This dissertation approaches both being and knowledge as functionally no different than storytelling, with stories themselves given life by the various theoretical and narrative frameworks and strategies through which they are shaped and made credible. Storytelling is the foundational methodology of this work, and the work itself takes imagination as central to complicating and disrupting the normative terms (i.e., the stories) of both being and knowledge. Its particular agenda is in making space for imagining futures without both war and the figure of the human, especially the human as Man, as a way through the interminable conflict characteristic of the contemporary historical moment. Situated in the field of human-animal studies, the analysis takes up military working dogs, which I argue are made to sustain the disimagination processes inherent to militarization. The innate dehumanization of war requires narratives that recover the human, and dogs, as companion species and creatures of the home, are especially well positioned for this task. Drawing on Black feminist thought, and anti-colonial insights from Indigenous thinkers, this work also shows how such dogs are used strategically within assemblages of whiteness to reify certain forms of sovereignty at the expense of both racialized people and dogs. Finally, I argue that imagining futures without conflict and war requires asking seemingly unimaginable questions, such as why sacrificing dogs in combat seems an unassailable truth given the alternatives. By asking such questions, I seek to engage a kind of radical imagination unconstrained by the limits of Man as the locus of ethics, especially during times of conflict, and to bring about an appreciation of dogs, whether in combat or otherwise, as beings for whom our responsibility to, and ethical relation with, runs far deeper than most humans willingly acknowledge. / Dissertation / Candidate in Philosophy / This project looks at weaponized and military working dogs within the context of war and conflict to examine the stories we tell about them, and what these stories do. I ask, how do these stories work and who are they for? To answer these questions, I traverse an expansive archive that includes, among other things, popular media representations, military memoir, mainstream journalism, and documentary film. I am especially interested in the ways stories about dogs inform how we understand war, militarization, and race, and how they impact the operation of power and sovereignty. I argue that dogs have been used to teach us who is and isn’t human, but that our obligation and responsibility to the gift that dogs bring is to undo the oppressive story of Man, which institutes untold amounts of suffering and oppression across species, and to tell new stories in its place.

Seit dem in den 1990er Jahren proklamierten Animal Turn befasst sich das interdisziplinäre Forschungsfeld der Human-Animal Studies mit dem von Missverständnissen geprägten Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Tier. Das Bestreben liegt darin, Disziplinen wie Biologie, Philosophie, Soziologie, Anthropologie und Geschichte zusammenzuführen und einen Perspektivwechsel hin zur Anerkennung nichtmenschlicher Wirkmächtigkeit und ihrer Agency vorzunehmen. Ich werde zu Beginn meiner Arbeit nachvollziehen, in welchem Maße die religiöse, wissenschaftliche und philosophische Zentrierung des Menschen immer wieder dazu gedient hat, jedwede Form von Unterdrückung und Gewalt an sogenannten Anderen zu legitimieren. Dies war und ist nur dadurch möglich, dass sich der angebliche Universalismus des Menschen aus dem Konstrukt des heterosexuellen, weißen Mannes speist(e), dessen Männlichkeit als geschlechtslos, dessen „Weißsein als unrassifiziert, Cis-Geschlechtlichkeit als echt, und so weiter“ (Laboria Cuboniks 2015: 26) erscheint. So wurden „Tiere“, „Frauen“ und „Schwarze“ in abendländischen Diskursen immer wieder als „Andere“ konstruiert, diffamiert, diskriminiert und eliminiert. Während das Überleben auf einem gemeinsamen Planeten einen ebenso bescheidenen wie essentiellen Anspruch formuliert, bleibt darüber hinaus auf kommende Gemeinschaften zu hoffen, in der unterschiedlichen Seins- und Beziehungsweisen nicht mit Gewalt und Unterdrückung, sondern gegenseitigem Respekt, Neugierde und „uneigennütziger Solidarität“ (Vgl. Ebd.: 33) begegnet wird, sowohl zwischen Menschen als auch zwischen Spezies. Die Bestrebungen der Human-Animal Studies sind in diesem Sinne basal für zukünftige, fürsorglichere Gesellschaften, die erst mit der Überwindung des Anthropozentrismus möglich sind. Wie kommen wir endlich von den etablierten Positionen im Nachdenken über humans und nonhuman animals hin zu einer Neukonstitution von Beziehungsweisen und zu der Anerkennung produktiver Differenzen? Einen eigenen Wissenskanon zu formulieren, ist eine wirksame Intervention, um den hartnäckigen Fundamenten den Kampf anzusagen. Diese Arbeit ist in dieser Hinsicht auch eine Dokumentation meiner Recherche nach Verbündeten, deren Gemeinsamkeiten und produktiven Differenzen. Die titelgebenden ANIMAL REMINDER leihe ich mir von Martha C. Nussbaum und etabliere sie im Laufe der Arbeit als eine Figur der Transition: ANIMAL REMINDER verweisen auf die Probleme und Potentiale an porösen Grenzübergängen. Deren Koordinaten sind variabel und einer Vielzahl an Interpretationen und Irritationen unterworfen. ANIMAL REMINDER kommentieren zeitgenössische Diskurse an den Schnittstellen von feministischer Theorie, Kunst, Technik und Wissenschaft und lassen sie in unterschiedlichen Bedeutungsfacetten changieren. Sie durchwirken und verbinden die folgenden Kapitel auf der Suche nach widerständigen Praktiken: ANIMAL REMINDER erscheinen in der Liebe, in Verwandtschaften, bei der Reproduktion, in Architekturen, als Abjekte und Monster. Sie sind trans*, sie atmen und sind belebt. Ausgehend von der Ordnung der Lebewesen als nur eine mögliche von vielen, werde ich die Möglich- und Wirklichkeiten der Transformation sozialer Beziehungen und deren Bedingungen erforschen. Interdependenzen zwischen menschlichen und speziesübergreifenden Beziehungen werde ich fortlaufend bespiegeln. Mit dieser Arbeit erhebe ich keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit, ihre Form der künstlerischen Recherche ist unabgeschlossen und durchlässig. Mein Umgang mit Sprache, Verknüpfung und Übersetzung ist spielerisch und beharrt auf ebendieser Unabgeschlossenheit. Jack Halberstam benutzt in seinen* Arbeiten den Asterisk nicht zur Markierung eines alternierenden Geschlechts, sondern drückt damit die „prinzipielle Konstruiertheit und Instabilität jeglicher (Geschlechts-)Identität“ (Halberstam 2021: 10) aus. „Trans* sei demnach weder als ein Seinszustand noch als ein zielgerichteter Übergang zu verstehen, sondern als genuine Unabgeschlossenheit ungewisser Seinsweisen, wie – aus einer queer-dekonstruktiven Perspektive – in letzter Konsequenz alle Identitäten betrachtet werden müssen.“ (Ebd.: 11) So bestand laut Halberstam auch der Nutzen des Begriffs queer nie darin, etwas zu beschreiben: „Queer sollte nie ein Begriff sein, mit dem sich jemand vollständig identifiziert, den jemand für sich in Anspruch nimmt […] Die Intention war vielmehr, mit queer ein kritisches Verhältnis zu Identität auszudrücken.“ (Halberstam 2007: 30) Dieses kritische Verhältnis ist für ANIMAL REMINDER wesentlich. Queere Diskurse sind in einer zweiten Hinsicht für diese Arbeit von Bedeutung: So wie das Tier als Prototyp für die Konstruktion von Andersartigkeit dient(e), können die Verhandlungen am Geschlecht als beispielhaft für die kulturelle Tradierung des Verhältnisses von Norm und Tatsache gelesen werden (Vgl. Laboria Cuboniks 2015: 22). Dieses Verhältnis ist laut Laboria Cuboniks nie festgelegt, sondern der unendlichen Aufgabe des Entwirrens unterlegen (Vgl. Ebd.: 28). Laboria Cuboniks (2015): „Xenofeminismus – Eine Politik für die Entfremdung“. In: Armen Avanessian, Helen Hester (Hg.): Dea Ex Machina. Merve Verlag Berlin Halberstam, Jack (2021): Trans*Positionen zu Geschlecht und Architektur. Anna Babka, Rosemarie Brucher (Hg.), Verlag Turia+r Kant Wien Berlin:Vorwort DELTA FIKTIVE TIERE* ANIMAL LOVERS [CON]FUSION ARCHITEKTUREN WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN

Nineteenth-Century Pets and the Politics of Touch examines texts of the era in which both humans and animals find empowerment at the point of physical encounter. I challenge contemporary perceptions of human-pet relationships as sweetly affectionate by focusing on touch. I uncover an earlier interest in the close reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that these nineteenth-century thinkers presented what I call a “politics of touch,” in which intimate and often jarring physical encounters allow for mutuality and autonomy. I first turn to Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and protective violence, a condoned ferocity that frequently unites and guards pet and pet keeper against unwanted amorous intrusions, while also showcasing animal agency and the possibility of deviation from the pet keeper’s wishes. Brontë’s animals simultaneously preserve and rework the traditional form of the marriage plot, allowing for powerful animal-centric possibilities. In chapter 2, I analyze the affective maternal and erotic bonds between women and their pets in Olive Schreiner’s novels. While this touch was frequently seen by both protofeminists and people antagonistic to women’s rights as a cause for disdain because affection was supposedly misplaced, it is a crucial part of Schreiner’s feminist project in that it provides forms of maternity outside of the socially mandated wifehood and motherhood that Schreiner so resents for stripping women of their autonomy. For chapter 3, I seek to complicate readings of Count Fosco, the compelling villain of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), to show the disquieting sympathy that privileges odd women and animals. Heeding Count Fosco shows that valuable sympathy is not a pretty picture of a lovely woman walking with her purebred dog, but rather the excessively grotesque images of an unattractive woman holding a dying dog in her arms and mice and birds erotically clamoring over a fat man’s body. The final chapter considers the violent sympathetic touch evidenced in the practice of mercifully killing grieving dogs in Frances Power Cobbe’s animal advocacy texts. I argue that Cobbe’s schema recognizes gender fluidity as she posits a feminized animal grief marked by excess, while she concurrently masculinizes human sympathy by making it violent through mercy killings that complicate our accepted understandings of nineteenth-century sentiment. In contrast to other scholars of nineteenth-century animal studies who look at how humans understand and treat animals, my focus on the reciprocity of human-animal touch keeps animals at the center of my analysis. I argue that nineteenth-century sympathetic and sentimental texts, often dismissed as trite or as creating distance between the sympathizing subject and object of sympathy, demonstrate theoretical and political complexity through representations of shockingly intimate touch. In doing so, Victorian writers anticipated and even transcended recent theoretical conversations in the field of feminist animal studies.

Despite growing academic interest in the human–animal relationship, little research has been directed toward the political regulation of animal treatment. Even less attention has been accorded to the emergence of the long dominant paradigm in this policy area, namely, the ideology of animal welfare. This book attempts to address this gap by chronicling the early history of animal politics in Sweden with the aim of producing a critical, deconstructive genealogy of animal cruelty and animal welfare. The study ranges from the first political debates about animal cruelty in 1844 to the institution of Sweden’s first comprehensive animal protection act in 1944. Taking a post-Marxist and psychoanalytically informed approach to discourse analysis, the study focuses on how the “problem” of animal cruelty was articulated in the parliamentary debates and government documents throughout the period: What was the problem of animal (mis)treatment represented to be? What kinds of animal (ab)use were rendered uncontroversial? What kind of affective investments and ideological fantasies underpinned these discursive constructions, and how did the problematizations change over time? The book contains six empirical chapters that deal with the most important legal revisions in the period as well as the parallel debates about animal experimentation and slaughter. Two major discursive regimes—an early “anti-cruelty regime” and a later “animal welfare regime”—are identified in the material, and the transition between them is theorized in terms of discursive antagonism and dislocation. Focusing on the conflict between competing discursive logics, the study charts a century of ideological struggles through which our modern attitudes toward animals were born. The book also offers a critical reinterpretation of the success story of animal welfare. Against the assumption that modern animal welfarism progressively grew out of the preceding anti-cruelty regime, the central claim of this book is that the “welfarist turn” that took place in the 1930s and 1940s also functioned to re-entrench society’s speciesist values and de-problematize the exploitation of animals for human purposes.

Animal slaughter has recently become highly visible in popular food media. This thesis interrogates the myths, assumptions and ideologies underlying this so-called New Carnivore movement, through critical analysis of a range of popular gastronomic texts. Socially-constructed ideas about ‘reality’, ‘sentimentality’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘redemption’ are intimately implicated in the process of animal slaughter, as are the notions of ‘good taste’ and social distinction. The domination of animals, demonstrated through the slaughter, butchery, and consumption of nonhuman bodies, is held to be an integral component in the performance of gender, as well as a means of reconnecting, via a kind of secular epiphany, with ‘Nature’ at its most authentic. As a hostile backlash against the social progress made by the animal advocacy and vegetarian movements, New Carnivorism denigrates vegetarianism and veganism as outdated, unfashionable, unnatural, puritanical and rude. Although these texts’ potential to inspire farmed animal welfare reform should not be ignored, New Carnivorism ultimately serves to naturalize, justify and promote the continued consumption of meat, and the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals, in Western societies.

While human-animal relations have always been part of human cultures the public zoo is a relatively recent phenomenon that reflects very specific elements of Western cultures’ modern ideas about, and relationships with, nonhuman animals. By becoming such a familiar part of popular culture the zoo naturalises these ideas as well as certain modes of looking at and interacting with animals. In this thesis I argue that as literary works contemporary novels provide a valuable defamiliarisation of zoos which encourages the re-examination of the human attitudes and practices that inform our treatment of nonhuman animals. Through my analysis of J.M. Ledgard’s novel 'Giraffe', Diane Hammond’s 'Hannah’s Dream', Lydia Millet’s 'How The Dead Dream', Valerie Martin’s 'The Great Divorce' and Ben Dolnick’s 'Zoology' I explore the inherently anthropocentric social construction of nonhuman animals in human discourses and the way the novels conform to or subvert these processes. I demonstrate that nonhuman animal characters are constructed through a process of identification which involves naming, recognising the existence of their emotions and mediating their nonhuman forms of communication. Anthropocentric tendencies both aid and hinder this identification, for example the human valuing of sight over the other senses that sees eyes become important literary symbols and the gaze a crucial part of interaction and attributing meaning. Gaze and observation are also fundamental to the concept of the zoo where human treatment of nonhuman animals is represented in visual terms in the relationship between powerful spectator and disempowered object. Drawing on texts from multiple disciplines I argue that the anthropocentric nature of socially constructed nonhuman animals in human discourses means that any study of these animals is actually concerned with the human ideologies and processes that create them; as a site of captivity that markets wildness and freedom the paradoxical nature of the zoo provides the literary setting for an exploration of these themes.

This thesis explores how people in mountainous regions of Albania interrelate with large carnivores. For the research, I used a combination of questionnaire survey and ethnographic fieldwork to generate insights into how rural dwellers perceive and interact with bears, wolves and lynx. Research and conservation efforts relating to large carnivores in areas where they live near humans often have a strong focus on human-wildlife conflicts; with the presumption that conflicts are a central part of people’s relationships with predators. I argue that, although conflicts between people and predators do occur, human-predator relationships in highland Albania are complex and diverse, beyond a simple engagement with conflict-causing animals. Large carnivores have rich local cultural profiles; each species being differently perceived, and responded to, by local groups in terms of their beliefs about the behaviours and characteristics of the animals. I argue that large carnivores are constructed, and responded to, as social actors and, as such, they are integrated into the moral community of humans. Customary codes that regulate the social life of people in highland Albania seem to extend into relationships with carnivores. Damages from predators are largely interpreted and evaluated on principles of belonging and moral integrity with little considerations of their financial aspects. Lack of conservation efforts from Albanian institutions for prolonged periods of time, and the remoteness of mountain communities, has brought about a situation in which locals have been largely left uninfluenced in shaping their relationships with large carnivores. I contend that such a situation, albeit seemingly problematic from an outside perspective, is particularly beneficial in maintaining low conflicts with, or over, predators. Recent increases in conservation efforts in Albania may influence relationships between people and predators in the future. Conservation actors will be faced with the challenge of avoiding possible conflict escalation to the detriment of large carnivores and to rural livelihoods.

This Master thesis contains a risk assessment regarding the possibility for humans to be bitten by dogs in Denmark. As a part of this risk assessment the thesis contains an analysis of the effect of the introduction of legal bans of specific breeds in Denmark. Furthermore, the thesis contains an analysis of the societal context for the Danish legislation. This is done with back ground in models of risk management developed by James Reason and William Haddon Jr. The conclusion is that the Danish society continuously is vulnerable regarding the risk of humans being bitten by dogs – and that the ban of certain breeds have been without effect on the number of persons seeking hospital care for dog bites. The thesis demonstrates that the risk of human dog bites is highest in the private sphere and in the local area. The thesis reveal that the Danish state has failed to target the principal factors: context, situation and relation between man and dog in connection to situations where dog bites occur. / <p>Bedømt til karakteren "VG".</p>

Within human animal studies (HAS), as well as within the posthumanistic field in general, it has been pointed out that we still lack knowledge of how animals can be recognized as subjects and agents with the possession of cognitive and social abilities. At the same time, we see a re-evaluation of the human anthropocentric boundary between Man and the Beast – in the academic world as well as in the practice of everyday life. One example is how the prevalent ways of relating to and handling with horses – our traditional equine cultures – are under transition. Norms, attitudes and practices – not least those relating to equestrian sports – are changing; some people even believe in a “paradigm shift”, while others predict a future “horse revolution”. This ethnological contribution to the field of HAS aims to study the acknowledgement of the horse as subject, how it is being expressed and practised by egalitarian communities within the Swedish horse society, and what the implications of that acknowledgement are, for both human and horse. Consisting of interviews and participant observations and seen through the lens of a phenomenological HAS-perspective, the empirical material shows that the egalitarian approach implies ethical and practical consequences. Not only does it entail considerations regarding such things as horse keeping, riding style, competitions, training and conditioning methods – for some individuals it may also implicate a personal change, as they discover the horse’s message of presence and authenticity

“An Examination of the Death and Dying of Companion Animals” explores the human-animal relationship as enacted in the home by becoming interspecies families. In particular, these relationships are considered when companion animals are dying and in need of special care and attention. This work provides historical and cultural context for how humans attend to animals in death and dying through the history of pet keeping and a complex literature review to explore the intersections of death and dying and religion, and human-animal studies. Specifically, models for companion animal end-of-life care replicate those services for humans by providing palliative care and a myriad of other treatments to attend to the suffering of aging and terminal pets. In addition to examining the creation of companion animal hospice and how it has quickly grown since the early 2000s, this work also confronts questions of euthanasia as a burdensome decision-making process. The decision to euthanize a loved one is fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty, and, at times, guilt. These experiences are idiosyncratic and by creating a discourse and popular platform through which to share these instances of death and dying, this project contributes to the newly established death positivity movement in drawing attention to caring for dead bodies in the home. This project ends by exploring after-death-care for companion animals. Burial and cremation are still, for the most part, how human families dispose of companion animal bodies. In addition to these more traditional forms of disposition, companion humans are also starting to preserve their companion animal bodies through taxidermy and freeze-drying. Though still considered grotesque by many companion humans, companion animal body preservation is just one example of new and reimagined mourning rituals. It is through these rituals and the recognition of this particular grief that the human-animal relationship in the home is seen in a new, complicated, ambiguous and intimate light. / Religion