DFG Project "Animals as Companions. Animal-human relationships between liveliness and standardization".

Animals are part of society. They are fought as intruders in human living environments or exhibited for admiration in zoos. They are bred, slaughtered, and eaten-or treated as family members and intimate friends. Commonly declared "pets," these companion animals can now be found in every second German household. They receive exclusive treatment, are named and loved. Differentiated consumer and service markets have established themselves around their care, generating billions in annual sales in Germany. Despite this obvious social relevance of companion animals, sociology has so far kept its distance and taken up the topic only selectively. It concentrates on certain animal species and presupposes the status of animals as companions. What remains open, however, is what constitutes the special quality of these interspecies relationships and why which animals attain companion status in the first place. The project closes these research gaps with a qualitative survey design. Owners of different animal species are accompanied through different relationship phases and questioned about acquisition motives, design and interpretations. In order to capture factors influencing companion relationships as well as their dynamics of change, the project also surveys animal-related services and the role of artifacts. Here, triadic figurations emerge, encompassing living beings and things, which can provide information about the extent to which motives for keeping animals are in tension with concrete ways of dealing with them. On the one hand, the acquisition of animals is linked to the need for originality and naturalness; on the other hand, tendencies towards the standardization of ways of keeping animals, a standardization of forms of relationships, and an increasing reification of animals cannot be ignored. With this search direction, the project moves into the center of sociological debates on hybrid interspecies relations and, in contrast to research on the artificial, can contribute empirical findings on the determinants of the living. Project Management: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Jürgens Project editing and information:

Services for companion animals - The changing nature of pet-human relationships exemplified by a growing service landscape (working title)

Currently, a large number of services are imaginable or already successful on the market for the provision and care of companion animals. Traditional services such as veterinary care are becoming more diverse in their range of services and more and more similar to the field of human medicine. A need for research on pet-related services can already be derived from the change and growth of the industry. However, the relevance goes beyond the exploration of the field as a remarkable service industry: it can be assumed that working with a non-human third party has its own characteristics.

For the PhD project, the concept, questions, and empirics of the DFG-funded project "Animals as Companions" (project number 443785427) can be taken up. In the DFG-funded project, pet-human relationships are conceived as a triad including service providers in order to investigate the influence of service providers on pet-human relationships. Accordingly, interviews and ethnographies are conducted and collected not only with keepers of different types of animals, but also with service providers. The services around companion animals will now be analyzed and interpreted in depth in the doctoral thesis. Firstly, the research is guided by the question of the specifics of working with companion animals in the concrete service interactions. Secondly, it is to be asked how service providers can be characterized: What motivations guide them? What images of animals and their owners do they evoke? The goal is to reconstruct empirically the inherent dynamics of the service process with animals, resulting from the specific constellation of services for a non-human third party. New impulses can be expected for the understanding of contemporary pet keeping as well as for intra-human service research.

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