Potentials for animal participation: remote intuitive interspecies communication

What the paper says

Purpose To move towards flourishing multispecies communities, scholars and practitioners are exploring non-human animal participation in planning, decision-making, research and design. A promising approach is intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) practiced by professional animal communicators (ACs). This study provides critical, descriptive knowledge of ACs’ experiences engaging in remote IIC (rIIC), where AC and animal are large distances apart, eliminating conventional external cues (visual, auditory, etc.). Design/methodology/approach Using descriptive phenomenology and arts-based methods, this paper explores what characterizes ACs’ rIIC experiences across cases. Findings Findings illustrate: (1) that the experience of intuitive impressions is foundational to rIIC; (2) how intuitive impressions evoke ACs’ experiences of an animal's presence and relational, communicative engagement, despite their physical absence and (3) how, through intuitive impressions, animals appear as actors influencing the purpose, content and outcome of communication. We also define rIIC and intuitive impressions, describe different ways of experiencing them and illustrate their general dynamics. Research limitations/implications rIIC shows significant potential for enabling animal participation in decisions that affect them. To better understand this potential, further research is needed, such as on ACs' processes, the degrees to which ACs’ reports match animals’ realities and rIIC's usefulness to humans and animals. Originality/value Findings offer baseline understanding and shared vocabulary to researchers, ACs and those interested in working with them, while providing a critical basis for designing future rIIC studies. ACs’ shared rIIC experiences described in this article also provide ethnographers with a starting point to trace shared culture among ACs differing in geographic origin, educational and professional backgrounds.