Editors' introduction to the special issue “Privilege, vulnerability and care: Interspecies dynamics in rural landscapes”

Abstract

Animals are central actors within rural societies but remain largely invisible within both our empirical and theoretical analyses. Approximately 20 years ago in the pages of this journal, Tovey (2003) pointed to the significance of animals in effectively defining rurality: They are central to the rural economy and society and foster a sense among rural residents that they are organically embedded in an interspecies world. Thus, our shared relations with animals are key to understanding rural social relations and their underlying inequalities and hierarchies. Tovey suggested that it was therefore necessary and appropriate that rural sociology should develop its own approach to including animals in theorising rural society. We believe that such an approach is yet to emerge. The aim of this special issue is to outline what such an approach might look like and to present a diverse range of articles to get it underway. In what follows, then, as editors and contributors, we collectively explore the role and significance of human–animal relations in shaping rural society via a particular focus on relations of privilege, vulnerability and care. There has been a significant and far-reaching ‘animal turn’ across the social sciences. In geography, for example, an increasing focus on ‘animal spaces’ and ‘beastly places’ (Philo & Wilbert, 2000) has developed our understanding of how animals make and inhabit places (Hovorka et al., 2021). These attempts to ‘hear the cry’ of animals pose ontological and methodological challenges, expose previously unacknowledged power relations and encourage us to expand our interest beyond the most commonly considered species (Gibbs, 2020; see also Buller, 2014; Hovorka, 2018). Similarly, within history, taking animals seriously helps us develop more complete histories and also challenges basic assumptions of the discipline such as the historian's epistemic authority (Domanska, 2017; Fudge, 2017). Thus, Swart (2010) suggests that including other species in understanding the past is not an esoteric occupation but a radical challenge to the discipline as a whole; it represents another way of ‘doing history’ that recentres a marginalised group within the disciplinary line of sight. Sociologists have been slower to take up the animal challenge, partly because of their reluctance to consider animals as an oppressed group (Arluke, 2003) and ‘society’ as a more-than-human phenomenon (Peggs, 2013). Carter and Charles (2018, p. 81) argue that ‘sociology has had a fraught relationship with biology, that it is based on assumptions about human exceptionalism and that its emergence as a discipline has to be understood in the context of industrialisation and urbanisation’. Nonetheless, in recent years, we have brought animals into the sociological study of alienation (Stuart et al., 2013), violence (Cudworth, 2015), work (Dashper, 2020), sustainability (Wadham, 2020) and technology (Latimer & Birke, 2009), for example, extending our understanding of these concepts by doing so. Beyond academia, there has been growing awareness and acceptance of animals as members of society. In the UK, for example, 53% of adults have a companion animal, with an estimated population of 11 million dogs and 11 million cats (PDSA, 2023), equalling the numbers found in the EU (Statista, 2023). Similarly, many of the 500,000 people foregoing meat in ‘Veganuary’ cite reducing animal suffering as a key motivator (Guardian, 2021). Elsewhere in Europe, these changing understandings of relations between humans and animals are increasingly acknowledged through initiatives and laws such as the recognition of animal rights in the German and Swiss constitutions and the Great Ape Project to extend legal personhood to gorillas and other large primates, which began in Spain's Balearic Islands in 2007 (Pozas Terrados, 2020). Rural sociology risks becoming marginalised within these wider efforts to include animals within academic and public discussion. Since