Opening interspecies encounters – Greetings between humans and nonhuman animals

Abstract

This paper investigates how interspecies greeting routines between humans and horses/dogs are organized. The aim is to understand how humans and animals jointly organize ‘becoming socially co-present’ (Pillet-Shore, 2008). The data comprises 12 h of video recordings with 30 humans, 40 horses and 7 dogs participating in every-day activities such as walks, dinner parties and grooming sessions. Multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Mondada, 2019) is used to investigate how humans and horses/dogs initiate and respond to greetings, and image based transcriptions of human and animal actions are used to avoid species hierarchy. The analyses reveal that humans and animals make a distinction between being physically co-present and socially co-present in interspecies interaction, and that all involved species take initiatives to greet and respond to such initiatives. The findings show both similarities and differences to human–human greetings, which is are addressed in a concluding discussion. By including animals’ systematic communicative actions in the investigation of social life and co-operative action we gain knowledge on how understanding both within and across species boundaries is achieved, which may have implications for how humanity views other living species on the planet.