Human-animal relations are increasingly imbricated, encountered, and experienced in the production of medicine and health. Drawing on an empirical study of care farms in the UK, this article utilises the language of symbiosis to develop a framework for critically considering the relationships enrolled within inter-species therapeutic practices. Care farming is an emerging paradigm that aims to deploy farming practices as a form of therapeutic intervention, with human-animal relations framed as providing important opportunities for human health. This article moves to attend to multispecies therapeutic interventions and relationships from a more-than-human perspective, drawing attention to the often-troubling anthropocentrism in which such practices are framed and performed. Attempting to perform and realise human imaginations of ‘therapeutic’ affects, spaces, and relationships can rely on processes that reduce animals’ own opportunities for flourishing. Yet, the therapeutic use of other species does not have to be forever anthropocentric or utilitarian. The article explores whether relations between humans and animals might result in a level of mutual proliferation of affective capacities, reciprocally beneficial. These human-animal entanglements highlight opportunities to think more critically about how to practice interspecies relationships and practices in ways that are less parasitic, and instead framed more by attempts at producing opportunities for mutualistic flourishing.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a system of food production and distribution aiming to involve local communities in the growing and rearing of their food. Whilst traditionally conceptualised as a mainly horticultural movement, recent developments have seen a number of CSA projects rearing and keeping livestock alongside their vegetable cultivation with consumers embracing the model as a means of access to a greater variety of produce. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with representatives from CSA farms across the UK and the Republic of Ireland this article explores the rationales, roles, and relationships that shape interactions between humans and non-human animals within this niche and alternative agricultural model. Livestock are implicated within CSA projects for diverse reasons, with animals strongly linked to the food based values and identities of each individual community group. Through the development of closer relationships between humans and animals, CSAs become additionally reframed as enterprises producing not just food, but also sources of animal encounters, with members joining the schemes for the encounter value of non-human life, rather than solely in a quest for alternative food (systems). Relationships between humans and animals result in new and different practices, performances, and imaginations of agriculture and agricultural space. Animals' involvement in CSA comes to be as much about producing an ‘alternative place’ as it is about producing ‘alternative food’.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. The concept of therapeutic landscapes has been used as a way to critically understand how health and well-being are related to place. However, traditional discourses on therapeutic landscapes have been constructed from an anthropocentric perspective, completely ignoring and silencing the agency and experiences of non-humans. Building on the idea of therapeutic spaces as assemblages, I highlight the heterogeneity of elements that come together to produce therapeutic space. Mobilizing empirical research undertaken in spaces involved in the practice of ‘care farming’, I demonstrate how non-human presence actively creates and facilitates a therapeutic engagement with place. However, with this recognition of the non-human in therapeutic spaces, there is a need to discuss animals’ contested positions, and question the ways in which being part of these assemblages impacts animals; for whom are these landscapes therapeutic? Thus, this article advocates a critical understanding of the role of non-human animals as both co-constituents and co-participants of therapeutic spaces, moving from framing therapeutic spaces–and the animals within them–purely in relation to human needs and desires.

This article draws on a more-than-representational approach to reconsider how geographers engage with ideas of ‘health’. Health can be understood as the constant reshaping of an individual's capacity to affect and be affected, the way in which a body's powers to act are dynamically augmented or diminished by different affective relations. The article also addresses calls for health geography to engage with the more-than-human. The article mobilises a qualitative study of ‘care farming’ within England and Wales to highlight the generative potential of human-animal relations in (re)shaping the diverse affective relations gathered together to produce new bodily capacities. The article demonstrates how animal presence and agency can break down barriers, allowing people to navigate and negotiate adverse contexts and access support in a manner and space in which they feel comfortable. Additionally, human-animal relations are shown to produce affective experiences that act to re-place identities, understandings, and ways of ‘being-with’ the world that can enact what different actants may become. Human-animal relations matter for health.