Joaquín Les Gusta: On Gut-Level Love for a Lamb of the House

A Spanish phrase animates this chapter by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín and Annemarie Mol: Joaquín les gusta. This forms an entrance into human-animal relations in a small village in Galicia, in the north of Spain. Here, we explore a particular kind of love for animals, condensed in the Spanish word gustar. There are guts in this word. Gustar is a gut-level love that stretches all the way from the attentive care for a beloved animal, to its slaughtering, its dedicated cooking, and the savoring of its meat during a festive meal. The term gustar was not borrowed from scholarly literatures to take to our fieldsite, but worked the other way around: it was distilled it from the field. Instead of critiquing the people to whom Joaquin gustar-s, is the chapter suggests that their story might help other scholars to ask if, in the sites and situations in which they find themselves, or with which they are confronted, some form of gustar might also flow between animals and humans.