4. More-than-human care: Caring for animals

 Welcome to Week 4 of Transforming Lives through Care. This is part of a course in the Anthropology of Care at La Trobe University.

In previous weeks, we analysed care through the lens of:

  • kinship (Week 2)
  • the Gift (Week 3)
You might have noticed in this discussion that pets came up as members of families and recipients of gifts. This is a topic we delve further into this week.  



🎯 Learning Goals

By the end of this week, you should be able to:
  • Analyse how care for animals expresses broader social, gendered, and spiritual dynamics
  • Reflect on how ritual, emotion, and power are entwined in human-animal relations
  • Compare the Melanesian "pig complex" with pet care in Australia and other industrialised societies
  • Begin to de-centre Western ideas of “animal care” by engaging with ethnographic evidence

🚦 Introduction

Care for 'animals' is a crucial part of many cultures. This week we ask:

  • What does it mean to love and care for an animal?

  • How is that love shaped by gender roles, ritual obligations, and cosmology?

  • Can animals be kin? Ancestors? Sacrifices?

Through an ethnographic lens, we’ll explore these questions in Melanesia and then reflect on parallels with pet ownership and care practices in Australia and the United States.


🗣️ Interactive tasks

 

🐾 Complete My Pet Poll (worth 1%). 

If you have owned a pet. Pick your favourite pet or your oldest pet. Now answer the following questions

  • What kind of animal? 
  • What kind of care how often did you do the following care:
    • Walking?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Cleaning faccees / urine?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Feeding?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Watering?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Cleaning feeding and watering utensils?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • trips to vet?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • washing / cleaning / grooming ---- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • sleep in your bed

  •  Do / did you celebrate birthdays?
  • Do/Did they 'give' or receive presents at birthdays or other celebrations?
    •  If so, please describe one occasion, the gift, and who gave it, and who received it.
  • Do/Did you love your pet?
  • Do/Did your pet love you?
  •  If they have passed away, did  mourn their death in a ritualised way?
OR 

If you have never owned a pet, find an online blog / vlog of animal care. Here's an example of someone caring for a dog in Melbourne, Australia. Now  and answer the following questions:

  • What kind of animal? 
  • What kind of care how often does it receive the following care:
    • Walking?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Cleaning faeces / urine?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Feeding?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Watering?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • Cleaning feeding and watering utensils?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • trips to vet?-- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • washing / cleaning / grooming ---- never / yearly / monthly /weekly / daily
    • sleep in carer's bed

📚 Recommended Materials

Read "Pig Love", an excerpt from Jolly. In this reading, I have excerpted the crucial parts of Jolly's article for TLC. These explain the four key features of pig-human relations in Melanesia:

  1. Women care for pigs

  2. Men appropriate pigs for exchange and ritual

  3. Pigs symbolise male prestige and power

  4. Pigs are spiritual beings with souls

Jolly’s ethnography challenges us to rethink care as both emotional and instrumental—deeply entangled with gender, hierarchy, and cosmology.

Summary: In many cultures, caring for animals extends beyond feeding and affection—it involves ritual, exchange, sacrifice, and spiritual entanglement. Jolly’s “Pig Love” challenges Western assumptions about animal care, showing how pigs in Vanuatu are loved, killed, mourned, and incorporated socially and spiritually. This week we explore care as a multispecies, more-than-human practice that often includes contradiction, hierarchy, and deep emotional labour.


📘 Essential Materials

Read the entire article, Jolly, M. (1984). The anatomy of pig love: Substance, Spirit and Gender in South Pentecost, Vanuatu. Canberra Anthropology, 7(1–2), 78–108.


🏁 Conclusion

Summary

This week, we saw that animal care is not simply about kindness or companionship. In South Pentecost, pigs are raised tenderly, named, and even wept over—but also ritually killed and transformed into spiritual and social capital. Care here is bound up with gender roles, status, and the sacred.

Significance

By looking cross-culturally, we can denaturalise our assumptions about pets and animal love. We come to see that care—even love—can involve contradiction: nurture and sacrifice, tenderness and hierarchy, personhood and property.

What’s Next

Next week, we analyse workers who care for the elderly as part of what is called "carescape". 


🔎 Further Research

Check out "Maru" an early YouTube cat sensation. This Scottish Straight moggie from Japan who became a global icon through charming videos of box antics.  Maru’s channel has over 535 million views Here, care takes the form of creative production and attention, turning daily pet life into cultural artefacts.  

Read "Grinding the Souls". For women volunteers trying to save dogs from being euthanised is 'soul-grinding' work for the women. Jun details how shelter workers' emotional and physical labour for animals intersects with guilt, burnout, and gender and class inequality.

 Read Paolo Bocci, “Tangles of Care: Killing Goats to Save Tortoises on the Galápagos Islands”. Can care kill?  Conservationists killed 200,000 goats to save endangered tortoises. Bocci explores how care entangles humans, animals, and ecosystems in morally complex, politically fraught decisions.

Read Gressier, Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms. In the book Nurturing Alternative Futures. Also listen to podcasts podcasts and multimedia coverage on Gressier's topic

Read my summary of Govindrajan, The Goat that Died for Family. This article is also one of the readings in ANT3ANI. 


Read Porter, N. (2019), Training Dogs to Feel Good: Embodying Well-being in Multispecies Relations. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 33: 101-119. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12459

Read my summary of a passage from Gender of the Gift. This summarise the relationship between the Gift, animals, and caring. You also get exposure to one of the great anthropologist of the 20th century,  Marilyn Strathern/

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