In December 2019, the Danish government finished building a fence on the border with Germany. Although the fence was nominally intended to prevent wild boar entering Denmark, the government had recently acquired enough barbed wire to reinforce it against human migrants. I tell the story of the wild boar fence in the context of a global trend for escalating border enforcement and environmental change. I explore how border fences shape human and wild animal worlds, drawing on ecological data and using theory from environmental history, border and animal studies. In order to understand how humans and wild animals interact with the German-Danish border fence, I journeyed along it on foot in August 2022. My methodology is autobiographical – by walking the route myself and interviewing local experts and activists in the field, I explored how far humans and wild animals are free to move on the German-Danish border and what habitat fragmentation means for them. Without the ability to move, species worldwide, including humans, could be trapped as regions become uninhabitable due to climate change. A barbed wire border fence on the German-Danish border could prevent people, deer, wolves and other species from adapting to dramatic sea level rise and flooding. I argue that migration is the adaptation, rather than the crisis, and that mobility is something to be protected rather than supressed.

The purpose of this study was to examine how a few travellers described animal agency in travelogues from the 17th century, printed in Swedish language. Because the aim of this paper was to study animal agency, the posthumanist perspective was chosen to analyse how the travellers both objectified animals and described certain animals to be able to express free agency. Furthermore, the study also examines how the travellers interpreted the animal’s free agency. First, the results show that animals were objectified in situations where animals functioned as economic resources, which also has been shown in previous research. Animals were objectified as tools, food, means of transportation and commodities. Second, the study shows that larger predators, the chameleon, the elephant and larger apes, were described to be able to express free agency. The larger predators exercised agency outside human living quarters and was interpreted negatively because of the danger they posed. This has also been shown in previous research. Third, and most important, the results indicate that humans didn’t view all animals the same. The travellers seem to have thought that certain animal individuals in certain situations could express free agency. For example, specific crocodiles were described to be able to choose whether to attack humans or not. They could also play with each other, which indicates that the author thought that the specific crocodile had emotions. Moreover, the elephant was described to be able to make its own decisions and only lacked the human ability to speak. In addition, the larger apes were deemed to be able to comprehend abstract concepts and act on conscious intention, like the elephant. Also, although the apes didn’t speak, they were believed to be able to. This shows that the travellers thought that specific animals could express free agency in given situations and had many so-called human abilities.

The field of equine therapy (ET) in Canada and the USA encompasses a range of distinct approaches, such as equine-facilitated therapy, equine-assisted therapy, therapeutic riding, and hippotherapy. Due to issues like inconsistent terminology and lack of standardized practice manuals, there are gaps in the ET knowledge about how these approaches relate or differ from each other. This research reviewed 47 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles about ET approaches and applied thematic analysis to determine key themes that clarify key traits of each approach. Recognizing that children and youth are common participants in equine therapy, this research was motivated by the questions: What type of relational dynamics are modelled for children and youth in ET? How are these horse-human relationships portrayed? Which participants possess their own agency? Findings of this research provide insights about each approach of ET and highlight the therapeutic affects of interspecies relationships between humans and horses. Contradictory viewpoints about mutual agency between species are identified in language that described horses are active, intelligent subjects and/or passive, inanimate objects. This research provides insights about the different forms of ET, highlights important benefits and gaps, and invites the fields of Child and Youth Care and Animal-Assisted Therapy to critically reflect on the relational tensions of employing non-human animals in human therapy. / Graduate

This essay concerns the relationship between humans and animals during the Late Iron Age, 450-1050 AD, in the Nordic region. The archaeological and osteological material studied is animal style ornamentation and inhumation and cremation graves. The essay is based on a human-animal perspective and is inspired by Human-Animal Studies (HAS). This perspective shows how an anthropocentric worldview and human exceptionalism have come to influence the previous research regarding humans and animals. From this perspective, the animal's agency becomes central, which means that the animal acts as its own subject that mutually affects people and each other. Several parallels between the animal style ornamentation and the osteological material are also apparent both within the previous research and within my own analysis. In the previous research, a secondary view of animals abounds, and the focus is on human agency. But in the study's analysis, it becomes clear how the animal's agency is present. In both materials examined, bodies are mixed and assimilated in different and unique ways. The interpretation of the material is that people during the Late Iron Age thought "with both people and animals" and that people wanted to be influenced by animals. There was a world view were all living beings were a transversal unit, a so-called zoe. Both humans and animals were becomings initiated in a process of eternal co-creation.

As humanity grapples with its significant global footprint in this era, there is a growing fascination with delving into the experiences and viewpoints of other animal species. This juncture offers an opportune moment to delve into the aesthetics of non-human animals by using diverse interdisciplinary methods and viewpoints. Insights of feminist aesthetics demonstrate how traditional understanding of aesthetics and aesthetic experience are heavily influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. Aesthetics as a humanistic discipline has determined the portrayal of non-human animals as beings with no capacity for aesthetic sensibility. In this thesis, I aim to bring to emergence the connection between human exceptionalist assumptions about aesthetics and the production of scientific knowledge about non-human animals. I defend the necessity of recognizing birds as beings with surprising and complex aesthetic sensibilities. Currently most scientists favor the adaptationist idea that the perception of beauty is influential in non-human animal lives only insofar as it serves to advertise fitness, and favor the reproduction and survival of the species. By weaving together insights from feminist philosophy of science and post-humanist studies of the human-animal bond, I present a framework capable of challenging human exceptionalist accounts of aesthetics. Particularly, I promote a methodology sensitive to the construction of gender in scientific portrayals of birds and their aesthetic preferences. I intertwine feminist critiques to pinpoint and challenge adumbrations of androcentrism in both animal sciences and aesthetics. Finally I examine, through an ungendered framework, instances of bowerbird behavior, and pinpoint aesthetic agency as an ability that we share in orchestration with other non-human animals. I conclude by proposing new avenues for research of non-human animal aesthetics.