Animal-informed consent: sled dog tours as asymmetric agential events

Animal-informed consent: sled dog tours as asymmetric agential events
David A. Fennell
Tourism Management, December 2022; 93
Abstract
Standing in the way of a stronger voice for animals used in tourism is Cartesian and contractarian thinking on the part of operators and ontologically and epistemically constructed barriers by theorists. This paper pushes the animal ethics agenda forward by developing a novel, first-of-its-kind animal-informed consent framework in tourism under the assumption that sled dogs do, in fact, consent or deny consent through their emotions, preferences, behaviours, and physical state. The Five Domains model of animal welfare focused on the subjective experiences of animals is used to build the framework. The discussion culminates with a discussion on asymmetric agency, which speaks to the lack of balance between human and animal agents working in the same events.