ABSTRACT
Chapter 7, continuing to draw on multispecies ethnographies, is focused on bringing into conversation friendship, veganism, and temporality in a beyond-human geography that attends to the disruption and disturbing of organisations of the world with other animals. Living with backyard chickens is thus not only differently navigating the world, disturbing dominant truths and navigating interspecies relations through re-navigations of somatic and proximal distance and closeness, but also has wider relevance to the ways we might rethink beyond-human violence. Living with chickens should not thus be dismissed as a hyperlocal concern but as connected with and in relation to changing global circumstances. In 2020, through the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, humans were exposed to the threat and consequences of eating animals poses to humanity and public health. Where conversations are taking place on the human abandonments and violences of the pandemic and how society needs to adapt, animals whose abuse is so closely entangled with possible futures have also been brought into new spaces. This chapter thus opens speculative questions about how we might begin to live, and how this hyperlocal scale is never divorced from global flows and spaces of the beyond-human.
