Kiwi chicken advocate talks with Californian dog companion

An influential feminist scholar in the field of human-animal studies, Donna Haraway (Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz) has over the past couple of decades provided ground-breaking critiques of such subjects as twentieth century primatology (and its links to race, gender and first-world/third-world politics), the place of nonhuman animals in laboratory science, and the phenomenon of pedigree dog breeding. Her most recent work focuses on our relationships with ‘companion species’, a term Haraway employs in her analysis of the diverse forms of human-animal interactions and exchanges that are part of everyday life. Drawing from ecological developmental biology, she suggests that companion species are the fruit of ‘multispecies reciprocal inductions’. In the following interview with Annie Potts (Co-Director, the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies), Donna Haraway discusses her views on, amongst other things, feminism and multispecies issues, human exceptionalism and posthumanism, and the pleasures of ‘becoming with’ our companion species.