Cockapoo Crisis! Social tensions in multispecies wellbeing

In recent years there has been a dramatic surge in claims that particular human-animal relationships offer win-win wellbeing benefits, which strengthen the physical and mental health of not only humans but the other species within these relations. This paper draws upon the case study of hypoallergenic dogs based on preliminary work for a five-year project, ‘Multispecies Mutualisms’, that interrogates both the potentials and the risks of multispecies relationships that are popularly presented as mutually beneficial. Drawing on ethnographic observation of nature reserves and documentary analysis of materials from pet-focused NGOs, the paper focuses on two interrelated social challenges that complicate wellbeing narratives about human-dog relations by bringing their broader sociological contexts into relief. Firstly, it focuses on an emerging set of tensions surrounding labour practices associated with the contemporary pet industry, pertaining to dog-walking gig-work and the growth of informal markets to supply popular breeds. Secondly, the paper reflects on how competing understandings of wellbeing (between different groups of people, dogs, and other species) generate social tensions about access to green space. By centring these tensions, and elucidating how competing understandings of wellbeing become (un)resolved in practice, the paper also offers a wider intervention into approaches to conceiving of human-dog bonds that have gathered force in social theory. In particular, the paper illustrates the need to rethink prominent ways of conceptualising human-dog entanglements, which are grounded in posthumanism and new materialism, by interrogating the socio-economic forces that are implicated in these relations.

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