And the Winner Is - Anthropocentrism and Speciesism: Writing a History of Animals in New Zealand’s Agricultural and Pastoral Events

Abstract

The paper explores news photographs from New Zealand between 1900 and 1932 and unpacks the happenings at agricultural and pastoral events. It utilizes an archival research strategy to find the news coverage of such events that is informed by an animalcentric philosophy. As such, it engages with critical posthumanist and poststructuralist thought. This allows the presence of nonhuman animals as sentient beings to be recognized and challenges previous approaches of scholarship. Thus, the paper writes farmed nonhuman animals into the history of agricultural and pastoral events. In illustrating what occurred at these events, the paper illuminates the anthropocentric bias and speciesism-grounded principles embedded in human attitudes toward farmed nonhuman animals. Humans treat fellow sentient beings unfairly and unjustly, which is problematic when nonhuman animal sentience provides moral worth. This study contributes to studies in leisure’s ‘animal turn’ by focusing on the entanglements of human and farmed nonhuman animals in events.