Dogs will be destroyed: moral agency, the nonhuman animal, and the tourist

In this chapter, we explore how nonhuman animals are represented by humans, particularly tourists, depending on how they fit within narratives that have been constructed to contain them. We do so through a first-person account of, and reflection about, an experience that triggered the initially rudimentary, though for some rather obvious, realization that contradictions in our relationships with nonhuman animals offer a useful platform to initiate philosophical discussions about constructions of meaning and worldmaking in mundane as well as “extraordinary” (or touristic) spaces. The choice of a reflective account to explore this particular experience and these contradictions is based on a trajectory that has taken both authors from the “first moment” of research to a “fifth moment” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005), where the boundaries between researchers and subjects, as well as their worldmaking (Hollinshead, 2009), are understood as blurred, and engagement with research becomes embodied (Ali, 2012). It is also based on the acknowledgement that our research experiences and actions have impacts on our thinking, formulations, and development of critically founded narratives. In this sense, “e share Richardson’s (2004) position that writing is more than “a mode of ‘telling’ about the social world… [w]riting is also a way of ‘knowing’ - a method of discovery and analysis” (p. 473). With this framework in mind, we build our arguments and discussions as a “writing story” (Richardson, 1995; Reis, 2011) weaved through a narrative journaled by Arianne some years ago after first encountering what she thought was a curious, if not intriguing, sign at a significant tourist location in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. The sign read: “Dogs will be destroyed.”