Regarding the Animal

This article traces the anthropocentric orthodoxy of public administrative thought and scholarship to suggest how nonhuman animals give shape to the field's theoretical discourse and inform, in important and unspoken ways, its everyday practice. Even critical approaches in public administration remain rooted in anthropocentrism and speciesism and do not offer fundamental alternatives to mainstream approaches. The article outlines several of the limiting and violent consequences for animals and humans of this anthropocentric mode of thought and ordering and suggests how this process, described as "radical othering," connects with other, more widely explored, human-to-human forms of marginalization in the field. It concludes by outlining personal, disciplinary, regulatory, and institutional possibilities for imagining a different kind of relationship with nonhuman animals.