Animals in our leisure and pleasure: Research for a More Species Equitable Future

As humans, leisure is an integrated part of our lives. It helps us maintain our physical and emotional health, provides mental stimulation and/or relaxation, and provides opportunities for both solitude and socialisation. While most people could probably describe what constitutes leisure for themselves, the concept of leisure and what represents leisure is still a topic of research and discussion. In this chapter, we discuss the idea of multi-species leisure, that is leisure that we humans may participate in where a species other than another human may also be present and perhaps participating. Using our human-centric understanding of leisure in this chapter, we explore activities that humans may currently engage in with animals as “multi-species leisure”, but seek to consciously apply species aware lens’ to these explorations in order to advance the potential for multi-species leisure to move beyond human-centric perspectives to more shared leisure-pleasure realities into the future.