Animals: Multi-species Companions

Abstract

Child–animal relations co-shape shared worlds. Children and animals ‘being together’ as multi-species companions within city spaces is the focus of this chapter. In particular, the chapter explores how children and dogs become deeply entangled in a place like La Paz. How they co-inhabit a shared relational world. In the process of reading the ‘intra-actions between child–animals in La Paz’ pouring over the photographs and drawings, the stories by the children and the walks in the streets and forests, I have sought to be mindful to the way humans and non-humans can slip out of the grasp of classic hierarchical structures. This re-reading of animal relations through the children’s encounters ‘enables’ the child–animal relationships to reveal a new plane of intra-subjectivity. Rather than thinking through the child’s relation to animals (nature) by elevating animals to the status of the children, or de-elevating the child to the status of an ‘animal’, in this posthumanist reading of child–dog in La Paz, I have sought to unpack political, ethical and ontological questions without enforcing a traditional human–animal distinction.