Knowledge and (Un)Certainty in Multispecies Care and Euthanasia

• In Event: Nonhuman Innovations, Nonhuman Disruptions - III: Death & Ethics

Abstract

The state of Illinois mandates that animal care workers train and become certified by the state in order to perform euthanasia within animal welfare organizations. These certification courses present euthanasia practitioners with standardized images and process descriptions that render animal euthanasia a predictable and replicable act. However, the chatter among more experienced care workers as they come up against these concretized ideals points towards the instability of these standardizations. Dead animal bodies sometimes do surprising things, interrupting the typically scalable and translatable scientific knowledges of animal biology and death.
In this paper I explore these stories of contingency using examples from my ethnographic fieldwork in a Chicago animal shelter. Interactions with and understanding of the nonhuman and the nonliving are necessarily tenuous when communicating, knowing, and representing across these significant divides. The instability and nonscalability of the sensory-driven, partial knowledges that do result from human engagements with these radically different others challenge the authority of traditional scientific knowledge-making and knowledge-spreading processes. This paper offers a pathway towards a social science that is prepared for the surprise of the unpredictable nonhuman and is committed to the generative potential of small-scale, unstable familiarities as valid alongside more traditional authoritative knowledge.

Author

• EJ Jetmore, Rice University