Multispecies tourism research

Human-horse relations

More people are choosing to include their ‘pets’ and companion animals in their holidays, but provision for and understanding of non-human travellers remain limited. Multispecies tourism provides an opportunity for the creation of rich, personally meaningful experiences that are key to satisfaction, but also has the potential for producing stress and disappointment.

The limited field of multispecies tourism tends to focus on dogs, whereas this paper considers some of the different issues raised when humans and horses holiday together. Auto / ethnographic vignettes of human-horse partnerships ‘on holiday’ are used to consider questions of interspecies trust and relationships as enacted through tourism, and to reflect on some of the complexities and contradictions inherent in these practices. These tourism activities prompt consideration of what makes a ‘good’ holiday and for whom, as well as some of the power relations inherent in multispecies tourism.

More than human emotions

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more-than-human and multispecies perspectives.

Organisations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of non-humans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, there is an argument that some non-human animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service for commercial organisations. More-than-human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organisational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalised others, human and non-human.