Animal Activism, Nonhuman Charisma, and Ethical Considerations when Working with Captive Animals and Animal Agency Employees
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i2.2049Keywords:
Captivity, nonhuman charisma, activism, ethics, multispecies ethnography, animal sheltersAbstract
When activists, multispecies ethnographers, or scholar-activists disrupt official narratives about how animal control agencies manage captive animals, the public pressure can result in increased vulnerabilities for both animals and agency employees. This paper unpacks an example where activists used public archives and records (methods widely used by multispecies researchers) to raise awareness about the story of a cat named Nina. Her case provides a reminder that bringing attention to injustice may result in punitive consequences for employees as the agency tries to appease the public rather than address internal policies. There are consequences for telling animal stories beyond simply giving animals a voice. How agencies respond to pressure resulting from the publication of animal stories demands ethical considerations beyond those currently required for research with human and nonhuman participants. This paper specifically addresses the use of public records to make captive animal experiences visible to a broader public and the potential for negative consequences these actions may have on the animals and employees of the animal agencies. The discussion suggests ways to mitigate these risks for captive animals and agency employees, beginning with preliminary research that situates the animal story within the political history of the agency, critical triangulation of data about the case, analysis of the internal policies that resulted in the situation, and the way the agency mitigates public criticism both internally and officially. These considerations weigh the risks and benefits of the short- and long-term impacts of confronting injustice against animals held in agencies’ custody and control.
References
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Ogden, Laura A., Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita. 2013. “Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography.” Environment and society, 4(1), 5-24.
Rose, Deborah Bird and Thom van Dooren. 2017. “Encountering a more-than-human world: Ethos and the arts of witness.” In, Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen & Michelle Niemann (eds). The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, pp. 120-137.
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Arluke, Arnold. 2003. “The no-kill controversy: Manifest and latent sources of tension.” In D.J. Salem & A.N. Rowan (eds.). The state of the animals II. Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, pp. 67-83.
Arluke, Arnold and Clinton Sanders. 2010. Regarding animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Beal, Flora. 2021. “Miami-Dade County Animal Services Department achieves two major milestones by surpassing the 90 percent No-Kill benchmark for the sixth consecutive year achieving a 93 percent save-rate for 2020 and being named the 2020 FACA Outstanding Agency of Year.” Miami-Dade County News Release on February 21, 2021. Accessed on June 23, 2021, from https://www.miamidade.gov/releases/2021-02-15-asd-nokill-faca.asp
Bear, Christopher. 2011. “Being Angelica? Exploring individual animal geographies.” Area, 43(3), 297-304.
Binder, Perry. 2019. Firing employees for their social media posts: Ethical and legal issues. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications: SAGE Business Cases Originals.
Braverman, Irus. 2014. “Conservation without nature: the trouble with in situ versus ex situ conservation.” Geoforum, 51, 47-57.
Buller, Henry. 2016. “Animal geographies III: ethics.” Progress in Human Geography, 40(3), 422-430.
Buller, Henry. 2015. “Animal geographies II: methods.” Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 374-384.
Collard, Rosemary-Claire. 2015. “Ethics in research beyond the human.” In, Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, & James McCarthy (eds.), The Routledge handbook of political ecology. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 127-139.
Creţan, Remus. 2015. “Mapping protests against dog culling in post-communist Romania.” Area, 47(2), 155– 165.
Dayan, Colin. 2015. With dogs at the edge of life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Derickson, Kate Driscoll, and Paul Routledge. 2015. “Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation, and the Production of Knowledge.” The Professional Geographer 67(1), 1–7.
Di Minin, Enrico, Christoph Fink, Henrikki Tenkanen, and Tuomo Hiippala. 2018. “Machine learning for tracking illegal wildlife trade on social media.” Nature ecology & evolution, 2(3), 406-407.
Driessen, Clemens. 2012. “Farmers engaged in deliberative practices; an ethnographic exploration of the mosaic of concerns in livestock agriculture.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 25(2), 163-179.
Gibbs, Leah M. 2020. “Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis).” Progress in Human Geography, doi:10.1177/0309132520942295.
Gibbs, Leah M. 2019. “Animal geographies I: Hearing the cry and extending beyond.” Progress in Human Geography. doi:10.1177/0309132519863483.
Gillespie, Kathryn and Rosemary-Claire Collard (eds.). 2015. Critical animal geographies: Politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world. New York, NY: Routledge.
Gillespie, Kathryn. 2019. “For a politicized multispecies ethnography.” Politics and Animals, 5.
Gillespie, Kathryn. 2018. The cow with ear tag# 1389. University of Chicago Press.
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Greenhough, Beth and Emma Roe. 2019. “Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37(2), 367-384.
Guenther, Katja. 2020. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals: The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guenther, Katja. 2017. “Volunteers’ Power and Resistance in the Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival.” Sociological Forum 32(4), 770-792.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Hausmann, Anna, Tuuli Toivonen, Rob Slotow, Henrikki Tenkanen, Atte Moilanen, Vuokko Heikinheimo, and Enrico Di Minin. 2018. “Social media data can be used to understand tourists’ preferences for nature‐based experiences in protected areas.” Conservation Letters, 11(1), 1-10.
Hovorka, Alice. 2017. “Animal geographies I: Globalizing and decolonizing.” Progress in Human Geography, 41(3), 382-394.
Irvine, Leslie. 2017. “Animal sheltering.” In, Linda Kalof (ed.) The Oxford handbook of animal studies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 98-112.
Irvine, Leslie. 2012. “Sociology and anthrozoology: symbolic interactionist contributions.” Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 25 (supplement 1), 123-137.
Jacobson, Willow S. and Shannon Howle Tufts. 2013. “To post or not to post: Employee rights and social media.” Review of public personnel administration, 33(1), 84-107.
Johnston, Jacquelyn. 2021. “Incongruous killing: cats, nonhuman resistance, and precarious life beyond biopolitical techniques of making-live.” Contemporary Social Science (16)1, pp. 71-83.
Kirksey, S. Eben and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The emergence of multispecies ethnography.” Cultural anthropology, 25(4), 545-576.
Kopnina, Helen. 2017. “Beyond multispecies ethnography: Engaging with violence and animal rights in anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology, 37(3), 333-357.
Locke, Piers. 2018. “Multispecies ethnography.” In Hilary Callan (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1-3.
Lorimer, J., 2007. “Nonhuman charisma.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(5), pp. 911-932.
McCubbin, Sandra G. and Alice J. Hovorka. 2020. “Visioning African lionscapes: Securing space, mobilizing capital, and fostering subjects.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3(4), 1053-1073.
Miles, Sandra Jeanquart and W. Glynn Mangold. 2014. “Employee voice: Untapped resource or social media time bomb?” Business Horizons, 57(3), 401-411.
Nagar, Richa. 2019. “Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability: The 2017 Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture.” Antipode, 51(1), 3-24.
Neo, Harvey and J. Z. Ngiam. 2014. “Contesting captive cetaceans: (il)legal spaces and the nature of dolphins in urban Singapore.” Social & Cultural Geography, 15(3), 235-254.
O’Connor, Kimberly W. and Gordon B. Schmidt. 2015. ““Facebook fired” legal standards for social media–based terminations of K-12 public school teachers.” Sage Open, 5(1), 1-11.
Ogden, Laura A., Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita. 2013. “Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography.” Environment and society, 4(1), 5-24.
Rose, Deborah Bird and Thom van Dooren. 2017. “Encountering a more-than-human world: Ethos and the arts of witness.” In, Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen & Michelle Niemann (eds). The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, pp. 120-137.
Rowan, Andrew and Jeff Williams. 1987. “The success of companion animal management programs: A review.” Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 1(2), 110-122.
Sandoval, Marisol. 2009. “A critical contribution to the foundations of alternative media studies.” Kurgu: Online International Journal of Communication Studies, 1, 1-18.
Slater, Margaret R., Katherine A. Miller, Emily Weiss, Kathleen V. Makolinski & Lila AM Weisbrot. 2010. “A survey of the methods used in shelter and rescue programs to identify feral and frightened pet cats.” Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery 12(8), 592-600.
Srinivasan, Krithika. 2013. “The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the U.K. and India.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1), 106-119.
Stoddard, Elisabeth and Alice Hovorka. 2019. “Animals, vulnerability and global environmental change: The case of farmed pigs in concentrated animal feeding operations in North Carolina.” Geoforum, 100, 153-165.
Taylor, Nik. 2010. “Animal shelter emotion management: A case of in situ hegemonic resistance?” Sociology, 44(1), 85-101.
Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Urbanik, Julie. 2012. Placing animals: An introduction to the geography of human-animal relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Van Dooren, Thom. 2017. “Making Worlds with Crows: Philosophy in the Field.” In, The Multispecies Editing Collective (eds) “Troubling Species: Care and Belonging in a Relational World,” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, no. 1, pp. 59 – 66.
Van Patter, Lauren E. and Charlotte Blattner. 2020. “Advancing Ethical Principles for Non-Invasive, Respectful Research with Animal Participants.” Society & Animals 28(2), 171-190.
Winograd, Nathan J. 2007. Redemption: the myth of pet overpopulation and the no kill revolution in America. Los Angeles, CA: Almaden Books.
Winograd, Nathan J. 2009. Irreconcilable Differences: The Battle for the Heart & Soul of America’s Animal Shelters. N. Winograd.
Wolch, Jennifer and Jody Emel (eds.). 1998. Animal geographies: Place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. New York, NY: Verso.
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Published
2022-03-03
How to Cite
Johnston, J. J. (2022). Animal Activism, Nonhuman Charisma, and Ethical Considerations when Working with Captive Animals and Animal Agency Employees. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21(2), 113–129. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i2.2049
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Special Issue - Ethics of Multispecies Research
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