ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Animal Behavior and Welfare
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1570879
This article is part of the Research TopicPromoting the 3Fs (freedom, forage, and friends) in Equine WelfareView all articles
Shared work? Unravelling interspecies entanglements, agency, and the rhythms of equids at work
Provisionally accepted
Tamlin Watson*
Cara Clancy- The Donkey Sanctuary, Sidmouth, United Kingdom
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Focusing on donkeys, this paper examines the type and scope of 'work' undertaken by working equids in three very different contexts in the UK, Europe and the Global South (case studies). Drawing on the concepts of 'animal work' and 'nonhuman labour' as discussed by critical theorists such as Porcher, Estebanez, Coulter, Blattner, Kymlicka, Barua and others we aim to: (i) Elaborate on the concept of 'shared work' by bringing key animal welfare concepts into dialogue with emerging literature on animal labour through a relational theoretical lens; (ii) Explore the nature of equid work including its physicality, and also the freedoms and opportunities that are afforded to equids (in terms of rest, play and kinship; (iii) Illustrate how work may be experienced by the equids themselves, using vignettes based on 'more-than-human' ethnographic fieldwork so as to foreground the equid perspective and illuminate questions of agency, sentience and subjectivity.
Keywords: Donkeys1, Working equids2, Working animals3, work4, Labour5, Equid welfare6, Agency7, More-than-human8
Received: 04 Feb 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Watson and Clancy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tamlin Watson, The Donkey Sanctuary, Sidmouth, United Kingdom
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