The Terrier [Men]

Abstract

‘Terrier work’ is an historical and deeply significant rural practice in the United Kingdom, in which small or medium size terriers are employed to track, capture and kill foxes in the larger context of an organized foxhunt. Between 2007-2009, I spent time following a small group of ‘terrier men’ and their dogs around the East Midlands countryside as part of an ethnographic project on the use of dogs in rural (mainly fox) hunting cultures. A small faction of these terrier men living in England and Wales participate in a quasi-legal hunting subculture. In this paper, and drawing heavily upon animal standpoint theory (Best, 2013), I shift analytic focus in human-nonhuman animal studies away from human constructions/ uses/ meanings of animals in animal ‘blood sports’ (Gillett & Gilbert, 2013), and consider a fox hunting case study from the positions and subjectivities of the animals involved. This reading calls sociologists of sport and physical culture to reconsider how human-animal sports, analyzed from marginalized or silenced standpoints, direct attention to the interplay between power, instincts, and desires involved when species interactively meet.

For an Emancipatory Animal Sociology

“…For example, Cudworth and Hobden (2015: 514) argue that war should be considered in posthuman terms, as ‘it is an indication of the deeply human-centred character of the discipline that almost none of the central texts even make a mention of the very significant roles that non-human animals have in the conduct of war’. There was also evidence of attempts to invert traditional scholarship to try and take nonhuman animals’ points of view, as in Atkinson’s (2014) attempts to consider blood sports from the point of view of the terrier dogs involved. There was a clear distinction between empirical and theoretical papers, in that all wholly politicised empirical papers were both animal and anthropocentric in their focus (often dedicating more space to human perspectives).…”

“…Articles were coded as animal-centric (n = 5; 5%) 4 if they explicitly focused on nonhuman animals, either considering issues from the position of the animals involved (e.g. Atkinson's [2014] attempt to write from the perspective of the terrier dogs in his study) and/or methodological attempts to understand the inner lives of animals by specifically including them. For instance, Alger and Alger's (1999) ethnographic study of a cat shelter explored the inner world of cats by observing how they negotiate their preferences with humans through interaction.…”

Toward More-Than-Human Understandings of Sport and the Environment: A New Materialist Analysis of Everyday Fitness Practices

“…Also within the sporting scholarship, scholars have focused on non-human matter as a way to think differently about the impact of sporting participation and consumption practices on animals (Atkinson, 2014;King, 2020). In so doing, some sport scholars are engaging with inter-and multi-species approaches to explore human-animal relationships in sport, including horses (Dashper, 2019) and canines (Merchant, 2020).…”

Beyond Boundaries: The Development and Potential of Ethnography in the Study of Sport and Physical Culture

“…To be clear, ours is a criticism of neither autoethnography nor reflexivity in ethnography. 14 When the balance is right, the ethnographer provides greater insight (e.g., Bunds, 2016;Flanagan, 2014) and/or methodological lessons and ethical considerations regarding the everyday and, oftentimes, unavoidable challenges of doing ethnography (e.g., Atkinson, 2014;Newman, 2011;Olive & Thorpe, 2011). However, the foregrounding of reflexivity in PCS ethnographies creates a tendency for introspective hand-wringing (e.g., Bunds, 2014;Clift, 2014;King-White, 2013;Newman, 2013) or tales of self-valor (e.g., Thorpe, 2014), despite being conducted in the effort of deconstructing power and social inequality in/through/as physical culture.…”