ARTICLE More‐than‐human families: Pets, people, and practices in multispecies households Leslie Irvine | Laurent Cilia Department of Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Correspondence Leslie Irvine, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309‐0327, USA. Email: leslie.irvine@colorado.edu Abstract Although humans have coexisted with dogs and cats for thousands of years, that coexistence has taken on various meanings over time. Only recently have people openly included their pets as members of the family. Yet, because of the cultural ambivalence toward animals, what it means for a pet to “be” a family member remains unsettled. Drawing from research on family practices including kinship, house- hold routines, childhood socialization, and domestic violence, this paper considers how pets participate in “doing” family and what their presence means for this social arrangement long considered quintessentially human. Today's more‐than‐human families repre- sent a hybrid of relations, human and animal and social and natural, rather than an entirely new kind of family. Becoming family has always been contingent on a cast of nonhuman characters, and rec- ognition of the “more‐than‐human” can enhance sociological under- standing, not only of the family but also of other aspects of social life. 1 | INTRODUCTION In a 1988 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, Alexa Albert and Kris Bulcroft wrote, “to date, none of the leading family studies journals have presented research based on systematically collected, empirical data on the role of the pet in the American household” (p. 543). They quoted a 1960 text entitled The Sociology of Child Development, in which the authors noted that “the role of the domestic pet in family life and child development has been neglected for the most part by serious students, despite their obvious importance” (Bossard & Boll, 1960, p. 206). Over recent decades, the importance of pets in families has become much harder to ignore. First, the population of pets has increased dramatically, quadrupling in the United States, and nearly doubling in the United Kingdom (Grimm, 2014; Pet Food Manufacturers Association, 2016). According to recent surveys, over half of all households in the United States, Canada, and the European Union currently include at least one pet (American Veterinary Medical Association, 2012; European Pet Food Industry Federation, 2014; Gibbs, 2013). The figure is just under half in the United Kingdom (PFMA, 2016). Moreover, the way people value and regard animals, in general, and pets, in particular, has changed in the last half century (Franklin, 1999; Kellert, 1985, 1993; Serpell, 1996). Franklin (1999) describes this as a shift from anthropocentrism (the assumption of human ascendancy) to zoocentrism (the recognition of animals as full or partial subjects), with a corresponding rise in sentimentality toward animals (see also Franklin & White, 2001). During the Received: 29 March 2016 Revised: 21 November 2016 Accepted: 15 December 2016 DOI 10.1111/soc4.12455 Sociology Compass 2017;11:e12455. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12455 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/soc4 1 of 13