„Struggling against Nature”: a Southern-Hungarian Animal Shelter’s relationship to their natural and built environment

Abstract (English)

This paper aims to shine some light on the complicated relationships of animal shelter workers to their environment in the context of a small-scale animal rescue foundation in Pécs, Hungary. Generally animal attendants at a shelter exhibit a high level of love for nature, and especially of animals: a kind of „missionary zeal” is characteristic of their attitudes when it comes to improving the welfare of animals under their care and to finding more humane and ethical ways for human-animal relationships to play out. That does not mean however, that their relationships to nature is always idyllic and harmonius: nature through her different forces often poses a challenge to an ideal animal shelter setting and the dynamic flow of caretaking work. The imperfect state of the shelter’s constructed infrastructure, the occasional extreme weather conditions and the presence of different animals, plants and sicknesses means that shelter workers always have to adapt their animal caretaking practices to different, and often threatening natural phenomena. In many ways there is an ongoing struggle at the shelter to mitigate the destructive forces of nature which is exacerbated by the lack of proper infrastructural conditions which is mainly due to the shelter’s postition on the periphery of the city proper. At the end of this paper I will also offer some tentative suggestions on how to improve the forms of adaptation and the resilience of this shelter setting, which might improve not only the welfare of the dogs living there, but also the well being of the shelter workers themselves.