Ethnographic shadowing and animal methods "without" methods

Carly Baker

Pet-food companies are incorporating overpopulated species, insects, and cultured meat as ingredients as a response to increasing environmental impacts of pet food and concerns of animal welfare. The objective of my research is to investigate the marketing and development of alternative protein dog foods. My research questions focus on the contestation of the science of sustainability and nutrition, overlapping food systems for pets and humans, and market development. I also ask how producers imagine their roles as carers of nonhuman animals – particularly for pets, traditional animals used in dog food, and the ‘new’ animals being used.

I developed an interest in the topic over the past 15 years working as a veterinary technician and farmer. I knew I wanted to study food geography, and it wasn’t until I was chatting with my master’s advisor that it occurred to me that dog food is understudied and important. I completed my master’s thesis with a qualitative study on humane certified dog food, mostly analyzing the discourse and images on the websites. I also analyzed certification documents and conducted two interviews.

My PhD dissertation is – in some ways – a larger version of that project. I am employing shadowing as an ethnographic technique. This involves following an actant (human or nonhuman) as it moves through a network – the dog food value chain – to see the inner and outer workings of the information or material presented by the institution or actants (Czarniawska-Joerges 2007). In this case, the material is the product that is sold to consumers (and the protein in it) and the information is the knowledge circulated on packaging and in production and sales discourses. I followed the protein – a controversial term in this case for the animal ingredient – which led to following humans. Of course, dogs have a role too.

Data collection has been messy, particularly thinking about nonhumans. I started with a plan that was constantly interrupted and expanded upon. For example, reading about fish behavior and crocodile attack frequencies unexpectedly interrupted my set aside 3-month period for doing textual analysis. I will lay out what I have done as clearly as possible, which means I will say what I have done but not in the order that I did it. This is not how I plan to write about it in my dissertation, where I will describe my methodology in all its chaotic splendor, jumping around by season instead of method.

Crocodile spotted during data collection

First, I engaged in autoethnography with my own dog. I reflected on my own feeding practices and my time working in the industry. This politicized my relationship with the animals and humans I was working with and positioned me in the web of relationships (Gillespie 2021). As a vegan, I am critical of eco-capitalism and do not think that meat can ever be humane or sustainable. Yet, for multiple health and behavioral reasons, I feed my dogs meat.

I conducted 30 interviews with supply chain actors. This ranged from CEOs and sales managers of pet food companies to fishers and insect farmers, to a graphic designer that rebranded a fish. I analyzed websites, nutrition blogs, and industry media to detect patterns and contestations of science. I won’t say much about these methods except that they were helpful to understand how participants talked about animals and how they expressed their feelings about animals. These were the most accessible methods.

I conducted participant observation in different settings with varying degrees of participation. First, I sold products (made with either overpopulated fish or insects) as a sales ambassador in the Seattle region. Ethically, this was complicated. I was not allowed to say I was a researcher while doing sales and therefore I was not allowed to collect data from the customers or their reactions to the animals. As stated above, my own morals made selling animal products complicated. However, I learnt about what aspects of the product – or the animal within it – to highlight to consumers and strategies for selling.

Second, I observed the material supply chain. This involved following a CEO to different fisheries while he tried to convince them to harvest and process lionfish in a particular way. Most could not be bothered to do so. I observed overpopulated species fishing and processing in the US and Mexico. I attended the inauguration of an insect facility and witnessed the workday at a cricket farm. Access was difficult, particularly with cultured meat and insect facilities. On the bright side, this helped to set boundaries on the research, and it was the highlight of my year despite the inherent sadness of what I was watching. I gained a better perspective on human-nonhuman interactions by talking to those that worked the closest with them, with participants that may have been impossible to reach had I not been in the field (including nonhuman ones).

Fishing for devil fish in Mexico and black soldier fly larvae

I still have a lot of questions and I faced a lot of challenges, such as:

-          How to engage with aquatic and invertebrates. I could maybe employee critical anthropomorphism (Burghardt 1991) or ethology, but it surely is not as easy as it might be with mammals. How can I attempt to understand their experience?

-          Challenging human exceptionalism. Following animals in a supply chain meant following humans, which meant centering the human experience in research on animals. Yet, I wasn’t sure that animal-centric methods or even a multispecies ethnography were appropriate for my questions. Is working with humans that work the animals animal-centric? Was I trying to get at animal subjectivities? Could I make the animals ‘thick’ on the pages (van Dooren and Rose 2016)? I am still a human telling the story.

-          Consent. I was watching routinized violence against animals. There was no room for consent when they are dying. I had to witness to violence and betrayal to maintain access to tell their story (García 2019; Gillespie 2016). Was that enough though? Will it change anything?

While writing my chapter, I stumbled across methodologies without methodology (Koro-Ljungberg 2016), which does not mean no methodology. Rather, it permits methodological boundary blurring, articulating the complexity of data collection, and leaving space for fluidity in the field. Sometimes methodologies without methodology means entering the field without methods. As it stands, I still do not know how I am approaching nonhumans and my data collection is done. What would it mean to do animal methods “without” methods? Is there something to be learned by doing so?

Carly Baker (BakerCR1@cardiff.ac.uk)

Carly Baker (she/her) is a third-year postgraduate researcher (PhD candidate) in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. She received her Masters of Arts in Geography at University of Kentucky. Her current research interest is the marketing and development of alternative proteins dog food supply chains and human-animal relationships within them (including nonhumans such as insects, invasive species, and cultured meat). She has two dogs - Liam Clancy and Townes - that inspired her research and assist in product sampling while in the field. 

Burghardt, Gordon. 1991. ‘Cognitive Ethology and Critical Anthropomorphism: A Snake with Two Heads and Hognose Snakes That Play Dead.’ In Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Griffin, 53–90. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara. 2007. Shadowing: And Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork in Modern Societies. Malmö, Sweden : Herndon, VA : Oslo: Liber ; Copenhagen Business School Press ; Universitetsforlaget.

Dooren, Thom van, and Deborah Bird Rose. 2016. ‘Lively Ethography’. Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527731.

García, María Elena. 2019. ‘Death of a Guinea Pig’. Environmental Humanities 11 (2): 351–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7754512.

Gillespie, Kathryn. 2016. ‘Witnessing Animal Others: Bearing Witness, Grief, and the Political Function of Emotion’. Hypatia 31 (3): 572–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12261.

———. 2021. ‘For Multispecies Autoethnography’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, December, 251484862110528. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211052872.

Koro-Ljungberg, Mirka. 2016. Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies without Methodology. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks California 91320: SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071802793.