Interviewing Animals Through Animal Communicators

Abstract

Abstract Animal communicators worldwide employ intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) to engage in detailed, two-way communication with nonhuman animals. IIC’s potential for doing research with rather than on animals has been insufficiently explored, due to contingent onto-epistemological biases. Cooperating with animal communicators as interpreters, pilot interviews with felines were conducted. Challenges included clearly filtering the animals’ voices and bridging ontological divides and communication modes. Nevertheless, the interviews produced clear, distinct, and consistent responses, challenging and confronting both animal communicators and the researcher to reflect on their perspectives, expectations and assumptions. Engaging animals as research participants through IIC simultaneously unsettles hierarchical divides between humans and other animals, as well as between different ways of knowing. IIC can support researchers and (non)human participants in the co-creation of novel methodological multispecies strategies that form a practical counterpart to the largely theoretical explorations of the ontological and species turns, and further multivocality in academia.