Animal Consent, Choice, and Control
The Influence of Design on Animal Behavior
About the Project
Providing animals with meaningful “choice” and “control” is a central goal in Animal–Computer Interaction (ACI), but whether and how researchers describe these concepts varies across contexts. We reviewed 94 live-animal papers published between 2016–2024 in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Animal–Computer Interaction and found that only 37.2% used the words “choice” or “control” explicitly. All studies involving zoo and sanctuary animals included some form of reference to these concepts, while just 57.1% of companion-animal papers and 52.8% of working-animal papers made mention of them—either directly or indirectly. We suggest these patterns in ACI publications reflect the broad differences in institutional norms and human-animal relationships that we enact in our research. We further suggest that relational approaches to ACI – like becoming with and dignity-based perspectives – offer useful frameworks for incorporating more detailed reporting about choice and control in our work.
Publications
This project is a collaboration with Cristina Bosco, Lisa Brey, Eli McGraw, Isha Mahajan, Dane Smith and Lilli Hassinger.
Publications
McGraw, E., McNames, M., Wagoner, I., Brey, L., & Nippert-Eng, C. (2025, December). ‘Choice’ and ‘Control’ in ACI Publications: A Systematic Review of Language Use Across Relational Contexts. In Proceedings of the ACM 12th International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (pp. 1-15). Link.
McGraw, E. B., Bosco, C., Brey, L., & Nippert-Eng, C. (2023, December). Dogs or not dogs? Examining ACI authors' reporting on animal participants' willingness to engage in research: a spotlight on mediated and contingent consent. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (pp. 1-13). Link.
Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank our participants for their time and feedback, which made this research possible. We would also like to thank the Department of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington for its support.