Stories of animal passports : tracing disease, movements, and identities

Like us, some kinds of animals require passports to enable coming and going across national borders. Passports tell all kinds of multispecies stories, in which humans and nonhumans are entangled in myriad ways. But what is the meaning of passports — human or nonhuman? What kind of symbolic, legal, material, relational identity and not least control and disciplinary work do they “do”? One of the authors (LB) pondered these questions at Calais docks, in France, while regarding the six passports on the her lap — two for each species, human, dog, horse. To re-enter the U.K required scrutiny of these documents to ensure all were bona fide residents of that country. But while all three species had passports, defining some sort of identities and belonging, there are important differences. So, we might ask: what role do passports play, not only in producing identities, but also in relation to human-animal relationships across times, places and national borders? Whilst the stories told by human passports have been considered (e.g., Kumar; Lloyd), what stories do animal passports tell?