ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the practice of manipulating digitized representations of other animals, particularly those found in social media and console games. It focuses on representatives of two genres: farming simulations on Facebook, such as Farmville and Family Farm, and Nintendogs and Nintendogs + cats, a group of pet-ownership simulations that run on the Nintendo DS handheld games console. These were chosen because of their representational style which echoes that highlighted in the family, educational and mass media sites that have discussed so far: anthropomorphism, infantilism and cuteness. The two genres focus on two distinct types of real humannonhuman animal relations: farming and pet-keeping. However, the style of representations, the discourses in which they are embedded and the modes of gameplay, echo each other and synergistically reproduce extant anthroparchal relations, while simultaneously enjoining players to rehearse those relations. Pet'-owning and farming simulations exemplify the differential intensity of the objectification of other animals, according to the human pleasures that they serve.
