TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies https://trace.journal.fi/ <p><em>Trace — Journal for Human-Animal Studies</em> is a peer-reviewed,&nbsp;fully open access online journal that&nbsp;provides a forum for research and discussion of human-animal relations from social and cultural perspectives.&nbsp;The journal&nbsp;publishes original research articles, lectiones praecursoriae, and conference reports, as well as reviews on books, art exhibitions, films, and other media. <em>Trace </em>accepts submissions in English, Finnish and Swedish.</p> Finnish Society for Human-Animal Studies (YKES ry) en-US TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies 2343-0591 <p>When sending a manuscript the author(s) accept <a href="https://trace.journal.fi/contract" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the digital publishing contract</a> (please open the link and read it!). The publishing contract covers the publication of the manuscript on the digital versions of the <em>Trace</em> journal according to the Open Access principles and the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license<strong>&nbsp;</strong>[<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a>].&nbsp; (NB! Changed on January 28, 2020!) The conditions allow the author to retain copyright to his/her work and anyone to copy and distribute it for free in any medium and form, changed or unchanged provided that appropriate credit to author(s) is given, a link provided to the license, and any changes are indicated. Information on copyright issues in Finland is given by <a href="https://www.kopiosto.fi/kopiosto/en_GB/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Kopiosto</a>.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Trace</em> is a scientific journal that doesn't pursue economic gain. Instead, the purpose of the publishing contract is to acknowledge the moral rights of the author(s) to their work and make possible the distribution of results of scientific research in the <em>Trace</em> journal in print as well as in digital form.&nbsp;</p> <p>The license concerning the metadata of published articles is Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).</p> <p class="P6_borderEnd">More information about open science in Finland:</p> <p class="P7"><a href="https://openscience.fi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://openscience.fi/</a></p> <p><a href="https://libraryguides.helsinki.fi/oa/eng" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://libraryguides.helsinki.fi/oa/eng</a></p> Val Plumwood’s contribution to intersectional veganism https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/142048 Richard Twine Copyright (c) 2024 Richard Twine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 220 239 Unveiling the strategic discourse of european dairy industry pressure groups: A Critical Animal Studies perspective https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/136722 <p class="p1">This article examines the discourse of pressure groups within the European Dairy Industry (EDI) using a Critical Animal Studies perspective. The study first identifies the EDI as a powerful economic actor by analysing its key companies, pressure groups, and their relationships. Then, it analyses the discourse constructed and the rhetorical devices these interest groups use regarding 1) the animals exploited by the industry and 2) the nutritional recommendations influencing dietary guidelines. The dairy industry forms a significant economic and corporate conglomerate that actively influences food recommendations and maintains extensive coalitions and lobbying efforts. The EDI interest groups tailor their narrative to align with current environmental, health, and animal welfare concerns while paradoxically contradicting them. Notably, the interest groups entirely disregard the interests of animals in their discourse, representing them as inanimate objects devoid of sentience, autonomy, and individuality through a series of rhetorical devices.</p> María Ruiz Carreras Copyright (c) 2024 María Ruiz Carreras https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 6 36 10.23984/fjhas.136722 ”You don’t have the right to steal my life”: Exploring the harms of puppy farming on ex-breeding dogs https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/131170 <p class="p1">The last decade or so has witnessed a growing body of work within green criminology exploring forms of non-human animal abuse and harms involving companion animals. To date, however, comparably less attention has been paid to the puppy trade and the phenomena of commercial dog breeding facilities (or puppy mills/puppy farms). The aim of this article is to add to this literature by exploring the multiple harms of puppy farming, focusing on its impact on the breeding dogs themselves; specifically breeding bitches. Adopting a green criminological perspective and drawing on interviews with animal rescue staff, foster carers and those who have adopted ex-breeding dogs within the UK, the article explores the harms of puppy farming on their bodies and behaviours. Interviewees describe how ex-breeding dogs are physically worn out after a life of constant breeding and often suffer from a range of often serious medical issues. In addition, they were invariably emotionally shut down, exhibiting anxiety and phobic responses when confronted with new situations, people and sounds, as well as ones that recalled the conditions in which they were kept while in the puppy farm.</p> John Walliss Copyright (c) 2024 John Walliss https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 38 61 10.23984/fjhas.131170 Becoming known: Practicing equine rescue and rehabilitation as a response-able ethic of interspecies care https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/131074 <p class="p1">In this paper we discuss the intertwining of care with learning to know and become with the other in interspecies relationships. Drawing on interviews at horse rescue yards (England), we ask: How does an animal come to be known? What does it mean to care with an animal well? How does animal agency shape the practicing of response-able care? Caring well for a rescue horse is centred upon establishing an intimate knowledge of horses as individuals and as agents of their own life. Often the life history of an individual animal is not known and it is up to the human to imagine a possible past and present for them by interacting with the animal. Central to this process is how the agencies of both human and horse shape the emerging relational embodied interaction. Weaving together scholarship on care, agency, and interspecies relationality, we explore how the situated and intertwined processes of getting to know the other and caring well unfold. Our main assertion is that the relational knowledge which underpins the practicing of a response-able ethic of interspecies care is itself dependent on the ability of both animal and human to actively enter into a mutual (ongoing) process of learning to know and become know-able by the other. By its very (relational) nature, therefore, practicing a response-able ethic of interspecies care is simultaneously situational, dynamic, intimate and unstable. It is beyond the control of either individual alone, yet ultimately not always determinable by mutual consent of either.</p> Alex Franklin Nora Schuurman Copyright (c) 2024 Alex Franklin, Nora Schuurman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 62 84 10.23984/fjhas.131074 Flying cats and dogs: Relationality, empathy and care in the transportation of animals by air https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/124730 <p class="p1">The carrying of companion animals by air has grown into an international business involving approved vets, pet travel agencies, airlines, and animal terminals. This study investigates how the experience of transportation is shaped and draws theoretically on an approach of more-than-human mobility. In detail, I approach mobility through relationality, empathy, and caring practices by considering air transportation as an anthropocentric means of animal movement. Movement, including the specific conditions used to carry companion animals, influences the experience of mobility, triggering multispecies empathy and caring practices. Empirical accounts provide 16 online interviews with cat and dog caregivers analyzed via a qualitative content analysis. The interviewees shared transportation experiences in the aircraft cabin, in the hold, or when carrying animals as cargo. The analysis reveals that caregivers and companion animals experience air transportation relationally and the separation of caregivers and companion animals causes negative transport experiences.</p> Lucia Gräschke Copyright (c) 2024 Lucia Gräschke https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 86 104 10.23984/fjhas.124730 Centring animal experience through comics-based research: The case of Pavlov’s dogs https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/136589 <p class="p1">The focus of this article is the collaborative creation of <em>Pavlov and the Kingdom of Dogs</em>, a graphic nonfiction novel aimed at highlighting the lives of dogs experimented upon by Ivan Pavlov in late 19th and early 20th-century Russia. The novel delves into the intricate human-canine relationships within the context of St. Petersburg’s scientific, cultural, and political landscape. The collaboration between a researcher, a professional illustrator, and a script editor aimed to challenge anthropocentric narratives prevalent in historical representations of Pavlov and experimental science. Rooted in animal studies and psychology, this project explores the potential of arts-based methods to centre animals and their relationships within historical contexts. It aims to deepen depictions of animal experiences and agency while bridging the gap between human-animal studies and psychology, where attention to animal lives in research settings remains limited. By focusing on Pavlov’s experiments, the project seeks to redefine experimental animals as active historical subjects, contributing to broader discussions on human-animal relationships and ethical responsibilities. The article delineates the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the graphic novel, provides insights into the comics-based research process, and discusses the affordances and challenges of this approach. It concludes by reflecting on the potential of comics-based research to engage both academic and public audiences, ultimately advocating for a deeper understanding of human-animal entanglements and their implications in contemporary society.</p> Matthew Adams Copyright (c) 2024 Matthew Adams https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 106 135 10.23984/fjhas.136589 Thinking with traces: A posthumanist reading of human and nonhuman agencies in Zhu Yingchun’s The Language of Bugs https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/136668 <p class="p1"><em>The Language of Bugs</em> by Zhu Yingchun (2018) is an art book wavering between the linguistic and the bodily, visual arts and literature. Consisting of thousands of traces left on paper by real-life insects and their bodily movements, it does not contain any text traditionally readable for humans, but claims to be a book written entirely in the language of insects. The traces indicate nonhuman agency for the insects and present writing and literature as subjects of nonhuman actions and messy interspecies collaboration. At the same time, the book rises questions on insect “language” and the possibility of ethical representation originating from a very human point-of-experience. In this article, I reflectively explore different crossings of human and nonhuman agencies in <em>The Language of Bugs</em>, as well as how the book engages with questions of representation and materiality, writing and literature in the framework of posthumanist reading. I analyse the book as participating in the attempt to notice more-than-human ways of being in literature and culture, which are traditionally only perceived through human agency. The context of my reading is threat posed by ecological crises and especially the decline in insect populations for the future of the planet. I argue that Zhu Yingchun’s book represents a wider shift in thinking about the natural world and humans’ place in it. Ultimately, the book articulates one very basic question: can literature widen to include traces of nonhuman movements?</p> Sofia Bister Copyright (c) 2024 Sofia Bister https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 136 159 10.23984/fjhas.136668 "Ché Coco, ché Coco": An animal reading of Coco the parrot in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/126115 <p class="p1">The various human characters of Jean Rhys’s novel <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em> (1966) have attracted the attention of literary scholars from different perspectives. However, the novel’s nonhuman animal characters have previously been studied mainly as symbols for human actions and destinies. In this article, I problematise this type of anthropocentric approach from a Human-Animal Studies and a literary criticism perspective. I analyse Coco as a character of the novel and as a member of his own species. My analysis examines the nature of human-animal relationships, their representations in literature, and the binary oppositions inherent in them. Additionally, I critically evaluate the ways in which nonhuman animals are perceived and depicted in cultural representations. I argue that Rhys shows Coco as a parrot with species-typical behaviour and as a character with his own agency. Nevertheless, one should not disregard his symbolic functions, which draw attention to gendered colonial violence. Furthermore, the symbolic and linguistic violence in the novel forces the nonhuman animal into a position below the human animal and normalises violence towards nonhuman animals. The human-animal relationships in <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em> vary from something akin to close companionship all the way to subjugation under the will of the more powerful.</p> Reeta Kangas Copyright (c) 2024 Reeta E. Kangas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 160 179 10.23984/fjhas.126115 Weird birds and abandoned places: Pigeons’ role in post-industrial settings https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/131533 <p class="p1">This article examines the role of pigeons (<em>Columba livia domestica</em>) in post-industrial settings and presents a case study of an abandoned pulp mill silo in Meri-Toppila, Oulu, Finland. Pigeons and humans have a long-shared history, during which the former’s role has changed from commodity to “nuisance” species. Using participant observation and perspectives from weirding and queer theory, this study explores the transformation of the human-bird relationship by observing a colony of pigeons at a culturally and historically significant site. In our urban cities, pigeons have found nesting places in attics, on building ledges and in nooks and abandoned structures. Even though we, as humans, avoid these abandoned places, these weird pigeons do not care about our dystopian images and instead thrive in places that we no longer consider valuable. Our everyday life could benefit from interaction with pigeons more than we might believe. Pigeons have become an integral part of our industrial heritage and could have a significant role to play in our daily lives if we were to only give them a chance.</p> Marjo Juola Copyright (c) 2024 Marjo Juola https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 180 202 10.23984/fjhas.131533 Human wildlife coexistence: A shark centric perspective https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/115617 Jennifer Rebecca Schauer Erin Catherine Walsh Cosette LeCoq Patterson Copyright (c) 2024 Jennifer Rebecca Schauer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10 204 218 Editorial https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/144985 Pauliina Rautio Copyright (c) 2024 Pauliina Rautio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-04-15 2024-04-15 10