ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the practice of humans associating themselves with non-human animals on the basis of the latter's appearance. As with human-human social aesthetics, the social issues surrounding animal aesthetics are based on our visual sense. Symbolic interactionism focuses on interpersonal relationships, with the microlevel principles expandable to societal-wide social relations. At any level, social interactions are developed, altered, ended, and reconstructed via many routes, such as by observing others social behavior. One thing that a social actor can confer on another is social status. The chapter draws attention to the alterations through which people put non-humans, much like those through which they put themselves, to improve appearance. At the human's request, cosmetic surgery is performed on non-human animals to make them more aesthetically pleasing to humans. In the human aesthetics literature, people often read of markers to designate features that are valued or disregarded, such as the ethnic nose, the obese body, and so on.
