‘If I don’t like the cats then they have to go’: navigating pet unfriendly rental accommodation

While nonhuman animals are often described as family, beloved, irreplaceable when fulfilling a companion animal role, they sit in a complex socio-legal context that does not value them as subjects of a life, but rather as optional appendages to the humans who own them. While this description may not resonate with the depth of emotion and strength of relational ties many humans share with their animal companions, in the context of dwindling housing stock, rising rents and increasing precarity of tenure, the disposability of companion animals upheld at a society level cannot be ignored. This article traces the experiences of tenants and housing stakeholders attempting to navigate the South Australian rental market to secure accommodation for multispecies families. In doing so it furthers existing work calling to situate experiences of housing inequality in their policy and structural contexts by explicitly articulating the intersection between anthroparchy (systemic speciesist domination) and capitalism. I conclude by arguing that despite recent legislative changes around multispecies tenancies, in the current structural context multispecies housing is, and can only ever be, precarious.