform a crucial role various human-animal interactions we consider them to be ‘actors’ and certainly ‘workers’ whether they are aware of it or not. In our own fieldwork, we have attempted to consider the possible

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consequences of this and while neither of us claims to be an animal expert, we have always been keen to allow the human participants in our fieldwork to make such claims for themselves. And they often did. The TV presenters, for example, considered theirs a professional vocation— a way for them to pass on their ‘knowledge’ to the uninitiated outsiders watching at home. The small animal vets also claimed a privileged vantage point on how individual pets were feeling, something that they expressed during their consultations. So our participants’ claims regarding their unique understandings of individual animals; whether it was their behaviour, their apparent ‘mindedness’, their ‘personalities’ (or lack of them) became a clear feature of the data we gathered. Without an ethnographic approach such subtleties would have been missed and while this does not necessarily capture the perspective of the animal it certainly brings us closer to the ways in which animals are constructed through human activities and meaning-making processes. Ethnography and People Writing Ethnography is literally people writing; both in the active sense (the verb) and in the written form (the noun). Critics could feasibly argue that it involves the observation of distinctively human traits while animals have a subjective experience of living which is wholly and almost inconceivably different from ours. Even the ethnographer’s practice of keeping a running log or a set of fieldnotes relies upon distinctively human registers of seeing and transcribing the world: feelings, emotions, surprises and even humour (Jackson, 1990). While we acknowledge these representational and epistemic limitations, we argue that ethnography—both as a verb and a noun—is unrivalled in its ability to penetrate and document the life-world of ‘others’ whether they are animal or human. This makes it a highly valuable method for considering human-animal relations and interactions. One reason for this is its usefulness in a wide range of scenarios. Multi-site, or multi-local, field work like ours has become increasingly recognized in anthropology and ethnography since the 1980s (Hannerz, 2003). It is useful for the identification of differences in behaviours, performances and assumptions between types of work and it helps us to make the point that there are partitions, imbalances and factions even within individual workplaces. We cannot lump together professional groups as cohesive wholes, just as we cannot assume that because people work together they experience the same feelings of membership, value or



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belonging when they are at work. The traditional approach of single-site field work is ill equipped to illuminate the scale of these problems and issues. In short, it can’t help us to make sense of patterns (or indeed, the frequent lack of patterns) across diverse communities. A further reason why multi-site ethnography is so crucial to quality organizational research, then, is its subversive ability to challenge the weighty canons of traditional paradigms, be they ideas about the nature of ‘dirty work’, ‘gender’, ‘professionalism’ or any number of presumed ‘facts’ about organizational life. Crucially, from our perspective, multi-local research has enabled us to consider the ways in which human and animals can become embroiled in close or distant connections, the varied ways that Animal-Networks are created and performed within human organizations. By examining a number of spaces where such networks can be observed, we have been able to offer at least a partial account of how such couplings and connections are realized. But the advantages of methods like ours are also political and they help us to achieve one of the central aims of the emerging Animal-Network project. Because ethnographers have often embraced the ‘underdog’ and deliberately sought to challenge epistemological and ideological assumptions, we think it becomes a perfect vehicle for an extension of research methods across species. The ideological obfuscation of neutrality in research is often openly contested by ethnographers who constantly ask, and answer, whose ‘side’ they are on (Becker, 1967). In doing so ethno­ graphy has the powerful ability to challenge the status quo whether it confronts the current received wisdom regarding the nature and role of (often positivist) research methods or whether it questions assumptions made about groups of people by actually working and living with them. But despite our belief that ethnography has always been well placed to offer such challenges, we think that its radical and boundary-pushing capacity is not always fully realized. One of these radical boundary challenges lies in its ability to facilitate research where ‘others’ may reasonably be animal or human. By remaining intellectually open to the subjective claims and feelings of others, ethnography paves the way for an epistemological alternative to more mainstream and quantitative methods. It can do so by interrogating “received truths” to establish whether group norms are universally shared or the product of “hegemonic ways of looking at the world” (Lecompte, 2001: 284). It can even detach knowledge from truth to consider the culturally-constructed ways in which subjects feel they understand the world. Investigating these phenomena is made easier, if not easy, by the sharing

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of common human behaviours and ways of communicating. It is crucial to bear in mind, however, that our own (distinctively human) methods for generating knowledge are implicated in the methods by which we represent others. This is an idea that is gaining momentum in the social sciences and elsewhere. Our methods are a fundamental vehicle by which such knowledge is assembled and it is through the ‘purification’ of otherwise ‘messy’ and competing categories that methods achieve their authority in making things known. Very often, this process of purification involves neat and categorical separations between things; between nature and culture, for instance, and between humans and animals (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Latour, 2004). Yet traditional paradigms hold that only certain kinds of research methods can reflect ‘objective reality’ and in fact, this was a view that several of the large-animal vets expressed during the fieldwork as the following extract from an interview makes clear: Rowan: [To the researcher] Go for it, if you think you can get an article out of this sort of stuff . . . ethnography. I’m not quite sure . . . If you’re going to do your research properly, for the rest of your career, I suspect you’d need to be sending questionnaires out as well as deciding what you want to talk to. So far, you’ve just talked to people. [Pausing—as if deciding whether to give advice] You first decide what you’re going to ask, right, so have a think . . . and this is just my opinion, bear in mind . . . but you need to think in your own mind, because I can’t see where you’re coming from with it. You need to get that straight in your own mind, what you want to try to establish if you like, if indeed you want to try and establish anything . . . which I guess you do want to. You surely want to try and establish something. Let’s say you went at it randomly, and you picked out . . . a hundred vets, in other words a qualified vet, working in practice because that defines a vet. Then send a questionnaire or maybe a telephone questionnaire.

Here the fieldwork subject became a scientific interrogator which constituted a reordering of the traditional roles of research. Like a patient on the operating table, ethnography was taken apart and examined (Hamilton, 2013). In this deft manoeuvre, it was the vet’s apparent ability to access ‘real knowledge’ that silenced the alternative discourse. By capitalizing on clinical epistemology—articulated here as the need to “establish something”—this participant fostered the impression that he could demystify and diagnose reality through his specialist skills. Ethnography, by contrast, was dismissed for its apparent inability to reproduce the truth. The vet’s foundational view of language was a weapon for enslaving ‘facts’—a powerful tranquilizer to all other readings of reality.



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His representations, rendered through the language of scientific rationality, were ‘real’. In practice, this was a tense moment for the fieldworker and seemed to point to an underlying struggle for ownership. For the farm vets, there was a rigid dichotomy between subject and object, surgeon and patient, science and arts; and they were vocal about their belief that science should remain hygienically distant from creativity. Their own ‘scientific’ discourses worked in parallel with their everyday work on the farm; places where the veterinarians wielded the power to see beyond the blood, muscles, skin and bones—in short the ‘mess’ of the animal body—to form a sanitized diagnosis. Their ontological certainty about a number of topics, both veterinary and ethnographic, stemmed from an almost priest-like ability to take the body apart to find the ‘truth’. The idea that truth might be local, intermittent, collectively decided upon and short-term was something that presented an unacceptable and ‘messy’ view of the world. We do not reveal or reflect upon these uncomfortable moments to satirize or ‘poke fun’ at our participants, however, because these were deeply held views that informed their professional identity at a very basic level. Being a scientist mattered to them and gave them a sense of belonging to a community that was larger than their immediate organizational setting. And in fact, this secure sense of place sometimes informed the ways that we—as researchers—were treated and ‘made sense of ’ within their dayto-day experiences of work. In the small-animal veterinary surgery, for example, the researcher had negotiated access that allowed her to stand in the consultation room to observe the interactions between vet and petowner. During one morning of fieldwork, the vet decided to play a practical joke on her, something that was recorded in the fieldnotes: Before calling the cat’s name out in the waiting room, the vet pulls me close to him and whispers, “Now I don’t want you to laugh at this next client, because she has a very posh [upper class] accent. She works in TV advertising doing voice-overs and such like so she has a very distinctive, husky voice that is quite loud. She’s always coming in with her cats, and this one is her pride and joy. But, as I say, just be aware that she has this ridiculously posh, booming voice.” He opens the door and shouts the name into the waiting room. A very short, frail, elderly lady with a noticeable tremor shuffles in to the consulting room. She moves slowly with the bulky plastic cat box, trembling as she lifts it onto the table. I wait to hear the fabulous booming voice. Instead, she whispers her way through a reticent and halting description of her cat’s difficulties with a tremulous voice. It is hard to understand or to hear her. I realize that I have been ‘set up’. I find it difficult not to laugh but

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The Implications of Method We argue, in common with many post-modernists and post-humanists, that research methods help to create the reality that they purport to describe (Latour and Woolgar, 1988). They do not provide us with a hot-wire to the ‘real world’. Any social and symbolic boundaries that we observe between human and animal, or even between researcher and subject, do not stand for the ‘natural’ order of things, but are culturally constructed and often collectively policed in order to maintain the apparent purity of these different categories. So the methods chosen by a researcher to evoke ‘reality’ are “enactments of relations that make some things— representations, objects, apprehensions—present ‘in-here’ while making others absent ‘out-there’ ” (Law, 2004: 254). Following this line of argument, supposed boundaries between human and animal, between social and natural are in part the outcome of methods and enactments which operate to set limits and which do so out of a “panicky fear of seeing humans reduced to things” (Latour, 2004: 76). And by being there, hanging around, watching and interacting we often interfere with the meaning-making done in that particular setting. This is a viewpoint that is enjoying considerable popularity and can be traced to the break with traditional modes of tent-door anthropology that seemed to dominate much social research before the Chicago School. An early example of this reflexive style is Foot-Whyte’s classic Street Corner Society (1943). We think that the complex human politics of being in the field should be documented and not simply theorized. Unfortunately there continue to be limits to our creative and expressive abilities to do so. Rolfe, for example, has argued that the ways in which social scientists are often asked to categorize their ‘findings’ rests upon a continuing assumption that certain “essences” are already lodged in the data, waiting for the objective researcher to expose them (Rolfe, 2006: 307; Cousin, 2010). The ways that journal editors continue to ask us to force complex issues into such simple categories is something which places a strict limit on what is currently possible in ethnographic writing. Methods are not simply human attempts for getting knowledge, then, but are intricately bound to the ontological politics of producing



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knowledge (Law, 2009). This is something which applies to traditional positivist research as well as our increasingly interpretivist methods. Recognition of the politics of the field has important consequences which are often magnified for those working in unconventional areas such as ours. One consequence is the need to identify how traditional methods of doing social science are political and analyse both their purpose and their effects. The second is to abandon these ‘original’ methods altogether and attempt to re-think them creatively. The first is beyond the scope of the current chapter but it is with the second that we are primarily concerned. Such an abandonment of traditional viewpoints and methods involves an acceptance that social life—both within organizations and outside of them—is not ordered and rational and instead is difficult, knotty and forever in the “becoming” (Cooper and Law, 1995). We argue that the ‘pure’ categories that segregate animal from human (and segregate human from human) are about power in the Foucauldian sense. The power lies in the discourse, the names and the definitions. But the most powerful discourses are those which are connected to and aligned with the movements of materials, objects in networks (Latimer, 2004). We must accept, however, that both the world and the methods we use to describe it are equally ‘messy’. But how might we approach the study of this ‘mess’ pragmatically? How might we move away from traditional methods (which often reinforce the need for clarity and order) into more creative and ‘messy’ forms of ethnography? These are tricky questions with no simple answers and unfortunately, in the majority of social science work pertaining to animals, this question is often overlooked altogether. So animals just get lost. Just as Latour and Woolgar pointed out that what ‘really’ happened in the laboratory was written away in the production of texts (Latour and Woolgar, 1988), animals are lost through the various transcription devices that social scientists use to make sense of them. Curiously then, power also emerges in the silences and voids created by a lack of discourse. Thus within much anthropocentric and humanist writing, the animal simply becomes an abstract and textualized non-person. So the fact that animals are not ‘heard’ within much social science research is just as much an outcome of the operation of discourse as is the traditional idea that animals are inferior to humans. If we accept the idea that discourses, materials and power are interwoven then we must be critically aware that our chosen methods—be they ethnographic or otherwise—are a part of that very weaving; a part of the ways in which animals become known to us. This is particularly important if our chosen methods silence animals—or at least silence the animal

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part of the human-animal relationship. With their stress on both numerical and textual methods the traditional social sciences have often done exactly this and have ignored and written animals out altogether. Even contemporary work on human-animal relations has a propensity towards this with its stress on the human side of the equation. Adopting certain methods of empirical investigation (like questionnaires) to examine the feelings of humans towards animals, means that researchers are often unable to evoke the subtlety of the social interaction between the species. In examining precisely these interactions and meetings, ethnography has a clear advantage over other possible approaches to research yet in doing so it presents an implicit epistemological and ontological challenge which may further marginalize it as a research method. Understanding that human-animal interactions and relations are often non-verbal is of paramount importance to those of us wishing to study the interactions between the species. The post-humanist turn in Sociology offers several interesting ideas here. With their insistence that social life, relationships and meanings are not fixed but emergent, multiple, mobile and performative, post-human scholars have begun advocating some interesting new methodologies (see for example Buscher, 2005; Bijker and Law, 1992; Buscher and Urry, 2009). They suggest that posthumanism engenders new kinds of “researchable entities” which allow us to reconsider the very notion of empirical research. In a practical sense this facilitates the opening up of new areas of enquiry by deconstructing assumed differences between actors of various species. This challenge paves the way for new methods by which to study animals and their relations with humans; methods which do not underscore the old order, the old power games and discourses by silencing animals or relegating them to the ‘natural order’ of things. For the most part the methods suggested by those working within the post-human template are ethnographic and involve ‘thick description’ and observation (Buscher, 2005). The argument goes that if cultural life is ‘messy’, mobile and in constant flux then the methods that purport to study it need to be responsive to this. So methods should ‘capture’ the ‘messiness’ as it emerges; they should be mobile and open to surprise (Buscher and Urry, 2009). Consequently, there is a renewed emphasis on sensory observation and experience, alongside an interest in developing the possibilities of the latest technologies for data collection. Techniques of visual ethnography, for example, use still and moving images to record field data and have much to offer those interested in inter-species



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workplaces (Myrvang Brown et al., 2008). At the same time, there are many other visual art-forms that can be drawn upon as a way of counterbalancing traditionally gathered (and usually) verbal or numeric forms of data. Art serves as a companion for troubling nature–culture dichotomies because it does not dismiss the symbolic and physical significance of animals in the way that traditional methods have done. So while many of the scholars within the social and ethnographic sciences remain unashamedly anthropocentric, it is easy to see how an emphasis on sensory experience—expressed in artistic and visual ways—might translate to the study of particular settings where humans and animals interact. We think that such methods could be adapted to evolve ethnography towards a more complex inter-subjective approach, better taking account of the very different sorts of agency that actors embody and present to the researcher. The ultimate goal of a multi-species and multi-local ethnography is not just to give voice, agency or subjectivity to animals, however. It is to interrogate notions of who ‘we’ are at far more profound levels (Haraway, 1989; Weider, 1980). This raises deeper philosophical questions of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ and means that we should not assume that biological species differences do this work of categorization for us. The problem remains, however, that even ethnographers who take a multi-disciplinary or radical multi-species approach still have no direct access to the private lifeworlds of their participants. Nor may they easily comprehend the subtlety of the meanings that their participants create to furnish those life-worlds (Gannon, 2006; Garfinkel, 1967 and 2002; Geertz, 1973). Researchers have even less access to the private world of animals. Even sharing a language with fellow human beings does not mean that we can necessarily ‘hot wire’ the words as uttered to their hidden and often deeply personal meanings. We deal with representations but not with reality. Yet we can observe the diverse ways in which actors of various species become physically and actively moved by the cultures they inhabit. We can watch how people are affected—bodily, emotionally and verbally—by the display or presence of animals (Taylor and Signal, 2006). Often, when we walk into an organization like a slaughterhouse or a vet’s practice, we see that many of these interactions have already marked their existence upon the physical surroundings. The consultation room mediates the interaction between the owner, on one side of the table, and the vet on the other. The animal is in between the two. There is a physical reminder of the symbolic barrier that sometimes works to divide those identities and their performances. So relationships are already underway

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before we even cross the threshold of such organizations. In the slaughterhouse, for example, there are strict and formal divisions between the different zones of the factory, from the lairage and killing room to the evisceration and packing end of the production line. But these are not to be taken-for-granted as ‘facts’. An engineer draws a plan and builders put these plans in place. They build the conveyor belts, the gas chambers and they decide where and when the humans and the animals stand, walk or wait. They decide where off-cuts and rejected bird carcases are collected, stored and eventually disposed of. They decide where workers may go to eat their food and engage in social time with each other. Workers of various species enter these designated spaces and are prompted, through physical and temporal reminders of where they are to conform to those original designs and plans. This is the reality of organizational life for most of us. Ultimately, we are all caught up in an array of temporal and material designs like these, whether in a slaughterhouse or the somewhat leafier setting of the university campus. Interestingly, however, few of us seem to notice or reflect upon these architectures of everyday life, the ways in which our interactions often seem to be decided for us, before we even get to work (Hernes, 2004). Foregrounding the arbitrariness, the very humanity of organization is important to us. Why should we assume that our settings, our assumptions are static and predetermined by everyday routines and repetitions? Analysis of daily life through ethnography allows us to reveal how normative conceptions of doing work, of space and time, are articulated through bodily ‘hexis’ and repeated, reiterated and represented in the numerous little tasks that make up a typical day at work. But ethnography also allows us to see how fluid, how dynamic and how different our lives could be if we overturned some of our preconceptions and expectations. We argue that the subtlety and the ‘messiness’ of ethnographic research allows us to do this. In so doing, we may start to think about extending agency and creative power to nonhumans. What is particularly important about being there to monitor and record ‘cultural effects’ is the opportunity it gives to take the animal subject as a central—rather than a marginal—part of the interaction. We can treat the animal with greater importance in both the practical and the symbolic creation of social life. By not excluding them a priori we give them, and ourselves, more space to be different; to do things differently. And by adopting a more creatively inter-disciplinary approach that seeks to trouble simple binaries and categories between animals and humans, we might at last begin to destabilize the long taken-for-granted assumption that humans reign supreme in the natural order of the world,



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or that things simply are as they are because they have always been done that way. So ethnographic methods must evolve from a traditional ethnocentric approach to one which imagines culture as an Animal-Network. To do that it needs to imagine and express the morphology of social life and inter-species connection rather than assuming a simple trajectory of representation, physical and cultural power from people to non-people. It also needs to expose the ways that ordering and organizing works in practice. This is a radical and an ambitious agenda. Recognizing the impact of methods on meaning-making should prompt social scientists of many different backgrounds to ask different questions of their research: how can we re-think human ways of knowing, of acting and of organizing? What kinds of study or ‘data’ will help us to do that? And not least, how can we account for non-humans in our field methods and our modes of reporting on those methods? How we approach and understand these questions will make available certain types of analysis which have until now been largely ignored. This chapter has tried to stimulate the energy that readers need to take up that challenge, to develop a better understanding of the non-human in organizational life. As readers will be aware, however, good ethnography is time-consuming and hard to do. It takes more than hard work to make a significant contribution, it takes a deep desire for researchers to expose and illuminate what they consider to be important problems. And it also calls for us to be creative in considering how research methods can help us to do that. At the moment, these are emergent methodologies. But we feel that they are methodologies in the becoming, ways for us to change the ways we write, think, feel, and work with others, be they humans or other animals.

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index Abattoir 10, 13, 21, 63–88, Ackroyd, S. and Crowdy, P. 22, 39, 51, 73, 167 Actor Network Theory 23–34, 132–134 Adams, C. 64, 76, Advocates, advocacy 125 Ag-gag Bills 64 Alger, S. and J. 110–111, 168 Animals as actors 7, 24, 168, 169 as meat 29, 63–88 as other 32, 51 as workers 25, 29, 166 as symbolic resources 31 as companions ix, x, 141 death of, euthanasia of 39, 63–88, 144 documentaries on 18, 63, 113–137 naming of 98–99, 107, 144–145 re-homing of 107, 111 clinical treatment of 42, 46, 140, 153, 157 rescue of 92, 94 see also rescue-craft  104 speaking for 135–136, 152 farm 37–62, 63 laboratory 6 pet 51–52, 67 see also Animalhood 32 Animal Network Theory 27–32, 37, 40, 41–43, 46, 61, 112, 117, 134, 150–152, 171, 179 Anthropology 170, 174 Anthropomorphism 18, 97, 129, 148, 149 Arluke, A. 5, 106, 147–9, 151 Back stage 115, 120–121, 131 Baldamus, W. 15, 55 Beck, A. and Katcher, A. 143–147 Belonging 21, 23, 31, 38, 171 Boundary work 4–5, 87 Bourdieu, P. 40–41, 61, 121–122 British Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons 39 BSE 69 Burrell, G. 63

Callon, M. 28 Care 29, 42, 54, 60, 93, see also caretakers 100 Carnism 69 Cattle 37, 41, 46, 78, 97 Chickens 63–88 Compassion in World Farming 69 Conscious, consciousness 7, 96–97 Cooper, R. 27, 61 Cudworth, E. 69, 75 Culture 16–17, 23–33, 87, 111, 165–179 Czarniawska, B. 16 Data 40, 93–94 see also data gathering  70, 116 Death 63, 65, 66, 145, 155–156, see also ‘good death’ 78, 152 Descartes, R. 25–26, 32 Dirt 37, 39, 49–60, 71, 107, 169 see also ‘dirty work’ Discourse and performance management 155–156 and humanity 28–29, 33 and power 42, 125, 161, 172 and science 48 and animal welfare 69, 109 and industry 81–86 and animal care 96 Distance 20, 76 see also distancing  41, 44, 48, 82 Dogs 93, 97, 102 Douglas, M. 37, 39, 44 Dunayer, J. ix, 79 Durkheim, E. 21 Epistemology 109, 119, 153, 172 Ethnography 9, 165–179 Excusing tactics 159–160 Farmers 33, 60 Field notes 10–11 Fitzgerald, A. 64 Foot and Mouth Disease 69 Francione, G. 67 Fraser, I. 84 Front stage 137, 155

194 Geertz, C. 41, 177 Goffman, E. 31, 109, 120–124 Habitus 121, 131 Hexis 122–123 Hochschild, A. 5, 7, 31, 121 Human Animal Studies 21, 25, 29, 137, 143, 151 Humanity 26, 91–92, 178 Humour 49, 168, 173 Identity professional 49–52, 150 the construction of ix, 21, 31 and cultural interaction 26, 31 and performance 31, 119, 125–132 and gender 39, 46 and animal companionship 145–149, 154, 159 Interaction order 6, 152, 161 Intimacy 18, 112, 139, 150 James, W. 23–24 Joy, M. 69 Kalof, L. ix, 65 Language 75–76, 79, 85 Latour, B. 123, 132–135 Law, J. 8, 16, 22, 174 Lowe, P. 37 Management of animals 42 of performance 52, 121–123 of labour relations 58, 103, 110 of emotions 151 Materials 22, 161, 175 Materiality 55, 83 Meaning-making practical acts of 26, 31, 109 and cultural production 20, 25 and identity 39 and ethnography 85 Meat cultural aspects of 20, 63–65, 69 the sexual politics of 64 and agricultural production 61 and labour process 64–66, 70 and distancing 70 scale of consumption 69 see also meat inspectors 70, 72 ‘Mess’ in identity work 122, 130

index and ethnography 165, 167, 175 and animals 173 see also ‘dirt’, ‘dirty work’ and ‘muck’ Mindedness 6, 12, 97, 148–9, 170 Moral schizophrenia 67 Muck 37–40 see also ‘mess’ and ‘dirt’ Multi-locale and multi-site research 13, 170 Networks and culture 21–22 as organizational ‘glue’ 22–23 see also ‘Actor Network’ and ‘Animal Network Theory’ Normalization of meat eating 69 of violence 78 of gender roles 57 of humanity 92–93 Ontological security 111, 114, 119 Oppression and professional capital169 of other species 28 of workers 65, 75 Organization Studies 16, 38 Participant observation 139, 165 see also ‘Ethnography’ Performance of workplace values 167–170 of self 4–8 of professional work 30, 52 of television presenters 115–119 Personhood of animals 139, 144 and social identity 162 see also ‘animalhood’ Porcher, J. 81–82 Post-human, post-humanism 168, 174, 176 Power and power games 8, 28, 176 and agency 178–179 and social interaction 7, 24–25, 41 and Actor Network Theory 29 and workplace relations 38, 45 and care 42 of discourse 28, 175 Primates 18, 118, 128 Proximity 93, 96, 112 see also ‘intimacy’ Reality and the ‘real world’ 174 and emotional experience 130

as authenticity 51–52, 121 enactments of 70 the creation of 76, 120, 137 the framing of 161, 172 Representation and reality 173–174, 177 and humanity 32–33 Resistance and work 53–55 and gender 57 and class 169 as a collective force 22–23 RSPCA 64 Rumens, N. 15 Sanders, C. 97 Science in networks 150 and rationality 160–161, 173 and violence 78 critical studies of 26, 30 the art of 47 Sensory work 47–48, 104 and sensory research 176–177 Serpell, J. 143, 146 Silverman, D. 40 Singer, P. 64 Slaughterhouse 10, 21, 63–88 see also ‘Abattoir’ Social capital xii, 119, 150 Social construction theoretical framework of 3–7 of work 51 and behaviour 160 Stibbe, A. 81 Stigma 22, 45, 92, 111 Substitute Child Theory 143–144 Taxonomy as a distancing technique 50 as scientific method 25 Technology of slaughtering 78, 80, 86–87 of television 123, 133

index

195

on the farm 37 and language 81, 125 Thick description 8, 176 Triangulation 10 US Department of Agriculture 69 Veterinary gaze 46 Veterinary surgeons, veterinarians and diagnosis 46, 145 and intuition 47 and emotional management 152, 155 and organization 49, 52 and professional belonging 51 and gender 56 on television 117 Vialles, N. 74–75 Weider, D.L. 6 Wicks, D. 74–75 Wildlife 114, 126 Wilkie, R. 97 Williams, R. 15 Work motivation for 17, 31, 33, 168 monotony of 65, 75 financial rewards of 15, 55 politics of 31, 51, 101, 110 gendered nature of 45, 78 emotion, emotion labour 105, 130, 151 ‘dirty’ 37–38, 44–45, 75, 168 factory 65, 75 professional 40, 153 team 22, 40, 45 office 55–57 inter-disciplinary 40, 42 as organizing 23, 179 as performance 31, 44 as culture forming 17, 33, 38 as value creating 22, 39, 44, 92, 111 as alienating 75 Zoos 167