Pet Person

What does pet ownership tell us about our instincts to care for, depend on and dominate nature?

Pet Person explores the lives we live alongside animals, and what those animals invite us to become. Moving between memoir, natural history, mythology and cultural criticism, Rebecca Giggs considers what separates a pet from a possession. Are they cherished companions or captives?

Along the way we meet a colony of snails tended to in lockdown, jewel-encrusted tortoises, cats confined indoors, meditation dogs that bite and vanished animal breeds memorialised in stone. Each encounter sharpens the central question: what kinds of attachments are possible – and defensible – between humans and beasts, especially at a time marked by ecological decline and social isolation.