Animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal–human divide in pet-keeping

This paper explores the ways in which pet-owners in contemporary Britain mobilize the categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ in their attempts to understand their pets. Pet-keeping forms one of the closest forms of human–animal interaction in modern western society and as such provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways in which people understand the similarities and differences between humans and non-humans in the course of their daily lives. Through the close-lived nature of pet–human relationships, people come to understand these animals in a variety of ways which go beyond ideas of instinctual behaviour to recognize their individual subjectivity and ‘personhood’, but also respect their ‘animalness’ and difference, rather than valuing them simply on the basis of their similarity to humans. These disruptions of binary categories provide a model for understanding notions of ‘post-humanism’ in the lived reality of everyday life.