Shared spaces on the street: a multispecies ethnography of ex-racing greyhound street collections in South Wales, UK

Every year in the towns and cities across Wales, humans and ex-racing greyhounds come together onto the streets in the name of charity. These public fundraising and awareness-raising events offer unique opportunities to unravel the reciprocal strands of canine and human experience which coalesce in leisure contexts. I conducted ethnographic research culminating in an autoethnographical account of four of these events, to determine how these encounters might be constituted for multispecies participants. Humans intra-acting with greyhounds on the street experienced an affective state; what I have termed an ‘auric imprint’, which prompted further exchanges of an emotional, economic and practical nature. Ideologies about greyhounds were underpinned by cultural understandings, situating these dogs as ‘not-like-other-dogs’ and resulting in a perpetuation of their representation as objectified, homogenous entities, and limiting their recognition as individual dogs. A practical embodied approach, inspired by discourse supporting attentive awareness to non-human animals, was discussed as a mechanism for enabling the recognition of greyhound subjectivities at street collections. Future research might examine how street collections may provide spaces of insight where human behaviour change for non-human animals can be tested and enacted.