ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to extend the understandings through the dual focus of violence and tenderness. It considers understandings of how rural human–animal relations have hitherto been written and represented. The chapter explores the ways in which agrarian capital framed the relationship between rural residents and animals. It looks at the ways in which co-existence shaped animal–human relations. The chapter also looks at expressions of love, affection and attachment between animals and their humans. It offers one possible way of writing a new more-than-human rural history. Central to the unfurling topologies, the relations constantly changing over time and according to spatial contexts, was the profound connection between, on the one hand, love and affection, and on the other hand, violence. Persistences of 'being with' animals and animality in urban England into the early nineteenth century speak to the importance of proximity, as opposed to distance, in changing popular conceptions of animal welfare.
