ABSTRACT

Over the span of a decade, the lead author of this chapter conducted three separate ethnographic efforts on animals in the sport and leisure sphere. Two of the three (respectively, greyhound racing and fox hunter cultures) empirically focused on the means by which animals become inserted into, and veritably used as objects within, sports cultures. The studies are out-croppings of his sociological interest in the animal-based “flesh economies” that comprise particular North American and British sport zones. In these studies, he charted how humans and animals systematically “collide” within a handful of sport/leisure cultures, and how extended figurations of human actors deploy animals as objects of sporting entertainment. A sociological focus on animals emerged in the third study quite accidentally. Through the study of fell running in the United Kingdom, he developed a fascination for how animals become implicit in the meaning of particular outdoor physical cultures in both direct and indirect manners. Animals are not especially germane to the performance of fell running (insofar as they are not ostensibly involved in the performance or representation of the practice), but are (co)present in fell running spaces nevertheless. Their presence bears directly on the physical culture's essence, and illustrates, as we contend in this chapter, something quite central about nonhuman animals as potential “moral patients” in sport and leisure spaces.