Veterinary Medicine and the Spiritual Imagination: A Body-Centered Approach

This fieldwork-based study explores veterinary professionals' vernacular beliefs about animal patients as an important form of occupational folklore. Veterinary workers' interactions with nonhuman animals through touch, voice, and other senses offer an embodied understanding of animals as distinctive, sentient, and perhaps inspirited individuals. These beliefs often challenge scientific and religious orthodoxy, and are gradually changing the ways in which animal medicine is taught and practiced. Because veterinarians today are widely recognized as experts on, and mediators of, human-animal relationships, their beliefs have the potential to reshape wider cultural perceptions of animals.