A dog bred to be hypoallergenic may still trigger allergies in its owner, and a therapy horse may be stressed by the very sessions meant to calm a human. This project examines how partnerships between humans and animals—often promoted as mutually beneficial—can actually mask hidden harms and inequalities. The problem is that the popular idea of a “win-win” relationship with animals, from nature-cures to ethical dairy farming, has received little critical scrutiny. Without fresh thinking, these practices risk deepening the very problems they claim to solve. The research team will analyse four case studies: nature-cures, ethical dairy production, equine therapy, and hypoallergenic dog breeding. They will use social science, humanities, and creative storytelling methods to understand how mutualism works—or fails to work—across individual, social, and ecosystem scales. This is a curiosity-driven, fundamental science project. It will not produce a new product or policy. But by revealing how genuine mutualism can be distinguished from harmful or unequal partnerships, it could reshape how we design animal-assisted therapies, livestock systems, and companion animal breeding in the future.
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This project offers a transformative reimagining of ‘multispecies mutualism’: the conviction that partnerships between humans and animals can underpin mental, physical and material health for all. Despite being associated with reciprocal benefits, lack of critical attention to the way that multispecies mutuality is represented, practised and theorised risks masking harms and inequalities that can emerge from these relations. There is thus an urgent need for fresh interdisciplinary thinking to avoid deepening problematic relationships, and to promote genuinely mutualistic ones. This project meets this need by: 1) examining how multispecies mutualisms are currently conceived, defined and contested in public representations of a healthy life. 2) analysing how competing priorities and understandings of multispecies health are negotiated in practice. 3) developing new theoretical trajectories to identify and overcome potential harms and inequalities. Multispecies Mutualisms is a curiosity-driven project that interrogates representations, practices, and theories of mutualism across four case studies:—nature-cures, ethical dairy production, equine therapy, and hypoallergenic dog breeding—to understand mutualistic relations across individual, social and ecosystemic scales. Bringing together an internationally-renowned research team, and via an innovative combination of social-scientific, humanities-based and creative more-than-human storytelling methods, the project pioneers a bold vision of what multispecies mutualism could be in the future.
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