| Summary: | Situated in the intersection of rhetoric and critical animal studies, this article examines the communication practices of marginalized justice-oriented force-free dog trainers. Through semi-structured interviews and rhetorical analysis of social media content and podcast episodes produced by this community, I argue that justice-oriented trainers engage in epistemic disruption by promoting non-coercive dog training methods, while challenging oppressive ideologies that undergird our relationship with dogs and with marginalized human communities. By doing so, justice-oriented dog trainers promote social change by disrupting commonly accepted knowledge that is based on oppressive principles, and by prompting their audience to reexamine their everyday multispecies engagement through an intersectional lens. I argue that force-free justice-oriented dog trainers perform a praxis of trans-species justice, while offering tools for their audience to interrogate and dismantle oppressive forms of relating in their own life.
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