This book defines and argues for a Critical Pet Studies that challenges conventional narratives about human-pet relationships. Bringing together critical theoretical understandings of human-pet relationships and empirical research on them, this book investigates three sites of inquiry: the construction of animals-as-pet-commodities, multispecies cohabitation, and multispecies resistance. This sociological analysis of human-pet entanglements firmly situates them in a broader structural context that enables the categorisation of animals as ‘Pet’.

Drawing on over 60 qualitative interviews with 'owners' and stakeholders involved in housing and supporting pet-owning humans, and species-inclusive observation, the author demonstrates that unequal power relations become evident when nonhuman animals are centred in research that concerns them. Committed to the activist-scholarship agenda, this book offers a fruitful contribution to multispecies scholarship and human animal studies more broadly. It moves beyond previously depoliticised and human-centric explorations of human-pet relations, and challenges the reader to re-imagine companionship with other animals.

Zoei Sutton is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University, Australia, who lives, learns and works on unceded Kaurna country (South Australia). She pursues critical, nonhuman animal-centric scholarship, chairs the Australasian Animal Studies Association and co-founded the International Association of Vegan Sociologists as well as The Australian Sociological Association's Sociology & Animals thematic group.