Talk audio: https://soundcloud.com/australian-sociology-tasa/rovers-revolutioncomplicity-and-resistance-in-human-companion-animal-relationships This talk is from the Sociology and Animals session at the ‘Precarity, Rights and Resistance’ conference by The Australian Sociological Association (TASA): https://tasa.org.au/sociology-and-animals/ You can follow Zoei on Twitter @zoei_sutton and see the following link to see her academic publications: http://flinders.academia.edu/zoeisutton

1. Rover’s revolution? Complicity and resistance in
human-companion animal relationships
Zoei Sutton
(@zoei_sutton)
PhD Candidate
Flinders University
Image accessed: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2017-01/26/12/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web-14/sub-
buzz-19072-1485451646-1.jpg?resize=625:637 on 15/11/2018

2. Agenda
• Key terms
• Resistance and Animals
• Method
• Findings - Rupture moments,
Resistance and Complicity

3. Key Terms
• Resistance - An active physical,
cognitive or verbal behaviour in
opposition to some sort of power
(Hollander & Einwohner 2004)
• Anthroparchy - A system of
dominance that maintains the
oppression of nonhuman animals
through structures that privilege
the wants and needs of humans
(Cudworth 2005; 2011)

4. Methods
1. Qualitative Interviews (n=30)
2. Observation
3. Visual Representation

5. Resistance and animals
• Can animals resist?
• Yes… but their ability to do so is
constrained (Cudworth 2011;
Carter & Charles 2011; 2013)
• Animals ‘fighting back’ (Hribal
2011)
• Turning to the instruments of
oppression (Wadiwel 2016)
• Need a more complex view of
resistance - action and affective
(Hollander & Einwohner 2004;
Hynes 2013)

6. Rupture moments
• Bearing witness to “acceptable”
practices
• Re-shaping ideas through
‘becoming with’ companions
• External interventions (training,
veganism)
• Interview process

7. Resistance by/for animals
•Resistance in public
•Intentional interventions
•Unwitting resistance

8. Complicity
• While owners may seek to
challenge anthroparchal norms in
their relationships, they are
constantly (re)creating minded
animals as pets and are thus
complicit in their oppression
• Resistance is rarely
‘pure’ (Hollander & Einwohner
2004)

9. Companion Animals in the
resistance movement
“we cannot force people to make moral and
ethical choices while they’re staring down the
barrel of a gun” (Torres 2007, p.142)
• Resistance by/for companion animals is
necessary to the broad structural changes
animal liberationists are advocating for
• The interventions reported as influential in
promoting positive relations (rupture
moments) and the resistant acts that occur
as a result of these altered worldviews
indicate that h-ca relationships have the
potential to effect broad attitudinal shifts
• Improve the living conditions of companion
animals now