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Changing attitudes towards animals in modern industrialised societies has triggered new lines of scholarly enquiry. The emergence of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) is part of the turn towards animals within the social sciences. Although sociology is a relative newcomer to multispecies scholarship, more than three decades ago a sociologist anticipated that the discipline might benefit from attending to the 'zoological connection' (Bryant, 1979). Bringing to the fore what usually remains in the shadowy background, i.e. our symbolic and material relations with nonhuman animals, has started to unearth underexplored areas of social life. This is a noteworthy retrieval, because it reminds us of the multifaceted and entangled nature of interspecies interfaces, networks and encounters. This article suggests that seeing life through a multispecies lens not only allows scholars in cognate and non-cognate disciplines an opportunity to engage in innovative scholarship, it also lays the groundwork to animalise the sociological imagination and sociologise HAS.Keywords animals and sociology, animal turn, human-animal studies, multispecies scholarship 'Zoological Connections': Changing Background and Disciplinary AssumptionsTo truly understand human social behaviour in all its vagaries, and to be completely sensitive to the full array of its nuisances [sic] and subtleties, we must enhance our appreciation of its zoological dimension. Accordingly, we might … come to perceive whole new vistas of behavioural linkages by taking into account the 'zoological connection'. Our behaviour, our

An innovative food sector is emerging in North America and Europe: edible insects. Eating insects is not new; farming insects for human consumption is novel. This paper provides an overview of entomophagy to contextualise this upsurge in 'minilivestock' farming. It also charts the rise of 'feeder' insect farms because their ability to mass rear invertebrates, for exotic pets, reptiles and other insectivores, is of much interest to those starting and intensifying edible insect farms. A descriptive characterisation of frontier farmers will be provided by preliminary profile findings from 17 semi-structured pilot interviews with people with varying experience of rearing feeder and/or food insects. Since conventional livestock workers were the 'forgotten pillar' in agricultural research, this paper affords timely insights into the socio-demographic characteristics, lifestyle interests, and farming experiences of 'entopreneurs' shaping this new 'insect industry'.

A discrepancy exists between the legal and perceived status of livestock. Legally, food animals are property, but their thing-like status is unstable and does not determine how they are perceived in practice. The extent to which food animals are regarded as commodities or sentient beings is therefore contextually contingent, oscillates, and is riddled with inconsistency. To understand livestock as a sentient commodity is to attend to, and (re)contextualize, the contradictory and changeable nature of the perceived status of commodified animals in food animal productive contexts, and to how stockpeople experience and manage this perceptual paradox in practice. Bringing to the fore the relatively mundane aspect of human-livestock relations not only upsets commonly held assumptions that productive animals are nothing more than mere commodities, it also highlights the non-productive aspects of stockpeople’s roles that have, to date, been typically overlooked or underexplored.

Human-Animal Studies (has) is an innovative field, tarnished by its politicized mixed-species subject matter. This paper considers how nonhuman animal scholars may also be tainted, for different reasons and to varying degrees, because of the academic “dirty work” they perform withinhas. As the field matures, tensions are emerging among this disparate scholarly group. These tensions are associated with the rise of Critical Animal Studies (cas), the extent to which animal scholars should engage in emancipatory-type scholarship and the appearance of the “animal as such–animal as constructed” axis withinhas. This paper draws on these intrafield tensions to form a potential framework that maps scholarly labor withinhas. As scholars begin to debate what counts as “good” and “bad” human-animal scholarship, this may engender the appearance of academic-moral havens. It is suggested that such enclaves may partly mitigate the personal challenges and professional stigma of working in a tarnished academic field.