Becoming-with in animal leisure: working dog search training as human and nonhuman intra-actions

Abstract

This article provides an ethnographically detailed moment-to-moment analysis of leisure as a ‘multispecies practice’ in working dog search training sessions. The data come from 30 hours of video recordings of two Finnish amateur groups engaged in working dog search training. Drawing on the existing literature on leisure with and for dogs as well as on new materialist thinking, the article contributes to the field of leisure studies both methodologically and empirically. It demonstrates how human and nonhuman elements – the handler, the dog, and the person searched for as well as the terrain and the wind – assemble and entangle by using the skills that are intrinsic to each agentive entity. Their intra-action produces not just successful training performance but also reciprocal learning and multispecies welfare. Our findings reveal that successful scent detection is not solely a product of dog skill or human guidance, but rather a situated achievement involving the searched person and environmental affordances. By attending to these entanglements, we offer a respecification of leisure as a multispecies practice, emphasising the co-constitutive roles of humans, animals, and environments in shaping shared recreational experiences.