Anthrozoology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in human-animal relationships grew out of a psychology degree and a job answering a veterinary practice telephone. In the consulting room I see owners explain their animals to us: the terrier who is "being spiteful" about the new baby, the elderly cat whose owner insists she has simply become lazy. These accounts are rarely accurate in behavioural terms, but they are never arbitrary. They tell us what the animal means to that household. Anthrozoology attracts me because it takes those meanings seriously as objects of study rather than treating them only as misconceptions to be corrected.

My undergraduate dissertation was a modest questionnaire study of eighty-three dog owners recruited through local walking groups and a community noticeboard, examining how strongly they attributed complex emotions such as guilt and jealousy to their dogs, and whether this related to how they described managing unwanted behaviour. I designed the survey, gained ethical approval, and analysed the responses using correlation and a simple regression. The associations I found were weak and I was careful not to overstate them, but the process taught me more than the result did. My open-text responses were far richer than my scales, and I finished the project convinced that this field needs qualitative methods alongside quantitative ones. Learning to code interview data properly is one of my main reasons for applying to a master's.

My reading since graduating has been steady rather than exhaustive. Hal Herzog's Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat helped me see the inconsistencies in how people categorise animals as a subject in themselves, and John Bradshaw's writing on dog and cat behaviour sharpened my scepticism about the folk psychology I hear daily at the reception desk. I have also been working through journal articles on the effects of animal-assisted interventions, where the variability in study design and the reliance on small samples is striking. I would like to understand the methodological debates in that literature properly rather than at second hand.

Alongside work I volunteer fortnightly at a cat rehoming centre, mainly cleaning, socialising nervous cats and occasionally helping with meet-and-greets. Last spring two of us were asked to rewrite the centre's adopter information sheet on introducing a cat to an existing pet. We interviewed three staff members, read the guidance from two national welfare organisations and produced a one-page version in plainer language, which the manager adopted with a few amendments. It was a small task, but watching adopters actually read the new sheet showed me how much of animal welfare depends on communication rather than knowledge alone.

I also keep a photography project documenting working dogs at a farmers' market near my flat: collies who travel in with a sheep farmer, a greengrocer's lurcher who sits under the stall. I ask the handlers about the dogs and write down what they say. It is a hobby, not research, but rereading those notes I notice how differently people speak about an animal who works with them compared with one who lives with them, and that contrast is something I would like to examine with better tools.

A taught master's suits me because I want structured grounding in anthropological, sociological and welfare-science approaches before deciding whether to pursue research. In the longer term I am drawn to work in welfare education or policy, where understanding owners' reasoning is as important as understanding the animals. I intend to continue working part time at the practice while studying, which I think will keep the reading connected to the people it describes.

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