Reading pain: Cultural conceptions of animal suffering

The conceptualizations of animal pain govern the ways in which animals are treated medically, legally and in everyday relations.

Animal pain cannot be directly accessed and, therefore, it is pivotal to understand how it is made sense of in cultural representations found in literature, popular science, and spiritual belief.

This project explores how ideas, concepts and discourses concerning animal pain have changed from the 1970s until today.

The project aims to identify these imaginaries through qualitative analyses of representations of animal pain, in three different but interrelated contexts: (1) fictional stories/memoirs about caring for animals; (2) veterinary knowledge and practice as displayed in animal care handbooks and guides; and (3) books about telepathic communication with animals, in which veterinary knowledge is contested.

The project departs from the idea that there are multiple areas of knowledge involved in assessing pain and illness in animals—scientific, practical, situated, and tacit—leading to diverse ways of conceptualizing animal minds.

This project differs from previous research by comparing these fields of knowledge in a novel way, highlighting how they impact one another. We will be able to identify different ways in which animal pain and illness are discussed and overlaps between them.

The project will shed light on how animal subjectivity came to matter, discern important shifts, and introduce key concepts in this process.