From godkin to oddkin: Love,friendship and kin making beyond the human family

Abstract

Work within the sociology of the family and personal life has tended to proceed with little or no recognition of non-human members of the household. In the sociology of human–animal relations, however, ideas of multispecies families, multispecies households and animal companions (pets) as kin have been proposed in attempting to capture the close bonds between people and the animals they share their homes and lives with. Drawing on a UK ethnographic study, this article considers the emotional ties and affective relations people have with dog companions. The article argues that the sociological concept of the family is stretched in attempting to capture intra-species domestic relations. Haraway uses kin making to indicate that intimate relationality might be more widely drawn, beyond immediate human relatives to a range of people and beyond the human. Through a critical engagement with Haraway’s conception of ‘oddkin’, the article asks whether kin might be a more productive category in conceptualising intimate relations with animal companions.

Introduction

In 2017, a judge in Rome ruled that the days away from work that a university librarian took in order to care for her dog should be regarded by her employer as paid leave (BBC, 2017), on the grounds that her dogs were her ‘family’ (The New York Times, 2017). This decision reflects how cultural understandings of families as being interspecies in nature are increasingly normalised in mainstream discourse (Laing, 2020); with survey data indicating that animal companions are considered family members and the number of people thinking in this way is rising (Harris, 2015). An estimated 62% of UK households have animal companions, with dogs being most popular and in 34% of homes. Figures for dog ownership are higher elsewhere in Europe (Romania 45%, Poland 43%) and the Americas (Argentina 66%, Brazil 44%) (Statista, 2022). Some consider multispecies households to be a sociological phenomenon (Charles, 2016), while others have gone further and suggest we have seen the development of multispecies (Laurent-Simpson, 2021) or interspecies (Owens & Grauerholz, 2019) family forms.

Within the sociological literature on animal companions and the family/household there is ambiguity however, and it is here this article makes its intervention. Drawing on a UK ethnographic study, the article considers the emotional bonds and affective relations people have with dog companions. It argues that the concept of the ‘family’ is too narrow and burdened to capture intra-species domestic relations. Through a critical engagement with Haraway’s conception of ‘oddkin’, to which the title refers, it asks whether kin might be a more useful category in conceptualising intimate relations with animal companions. Haraway uses kin making to indicate a broader intimate relational landscape than relatives of blood or intra-human intimacy, socially sanctioned – perhaps by organised religion – and often legally prescribed. Haraway refers to the latter as ‘godkin’. By contrast, her notion of ‘oddkin’ suggests intimate relationality might be more widely drawn, beyond immediate human relatives to a variety of people and beyond the human (Haraway, 2016, p. 2).

The article begins by considering how sociology has maintained an exclusively-human perspective on the family and personal life, although some sociologists have sought to incorporate animal companions. The second section interrogates the possibilities of kin, and the ways Haraway has used this to account for intimate relations with the non-human. The article then turns to an ethnographic project on people’s everyday lives with dog companions to explore emotional bonds people have with dogs and how they think about their relationships. The affiliations mapped by the data analysis will then be considered in relation to conceptions of family and kin.

Intimacy, the family and animal companions

The social sciences have largely seen non-human animals as beyond their remit, rendering animals invisible in most scholarship in family studies, social work, sociology and other disciplines concerned with the family (Laing, 2020). Work within the sociology of family life has tended to proceed with little or no recognition of non-human members of the household. Even recent texts claiming to fully embrace the extent of family change – with new intimacies, diverse relationships and varied living arrangements – have nothing to say of non-human animals (Chambers & Gracia, 2022).

Some sociologists deploy tight definitions of family based on genealogy (blood relations) or legality (formalised in law) despite acknowledging a variety of forms (Berger & Carlson, 2020, p. 479). Looser definitions focus on personal relations based on connections other than blood ties, and are part of a critical literature which suggests the institution of the family is too narrow to capture contemporary Western practices. For Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, p. 2) marriage and the family have been replaced by new forms of multiple and alternating relationships. The family has been understood to be in a condition of fragmentation such that we need no longer associate it with a particular institutional form (Smart & Neale, 1999). Rather, Smart proposes a sociology of personal life, understood as a set of practices and conceptualised as varied sets of intimacies and relationships, incorporating diverse sexualities, friendships and acquaintances (2007, p. 188). Critics suggest that this risks ‘overstating the open-endedness of intimate relations’ while ‘obscuring power relations’ (Gilding, 2010, p. 757). This is an important point, especially when it comes to thinking about the persistence of institutions and practices which ‘deal in some way with ideas of parenthood, kinship and marriage and the expectations and obligations which are associated with these’ (Morgan, 1996, p. 11). Morgan (2011, p. 10) proposes something of a midway position, retaining the term but conceptualising ‘family as a verb’ – something we ‘do’, rather than a noun. Here, family is made and remade via everyday practices which are constructed, relational, active, fluid and negotiated, rather than an institution reflecting biological or legal relations (2011, pp. 5–7). This is similar to Smart’s position where ‘family is what families do’ (2007, p. 4). Yet, Smart acknowledges that whatever the domestic formation, ‘love and support for family members and kin’ is provided (2007, p. 13); and when pinning down what makes a practice ‘relevant to family’, Morgan (2011, p. 12) conventionally foregrounds parenting and cross-generational care. Slightly different are arguments for a conception of families of choice as a counter to the heteronormative understanding of family and involving alternate constructions of kinship involving chosen friends, lovers and (some) relatives (Weeks et al., 2001). These are overlapping with, but different to, straight models of family (Weston, 1991). Whether conceptions of family as an institution, a set of iterative practices, or more fluid personal relations are adopted, the focus remains firmly human. As discussed below however, some of these conceptions of family may be more open to the challenge of multispecies kinship than others.

Some theories about family change are incorporated into models of relations between humans and animals. Following Beck, Franklin (1999) argues that increased pet ownership can be explained by postmodern conditions of ontological insecurity which have led to ‘pets’ compensating for a lack of human affection and becoming ‘companionate family members’ (Franklin, 2006, p. 138). Laurent-Simpson (2021) contends that a specific multispecies family form has emerged in the US through increased relations of intimacy, because living with animal companions can be seen to impact on extended family interactions, fertility considerations, parent–child relationships, family life course and finance matters and the structure of the household. For example, the emotional connections and meaningful relationships which people have with animal companions have been proposed as an explanation of why US women delay having children (Laurent-Simpson, 2017). Others accept the concept of multispecies family but reject the idea that this is new, or a ‘post-human’ family form (Charles, 2016, 2.4). For families to be understood as posthuman, Charles suggests, the ‘power differentials between companion animals and their humans would need to be challenged and the distinction between human and other animals, which reinforces human superiority, questioned’ and this cannot be identified empirically (2016, 6.1, 9.2). Charles allows that some kinship practices can be seen as posthuman in blurring species boundaries in her UK study, but relations of species inequality and dependency predominate. While I concur humancentrism frames relationships with dog companions and the statistical picture indicates dogs are vulnerable, often perilously so (Boyd et al., 2018), households are characterised by various intra-human dependencies and the family may reproduce power differentials and boundary-reinforcement in terms of adultism, ableism or in relation to gender. The attempt to evaluate multispecies households against a conception of family and find that they poorly align is useful however, because it illustrates the humancentric sociological notion of ‘family form’. Charles tellingly tends to refer to kin and kinship practices, rather than family practices – a matter to which we will return.

In US interview-based research, animal companions such as dogs are described by research participants as ‘children’ or ‘fur babies’ (Greenebaum, 2004; Turner, 2001), perhaps supporting Franklin’s assertion of compensatory relationships of substitution. Interviews with US childless families have led researchers to conclude that adult humans gain similar emotional fulfilment from caring for a dog or cat as for a child or grandchild (Laurent-Simpson, 2021). Particularly in households without human children, interviewees in the US have been found to consider themselves ‘pet parents’ and dogs and cats to be ‘children’ and ‘babies’ (as found by Volsche, 2018); and the effects of different ‘parenting styles’ on the relationships and bonds of pet owners have been the subject of survey research (Volsche & Gray, 2016). This has led Volsche (2019) to argue for the conceptual legitimacy of ‘pet parents’ as an identity, and one that should not be pathologised. Yet other US research using semi-structured interviews suggests childless people tend to construct narratives of pets-as-children, while others do not, with those with younger children emphasising differences between pets and children (Owens & Grauerholz, 2019). Work using surveys with scales of ‘family bondedness’ also gives ambiguous results, suggesting caution is needed in estimating the extent to which relations with pets are similar to those with human family (Nugent & Daugherty, 2022). In addition, there is evidence from interview-based research outside the US that people resist the idea that pets provide a substitute for relations with other humans (Charles, 2016, 5.4), including among women without children (Peterson & Engwall, 2019). Constructing and treating animal companions as human children has also been seen to be inappropriate and abusive of animals by researchers in veterinary medicine (Mota-Rojas et al., 2021).

Using interviews and dog owner diaries, Power (2008) found diverse understandings of dogs as family in Australia. Only some participants saw dogs as family because they are similar to children in requiring care. For others, dogs are incorporated in the family understood as a pack, with participants emphasising the inherent ‘otherness’ of dogs which altered family relations (2008, p. 552). The agency of dogs was also recognised as dogs actively participate in everyday practices (2008, p. 536). Here, human family members were compelled to accommodate the ‘dogginess of canine companions’ and resist seeing dogs as ‘furry humans’ (2008, p. 541). Power argues for a broadening of the concept of family beyond biological relations to include more-than-human relationships forged through cohabitation and everyday interaction in shared space. My reading of Power’s empirical material, however, is that the concept of family is being considerably stretched in attempting to accommodate the variety of ways she suggests that dogs are integrated into human homes.

Blouin’s (2013) interview-based research led to conceptualising different orientations in dog owners’ attitudes toward, treatment of, and interactions with dogs; which were dominionistic (a low regard for dogs), humanistic (dogs as surrogate humans) and protectionistic (a high regard for dogs). This implies that relationships vary significantly, and this is important to consider in the context of human power. Legally, dogs are property; commodities that are exchanged and can be abandoned or killed when they no longer fit their humans’ needs or beliefs about how dogs should behave (Boyd et al., 2018). Where domestic violence is present in households, animals tend to also be victims (Taylor & Fraser, 2019). There are significant challenges for dogs – unable to consent to being ‘pets’ – in a role that can require extreme levels of emotional control and suppression of species-appropriate instincts and behaviours (Pierce & Bekoff, 2021). Redmalm’s Swedish study concluded that even in households where animals are highly regarded, the lower status of ‘pets’ is evidenced by the fact they are replaceable (2015, p. 32). However, replaceability does not imply lower status – human relationships are replaceable also, and dogs have significantly shorter lifespans than humans. Studies have found people will make considerable sacrifices because of their attachment to animal companions, for example by becoming or remaining homeless (Irvine, 2013; Scanlon et al., 2021). Additionally, observational work has suggested that despite a context of human power, dogs can express meaning in encounters with human carers enabling the adjustment of their treatment (Motamedi-Fraser, 2019).

In sum, literature on animals-as-family tends to stretch ideas about the human family to incorporate non-humans, or find that species inequality renders dogs outside of family. The former often involves over-comparing relations with dogs to those with humans. Alternatively, the persistence of difference and differentials of power is taken as evidence of the ambivalent status of animals. Rather than stretch the notion of family or retain humancentrism, might kin be more productive in thinking about household relations across the species barrier?

From family to kin?

Kin and kind are etymologically similar. The dictionary definition of ‘kin’ overlaps with ‘family’ in that the term ‘kind’ may refer to a family, a species, a biologically defined class or set of plants or animals whose members have the same or common characteristics. ‘Kindred’ is commonly held to simply mean in close relation. This emphasis on relationality is important, for Haraway’s suggestion is that kin enables affiliation which can be understood beyond human attachments of dependency and emotional connection: ‘It’s not necessarily to be biologically related but in some consequential way to belong in the same category with each other’ (in Paulson, 2019, n.p.).

Haraway sees potential in the concept of kin as an alternative to family. Her emphasis is on who we choose as kin, to be partners, collaborators and allies and has lineage in attempts to queer the heteronormative family and foreground the construction of kinship in which ‘choice’ and ‘love’ are at least as, if not more, significant than ‘blood’ (Weston, 1991, p. 3). Kin, for Haraway ‘is a wild category’ that people ‘do their best to domesticate’, with the Western conception of family being a key line of the domestication of kin into the narrow, legally demarcated and genealogically bound ‘godkin’ (2016, p. 2). Haraway challenges readers to make kin unbounded by ancestry, outside of normative familial (or species-bound) structures, and to ‘practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages’ (Haraway, 2015, p. 161). This is her move beyond the families of practice or choice position, for making kin is an ethical path for better species interrelating, where the strangeness of other species is accepted and some of the closest of our kin are not human.

Haraway goes as far as to suggest that ‘all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense’ (2016, p. 103), and that reinventing kin making is key to responding to ecological crisis. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway (2016) produces some speculative fiction which tells of the ‘Children of Compost’, living in a time of ongoing extinction due to climate change, the effects of which last for centuries. For her imaginary communities, kin making involves intentionally reducing the numbers of human babies and promoting the flourishing of species threatened with extinction. These ideas are developed in her manifesto call to ‘make kin not babies’ (Haraway, 2018). There has been concerted attack on her use of population, a concept some consider anti-feminist in its neo-Malthusianism (Ojeda et al., 2020). Haraway has been accused of adultism in presenting children as passively ‘being made’ and childist by suggesting that having children is inevitably negative in terms of environmental consequences (Mattheis, 2022). Yet Haraway is critical of the way children who are not of the ‘right kind’ are treated (2018, p. 96), and sees making kin as pro-child in that babies from all communities might be valued. Opening up the notion of kin through drawing on decolonial, Indigenous and queer perspectives in order to ‘tell new stories to sustain needed new worlds’, is important (Haraway, 2018, p. 98).

This said, Haraway is ambitious in suggesting kin making with the enormous variety of beings and things in the living world as the solution to climate catastrophe. More significant for this article, however, is the issue of species difference, because there are various forms and intensities of relations possible. For example, Haraway calls us to relate to the world of compost, yet bonds with plants or microbes may be less emotionally proximate than those with species which are less ‘odd’ to us. For example, dogs inhabit home space and share lives in ways more intimate and response-filled than those with other species. If bonds are less proximate with other species, can this be called ‘kin’? Here, sociological work on intimacy might usefully intervene. ‘[L]oving, caring and sharing’ are dimensions of intimacy, suggests Jamieson (1998, p. 8), and there are some species with whom such exchanges might more readily happen.

In earlier companion species work, inspired through her relationship with dog Cayenne, Haraway’s (2008) observations on everyday practices are used to illustrate connection, intimacy and affection with dogs. Charles contends that it is ‘daily practices of kinship’ in shared human–dog households which enable dogs to be constituted as ‘kin’ because they ‘construct a world where dogs and humans are part of the same social group’ (2016, 9.3). Charles’s work with material from mass observation directive UK data ¹ demonstrates deep connections between humans and animal companions are possible. She also suggests that intimate relations might be better represented by such written responses than in those given in interviews (Charles, 2017). That Charles (2016) allows dogs to be conceptualised as kin, but not as family is significant because it illustrates the problem with narrow ways in which familial relations are cast. A New Zealand study of family relations with animal companions using story-telling methods included contributions from participants from Indigenous communities which involved animal companions being referred to as ‘furry whānau’ (Sayers et al., 2023, p. 541). The latter is broader than family, encompassing various human relationships and other affinities. Sayers et al. conclude that situated caring knowledge, love and reciprocal care relationships across species suggests that the conception of family ‘needs revising’, but their findings indicate we might draw on other world views in so doing (2023, p. 541). Indigenous scholars have problematised conceptions of family as colonial impositions and, like Haraway, promoted kin as more inclusive (TallBear, 2018). As much translation is required in making relations across species, familial metaphors may not best serve us in thinking about emotional connections and personal relations with animal companions. The following sections consider how experiences in human–dog households shed light into how far kin might be a productive category in understanding affective ties and relations within multispecies homes.

Methods

This article draws on material from an ethnography which involved observational fieldnotes and semi-structured interviews. The initial phase of the overall project was a period of intensive immersion in the main field site in London’s largest park (the Lee Valley). Daily observations were undertaken while walking with dogs over the course of a calendar year and fieldnotes were kept in the form of a diary. The second phase involved 37 semi-structured interviews being undertaken with people who walked dogs on the marshes of the Lee Valley Park. Some interviews were individual, others were with couples or pairs of friends. Questions about the extent to which the urban (and London) location affected the initial findings ² prompted a third phase of the study, where 15 interviews took place with people who walked dogs in rural Leicestershire in central England. The same method and questions were used in both phases of interviewing. It had been assumed that rurality would make a difference to the data collected, yet a surprising finding was that it did not. In both locations, participants were members of the researchers’ dog walking community and were recruited by word of mouth and fliers. The article draws on the interview data from the second and third phases of the project (52 in total). While the qualities of relations between people and dogs were apparent in conversations and observations recorded in the fieldnotes, all interviewees discussed elements of their personal relationships with dogs in some detail, and for this particular article, it was considered that this provided more accurate and precise data.

While semi-structured interviewing has often been used in research into dog–human relations, the majority of interviews for this project were distinctive by being ‘go-along’ or ‘walk and talk’, where the researcher and two of her dog companions walked with human interviewees and their dog(s). The interviews were of 45–90 minutes’ duration, which Kusenbach – an early exponent of mobile or ‘go-along’ interviewing – describes as an ‘optimal’ length (2003, p. 464). Interviews were conversational and people were asked to describe daily routines and everyday practices with their dogs, to reflect on their relationships with current and past dogs and the benefits and challenges of living with dog companions. This method was chosen because it was relatively unobtrusive and likely to enhance authenticity. Interviewees were in a known environment, and they and their dogs undertook their regular walk at a time of their choosing. Interviewees were given a choice of a mobile interview while dog walking, or being interviewed at another location. While the majority of interviews took place while walking, others were undertaken at pubs, cafes, interviewees’ homes or on two occasions, the researcher’s home. ³ The interview sample was shaped by the relationships of the researcher’s dogs to others (both human and dog); yet their involvement secured legitimacy in the field and stimulated responses in interviews.

Interviews charted the practices of people who walk dogs regularly and have close bonds with them. All participants in this study shared home space, and Varner (2002) would describe these households as those where human participants understand dogs mainly as ‘domestic partners’ or ‘companion animals’ but not ‘mere pets’. More women than men were found willing to participate, particularly in the rural study site. ⁴ In part, this is because the majority of dog walkers in both locations were female, and as the findings reported elsewhere suggest (Cudworth, 2022), walking with dogs is an element of the gendered carework for dogs. Thus, this limited qualitative study considers a subset of inclusive human ‘owners’ and their relations with dogs.

This project worked inductively, with findings theorised after manual thematic analysis of both the diary/fieldnotes and the full verbatim interview transcripts was undertaken. This identified overarching clusters capturing aspects of life with dog companions such as the impact of human work, practices of care, food and eating, walking with dogs and use of leisure time. Data were extensive and rich, and this article focuses on one of the themes, emotions, intimacy and attachment, drawing only on the interview material.

Findings

Different degrees of intimacy and affectional ties were present and varied levels of ambiguity and tension apparent in the stories people told of their relationships with dogs, and other animals, in terms of emotions and connectivity. Some resisted the idea of ‘the dog’, stressing the individuality of their relationships with different dogs as unique individuals; while some considered that ‘the dog’ is categorically significant, encouraging humans to think about species difference.

Connection and relations

In thinking about dogs-as-kin, it is important to consider whether dogs occupy a different role to other animals kept in the household. While dogs and cats are the preeminent animal companions, also popular in the UK are certain birds, equids, camelids, rodents, reptiles and pigs; and fishes are commonly referred to as ‘pets’. Indian stick insects are also described as such (RSPCA, n.d.). However, comparing the stick insects kept by his son, to his dog, one man opined that ‘you can’t have the same kind of relationship’, as this interaction with his co-interviewee suggests:

Stick insects are a bit beyond me. But maybe people feel like that [the way he feels about his dog] about their goldfish as well. But it’s more extreme with mammals, I guess. It’s more evident; it’s more clear. (Participant [P]9)

Like with stick insects and fish it’s that closeness to a living thing, possibly, but not the relationship side. You know, the interest of watching what they’re doing, the way they move, the colours, and the way that they breathe – it’s the visual thing, the interest in nature not the relationship, I think. (P10)

In his well-known work on the ‘pet’, Tuan (1984) contends that fishes are considered ornaments, and an interviewee suggested that she saw some of her fishes similarly:

the fish are kind of part of the home really, they’re part of the furniture and most of the time I take them for granted [. . .] don’t really have a relationship. I think it’s because with the fish you can’t physically be in their world. (P20)

Here, the extent to which animals are considered ‘odd’ or distanced seems to impact the closeness of the relationship and thereby the extent to which animals might be considered ‘kin’. Interestingly, however, it was not only the species, or where animals were kept that affected the emotional connection for this woman. While she described the small tropical fishes in a tank inside the home as like furniture, she showed me Koi carp in a pond which took up much of the garden. She claimed Koi were ‘friendly’ animals who ‘come up and greet you’; and described how, in warmer weather, she would sit with her feet in the water and that the Koi would rub against her and could be stroked. It was apparently the ability to engage in individual relationships with these fishes, to exchange touch and ‘be in their world’ which seemed to enable a different relationship for this woman.

More than a third of interviewees lived with cats. Most differentiated the level of responsibility, with dogs requiring more time-consuming care, but close relations with cats were always reported. Others appeared to have close relations with guinea pigs – in one case, guinea pigs and dogs were exchanged by two sisters who undertook ‘day-care’ for each other’s animals when they were working. However, there were exceptions to close relations with other mammals and troubling accounts given of relationships with rabbits recalled from childhood:

Our rabbit was called Tiger and was just awful; it was like a pit-bull version of a rabbit. We were frightened to death of it [. . .] we lived next door to a church and the rabbit would frequently go into the graveyard and just sit in the middle of big graves waiting for us to try and catch her [. . .] she would bite you and scratch you and was very unpleasant. (P11)

We had a rabbit [when we were] growing up. It disappeared. My Mum said it went to a farm. I don’t know, I don’t think it did go to farm. I don’t like to think about it. I don’t think we treated that rabbit very well. (P8)

By contrast, some interviewees claimed they would be prepared to go to extreme measures to care for their dogs, with a number mentioning that they would surrender their home to pay for medical costs, or here, stay in another country:

If we went to Spain and the dogs couldn’t come back, then we wouldn’t either. And they [people without dogs] think ‘it’s a dog!’ People who don’t like dogs or don’t want dogs don’t understand at all. (P2)

People spoke of grief over past dogs both as adults and as children. They expressed fear in relation to the illness and death of their current dog(s), and described the extent to which dogs had been an integral part of the fabric of their lives over an extended period. Participant stories emphasised the intensity of relationships that were often compared to bonds with human kin:

What do you do about any person? Do you stop loving so much and put the barriers up? No, it’s going to happen [the death of her dog] and you’ve just got to go with the flow [. . .] I’m just sure that the joy outweighs the grief. I’ve just lost my dad, I’ve lost my uncle, you know, I know what it means. (P3)

In understanding the possibility of multispecies kinship therefore, participants suggested that species matters (such as the differences between dogs and stick insects), as does particular kind (such as the difference between Koi and other fishes). Different proximity and sharing of spaces inside the home affected participants’ experiences of different levels of connectedness and intimacy. This suggests that making kin is implicated in understanding difference and specificity – the extent of connectedness that might be possible between humans and different species.

Dogs, parenting and family values

When asked how they felt about their dogs, interviewees expressed strong resistance to understanding their relationship as a form of parental guardianship; and aversion to the infantilising of dogs, who were described as agentic members of the household with ‘a point of view’. As family is a persistent cultural concept, and often conflated with the household, it is not surprising that some participants included dogs in their understanding of family:

They’re just part of the family aren’t they? (P26)

[. . .] both my husband and myself grew up with dogs, always part of the family, family’s not complete without a dog. (P16)

However, many seemed to struggle to describe the precise kind of relationship. Here, for example, a woman moves through a number of conceptions before moving away from family:

[. . .] I don’t think of them as children, I’ve never wanted children. But they’re part of family [pause] or life and they have a place and they have to be treated in a certain way. (P1)

Others use the similarity between relations of care and affective connection between people and children to try and articulate their relationship with their dog:

The love people say that they feel for their children, I couldn’t really understand it, but you know I think I might understand now a little bit. Because you know, really, well, I just love him [her dog], I love him so much. It’s incredible. (P3)

In the literature focusing on dogs as family, particularly in the US context, the cultural frames of teaching, training and caring for human children are used by some research participants to construct their relationship with animals as parenthood (Owens & Grauerholz, 2019). The idea of dogs as children, however, was rarely expressed, with only two interviewees claiming their dog fulfilled a parenting need and, in both these interviews, the overwhelming thrust of the narrative was that dogs should be respected and able to ‘be a dog first’, as one put it.

The most common way for notions of ‘pet parenting’ to play out was by being attached to a story seen as humorous, or presented as a joke:

[. . .] a surgeon at work, who wanted us to stay late to finish a case in theatre, and I said, ‘well, you really need to tell me how long you’re going to be and how long you want me to stay because I need to get home for the boys, I can’t leave them on their own all day’, and his face, he was just like ‘What? You’ve left your children at home on their own?’ [laughing] (P29)

[. . .] he had the same hair colour as me so [name of son] thought that we should get him [the dog] because he would think that I was his mother [laughing hard] which he does, obviously! (P11)

There was antipathy expressed concerning the humanising of dogs in terms of practices which interviewees regarded as inappropriate or cruel. This was apparent in discussions of dog training, where enabling dogs to ‘retain their dogginess and sense of adventure’ was very important to participants and not having a dog be ‘squashed’ or ‘crushed’ by excessive human regulation or ‘rules’ was seen as desirable. It is important to clarify here that this was not representative of a cavalier attitude, as training to ensure the safety of dogs and people was understood as a necessity. The dressing up of dogs was particularly criticised and an element of a narrative of the appreciation of the species difference linked to respect for dogs. For example:

I’ve got a friend who’s got a little Shih Tzu and we often walk together [. . .] she’s now treating her dog like it was a human, she’s bringing it out in clothes [. . .] she actually treats the dog like she’s a little girl [. . .] I think it is important that you do remember that your dog is a dog. (P13)

I don’t try and make them into a human being, silly hats at Christmas and stuff like that, I’m not into any of that. (P31)

Unlike the findings of some US studies (Laurent-Simpson, 2021; Volsche, 2018), the notion that dogs were seen as surrogate children by women without children was rejected. Hostility expressed to the presumption of ‘pet parenting’ was a narrative that segues with feminist critiques of heteronormative familialism:

Oh, we know what people think of us, the way they look at us, two women with a dog that’s spoilt. I think dykes get that a lot, you know, ‘it’s their child’. It makes me furious. (P6)

I think people always want to draw a parallel and when you’re my age and lots of your friends have had children, and your family are thinking that you should be having children [. . .] then I think it’s nice for them to put you in that box and say ‘oh [interviewee’s name] hasn’t had children yet but that Rocky [name of dog] is her little baby’. I think almost it’s just for them to reinforce their family values. (P18)

All interviewees discussed the differences between relationships with dogs and with humans, and suggested what was special or particularly enjoyable about relations with dogs was precisely that dogs are not human. People often found this difficult to articulate; for example:

I don’t know, it’s difficult to describe, isn’t it? Erm there’s so much joy that can be through, you know, interacting with your dog because it brings out just a different side of your personality, obviously you don’t have um the same language to communicate with them and so your relationship is different, based upon that lack of understanding I suppose. You have to try and work out what each other are thinking. (P18)

A strong narrative across the interviews is that what makes the specific relation between dogs and humans living together is that they are attempting to negotiate everyday life across species difference. It is the cross-species interaction which leads some people to assert resistance to the comparison with children:

I don’t like that phrase that a dog is like a baby or whatever, because it’s not [. . .] you’ve got this relationship with something that’s not human. Yes, it’s that thing with a different being. (P10)

These kinds of cross-species connections, bonds, and also differences and difficulties were an important element in participants’ accounts of living with dogs. Dogs were seen to come into a relational field where ‘intelligence’, ‘emotions’, ‘care’, ‘play’ and ‘kindness’ were aspects of shared lives, alongside different kinds of tension and misunderstandings. The success of these relationships demands much of companion dogs, and most participants reflected on the challenges of relating across the species and their attempts to better their understanding of dog behaviours by reading dog body language (as Motamedi-Fraser [2019] suggests). Some consider owners underestimate dog abilities and potential for independence (Bekoff & Pierce, 2019), but participants in this study were more likely to reflect on what they saw as the ingenuity and intelligence of dogs:

I have a high regard for dogs. I think their understanding, their comprehension of language [. . .] it’s far superior of our understanding of their language. I think we completely underestimate their understanding of us. (P17)

I think he’s very intelligent, he knows exactly what he’s doing [dog barks]. (P30)

Thus like other research in the UK context, the use of parenting and familial metaphors applied to relations with dogs is ambiguous (Charles, 2016, 5.4). In addition, a theme of participants’ narratives was resistance to the infantilising of dogs and to ‘family values’ with respect to how relations particularly between women and dogs are culturally perceived. Such ideas were also interwoven with an appreciation of the difference of species and the idea that dogs should be able to express ‘dogginess’.

A special relationship

Participants were asked about specific relationships with individual animals and to describe what their dogs were ‘like’. Most responses included detailed accounts of the personality they ascribed to their dog, their likes and dislikes, their responses to experiences and quality of relationships:

to smell foxes, chase squirrels, rabbits [. . .] that’s what makes her happy so I think she’s very, very much an outdoor dog, and she loves swimming. (P16)

She loves aftershave and she’s very urban. She hates getting her feet wet. She doesn’t see her role as a protector. She’s a receiver, she’s not a giver. (P7)

I can imagine Lola in a previous life being the sort of erm er [pause] you know, a bar room lush, ⁵ with too much make up on and a dress that’s a few sizes too small, you know, going for every fella in the place. She’s only got to see a builder or a bar keeper and she’s all over him like a rash. (P15)

As with the findings of other UK studies, dogs were understood to possess selfhood and to be individuals with distinct personalities and characters (Charles, 2016, 7.2). They were perceived as active agents able to make their views and experiences known. All interviewees claimed that their dogs were in communication with them, and asserted that they were able to understand at least some of what was being communicated vocally, facially and in terms of body language. Relationships with dogs were with individual animals, and people who had experience of living with a number of dogs were careful to describe particular personalities and bonds.

In speaking of Cayenne, Haraway reflects that she had a ‘love affair with her’ (Paulson, 2019, n.p.). Garber suggests that the close emotional ties people have with dogs should be understood as ‘love’, and that in living with dogs, people are compelled to try to understand the inner being of another species (1997, p. 32). Most participants referred to dogs as creatures that they loved, or were in love with, and the word ‘love’ was used often and repeatedly by participants:

we just desperately love them, just love them. (P12)

you just love their [pause] their being. (P20)

In some cases, people had a breed preference, and described themselves as ‘in love’ with lurchers, spaniels, ‘rescue mutts with collie in them’, or in the case of this woman:

Old English sheep dogs, I just loved the way they walk, how the hips all wobble and they’re silly [. . .] I just like that breed. I love the breed. I just love them, love them. (P23)

However, this story of a love for a particular breed quickly turns into a story of a history with different dogs, the first of which was recalled as ‘a gentle giant really, oh God, I think I’m going to cry’ and followed by reflection on the devastation of losing a specific dog and the challenges of establishing relations with other dogs. Such a pattern of discussing the kind of dog followed by a specific dog was common. People would comment on who a particular dog would be closest to in their household and occasionally outside it, the specific and different relationships dogs had with other dogs and other humans they knew, or the different qualities of their relationship with a particular animal. In some cases, the way in which the relationship was expressed was reminiscent of the ways in which people might discuss a human lover:

It’s really hard to put into words, because I just have so many feelings. When I’m just thinking about something, thinking about him during the day when he’s not there, something that’s made you smile, you know, he just makes you laugh – it’s all quite overwhelming really. (P3)

In terms of affective relations people suggested ‘a real reciprocity there’; they felt their love was returned. While some considered the love of a dog was ‘unconditional’, this was uncommon in the ways participants represented their relationships. Relationships with particular dogs were recounted as developing in particular situations. Some were not straightforward, but were reported as hard work – particularly with nervous dogs and those traumatised prior to rescue.

A number spoke directly of species difference and what this means for close emotional attachments. In these cases, participants suggested that they experienced special qualities in their relationship with another animal:

I think there’s something really magical about becoming intimate with a member of a different species. And the bond of, you know, need, and dependency and responsibility and love crossing that boundary, is very exciting. In some ways, even more exciting than with another human, ’cause it’s so much more mysterious as well. (P9)

It’s so hard, to get your head around it [. . .] that she’s a dog and that I am [pause] I am a human because she is so h- you know what I mean – she is so human in so many ways. I just look at her with real love and I just think god – you know me and I know you and you’re another, you are another [pause] that thing, you are another species. Species, it’s a very strange thing. (P21)

Dogs as (odd)kin

While Power (2008) argued for a broadened concept of family to include more-than-human relationships forged through cohabitation, the concept of kin is potentially more inclusive and might better capture the quality of intimate relations with dogs.

While a minority of interviewees used the word ‘family’ to describe relationships with dogs, none used metaphors identifying themselves as parents or dogs as children except in jest. Unlike findings from some US research (Laurent-Simpson, 2021; Volsche, 2018) there was often antipathy expressed in response to the idea that people were in a parenting role with animals; rather, it was important to enable dogs to be free to express themselves and ‘be a dog’. Other US studies have been more ambiguous in their conclusions about interspecies parenting (Owens & Grauerholz, 2019) and family bondedness in relation to animal companions (Nugent & Daugherty, 2022), but ideas of parenthood still tend to feature in participants’ accounts and form an element of data analysis. However, it is not only relations of dependency on adults that seem to lead to dogs and owners being perceived as children and parents. Cultural narratives may also play a part, and perhaps the findings of this project may apply beyond the UK, to Europe and perhaps Australasia, but less so to North America, where concepts of ‘parenting’ of animal companions are more established in popular culture (for examples see Laurent-Simpson, 2021).

What many participants in this study seemed to like about dogs is that they are not human. While, inevitably, people anthropomorphise the animals they live with in describing characteristics, relationships and behaviours, the humanising of dogs as eternal children requiring parenting was not borne out in the findings. Rather, dogs were seen as different beings with agency and emotion. People understood dog companions to be close relations, most described feelings of love across the species barrier, and for some participants the human–dog boundary was blurred or ambiguous. This does not mean that the species barrier is overcome in such relationships. Ultimately, households are subject to human rules and schedules; most dog companions do not have the opportunity to ‘be a dog first’ as one participant put it, and multispecies kin making reflects a human dominant world. This prompts further reflection on the ‘parenting’ analogy. Participants from this UK study did think about their relationships with dogs in terms of species hierarchy, and while some saw this hierarchy as problematic, the most common way this was understood was in terms of human responsibility for dogs as agential beings, rather than on dogs as dependants, and this may have mitigated against recourse to a narrative of parenting in participant responses.

Interviewees struggled to articulate their relationship, using terminology such dogs being ‘home’, ‘life’ and ‘friends’, while emphasising close bonds. As ‘making kin’ involves developing new relationships and ‘the daily actions that transform partial relations into deeper ones’ (Clarke, 2018, pp. 32–33), this may help describe relationships with dog companions which deepen and intensify over time through daily intra-action. The concept of families of choice still ties us to the overlaps with blood relations (Weston, 1991), and this precludes other animals, despite opening up kin making as an active process. The otherness of dogs was a key narrative of participants’ stories. They were not described or understood to be furry humans; rather, the ‘dogginess’ of dogs was accommodated, and people expressed high regard for dogs with whom they were in relation – what Blouin (2013) would refer to as ‘protectionistic’ attitudes. As cross-species relations are necessarily fraught with accommodating very different ways of sensing and understanding the world, oddkin is a concept that is a good fit for dog–human kin making. Stretching the human imagination is central to the process of making positive relationships with dogs (Pierce & Bekoff, 2021), and making dog–human oddkin speaks to the ways human participants in this study described their relationships as interesting, strange and magical, because ‘kin are unfamiliar’ (Haraway, 2018, p. 94).

Oddkin can also be useful to capture the close relationships some people and dogs develop because relationality is linked to ‘response-ability’ (capacity to respond) in Haraway’s formulation (2018, p. 70). Certainly, human participants saw care, affection and friendship as responses to the dogs they lived with, and understood these as reciprocated in certain ways. Haraway’s kin making draws on Indigenous thinking and concepts of co-constituted combinations of beings in place and space. Finally, while Haraway suggests multiple species and sites, oddkin-making emerges from her passion for dogs specifically, and one in particular, Cayenne, ‘who completely changed my life’ (2017, 36:53). Making multispecies kinship means resisting the flattening out of relations with non-humans – not all relationships with all kinds of animals are of the same quality. In the stories people shared of their relationships with dogs, what was crucial was a particular relation with specific animals. People expressed closeness with dogs (and cats, horses and goats for example) but not all creatures (fishes, stick insects). Relationships are developed over time so that people are able to give detailed accounts of the personality traits of the dogs they live with and the kinds of relations they have with them. These are intense and involve a range of emotions concerning care, companionship, happiness and loss that sociologists of intimacy would recognise (Jamieson, 1998; Smart, 2007) and which question the idea of individual dogs and relationships with them as replaceable (Redmalm, 2015). While these are everyday practices of intimacy and care, and reproduce relations, it is not apparent that they designate family members in the way of the named ties Morgan suggests (2011, p. 12).

Some of the research on multispecies households seems more comfortable with concepts of kin than family (Charles, 2016). Those studies from the US conceptualising dogs as family do tend to be characterised by narratives of infantilism, humancentrism and sometimes heteronormativity (expressed in participants’ narratives and in analysis; Greenebaum, 2004; Volsche & Gray, 2016). The intimacies in everyday relating between people and dogs reported here do not fit such framing. Making kin might better capture what goes on in forging personal relations and intimate ties with dog companions, and certainly Haraway’s articulation of kin embraces non-human animals in ways more elastic conceptions in family sociology do not. While Haraway (2017) is right to suggest that feminism needs to revisit, develop and promote different visions of kin making ‘across species, generations, across categories’, there are limits. The findings of this study indicate that multispecies notions of kinship may work better for dogs (and some other mammals) than for species too ‘odd’ to be intimate kin, and different conceptualisations need to be developed to capture the qualities of such relations.