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Abstract

This essay focuses on the public servants who animate biopolitics and the publicness of animal care and control through the example of workers whose jobs involve killing animals in government shelters. From the perspective of government, stray domestic animals are mostly nuisances that are killed, so killing becomes someone’s job. Government-operated and government-funded shelters are less able to claim “no-kill” status compared to private or nonprofit shelters, and therefore workers in government shelters are more likely to be involved in euthanasia than those in nonprofit shelters. The ubiquity of death, including participating in decisions about which animals to kill, represents the most stress-inducing work in animal shelters, according to research. Governing life—biopolitics—is highly public. Private-sector, for-profit entities might do this work, but only according to government regulations. More often, the work is left to government and government workers. For certain services, government is the provider of last or only resort. Understanding the implications of this role on the workers who fulfill it would make an important contribution to the study of government organizations.

Keywords

Animals in organizations biopolitics dirty work emotional labor

This essay focuses on the public servants who animate biopolitics and the publicness of animal care and control through the example of workers whose jobs involve killing in government animal shelters. From the perspective of government in the Global Northwest, stray domestic animals are mostly nuisances that are seized by animal-control officers. Organizations involved in this work are highly public, given the high stakes and ethics of placing biopower in the hands of private, for-profit businesses. Organizations fall on a continuum of “publicness” to “privateness” based on their legal status of ownership, funding sources, and control (Andrews et al., 2011). Governing life is a highly public function; organizations involved in governing life commit to due process, accountability, equity, and public wellbeing through adherence to government regulations (Antonsen and Jørgensen, 1997). Professional norms could manage these decisions, but most often, laws do. Moreover, for certain services, government is the provider of last or only resort (Guy et al., 2008).¹

The centrality of publicness and the role of government organizations in biopolitics remain obscured after decades of re-invention and reforms in the 1980s and 1990s (DuGay, 2008; Stokes and Clegg, 2002). Through contracting out, public/private partnerships, privatization, and other reforms, government organizations have been reorganized to operate more efficiently and responsively like private-sector businesses, blurring the differences between government and business. After so much change, the extent to which government differs from private-sector organizations may not be as obvious as it used to be. However, one crucial difference between public and private sectors is the absence of competition or a choice of provider/supplier—meaning government is the provider of last or only resort for certain services. Some of the contexts within which governments operate tend not to involve competition between multiple providers. Business-based reforms run aground in such contexts, and a dramatic illustration of government’s role as a provider of last or only resort is found in animal care and control, at least in the United States, especially outside urban centers.² In this context, some workers are in the position of killing as a routine part of their jobs. How do organizations motivate their workers to kill animals they have cared for, and how do workers not directly involved in killing come to accept death as part of their work?

Hundreds of thousands of animals are killed in government-run and -operated shelters in the United States each year (No-Kill 2025 FAQ, n.d.). The current essay explores the public nature of the animal care and control function (Hillier and Byrne, 2016) and the role of the government worker in particular. Developing his theory of the “caring-killing paradox,” Arluke (1994) studies the role of organizations in workplace socialization. He asks (Arluke, 1994: 145):

How do institutions “transform everyday people, who themselves may own dogs or cats as pets, into workers who can kill these same species”?

How do organizations get some of their members to kill for a living? In animal shelters, any staff member can be directly or indirectly involved in euthanasia. Even volunteers cleaning the kennels will recognize when an animal is missing. Public administration theory—specifically, theories on organizational publicness—can help answer the question of how organizations motivate some workers to kill and others to accept killing as part of the organization’s mission. Public administration theory can answer Arluke’s (1994) question more completely because publicness is emphasized and the existing literature on animal care and control has not accounted for this aspect of the function. I propose that government organizations motivate workers managing the caring-killing paradox through the combined approaches of emotional labor, dirty work, and publicness. Arluke (1994) arrives at a substantial portion of this answer in his own research: He examines emotion management strategies of shelter workers, acknowledging the nature of shelter work as dirty work. He combines the emotional labor and dirty work literatures to reveal how workers in stigmatized occupations employ emotional labor to manage the stigma of their work. But what is missing is the publicness of the function. A more comprehensive approach that includes theory on emotional labor, dirty work, plus the added dimension of the publicness of shelter work better explains how organizations can motivate their workers to care, yet kill, for a living.

Combining emotional labor in government with stigmatized work in government helps to unravel the unique public sector context within which many shelter workers engage with animals. Emotional labor is the effort to express what is appropriate and suppress what is inappropriate to the performance of a job. This approach surfaces the publicness of animal care and control because government manages (stray, domestic) animal lives. Arluke (1994, 2004) does not theorize the caring-killing paradox through a public-sector lens, but he does capture the stigmatization of this work. Therefore, Arluke (2004) captures substantial aspects of animal welfare work—emotional labor plus dirty work—but not the important contributing factor of publicness. Taylor (2004: 90) also applies emotional labor theory to shelter work: “Shelter staff identified that they managed emotions on three different fronts: (1) workers with animals; (2) workers with other workers; and (workers with the public) . . . deemed to be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ homes.” However, neither Taylor (2004) nor Arluke (2004) emphasize the publicness of animal care and control.

Intentionally combining these perspectives—emotional labor, dirty work, plus publicness—offers a more complete answer to the original question about how organizations socialize some workers to kill for a living. Applying a public sector lens only increases the stakes of the already-momentous work performed by public sector workers on behalf of the communities they serve (Mastracci, 2022; Mastracci and Sementelli, 2022). While some shelters can implement a limited-intake policy and avoid euthanizing any animals, government-run and government-funded shelters cannot. Furthermore, while Arluke (1994) observes that the role of the animal shelter in American society is emblematic of society’s regard for animals in general, I extend this observation to government work and government workers throughout the US. While Americans want nuisances to be handled out of sight and out of mind, likewise do they regard government work, especially in the current ideologically-divided, anti-government context of the United States. Finally, given the publicness of shelter work, staff members in the position of euthanizing animals need to convince themselves of the necessity of this work and that if they don’t do it, no one will. Research reveals that the stress of euthanasia in shelter work extends beyond the personnel directly involved in euthanization to other staff (Andrukonis et al., 2020; Tallberg and Jordan, 2022). Therefore, it is worth investigating whether the wellbeing of all staff is affected by limiting the direct involvement in euthanasia—including which animals to kill—to a single person or a few people. Which approach is best for the organization: To limit euthanasia-related tasks to a few workers (following Pachirat’s (2011) politics of sight) or to make euthanasia decisions collectively and perhaps employ job rotation (a staple of human resource management)—if not in the act of killing, which is restricted to certified workers, then in the decisions about which animals to kill?

The current essay is structured as follows: In the next section, I discuss research that includes animal shelter work in the definition of dirty work as well as the implications of shelter work as dirty work. In the third section, I discuss publicness; specifically local government’s role in animal care and control, historically and at present. The public servants who animate the animal care and control function introduce a context that has not been studied specifically in research on animal shelter workers. Fully half of all US shelters are operated by local governments (Rodriguez et al., 2022), so governing the lives and deaths of stray domestic animals may be characterized as a public service function serving a public purpose (Hamilton and McCabe, 2016); the extension of political rationality to life and death (Foucault and 1981 [1976]): 136). A micro-level focus on workers themselves tends not to be found in research on biopolitics, which tends to focus on the meso/organizational or macro/state level. Publicness and the public sector provide important explanatory power to Arluke’s theory of the caring-killing paradox. Working for the public good adds a dimension to animal care and control work that has not been highlighted specifically. Furthermore, following prior research (Hillier and Byrne, 2016; Labatut et al., 2016; Lemke, 2011; Redmalm, 2019) I extend Foucault’s observations about governing human life to the regulation and control of shelter animal life; particularly the ethics surrounding who decides which lives to save and which lives to end. The high stakes of working in the public sector (Mastracci, 2022) make euthanasia especially challenging to worker wellbeing in a way not captured by the caring-killing paradox and the dirty work literature alone (Baran et al., 2016). In the last section, I articulate one approach to researching animal welfare work in government.

Dirty work and animal care and control

Work is defined as dirty in three ways: Physically, socially, and/or morally (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999, 2014). Examples of physical dirty work in the public sector include collecting garbage or performing autopsies or working in dangerous conditions such as firefighting or policing. Public-sector social dirty work places the worker in close contact with socially-stigmatized populations, such as addiction counselors, prison guards, and parole officers. Public-sector moral dirty work involves engaging in what some might consider ethically-questionable conduct and/or coming into contact with those who do, such as social workers in needle-exchange programs or lawyers working as public defenders. None of these examples are unequivocally dirty: “Dirt” is socially constructed such that, for instance, public defenders vigorously defending guilty clients are at once crucial elements of the American justice system as well as engaged in the morally-questionable conduct of defending guilty criminals. Likewise, needle-exchange programs may be hailed as innovative approaches to treating people suffering from addiction, while others might criticize such programs as only encouraging continued drug use. Like emotionally-laborious work, dirty work can be draining yet rewarding (Guy et al., 2008). The potential for pride in doing dirty work does not offset its difficulties and consequences, including physical ailments, diminished mental health, even moral stress (Levitt and Gezinski, 2020; Lopina et al., 2012; Rogelberg et al., 2007a, 2007b; Rollin, 2011; Schneider and Roberts, 2016; Tallberg and Jordan, 2022).

Government and animal care and control

Government’s role in animal care and control in the United States dates back to colonial times. Local government held livestock that escaped owners’ pens to be reclaimed, sold, or killed (Davis, 2016). “The earliest laws to protect animals in America were meant to protect animals with value as property. This included livestock, but not dogs and cats” (Zawistowski and Morris, 2012: 3). Animals found wandering from their owners’ homes or found on public property were captured and impounded by local poundmasters. Laws allowed poundmasters to sell unclaimed animals or keep them for their own household use. While cows, sheep, and pigs held economic value at the time, stray dogs did not, and were usually killed upon capture. Increasing urbanization in the United States throughout the 1800s decreased the practice of individual households keeping cows, sheep, and other livestock. At the same time, stray dogs living off food waste in urban areas became a public health threat. The public health aspect of managing populations of stray animals in American cities arose mainly out of concern over the transmission of rabies through bites from stray dogs (Wang, 2012: 1010).

One contemporary account complained that stray dogs in New York City “swarm in all the streets, obstruct the pavements, [and] make night hideous with their howls” (New York Daily Times, 1856, quoted in Wang (2012: 1001). While poundmasters attempted to manage stray dog populations, some also seized owned dogs for ransom: “The pound system evolved into a corrupted practice of kidnapping owned dogs and ransoming them back to their owners” (Zawistowski and Morris, 2012: 4, emphasis supplied). Ransoming owned dogs was another symptom of corrupt machine politics in American urban centers at that time. Furthermore, “dog catching was just one of the numerous street trades pursued by children” motivated by generous bounty systems (Wang, 2012: 1005). Beyond ongoing public health and safety concerns, ransom practices at corrupt pounds and the use of children in urban animal control attracted the attention of social reformers.

In the mid- and late-1800s in the US, dog pounds were organized as municipal departments. Also at this time arose Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCAs), nonprofit charitable organizations patterned after the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the UK: “By the 1820s, a domestic ethic of kindness to animals linked the treatment of pets and other creatures to the cultivation of Victorian gentility. . . . Nearly every major US city had an SPCA chapter by the 1890s” (Wang, 2012: 1004). Wang (2012) also observes that animal advocates accused cities of overstating the threat of rabies to rationalize seizing animals, leading to tensions between zealous animal control bureaucrats and animal-welfare groups like SPCAs. As they grew in number, charitable organizations like the SPCAs assumed control over or partnered with local governments to provide shelter services and more humane euthanization than had been the prevailing practice in dog pounds. Zawistowski and Morris (2012) observe: “It is not uncommon to find that a community has both a government-operated animal shelter and one or more shelters operated by humane groups” (p. 4). This reflects the animal control landscape in the US today: A mix of public and private providers. And whether public or private, government regulates all shelter activities. In this way, the public sector is as involved with animal life and death as it is in human death management (Zavattaro and Guy, 2022)—both as stigmatized government functions. Operating shelters and regulating human deaths in the US demonstrate the centrality of government to literal life and death decisions, and both are examples of Foucault’s biopolitics. The research agenda proposed in the current essay builds from prior work that brought biopolitics into the calculus of political rationality and the government of animal lives and deaths (Catlaw and Holland, 2012; Hillier and Byrne, 2016; Labatut et al., 2016; Redmalm, 2019; Reed, 2012; Skoglund and Redmalm, 2017; Thomas, 2011). This essay extends prior research by highlighting the role of government as well as the experiences of public servants.

The unavoidability of euthanasia in government shelter work, what I refer to here as the euthanasia imperative, introduces the “caring-killing paradox” for shelter workers. Arluke defines this paradox as follows: “On the one hand, [shelter workers] tried to understand and embrace the institutional rationale for euthanasia, but on the other hand, they wanted to nurture and tend to shelter animals. Doing both seemed impossible” (Arluke, 1994: 147). The caring-killing paradox is the conflicted situation in which shelter workers find themselves, where “shelter workers are expected to euthanize animals for which they have been providing care and protection” (Reeve et al., 2005: 120). Andrukonis et al. (2020: 14) reveal that the stress of euthanasia extends even to workers not directly involved in the act: “Providing husbandry and constant care for animals may be enough to develop compassion fatigue.” Reeve et al. (2005: 120) reveal some of the costs borne by shelter workers: “Individuals performing animal euthanasia are at increased risk of emotional mismanagement, physical ailments such as high blood pressure and ulcers, unresolved grief, depression, as well as substance abuse and even suicide.” Suicide rates in veterinary medicine are higher than in the general population and higher than in other professions, both within and outside the US (DaSilva et al., 2023).

Furthermore, any animal currently under the care of a shelter could be euthanized. Beyond health issues and severe behavior problems, there are no obvious candidates for euthanization, given the need to sometimes kill healthy but unwanted animals to make space for more animals. For these reasons, the stress of the euthanasia imperative in shelter work could affect any shelter worker (Levitt and Gezinski, 2020; Tallberg and Jordan, 2022). Moreover, because the common definition of “no kill” allows for as much as 10% of a shelter’s animal population to be euthanized (No-Kill 2025 FAQ, n.d.), even workers in no-kill shelters could be negatively affected by the euthanasia imperative in shelter work. Better understanding the impacts of killing for a living on all shelter workers is crucial to understanding the circumstances of this overlooked segment of government.

The best estimate of the number of animal shelters in the US is about 4400, with half run by local governments, and another 22% operated by nonprofits under a contract with a local government, and the remaining being private nonprofits (Rodriguez et al., 2022: 1). These estimates suggest that between one-half and three-fourths of animal shelters in the US are publicly funded and operated or at least under contract with a local government. Unlike private or nonprofit shelters, for government-operated shelters (Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), 2012: 1):

Most are legally required to take in all stray dogs regardless of their health, temperament, or age (since rabies is commonly seen as the most pressing public health concern relating to companion animals), and many voluntarily expand their operations to accept surrendered pets, cats, and other types of animals in need.

Reeve et al. (2005: 129, fn 7) conclude that “Nearly every employee in a government/municipal shelter was involved in euthanasia activities to some extent . . . this difference is not an atypical finding.” Moreover, if government-operated and -contracted shelters are larger than nonprofit shelters, then it is possible that most animals in custody are the responsibility of a local government in the US.

Government’s involvement in animal life and death decisions arises from Foucauldian “dividing practices,” which are “modes of manipulation justified by science and scientific classification, and performed through social and spatial exclusion, including death” (Hillier and Byrne, 2016: 393). Dividing practices are social norms that determine which animals are wanted and which are not, with the latter subject to confinement by government and death at the hands of government (see also Hillier and Byrne, 2016; Labatut et al., 2016). Extending Pachirat’s Politics of Sight renders shelter functions invisible to the society that demands those functions, to the extent that stray animals are not tolerated on US streets (Hamilton and McCabe, 2016). Pachirat (2011) developed his theory of a Politics of Sight through his fieldwork at a cattle slaughterhouse in the US. His research arose from the American norm (human norm?) demanding widely available and cheap food, without regard for its origins. Likewise, the sight of stray animals is not tolerated in most American cities (Rodriguez et al., 2022) with few people knowing or caring how that outcome is obtained.

A research agenda on local government and animal care and control

The preceding paragraphs argue that the public-sector context is important to understand because public servants are often providers of last resort, but also because they act in our name. Privatization reforms in government have not changed this. Government has long been central to the control of animal bodies and lives. Research on government shelters can address Arluke’s questions surrounding his caring-killing paradox by introducing the key element of publicness.

To explore how organizations socialize some workers into killing for a living, I propose employing a combination of perspectives from social science: Emotional labor theory plus demands of dirty work plus the publicness of animal care and control. This combination of perspectives provides a fuller explanation for how institutions can motivate “ordinary people” (Arluke, 1994: 145) to kill animals that they have cared for, including the kinds of animals that they may have as pets. Recent research on emotional labor in work that incumbents consider a calling could inform this approach as well (Pradies, 2023; Schabram and Maitlis, 2017). A perspective grounded in biopolitics highlights the centrality of government’s role in making life and death decisions. A sense of publicness and serving as a provider of last resort compels public servants to understand that no one else will do this necessary work if they don’t. Fieldwork in government shelters including participant observation and interviewing would help to reveal how shelter workers make sense of their work.

A research agenda on government’s role in animal care and control could explore whether workers in government-operated shelters suffer greater or lesser degrees of stress compared to those in private shelters, given the mixed results in the current literature. For instance, Reeve et al. (2005: 129) find that “nearly every employee in a government/municipal shelter was involved in euthanasia activities to an extent.” Coupled with Andrukonis et al. (2020) who find that participation in decisions about which animals to kill is as stressful as participating in euthanasia and Tallberg and Jordan (2022) who reveal significant dissonance experienced by shelter workers. Together, the implications from these studies suggests that workers in government-operated shelters may suffer greater stress than do workers in nonprofit shelters. Such a result would be consistent with the idea that government work involves higher stakes than work outside the public sector (Mastracci, 2022). Similarly, Reeve et al. (2005: 132) conclude: “Employees of private animal shelters were significantly more satisfied with their job overall (based on both Overall Job Satisfaction and Job In General scale) and specifically with their supervisor. The effect size estimates for these differences suggest a large effect.” Reeve et al. (2005) also find fewer stress-related physical complaints and improved wellbeing from workers at private shelters.

In contrast, Andrukonis and Protopopova (2020: 124) find that “municipal shelter employees had a lower [PTSD score] than private shelter employees . . . [but also that] municipal shelter employees had a lower median compassion satisfaction score compared with private shelter employees.” And different still, Hill et al. (2020: 102) find: “Organization type was not significant when dummy variables were entered.” A research agenda on government’s role in animal care and control could also consider a range of human resource management approaches to shelter operations. Human resource management tools include training, job rotation or other practices to affect how work is done. Andrukonis et al. (2020) suggest that collective decision making about which animals are euthanized could be a means by which the shelter staff can share the stress that this decision making involves (p. 127):

If the most difficult euthanasia-related decision is deciding which specific animal will be euthanized, then it may be beneficial for shelters to implement a multi-level approach to euthanasia-related decisions. This may lessen the decision-making burden on a specific person by sharing it amongst the group. It would provide a protective buffer for individuals directly involved in euthanasia-related decisions.

Human resource management approaches should also account for the emotional labor of shelter work: “Although institutions will, no doubt, equip newcomers with rules and resources for managing unwanted emotions, researchers have not examined how such emotion management strategies actually work . . . it is generally assumed that newcomers learn ways to distance themselves from their acts and lessen their guilt” (Arluke, 1994: 146). How is emotional labor employed to allow workers to manage the emotions of euthanasia? Also, how is emotional labor used to manage one’s identity as a dirty worker? In one instance, Animal Control Officers (ACOs), as public employees, respond to the stress of their jobs “by not talking about the details of their work, unless asked, a technique shared with other workers who find that people would rather not know specifics about their jobs” (Arluke, 2004: 17). Arluke (2004) also reveals the concern that ACOs feel to manage the impression of their jobs as law enforcement officers and not animal rights advocates. ACO impression management is shared by other government workers: “By viewing their roles in this way, these officers managed their feelings by restricting, minimizing, or denying the impact of cruelty on their mental and emotional states, a practice shared with regular police who are trained to detach their feelings and behave in an unemotional manner” (Arluke, 2004: 19). How can we better understand these common experiences through a focus on publicness? And are suicide rates in animal care and control higher than overall averages, like they are in veterinary medicine?

One approach that has been used in fieldwork to gather evidence on the unique aspects of working in animal care and control is institutional ethnography (Smith, 2006). Institutional Ethnography (IE) is “a form of inquiry that aims to discover the actual, everyday work of people in an institution and examine how these work activities are organized by institutional processes” (Koralesky et al., 2023a: 2). The objective of IE is to “describe occasions when institutional aims . . . and the everyday work of people . . . result in tensions that are not captured in the metric data” (Koralesky et al., 2023a: 2). Institutional ethnographies are “built from the examination of work processes and study of how they are coordinated, typically through texts and discourses” (DeVault, 2006: 294). The high stakes of public sector work provide interesting contexts for institutional ethnographers to examine front-line organizational work (see examples in DeVault, 2012), including animal shelters (Koralesky et al., 2023b). But, a research agenda in public administration on government’s role in animal care and control could go further and take the perspective of multispecies methodologies—specifically, multispecies ethnography—in order to more accurately capture the position of the researcher among nonhuman research participants (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010). This perspective would be new to public administration research and would recognize nonhuman agency and entanglement with human lives and the administrative state. Multispecies ethnography would capture agency, work, and life across species boundaries and the posture of the reflective ethnographer would acknowledge perspectives beyond the human. In this way, the ideas discussed in this essay would advance human-animal studies in the administrative state beyond what has been proposed for public administration to date (Catlaw and Holland, 2012).

Outside public administration, Drew and Mills (2007: 218) claim that ethnography is academic dirty work because qualitative research can be marginalized and marginalizing in the social sciences. Combined with Wilkie’s (2015: 225) observation that human-animal studies as a focus area for academic research remains somewhat marginalized, then ethnographic research in animal shelters would be doubly suspect: “By breaching anthropocentric norms . . . animal-related issues are out of place in the social sciences.” Finally, within this research agenda lies an area of inquiry surrounding the emotional labor of doing embodied social science research: “Emotions are a central part of social research . . . As qualitative researchers, our goal is to see the world through someone else’s eyes, using ourselves as a research instrument” (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009: 61–62). A research agenda on government’s role in animal care and control would demand its own emotional labor and is itself potentially stigmatized.

The role of organizations to socialize some workers into killing for a living—and other shelter workers to accept it—is crucial to understand as well. Understanding how workers manage and navigate the caring/killing paradox can reveal something important about contemporary attitudes toward government. In this, I follow Hamilton and McCabe (2016), who argue that how we make sense of managing unwanted bodies, in this case, unwanted animals, says much about our society. Studying workers in animal shelters is a direct approach to understanding the management of paradox and inherent resentment toward government because (Arluke, 1994: 163, emphasis supplied):

Far from being a unique situation, the shelter workers’ relationship with animals is but our general culture’s response to animals writ small. . . . our individual ways of managing our thoughts and feelings may similarly dull the conflict just enough for it to become a familiar uneasiness. For shelter workers, the conflict is merely heightened and their struggle to make peace with their acts is more deliberate and collective.

Here, Arluke claims that shelter workers’ management of the caring/killing paradox is a microcosm of society’s view of animals. I would extend this argument and suggest that Arluke’s observation may also be a microcosm of how US society perceives its government. Individual approaches to managing thoughts and feelings about government similarly result in an uneasiness about aspects of people’s lives being controlled. This anxiety periodically erupts in protest. Studying emotional labor and dirty work, Ward et al. (2020) reveal a resentment toward agents of social control—including government workers like police officers—as embodied representations of the control government has over individuals’ lives. Like animal sheltering, policing is another service that is high in publicness and controversial in a for-profit context. Resentment surrounding both human dirty work (policing) and animal dirty work (ACOs and sheltering) may reveal important aspects of how the (US) public views government. Resentment of government in an Individualist culture like the US might arise as a reminder that no individual lives entirely independently of others. Understanding how shelter workers negotiate mental and emotional conflicts of caring and killing may shed light onto how society views the necessary but undesirable dirty work of government. Comparisons to workers at a private shelter would be needed as well.

Finally, future research might also investigate why shelters do not kill all of their animals immediately after some minimum number of days. Local laws usually specify a minimum number of days that a shelter must hold an animal to allow owners to retrieve lost pets. However, most animals in shelters are voluntarily surrendered by owners to government custody and not lost. An efficient government-run or government-funded organization would not spend any money feeding and providing clean and safe shelter for animals that are eventually killed. Why wouldn’t such an efficiency-minded operating strategy receive public support? Fieldwork can address these questions, as well as Arluke’s (1994) initial question about the killing-caring paradox. Ultimately, fieldwork in this area could generate insights into animal care and control and also into other government work that involves violence or use of force, given what Ward et al. (2020) reveal about the emotional labor demands on agents of social control. In the US, this would also include government workers in correctional facilities that implement capital punishment (i.e.: Workers on “death row”). Such research would complement Pfiffner’s (2005: 324) observations of the effects of enhanced interrogation techniques on military personnel at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq: “The practice of torture brutalizes and dehumanizes its victims, but it also brutalizes and dehumanizes those who torture their fellow human beings.” Government workers hold a crucial place in the exercise of biopolitical power. The impact of the work that they do in the name of the people is likewise crucial to apprehend and understand.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sharon Mastracci

Notes

Author biography

Sharon Mastracci studies the experience of working in public sector organizations; specifically, emotional labor in public service, motivation, burnout, stigmatized work, and gender. She is a Professor at Virginia Tech (USA), was a 2014–2015 Fulbright Scholar to the University of Birmingham (UK), and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (USA).

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Killing for a living: A research agenda on government’s role in animal care and control

Abstract

Keywords

Dirty work and animal care and control

Government and animal care and control

A research agenda on local government and animal care and control

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References