Individuals, instinct and moralities: exploring multi-species leisure using the serious leisure perspective
ABSTRACT While there has been increasing interest in the human-animal leisure intersection in recent times, leisure still largely remains human-centric or focussed. Much remains to be explored in seeking to understand animal leisure, and the intersection of animal leisure with human leisure. Spring boarding from Franklin’s argument that understanding cross species involvement calls for intense, reflective analyses that can begin in our own human lives and experiences we use an ethnographic approach to explore the intersection of human and animal leisure’s. Use is made of Stebbins’ Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) categorisation to present observations, analyses and learnings as to the leisure lives of the 5 dogs that share our (the authors) very different multi-species leisure lives. Our explorations demonstrate that multi-species leisure cannot be presumed; and that experiences of leisure per se intersect with individual animal preferences and personalities. We also identify the potential to see some animal leisure as Serious-Amateur and even Devotee Work when incorporating ‘instinct’ (the outcome of generational human control of some species fertility) into considerations, and briefly explore the extension of human parenting and leisure moralising to the rising profile of fur-parenting.