Te Ao Māori and One Welfare in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses One Welfare, which is an influential approach to understanding the vital relationship between human and animal welfare in a variety of industries and organizations around the world. One Welfare Aotearoa recognizes the need for both a trans-disciplinary approach and partnership with Māori (the tangata whenua or Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand), around human-nonhuman-environmental interfaces to do with human and animal health and welfare. The One Welfare concept extends beyond physical health, recognizing that human wellbeing, animal welfare, and the natural environment are all interconnected. The chapter introduces a research project on attitudes to companion animals in Aotearoa to discuss a Te Ao Māori approach to One Welfare. The research project involved a Whānau Ora (family wellbeing) collaborative action research case study between local educators, tertiary students, researchers, and the PatuTM Aotearoa gymnasium and its whānau (staff and members) who were predominately Māori, along with their pets. The chapter discusses the Whānau Ora study to show how Indigenous worldviews contribute to understanding human-animal relations in both research and in local bodies such as regional councils. A focus on human-kurī (dog) relations and the issue of dog registration illustrate the chapter’s arguments and contributions to developing animal organizational studies is discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.