Lauren Van Patter

University of Guelph | UOGuelph · Department of Clinical Studies

The One Health conceptual framework envisions human, animal, and environmental health as interconnected. This framework has achieved remarkable progress in the control of zoonotic diseases, but it commonly neglects the environmental domain, implicitly prioritizes human life over the life of other beings, and fails to consider the political, cultura...

The One Health conceptual framework envisions human, animal, and environmental health as interconnected. This framework has achieved remarkable progress in the control of zoonotic diseases, but it commonly neglects the environmental domain, implicitly prioritizes human life over the life of other beings, and fails to consider the political, cultura...

The ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus insisted that philosophy should be concerned with nothing less than 'what matters most'. This collection of philosophical conversations seeks to honour Plotinus' vision by addressing questions related to the art of living. Much has been written about the 'art of living' and it typically conjures up ideas of t...

What does One Health want? Despite its touted interdisciplinarity, to date there has been limited engagement with the social sciences and humanities – in particular with streams of critical social theory that enable a response to this question. In this paper we draw on the critical social sciences to consider how One Health is defined, conceptualiz...

This article advances a more-than-human everyday urbanism as a useful analytic for articulating a less anthropocentric reading of the city. Using a case study of eastern coyotes (Canis latrans) in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, it draws on empirical data and ethological literatures to consider everyday life in multispecies cities through two reg...

Recent efforts within geography to deconstruct anthropocentric readings of the urban and explore the city as ‘multispecies’ or ‘more-than-human’ face substantial methodological challenges. This paper contributes an empirical case study of human-coyote urban cohabitations in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, using a ‘hybrid’ methodological approach...

We are living in the age of the urban, with the majority of the planet’s human population now inhabiting cities. Urbanisation creates novel challenges for many animals who are either driven out of these ‘human-dominated landscapes’ or forced to adapt to drastically different conditions to survive.

What explains the silencing, dismissal, disavowal, ridicule, and stigmatizing of care for individual animals observed in conservation discourses? We examine this question using a comparative case study of feral cat management in North America and lion conservation in southern Africa. We apply intersectionality to illustrate the ways in which hierar...

Animal studies scholars are increasingly engaging with nonhuman animals firsthand to better understand their lifeworlds and interests. The current 3R framework is inadequate to guide respectful, non-invasive research relations that aim to encounter animals as meaningful participants and safeguard their well-being. This article responds to this gap...

In 2014, 116 Guelph residents were surveyed to investigate attitudes about community cats and preferences for population management. There are an estimated 29 579 owned cats in Guelph, an estimated 40% of residents allow outdoor access to their cat(s), and 8054 households (15%) feed community cats. Participants reported more concern with community...

Implementation of cat population management strategies that are effective and supported by the community requires knowledge of local contexts, public values, and preferences. From 2014 to 2015 the Guelph Cat Population Taskforce surveyed Guelph, Ontario residents to investigate attitudes and values concerning community cats and preferences for cat...

Feral cats are contentious and transgressive, with opposing views on whether to classify them as abandoned pets, wild animals, or invasive species. Concerns about their welfare often conflict with fears that they are impacting native fauna. This paper presents the results of a case study of human–feral cat relations that took place in southern Onta...