Coalitions of touch: Balancing restraint and haptic soothing in the veterinary clinic

Abstract

This article responds to recent calls to further incorporate the study of animal health care into the sociology of health and illness. It focuses on a theme with a long tradition in medical sociology, namely clinical communication, but explores matters distinctive to veterinary practice. Drawing on video recordings of 60 consultations across three small animal veterinary clinics in the United Kingdom, we explore how clients and veterinarians (or “vets”) fashion fleeting “coalitions of touch,” that aptly position the animal to enable the performance of medical work, often in the face of physical resistance. Building on recent developments in the study of haptic sociality, we analyse how care and emotional concern for animal patients is communicated through various forms of embodied action; thus, how the problematics of forced care and restraint are mitigated through distinctive ways of touching and holding animal patients. Moreover, while prior studies of small animal veterinary work have highlighted the significance of talk within the clinician–animal–client triad, we reveal the fundamentally embodied and collaborative work of managing and controlling patients during sometimes intense and fast‐moving episodes of veterinary care.

Gaze in Interspecies Human–Pet Interaction: Some Exploratory Analyses

“…This article is a contribution to a growing body of research that considers interspecies human-animal interaction, broadly speaking, to be a perspicuous locus for the study of traditional linguistic issues such as participation framework (Roberts, 2004 ;MacMartin et al, 2014;Llewellyn et al, 2022), phonetics and recipient design (Harjunpää, 2022; Szczepek-Reed, forth. ), intersubjectivity in interaction (Mondémé, 2011;Simonen & Lohi, 2021), intention ascription (Deppermann, 2017;Camus, 2022;Mondémé, 2022b), sequential formatting and turn-taking (MacMartin et al, 2014;Mondémé, 2019;, and haptic communication (Mondémé, 2020;Llewellyn et al, 2022).…”

“…This article is a contribution to a growing body of research that considers interspecies human-animal interaction, broadly speaking, to be a perspicuous locus for the study of traditional linguistic issues such as participation framework (Roberts, 2004 ;MacMartin et al, 2014;Llewellyn et al, 2022), phonetics and recipient design (Harjunpää, 2022; Szczepek-Reed, forth. ), intersubjectivity in interaction (Mondémé, 2011;Simonen & Lohi, 2021), intention ascription (Deppermann, 2017;Camus, 2022;Mondémé, 2022b), sequential formatting and turn-taking (MacMartin et al, 2014;Mondémé, 2019;, and haptic communication (Mondémé, 2020;Llewellyn et al, 2022). In previous work, I made the case that analyzing human-animal interaction through the lens of sequential analysis (inherited from conversation analysis [CA]) was not only empirically possible (Mondémé, 2023), but also theoretically fruitful (Mondémé, 2022a) to test the possible extension of social theory to other nonhuman social species.…”

How Do You Touch an Impossible Thing?

“…Despite the fact that "there is no shortage of theoreticallydriven or empirically-informed accounts of touch" in areas like anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history 2 , botany, computer science, cybernetics, education, experimental psychology, haptic media studies, haptic sociality, linguistics, literary theory, neuroscience, and sociology (24,(37)(38)(39)(40)(41), there is a good case to be made that if any group in society should have a thoroughgoing philosophy of touch, it ought to be those who deal in the physical therapies. And certainly some have tried.…”