Shared spaces on the street: a multispecies ethnography of ex-racing greyhound street collections in South Wales, UK

ABSTRACT

Every year in the towns and cities across Wales, humans and ex-racing greyhounds come together onto the streets in the name of charity. These public fundraising and awareness-raising events offer unique opportunities to unravel the reciprocal strands of canine and human experience which coalesce in leisure contexts. I conducted ethnographic research culminating in an autoethnographical account of four of these events, to determine how these encounters might be constituted for multispecies participants. Humans intra-acting with greyhounds on the street experienced an affective state; what I have termed an ‘auric imprint’, which prompted further exchanges of an emotional, economic and practical nature. Ideologies about greyhounds were underpinned by cultural understandings, situating these dogs as ‘not-like-other-dogs’ and resulting in a perpetuation of their representation as objectified, homogenous entities, and limiting their recognition as individual dogs. A practical embodied approach, inspired by discourse supporting attentive awareness to non-human animals, was discussed as a mechanism for enabling the recognition of greyhound subjectivities at street collections. Future research might examine how street collections may provide spaces of insight where human behaviour change for non-human animals can be tested and enacted.

KEYWORDS:

• Ex racing greyhounds
• multispecies ethnography
• liminality
• human behaviour change
• embodied knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hope Rescue, a South Wales-based charity, is a co-ordinating rescue who save dogs from emergency situations in Local Authority-run kennel facilities. As an organisation, they are particularly public-facing and rely heavily on the support of foster homes, to help rehabilitate some of the dogs they take in. Lizzie’s Barn is a small independently family-run rescue who operate a private sanctuary facility for hard-to-home dogs. Both of these contacts were made via a former colleague, who also works in animal rescue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kerry L. Sands

Kerry L. Sands is a PhD candidate in Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter. Her doctoral research is focused on exploring the lives of racing greyhounds in a Western context.