ABSTRACT
Emotion is contextualised by welfare, scientific and other discourses that broadly situate companion animals as having emotional capacities that humans are responsible for maintaining, often through purchases of food, toys, treats and so forth. Farmed animals are depicted in marketing for animal products as having emotionally fulfilled lives within the context of a welfare discourse, while the realities of their lives and deaths within the animal agriculture industries are seldom accessible to the public. The emotional capacities of free roaming (wild) animals is ambiguous, species-dependent and contextually driven by various forces including conservation, welfare and scientific discourse. Examining the politics of the mediation of animals’ lives, this chapter explores the regulation of animal emotion at different sites of anthropomorphism. It looks at the management of anthropomorphism and how the authority of interpretation is constructed and the importance of gender and genre to its authorisation or disavowal.
