Dog's Best Friend?: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations 9780228000488

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Dog’s Best Friend?

Dog’s Best Friend? Rethinking Canid-Human Relations

Edited by John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 ISBN 978-0-7735-5905-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5906-6 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0048-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-0049-5 (ePUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto. Funding was also received from Brock University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Dog’s best friend? : rethinking canid-human relations / edited by John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka. Names: Sorenson, John, 1952- editor. | Matsuoka, Atsuko Karin, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190144483 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190144505 | ISBN 9780773559059 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780773559066 (softcover) | ISBN 9780228000488 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228000495 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Dogs–Effect of human beings on. | LCSH: Dogs–Social aspects. | LCSH: Pets–Social aspects. | LCSH: Human-animal relationships. Classification: LCC SF422.5 .D64 2019 | DDC 636.7–dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design Inc. in 10.5/14 Sabon.

This book is dedicated to Rita and Thomas and to Blackie.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka

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Section One: Historical Canid-Human Relations 1

Dogs and Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome: Towards a Definition of Extended Appropriate Interaction Cristiana Franco

2

Well-Bred Is Well-Behaved: The Creation and Meaning of Dog Breeds 59 Martin Wallen

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Significant Others: Fox Gods and Dog Generals in Pre-Modern Japan 84 Michael Bathgate

Section Two: Dogs in Space 4

Dogs, Dirt, and Public Space Karla Armbruster

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Contents

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Post-Human Families? Dog-Human Relations in the Domestic Sphere 135 Nickie Charles

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Connected and Interconnected: Bali People and Bali Dogs 160 Kim McCreanor, Stephen McCreanor, and Agra Utari

7

Street Dogs, Rights, and the Pursuit of Justice in India’s Dogopolis 176 Lisa Warden

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Gone Stray: A Journey of Gou Mama and Their Fur-Kids Chia-ju Chang

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Caring for Istanbul’s Street Animals: Empathy, Altruism, and Rage 230 Kimberly Hart

Section Three: Exploitation 10 Eating Dogs John Sorenson 11

251

The Beagle Freedom Project: Activism, Advocacy, and Awareness 277 Tim Fowler

Section Four: Wild Canids 12 Becoming “Us” Sandi Mikuse

293

13 Time to Rethink the Wolf: Reflections on Captivity Rob Laidlaw 14 Of Bounty and Beastly Tales: Wolves and the Canadian Imagination 337 Stephanie Rutherford

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Contents

Conclusion: Canid-Human Relations, Speciesism, and Overlooked Interlocking Systems of Oppression John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the contributors to this book who waited patiently through various revisions. Our special thanks to James MacNevin, formerly at mqup, for his role in initiating this project. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their useful comments. We thank Anupama Aery and Mehmet Emin Boyacioglu for their diligent and attentive work in helping to prepare the manuscript. At mqup, we thank Mark Abley for his careful editing and his insightful and supportive comments. Also at mqup, we thank Kathleen Fraser, Elena Goranescu, Amy Hemond, Joanne Pisano, Grace Rosalie Seybold, and Jonathan Crago for their help in designing, copy-editing, and producing the book. This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The editors and publisher would like to thank the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, and Brock University for the further financial support they provided to this work. Finally, not least, we thank the canids who share the world with us, as well as the readers who join us in pursuing trans-species social justice by taking the time to rethink our relations with them. Thank you for your efforts to stop their exploitation and marginalization and to stop speciesism.

Dog’s Best Friend?

INTRODUCTION

Rethinking Canid-Human Relations John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka

This edited book, Rethinking Canid-Human Relations, investigates our interactions with dogs, coyotes, wolves, and foxes, and our representations of these animals in various times and spaces. Taking a Critical Animal Studies perspective, the volume questions our socially constructed images of canids and the boundaries we construct around them, and challenges us to reconsider them. While the animal rights movement has raised profound ethical and political questions about our domination and exploitation of other animals, the “animal turn” in academia over the last two decades has provided rich insights into how human identities are shaped by encounters with other species. In keeping with the principles and objectives of Critical Animal Studies (CAS), the book combines the voices of scholars with those of activists who are working for animals. Also reflecting a CAS approach, the volume offers transdisciplinary perspectives from prominent and upcoming contributors in the fields of history, literature, religious studies, gender studies, social work, sociology, and environmental studies, as well as from animal activists. Due to our long association with them and the complexity of our interactions, our relations with canids are of particular interest. The Canidae is the biological family that includes animals such as dogs, wolves, foxes, and jackals, as well as extinct forms. They are divided into 14 genera, with the number of species under debate, from 34 to 37; recently, the golden jackal was classified as two separate species, making the newly named African golden wolf the first new species of canid

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identified in 150 years. Living in a variety of habitats, several of these species are critically endangered and many are threatened. Arguably, canids have engaged our emotions and imagination more than any other group of mammals, and it is remarkable that we have projected such diametrically opposed characterizations onto what are in fact closely related animals. On the one hand, we characterize the domestic dog as “man’s best friend” or as a member of post-human families (see Charles, chapter 5 in this volume), reflecting the long association between these species, dating back 15–25,000 years (Bradshaw 2011), although others date the divergence between dogs and wolves at 27–40,000 years ago (Skoglund et al. 2015). On the other, we have vilified wolves as savage monsters or, indeed, actual demons, and have attempted to exterminate them completely, with great success in some locations. In fact, the distinction between these animals is not as clear as some may think. Domestication of wolves began during the last 40,000 years and may have been initiated by wolves themselves, who served as “teachers and companions” in a cooperative and co-evolutionary relationship that allowed both species to survive and flourish (Pierotti and Fogg 2017, 3). Pierotti and Fogg argue that, typically, those who study either dogs or wolves seem to know little about the other species and that our ideas are shaped by a Western cultural bias that perceives wolves as dangerous and aggressive animals, in contrast to the views of Indigenous peoples. As Steinhart (1995, 337) suggests, we all invent our own wolves and use them as a mirror in which we examine our own nature (345). We continue to have complex and inconsistent emotional and social relations with canids. While the canids were classified in terms of the Linnaean taxonomy which was developed in eighteenth-century Europe, we may ask about the variety of social meanings that humans have attributed to these fascinating animals. What are the canids today? How about in the past? Whose point of view is it? This book takes up the project of looking at both domesticated and wild canids. There is extensive literature on human relations with domestic dogs and with wolves, and this attention to dogs and wolves is understandable, since these are the types of canids that have evoked the most intense feelings among humans. Just to name a few, recent works have re-examined our relations with either wild canids such as coyotes (Flores 2016) and wolves (e.g., Beeland 2013; Haber and Holleman 2013; Hickey 2011; Knight 2006; Musiani, Boitani, and Paquet 2009, 2010; Robinson 2005; Walker 2005) or domesticated dogs (e.g., Anderson 2008;

Introduction

5

Bradshaw 2011; Berns 2013, 2017; Brandow 2015; Derr 2004; Garber 1996; Haraway 2003, 2008; Horowitz 2009, 2016; Irvine 2004, 2015; Kuzniar 2000; McHugh 2004; Markovits and Crosby 2014; Masson 1997; Morey 2010; Overall 2017). However, no other book has provided an opportunity to examine both domesticated and wild canids together in the same volume as a means of rethinking our relations with these animals so that we may move toward achieving social justice beyond human animals, i.e. trans-species social justice. This book is intended as a modest effort toward that goal. We acknowledge that little attention has been given to the complexity and contradictions of our attitudes and behaviour towards other types of canids and we hope that this book will inspire further consideration of these issues. In this introduction, we will highlight, in addition to what we have already mentioned, several unique features of this volume which explain why such an attempt is important today, then we will introduce the chapters included in this volume.

Tenuous Borders There are several other reasons why we might give some thought to the Canidae generally rather than only to particular species. First of all, it is not quite clear what a species is. Typically, species is considered a kind of boundary, within which individuals are capable of producing fertile offspring. However, various canid species are capable of interbreeding in this way, so the divisions are not as clear as we might think. In fact, they are not only capable of interbreeding but some human animals long for such hybrids and deliberately interbreed them; as a result, the boundary of species blurs. Coppinger and Coppinger (2016, 12) note, “there seems to be an appeal for a dog to be part wolf.” Many are drawn to the idea of keeping a wolf or a wolf-dog hybrid as a pet because of their admiration for the power and the majestic character that are often now ascribed to them. For some, these animals seem to embody the very essence of the wild and owning one is a means of acquiring status, demonstrating power, and gratifying feelings of self-importance. While young wolves may share the same appealing features of domestic dog puppies, adult wolves are unmanageable and dangerous, like other wild animals who are marketed as exotic pets. Many assume that wolf-dog hybrids will have the physical appearance of wolves but the tractable and affectionate character of domestic dogs. While much depends on

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socialization, wolf-dog hybrids do seem to be more independent and less responsive to human efforts to control them (Cusdin 2000, 18). As a consequence, often these animals are killed, or end up permanently chained or sent to overburdened sanctuaries. In such cases, the boundary of species has been violated at great cost to individual animals. As with the commodification of other animals, fashions in ownership are shaped by popular culture. Just as the 1990 film Dances with Wolves created a fad for keeping wolves as pets (Cusdin 2000, 7), the appeal of the charismatic dire wolves depicted in the popular television series Game of Thrones sparked a demand for acquisition of this type of animal. Of course, actual dire wolves became extinct during the Late Pleistocene period and were portrayed on television by Northern Inuit Dogs, a type of domestic dog that has been crossbred in the United Kingdom to resemble wolves. This created greater demand for Northern Inuit Dogs and for other large “wolf-like” dogs as well. In Ireland, malamutes were farmed to supply the market but many ended up in sanctuaries because owners were unwilling to meet their needs for exercise (Black 2015). In the US, there were long waiting lists to purchase Alaskan Alsatian dogs at $3,000 each from dog-breeder Lois Schwartz, whose Dire Wolf Project claimed to replicate the appearance of these extinct canids (Edidin 2013). High wolf content in hybrid animals means they can be sold at higher prices, and breeders may misrepresent their products for greater profit. Some so-called wolf-dogs may not have any recent wolf ancestry at all, since it is “impossible to assess an animal’s parentage from appearance or behavior alone” (Cusdin 2000, 10), while “even a combination of physical characteristics, blood proteins, microsatellites, [and] nuclear and mitochondrial DNA tests” has not been sufficient for identification in legal terms (17). The creation and commodification of fantasy animals demonstrates how tenuous the borders are between canids.

A Critical Animal Studies Approach MacDonald and Sillero-Zubeiri (2009) have advanced our understanding from the perspective of the natural sciences with their useful compendium of research on wild canids. Any similar project from the perspective of the social sciences to explore human interactions with, and ideas about, a variety of canids must be critical of the structures of speciesist oppression in which these interactions occur. Our work is

Introduction

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located in the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS); thus an examination of intersection with various other forms of oppression with the operation of speciesism, uncritically taken-for-granted human privilege, and interconnectedness with political, economic, and social systems is vital (Best et al. 2007; Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018; Nibert 2002, 2013, 2017; Nocella et al. 2014; Sorenson 2014). Therefore, we have encouraged contributors to be attentive to these interlocking systems. In addition to using an intersectional lens, CAS acknowledges the entanglement of reason and emotion (see Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018). Current discussions on human relations with other animals from a Critical Animal Studies perspective identify emotion as fundamental for understanding in animal ethics and for mobilizing social movements and political actions (Aaltola 2013, 2014, 2018; Donovan 2007, 2014, 2016, 2018). Understanding emotion as an epistemological basis for examining nonhuman animal–human relations (Adams 1996, 2007; Aaltola 2013, 2014, 2018; Donovan 2014, 2018) is clearly relevant for canid-human relations in particular, where complex and often contradictory emotions are evoked and suppressed. Contributors to this volume capture some of the various institutional (social, cultural, economic, and political) contexts of affects. As well, CAS is committed to activism, to not just describing the world but attempting to change it. Thus, we have included chapters from activists and practitioners, rather than limiting the contributions to academic analyses. To move toward trans-species social justice, destabilizing fundamental power relationships and providing opportunities to think possible transformative strategies are necessary steps. Thus contributors, whenever possible, have incorporated possible transformative strategies. For example, Franco, in chapter 1, introduces a new concept, extended appropriate interaction, to rethink canidhuman relations. Warden (chapter 7), Fowler (chapter 11), and Rutherford (chapter 14) present successful strategies for countering speciesism. The key strategies in this volume share commonalities with other social movements such as the movement against the stigma of mental illness, which in turn adapted its own strategies from anti-racism movements. Anti-stigma and anti-racism movements teach that to change people’s attitudes, behaviours, and discourse we should apply a three-pronged approach: educate, contact, and protest (Corrigan et al. 2001). It is necessary to educate (provide information and knowledge), but we also need to protest when we confront oppressive practices and ideas – in this case,

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speciesist ones. Furthermore, we must create positive contacts, in our case, both with nonhuman animals and with human communities for people to change their attitudes and behaviours. Warden (chapter 7), Fowler (chapter 11), and Rutherford (chapter 14) incorporate the threepronged approach in various degrees, while in chapter 12, Mikuse details some of the difficulties activists face in their efforts to transform human attitudes about wild canids. In the absence of their neighbourhood’s positive contact with canids, in this case coyotes, activists failed in their attempts to protest speciesist perspectives and actions and to educate so that an alternative, less-anthropocentric approach could be instituted. Chapter 13 illustrates that the lack of such a three-pronged approach is complicit with speciesism. In this chapter, Rob Laidlaw examines wolves in zoos. In delineating the reality of zoos, Laidlaw challenges the degree of information and knowledge they ostensibly provide and shows that the contact we have with wolves in these institutions is a constructed one, not a representation of who they are; and he indicates the need to advocate for these animals and to protest their less-thanideal environment. We hope that this volume will encourage readers to rethink our canid-human relations, to counter speciesism and move toward trans-species social justice.

Time and Space Another noteworthy aspect of this volume is the fact that we have sought to highlight the work of Canadian scholars and activists. However, we also include contributors from outside Canada to bring understanding of canid-human relations in different societies ranging across time and space. Such an approach is critical today for several reasons. First, because of our socialization we often do not realize that our relationships with animals are culturally bound, and we fail to understand how people in different societies relate to animals. This book examines these relations in various social contexts. Some contributors examine canid-human relations in local communities; others investigate them within the context of the nation/state; and still others weave together local and state contexts. The book also includes consideration of different timeframes. Critical Animal Studies approaches nonhuman animal–human relations by utilizing an intersectional lens which helps

Introduction

9

to link cultural and social practices related to nonhuman animal–human relations with structural issues and political and economic systems. This volume will help to make such links visible as readers travel among different societies in time and space by going through the chapters. Second, because of globalization and transnationalism, knowledge,  ideology, and practices are not bounded by physical space. Knowledge, ideology, and practices influence policies and programs which shape nonhuman animal–human relationships. Thus, canidhuman relations are influenced by global political and economic power and are not determined by people in a particular society within the nation/state alone. Third, contemporary ethological studies using recent technology and behavioural psychology, informed by an animal agency perspective, expand our understanding of them (e.g., Berns 2013, 2017; Miklosi 2015; Topàl and Gàsci 2012). These new discoveries dismiss Kantian and Cartesian views of animals. They affirm the agency and intelligence of canids as sentient beings and illuminate the fact that what they lack are opportunities to fully exercise their agency because of their relationships with human animals. If we hope for justice for other animals, animal rights, and liberation, the CAS approach to examining nonhuman animal–human relations in the context of culture, politics, and economics is significant, and comparing a variety of spatial and temporal contexts helps further analysis. Finally, looking at different canids over various times and spaces in one volume helps us to see the inconsistencies and similarities in social representations and meanings that we have imposed upon various canids. One of the major symbolic uses of canids, both domesticated and wild, is their deployment as markers of human identities. Running through all the chapters is a strong theme about how representations of various canids function in the social construction and performance of human self-definition and boundaries in terms of class, family, gender, nation, and race and how they are used to assert power, prestige, and status. While these representations are anchored in economic relations, such as in the dog-flesh trade or the biomedical testing industry, they are also products of fantasy and imagination. For example, the commodification of purebred dogs and dogs for meat constitute not only businesses but also performances in which humans assert their

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powers of creation, dominance, and discernment and craft messages about their own character and position, as noted in Wallen’s and Sorenson’s chapters respectively.

Social Representation and Meanings of Canids Along with examining canids in different times and spaces, this volume addresses social representations and meanings of canids. Despite extreme differences in how these animals are imagined and treated, in reality, many people cannot tell the difference between different types of canids. Pierotti and Fogg (2018) state that in Siberia, dogs and wolves continue to interbreed and are difficult to distinguish, and argue that in North America distinctions remain unclear even to presumed experts, resulting in poor legislation based on emotional reactions. A striking example of this inability to distinguish one type of canid from another occurred in October 2015, when an Ontario Provincial Police officer in Collingwood made national headlines after using his police cruiser to run over a dog, three times, before shooting the animal. The police defended their actions in a press release stating that the animal was a “coyote” who was “aggressive” and possibly “rabid” (Edwards 2015). However, the dog, Merrick, who had fled from her yard in a storm, was twenty-one years old and deaf, and clearly not a threat. At least fifty complaints were registered with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, and hundreds of online comments responding to news reports criticized the police for brutality, with many drawing analogies with police shootings of racialized individuals and individuals in mental health crisis. Although a few did comment that the brutal attack was unjustified regardless of species, many were outraged that police had killed a “beloved pet.” A minority of voices expressed support for the police, defended the killing, and criticized Merrick’s owner for having allowed the dog to escape from private to public space. The range of comments reveals many of the contradictions we hold towards canids. The case draws our attention to the significance of images and representations and to the ways in which canid-human relationships are played out in terms of spatialized order. Many in the West insist that public spaces are for humans only and that dogs are dangerous, dirty, and noisy (see chapter 4, Armbruster’s interrogation of this matter). For example, in October 2015, the Quebec

Introduction

11

town of Vaudreuil-sur-le-Lac banned even leashed dogs from public parks. While the use of urban space by domesticated dogs is hotly contested, conflicts are further intensified when other canids are seen as “invading” areas considered to be for human use (see chapter 12). When we shift our space to outside the West, the meanings of dogs are not necessary the same (see chapters 6 to 10, for example). Describing the love that many feel for their companion animals, Ferguson (2004, 386) suggests that in North America dogs have been given a “semi-sacred” status. This has created a number of paradoxical situations, again related to the blurred boundaries of species. For example, in November 2015, the National Observer exposed the fact that the clothing chain Kit and Ace was misleading its customers by not acknowledging that the fur pom-pom on the expensive cashmere toques sold in its stores came from “raccoon dogs,” members of the Canidae family that includes wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs (McSheffrey 2015). The National Observer produced leaked emails from the company’s public relations department that emphasized “fur is an issue of choice” and instructed staff members to refer to the fur as “Asian raccoon” rather than acknowledging it as being that of a “raccoon dog.” As well, the Observer emailed the company posing as a customer and received the company’s “guarantee” that the fur was from a raccoon. Kit and Ace clearly intended to mislead its customers in order to avoid the stigma of using fur from a species named as a type of dog. Of course, this raises the question of why it would be considered acceptable to use the fur of a raccoon, or to use the hair of goats to produce the cashmere wool that formed the hat itself. Responding to public outrage about the use of canid fur, Kit and Ace insisted that they maintained “high integrity standards during production” in their association with a raccoon dog fur farm in China, a claim that is self-evidently false since fur cannot be ethically sourced (unless it is stripped from animals who have died from natural causes). While Kit and Ace attempted to mislead their customers in order to evade the stigma associated with killing dogs, other companies have actually promoted the use of canid fur in their garments. For example, the Canada Goose company proudly announces its use of the fur of coyotes as decorative trim on its winter jackets and many consumers seem untroubled by cruelty towards and killing of these animals (Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals 2015). Instead, the idea of “wilderness” as represented by the coyotes’ fur

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adds value to the commodity. Terms such as “coyote” and “Asian raccoon” represent lives that are considered not grieveable, but consumable, while the term “raccoon dog” alarms consumers. Humans react not to the lives and the bodies used in production of the clothing but to the social representations which language denotes. This volume provides opportunities to critically reflect on how language and representation shape canid-human relations. Reading this volume by keeping these examples in mind makes us question social representations and meanings we attach to various canid species whose borders are, as pointed out above, tenuous. Because of the tenuous borders of canid species, social representations and meanings of canids are easily manipulated and used to justify exploitation of the lives of canids. As the famous Canadian author Farley Mowat asserts, “We have doomed the wolf not for what it is but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be: the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer – which is, in reality, not more than the reflected image of ourselves. We have made it the scapewolf for our own sins” (2001, viii).

Rethinking Canid-Human Relations The book begins with a section on “Historical Canid-Human Relations.” Examining three different times and spaces, the contributors reveal how canid-human relations are more than they appear to be and thus challenge our superficial understanding of nonhuman animal–human relationships generally. They make us rethink the uncritical acceptance of current dominant views on our relationships with canids. Cristiana Franco’s enthralling chapter examines canid-human relations in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, and helps us to question our taken-for-granted assumption that affection for companion animals and the willingness to consider dogs as part of the family are products of modernity. She uncovers contradictions in ancient Greek and Roman literature between portraits of the dog charged with moral flaws and the evidence which shows dog-human cooperation based on canine affection and loyalty. Her examination leads us to the realization that neither the recognition of dogs as subjective beings with agency nor contradictory attitudes towards dogs are new. Her close attention to language uncovers how in these ancient societies, dogs were used for maintaining the status quo and considered for their benefits to humans,

Introduction

13

despite their recognition of dogs’ agency. Based on her investigation of canine-human relations in ancient Greek and Roman societies, Franco proposes an innovative conceptualization to develop more beneficial and sustainable practices for both humans and dogs. Chapter 2 takes us to eighteenth-century England to investigate the creation of dog breeds. Martin Wallen critically investigates the formation and meaning of dog breeds in the political, social, and economic contexts of the time, and examines the idea that individual dogs could be produced as representatives of types with predictable character and qualities, noting parallels with ideas about human races. He argues that the creation of breeds of dogs was used to reify an analogy for racial divisions among humans and was the result of ideas about the human capacity to improve upon nature and control both nature and humans. These god-like exertions were achieved through violence inflicted on the bodies of dogs, in the form of inbreeding and killing undesirable specimens. Wallen digs deeper in his archaeology of control by showing how these ideas about breeding and perfecting dogs were accompanied by efforts to limit ownership of dogs by the lower classes through a dog tax, motivated in large part by prejudice against the working class. Thus, ideas about controlling dogs were paralleled by ideas about the need to control certain types of humans and maintain dominant power relations over them. Wallen argues that by assigning a breed identity to dogs, we have predetermined their identities and distracted ourselves from the individuality of dogs. This chapter provides us with a vivid picture of how manipulating the meanings and value of dogs produced particular canine-human relations which became a vehicle to maintain broader political and economic systems. Michael Bathgate, in chapter 3, brings the readers to pre-modern Japan. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the constant military conflict that had lasted nearly a century and a half was finally ended. At the end of the century, the Tokugawa Shogunate’s policy was to govern by law and moral education based on neo-Confucianism, not might (Nishimura 2016). In this context, Michael Bathgate looks at animal imagery, examining ideas about domesticated and street dogs and wild foxes in pre-modern Japan. Bathgate considers not only how our ideas about animals are related to our behaviour towards them but also demonstrates how canid-human relations are used to regulate social change and engineer new orders. This fascinating chapter addresses

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two cases of canid-human relations, the persistent association of foxes with shrines devoted to the god Inari and the “Edicts of Compassion for All Living Things” initiated by the Shogun Tsunayoshi in the 1690s, instituting protection for animals, especially dogs. Bathgate suggests that ideas about animals also operate as ideas about humans.1 Noting how foxes were increasingly displaced by agricultural development and urbanization, Bathgate proposes that they became a symbol not only of wild nature but of human alienation and estrangement from nature and that the Inari shrines operated as sites of symbolic mediation and as means of ritual pacification that did not involve any actual limitations on human behaviour. Similarly, he suggests that Tsunayoshi’s Edicts were less concerned with animal welfare (although they did promote benevolence and compassion toward other animals [Nezaki 2005]) than about regulating the power of the samurai class. The chapter indicates how canid-human relationships – i.e. attitudes about, images of, and behaviours towards animals – do not end within themselves, but rather shape and maintain new economic, political, and social orders. The second section of the book, “Dogs in Space,” pays closer attention to our spatial relations with other animals. To achieve a critical examination of canid-human relations, as well as to think about our relations with other animals, it is essential to consider our ideas about space and where we consider it appropriate for other animals to be. We have organized this section into two parts, with the first two chapters focused on space in the West, followed by four chapters investigating space and human relations with street dogs in Asian and Eurasian societies. In her contribution to this volume, in chapter 4, Karla Armbruster takes up these concerns by discussing anxieties and conflicts that arise about the presence of dogs in public space. As do the other contributors, Armbruster considers how dogs range across the boundary of nature and culture and lead us into spaces of interspecies dependencies. Depicting a situation in a suburban or urban area of the United States, she observes how normally law-abiding citizens seek space and opportunities to let their dogs run free illicitly. She points out various contradictions in dogs’ existence and our relations with them as cherished companions in private space and hostility toward them in public space, embodied in efforts to ban them from public spaces, including both civilized spaces such as restaurants, stores, and public transportation and wild spaces such as national parks and wilderness areas. She speculates that the contradiction

Introduction

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is due to our obsession towards cleansing public spaces, which is rooted in cultural mandates to differentiate humans from other animals and to exercise domination and control over what we see as nature. She asks what we owe to these other animals and how we can best respect their natures and their needs in the world we control. Armbruster’s insightful discussions make us aware that to understand our relationships with dogs we must confront dominant ideas of order and cleanliness with reminders of the messiness of our biological existence. Nickie Charles examines the changing nature of our intimate relationships with nonhuman animals, charting numerous complexities of sharing domestic space with them and exploring how this affects our ideas about family and kinship. Noting that nonhuman animals are considered both grieveable and replaceable, she asks what this means in the context of the growing interest in the concept of post-human families, and how applicable that term is for understanding nonhuman animal–human relationships. Drawing on interviews done as part of her work with the University of Sussex’s Mass Observation Project, Charles considers how boundaries are blurred as we establish emotional connections with animals and recognize their subjectivity and agency, while the precarity of their status also maintains ideas of human exceptionalism. Her study shows that everyday experiences and practices in domestic space with dogs disrupt the nonhuman animal–human distinction as we develop kinship across species. She concludes that such multi-species groups can be seen as post-human families. James Serpell (1995) made an astute observation: “The existence of feral dogs, and the widespread cruelty, intolerance and indifference that dogs experience throughout the world, serves to illustrate the curious ambivalence of human attitudes towards this affectionate and supremely useful animal” (261). This observation about feral dogs can be applied to street dogs as well. Feral dogs occupy liminal space and so do street dogs. The second part of “Dogs in Space” specifically looks at dogs on the streets of Asia and Eurasia who have lived in different historical and religious contexts from those of a Judeo-Christian tradition but who also have experienced the global history of capitalism, which includes colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism. Street dogs can be stray dogs, and they can be free-roaming dogs with or without owners. Dogs were with humans before streets existed. They have been a part of one of the oldest “social communities” (Alkan 2016, 629) as loved

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or despised members. Humans created streets and decided that, as a symbol of civilized modern society, they should be clean and free from dogs. Skabelund (2005, 2011) documents how canid-human relations intertwined with European and American imperialism in Japan during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The manufactured hierarchy between “breed dogs” from the West and native dogs became a social representation of civilized vs. chaos and cultured vs. wild. The streets in Japan were spaces for the public display and enactment of such social representations. These representations were reflected in the relationships between the colonialists and the colonized. The Japanese government forcibly wiped out street dogs in the name of “civilization and enlightenment” from the late nineteenth century onward and continued to eliminate free-roaming dogs, citing justifications of public health and safety, in particular the threat of rabies. Today dogs in Japan are either leashed or chained as far as the public eye reaches, ensuring order and that the uncivilized are under control. In other parts of Asia, similar mechanisms have been used to embody hegemonic ideas brought by colonialism and imperialism, in the name of civilization, Westernization, and modernization. Countering such oppressive political and economic power, decolonizing efforts continue to be made, whether or not they are explicitly acknowledged as such. The situation in Bali is an interesting one. Dutch colonialists worked differently in Bali as they enacted a law which forbade the importation of breed dogs to Bali; it was repealed only in 2004 (Bali Animal Welfare Association n.d.). This segregation allowed Bali Dogs to flourish, and today, according to groups such as Bali Animal Welfare Association, they are considered part of Bali’s important heritage and regional identity (ibid.). According to genetic tests done by the University of California Davis, the Bali Dogs are “the oldest breed of dog known to man” but now are “threatened with extinction as a unique breed through a combination of crossbreeding, mass culling and the terrible dog meat trade” (ibid.). In chapter 6, animal advocates Kim McCreanor, Stephan McCreanor, and Agra Utari tell of Indigenous canine-human relations in Bali, looking at how dogs developed relationships with people over centuries and how these are entwined in scripture, ceremony, mythology, and everyday practices. They demonstrate that canid-human relationships and the boundaries between them do not precisely align with Western cultural expectations of pet ownership. Bali Dogs have been recognized

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as having sentience, considered as spiritual beings, and integrated as a part of moral teaching. McCreanor, McCreanor, and Utari point out that Bali’s traditional teachings have not insisted on a clear division between humans and animals. However, they have witnessed that since importation of Western breed dogs was allowed in 2004, these Western breed dogs have been elevated as a status symbol over Bali Dogs. In addition, since the 2008 rabies outbreak, street dogs have come to be seen as risks to be controlled, and canine-human relations are evolving toward pet ownership from collaborative working relations, undermining Bali’s social relations. In chapter 7 activist/scholar Lisa Warden considers animal protection laws in India, which are perhaps the world’s most progressive ones. This sets the context for her analysis of concerns about dogs in public space: street dogs. Warden draws on her experience working with the organization Dogstop to investigate the situation of street dogs in India. In doing so, she applies her new concept, “dogopolis,” developed from Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis (2011), which suggests ideas about citizenship and interspecies community. Street dogs occupy a liminal status, neither property, companion, nor wildlife, but are commensal beings who share urban space with humans. Warden describes how Indian governments have attempted to address the presence of street dogs, noting progressive legislation concerning animal protection and birth control methods, although these laws are not always properly implemented. She also addresses how cultural differences are played out in Eastern and Western attitudes toward other animals, the implications for street dogs, and what this means for ideas about trans-species social justice. Dogs play an important ecological role in this space and, as urban scavengers, contribute to human health in ways that are often unrecognized. However, they also share urban space in ways that are dangerous, sometimes for humans, but more often for themselves, as they are often targets of attack by humans. To transform the lives of street dogs, Warden worked through the everyday experiences and practices of students on campus, i.e. transforming canine-human boundaries. In this chapter, she shares strategies she employed. Such strategies worked because she educated individuals, gently protested speciesist views, and created opportunities for positive contact with street dogs. This strategy first touched upon individuals’ emotions; in this sense, she utilized a different epistemological approach to deconstruct canine-human boundaries.

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Chapter 8 looks at relationships with stray dogs and humans in Taiwan. Chia-Ju Chang examines this in terms of women known as gou mama (dog mothers), whose compassion for stray dogs and practices of feeding them grow out of a shared experience of poverty and hunger. She situates these practices in cultural and historical context, showing how the commodification of animals has created new pet-keeping practices that treat dogs as disposable objects, making unwanted and abandoned pets into “garbage animals.” Street dogs, or as Chang calls them, “stray dogs,” are treated with hostility, generated by a sense of them as nuisances and as waste products of capitalism. In spite of the fact that the dogs cannot survive without human food waste, Taipei implemented a “garbage-does-not-touch-the-ground policy” in 1996. Just as capitalism turns these living beings into unwanted commodities, it produces humans who are inured to exploitation, so alienated they do not even recognize the slow violence (eradicating dogs by starving them), thus trans-species injustice, unfolding all around them. Street dogs have been a “ubiquitous presence” in Turkey and “historically part of the cultural landscape,” and travellers to Istanbul have acknowledged this since the seventeenth century (Fortuny 2014, 287). According to Alan Mikhail (2017), Muslim cities were among the largest urban centres in the world from the eighth to eighteenth centuries and dogs served important roles there. “From Damascus and Baghdad to Cairo and Istanbul, urban authorities supported dog populations as consumers of waste to keep city streets clean. Muslim leaders built watering troughs for dogs, many mosques put out food for them, and butchers used them to keep away rats and other vermin. Humans who committed violence against urban canines were often punished. Muslim cities were much cleaner and more pleasant places with dogs than without them.” In the late nineteenth century, writers such as Mark Twain and Edmondo de Amicis remarked upon their presence, commenting that street dogs “constitute a second population in the city” (Amicis 1896, 173, cited by Alkan 2016, 617). In 2004 Turkey passed the Animal Protection Law, TR-5199, which is noted as being “ahead of much of the Western world” (Aklan 2016, 619). When the government tried to amend the law to undermine its purpose2 in 2012, as Kimberly Hart in this volume notes, mass demonstrations took place in Turkey and stopped the amendment which allowed government authorities to cast away street dogs to remote areas where they had little chance to be fed.

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Although such government actions are clearly oppressive, these huge protests demonstrate that, for many Muslims, canine-human relations are not characterized by obdurate hostility to dogs, as stereotyped notions of Islam would have it. In fact, we may have much to learn from some canine-human relations in Muslim countries if we hope to stop “perpetuat[ing] the often inhumane treatment” of dogs and unveil our curiously ambivalent attitudes towards them (Serpell 1995, 262). We attain insight into the greater complexity of these relations in Kimberly Hart’s chapter. She conducted ethnographic field research on street animals in Istanbul and while her research includes dogs, cats, and birds as street animals, she focuses on canine-human relations in chapter 9. Her interviews illuminate how people who care for street dogs see the streets as the legitimate place for these animals to live, just as humans live in their communities. Even when they do not explicitly use the language, they seem to consider that dogs have “rights” to live on the streets. Thus, she argues that the entangled nature and experience of canines and humans are not the same as those in the West. Space and historical experience shape canine-human relations. Dogs’ liminal existence is further threatened by the twenty-first century’s tense politics and economic developments which unevenly benefit populations (including human and nonhuman animals). Chapters 6 to 9 look at street and stray dogs in different countries, taking into account specific historical situations and indicating how power relations, among humans and between humans and other animals, continue to operate in post-colonial contexts. These chapters make us rethink our taken-for-granted idea of a “place for dogs” in the West (in particular Western Europe and the US and Canada). Demarcations between Western breed dogs and native dogs or street dogs and where they belong further make us rethink how their commodification determines the spaces where they are allowed to stay (i.e. those breed dogs who live with owners as pets and status symbols, compared to native, stray, or street dogs who are losing space to live unless they have some function that allows them to claim space; otherwise they are marginalized as waste and culled, starved, or cast away). It is often tourists from “modernized” societies where street dogs do not exist who demand that the streets should be the same as those where they are from (e.g., Strickland 2015). Such demands ignore historical canine-human relations and impose neo-colonial species boundaries. This constitutes a

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form of cultural imperialism, not only in an anthropocentric way, but in a speciesist way as well. We continue to dominate space and determine species boundaries and ignore canine culture and needs for space. Local resistance to such neo-colonial power differs; however, as described in these chapters, we see humans acting on local beliefs about canines’ innate power and on compassion-based care. Thus, layered forms of cultural imperialism seem to work on and through canine bodies to construct canine-human relations and power relations among humans. In other words, canine-human relations are constructed to engineer, maintain, or resist neo-colonial power. Cultural imperialism and marginalization are forms of oppression and injustice (Young 2011). The next section of the book addresses another form of oppression and injustice: exploitation. Critical Animal Studies envisions both animal liberation and total liberation (Nocella, Sorenson, Socha, and Matsuoka, 2014). We consider that achieving social justice beyond human animals, trans-species social justice, is a step toward such total liberation. When we think about justice we are not thinking simply about distributional justice. We adopt a conceptualization of justice following Iris Marion Young (2011) (see Matsuoka and Sorenson 2014, 2018). Young pays close attention to institutionalized social practices and social conditions where domination, oppression, and inequalities are created. She considers five facets of oppression – violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism – as aspects of oppression and oppression as a primary source of injustice. Although Young did not apply her conceptualization to nonhuman animal–human relations, it is quite useful for the analysis of these relations. Matsuoka and Sorenson (2014, 70) defined trans-species social justice as consideration of interest of all animals (including humans) to achieve institutional conditions free from oppression and domination. During the past decade, while the academic study of human relations with nonhuman animals has established itself as a respectable field of inquiry, controversy about the use, treatment, and rights of nonhuman animals has intensified. With good reason, much of the controversy has focused on the production and consumption of animals as food, with special emphasis on the factory farming of animals such as chickens, cows, and pigs, whose flesh is consumed on an already-astronomical yet still-growing scale, and on the use of animals in laboratories. These acts of violence and exploitation of animals are injustices which need to be challenged.

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The third section of this book focuses on one of the faces of oppression, “Exploitation.” We often describe dogs as “man’s best friend” and claim to love them as “part of the family,” especially in Western societies. Yet dogs are placed in the category of “food animals” in some countries. In chapter 10, focusing on the situation in Asia, Sorenson examines practices of eating dogs, anti–dog meat campaigns, and contradictory, hypocritical, racist, and cultural imperialist ideas about these practices; by doing so he shows how eating dogs operates as intersectional exploitation and how ideas of traditions and identities are appropriated to justify economic and political systems. The comparative approach of the chapter demonstrates that eating dogs involves complex processes hidden behind a seemingly simple act of consumption and that these particular forms of canine-human relations are changing with pressure both from within particular countries and from outside. Sorenson helps us realize that consumption of other animals is exploitation based on speciesist cultural imperialism. The chapter challenges readers to rethink the idea of Western societies as “animal-loving” and the speciesist hierarchies used to classify animals as food. He advocates for veganism as part of a strategy to address the root of this exploitation. Tim Fowler looks at efforts to rescue dogs from institutions where they are considered commodities and subjected to brutality. First, he gives us an overview of animal-testing industries and provides a critique of the use of animals in experiments, pointing out the many scientific flaws in such work as well as the ethical problems involved in using other animals this way. He introduces the work of the Beagle Freedom Project, a California-based advocacy organization that rescues, rehabilitates, and rehomes such dogs. Their work brought about the Beagle Freedom Bill in Minnesota; under this bill, any tax-funded institution must provide opportunities for animals used for testing to be adopted and not be killed. Fowler describes overwhelming support for the bill in Minnesota and great interest from other states. He argues that the success of the Beagle Freedom Project rests in addressing three areas: legislative effort to release the victims of animal testing, the rescue work the Project does, and the effective use of new social media. In this chapter we learn of innovative ways to work on anti-vivisection campaigns by using technology which builds concrete data to encourage companies to reconsider policies on animal testing. Fowler explains how new social media help to develop community and two-way communication. We

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find that, although the Beagle Freedom Project occasionally posts hardto-look-at images, it mostly posts positive ones to encourage effective and positive contact with the public as part of its strategy. Fowler shares some of the useful strategies used by the Beagle Freedom Project to counter speciesist exploitation and shows us how it works toward systemic political changes to transform speciesist structures. The concluding section, “Wild Canids,” examines our relations with wolves and coyotes, with contributions by three Canadian activists and scholars. In chapter 12, Canadian animal and environmental activist Sandi Mikuse provides a personal account of her experience with a family of coyotes and how humans in her community reacted to the presence of wildlife in “their” space. She describes obfuscation and resistance on the part of local Conservation Service officials in British Columbia, as she analyzes the hostility and fear expressed by neighbourhood residents in response to her efforts to protect coyotes from being killed. Describing how government officials and community members see clear divisions between humans and animals, she reflects on the anthropocentric notion that humans are separate from and superior to these animals, and on how that leads us to both fear them and believe in our innate right to dominate them. Her experience shifted her understanding of coyote-human relations from one of “me and them” to one of simply “us.” Most of us do not have contact with wild canids, except in zoos, which are artificial confined environments with a long historical association with imperialism, racism, and relations of power over nature, animals, and other humans (e.g., Malamud 1998; Miller 2014). In chapter 13, Rob Laidlaw, director of Zoocheck Canada, provides a glimpse into the captivity of wolves and an expert analysis of their situation. Laidlaw notes that wolves have long been a staple of zoo collections, and questions the ethics of captivity. By using the biology, behaviour, and natural lifestyles of wolves as a benchmark, he explores what, if any, conditions can satisfy the needs of wolves in captivity. He argues that despite their conservation rhetoric, zoos do not actively promote the protection of animals, nor do they educate the public about their plight and what might be done to help them. Pointing out the morphological and behavioural changes that captivity creates, and the stress and suffering that animals endure in zoos, Laidlaw forces us to reconsider what it is that we actually see when we stare at captive wolves and other animals. What is most apparent is our own brutality and careless disregard for these iconic canids. After

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reading this chapter, readers may reconsider what it is that they derive from such displays and how their participation in such activities makes them complicit in maintaining domination over other animals. The book ends on a positive note. In the final chapter, Stephanie Rutherford thought-provokingly documents the ways that wolves have moved through space and time in Canada. By thinking about how wolves have been imagined and thus have drifted in and out of favour, Rutherford examines the history of wolf extermination campaigns in Canada, which have been shaped by colonialism, operating through a bounty system and a process of vilification, and the process by which the few survivors became romanticized as symbols of wildness. Rutherford demonstrates that the image of “the wolf” (rather than actual wolves) is historically contingent, and that this supposedly natural entity is shaped by culture and power. Rutherford introduces us to wolf howl events in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, a creative practice to change our cultural expectations of wolf-human relationships: contacting wolves as equals and experiencing them in the wild. Thus, it generates new canid-human power relations which one may consider a step toward just practice and respectful ways to share space. We hope that this book will help to destabilize uncritically presumed human privilege – speciesism. Bathgate’s account of the rejection of Tsunayoshi’s “Edicts of Compassion,” Armbruster’s feeling of having become a “criminal” for wanting to allow her dog freedom to run in violation of leash laws, Chang’s description of the scorn directed at marginalized Dog Mothers in Taiwan, Fowler’s discussion of corporate refusal to collaborate with the Beagle Freedom Project, Sorenson’s discussion of defenses offered for dog consumption, are all echoed in Mikuse’s ostracism by her human neighbours for her attempt to protect coyotes and to preserve a space for them. These are manifestations of a deeper speciesism that represses the interests of nonhuman animals generally. Whether we wish to align ourselves with those repressive forces or with those who seek trans-species social justice is a question of no small ethical and political significance. Examining canid-human relations, not “as is” but in their unnoticed impacts in political, economic, and societal organizations and structures, helps us to undo our constant innovations for perpetuating anthropocentricism and human superiority. We hope that the book encourages greater attention to how political, economic, and social structures disseminate and institutionalize speciesism. We also

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hope that the book engages readers and that, by rethinking canid-human relations, it prompts reflection and discussion which will inspire action to achieve justice for all animals.

Notes 1 The edict was for abandoned children and for the sick, and Toishi (2016) argues that it was the basis for public edification and for the welfare system in Japan. 2 The purpose of the law is stated as “to ensure that animals are afforded a comfortable life and receive good and proper treatment, to protect them in the best manner possible from the infliction of pain, suffering and torture, and to prevent all types of cruel treatment.” See more details of the act: Animal Protection Law TR-5199, 24 June 2004. http://www.lawsturkey.com/ law/5199-animal-protection-law.

References Aaltola, Elisa. 2013. “Empathy, Intersubjectivity and Animal Ethics.” Journal of Environmental Philosophy 10, no. 2 (Fall): 75–96. – 2014. “Varieties of Empathy and Moral Agency.” Topoi – An International Review of Philosophy 33, no. 1 (April): 243–53. – 2018. “A Critique of the Case against Empathy in Animal Ethics.” In New Directions in Critical Animal Studies: Towards Transpecies Social Justice, edited by Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson, 275–95. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Adams, Carol. 1995. “Caring about Suffering: A Feminist Exploration.” In Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethics for the Treatment of Animals, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 198–226. New York: Columbia University Press. – 2007. “Caring about Suffering: A Feminist Exploration.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 198–226. New York: Continuum. Alkan, Ayten. 2016. “Deportation as an Urban Stray Dogs Management Policy: Forest Dogs of Istanbul.” Lex Localis 14, no. 3: 613–35. doi:10.4335/14.3.613-635. Anderson, P. Elizabeth. 2008. The Powerful Bond between People and Pets: Our Boundless Connections to Companion Animals. Westport, Ct: Praeger.

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Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals. 2015. “The Fur Policy of Canada Goose.” 4 March. http://thefurbearers.com/blog/the-fur-policyof-canada-goose-inc-revisited. Bali Animal Welfare Association. N.d. “Bali Heritage Dog: Why We Need to Save the Bali Dog.” http://bawabali.com/bali-heritage-dog/ (accessed 28 February 2019). Beeland, T. Delene. 2013. The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save America’s Other Wolf. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Berns, Gregory. 2013. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain. New York: New Harvest. – 2017. What It’s Like to Be a Dog and Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience. New York: Basic Books. Best, Steve, Anthony J. Nocella II, Richard Kahn, Carol Gigliotti, and Lisa Kemmerer. 2007. “Introducing Critical Animal Studies.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5, no. 1: 4–5. Black, Rebecca. 2015. “‘Dire Wolves’ the Unfortunate Victims of Game of Thrones’ Success – Animal Shelter Takes In Abandoned Dogs Made Popular in Hit Show.” Belfast Telegraph, 16 January. http:// www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/dire-wolves-theunfortunate-victims-of-game-of-thrones-success-animal-shelter-takes-inabandoned-dogs-made-popular-in-hit-show-30911809.html. Bradshaw, John. 2011. Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behaviour Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet. New York: Basic Books. Brandow, Michael. 2015. A Matter of Breeding: A Biting History of Pedigree Dogs and How the Quest for Status Has Harmed Man’s Best Friend. New York: Beacon Press. Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Corrigan, Patrick W., L. Philip River, Robert K. Lundin, David L. Penn, Kyle Uphoff-Wasowski, John Campion, James Mathisen, et al. 2001. “Three Strategies for Changing Attributions about Severe Mental Illness.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 27, no. 2 (January): 187–95. Cusdin, P.A. 2000. The Keeping of Wolf-Hybrids in Great Britain. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. June. http://www.caninefirstaid.ie/ uploads/2/6/1/5/2615147/dwa-wolfdogs.pdf (accessed 28 February 2019). Derr, Mark. 2004. Dog’s Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford, Uk: Oxford University Press. Donovan, Josephine. 2007. “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 174–97. New York: Columbia University Press. – 2014. “Participatory Epistemology, Sympathy, and Animal Ethics.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 75–90. New York: Bloomsbury. – 2016. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury. – 2018. “Animal Ethics, the New Materialism, and the Question of Subjectivity.” In New Directions in Critical Animal Studies: Towards Transspecies Social Justice, edited by Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson, 257–74. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Edidin, Rachel. 2013. “Your Dreams of Owning a Dire Wolf Can Finally Come True (Sort Of).” Wired, 26 March. https://www.wired.com/2013/03/ dire-wolf-pet-dog/. Edwards, John. 2015. “Collingwood Police Confirm It Was Dog, Not Coyote Run Over by oPP Cruiser Three Times.” Simcoe.com, 21 October. https:// www.simcoe.com/news-story/5970394-collingwood-police-confirm-it-wasdog-not-coyote-run-over-by-opp-cruiser-three-times/. Ferguson, Kennan. 2004. “I♥ My Dog.” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June): 373–95. Flores, Dan. 2016. Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History. New York: Basic Books. Fortuny, Kim. 2014. “Islam, Westernization, and Posthumanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog.” isle Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 2 (September): 271–97. doi:10.1093/isle/isu049. Garber, Marjorie. 1996. Dog Love. New York: Touchstone. Haber, Gordon, and Marybeth Holleman. 2013. Among Wolves: Gordon Haber’s Insights into Alaska’s Most Misunderstood Animal. Fairbanks, Ak: University of Alaska Press. Haraway, Donna. 2003. Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. – 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hickey, Kieran. 2011. Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History. Dublin: Open Air.

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Horowitz, Alexandra. 2009. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know. New York: Scribner. – 2016. Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell. New York: Scribner. Irvine, Leslie. 2004. If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. – 2015. My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals. Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner Press. Knight, John. 2006. Waiting for Wolves in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Kuzniar, Alice A. 2000. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, David W., and Claudio Sillero-Zubeiri. 2009. Biology and Conservation of Wild Canids. Oxford, Uk: Oxford University Press. Malamud, Randy. 1998. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press. Markovits, Andrei S., and Katherine N. Crosby. 2014. From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion. Ann Arbor, mI: University of Michigan Press. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. 1997. Dogs Never Lie about Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs. New York: Three Rivers Press. Matsuoka, Atsuko, and John Sorenson. 2014. “Social Justice beyond Human Beings: Trans-species Social Justice.” In Animals in Social Work, edited by Thomas Ryan, 64–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan. – 2018. Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice. London: Rowman and Littlefield. McHugh, Susan. 2004. Dog. London: Reaktion. McSheffrey, Elizabeth. 2015. “A Furry Fiasco.” National Observer, 9 November. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/11/09/furry-fiasco-investigationshows-canine-fur-used-kit-and-ace-products. Mikhail, Alan. 2017. “Why Can’t Sunni Muslims Have Dogs as Pet?” Quora, 6 November. https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-Sunni-Muslims-havedogs-as-pet. Miklosi, Adam. 2015. Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford, Uk: Oxford University Press. Miller, Ian Jared. 2014. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Morey, Darcy F. 2010. Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mowat, Farley. 2001. Never Cry Wolf. Boston: Back Bay Books. Musiani, Marco, Luigi Boitani, and Paul C. Paquet, eds. 2009. A New Era for Wolves and People: Wolf Recovery, Human Attitudes, and Policy. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press. – eds. 2010. The World of Wolves: New Perspectives on Ecology, Behaviour and Management. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press. Nezaki, Mitsuo. 2005. “Shōruiawaremi Seisakuno Seiritsu ni Kansuru Ichikōsaku: Kinsei Nihon no Dōbutsuhogoshisō To no Kanren de.” Nrngenkankyōronshū 5 (2005): 1–18. Nibert, David. 2002. Animal Rights Human Rights. Lanham, mD: Rowman and Littlefield. – 2013. Animal Oppression & Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. – ed. 2017. Animal Oppression and Capitalism. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Nishimura, Rei. 2016. “Nihon Kinsei ni okeru fusesshōshisō no tenkai: sankyō hōseibenwaku ni tsuite.” Shūkyōkenkyū 89 (2016): 323–4. Nocella, J. Anthony, II, John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka, eds. 2014. Defining Critical Animal Studies: An Intersectional Social Justice Approach for Liberation. New York: Peter Lang. Overall, Christine. 2017. Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with Companion Animals. New York: Oxford University Press. Pierotti, Raymond, and Brandy R. Fogg. 2017. The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press. Robinson, Michael J. 2005. Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West. Boulder, Co: University Press of Colorado. Serpell, James. 1995. “From Paragon to Pariah: Some Reflections on Human Attitudes to Dogs.” In The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People, edited by James Serpell, 245–62. New York: Cambridge University Press. Skabelund, Aaron. 2005. “Can the Subaltern Bark? Imperialism, Civilization, and Canine Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” In japanimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life, edited by Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, 195–243. Ann Arbor, mI: Centre for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan.

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– 2011. Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press. Skoglund, Pontius, Erik Esrmark, Eleftheria Palkopoulou, and Love Dalen. 2015. “Ancient Wolf Genome Reveals an Early Divergence of Domestic Dog Ancestors and Divergence into High-Latitude Breeds.” Current Biology 25, no. 11 (June): 1515–19. Sorenson, John. 2014. Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Steinhart, Peter. 1995. The Company of Wolves. New York: Vintage Books. Strickland, Paul C. 2015. “It’s a Dog’s Life: International Tourists’ Perceptions of the Stray Dog Population of Bhutan.” Journal of Arts and Humanities 4, no. 12 (December): 1–11. Toishi, Nanami. 2016. “Nihon no dentōnōson ni okeru shakaifukushiseido: Edo jidai o chūshin ni.” Kyōsai sōgō kenkyū 74 (2016): 38–51. https://www.jkri.or.jp/PDF/2016/sogo_74_toishi.pdf. Topàl, József, and Màrta Gàsci. 2012. “Lessons We Should Learn from Our Unique Relationship with Dogs: An Ethological Approach.” In Crossing Boundaries: Investigating Human-Animal Relationships, edited by L. Birke and J. Hockenhull, 163–86. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers. Walker, Brett. 2005. The Lost Wolves of Japan. Seattle, wA: University of Washington Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press.

SECTION ONE

Historical Canid-Human Relations

CHAPTER ONE

Dogs and Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome: Towards a Definition of Extended Appropriate Interaction Cristiana Franco

A Social and Moral Agent Despite the highly anthropocentric nature of Greek and Roman societies – where, with a few exceptions, speciesism was a very common prejudice and animals were variously exploited, abused, or plainly considered “killable bodies” (Agamben 1998) – cooperative domestic animals such as horses, oxen, and dogs often enjoyed a special status. Sometimes perceived as companions, their activity was highly appreciated and granted them a certain degree of respect. Owners gave dogs and horses personal names and bonded with them in many ways. However, there was a crucial difference between canine, on the one hand, and bovine or equine cooperation. Whereas horses, mules, and oxen were controlled by means of yokes, bridles, bits, hobbles, and the like, dogs’ agency was not directed from the outside: watchdogs, sheepdogs, and hounds must act autonomously as “proxies” of human agents. Pet dogs, on their part, had to acknowledge human etiquette. The dog’s agency answers to rules that the animal has to internalize; therefore, in order to be effectively part of human society, dogs must be trained to behave appropriately. Whether pets or working animals, dogs are normally expected to put up with many human social rules now as in past times. Ancient people were aware of this canine specificity. An overview of the representations of dogs in ancient Greece and Rome and a new

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assessment of the anxiety triggered by the dog’s failures in abiding by social requirements (sudden outbursts of aggression, refusal of obedience to ‘superior orders,’ intrusion into forbidden spaces) can help us rethink contemporary issues concerning the role of the dog in our societies as a moral and social agent.

Humans and Dogs in Ancient Greece In ancient Greek texts, the dog is often under suspicion of lacking moderation and a sense of shame: the name of the dog (kyōn) was synonymous with anaidēs, i.e. lacking aidōs (“restraint,” “self-control”). Moreover the word “dog” and certain related compounds – such as kynōpas, “brazen face” – served as common terms of insult, and all this despite a marked contiguity between humans and dogs attested in a large number of sources. The paradox puzzled the classicists for a long time, making them suppose that the dog had been a despised animal at a certain stage of Greek prehistory and that the relationship with the dog had changed over time, leaving behind a faint memory of the original revulsion reflected in language through the use of kyōn as a term of abuse. But the apparent contradiction can be explained differently. As evidence shows, in fact, the dog in ancient Greece had been coopted into the human social sphere in a position which, according to LéviStrauss’s classification (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 191–216), can be defined as “metonymic-subject”: the dog was not only considered as a member of the human community, but was also endowed with agency and held responsible for its actions. The ‘honour’ of belonging to human society charged the dog with a high degree of duties and expectations, including respect of hierarchical positions, obedience to its superior, and the demonstration of a capacity for self-control: a moral sense that the animal could possess and yet could not conform to impeccably. In other words, if the dog was often blamed as a shameless animal, this happened precisely because, unlike other species, it was requested to feel ‘ashamed’ and behave accordingly (Franco 2014). As in many other traditional cultures, dogs in ancient Greece were trained from the earliest age and great importance was attached to their education (see, for instance, Xenophon’s treatise On Hunting; Plato, Republic, 416A 1–7). By the same token, they were blamed for certain

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behaviours that other species would no less exhibit: the display of sexual acts, incest, coprophagy, necrophagy. These acts were imputed as shameful only to domestic canines, because, unlike other domestic animals, they would actually perform them “in public,” i.e. in the eyes of their human companions, in the house, on the street, in the middle of a (human) social space. And this was considered “inappropriate.” Greeks bestowed on their dogs a high degree of agency and credited them with considerable cognitive ability. They expected their dogs to observe the ‘pact of food,’ i.e. to pay back their debt to their caretakers for the food received, in the form of work – hunting, watching – or aesthetic pleasure and affection – as in case of the beautiful aristocratic hounds and the little cute Melitan (or Maltese) pet dogs. Working dogs had to: distinguish ‘friends’ from strangers and ‘enemies’ such as thieves, wolves, or foxes; perceive and signal invisible presences (gods or things that remained hidden to humans); protect their owner’s properties; share the hunter’s pleasure and even ‘smile’ out of joy when they tracked down prey (Xenophon, On Hunting, 4):1 In following up scent, see how they show their mettle by rapidly quitting beaten paths, keeping their heads sloping to the ground, smiling, as it were to greet the trail … When they are close to the hare itself, they will make the fact plain to the huntsman by the quickened pace at which they run, as if they would let him know by their fury, by the motion of head and eyes, by rapid changes of gait and gesture … by twistings and turnings of the body, flinging themselves backwards, forwards, and sideways, and lastly, by the genuine exaltation of spirits, visible enough now, and the ecstasy of their pleasure, that they are close upon the quarry. The hunter-dog couple was an exquisite example of what we would now label “interspecific structural pairing” (Marchesini and Andersen 2003, 49–55; Grasseni and Ronzon 2004, 23), an empowered morethan-human entity that couples animal and human skills in order to pool resources and accomplish augmented performances. This fact is apparent in the Homeric poems, where the interspecies groups of hunters facing the prey are always treated as a unity, endowed with one collective agency and referred to with the formula “dogs and men” (Franco 2014, 18–23).

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Domestic canines were expected to wait patiently next to the table for their portion of human food. The aristocratic habit of having dogs raised for their beauty and displayed in dining rooms to emphasize the luxury of the house dates back to archaic times. These “table dogs” (kynes trapezeis) are mentioned in the Homeric poems and portrayed on pottery since the seventh century BC (Homer, Odyssey, 17:309–10; the Corinthian krater from Caere, Louvre E635, showing dogs leashed to the dining couch, dates back to 600–590 BC; further iconographical references in Mainoldi 1984, 113). They were tied to the dining “sofas” (klinai) where people lay down, and they would catch the pieces of food thrown by the banqueters. Most of the time the food consisted of waste and leftovers, such as bones, hide, and the like – not surprisingly, a dog’s diet was antonomastic for “poor.” However, the dog shared with humans bread and cooked meat and fish, which made it a “tablemate.” Therefore when a person wanted to threaten an enemy, nothing was more horrific and menacing than to throw his body to one’s dogs, thus reversing the hierarchic order at the table and making a human body raw flesh to be eaten by the lowest of the tablemates or even “table waste” to be eliminated (Franco 2014, 54–74). There is also evidence for people taking home “doggy bags,” and this was a privilege accorded only to the dog, thanks to its special bond with the master (Homer, Odyssey, 10:216–17; Aesop, Fables, 93, in Hausrath 2nd ed.; Vita Aesopi, 45). Some images of dogs standing next to an altar and most likely waiting for a piece of the victim (e.g., the olpe of Berlin, Staatliche Mus. 1915; the olpe of Heidelberg, Universität 253; Corpus vasorum antiquorum, Deut. 10 pl. 39) show that the animal was even generally admitted to sacred rites. Its exclusion from holy sanctuaries and places such as the Acropolis in Athens and the island of Delos (Xenophon, On Hunting, 5.25; Plutarch, Roman Questions, 111; Strabo, 10.5.5) was probably exceptional. Due to the dog’s closeness to the human life and its inclusion in the social sphere, a great disappointment arose when the animal proved incapable or unwilling to meet the expectations. As a matter of fact, a dog may fail to respect strangers of good intent, steal food from the kitchen or from the altar, ‘flatter’ and cheat its owner, or give up the custody of human properties and be bribed by thieves and wolves. The dog is in these cases thought of as a betrayer, an enemy that is especially dangerous as it acts from within the community to which it was supposed to belong.

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The dog is therefore represented as a potential skilled cheater, and to act “in a doggish way” (kynedòn) means to deceive, to act covertly (Aristophanes, The Knights, 1030–4). The animal’s most powerful weapon is its ability “to fawn” (sainein), the canine distinctive behaviour that consists of wagging its tail and ears and jumping up and down around a person. The Greeks interpreted this behaviour as a form of intentional communication by the animal, a sign of appreciation and affection on its part. However, they were much less naive than we are and did not trust in the dog’s effusiveness; quite the contrary, they regarded it with suspicion. The idea that dogs could make a distorted use of communication must have been more widespread than we are inclined to believe. In our modern urban societies we do not rely as much on the dog’s ability to indicate, but for the Greeks this was a major worry – Xenophon, for example, warns that some hounds “cheat” and point out wrong tracks or “try to make the false appear true,” or only “pretend” to track (On Hunting, 3.4–10). Moreover dogs do not fawn only to signal the presence of someone they know or to show that they have found a hunting trail. They also use the gesture in a typically seductive way, for example to get food or attention. By means of fawning, dogs gain privileges other domestic animals are excluded from. But fawning was also a dangerous weapon to the Greeks: while insisting on its user’s submission and devotion, it could disguise self-interested motives or even hostility ready to burst out. Another relevant source of human concern was the fact that dogs are subject to becoming rabid. They enter a state of mind whose name in Greek (lyssa) meant more or less “wolf syndrome”: a frenzy that drove them out of civilized spaces and made them join their wild ‘brothers’ in assaulting humans and their flocks. This altered mental status was perceived as an actual ‘madness’ that made the dog hallucinate to the point of not recognizing its own beloved master. In a very popular myth a young hunter, Actaeon, is punished by the goddess Artemis who drives his hounds mad with lyssa, making them mistake him for a stag and mauling him to death. Also in this respect the dog did not differ much from humans; on the contrary, it shared with them the experience of temporary attacks of insane aggression. It is not by chance that maenads – women taking part in Dionysian rites in the wild and driven out of their minds by the inebriating god – were often compared to rabid dogs affected by lyssa (Franco 2014, 94–9).

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We can therefore conclude that for the Greeks the ideal interaction between humans and dogs was one in which the dog displayed competence, or better: the dog, trained to live in a human community, was expected to stay sane, be wise, and behave appropriately. The dog was required not to indulge in uncontrolled impulses, not to cheat, to respect its owner, to be true to him/her, and to keep itself in its place: virtues that for the Greeks all fall within the semantic field of aidōs (“restraint”). The dog definitely afforded this type of investment. Yet it did not always match the requirement. It sometimes proved “shameless” (anaidēs). To put it in plain language, if countless ancient texts speak about the dog’s lack of restraint, it is because the dog, invested with ethical expectations set up for the lower class, aroused great hopes as well as great anxiety about its reliability. As the lone domesticated carnivore, the dog was the only eater of raw meat required to restrain its predatory instincts. Dogs lived among and with humans thanks to their ability to be “wise” and to direct their aggression with judgment. The number of ancient portrayals of dogs stealing food, being bribed by their “brother” wolf or by a thief in exchange for silence, attacking their owner-hunter, all seem to stem from the unease of having as ally a being that cannot be fully assimilated. Viewed in sociological terms, the relationship established hierarchical positions, duties, and ethical norms; on the emotional level, however, it aroused joy and sharing as well as illusions and anxiety. The Greek humans thought of themselves as “masters” (anaktes, despotai) of their dogs. For all that, the dog was rarely depicted as a slave: it was rather assimilated to a member of the family – whether a wife, a daughter, or a servant born and raised in the house (a sort of first-class slave, bound to his/her master by ties of affection). In fact the dog often played the female part in ancient Greek texts, to the point of becoming a sort of totem animal for the “race of women.” In Greek mythology the dog symbolically related to the faithful wife, guardian of the house (Clytemnestra), the spouse who throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre (Evadne), the devoted daughter ready to follow her father into death (Erigone and Maira) – but it also evoked images of “bitchiness,” of ungrateful daughters (Melantho, Scylla), adulterous spouses (Helen, Clytemnestra), women who dared to take over, aspired to autonomy and power, and achieved their goals by means of a doggish flattery (Franco 2014, 121–53). The mythical ancestor of all wives, Pandora, was

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provided by Hermes with a “doggish mind” (kyneos noos), a deceitful and ambiguous nature inherited by all women afterwards (Hesiod, Works and Days, 67). This state of affairs can only be explained by supposing that the Greeks believed in their dogs’ capability for understanding, recognizing, and respecting certain social rules. At the same time they were aware of the fact that this did not happen without exception, and felt anxious about their dogs’ reliability as competent social actors. A comparison with other animal symbolism is telling: the ass, mule, or horse, acting under strict control with saddles, reins, bits, and bridles, represented practices of “taming” unmarried women; dogs were rather used to emblematize the risks of entrusting a lower-ranked subject (especially women) with agency.

Roman Dogs Roman sources are even clearer about the virtues that dogs – whether hounds (canes venatici), watchdogs (canes villatici, otherwise domestici), or sheepdogs (canes pastorales alias pecuarii) – were requested to exert and acknowledge. It is of course important that the dog has been well bred and possesses some particular physical characteristics and natural inclinations: much advice on this matter is given by Grattius (first century BC) in his treatise On Chase (155–222). Three centuries later Nemesianus recommends that the dogs chosen for breeding purposes not be “of humble origin” (On Chase, 108). But even more important is the requirement that they have a good temper (Nemesianus, On Chase, 50: facili cane) and are appropriately raised, having learned how to behave. In fact, to quote Columella (first century AD), one of the most important Roman writers on agriculture, in order to obtain a good dog training plays a crucial role, since “not only nature, but also training forms habits” (On Agriculture, 7.12.6). Giving advice to the farmer who wants to get good sheepdogs, Varro (second to first century BC) warns him against buying one from a hunter or a butcher, for both types of dog would already have bad habits: one would be more interested in pursuing game animals than in looking after the flock, while the other would idly wait for a free piece of meat (On Agriculture, 2.9.5).

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Also crucial was the way dogs were fed. In the case of hounds, their diet must be strict and they should get only a small share of the captured prey (Grattius, On Chase, 247–8, 308–9). Guard dogs must instead be provided with food in good quantity, because hunger would prompt them to go in quest of food or be bribed by strangers (see e.g., Petronius, Satyricon, 72; Horatius, Epodes, 6); it should consist primarily of barley bread or barley flour soaked in milk or in the liquid of boiled horse bean, and bones; the flesh of dead sheep was to be avoided, lest the dogs like the taste and could no more refrain from attacking the livestock (Varro, On Agriculture, 2.9.8–10; Columella, On Agriculture, 7.12.10). Puppies must be carefully culled (Grattius, On Chase, 230–1; Nemesianus, On Chase, 127–50) and educated from the earliest age. Owners of hound whelps must train them to promptly respond to the hunters’ orders, to abstain from barking while chasing (Grattius, On Chase, 230–1), and to refrain from eating the prey whenever they get hold of it. The hounds must learn to endure the labour for virtue’s sake and enjoy the pleasure of being praised for their success (Nemesianus, On Chase, 177–92). Guard dogs’ breeders must encourage the puppies’ fighting spirit by making them engage in combat against one another; they should be careful not to weary them, lest they become inactive; but they should resort to the whip in order to teach the puppies not to chew on leashes and collars (On Agriculture, 2.9.12–13). In sum, farm dogs must be aggressive (acres) to ward off thieves and predators, but not too much so – actually, according to Columella (On Agriculture, 7.12.5), their temper must not be cruel (truces atque crudeles) nor too mild (mitissimi, blandi), but something in between: they should be stern (severi), attentive, and prudent (adsidui et circumspecti) enough to avoid provoking false alarms or attacking visitors who should be welcomed. According to Cicero (Oration for Sex. Roscius Amerinus, 56), if the dogs guarding a temple barked at people coming to worship the god in daytime, “their legs would be broken for being active then also, when there was no suspicion.” The guard dogs on the Capitol hill failed to signal the attack of the Gauls one night in 390 BC, whereas the sacred geese of the temple of Juno raised the alarm; as a consequence, the birds were looked after at State expense and carried around on litters with purple and gold cushions each year, while dogs were crucified alive during the same ceremony as a punishment for the failure of their ancestors (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 29.14 [57]).

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Dogs must possess virtus and animus, the “bravery” of the good soldier-citizen (Grattius, On Chase, 173, 254, 266), but also dignitas (Varro, On Agriculture, 1.21), one of the most pre-eminent social virtues a valuable Roman person was expected to display: the capacity of staying in one’s place, exerting self-control, successfully accomplishing assigned tasks, and earning the social respectability deriving from it. They are also requested to have fides (“trust, reliability”), again one of the most important virtues for a Roman citizen. The dog is very often described as fidus (“trustworthy,”“reliable”) as in Pliny the Elder’s definition: “Among the animals, also, that live with mankind, there are many circumstances that are far from undeserving of being known; among these, there are more particularly the most faithful (fidelissimum) to man: the dog, and the horse” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 8.61 [142]; see also Lucretius, On Nature, 5.864, 6.1222).2 Many traditional stories represented dogs who strenuously defended their masters; some are listed by Pliny (Natural History, 8.61 [142–5]): We have an account of a dog that fought against a band of robbers, in defending its master; and although it was pierced with wounds, still it would not leave the body, from which it drove away all birds and beasts. Another dog, again, in Epirus, recognized the murderer of its master, in the midst of an assemblage of people, and, by biting and barking at him, extorted from him a confession of his crime. A king of the Garamantes also was brought back from exile by two hundred dogs, which maintained the combat against all his opponents. The people of Colophon and Castabala kept troops of dogs, for the purposes of war; and these used to fight in the front rank, and never retreat; they were the most faithful of auxiliaries, and yet required no pay. After the defeat of the Cimbri, their dogs defended their moveable houses, which were carried upon wagons. Jason, the Lycian, having been slain, his dog refused to take food, and died of famine. A dog, to which Darius gives the name of Hyrcanus, upon the funeral pile of King Lysimachus being lighted, threw itself into the flames, and the dog of King Hiero did the same.

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Philistus also gives a similar account of Pyrrhus, the dog of the tyrant Gelon … Among ourselves, Volcatius, a man of rank … was attacked by a robber, and was only saved by his dog. The senator Cælius, too, while lying sick at Placentia, was surprised by armed men, but received not a wound from them until they had first killed his dog. But a more extraordinary fact than all, is what took place in our own times, and is testified by the public register of the Roman people … when Titius Sabinus was put to death, together with his slaves, for the affair of Nero, the son of Germanicus, it was found impossible to drive away a dog which belonged to one of them from the prison; nor could it be forced away from the body, which had been cast down the Gemitorian steps; but there it stood howling, in the presence of vast multitudes of people; and when someone threw a piece of bread to it, the animal carried it to the mouth of its master. Afterwards, when the body was thrown into the Tiber, the dog swam into the river, and endeavoured to raise it out of the water; quite a throng of people being collected to witness this instance of an animal’s fidelity. Another noticeable affordance for positive interactions is the dog’s keen sense of smell (its sagacitas). Thanks to this extraordinary ability, the dog can sniff out hidden presences and track down prey, thus enhancing human performance when hunting and guarding. Accordingly this keenness of perception was to the ancient Romans one of the most salient characteristics of the dog and the most remarkable proof of its acumen – “In daily life we have discovered many other valuable qualities in this animal; but its intelligence and sagacity are more especially shown in the chase” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 8.61 [147]) – and it provided them with very productive metaphors for human intelligence (Tondo 2007): smart people have “a keen nose” (e.g., Plautus, Curculio, 112), they are “sagacious” like dogs, and saga was applied to a woman who claimed super-human powers (Cicero, On Divination, 1.65):3 Now sagire means “to have a keen perception.” Accordingly certain old women are called sagae (“witches”) because they are assumed to know a great deal, and dogs are said to be “sagacious” (sagaces). And so one who has knowledge of a thing before it happens

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is said to “presage” (praesagire), that is, to perceive the future in advance. Other signs of the animal’s cognitive superiority over other species were its memory and its ability to recognize people and voices: Dogs are the only animals that are sure to know their masters; and if they suddenly meet him as a stranger, they will instantly recognize him. They are the only animals that will answer to their names, and recognize the voices of the family. They recollect a road along which they have passed, however long it may be. Next to man, there is no living creature whose memory is so retentive. (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 8.61 [146]) Generally speaking it appears that, when compared to the Greeks, the Romans were more inclined to stress the positive side of the relationship, focusing on the dog’s ability to comply with the rules rather than insisting on its failures. Columella’s praise of the dog (On Agriculture, 7.12.1)4 is enthusiastic: What servant is more attached to his master than is a dog? What companion more faithful? What guardian more incorruptible? What more wakeful night-watchman can be found? Lastly, what more steadfast avenger or defender? To buy and keep a dog ought, therefore, to be among the first things which a farmer does, because it is the guardian of the farm, its produce, the household and the cattle. As is Cicero’s remark (On the Nature of Gods, 2.63):5 Then think of the dog, with its trusty watchfulness, its fawning affection for its master and hatred of strangers, its incredible keenness of scent in following a trail and its eagerness in hunting – what do these qualities imply except that they were created to serve the conveniences of men? Great care was taken to avoid and cure serious diseases, especially rabies and scabies (“mange”), and to get rid of worms, fleas, and ticks. Tail docking was believed to prevent the puppy from getting rabies;

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amulets and magical charms were also employed to protect dogs against the most dangerous pathologies (Grattius, On Chase, 383–98, 401–7; Columella, On Agriculture, 7.13; Pliny, Natural History, 8.63 [152–3]; Nemesianus, On Chase, 195–222). Sicilian people would take their ill dogs to Vulcan’s grotto, and attend a special rite in order to obtain the god’s help (Grattius, On Chase, 430–50).

Affection and Aggression Nevertheless, the dog occupied an ambiguous position between tameness and ferocious wildness (Trinquier 2011). Most of the descriptions of dogs found in Latin texts do not neglect to mention their “sharp” (acer) temper and “ferocity” (saevitia). Dogs are tame animals but “not harmless” (non innoxii, according to the anonymous Latin author of a treatise on physiognomy). The Digestus refers to an edict that banned harmful animals from public places: besides lions, wolves, bears, panthers, and lions, it also mentions dogs and pigs. Roman shows taking place in circuses and amphitheatres featured both hounds expected to pursue game animals and fierce dogs playing the role of wild beasts (ferae, beluae) and expected to tear other animals or humans into pieces. Anecdotes were reported of country dogs – probably sheepdogs – attacking passers-by or eating human corpses (Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 9.8.37), and people who walked down the street at night to visit their beloved were notoriously exposed to dogs’ bites (Propertius, 3.16.21). In ancient Greek lore the dog was also Hekate’s satellite in the goddess’s nocturnal raids – probably the same wandering dogs that were thought to patrol the Underworld (Aristophanes, Frogs, 472: Kokytou peridromoi kynes). Kerberos was Hades’s watchdog and was endowed with the same attitude as his master: he would let everybody in, but prevented everybody from escaping – a reversal of the normal watchdog activity that matched the infernal god’s tendency to welcome anybody and keep them forever locked in. However, this ‘nocturnal’ and hellish side of the animal never caused its exclusion from human society. Despite Horace’s definition of the dog as immundus (“filthy”) and ancient texts that abound with references to scavenging dogs, there is no evidence that the dog in ancient Greece and Rome was ever considered impure and banned, as happened in the Jewish tradition and in other Eastern cultures.

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In fact the dog’s aggressive attitude – even towards human beings – was something required in ancient times, as it is wherever the animal is asked to perform as a watcher or hunter. In modern urban cultures in the West instead, most likely due to the progressive reduction of its functions to those of a companion animal, the dog has been “Disneyfied” (Baker 2001, 174–5; Bettini 2013, 138–9; Franco 2014, 55): its representation has been flattened out according to standards for animated cartoon characters, resulting in a predominantly anthropomorphized image that excludes undesired bestial traits – such as the tendency to attack human beings, eat carrion and excrement, or have a ‘wild’ sexual life and reproductive cycle. Mass media play a crucial role in constructing this ‘sanitized’ representation of the animal, inducing the owners to misunderstand the dog’s ethology and underestimate the danger of handling a big dog while denying its aggressiveness. In Roman times instead, as in many other cultures, the different and contradictory aspects of the dog were included in the popular image of the animal, and it is clear that the two characteristics were perfectly harmonized, at least in the eye of the dog’s owner. One scene in Petronius’s novel Satyricon (64) is significant in this respect. It is the famous episode of “the dinner of Trimalchio,” hosted by a wealthy freedman who throws a lavish party in his house. The scene sets side by side the little harmless lapdog Margarita (“Pearl”) – petted and fed up by Trimalchio’s debauched favourite – and the dreadful guard dog Skylax (“Puppy”), tied to a chain and introduced to the dining room by the doorkeeper on Trimalchio’s request. It is worth noting that, despite its wildness and ferocity, Skylax is said by Trimalchio to be “the one in the house who loves [him] most.” This confirms the fact that even the most aggressive dogs were thought to be connected by a tight bond to their owners, who felt protected (“loved”) by their ferocity against strangers. A dog’s aggression towards its own human companion was a rare and exceptional event: according to Varro, the Greek myth of Actaeon torn to pieces by his own hounds was erroneous and slaves were more prone to betray their masters (Varro, Menippean Satires, 514.355, 3: “believe me, more numerous are the masters devoured by their slaves than by their dogs!”). Even the most relentless hounds and the most ferocious watchdogs are “sweet” (blandi) to their human companions. The poet Martial (Epigrams, 11.69) praises a hound named Lydia for being “ferocious in the woods, most sweet at home” and “very true to her master.”

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Despite the hierarchical nature of the relationship – the human companion is the dominus (“master”) and the dog his famulus (servant member of the familia) – the tightness of the bond between humans and working dogs even in rural environments is confirmed by a large number of sources: Columella (On Agriculture, 7.12) holds that no servant is more affectionate to his master than the dog, and Cicero (On the Nature of Gods, 2.158) praises the canine capacity to show love to their owners by means of adulatio (“fawning”). This was even truer, of course, for pet dogs who were said to be their owners’ deliciae, a word meaning “beloved” or “sweetie” which was normally employed to qualify a person (especially a lover) as a source of one’s exquisite pleasure (voluptas). The erotic overtone of the metaphor was accepted, and sometimes quite intended, without implying any sexual intercourse: it was just a way to designate physical intimacy and a deep bond of affection, as today one would rather call her pet “my baby” and herself the “dog’s mom,” resorting to a parental metaphor instead (Franco 2017). Children had dogs among their favourite pets (Bradley 1998; Calder 2017). Juvenal even insinuates that many women in his time, if the gods allowed the exchange, would give up their husbands’ lives to save those of their pet dogs (Satires, 6.651 ff.).

Victims All this did not prevent ancient people from killing dogs mercilessly – especially puppies and stray dogs  – whenever they thought it was convenient to do so. We must keep in mind that the Greeks and the Romans would treat with similar cruelty many human beings as well. Philosophers launched frequent appeals for philanthropia (“humane attitude”), humanitas (“kindness”), and clementia (“mercy”): despite this, babies, slaves, criminals, and captured enemies, just to mention a few categories, were still abandoned, raped, killed, tortured, and executed in large number throughout classical antiquity. Predictably, when the matter was the killing or torturing of a nonhuman animal, ancient people were in general – with some remarkable exceptions (Sorabji 1993; Newmyer 2005; Osborne 2011) – even less sensitive. Undesired whelps were victims of culling right after their birth; puppies were employed in rites and in medical practice, either slaughtered and eaten (Pliny, Natural History, 29.14 [58]) or rubbed against a person

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as a means of absorbing contamination and diseases (Theophrastus, Characters, 16.13; Plutarch, Roman Questions, 68.280c; Life of Romulus, 21.10); dogs were sacrificed in Greek and Roman cities (Gourevich 1968; Zaganiaris 1975; Mainoldi 1984, 52–72; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006) in varying sacred ceremonies: see, for instance, the purification performed by passing through the two parts of a split canine body, the sacrifice for Hekate, those for the goddess of childbirth Eilioneia, or the war-god Enyalios (Plutarch, Roman Questions, 52. 277b; 111. 290d), and festivals such as Kynophontis in Greece; Supplicia canum, Furrinalia, Lupercalia, and Robigalia in Rome. According to Plutarch (Roman Questions, 52, 277B), Roman people used to sacrifice a dog to the goddess Genita Mana for every baby slave born in the house. A dog, together with a monkey, a snake, and a rooster, was also put in the leather sack in which the parricide (the murderer of a relative or a patron) was sewn up alive and thrown into the river (poena cullei).

Posthumous Recognition A prominent feature in ancient sources about the human-dog relationship is the fact that writers do not indulge in describing their relationship with their dogs and are not prone to talk about their affection for them. What they constantly emphasize instead is the dog’s attachment to them. It seems therefore that it was considered not appropriate to express one’s feelings towards an animal, at least in a prose work. A passage from Arrian’s treatise On Hunting (5.1–6), which was meant to continue Xenophon’s work, is a rare instance of an author indulging in a detailed description of his relationship with a dog. As usual, it is the animal’s love for her master “Xenophon” that is celebrated: For I have myself bred up a hound whose eyes are the brightest of the bright; a swift, hard-working, brave and so sound-footed dog that, when she was in her prime, she was a match for no less than four hares. Moreover she is … the most gentle and affectionate (praotatē kai philanthrōpotatē) dog I have ever seen: never before had any dog shown such an intense yearning for me (eme epothēsen) and for my friend and fellow-sportsman Megillos. In fact, when she has finished running, she never steps away from either of us: if I am at home, she stays with me; she escorts

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me anywhere, accompanies me when I go to the gymnasium, and sits down by me while I am exercising; on our way back she precedes me, looking back constantly to see whether I had turned anywhere out of the road: and when she catches sight of me, she smiles (epimeidiasasa) and starts trotting ahead again. Whenever I go out on any political business, she remains with my friend and behaves in the same way towards him. She never abandons whichever of us becomes sick. And if she has not seen either of us for only a short time, she jumps up nicely, like she was warmly greeting us (hōsper aspazomenē), and adds to her welcoming gesture some sweet vocal expressions of love (epiphtheggetai hoia philophronoumenē). When we have our meals she stays by and pats us with one paw first and then with the other, to remind us that she is to have a share of the food. She can utter an extraordinary variety of tones, more than I ever knew in any other dog: she knows how to vocally express her needs (hosōn deitai tēi phonēi semainei). Since, as a puppy, she was corrected with a whip during the training process, still now if someone mentions a whip, she would come up to him cowering and begging and applies her mouth to his mouth as if to kiss him (hōs philousa), and jumping up she would hang from his neck, and wouldn’t let him go until she has appeased his angry threats. Therefore I don’t think I should feel ashamed to immortalize the name of this dog: that it may be left to posterity that Xenophon the Athenian had a dog called “Rush” (Hormē), of the greatest speed and wisdom, almost a divine creature (hierotatē).6 The last sentence’s beginning (“I don’t think I should feel ashamed”) betrays a certain embarrassment on the writer’s part in celebrating his dog’s name. It is worth comparing this embarrassment with Odysseus’s attitude in the famous scene of his encounter with the dog Argos (Odyssey, 17.290–327). The animal recognizes him – after twenty years and despite his false appearance as a beggar – right before taking the last breath. The hero is moved to tears, but conceals his feelings in order to remain incognito. This constraint imposed on Odysseus by the plot enhances the tension and results in a very touching scene. At the same time, however, it exempts him from explicitly expressing his

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attachment to the dog. The focus is, again, on the animal’s recognition of his owner, not the other way around. Even the long praise of Argos’s qualities that precedes this passage – when he was still young, he was a wonderful hound – is not uttered by Odysseus: it is assigned to the swineherd. Would it have seemed inappropriate for a hero to indulge in an encomium for a dog? Evidence, however, of owners’ affection for their dogs comes from funerary inscriptions (Georgoudi 1984; Bodson 2000). It was not uncommon for a person to provide his/her dog with a tomb, as s/he would have done for a member of the family or a beloved slave. The most ancient records date back to the fifth to fourth century BC. Plutarch (Life of Themistocles, 10.9–10) tells the story of Themistocles’s father’s dog, who swam after the ship in which his owner was sailing away from Athens and died right after touching land on the island Salamis; Theophrastus (Characters, 21.9, fourth century BC) ascribes the habit of putting up a memorial slab for one’s dog to the “man of petty ambition.” This custom seems to have become widespread in late Hellenistic and Roman times (from the third century BC onwards). Wealthy people would have paid for a long poetic epigram – and funerary poems for dead pets became a literary genre in Hellenistic and Roman times (Herrlinger 1930; Garulli 2014) – or commissioned portraits of their beloved animals. The poet Martial devoted a famous poem (I 109) to Publius’s she-dog Issa, said to be his “darling” (deliciae): she is praised for her capacity of expressing herself so well that one would think she is talking; for understanding and sharing her companion’s sadness and joy; for not betraying the bedcover when urged by her belly’s need; and for being chaste like a honest maiden, to the point that it is hard to find a worthy mate for her. Publius’s love for Issa is so deep that he has commissioned a portrait of her, a very realistic copy, meant to relieve his grief after her death:7 Issa is more playful than the sparrow of Catullus. Issa is more pure than the kiss of a dove. Issa is more loving than any maiden. Issa is dearer than Indian gems. The little dog Issa is the pet of Publius. If she complains, you will think she speaks. She feels both the sorrow and the gladness of her master. She lies reclined upon his neck, and sleeps, so that not a respiration is heard from her. And, however pressed, she has never sullied the coverlet with a single

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spot; but rouses her master with a gentle touch of her foot, and begs to be set down from the bed and relieved. Such modesty resides in this chaste little animal; she knows not the pleasures of love; nor do we find a mate worthy of so tender a damsel. That her last hour may not carry her off wholly, Publius has her limned in a picture, in which you will see an Issa so like, that not even herself is so like herself. In a word, place Issa and the picture side by side, and you will imagine either both real, or both painted. More frequently a sculpted portrait of an animal is accompanied by a few simple lines praising the dog’s qualities, such as the funeral monument for Aeolis (AE 1994.348; Praeneste/Gallicano nel Lazio; see Granino Cecere 1994), in which the she-dog is portrayed and the poetic inscription reads:8 Behold the tomb of Aeolis, the cheerful little dog taken away by a rapid fate, whose loss grieved me beyond measure. In the following epigram for the she-dog Parthenope (IG XII 2.459; Castro, Metelin Island, Inv. 411 T - Mendel Cat. 1085 Istanbul, Museum of Archaeology) the owner speaks of both himself and the dog in the third person: Her master has buried the dog Parthenope, whom he played with, in gratitude for the happiness she gave him. There is a prize for dogs’ love too, like the one won by this dog: Having been affectionate to the one who raised her, she deserved this grave. Behold this, passerby, and find yourself a worthy friend who is both ready to love you when you are still alive and also will care for your body (scil. once you are dead). A sign that the habit was laughable to some people is the following Greek epigram found in Rome (IG XIV.2128.2): Please do not laugh, you passerby, at this grave of a dog.

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Nevertheless, there were people willing to challenge the stigma in order to express their grief for the loss of their beloved dog and express feelings that are surprisingly close to those of a lover, as in this remarkable Latin funerary inscription from the 2nd century AD for the she-dog Patrice (CIL X 659 = CLE 1176): In tears I have carried you, our little dog, The only consolation being that you were almost fifteen. So now, Patrice, you will no longer give me a thousand kisses, nor will I have you lying gratefully in my lap. In sorrow I have placed you in a marble tomb, which you well deserved, and I have united you forever to my Manes. Your ways were so clever that equalled human demeanor; What a sweetheart I have lost, alas! You, sweet Patrice, would join us at table and fawningly ask for food in our lap, you would lick with your greedy tongue the cup which my hands often held for you and would welcome your tired master with wagging tail, expressing with a single gesture all kinds of sweet flattery. Archaeological remains thus provide unambiguous evidence for the strong feelings of owners towards their beloved dogs. If literary epigrams for animals, a conventional genre in Hellenistic and Roman times, leave us uncertain about the reality of the feelings expressed in them, funerary monuments offer reliable documentation. Other literary works, conveying public discourse, had almost completely erased this side of the picture, either representing the bond as a one-way attachment (it is the animal who ‘loves’ its master) or silencing the owner’s emotions. Funerary art allows us to fill the gap.

Towards a New Definition of Canine Agency If it is true that humans can say anything about nonhuman animals – and sometimes they do make up incredible stories about them – in practice, representations of other species found in most cultures are seldom completely arbitrary. Each animal has its own morphology, gait

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and movements, odours and tactile effects, sounds and noises, eating habits and abilities, places where the animal tends to appear or hide – all are traits that offer to the human imagination both possibilities and constraints. To define how the aesthetic and ethological traits of an animal inspire and guide human symbol-making, Maurizio Bettini borrowed from James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology the concept of “affordance”: just as the environment affords a living being’s body and perceptual system certain possibilities for action and prohibits others, so also an object in the world affords the human imagination concerned with it some opportunities for elaboration (rather than others). Thus the weasel’s slinky and sinuous agility afforded the Greeks and Romans the opportunity to develop a rich imagery about childbirth; though other animals were available for representing slippery slithering motion, such as the serpent, say, the weasel was preferred because of more affordances that oriented its representation toward the domestic and maternal spheres (weasels lived in the house, where they guarded against mice; a weasel takes good care of its young, carrying them in its mouth). Of course this does not mean that an animal will necessarily produce the same sort of elaborations the world over. Permutations are abundant and depend not only on the different practical and symbolic “projects” pursued in a culture, but also on the total possibilities offered by an environment. Yet the affordance theory explains well the recurrence of  some cultural elaborations on animals, especially some glaring cases of “convergence” among animal representations in cultures far removed from each other (Bettini 2013, 125–30). As any perceivable presence in the environment, animals offer humans a variety of affordances; by the same token, we afford nonhuman species a variety of possibilities for action and mental activity. This reciprocity distinguishes the human-animal from other ecological relationships (Reed 1988). Whereas inanimate objects offer only possibilities for action, those of animate beings offer interactions (or “mutual affordances”). If I take a walk in the woods and decide to walk on a bed of leaves, the leaves offer me the opportunity to walk on soft ground; if I walk in the woods and run into a bear, the animal offers me more complex possibilities. I can choose from various moves, but all the options suggested to me by the environment for action (and thought) do not depend solely on me, but also on how the bear will react to my presence, since I, in my turn, offer the bear certain affordances she may choose or not choose to exploit for her own ends.

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Transferred from the plane of action to that of mental activity, we may say that agency makes the affordances the animal offers to human imagination include the conditions of relation, that is, how the respective behaviours of the subjects are modified in the shared environment. Take the arena of hunting: animals such as deer that stake their chances for survival on flight will hardly inspire elaborations on courage from their human predators; instead the boar, stoutly defending itself against swarms of circling hunters, will foster representations of courageous self-defense. In every case elaborations emerge from the mode of interaction between the subjects in a specific ecological context. In a contribution on the affordances of animate environment that elaborates on Gibson’s theory, Edward S. Reed lists three different types of affordances (Reed 1988): 1

the affordance of inanimate objects, which offers possibilities for action; 2 the affordance of animate beings, which offers interactions (or “mutual affordances”); 3 the mutual affordances experienced by members of a social community, that offer possibilities of appropriate interaction. The last type of affordance characterizes relationships between individuals who have been raised and trained within the same community and thus share values, rules, and expectations. In this case interactions are predictable and can be evaluated in terms of appropriate vs. inappropriate. Reed takes it as necessarily referring to same-species communities, i.e. individual members of a social group belonging to one species (whether human or other animal species). I propose to add a fourth type of affordance, the one that takes place in a multi-species community where nonhuman animals are intentionally selected, raised, and trained to be part of the group, to abide by certain rules and behave well. I label it extended appropriate interaction, i.e., interaction between subjects belonging to the same interspecies community and experiencing a relationship that is de facto social. By its own morpho-ethological characteristics – carefully selected throughout the process of domestication and breeding – the dog affords a high degree of interaction; moreover, as we have mentioned, the dogs’ agency is not directed from the outside as with other collaborative animals such as horses, mules, and oxen. Even if in downtime it is kept

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chained or leashed, when performing a task on a human being’s behalf (guarding, hunting) the dog acts autonomously: it must be free in order to do the job. A watchdog would often be chained and sleep in the daytime but would roam free to protect the house at night. When the hunters – called kynēgētai (“dog-leaders”) in ancient Greek – went to the wild taking their hounds on leash, they would actually walk after the animals along the tracks; the dogs were the main agents of the chase and their human companions were just followers. Once they detected the game, the hounds would be let free for the final assault. The dog’s specific agency answers to rules that the animal has to internalize. It is up to the dog to decide whether it will respect the command or not, hunt the game or run astray, protect the house and the flock or let the thief and the wolf in. That is why people put a lot of energy and effort into training their puppies. There is ethnographic evidence for the fact that dogs belong to human society in a very peculiar way, for they are not socialized by their conspecifics, except in early infancy, but by humans: the Runa of the Amazon educate their dogs with a level of care comparable to their education of children and the dog’s probability of survival depends on its ability to behave “like humans” (Kohn 2007, 9 f.); the Nuaulu of Indonesia think of the relation with their dogs in terms of social relationship (Ellen 1999, 63 f.). The animal’s actual capacity to respond to the human educational process is the affordance that enables it to be thought of as acting consciously and responsibly (Hare et al. 2002). A brilliant description of this can be found in late antiquity. In the prologue to his History against Pagans, Paulus Orosius (fourth to fifth century AD) describes the peculiarity of the dog’s nature as follows:9 For as in the great house of a great squire, although there are different kinds of animal that are useful to the household, the dogs’ task is not the lowliest. They alone have been given a nature which urges them on to carry out willingly the tasks for which they have been trained, and through some innate disposition towards obedience, hold back, simply showing a disciplined tremor of expectation, until they are sent off with permission to act by a nod or a sign. Needless to say, a reassessment of human-canine relationship should avoid Paulus’s anthropocentric bias according to which the wonderful

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nature of the dog consists only in its disposition towards obedience. We are lucky to be far away from those slave societies where many human beings as well were considered mere ‘instruments’ at their owners’ disposal. However, it should not be forgotten that dogs have been created by humans through domestication. They are wolves molded to ‘serve’ human purposes, from hunting and labour work to the exchange of love and affection, and to share human spaces. The dog’s sociability is therefore something we are responsible for and should closely scrutinize. The concept of extended appropriate interaction might help us reconceptualize the dog’s agency in the social environment in which the animal exerts it. A human group that hosts canine members is – and should be thought of as – a hybrid society that encompasses human-animal bonds. Ancient evidence invites us to think of the relationship with our dogs not simply in terms of private emotional attachment – i.e. a bond that is spontaneously established and can be rejected anytime – but as a social interaction (with expectations on both sides, educational responsibility, and spaces for negotiation). This calls for public discussion and would eventually promote practices that are not only appropriate for the human partners but are beneficial and sustainable for the canine members of the shared community also.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Translations from Xenophon, On Hunting, are by Dakyns. All translations of Pliny’s Natural History are by Bostock and Riley. Translations from Cicero’s De divinatione are those by Falconer. Columella, On Agriculture, Books V–IX, ed. and trans. by Forster and Heffner, p. 307. Translations from Cicero’s De natura deorum are by Rackham, p. 275. Translation by Matthew Fox (FrANCo 2014, 122–3), courtesy of the University of California Press. Online edition (revised by Roger Pearse) of the anonymous translation in The Epigrams of Martial published by H.G. Bohn (reprinted in London by G. Bell and sons, 1897). http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/martial_ epigrams_00eintro.htm (accessed 28 February 2019). Translations of the inscriptions in this section are mine. Orosius is translated by Fear, p. 31.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baker, Steve. 2001. Picturing the Beast. Animals, Identity, and Representation. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bettini, Maurizio. 1998. Women and Weasels. Translated by Emlyn Eisenach. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Originally published as Nascere: Storie di donne, donnole, madri ed eroi. 1998. Turin, Italy: Einaudi. Bodson, Liliane. 2000. “Motivations for Pet-Keeping in Ancient Greece and Rome: A Preliminary Survey.” In Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships between People and Pets, edited by Anthony L. Podberscek, Elizabeth S. Paul, and James A. Serpell, 27–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bostock, John, and Henry T. Riley, eds. and trans. 1855. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History. London, Taylor and Francis. Bradley, Keith R. 1998. “The Sentimental Education of the Roman Child: The Role of Pet-Keeping.” Latomus 57, no. 3 (July–September): 523–57. Calder, Louise. 2017. “Pet and Image in the Greek World: The Use of Domesticated Animals in Human Interaction.” In Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, edited by Thorsten Fögen and Edmund Thomas, 61–88. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Cicero. De divinatione. See Falconer, ed. and trans. – De natura deorum. See Rackham, ed. and trans. Columella. See Forster and Heffner, eds. and trans. Dakyns, Henry Graham, ed. and trans. 1897. “Xenophon, On Hunting. A Sportsman’s Manual Commonly Called Cynegeticus.” In The Works of Xenophon. London: Macmillan and Co. Day, Leslie Preston. 1984. “Dog Burials in the Greek World.” American Journal of Archaeology 88, no. 1 (January): 21–32. De Grossi Mazzorin, Jacopo, and Claudia Minniti. 2006. “Dog Sacrifice in the Ancient World: A Ritual Passage?” In Dogs and People in Social, Working, Economic or Symbolic Interaction, edited by Lynn M. Snyder and Elizabeth A. Moore, 62–6. Exeter, Uk: Short Run Press. Ellen, Roy. 1999. “Categories of Animality and Canine Abuse: Exploring Contradictions in Nuaulu Social Relationships with Dogs.” Anthropos 94: 57–68.

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Falconer, William A., ed. and trans. 1923. Cicero, De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione. Cambridge, mA, and London: Harvard University Press. Fear, Andrew T., ed. and trans. 2010. Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans. Liverpool, Uk: Liverpool University Press. Forster, Edward S., and Edward H. Heffner, eds. and trans. 1954. Columella, On Agriculture, Books V–IX. Cambridge, mA, and London: Harvard University Press. Franco, Cristiana. 2014. Shameless. The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece. Translated by Matthew Fox. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. English updated and expanded edition of Senza ritegno. Il cane e la donna nell’immaginario della Grecia antica. 2003. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino. – 2017. “Greek and Latin Words for Human-Animal Bonds: Metaphors and Taboos.” In Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, edited by Thorsten Fögen and Edmund Thomas, 39–60. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Garulli, Valentina. 2014. “Gli epitafi greci per animali. Fra tradizione epigrafica e letteraria.” In Memoria poetica e poesia della memoria (Studi di Archivistica Bibliografia, Paleografia 3), edited by Antonio Pistellato, 27–64. Venice, Italy: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari. Georgoudi, Stella. 1984. “Funeral Epigrams for Animals.” Archaiologia 11 (1984): 36–41. Gourevich, Danielle. 1968. “Le chien de la therapeutique populaire aux cultes sanitaires.” Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire 80, no. 1: 247–81. Granino Cecere, Maria Grazia. 1994. “Il sepolcro della catella Aeolis.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100: 413–21. Grasseni, Cristina, and Francesco Ronzon. 2004. Pratiche e cognizione. Note di ecologia della cultura. Rome: Meltemi. Hare, Brian, Michelle Brown, Christina Williamson, and Michael Tomasello. 2002. “The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs.” Science 298, no. 5598 (November): 1634–6. Herrlinger, Gerhard. 1930. Totenklage um Tiere in der antiken Dichtung. Tübingen, Germany: Beiträge zur Altertumswisswnschaften, H 8. Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement.” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (February): 3–24. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Mainoldi, Carla. 1984. L’image du loup et du chien dans la Grèce ancienne d’Homère à Platon. Paris: Ophrys. Marchesini, Roberto, and Karen Andersen. 2003. Animal Appeal. Bologna, Italy: Hybris. Newmyer, Stephen T. 2005. Animals, Right and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics. London: Routledge. Orosius. See Fear, ed. and trans. Osborne, Catherine. 2011. Dumb Beasts & Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature. Oxford, Uk: Clarendon Press. Pliny the Elder. See Bostock and Riley, eds. and trans. Rackham, Harris, ed. and trans. 1933. Cicero. De natura deorum. Academica. Cambridge, mA, and London: Harvard University Press. Reed, Edward S. 1988. “The Affordances of the Animate Environment: Social Science from the Ecological Point of View.” In What Is an Animal? edited by T. Ingold, 110–26. London and New York: Routledge. Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals. The Origins of Western Debate. London: Duckworth. Tondo, Isabella. 2007. Uomini dal naso di cane. Figure dell’intelligenza in Roma antica. Rome: Carocci. Trinquier, Jean. 2011. “Les prédateurs dans l’arène: gibier traqué ou combattants valeureux?” In Prédateurs dans tous leurs états. Évolution, Biodiversité, Interactions, Mythes, Symboles. XXXIe rencontres internationales d’archéologie et d’histoire d’Antibes, edited by J.-P. Brugal, A. Gardeisen, and A. Zucker, 485–501. Antibes, France: APDCA. Xenophon. See Dakyns, ed. and trans. Zaganiaris, Nicolas J. 1975. “Sacrifices de chiens dans l’Antiquité Classique.” Platon 27: 322–9.

CHAPTER TWO

Well-Bred Is Well-Behaved: The Creation and Meaning of Dog Breeds Martin Wallen

Historians of human-animal relations generally point to the late eighteenth century as the time when humans in the West began to develop caring, responsive relations with animals. The period just prior to and following the Napoleonic Wars saw the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, along with widespread expressions of concern for the proper treatment of farm animals that had previously been treated as expendable beings incapable of feeling or of having inner lives.1 In particular, historians have looked to this era for the first recognizable expressions of affection for pet dogs, especially among the upper-class ladies who kept lapdogs.2 Alongside these notable changes, a significant development also took place that shaped the relations humans have with dogs, and even made the modern human-canine relations based on affection possible. This development was the creation of breeds. The first dog breed created, and certified with a written pedigree, was the English Foxhound, developed for the sole purpose of finding the scent of a fox and then chasing it over long distances to provide sport for the mounted men and women following behind. Throughout the several histories of the Foxhound, an important theme stands out for the insight it provides into the changing attitudes toward animals: the creation of this highly specialized dog is described as constituting a caring response to a need, a lack in nature. Perception of this lack coincided with an anxiety over the confusing variability among dogs which seemed to parallel the wide-ranging differences among humans.

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And in England, this anxiety drove regulative efforts to restrict the canine population and to organize the variability into regular and meaningful categories – breeds – which held meaningful analogy to the categorization of human variety into races. This essay will identify the motifs running through the histories written about the Foxhound as it is widely believed to have developed, showing that the Foxhound represents the improvement and regulation of canine variability that intrigued natural historians and caused anxiety over an apparent natural chaos. The regulation of canine varieties into recognizable and sustainable breeds reflected the need to correct the perceived lack by organizing nature into a legible and manageable order. I shall situate these histories within the contexts of two events taking place at the same time: the Parliamentary debates over the English Dog Tax, and the organization of human races and canines into parallel taxonomies by the French natural historian the Comte de Buffon. Prior to the domination of breeds, canine taxonomies generally focused on loosely defined “types.” Dame Juliana Berners (quoted in Shaw 1890, 2) lists thirteen canine types prevalent in the fifteenth century: “Grehoun, a Bastard, a Mengrell, a Lemer, a Spaniel, Raches, Kenettys, Teroures, Butchers Houndes, Dunghyll dogges, Tryndeltayles, and Prykeryd currys, and smalle ladyes poppees that bere away the fleas.” Of this list, no more than five types are recognizable as meaningful categories today: the “Grehoun,” the spaniel, the Rache (a scent hound), and “Terroures.” John Caius, who published a list in the sixteenth century, bases his distinctions on use, a standard that remains in a vestigial form in the originary breed narratives of the nineteenth century and after. He thus identifies eight types of hunting dogs according to their reliance on scent or sight, and their speed; three types of spaniel based on the game they are turned to; small “comfort” dogs, also of the spaniel type; dogs of the “coarse” type that can be called by ten different names but seem to belong to the same large, violent type; and the “mungrell” that includes turnspits and dancing dogs, as well as those crossbred from wolves, foxes, or bears (Caius 1576, 2). The loosely defined types identified by both Dame Juliana and Caius rely on the various tasks performed by dogs – from “comfort” to turning a spit. This looseness continued all the way through the eighteenth century, when written pedigrees – along with the regulative breed discourse – attained their authority.

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The looseness came increasingly to trouble intellectuals for whom it indicated a lack of order and meaning in the natural world. A consequence of the European exploration of other continents was the burden of encountering more diversity without a discernible system making the differences among humans and animals meaningful. One of the great projects of the eighteenth century aimed to discover the natural organization of the seemingly overwhelming variability of life by grouping beings according to their perceived similarities. Thus Immanuel Kant (2000, 8) began his 1777 essay, “Of the Different Human Races,” with a foundational analogy explaining human diversity: “In the animal kingdom, the natural division into genera and species is based on the law of common propagation and the unity of the genera is nothing other than the unity of the reproductive power.” This observed law of “the animal kingdom” enables Kant to establish that “all humans any where on earth belong to the same natural genus, because they always produce fertile children with one another even if we find great dissimilarities in their form” (9). To account for the “dissimilarities” among members of the one genus, Kant, like most of his contemporaries, pointed to “the conditions of the earth (dampness or dryness), along with the food that a people commonly eat” (10). Connecting the features that would almost immediately distinguish racial categories (Kant is generally considered the first to use the term “race” in its modern sense) with regional topographical characteristics was an obvious gesture in humoural science, where “dampness or dryness” factored heavily in shaping human characters. And since the distribution of human races seemed to correspond with different climatic zones, Kant and his contemporaries referred to climate as the primary cause of racial difference, working on the assumption that physical shape reflected a direct response to the immediate environment. The capacity for this particular responsiveness came to serve as the measure for the inner ability to feel, an ability that brought humans and dogs together as mutually responsive companions. In France, Kant’s contemporary, George LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, developed his massive taxonomy, Natural History, General and Particular, over four decades in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This work became the basis for all subsequent accounts of variety among animals, and at the same time played a significant role in delineating human races. Notably, Buffon (1791, 9) draws a clear analogy between humans and dogs, explaining the variability among each in a way that supports

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the division of both into races and breeds. “Of all animals, the dog,” Buffon says, is “most susceptible of impressions, most easily modified by moral causes, and most subject to alterations occasioned by physical influence.” The sentiment of dogs makes them susceptible to climatic influence, and here is where Buffon draws his key analogy: In the frozen regions of the north, the human species is deformed, rustic, and diminutive. Lapland, Greenland, and all countries where the cold is excessive, produce only dwarfish and ugly men. But, in the neighbouring and less rigorous regions of Finland, Denmark, &c. the most beautiful race suddenly appears; for, in figure, colour, and stature, they are perhaps the handsomest of the human kind. The same phenomenon is exhibited in the dog-species. The Lapland dogs are very ugly, and so small that they exceed not a foot in length … But, in the neighbouring climate, where we meet with the handsome men already mentioned, we find also the most beautiful and largest dogs.3 (Buffon 1791, 18–19) The effect of climate on physical appearance becomes the key explanation for the variability of both dogs and humans. Like Kant, Buffon begins with the notion that all varieties of a species derive from a single ancestor (the “monogenetic” theory, as opposed to the “polygenetic” theory that would allow for multiple ancestors, and would effectively make races and breeds into different species), and that variability can be explained by the effects of weather, food, and activity. The fact that the different varieties of a species all share a common ancestor means that their differences constitute departures from the original, the process Buffon terms “degeneration,” which has since come to be referred to as evolution. If, for example, “man were forced to abandon those climates which he had invaded, and to return to his native country,” which Buffon (1791, 394) takes to be “temperate” regions, “he would, in the progress of time, resume his original features.” And intermarriage would reach the same end even faster, so that, “by this mixture, 150, or 200 years, are sufficient to bleach the skin of a Negro.” If the original human is a white European, the original dog would be the “shepherd’s dog,” “for in every country inhabited by savage or by half civilized men, the native dogs resemble this race more than any other” (16). Naturally, then, wherever the shepherd’s dog is transported,

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it responds to the climate by assuming an appearance similar to the humans residing there. In “Lapland, or other very cold climates,” the shepherd’s dog “assumes an ugly appearance, and shrinks into a smaller size. But, in Russia, Iceland, and Siberia, where the climate is less rigorous, and the people a little more advanced in civilization, he seems to be better accomplished.” Most notably, “[t]he same shepherd’s dog, when brought into temperate climates, and among a people perfectly civilized, as Britain, France, Germany, would, by the mere influence of the climate, lose his savage aspect … and assume the figure of a bull-dog, the hound, and the Irish grey-hound.” And, in pointing to the pinnacle of canine development from the savage original, Buffon (38–9) reveals his class bias: “The hound is farthest removed from the shepherd’s dog … the gentleness, docility, and even the timidity of the hound, are proofs of his great degeneration, or rather of the great perfection he has acquired by the long and careful education bestowed on him by man.” The malleability of dogs, due to their responsiveness to external influences, has, in this thinking, made them companions to humans and capable of being improved to suit the needs of the people who used their companionship for labour, for affection, or for sport. Companionship between humans and dogs is thus based on their shared variability – their analogous divisions into breeds and races – which in itself signifies their shared sensitivity, one that even approaches an aesthetic sense. As I shall suggest later, this sensitivity is the quality humans admire in themselves as the capacity to recognize responsiveness in animals and to comprehend the order of nature, as well as to notice where nature lacks and is need of improvement. At the same time that Buffon was working on his Natural History, the English Parliament was debating the creation of a Dog Tax aimed at curbing the canine population. In these debates the human-canine analogy prevails, cast in terms of class rather than race. As with Buffon’s taxonomies, the class analogy assigns meaning to the otherwise fluid variability of dogs, in order to devalue some dogs and heighten the social merit of others. Calls for a tax began fairly early in the eighteenth century and achieved their aim only on the eve of the nineteenth century. Motivating the calls was first of all a bias against working-class people and their dogs, since a lower-class person with a dog would – in the eyes of the Parliamentarians – be poaching, and second a concern that dogs simply needed some sort of regulatory curb on their reproduction. These two motives intertwined and overlapped so that much of the

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debate focused on the type of relations that should be allowed between humans and dogs, and who should be allowed to keep dogs. The need for regulation generally was driven by the broader anxiety over the fluid variability of dogs and humans alike, a variability that defied understanding unless it could be regulated into a legible organization. The Dog Tax as a means of regulating the number and variability of dogs basically extended the earlier restrictions on dogs imposed by the ancient Game Laws. Although the Game Laws may be said to have taken various forms throughout their existence, they served the consistent purpose of restricting the hunting of certain prey animals – deer, hare, and game birds – to the aristocracy. Toward this end they prohibited access to the forests throughout England, and they regulated the possession of dogs. The laws allowed for the seizure or destruction of “guns, dogs, nets and engines kept by unqualified persons to destroy game” (Blackstone 1979, 418). In his seminal work on the Game Laws, P.B. Munsche (1981, 3) frames the period from 1671, the year the Game Act revived the exclusionary aspects of the old laws, to 1831, the year that the Game Reform Act relaxed hunting restrictions and, consequently, dog ownership, as the era when hunting was enforced as the exclusive privilege of the gentry. For my purposes what matters is that the accoutrements of hunting – especially dogs – also sufficed to mark a person as a poacher. The metonymic relation that could exist between a gentleman and his hound became a legal, social, and grammatical solecism among the lower classes. Outside the aristocracy, dogs could not be claimed as companions, for they always held the potential of signifying illegal activity by the human. Indeed, “by 1707, the penalty for possessing a snare or a hunting dog was the same as that for killing game,” which is to say that the snare and dog outside the restricted context became equivalent signifiers of an intent that was itself equivalent to the actual performance of poaching (21). Citing various reasons, such as the gentry’s fear that money would gain ascendancy over land-based wealth, Munsche stresses that during this era “the property qualification for sportsmen was enforced with increasing vigour” (6). Dogs accompanying unqualified people could be seized and destroyed, apparently without any provision for size or hunting ability. These laws enforced the metonymic values between humans and their canine companions, so that dogs kept by the aristocracy became aristocratic, and dogs kept by the lower classes became criminals.

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The actual effect of the law on the number of dogs in England seems to have been minimal, since dogs appear to have remained almost ubiquitous. But the fact of the laws, the sense that they were needed, even when transformed into the less obviously restrictive tax, is what matters most. Aimed at preventing the free interaction of dogs and people of  the lower classes, the restrictions in fact strengthened the privilege of the classes that could have dogs. The legal right to own dogs signified the ownership of land that, in turn, secured the privilege of class and the ability to regulate others. In the words of historians Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy (1987,  124), “The great landowner was mythologized as a wise and powerful figure … [whose] benevolent omniscience was a result of his landed status, for as owner of the nation he was seen to be able to understand its needs.” Conversely, those without privilege derived from property lacked the capacity for self-governance, so that relations between working-class people and dogs would be characterized by waste and abuse. William King, for example, arguing for a Dog Tax in 1740, asserts: Even the Labourer, who gets his Bread by the Sweat of his Brows, and the Stroller, who begs his from Door to Door, will waste and consume a great Part of it upon their Dogs … This is one of the Inconveniencies, which arise from suffering all Men to have full and free Liberty to keep as many of these useless Animals as they please; even tho’ they want Bread for the Support of their Families. (King 1740, 7–8) Likewise, George Clark’s proposal of 1791 condemns the immorality of allowing people to keep dogs as luxuries, which are “generally in some degree pernicious” (6). So, for fifty years, proponents of the tax focused on the lower classes who did not need dogs and kept them only as pernicious luxuries. “Useless” and “inconvenient” dogs (which became a sweeping reference to dogs of the wasteful lower classes) provided a focus for the general and persistent anxiety felt by the gentry over the uncertain relations among beings – humans of different classes, and animals of dizzying variety. The “full and free Liberty” of unregulated human-canine relations makes the canine population into a persistent threat of immorality and disease. King levels the charge that dogs would certainly facilitate

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an epidemic of plague, if there were one, and with only slightly less hysteria, he raises “the frequent danger of Madness” (King 1740, 11). The MP introducing the bill, John Dent, asserts that “thirty three persons in Manchester within a twelve month had been admitted into the infirmary” with rabies (Woodfall 1796, 199). Unregulated dogs are a malady threatening society with bestialization, for the madness of rabies, Clark says, degrades humans “from the image of God, to the condition of a brute animal” (Clark 1791, 9). As Harriet Ritvo (1987, 170) has stated, rabies was looked on “as yet another manifestation of unsettling social forces.” The threat is not just disease, but moral degradation, with hints of miscegenation, allowing unfettered lower-class people and their dogs to mix with privileged and morally good people and dogs. These sensationalist appeals helped the framers of the bill to present the tax as a regulatory necessity to curb the disease and immorality threatening the nation rather than an arbitrary restriction, as in the Game Laws that physically excluded most people and dogs. But the reality of regulation becomes clear when King takes up the consideration of “who shall be thought proper Persons to keep a Dog, and who not,” and distinguishes two categories on the positive side, those “who hath anything of Value to lose,” determined by having land “to the Value of Ten Pounds a Year,” and those “who have any Trade which may require the use of a dog; such as Tanners, Curriers, Fellmongers, Butchers, and the like” (King 1740, 15). These two groups of legitimate dog owners King distinguishes from sportsmen, whose right to dog ownership is beyond question, and from the negative category: the “Set of Strollers, who go by the Name of Gypsies and Tinkers, who always keep a Number of those mischievous Animals, and undoubtedly with no other View but to kill Sheep, Lambs, and Fowls, and to rob Gentlemens [sic] Coney Warrens, &c.” (21). Three types of dogs thus hold legitimacy, determined by the person associating with them; another broad range of dogs continues to threaten the nation, if not literally with disease, then with a similar incursion of poaching or immorality. As Ingrid H. Tague (2008) stresses throughout her history of the debates, many arguments for and against the tax relied on the rhetoric of sensibility, the same aesthetic movement based on feeling and sympathy lying behind Buffon’s analogous taxonomies of breeds and races. Thus, even while denying moral responsibility to lower-class people, the debates affirmed the sensitivity of aristocratic dogs. If the analogy justified the extermination of lower-class dogs, it also affirmed the special

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status of dogs as sharing a responsive sensibility with humans. So, in mid-century, when “Brindle” (1753, 2) published his appeal against the tax, he not only took the dog’s perspective but began with an assertion of dogs’ capacity for feeling: “Consider, gentlemen, we are animals and not such senseless machines as you men are pleased sometimes to make us: we have a feeling of pain, a sense of pleasure, tread the same earth, are warmed by the same sun as our masters.” Brindle brought dogs very close to humans, insisting on the same responses to the outer world, most notably allowing for “pleasure,” which granted dogs a kind of aesthetic capacity. Sympathy for canine feeling – of great importance for the animal rights movement – was made possible through recognition of a sameness growing out of the relations of analogy and metonymy, and driven by efforts to naturalize race and class as measures of the capacity to feel. Relations between aristocratic humans and dogs were described in terms of refinement, while those of the lower classes appeared as brutish and violent. These descriptions also marked a shift in the view of human-canine relations, from simple interactions (sport, work, or crime) to dog ownership by humans. Making dogs into property reinforced the meanings generated by analogy and metonymy, while also narrowing the possibilities for the types of relations considered legitimate, or even possible. The luxury dog could be a non-working companion, a friend, as in the case of lapdogs; and sporting hounds could serve as agents sharing in humans’ aesthetic joy. But friendship beyond the codified range of hunt-aesthetics or lap-dog affection remained connected to immorality and bad taste. The effect was to shift the identity of a dog from what it did to whose dog it was, which could also be understood as the kind of dog sought by a kind of person. And when the debates began openly addressing the consequence of people killing large numbers of dogs, the question became, as Lynn Festa (2009, 30) notes, “not so much whether it is acceptable to kill dogs as which dogs it is acceptable to kill”; the answer, of course, depended on whose dog it was, who the owner was.4 On 19 May 1796 Parliament passed the “Act for granting to His Majesty certain Duties on Dogs” (36 Geo. 3, c. 124). Festa summarizes the bill thus: All individuals keeping either a hunting dog (“Greyhound, Hound, Pointer, Setting Dog Spaniel, Lurcher or Tarrier”) or “two or more Dogs of whatever Description or Denomination” were

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to pay the sum of five shillings per dog, while those who paid assessed taxes were assessed three shillings for any dog they owned not embraced under [the] former category (such as lapdogs). The poor – those who did not pay assessed taxes – were only subject to the dog tax if they kept a hunting dog … or if they kept more than one dog. (Festa 2009, 15) In one sense this law officially recognized that persons of all classes could and did keep dogs, and for purposes beyond the traditionally recognized functions of guarding, herding, and sport. In this sense, the law re-enforced the traditional distinctions among sporting dogs and lapdogs, kept by the aristocracy, and imposed a tax burden on the poor only if they tried to hunt (still illegal for those not owning land). And in another sense, this law, in recognizing that all classes of people might keep dogs, reflected the view that a dog was an object to be owned, property with an assessable value. A dog became not just a companion or a friend, but something that had to signify a value for its owner. The legal measures aimed at managing dogs functioned within the Enlightenment project of systemic knowledge that also, and at the same time, led natural historians to begin organizing canine variability into breeds. Just as the generation of laws regulating the populations of humans and dogs entails an active shaping and framing of the possibilities of human-canine relations, so the delineation of taxonomies entailed the mapping of the same range of possibilities to organize the jumble of canine variability into a legible text, or catalogue of signifiers. Taxonomies and restrictive laws provided the grammar in which variability could be read meaningfully: as dogs were grouped according to certain traits, and as some dogs were associated with certain classes, they naturalized the grouping of human varieties into meaningful social groups and races, affirming the unquestioned views that different groups held different capacities for judgment. The associative analogies between humans and their dogs grew into mutually sustaining systems of class, or race, and breed, each validating the other as natural evidence of the accuracy of taxonomic perception. While the Dog Tax was eventually repealed in 1828, the taxonomies produced in this era have continued to govern Western thought about variability, as is evidenced in the reification of both races as the explanation of human variability and breeds as the explanation of canine variability.

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In order to provide such an explanation, “breed” not only had to frame differences into categories, but had to provide histories grounding the differences in the natural landscape, reinforcing the overall view that physical appearance followed from aesthetic responsiveness. Following the model set by Buffon, and his identification of the shepherd’s dog as the parent of all other varieties, the histories connect a breed to a region by recounting its early role in a primordial pastoralism in order to explain such matters as temperament and physiognomy, and through such explanations they assign much of the current meaning to a dog, grounding its significance in an ancestral association with a region and activity. Overall, breed resolves the anxiety over the uncertainty of a dog’s appearance and character by introducing a reliable pre-determination governed by strict enforcement of standards that supposedly preserve the primordial type. To a great extent, these narratives are spurious, fabricated through conventions developed as a genre, a literary breed. And in this sense, “breed” is nothing more or less than a discourse directing our relations with dogs, informing us humans in advance of how we might expect our dog to respond to us, and looking to them as metonymic reflections of ourselves, adhering to the relation codified by the Dog Tax. Buffon’s beliefs about the effect of climate on dogs and humans played an influential role in the development of breed history as a genre. In Britain, as elsewhere, most of the literature on dogs prior to Buffon focused on their role in hunting, since the primary legal interaction between (upper-class) humans and dogs took place on the hunt field. The Foxhound stands out in being the first modern dog recognized as a breed, with a pedigree and a history, and in being one of the very few dogs whose history actually points out the human interventions to engineer a particular kind of dog for a single purpose. In so doing, this history stresses the aesthetic astuteness of the humans who created the Foxhound in response to a need, a lack in nature that they corrected. So the meaning of this dog carries the notion of perfection, attained by achieving an ideal, and the histories keep the ideal in sight as the goal attained. Narratives on the development of the Foxhound thus conventionally begin with the primordial state of the English countryside when hunting and hounds varied widely among the different regions. In the standard view, two strains of primordial hounds stand out for their contributions to the modern Foxhound;

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these are identified regionally, as the fast Northern hound, which was a sight hound used in chasing hares, and the slow Southern hound, or Talbot, a scent hound used in wooded hunts. In 1686, Richard Blome (quoted in Gilbey 1913, 93) complained about both types, describing the Northern Hounds as “fleet of foot [but] thin-skinned and therefore not proper for coverts and bushy enclosure as the Southern Hounds are which are thick-skinned and slow-footed, and not fit for the long chases that open countries afford.” Blome’s complaint points to the lack of a hound proper to the way foxhunting was developing, as a mounted hunt moving over expanses of open country. Thitherto crosses were avoided out of fear of exacerbating the poor qualities rather than combining the desired ones. But that changed in the eighteenth century (see Russell 1986, 12–13; Ritvo 1997, 119–20).5 And within a hundred years after Blome’s complaint, the idea of a homogenized hound displaying the best of the two ancient regional hounds became widespread, as when William Blane (1788, 89–90) advised his fellow huntsmen “to breed on the middle-sized dogs, betwixt the Southern Hound and the Northern Beagle.” The nineteenth-century hunt historian T.F. Dale (1901, 77) asserts that the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton pack provided the link between the two old hounds of the North and South, and began breeding out to Hugo Meynell’s hounds as well as to the Belvoir pack. Dale’s aim is to identify an origin that would link the modern Foxhound to the older hounds in order to turn the modern Foxhound into the preserve of the two foremost indigenous hounds of Britain, with the primary emphasis on the Southern hound, which had been used in the Royal mounted hunts for stag.6 Thus Dale (1899, 2) asserts that the Foxhound “certainly was not developed out of the old harrier or beagle, neither was he modified from the bloodhound … [H]is direct descent I believe to be from the hounds kept by the great territorial families for hunting the stag.” Hunt historians retrospectively cast this cross as the pivotal event that the countryside was waiting for to enable foxhunting to develop toward its ideal. Once the importance of the cross is recognized, the problem arises of how to move it beyond surmise to a documented certainty, since, as Dale (1899, 2) states quite simply, “for such a history no sufficient materials exist.” The paucity of concrete, verifiable sources opens an originary gap that the narratives fill with accounts of how, in one way or another, the Foxhound belongs to the proper human response

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to nature; the lack of documentation itself becomes the denouement to the plot of how the Foxhound grew into an irresistible necessity. Sir John Buchanan-Jardine (1937, 138–9) opines that the vital cross had already taken place in the seventeenth century and in the north, so the Northern hound would itself be the embodiment of the combination which was subsequently made use of “all over the country to speed up local types of hounds,” while it was the old Norman hound that gave rise to the Southern hounds. In accounting for this Northern cross, Buchanan-Jardine (138) says the Northern hound was connected to the Talbot up until “around 1640,” then “almost suddenly the tide seemed to turn … when one finds a very fast, galloping kind of hound being bred in Yorkshire and the North generally.” This “sudden” development he attributes to the pack of staghounds given to King James I by Henry IV of France (103). These noble staghounds, the surmise is, were bred with the regional descendants of the Talbot to give rise to the Northern hound. But once Buchanan-Jardine (138) has fabricated this much genealogy, he turns to the motif of uncertainty due to lack of documentation – “there is no ascertaining for sure” – and relies repeatedly on the “suddenness” with which the Northern hound appeared. The conventionality of breed histories becomes evident when, even though Buchanan-Jardine gives a bit more attention to the Northern hound than do other hunt historians, he proceeds along almost identical lines as the narratives on the Southern hound. First is the connection to nobility, which for the Southern hound occurs through the old connection to the stag-hunt, and for the Northern hound with the gift from King Henry IV. Second is the lack of verifiable evidence, which in other narratives leads to the explanation about climatic naturalization, and in Buchanan-Jardine’s account results in exclamations over the suddenness of the Northern hound’s appearance. In itself, this puzzling suddenness can be explained as a change not so much in the hounds themselves as in the humans who began selecting the hounds according to modern principles. “Almost suddenly,” as the quarry shifted from deer to hare and foxes, sportsmen began to choose hounds for their speed combined with the ability to follow scent. But the suddenness is then projected away from the men who already had the capacity to decide which animals would participate in their field sports, and onto the hounds as elements of nature to be brought into their needed form. By turning away from the human selection, sportsmen – and sport historians – can describe the hounds as sensitively responsive to the climate and the natural rhythms

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of hunting, and they can describe the developers of the Foxhound as being responsive to the requirements for bringing the old, insufficient mode of hunting with hounds into the modern era. If both progenitors of the modern Foxhound can be shown to belong to a primordial English pastoralism, then all the hunting associated with and developed alongside this hound would also be indigenous to Britain. This genealogical foundation – undocumented and speculative as it may be – is the primary aim of virtually all the narratives on the Foxhound, because it obviates the hound’s artificiality: even as an engineered animal, the Foxhound as heir to the ancient Talbot and the seemingly autochthonous Northern hound embodies the heritage of a mythic English landscape that provides a national identity. Even as a modern, perfected animal, the Foxhound has been made into a fertile emblem of the relations privileged humans hold to the land, relations that extend beyond social rights granted by law, for these relations are cast as inherent qualities, defining characteristics of England, just like the weather. Thus, the histories of the Foxhound might fail to identify the actual origin, or the moment of the all-important cross, but they do succeed in creating an identity that is both aristocratic and uniquely English. The tacit suggestion drawn from the lack of documentation is that the Foxhound embodies the changes in the landscape and quarry that made improvements on old hounds necessary; that is, in this discourse, the modern, engineered Foxhound belongs to England as much as did its more regionally distinctive ancestors. As modern foxhunting spread across the different regions, it became more or less regularized, and the Foxhound also took on some general standards, even while hunts sought to distinguish their packs through “accidental” features such as coat colour (e.g., the “Belvoir tan”).7 In similar fashion, the sources for the history of the Foxhound’s creation themselves – indirect as they are – provided the template for the breed histories that became vital to establishing the quality of naturalness to the engineered, artificially created and preserved breeds by making them appear to have once held an indigenous role in a pre-industrial pastoralism. But, of course, the key step in creating an actual breed was when huntsmen began keeping pedigrees for their hounds, and for the first time ensured a factual record of their lines. According to sport historian Robert Vyner (1847, 12–13), Lord Yarborough began to keep pedigrees for his Brocklesby hounds in

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1746, and these hounds were subsequently used by many other kennels as modern breeding practices spread to other hunts seeking to improve their packs. The important detail is that by mid-century breeders began keeping stud lists, and the uncertainty facing historians trying to unravel the relations between different types of hounds ends with the advent of physical and authoritative records. From that point on, historical preservation was as much a part of a well-bred hound as its ability in the field. With written pedigrees, breeders knew which qualities hounds were likely to inherit. Individuals were continually assessed for performance in the field and for the likelihood of passing their good qualities on to their progeny. That is to say, individuals were appraised for their lack of individuality, or any deviation from the normative ideal determined by the new possibilities of hunting foxes in a particular fashion. Once the mythic cross between the Northern and Southern hounds had taken place, breeders embarked on a systematic development of the ideal Foxhound. Vyner points to the underlying principle of the new approach: hound breeding at that time was as scientifically pursued as sheep-breeding, and the successful perseverance of Mr Meynell and Lord Yarborough will ever be deserving of the warmest gratitude from true sportsmen, for lighting up what might be justly termed the dawn of science in the hunt. (Vyner 1847, 3) This is not a haphazard comparison. These men “persevered” through their methodical, “scientific” programs of line-breeding – that is, breeding to preserve not just the qualities of an individual but those of its ancestors – and in-breeding, which duly increases the likelihood of passing characteristics to offspring since the parents are closely related. Hugo Meynell adopted his method from agriculturalists such as Robert Bakewell, who, in the words of Margaret E. Derry (2003, 3), “attempted to ‘improve’ horses, sheep, and cattle.” Just as Bakewell sought to create sheep and cattle that could feed a growing population cheaply, so sportsmen sought an entirely new hound that would lead foxhunting toward its ideal. It is in this sense that the Foxhound represents an aesthetic response to the natural world, filling in the gap of the lacking hound that would make the sport possible. The references by Buffon

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and his successors to the Foxhound as having “attained the criterion of perfection” reflect this representation (Taplin 1803–4, 2.180). As an ideal, the Foxhound is never recognized as a singular being but always in a collective group – the pack, or as the even more broadly framed performative function of the hunting cycle consisting of fox, hounds, horses, and humans in their differentiated roles. In the eighteenth century, as now, there were certainly hounds known singularly, such as the famed Blue Cap, who in 1763 outran the hound presented by Meynell (and spurred the famed breeder to focus on developing more speed in his pack) (Daniel 1801, 212), and Lord Yarborough’s Brocklesby Ringwood, painted by George Stubbs in 1791; but such examples have been individualized only as ideals, as representing the standard for the Foxhound generally. Thus Robert Fountain and Alfred Gates (1984, 40), in their commentary on the Stubbs portrait, say of Ringwood, “This hound had at least forty lines back to Charlton Ringwood 1771 and would look at home in the Perterborough Hound Show of today.” Their recognition of Ringwood as Foxhound par excellence – typical of the responses to this painting – demonstrates the way a Foxhound is situated genealogically. The emphasis away from the singular individual is identified as one of the three breeding principles of Meynell’s scientific program, and it is just this emphasis – along with the success of Meynellian science in producing successive generations of consistently good, or even better, hounds – that spurred the need to identify common qualities among diverse individuals, to segregate them according to determined commonalities conceptualized teleologically, and then to preserve the collective breed over individuals. In privileging lineage over individuality, the breeders established an emphasis on purity, adherence to the categorical ideal. Historian Nicholas Russell points out that during this time the “worship of ‘blood’” became the standard for pedigrees in the belief that “properties could descend intact over long series of generations.” Thus, even as Bakewell and Meynell were demonstrating the effectiveness of breeding for particular traits, they were also driven by the aim of preserving those traits associated with proven lines of blood. Their strategies of in-breeding were intended to protect blood-purity. The primary mechanism for ensuring such purity, Russell (1986, 100) argues, was the “accumulation of pedigree data.” The principle of purity as sustained blood makes a breed into something more than a cross, it ensures that breed attains the status of biological

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category, analogous to race. Appropriately, then, once the Foxhound became recognizable as the sole hound vital to foxhunting, sportsmen pointed to blood purity as a crucial quality, as when Delmé Radcliffe (1839, 34) advises “any man undertaking to hunt any country, to stick to the best blood” (emphasis in the text). The emphasis on purity led to the need to preserve it, to avoid careless intermixing of pedigrees, and followed the same terms as fears of racial miscegenation. Writing about racial divisions, Robert Bernasconi (2001, 3) justly asserts that “it is not so much the reality of race as racial purity that has been at the center of discussions of race over the last two hundred years.” As fluid variability among dogs and humans hardened into differentiated categories of breed and race, the standard of purity occluded individuality to predetermine what a particular human or dog might mean or become. Breed, like race, became the dominant factor of an individual’s identity, setting the individual dog against the categorical ideal grounded in the supposed ancestral origins. In generating meaning through categorical identification, both race and breed relegate the differences that had once seemed overwhelming into accidentals overshadowed by similarities. For the eighteenth-century natural philosophers, categorical identification provides the grammar transforming the confusing variability of nature into a legible text of origin and purpose. In his essay on race, Kant (2000, 10) argues that “[w]e take pleasure in becoming aware of how we can account for the origin of the different stock of human beings according to the variety of causes that account for these differences.” The pleasure Kant finds comes from developing a systematic knowledge of the world by dividing it into manageable categories of individuals, based on the perception of likeness and the exclusion of difference, or the determination of which differences hold meaning and which hold secondary relevance to the similarities. Notably, Buffon (1791, 24–7) expresses surprise that a dog and a fox should show no interest in mating, since their similarities seem evident to him, if not to the dog or fox. The narratives of breed or racial origin determine which differences can bear recognizable meaning as signs of categorical limits, such as the limit between a dog and a fox. Recognizable and meaningful differences can occur only at the level of categories into which individuals are synthesized through similar origins. Variable individuality is then forgotten, for, as Kant (2007, 103) says, “knowledge is produced by the synthesis of a manifold.”

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The individual remains unknowable, except as it can be recognized as belonging to a category – breed or race – so that its particularity within the variable “manifold” disappears. Synthetic knowledge, attained through the formation of categories, transforms the confusing world of variability into a system of meaningful relations; the taxonomies of Buffon and his followers simply map out those categories by emphasizing the similarities, and suppressing the variability, of individuals. In 1805 Sydenham Edwards published the first English book on dogs since Caius’s that did not consider them from the perspective of field sports. Cynographia Britannica is not only rare but incomplete, ending in mid-sentence (Edwards 1805, 1).8 Nonetheless, Edwards – together with the contemporaneous William Taplin – promotes the view that canine varieties, even the Foxhound, represent types of dogs that are self-sustaining and that originated in response to climate and activity. These emphases, which I shall evaluate successively, all had the effect of naturalizing the different breed categories along with their associative meanings. After these taxonomies, “dog” no longer referred to a variable being valued for its individuality, but became a set field of categories historicized with a mythically pastoral origin. It is not surprising, even this early, that the delineation into manageable breeds should be accompanied with warnings against miscegenation. Both Edwards and Taplin accept Buffon’s identification of the shepherd’s dog as the primordial ancestor. All descendants of this dog – which would be every domestic canine – become signifiers at once of the primordial bond between man and nature and of man’s improvement of nature. In contrast to the “civilized” Foxhound – the dog most advanced from the shepherd’s dog, and whose gentleness, Taplin (1803–04, 1.25) says, is proof “of the wonderful perfection he has acquired” – are a small group of dogs both Edwards and Taplin find distasteful. The bulldog, which some fanciers had identified as the national English dog, Taplin (1.81) finds too closely associated with “that class of people who delight in a sport formerly in great estimation (with the lower orders).” In the Lurcher Taplin sees an example of breeding practices applied without proper regard to aesthetic and moral principles: he says it is “neither more nor less, than a bastard-greyhound, with some additional qualifications, but without their beauty.” And lacking any “beauty,” it is “little calculated for the sports of the great,” and is “doomed to obscurity by the rusticity and unattracting singularity of his appearance.” What is worse,

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the Lurcher, like the bulldog, has unhappy class connections: “we find him almost invariably in the possession of, and in constant association with poachers of the most unprincipled and abandoned description; for whose services of nocturnal depredation of various kinds, they seem every way inherently qualified” (2.102–3). As with the brutish violence of pit-fighting, poaching – always suspected of the lower classes – intrudes on the beauty of upper-class relations among humans, dogs, and nature. All these low-class dogs are epitomized in the category Edwards identifies as “The Drover’s Dog, or Cur,” which, he says, has been produced by “chance.” Even worse than the bulldog or lurcher, the cur is recognized by its suspect moral character: “his restless manner, shuffling gait, incessant barking, vagabond appearance … bespeak him incapable of any great design, or regular chain of action” (art. “Drover’s Dog, or Cur”). Curs have “little value” for Edwards because they have not been bred for any particular task, and because they lack any genealogical connection to a region. Bulldogs and Lurchers can be identified in terms of a putative (though unauthorized, unwritten) genealogy, and so can even be identified as a type; their crime is to participate in the illegitimate activities of the lower classes. But the cur is the dog of no type; it remains singular, simply as the dog apart from design or order of relatedness. Curs are always individuals that are not calculable in advance. They remain unknowable in Kantian terms because they cannot be read categorically through any conventional narrative tying them to a clear origin. They threaten the taxonomic organization of canine types through their individuality, posing the danger of miscegenation, ruining the purity and the sharp regulatory boundaries between breeds; and they threaten the ability of an informed observer such as Edwards to know what a dog is, what conventionalized, historical, and scientific meaning it presents. Lower-class bulldogs and Lurchers threaten society with violence and crime, while curs threaten the categorical delineation that has organized and preserved canine variety into a system of meaning. This is the same discourse that drove Parliament to enact the Dog Tax as an official delineation of legitimate and illegitimate dogs and human-dog relations; and it made taxonomic divisions appear to be empirical descriptions of canine characters as it discarded and forgot individual differences among dogs. Taxonomies of breed and racial differences arose at the same time as the Dog Tax because they all impose identities based on genealogy; breed and racial identity both become

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recognizable as qualities that are supposedly grounded in the primordial system of nature. The nascent taxonomy of breed division and relations affirms its legitimacy by expanding the divisions and refining the categories. Not only must canine sexual activity be regulated and authorized by official pedigree records to extend the purity of lineal descent, but breeds themselves must be proliferated to reinforce the networks and schemata of taxonomies mapping out the signs by which dogs can be recognized as reflections of humans’ responsiveness. Such legitimation already occurs within Cynographia Britannica in the category of terriers, which for Berners and Caius had constituted a loose type of small vicious dogs. Edwards distinguishes terriers as a type unto itself, and as “an original native of this island” (art. “Terrier”). And he recognizes the terrier type among enough variations to generate subsequent distinct breeds as sub-categories. During the two centuries since Edwards published his taxonomy, “terrier” has expanded so much that it has become the largest of modern “groups” of breeds. Rawdon Lee (1894, 17), at the end of the nineteenth century, devotes a full volume to the numerous breeds of terriers in his three-volume work History and Description of the Modern Dogs of Britain and Ireland; he refers to a terrier show in 1893 with “162 classes provided for terriers.” Terriers expanded into the largest group of breeds, very often on distinctions as arbitrary as leg shape and color. The Norwich and Norfolk terriers of today are differentiated primarily by ear shape; and Cairns, Westies, and Scotties were once distinguished only by colour. Along the way, as individual differences were discarded, forgotten, and regulated out of existence, these arbitrary distinctions acquired significance that made them anything but arbitrary, so that a Westie is not just a white Scottie, but an altogether different terrier with its own breed narrative positing an origin and ideal that must be preserved. The Parliamentary debates leading to the Dog Tax, along with the taxonomies of natural history, legalized and naturalized the meanings of individual canine appearance. In a real way, the law creating the Dog Tax defined which dogs could exist in the future, which ones had a legitimate function, and which were immoral or aesthetically unpleasing. And the scientific authority of the natural historians gave the analogies drawn through class and racial bias a grounding in nature, and thereby predetermined the relations humans and dogs might have with one another. These relations constitute the interpretations that humans

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assign to dogs through historical associations with regions, activities, and classes (legal hunting, poaching, agricultural activities, etc.) within a mythically primordial landscape. Expansion of the canine taxonomy not only meant that the sheer number of dog breeds grew, but that breed as the authorized essential quality of dogs was naturalized into the easiest – and necessary – way to describe an individual dog. As the class analogies between dogs and humans were cast into Parliamentary law, the racial analogies were cast into natural law. And just as these analogies affirmed and reified class and racial differences among humans, they legalized and naturalized breed distinctions with the same authority of law and nature. A breed gives us something we can – and must – describe, with empirical rigour, as the differences of an individual dog, and then – this is the most important step – situate those differences within a taxonomy that forges the particularities into a historical concept. The descriptive taxonomy of breeds, along with the tax law defining dogs as property, established conventionalized identities that dogs might hold within the regulated landscape of human-canine relations and by which they might be known. To know a dog through its breed identity is to recognize it through the essence of its authorized category, and to recognize it conceptually – not individually – within an economy of human relations with animals and nature generally. The taxonomy of canine breeds enframes the totality of “the dog” into a field of particularities that can be apprehended within the systemic whole. Every encounter with a breed dog reinforces the taxonomy through the decision to emphasize categorical identity over individual particularity. For two centuries, our dogs have behaved best when they conform to our expectations of their breed; perhaps by recognizing how we approach our canine friends, we might begin to learn a new way of greeting them apart from our self-serving breed bias.

Notes 1 Hilda Kean (1998) provides the most thorough account of the changing social attitudes involved in the animal rights movement, linking concerns with animal welfare with the abolitionist movement and upper-class bias toward the lower classes. Kathleen Kete (1994) traces the same trajectory of changing views toward animals in France. And see Moira Ferguson (1998).

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Linda Kalof (2007) examines the shift toward care for animals in terms of the visual imagery presenting animals. And behind all contemporary work on human-animal relations stands Keith Thomas (1983). Lapdogs have attracted a fair amount of attention over the past decade, generally for their associations with women and their possible role as the earliest modern dogs kept for reasons other than utility, which is to say as pets. See, for example, Wyett 2001; Braunschneider 2006; Brown 2010; and Ellis 2007. Kari Weil (2012, 84) has a sophisticated discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, that explores how the biography searches “for an androgynous and mongrelized reality outside the cultural conventions that restrict what we know of such creatures as women and dogs.” In her discussion of Buffon and eighteenth-century natural history, Louise E. Robbins points out that these historians often relied on pet animals to construct their observations, and they were especially interested in “groups of animals that imitate human gestures and sounds”; even though Buffon went on to assert a “vast gulf between animals and humans,” he was clearly interested in the analogy presented through the imitation. See Robbins 2002. Kalof (2007) points out that “[a]s a direct consequence of the 1796 licensing law, thousands of unlicensed dogs were slaughtered throughout England” (118). Ritvo’s focus lies always on the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Stephen Deuchar (1988, 107–8) has made the mythic connection between modern foxhunting and the older stag hunt plain in his reading of George Stubbs’s The Grosvenor Hunt (1762). On the increasing regularity of foxhunting, see Carr 1986, especially 33–105. Only the first eight pages of this work are paginated, and so further citations will appear with the title from the category being quoted from. On this interesting work, see Secord 2001 (60).

References Bernasconi, Robert. 2001. “Introduction.” In Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi, 1–8. Oxford, Uk: Blackwell. Blackstone, William. 1979. Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769. 4 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Blane, William. 1788. Cynegetica, or Essays on Sporting, consisting of Observations on Hare Hunting. London: John Stockdale.

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Braunschneider, Theresa. 2006. “The Lady and the Lapdog: Mixed Ethnicity in Constantinople, Fashionable Pets in Britain.” In Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, edited by Frank Palmeri, 31–51. Burlington, vt: Ashgate. Brindle. 1753. The Dog’s Plea: or Reasons most humbly submitted by the Barking Fraternity of Great Britain to the Men their Masters, shewing why Dogs ought to be exempted from Taxes. London: R. Griffiths. Brown, Laura. 2010. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press. Buchanan-Jardine, Sir John. 1937. Hounds of the World. Penrith, Uk: Grayling Books. Buffon, George Le Clerc, Comte de. 1791. Natural History, General and Particular, 3rd ed. 9 vols. Translated by William Smellie. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Caius, John. 1576. Of Englishe Dogges. Translated by Abraham Fleming. London: Rychard Johnes. Carr, Raymond. 1986. English Foxhunting: A History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Clark, George. 1791. An Address to both Houses of Parliament: Containing Reasons for a Tax upon Dogs, and The Outline of a Plan for that Purpose; and for effectually suppressing the oppressive Practice of Impressing Seamen, and more expeditiously Manning the Royal Navy. London: Johnson. Dale, T.F. 1899. History of the Belvoir Hunt. Westminster, Uk: Archibald Constable. – 1901. The Eighth Duke of Beaufort and the Badminton Hunt. Westminster, Uk: Archibald Constable. Daniel, William B. 1801. Rural Sports. London: Bunny and Gold. Derry, Margaret E. 2003. Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since 1800. Baltimore, mD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Deuchar, Stephen. 1988. Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press. Edwards, Sydenham. 1805. Cynographia Britannica: Consisting of Coloured Engravings of the Various Breeds of Dogs existing in Great Britain; drawn from the Life, with Observations on their Properties and Uses. London: C. Whittingham. Ellis, Markman. 2007. “Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and CounterSensibility.” In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in

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Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, 92–113. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Ferguson, Moira. 1998. Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900. Ann Arbor, mI: University of Michigan Press. Festa, Lynn. 2009. “Person, Animal, Thing: The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things.” Eighteenth-Century Life 33, no. 2 (Spring): 1–44. Fountain, Robert, and Alfred Gates. 1984. Stubbs’ Dogs: The Hounds and Domestic Dogs of the Eighteenth Century as seen through the Paintings of George Stubbs. London: Ackermann. Gilbey, Sir Walter. 1913. Hounds in Old Days. London: Vinton. Kalof, Linda. 2007. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. “Of the Different Human Races.” In The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott, 8–22. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. – 2007. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Marcus Weigelt. New York: Penguin. Kean, Hilda.1998. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800. London: Reaktion Books. Kete, Kathleen. 1994. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in NineteenthCentury Paris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. King, William. 1740. Reasons and Proposals for Laying a Tax upon Dogs. Humbly addressed to the Honourable House of Commons. By a Lover of his Country. Reading, Uk: D. Henry. Lee, Rawdon B. 1894. A History and Description of the Modern Dogs of Great Britain and Ireland (The Terriers). London: Horace Cox. Munsche, P.B. 1981. Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671– 1831. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Radcliffe, Delmé. 1839. The Noble Science: A few general Ideas on Fox-Hunting, for the Use of the rising Generation of Sportsmen, and more especially those of the Hertfordshire Hunt Club. London: Rudolph Ackermann. Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. – 1997. “Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain.” In The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination, 119–20. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press.

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Robbins, Louise E. 2002. Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Baltimore, mD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Russell, Nicholas. 1986. Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Secord, William. 2001. A Breed Apart: The Art Collections of the American Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog. New York: Antique Collectors’ Club. Shaw, Vero. 1890. The Illustrated Book of the Dog. London: Cassell. Tague, Ingrid H. 2008. “Eighteenth-Century English Debates on a Dog Tax.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (December): 901–20. Taplin, William. 1803–04. The Sportsman’s Cabinet, or a Correct Delineation of the Various Dogs used in the Sports of the Field. 2 vols. London: J. Cundee. Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon. Vyner, Robert T. 1847. Notitia Venatica: A Treatise on Fox-Hunting. 2nd ed. London: John C. Nimmo. Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University Press. Williamson, Tom, and Liz Bellamy. 1987. Property and Landscape: A Social History of Land Ownership and the English Countryside. London: George Philip. Woodfall, William. 1796. An Impartial Report on the Debates that occur in the two Houses of Parliament. 4 vols. London: T. Chapman Wyett, Jodi L. 1999. “The Lap of Luxury: Lapdogs, Literature, and Social Meaning in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 10, no. 4: 275–301.

CHAPTER THREE

Significant Others: Fox Gods and Dog Generals in Pre-Modern Japan Michael Bathgate

In 1590, the Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu selected the small castle town of Edo (now known as Tokyo) as his headquarters. When Ieyasu defeated his rivals to become the unrivalled military hegemon of the country some thirteen years later, Edo became the de facto capital of Japan. The emperor’s palace remained in Kyoto, but Edo, as the seat of the shogun’s government, served as the centre of a political and commercial network that reached beyond regional boundaries to encompass (and in many ways define) the nation as a whole. At the turn of the eighteenth century, it had grown to a million inhabitants, and may well have been the largest city on earth (Totman 1993, 151–7). After generations of unrest and civil war, the “pax Tokugawa” (typically reckoned to have extended from 1615 to 1868) ushered in unprecedented opportunities for prosperity in both the city and the surrounding countryside. But growth is seldom without its costs. The expansion of cities such as Edo absorbed outlying farming villages, transforming agricultural areas into urban spaces. Meanwhile, the increasingly dense populations who lived there grew ever more dependent on crops and materials produced by others. For a time, the clearing of new fields met those needs, and filled the coffers of samurai bureaucrats, merchants, and a new class of wealthy peasant landowners. Ultimately, however, intensive agriculture (and the exploitation of the mountain and forest regions not under cultivation) reached the ecological limits of the land to sustain it. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, cities such as

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Edo (and, by extension, the entire Japanese archipelago) faced social, economic, and ecological challenges with which the old hierarchies seemed ill-equipped to cope (Totman 1993, 223–31).1 An oft-quoted satirical verse from this period reflects something of the anxiety and dissatisfactions of this time: chōnai ni iseya Inari ni inu no kuso In Edo, merchant houses and Inari shrines are everywhere, like dog shit. Modern historians have cited this expression to indicate – depending on the focus of their study – either the growing popularity of the god Inari (a deity associated most notably with the fertility of rice paddies, the accumulation of wealth, and foxes) or the widening reach of commercial networks, especially those of the cotton traders known as Ise merchants.2 The reference to dog droppings has similarly been viewed as an allusion to the fifth shogun, Tsunayoshi (r. 1680–1709), whose reign is often associated with the high point (and worst excesses) of Edo’s prosperity, and whose edicts protecting the city’s canine population earned him the sobriquet “the dog shogun” (inu kubō). Taken as a whole, the crude comparison of Inari shrines, merchants, and excrement appears as a none-too-subtle indictment of the city’s leadership, a government remembered principally for its failure to maintain the certainties of the old order against the changing realities of the time (Matsumoto 1970, 210). This saying also provides us with a vantage point from which to consider the rich traditions of canid imagery by which the Japanese of the time made sense of their changing world. As with any vantage, however, the view I offer here will be necessarily incomplete. Foxes and domestic dogs, after all, are only two of a wider range of canid species with which the Japanese have lived. These other canines – including the raccoon dog (tanuki) and the (now extinct) Japanese wolf – each have their own places in the natural and symbolic ecologies of the archipelago, and won’t be part of this inquiry.3 At the same time, we would do well to remember the fundamental diversity of Japanese culture, both in space and in time. Rich and poor, urban and rural, lowland farmers and mountain hunters – each would have interacted with animals such as the fox and the dog in very different ways, relationships that

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would have shifted with the introduction of new technologies and new social configurations.4 Japan has also been home to significant ethnic minorities, peoples with their own characteristic practices and images associated with nonhuman animals.5 I have chosen to focus on these particular animals in this particular time and place because it allows us to consider questions of continuing relevance today. The expansion of Edo into the surrounding countryside, and the growth of its human population – up to (and, at times, beyond) the ability of available social, economic, and ecological resources to accommodate it – could be said to anticipate the social and ecological pressures caused by the concentration of human beings in urban centres today. At issue is the adequacy of such fundamental categories as domestic and wild, especially as the domain of the former expands and the latter becomes increasingly notional. At stake is our ability to navigate a future in which human, as well as nonhuman, animals can flourish. In this context, the fox and the dog were not simply two of the animal species with which the humans of Edo had ongoing (and changing) relationships; we will see that they served (or, perhaps more accurately, were pressed into service) as symbols by which those humans represented and responded to the world that surrounded them. These two canines – the one at home in the ever-expanding domain of human domestic space, the other at home in the shrinking wild margins of that space – were employed to signify the dramatic changes affecting human relationships with one another, with the land, and with nonhuman animals. Saussurean linguistics, however, reminds us that the relationship between signifier and signified is always arbitrary. Or, to use Umberto Eco’s (1979, 7) provocative formulation, a sign is “everything which can be used in order to lie.” A critical history of animals such as the fox and the dog in early modern Japan will thus be, first and foremost, a history of discrepancies. Japanese ideas about the fox and the dog, for example, were at least in part grounded in the day-to-day experience of these two animal species, but were also bound up with a complex amalgam of indigenous folklore and cosmological speculation imported from the continent, images that often have little in common with the findings of modern zoology. At the same time, juxtaposing these traditions of animal imagery with the treatment of the animals themselves provides us with an opportunity to consider the fraught relationships between ideology and

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practice. In this respect, the imagery of the fox and the dog in eighteenthcentury Japan can be profitably compared to the “charismatic” or “flagship” species that appear in modern ecological discourse. Like the wolves of twenty-first-century Yellowstone, these canids were used to “stand in” for more complex (and contentious) social, economic, and ecological relationships, often in ways that have obscured as much as they have clarified.6 The history of these “significant others” consequently raises troubling questions about the utility, the disparities, and the unintended consequences of human efforts to think with and about nonhuman animals.

The Fox and the Lord of the Land Perhaps the single most widely recognized focal point of fox symbolism in contemporary Japan concerns the association (and, in some cases, identification) of foxes with the god Inari. The earliest records of Inari worship, however, make no reference to the fox, prompting a variety of narratives and theories – scholarly and otherwise – to explain how this association came about (Smyers 1999, 15).7 In the final analysis, such efforts to reconstruct the ancient origins of folk beliefs rest more on conjecture than evidence; all we can say with any certainty of this early history is that ideas about Inari and the fox had become thoroughly intertwined in historical documents by the thirteenth century. Indeed, efforts by shrine priests in the modern period to disentangle Inari from the fox (motivated by a desire to “return” Inari worship to its earliest, most “authentic” form, untarnished by folk practices they dismiss as “superstition”) appear to have had little impact (Smyers 1999, 86–7).8 We may be on firmer historical footing, however, if we focus our attention less on the primordial roots of Inari’s association with foxes, and more on the ways those links were employed in specific times and places. We might note, for example, that it was precisely during the seventeenthcentury period of economic growth and agricultural expansion that Inari worship spread from the environs of the old imperial capital to become a common sight in the streets of Edo. Folklorists studying this period recognize Inari as one of several so-called hayarigami (“trendy gods”) in Edo, deities whose neighbourhood shrines would suddenly become famous, only to fade again into obscurity after a few years had passed (Miyata 1983, 145–7).

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I have written elsewhere about the significance of foxes as a symbol of wealth, especially ill-gotten wealth. As the Edo period wore on, and the exchange of money supplanted more traditional forms of wealth and power, the fox (and, by extension, Inari) became an important symbolic resource, both for those seeking to thrive in the new economic order and for those wishing to fight against it (Bathgate 2004, 101–36). Ultimately, however, these ideas about the fox have little to do with the experience of foxes in the wild, and more to do with a view of the fox as a magical shapeshifter (a spirit that often takes the form of human women in order to seduce unwary men), as well as a minion of witches. The popularity of Inari shrines in Edo during this period, however, may also reveal something of the Japanese experience of the changing face of the natural world, one in which the fox would have been an apposite symbol. Zoologists describe foxes as “predators of the edge,” favouring “transition zones” where different kinds of habitat (such as forest and meadow) intersect, affording them both the cover and the variety of foodstuffs they have so admirably evolved to exploit (Henry 1996, 35).9 Among these transition zones are those created by human beings as they clear land for agriculture and shelter, and the fox likely took advantage of the habitat-creating powers of human beings from their earliest meetings in Eurasia (41). Nevertheless, unlike their cousins among domestic canines – who took up a symbiotic association with humans that placed them at the centre of human settlements – the relationship between foxes and human beings has been largely antagonistic. Foxes are both clever and adaptable, hunters and scavengers whose omnivorous diet appears to put them in direct competition with human efforts at hunting, fishing, animal husbandry, and even some forms of agriculture.10 Foxes are also among the most energetic and industrious animals with which humans must contend, combining a seemingly gratuitous urge to kill with an almost uncanny ability to escape detection (97).11 By the end of the seventeenth century, as the fields and brush that had once provided gaps in the fabric of human cultivation (and a habitat for foxes) were converted into farmland or residences, the incursions of foxes naturally grew less frequent, especially in urban centres. Writing on the growth of Inari worship in and around the city of Osaka, Nakagawa Sugane suggests that the increasing rarity of fox sightings only served to remind urban dwellers (especially those who had come to the city from

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the countryside) of their alienation from nature, “both physically and psychologically.” As he (1999, 200) writes, “the spread of Inari worship and the fox’s acquisition of new religious attributes came at a time when the people of Ōsaka felt increasingly divorced from the world of nature that previously had seemed always to surround and comfort them.” Throughout the Edo period, numerous small shrines were established in response to fox-sightings, especially when the fox was associated with something unusual, as when a fox was said to have led police to evidence in a murder investigation (Smyers 1999, 88). As the period progressed – and the stone statues of foxes guarding Inari shrines became more ubiquitous than foxes of flesh and blood – the simple appearance of a fox may have been marvel enough. However much the behaviour of real foxes may have served to reflect human interaction with (and isolation from) the wild, such an explanation does not address the question of why people should respond to those sightings in the ritual idiom of Inari worship. In a survey of foundation legends from dozens of Inari shrines established in Edo, folklorist Miyata Noboru (1973, 249–71) notes an intriguing historical shift in the motivations and symbolic associations expressed by those enshrining this deity. He describes Inari as a “divine lord of the land” (jinushigami), not only venerated as a god of agriculture (and of the small sacred groves and hedgerows interspersed among the fields), but also appearing prominently among those deities who claimed the land on which people constructed their homes, and with whom families must develop the proper relationship to ensure prosperity and avoid disaster. As the Edo period wore on, he notes (270–1), enshrinements of the first kind grew less common, to be replaced by Inari shrines dedicated to the appeasement and domestication of new household spirits, especially in association with the manors constructed by the feudal nobility. Miyata argues, however, that the enshrinement of Inari as a household deity often involved more than simply a desire to benefit from this particular god’s protection. In more than one folktale, foxes make their displeasure known to the owners of newly established households, retaliating against those who have usurped what was once their home. In consultation with ritual professionals, these vengeful spirits were often enshrined as Inari, to ameliorate their anger and create a harmonious relationship between spirit and human, enabling them to inhabit the same space (262–5).

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As population growth and agricultural development expanded, human beings thus essentially reversed their earlier relationship with the fox. Whereas foxes had once been characterized by their incursions into human space, humans were now the interlopers in the fox’s domain.12 The intrusions and injuries entailed by this human domestication of the wilderness might provide substantial benefits for human beings, but it might also incur the wrath and resentment of the wild. In this respect, the fox represented an ideal image, not only of the estrangement of urban dwellers from the natural world, but of the increasingly fraught consequences of that estrangement. And it is in this respect that aspects of the fox’s magical abilities become intertwined with the experience of foxes in nature. Folktales are replete with accounts of foxes playing cruel yet clever tricks on those who slight them. The folklorist Seki Keigo, for example, relates the story of the “headshaving fox.” In it, a man travelling in the mountains happens to spy a fox magically transform itself into the form of a young woman carrying a baby. He follows her, and when she comes to a remote village and is greeted by an old couple as their long-departed daughter, he rushes to intervene. When the family doesn’t believe him, he snatches the fox-woman’s “baby” and throws it to the ground. He is dumbfounded when not only does the woman not assume her true form, but the baby is killed and he finds himself arrested for murder. Given the choice of execution or joining a monastery, he agrees to take the tonsure. As the local Buddhist priest begins to shave his head, the man suddenly comes to his senses, and he realizes that everything – the woman and child, her family, the village magistrate, and the monk shaving his head – were all illusions wrought by foxes. Lacking a razor, the foxes had simply pulled his hair out by the roots, causing him so much pain that the spell was broken (Seki 1953, 1313–18). Foxes were also known arsonists, using their mastery of fire to destroy the homes of those who offended them, as a warrior discovers when he decides to shoot at a fox while riding home from work one evening. Wounding the fox, he continues on his way, only to discover that the fox has arrived home ahead of him, and set fire to the place with a torch (Mills 1970, 218). Perhaps most importantly, foxes were understood to be among the foremost creatures capable of spirit possession (tsukimono). Indeed, spirit possession provides the mechanism by which the resentment of the fox is made manifest in a number of shrine foundation

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legends. Not only do possessing foxes often speak through their victims to reveal their identity and wishes, but they also use possession to enact their vengeance, causing madness and disease in human beings (Miyata 1973, 266–7). Enshrinement as a domestic deity provided a way to resolve the aggrieved spirit’s complaint, bringing an end to the possession and creating a new relationship of mutual support rather than antagonism. As Miyata notes (265), Inari shrines established in response to fox possession became increasingly common as the Edo period wore on, as indicated by another satirical verse from the early nineteenth century: “kitsune tsuki ochite Inari ga issha fue” (A fox is exorcised and Inari adds one more shrine). The vengefulness of the fox would no doubt have seemed particularly appropriate in the second part of the Edo period, as crop failures and famines made it apparent that the more intensive the domestication of the soil, the more terrible the consequences when it slipped out of human control. In another study, in which he explores the history of monster imagery in urban folklore, Miyata (1990) has argued that certain animals during the Edo period (such as the namazu or catfish) served as ambivalent symbols of the natural world, the relations with which came to be increasing anxious as population pressures seemed to approach ecological limits. Although they were able to bring gifts to the world of human beings, creatures such as the catfish also appeared as agents of natural disaster, causing the earthquakes that threatened to destroy the overreaching monuments of human activity. I would suggest that a similar interpretation can also be applied to the imagery of the fox, a being whose habitat was being consumed in the course of the very development it was being venerated to support. It has been noted, for example, that Inari worship in Edo expanded during a time marked by strings of natural disasters (volcanic eruptions, fires, floods, and famines) that plagued Japan during the eighteenth century (Kentarō 1958, 178). More than simply a matter of the general desire of the population for safety from catastrophe, the growth of Inari worship during this period may have been precisely to assuage spirits angered by the ecological devastation wrought by population growth and urbanization. The rise of Inari as a domestic deity during the latter half of the Edo period could thus be seen in terms of humanity’s shifting relationship with the land – an attempt to recast an exploitative relationship with nature by bringing its unpredictable power (symbolized by the fox)

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into the symbolic and ritual field of a tutelary divinity (Inari). When fox-spirits were venerated in the idiom of Inari worship, the energy of the newly constituted deity would be directed towards growth and prosperity rather than disruption of the domestic order. More than just a reflection of prior religious beliefs linking the fox and Inari, actions such as this effectively created those associations, incorporating the fox – and the transgressive powers with which it was associated – within a system of relationships and expectations that attempted to pacify and control those powers. In this respect, we might say that the fox represented such a useful symbol for the ecological transformations of the Japanese countryside precisely because it was susceptible to an exclusively theological solution. Enshrinement within the context of Inari worship provided a way to acknowledge the insults perpetrated by human development, but the reconciliation it offered was not a matter of agricultural practice or land use policy (a conversation which might have called for painful or inconvenient limits to be placed on growth), but in the far more commodious realm of ritual pacification.13 Indeed, we may well wonder to what extent the incorporation of foxes (in spirit or in stone effigy) into the religious life of Edo offered any consolation to the foxes themselves, who found themselves pushed out of their old habitats by the very humans that now worshipped them.

The Dog Shogun In contrast to the fox – whose wildness can only be tamed in the ritual logic of worship – the dog regularly appears in Japanese myth and ritual as the domestic animal par excellence. We should not be surprised, therefore, that it routinely figures in medieval legends as the natural enemy of foxes. In one of the earliest stories recounting the magical transformations of foxes, for example, a man encounters a beautiful and mysterious woman while travelling in the wild. He brings her home to be his wife, and before long, she gives him a son. At precisely the same time, however, the family dog delivers a puppy. The puppy takes an immediate dislike to the woman of the house – she asks her husband to kill the beast, but he just doesn’t have the heart to do it. Sometime later, while the woman is carrying refreshments to servants pounding rice cakes, the now-grown dog lunges for her with its teeth bared. Terrified

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by the attack, she suddenly reveals her true form, and a fox runs off into the hedgerows (Nakamura 1997, 104–5). Similarly, one eighteenth-century variation on the “head-shaving fox” tale describes the tribulations of a hunter who startles a fox by firing his rifle nearby, only to find himself pulled from his bed in the middle of the night and arrested by the magistrate for hunting in the private preserve of the local feudal lord. He is very nearly compelled into committing suicide when his dog bursts into the room and sets upon the magistrate and his escort. Before his eyes, his captors’ human forms melt away, and a group of foxes run for cover (deVisser 1908, 71). The same antagonism between foxes and dogs also features in old folk remedies – the character for “dog” (inu) painted on an infant’s forehead, for example, was said to protect the child from illnesses caused by fox possession, while those already subjected to fox-possession could be cured by smearing the afflicted with fish paste and allowing a dog to lick it off (Smyers 1999, 97). In marked contrast to the conniving trickery of the fox, dogs are frequently presented as symbols of steadfast devotion and duty. One seventeenth-century tale, for example, describes a hunter who becomes infuriated when his dog’s incessant barking scares away his prey. Drawing his sword, he lops off the beast’s head, only to see it miraculously fly from its body to tear out the throat of a venomous serpent lying in wait only a few feet away. The dog had only barked to save its master, and ultimately succeeded in doing so with its dying breath. In wonder and gratitude (and, we might suspect, no small amount of shame), the man erects a shrine in the dog’s honour (deVisser 1909, 23). In a similar fashion, some of the earliest written accounts describe dogs that remain by the side of their fallen masters on the battlefield, and the modern tale of Hachikō – who continued to seek his master at the commuter station for years after the man’s death – has been celebrated with monuments, books, and even a major American motion picture (10).14 For all this imagery of dogs as guardians of hearth, home, and humanity, however, we would do well to remember that the role of the dog in early modern Japan was often quite a bit different from what we may be used to (or comfortable with) today. Among commoners, it seems that dogs were seldom considered the property of individuals (let alone members of the family), but rather lived as “village dogs,” sustained by scraps and garbage, and sleeping in the streets.15 Among the upper classes, too, dogs were seldom considered “pets” in the sense we often use today.

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With the exception of small lapdogs (chin), who were kept indoors by wealthy ladies, warrior elites largely appear to have valued dogs as a resource to be exploited as part of their principal pastimes.16 As in the West, dogs assisted noblemen in their recreational hunts, but were just as often employed as the victims of the hunt. One popular spectacle sponsored by the shoguns, for example, were “dog chases” (inu oi), in which an open space would be fenced in, and mounted samurai would demonstrate their prowess with the bow by shooting dogs released into the centre of the paddock (Bodart-Bailey 2006, 134).17 Dog meat was also an important food for the hawks and falcons used by feudal lords in their hunts. In some domains, the local lord required peasants to provide him a regular supply of dogs with which to feed his hawks, and in Edo, kennels were maintained precisely to support the needs of the nobility’s prize birds (148). Hunting, of course, was understood by the warrior class not simply as a form of entertainment, but as a means of cultivating the skills and dispositions appropriate for fighting men. And in this respect, too, dogs figured prominently, both as participants and as victims. As early as the fourteenth century, the leaders of the samurai government in Kamakura are said to have held regular dog fights: prize animals, pampered with fresh meat and dressed in fine brocade, were brought together by the hundreds to battle to the death while the nobility looked on. Some, we are told, saw the carnage as a wonderful reenactment of the battles of men; others, however, were distressed by what they saw as an omen of war (McCullough 1959, 133). Indeed, the military government in Kamakura would soon be overthrown by civil war, but this dire association did not stop later warrior leaders from continuing the practice, and Japan is one of the few nations in the world today where dog fighting remains legal. We also see dogs described (along with condemned criminals) as an excellent object on which young warriors could practise their swordsmanship. The nostalgic paean to seventeenth-century warrior values Hagakure, for example, praises a father who teaches his five-yearold son what it means to be a samurai by having him kill a dog with his sword (Bodart-Bailey 2006, 130). The dogs of Edo, in other words, participated in what historian Tsukamoto Manabu (as cited in Skabelund 2011, 3) has described as a “feudal mode of dog ownership.” The lapdogs kept by ladies of leisure, the fighting and hunting dogs of the warrior elite, and the street dogs

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that dined on the refuse of commoners all served to reproduce the social distinctions so carefully maintained by the period’s class system. Not only were certain activities (and the dog breeds with which they were associated) carefully restricted to specific social classes, but dogs themselves served as important objects of exchange between and within the social classes, an embodiment of the social hierarchies on which the feudal order depended. Samurai retainers (and foreign visitors, who quickly learned the esteem with which the warrior nobility prized the dog breeds of Europe) offered dogs to the warrior barons of Japan. These gifts were often reciprocated by the lords themselves, who gave prize specimens to their vassals in reward for loyal service. And, of course, the commoners were often tasked with providing dogs as fodder to support the samurai’s entertainments. Nevertheless, the social and symbolic logics of custom, however internally consistent, had no necessary relation to the shifting ecological dynamics of growing urban centres such as Edo. By the late seventeenth century, these ecological pressures grew increasingly intransigent, creating serious issues of safety and hygiene for both humans and dogs living in the city. The population of street dogs – bolstered by animals either escaped or released from the kennels of samurai manor houses – formed packs that regularly threatened people on the street. Accounts of the period suggest that women and children among the urban poor were the most common victims of these half-feral dogs, while the warrior class – protected by their own fighting dogs and by the swords they carried – viewed strays as an opportunity to practise their martial skills (Bodart-Bailey 2006, 133–4). The animals so dispatched (which, as street dogs, were not understood to belong to anyone in particular) were typically left where they fell, to rot in the street or be thrown into the river. By 1685, the situation had reached the point that even samurai marching in the shogun’s procession were thought to be in danger of attack (150). It is in this context that we may best understand one of the more infamous episodes in historical accounts of Edo’s excesses, the so-called “Edicts of Compassion” issued by Shogun Tsunayoshi. Like the complex of mythology, ritual, and folklore that constituted Inari worship, Tsunayoshi’s edicts did not represent a single systematic declaration, but was composed of some 135 proclamations issued over twenty-five years, covering – among other topics – the treatment of animals (both

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wild and domestic), the regulation of firearms, and the protection of the poorest members of society. Indeed, many of the edicts serve to refine, elaborate, or even retract earlier edicts, making for a complex and unfolding phenomenon.18 Nevertheless, it is the edicts addressing the treatment of dogs for which Tsunayoshi seems best remembered, in his own day and in ours. Engelbert Kaempfer, who traveled to Japan in 1691 and 1692 as part of the Dutch East India Company delegation, describes his experience with the dogs and the policies of the shogun as follows: Under the present shogun’s government there are more dogs in this country than in any other. Masterless dogs lie around the streets, causing great obstruction to passersby. The citizens of each street have to maintain and feed a certain number of them. When they are sick, they have to be cared for in a hut erected in each street, and when they die, they have to be carried up a mountain and buried like a human. On pain of death they may not be mistreated or killed, except by the bailiff himself, when the dogs have committed a crime and deserve to die. This has been commanded on account of the superstition of, and an order from, the shogun, who, just as the Roman Emperor Augustus honored the ibex, holds dogs in special respect because he was born in the Year of the Dog. A citizen carrying a dead mongrel up the mountain to be buried grumbled impatiently about the year of the shogun’s birth. His neighbor told him to be quiet and to thank heaven that he was not born in the Year of the Horse, for then their load would have been much heavier. (Bodart-Bailey 1999, 72) He later describes the consequences of the shogun’s supposed special regard for dogs. A porter in the employ of the Dutch trade delegation is brought in for medical treatment after being attacked by “a large street dog.” As they bind his badly wounded leg, they ask if the porter had injured the dog in order to escape – the man replied incredulously, “Do you think that I am also going to risk my life?” (408). He appears to have been willing to risk a crippling injury rather than incur the wrath of the shogun’s judicial system. Kaempfer clearly views these developments as a classic example of the superstition and despotism that were part and parcel of Western

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stereotypes of the Orient during his day.19 Yet his portrayal also suggests something of the complaints discreetly offered by the Japanese themselves – it isn’t hard to imagine, for example, that the conversation of two “citizens” with which he ended his account had its origins in a bitter joke told by a native informant. Indeed, the details of Kaempfer’s depiction (including the idea that the shogun sought to protect dogs because of his astrological affinity with the animal, and that draconian punishments were levied on anyone who dared to resist) also appear in Japanese accounts of Tsunayoshi’s reign. One of the most damning of these is found in the memoirs of Confucian intellectual Arai Hakuseki, who called for a retraction of the edicts (and a general amnesty) during the reign of the subsequent shogun. Owing to these statutes protecting animals, for many years past myriads of people had been punished … For the sake of a single bird or beast, men suffered the extreme penalty, and even their relatives were put to death, while others were deported and exiled. People could not live in security. Their fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, wives and children were turned adrift in untold thousands. (Ackroyd 1979, 94, 106–7) This impression, of Tsunayoshi as an impractical (even incompetent) hegemon, whose pious gestures of regard for animal welfare created unprecedented suffering for his human subjects, continues to influence the popular consensus in Japanese historical memory today. Yet, as Beatrice Bodart-Bailey has persuasively argued, this picture depends on the self-serving arguments of elite players in the politics of the shogunal court, and the details are seldom supported by the larger historical record.20 To be sure, Tsunayoshi did indeed issue edicts – couched not in the language of astrology, but in the Confucian language of “benevolence” and the Buddhist idiom of “compassion towards living beings” – demanding the humane treatment not only of animals, but of children and the homeless. He dramatically reduced the practice of falconry, prohibited the cosmetic mutilation and overworking of horses, and created what may well have been the first “no kill” dog shelters in history (using the very kennels that had once provided meat for the shogun’s hawks). There were indeed those whose flagrant violation of the Edicts earned them the ultimate penalty: in one notable case, the

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shogun’s own veterinarian was ordered to commit suicide when he publicly crucified his neighbour’s dog in retaliation for the beast having killed one of his ducks (Bodart-Bailey 2006, 158). Nevertheless, BodartBailey argues that we should view the central rationale of Tsunayoshi’s edicts as focused less on the welfare of animals per se than on the practices of the samurai with which those animals were implicated, and the consequences of those practices for the well-being of the common people (a concern which she attributes to the influence of the shogun’s common-born mother). An end to the shogun’s falconry excursions, for example, certainly served to spare both wild animals and the dogs butchered for meat, but it also meant that peasants would no longer fear punishment for chasing birds from their crops, lest the samurai who trampled their fields in the hunt find no suitable prey for their entertainment (149).21 Similarly, the shogun’s edicts regarding dogs – forbidding the indiscriminate killing of dogs, requiring owners to register their dogs, and mandating the feeding (and eventual housing) of strays – could be said to have been directed as much towards the health and safety of the common folk (who would no longer have to fear attacks from hungry packs, or endure the stench of animals cut down by samurai) as towards the welfare of dogs themselves. In this sense, Tsunayoshi’s admonition to show compassion to living beings could be viewed less as the innovations of a pious and eccentric ruler than as an effort to apply a much older ritual logic, one established by the previous shogunal dynasty. In the old capital of Kamakura, the extensive ritual calendar of the state included the release of captive animals back into the wild, an act of compassion that provided benefits to both the animals and (through the cultivation of good karma) the person releasing them. As Duncan Ryūken Williams has noted, however, the performance of this ritual by the shogun may have served to demonstrate the power and influence of the regime as much as to benefit wild animals. This elaborate affair required that thousands of animals first had to be captured before they could be so conspicuously released – indeed, it was presumed that the majority would die in captivity before the ritual could be completed (Williams 1997, 149–62). Like the release of living beings in Kamakura, the sheer logistics required to enforce regulations on the well-being of all the dogs of Edo would have served as an end in itself, a fitting ornament to the shogun’s influence over his subjects.

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The Edicts of Compassion may also have been bound up with an even more ambitious agenda: to re-imagine the prerogatives and responsibilities of the warrior class as a whole. As Eiko Ikegami has argued, the Edo period saw a transformation of the values and practices of the samurai, in which the drive for personal honour and prestige of the warrior in the field was gradually subordinated to the needs of a complex peacetime bureaucracy under the auspices of the shogun’s authoritarian rule. This “taming of the samurai” entailed not only the regulation of the extra-legal violence that was felt to be the birthright of  the warrior class, but the exercise of a degree of responsibility towards the other classes (Ikegami 1995). The Edicts of Compassion not only significantly restricted some of the freedoms traditionally enjoyed by the samurai, but implicitly placed them on a legal footing much like the other social classes, as subjects under the authority of the shogun. This helps us to understand not only the striking punishment levied against the shogun’s veterinarian – a dramatic demonstration that no one is above the law – but also the resentment such measures would have elicited from the warrior class in general.22 Bodart-Bailey (2006, 152) argues, “The problem of being molested by stray dogs affected mainly the commoners, and among those the weakest and poorest, who could not defend themselves against marauding animals, and they counted for little in the society of the day. Requiring officials to shoulder additional, onerous duties to create a safe environment for those at the bottom of the social scale was an abrupt reversal of the value system.” Whatever the astrological sign under which he was born, in other words, it appears that Tsunayoshi’s Edicts of Compassion were concerned most immediately with a very different kind of predator stalking the streets of Edo, one that went about on two legs rather than four. It was precisely because dogs were so thoroughly bound up with the feudal order that efforts to modify that order were directed at the practices of dog ownership. This discrepancy between the explicit object of the Edicts and the implicit social problems they were ultimately meant to correct, however, might also help us to understand why those edicts seem so often to have gone spectacularly awry. One of the first of the directives addressing dogs, for example, called on the populace to feed strays, and thus presumably reduce their motivation for attacking human beings. It seems to have had precisely the opposite effect, however, as shop owners

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and temple priests began disposing of the very food they had once offered to street dogs. Strays tend to stay close when they are fed, after all, and townsfolk appear to have been afraid the magistrates would take them to be the dogs’ owners, holding them responsible for their behaviour with the brutal justice they had come to expect of the samurai. Similarly, the costs of registering dog ownership and the kennelling of strays – by 1697, more than 40,000 dogs were being warehoused in overcrowded kennels on the outskirts of Edo – fell largely on the warrior aristocracy (the upkeep of kennels was supported by a tax levied on the size of one’s manor, and registration prevented the lords of those manors from simply releasing or disposing of their own unwanted dogs). We should not be particularly surprised when those same warrior elites, when tasked with enforcing the Edicts, may have done so in a manner that deliberately undermined the spirit of the law. Tsunayoshi himself seemed to have thought so, and was quick to chastise his ministers in an unprecedentedly public declaration (Bodart-Bailey 2006, 150–3). Upon his death, those same ministers made the repeal of the Edicts their first order of business.23 We may well wonder what became of the dogs themselves, or, for that matter, whether life in an overcrowded kennel – overseen by resentful samurai bureaucrats – had, in fact, represented a net improvement over life on the streets.

Relating (to) Animals in Religion and Ecology Much of contemporary scholarship on religion and ecology can arguably be traced back to historian Lynn White’s 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” In that seminal work, White (1967, 1205) argued that the scientific rationalism on which our current, disastrous ecological paradigm is based is rooted in the worldview of Western Christendom, “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”24 This notion has proven to be enormously influential, not only in the study of ecology, but in the ethics of human-animal interaction. Peter Singer, for example, devoted a full chapter of his ground-breaking Animal Liberation to the history of Western “speciesism,” a survey that, like White’s, located our contemporary behaviour towards nonhuman animals (from animal experimentation to industrial feeding and slaughter) in the human-centred inheritance of the Christian tradition. Indeed, he (1990, 185) suggested that the Western tradition of speciesism deserves such scholarly attention, not because it is superior to other religious

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ideologies, but precisely because “the reverse is true, so far as attitudes towards animals are concerned.” Of course, the idea that Christianity carries a unique responsibility for our profligate cruelty towards the nonhuman natural world has received its fair (and not-so-fair) share of criticism in the decades since 1967.25 In this context, the story of the fox and the dog in eighteenth-century Edo would seem to present a cautionary tale for those (including White and Singer) inclined to view the “East” as a straightforward alternative to the history of Western excesses. However salutary they may appear on the surface, the Shinto, Buddhist, and Confucian doctrines on which Inari worship and the Edicts of Compassion depended clearly offered no guarantee for the well-being of the city’s nonhuman neighbours. Indeed, the apparent failure of both Inari worship and the Edicts of Compassion to improve the lot of actual foxes and dogs should encourage us to reconsider one of the foundational premises expounded by White (and shared by many of his critics).26 Whether they are inclined to condemn, defend, or rehabilitate the ecological legacy of Western Christendom (or to present alternatives drawn from other religious traditions), a great deal of this scholarship at least tacitly accepts White’s (1967, 1205) thesis, that “human ecology is conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny – that is, by religion.” Yet the history of poor treatment suffered by nonhuman animals (despite the admonitions of leaders in many religious traditions) suggests a more complex dynamic of cause and effect. Rather than simple hypocrisy, or the lamentable failure of fallen beings to manifest our highest ideals in practice, the case of the foxes and dogs of Edo invites us to question the extent to which religious discourse involving animals (and the symbols and practices with which it is engaged) is, in the final analysis, really about those animals at all. In the first instance, the incorporation of foxes into the worship of the god Inari could be said to represent a kind of ritualization of ecology. As Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland (1997, 19–20) have argued, “By infusing spirits into nature, not only are the sacred and profane worlds conflated, but people obtain the means of coming to terms with nature by establishing a working relationship with the spirits … A divine nature is, therefore, by no means a guarantee against environmental degradation, as has often been claimed.” It seems clear that the people of Edo saw, in their experience of the fox, a fitting symbol for their changing relationship with the nonhuman natural world. That same constellation

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of associations, however, also presented a fitting symbolic solution to the anxieties raised by those changing relationships. Both ecology and the Inari cult, after all, are founded on the study and manipulation of relationships, between the lifeforms in an ecosystem in the first case, and between a deity and its devotees in the second. Insofar as the people of Edo responded to their ecological experience in the idiom of Inari worship, however, they effectively substituted one kind of relationship for another. The wild fox, as the symbolic embodiment of injuries and resentments created by the dominion of intensive agriculture and urban sprawl, was ritually domesticated by the construction of Inari shrines, transforming the antagonism between human and nonhuman animals into a bond based on worship and divine patronage. As a result, even as they proliferated as symbols, foxes of flesh and blood faded from both sight and mind. In contrast, the Edicts of Compassion appear to have been explicitly concerned with the application of Buddhist and Confucian ethical principles to the relationships between human and nonhuman animals. In a fashion not unlike the sermons of popular preachers for centuries before him, Tsunayoshi exhorted his subjects to treat one another according to the Confucian principles of benevolence and filial piety, and to treat animals according to the standards of Buddhist compassion.27 He did so, moreover, with the full force of the shogunal government – with all its bureaucratic oversights and judicial punishments – behind him. Resistance to those edicts (and their immediate repeal upon Tsunayoshi’s death), however, ultimately tells us less about the power of Buddhist and Confucian doctrines over the imagination of the Japanese people (or the power of the shogun’s government over their behaviour) than it does about the inherent limitations of symbolic interventions to address complex social (and ecological) problems. Indeed, one might be tempted to say that the fox represented a far more effective symbol than the dog, precisely because the fox appears to have declined in numbers (in direct proportion to their presence as symbols in Inari worship) while the dogs of Edo remained an intransigent presence. Symbols, after all, are far less likely to bite the hand that feeds them. It seems fitting to conclude with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963, 89) oft-quoted dictum that animals are every bit as “good to think” as they are “good to eat.” Responding to the crass materialism of previous anthropologists – who theorized that totemism was little more than

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a reflection of the foodways of the hunter-gatherers who practised it – Lévi-Strauss argued that animals were bound up in complex systems of classification. In the end, however, it is important to remember that “thinking” animals is no less a form of consumption (and exploitation) than eating them. In both cases, the goodness of animals is located in their utility for satisfying human needs, with little or no connection to the flourishing of the animals themselves. Insofar as animals provide, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, “a certain code” for expressing other kinds of relationships – in our cases, between humans and nature, or between the samurai and the lower classes – their significance lies more in the symbolic functions into which they are pressed than in the concrete realities of actual animals, whether individually or as species. Indeed, an animal could be entirely mythological – or can be comfortably rendered extinct – without hindering their “goodness” as objects of thought. The story of the fox and the dog in early modern Japan suggests something of the care we must take lest the flourishing of our “significant others” be eclipsed by the very work of signification in which we employ them.

Notes 1 He ultimately divides the rise and fall of Japanese economic prosperity (and ecological exploitation) into four periods (29–35). The middle two periods are most apposite to our purposes, those he describes as “the Tokugawa heyday” (1630–1710, when the redirection of energies from warfare to peacetime resulted in profound growth on almost all fronts of human endeavour) and an age of “struggling to stand still” (1710–90, when policy was dedicated towards maintaining the status quo, despite the economic and ecological limits of growth). 2 Inari scholars citing the saying include Smyers (1999, 20) and Kazuhiko (1997, 204). Kitajima Masamoto introduces the verse in his discussion of Ise merchants in Edo jidai (1958, 111–14). In fact, however, the expression itself makes no mention of their relative numbers, being instead a relatively openended – and allusive – list. Another, more literal translation might read, “in the city, [there are] Ise merchants, Inari, and dog shit.” 3 See, for example, Foster 2012, 3–29, and Knight 1997, 129–59. The complexity of canid imagery grows exponentially if we take into account native taxonomies (both indigenous and those imported from China and Korea). Perhaps the most extreme example of this can be found in the mythological

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figure of the tengu, mountain goblins whose name literally means “heavenly dog,” but who are commonly depicted with beaks and wings. Archaeology is providing interesting insights into Japanese prehistory, particularly as it bears on ancient Japanese attitudes towards the nonhuman natural world. See, for example, Hudson 1992, 139–89. Academic studies of animal imagery amongst these minorities has tended to focus on the Ainu, who make their home in what is now Hokkaido. See, for example, Strong 2009, 27–54. On Yellowstone’s wolves, see Thorp 2014, 175–97. There is, of course, a large body of academic literature on the utility of such “charismatic” species, both for mobilizing public sympathy and as “indicators” of larger ecological dynamics – a concise summary of this literature can be found in Ducarme, Luque, and Courchamp 2013, 1–8. A great deal of Inari scholarship attempts to explain (or, in some cases, explain away) the symbolic link between the fox and Inari. English-language discussions include deVisser (1908, 129–44), Buchanan (1935, 30–58), and Casal (1949, 42–62). As Karen Smyers notes in her critical review of the most commonly cited origin theories, the majority of such explanations revolve around either (1) a perceived connection between the fox and agricultural fertility, or (2) the link established by Japanese translators between foxes and the esoteric Buddhist jackal-spirits known as dakini (1999, 73–86). The visitor to Inari shrines today seldom has to look far before encountering a placard encouraging the visitor to remember that “Inari is not a fox!” Japanese folklore carries a similar connotation, describing the fox as yakan or yako, a beast of the wild spaces. As Henry (1996, 28) notes, “Hunters believe that foxes live mainly on grouse, quail, pheasants, and perhaps an occasional young deer. Chicken farmers believe foxes eat mainly chickens, and sheep ranchers contend that they eat lambs.” While Henry notes that such accusations may exaggerate the breadth of the fox’s accomplishments (foxes, for example, are less than entirely effective bird killers, and the size of their prey is largely limited to animals smaller than a rabbit), the primary error of such lay beliefs seems to lie more in each group’s assertion that theirs is the group most afflicted. Foxes will continue to hunt (and kill) prey even after they have satisfied their hunger. Henry attributes this, not to some sort of “bloodlust,” but rather to a food-caching instinct by which the fox guards against times of scarcity. Such a distinction, however, is likely to be little consolation to the farmer who finds his flock destroyed.

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12 Hara Takashi (1928, 184) describes one old custom suggestive of earlier beliefs centred on preventing the incursions of the fox. Called a “fox hunt,” people travel from village to village ringing bells, demanding that foxes run off to their burrows rather than raiding their stores and livestock. 13 Conrad Totman (1989, 179–88) notes that, as the consequences of seventeenth-century agriculture became clear (and erosion, flooding, and famine became increasingly common), the Japanese were, in fact, able to step back from the ecological abyss. He credits this feat not to the aesthetic or theological sensitivities of the Japanese (sometimes summarized as a uniquely Japanese “love of nature”), but to the pragmatic rationalism of bureaucrats working to preserve their principal streams of income. 14 On Hachikō, see Skabelund 2011, 87–129. 15 On the relatively recent history of dogs as members of the family, see Veldkamp 2009, 333–46. 16 Writing on the subject of chin (which he translates as “pug”) in 1904, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1971, 401) notes that “the Japanese do not look on pugs as dogs.” 17 Interestingly, one legend holds that this practice of dog hunting was first initiated by a samurai who sought to improve his archery skills in preparation for his foray against an ancient and malevolent fox spirit haunting the moors of Nasu – see deVisser 1908, 51. Otherwise, there is little evidence that foxes were ever made the systematic target of sport (with or without the support of hunting dogs), as they became in the Western tradition of fox-hunting. 18 For other treatments of the edicts, see Walker 2005, 80–3, and Yamauchi 2012, 79–90. 19 Bodart-Bailey (2006, 145) notes that Kaempfer’s accounts of the shogunal authorities were widely read in the West, and ultimately inspired Gilbert and Sullivan to compose The Mikado. 20 She (ibid., 146) notes, for example, that key details of the narrative (most notably, the idea that dogs were held up for special regard because of the Shogun’s astrological affinity for the animals) appear to derive from an anonymous satire, entitled Sannō gaiki (“An Unauthorized History of Three Rulers”), that presents the manifold personal and political failings of a fictitious Chinese king as a thinly veiled parody of Tsunayoshi. 21 She further notes (ibid.) that the drastic reduction in hawking was accompanied by widespread reforms in the bureaucracy tasked with supervising peasants, collecting taxes, and the construction of public works.

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22 Contrary to Arai’s evocation of countless individuals and families punished for violation of the Edicts, Bodart-Bailey (2006, 157) notes that in most instances – such as the 1687 case of a samurai who drew his sword to defend himself against a pack of hungry dogs that set upon him in the street – the perpetrators appear to have been pardoned. 23 Arai Hakuseki states that the edicts had created such resentment, and their revocation was so important (despite the clear command by the shogun that they continue to be enforced after his death), that Tsunayoshi’s funeral was delayed until the proclamation ending the penalties for mistreatment of animals could be disseminated. In this way, it appeared that Tsunayoshi himself had seen the error of his ways, and his heir would avoid any appearance of ignoring his uncle’s wishes (Ackroyd 1979, 95). 24 In fact, White’s central notion – a dichotomy between pagan veneration and Christian exploitation of nature – has a long pedigree, and can be traced back at least to Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1841 The Essence of Christianity (especially ch. 11). 25 White himself was quick to note that the Christian tradition provides a rich source of more ecologically enlightened perspectives (1967, 1206–7), and the scholarship of religious historians (and, more recently, eco-theologians) is replete with analyses refining or refuting the association between Christian doctrine and ecological irresponsibility. See, for example, Cohen 1985, 155–72, Fortin 1995, 197–223, and Harrison 1999, 86–109. 26 This is a point made only a few years after White’s article by Tuan (1971, 216). 27 The treatment of animals in medieval Japanese didactic literature is marked by its own disjunctures and semiotic slippages – see Bathgate 2015, 174–91.

References Ackroyd, Joyce. 1979. Told Around a Brushwood Fire: The Autobiography of Arai Hakuseki. Tokyo: Princeton University Press and University of Tokyo Press. Asquith, Pamela, and Arne Kalland, eds. 1997. Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Bathgate, Michael. 2004. The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York: Routledge. – 2015. “Jakushin’s Dogs and the Goodness of Animals: Preaching the Moral Life of Beasts in Medieval Japanese Tale Literature.” In Beastly Morality:

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Animals as Moral Agents, edited by Jonathan Crane, 174–91. New York: Columbia University Press. Bodart-Bailey, Beatrice. 1999. Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. – 2006. The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Buchanan, D.C. 1935. “Inari: Its Origin, Development, and Nature.” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 2nd series 7: 30–58. Casal, U.A. 1949. “Inari-sama: The Japanese Rice-Deity and Other CropDivinities.” Ethnos 14, no. 1 (January–March): 1–64. Chamberlain, Basil Hall. 1971. Japanese Things: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co. Cohen, Jeremy. 1985. “The Bible, Man, and Nature in the History of Western Thought: A Call for Reassessment.” The Journal of Religion 65, no. 2 (April): 155–72. deVisser, Marinus Willem. 1908. “The Fox and Badger in Japanese Folklore.” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 36, no. 1: 129–44. – 1909. “The Dog and Cat in Japanese Folk-lore.” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 37, no. 1: 23. Ducarme, Frederic, Gloria M. Luque, and Franck Courchamp. 2013. “What Are ‘Charismatic Species’ for Conservation Biologists?” BioSciences Master Reviews (July): 1–8. Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Fortin, Ernest L. 1995. “The Bible Made Me Do It: Christianity, Science, and the Environment.” The Review of Politics 57, no. 2 (Spring): 197–223. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2012. “Haunting Modernity: Tanuki, Trains, and Transformation in Japan.” Asian Ethnology 71, no. 1: 3–29. Hara, Takashi. 1928. “Tajima no kitsunegari.” Minzoku 4, no. 11: 184. Harrison, Peter. 1999. “Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the Exploitation of Nature.” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 1 (January): 86–109. Henry, J. David. 1996. Red Fox: The Catlike Canine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hudson, Mark J. 1992. “Rice, Bronze, and Chieftains: An Archaeology of Yayoi Ritual.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29, nos. 2–3 (June– September): 139–89.

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Ikegami, Eiko. 1995. The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. Kitajima, Masamoto. 1958. Edo jidai. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Knight, John. 1997. “On the Extinction of the Japanese Wolf.” Asian Folklore Studies 56, no. 1: 129–59. Komatsu, Kazuhiko. 1997. Akureiron: ikai kara no messeiji. Tokyo: Chikuma Shoten. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press. Matsumoto, Shigeru. 1970. Motoori Norinaga, 1730–1801. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. McCullough, Helen Craig. 1959. The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan. Rutland, vt: Charles E. Tuttle. Mills, D.E. 1970. A Collection of Tales from Uji: A Study and Translation of the Uji Shūi Monogatari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miyata, Noboru. 1973. “Edo chōnin no shinkō.” In Edo chōnin no kenkyū, edited by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, 249–71. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan. – 1983. “Inari shinkō no shintō to minshū.” In Inari shinkō, edited by Naoe Hiroji, 145–7. Tokyo: Yūzankaku Shuppan. – 1990. Yōkai to minzokugaku: Nihon no mienai kūkan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nakagawa, Sugane. 1999. “Inari Worship in Early Modern Osaka.” In Osaka: The Merchant’s Capital of Early Modern Japan, edited by James L. McClain and Wakita Osamu, 200. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press. Nakamura, Kyoko Motomochi. 1997. Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai. Surrey, Uk: Curzon Press. Nomura, Kentarō. 1958. Edo. Tokyo: Shibundō. Seki, Keigo, ed. 1953. Nihon mukashibanashi shūsei. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Singer, Peter. 1990. Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review of Books. Skabelund, Aaron Herald. 2011. Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press. Smyers, Karen. 1999. The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Strong, Sarah M. 2009. “The Most Revered of Foxes: Knowledge of Animals and Animal Power in an Ainu Kamui Yukar.” Asian Ethnology 68, no. 1: 27–54.

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Thorp, Thomas. 2014. “Eating Wolves.” In Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy: Transatlantic Conversations, edited by Martin Drenthen and Jozef Keulartz, 175–97. New York: Springer International. Totman, Conrad. 1989. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. – 1993. Early Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1971. “Environmental Attitudes.” Science Studies 1, no. 2 (April): 215–24. Veldkamp, Elmer. 2009. “The Emergence of ‘Pets as Family’ and the SocioHistorical Development of Pet Funerals in Japan.” Anthrozoös 22, no. 4: 333–46. Walker, Brett. 2005. The Lost Wolves of Japan. Seattle, wA: University of Washington Press. White, Lynn. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (March): 1203–7. Williams, Duncan Ryūken. 1997. “Animal Liberation, Death, and the State: Rites to Release Animals in Medieval Japan.” In Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryūken Williams, 149–62. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. Yamauchi, Tomasaburō. 2012. “The Ethico-politics of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi: Animal Liberationism and the Forty-Seven Ronin.” Memoirs of Osaka Kyoiku University 60, no. 2: 79–90.

SECTION TWO

Dogs in Space

CHAPTER FOUR

Dogs, Dirt, and Public Space Karla Armbruster

If you live with a dog in a suburban or urban area of the United States these days, there’s a good chance that you have been tempted to become a criminal. Take my experience in Webster Groves, an old train suburb about twelve miles outside of downtown St Louis. Several years ago, I set out to find a place where I could let my dogs Leo and Addie run off-leash. The nearby dog parks were unappealing: they were small, required membership fees, and prohibited children. And besides, none were close enough to reach during a daily walk. But a mere ten minutes’ stroll away, there was a park with a wooded area that I realized might work. More or less enclosed on three sides by a large creek, a steep slope popular for sledding, and a train trestle, it seemed a fairly safe spot to let the dogs explore, and except when its one baseball field was in use, it was also relatively empty. The catch was, of course, that my plans were technically illegal. I took treats with me every time we visited the park, and in a short time the dogs were fairly reliable about coming when called. In a pinch, yelling “Biscuits!” always got a response, and so I felt safely in control of my dogs. But I was always well aware that I was breaking the law – and never more so than when we encountered another person with dogs. Finding other dogs to play with is pretty much the gold standard for an off-leash walk, so I developed some strategies for feeling out other dogwalkers without completely giving away my illicit intentions. I’ve never solicited sex or drugs in a public place, but now I think I have a

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little taste of what it might be like: With my dogs properly leashed, I walk nonchalantly in the direction of the other person with a dog. Once within hearing distance, I say, “Would your dog like to say hi? Mine are friendly.” If given the assent, we move closer and the dogs touch noses and sometimes invite each other to play. Then I say, “Does your dog like to play?” If that answer is positive, I ask, “Do you ever let her/him off leash?” If I get a yes to that, soon, dogs are rocketing around us in circles and joy fills the air. But we’re still on the lookout for walkers, cyclists, and anyone who might be inconvenienced or annoyed. If another person appears, we call the dogs back to us, and playtime is over, at least temporarily. There’s always a little nagging worry that someone will complain or even call the police. I didn’t realize how stressful these encounters were until I visited a big, lovely dog park in Lansing, Michigan. When I let our dogs off-leash, my five-year-old daughter looked around at the other people and dogs and said, in a worried voice, “Don’t you think we should put their leashes back on?” The relief in being able to say, “No – this is what we’re supposed to be doing here,” was immense. In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of dog memoirs – stories of authors’ lives with their dogs – in the US and the UK. After reading many of these tales, I realize that I am not alone in my quasi-criminal status. Especially for authors who live in urban areas, this problem of finding an off-leash area, whether officially designated or not, is one that often occupies many pages of the memoir. John Zeaman’s Dog Walks Man: A Six-Legged Odyssey chronicles the writer’s ongoing search to find new pockets of “fringe” wildness in suburban New Jersey where he can walk his standard poodle Pete off-leash. In Off the Leash: A Year at the Dog Park, Matthew Gilbert details the challenges he and his yellow Lab Toby faced as they learned to navigate the unleashed human and canine social world(s) of their Boston dog park. But perhaps the most direct, passionate argument for why a dog needs the chance to run and play unrestrained in the first place comes from British writer Stephen Foster in Walking Ollie. New to life with a dog, Foster is at first surprised that his nervous, formerly stray lurcher doesn’t seem to enjoy being in his house. As Foster explains, he assumed that Ollie “must be counting himself lucky” to have been adopted into such a good home, and only much later did it occur to him that the house “could represent some sort of confinement since it was not a forest or dog pen where he was free to do as he wanted, how and when he saw fit” (2006, 69). He’s also

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surprised when Ollie doesn’t take to walking on a leash, later musing that since Ollie spent months as a stray going wherever he pleased, it must be a particularly difficult adjustment, especially for a dog who is half greyhound. Only when running off-leash does Ollie seem happy: “The freedom clearly delighted him,” writes Foster; “… it was clear in an instant that running was his vocation in life” (71). In other words, he recognizes pet-keeping as a form of captivity and commits himself to mitigating the limitations it poses on his dog’s happiness. Foster is typical of these recent memoirists not only in his desire to provide his dog with the chance to explore the world off-leash but also in the multiple challenges he encounters as he tries to do so. He finds that even people with dogs of their own can be intolerant when Ollie solicits their dogs for play, and he categorizes them based on the ways they respond: those who pick their dogs up to avoid encounters with other dogs, “the putters-on-the-leash, the Thatcherite disciplinarians (‘No, no, no, no no no no – Niet!’), the aloof, and the snooty (‘I didn’t pay a fortune for this pedigree to have it associate with the likes of you’)” (2006, 82). He becomes quite indignant not just on behalf of himself and Ollie, but also in defense of all dogs being deprived of off-leash encounters with other dogs, launching a tirade that ends with “if you’re going to have a dog, LEt It PLAy, you odious farts” (84). Other writers run into trouble with the law; in Louise Bernikow’s Bark if You Love Me: A Woman-Meets-Dog Story, an entire chapter titled “Crackdown” is devoted to the attempt to end the regular (though not officially sanctioned) off-leash dog playtimes in her New York City neighbourhood park. A novice dog person at the beginning of her book (like Foster), Bernikow is astonished to encounter hostility towards her small mixed-breed dog Libro even when he is on the leash; as he is happily splashing in a fountain with several children who seem to be enjoying his company, the nanny watching over one of them calls him a “dirty dog” and yells that Bernikow should “Get that dog out of here” (2000, 42–3). It’s no wonder that people new to life with dogs like Foster and Bernikow are surprised at the antagonism they sometimes encounter when walking their dogs off- or even on-leash. Anglo-American culture is famous for its inordinate love of dogs. In the US, it seems that every few months a news story or book takes on the growing excesses of pet-lovers and the industries that have emerged to cater to them, inevitably citing statistics from the American Pet Products Association on how much we

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spend on our companion animals. According to David Grimm in Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, the amount was $55 billion in 2013 – astonishingly, two and half times what we spent in 2000. To put this in perspective, Grimm explains that today “[w]e spend more on our animals than the entire economic outputs of over half the world’s countries” (2014, 12). Though Grimm chronicles the way “social and legal revolutions” (xi) have transformed the status of companion animals over the years with an open mind, many treatments of what Michael Schaeffer calls the pampered pet story are openly incredulous or judgmental; in One Nation under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food, Schaeffer explains that he and his wife resolved to resist this trend as they set out to adopt a dog, determined not to become the kind of people who “shell out for the spa days and agility training and homeopathic medicine for their animals, the ones who laugh it off when their puppies frighten children away from the neighborhood playground, the ones who give up vacations and promotions and transfers in order to save pooches with names like Sonoma and Hamilton and Mordecai from having their lives disrupted” (2009, 4). A major factor propelling all this spending and pampering is the oft-cited notion that our pets have become part of our families. In 2003, Jon Katz made the argument that most dogs in the US weren’t performing the tasks they were bred for, such as hunting, herding, or retrieving; instead, the “new work” of dogs had become providing companionship for humans in a society where they were increasingly isolated from each other. This trend has only intensified since then, with the result that, according to Grimm, “[e]ighty-three percent of [dog and cat] owners refer to themselves as their pet’s ‘mom’ or ‘dad,’ up from 55 percent just twenty years ago. More than 90 percent consider their dog or cat a family member. Seventy percent celebrate their pet’s birthday” (2014, 12). Apparently, even the accusation sometimes hurled at dog and cat lovers that they prefer nonhuman animals to people, meant as an irrefutable condemnation, has lost its sting, with half of all dog and cat owners admitting that “if trapped on a desert island … [they] would rather live out their days with a dog or cat than with a human companion” (12). However, once the contemporary dog lover leaves the private space of the home, yard, or car, the world looks very different (with the exception

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of places where consumer dollars buy access, such as doggy day care and pet stores). Dogs and their human companions face severe restrictions on where they can go, and even on public sidewalks and park grass, off-leash walking is nearly universally prohibited. As memoirists such as Foster and Bernikow quickly learn, dogs are merely tolerated in public (when allowed at all) as the property and sometimes lifestyle accessories of their human companions. In fact, nothing makes our dogs’ legal status as property more clear than the discourse and practices that exist around dogs and public space. The kind of concern for their welfare and happiness that is accepted and even encouraged (at least by the pet products industry!) in the private sphere often becomes criminal in public space. In this essay, I will explore the motivations and history behind the contrasting roles provided for dogs in public and private, ultimately tying the role of dogs in public space to the anthropological category of dirt. Ultimately, I will argue that we can go, and have gone, too far in our quest to sanitize our environments, including in our attitudes towards dogs in public space, and that these companions who are so close to us in our daily private lives offer us an opportunity to cultivate a new, more balanced relationship with dirt that could benefit not only humans and dogs, but also the world we share.

Public Space in the US: A “No-Dog’s Land” Here in the US, the dramatic contrast between the prevalence of dogs in private life and their severely limited role in public space is so ingrained in our way of life that most of us don’t even notice it. It seems normal to spot dogs in many fenced yards, homes, and even cars (especially on the weekends when people are running errands and want to spend time with their canine companions), while simultaneously understanding without the benefit of any signs or other reminders that they are not welcome in most of the places we need to go when we leave home, including workplaces, stores, and restaurants. The comfortably middle- and upperclass are generally able to navigate this system where we love our dogs at home but barely tolerate them in public without undue trouble. But the inconveniences and deprivations of this double standard become clear as privilege falls away. People who are homeless typically have to choose between keeping their companion animals and taking advantage of shelters and other opportunities for housing, as chronicled in

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Lars Eighner’s memoir Travels with Lizbeth. Even working people with homes run into trouble if they don’t own cars. In the US, most forms of public transportation prohibit pets, especially larger dogs that can’t be transported in a carrier. Although most situations are less extreme, in his story “Gracie’s Last Walk,” Jon Katz invites us to imagine the dilemma of Carolyn, whose beloved golden retriever Gracie has died at home in her urban apartment. Because Carolyn does not own a car, her grief is compounded by the seemingly impossible challenge of transporting Gracie’s body to her veterinarian’s office for cremation using only a suitcase and public transportation. Once these perspectives are considered, a larger picture emerges: while many of us consider individual dogs to be beloved canine “family members,” from a societal perspective they are categorized as something closer to pigeons and rats: potential or actual nuisances, indulged only as the lifestyle choice or accessory of a human being – and even then only under specific, controlled conditions. Without a suitably privileged person to protect them, they are not welcome; if they seem out of control or out of place, they are pushed out of the way (or into the crate or euthanasia chamber). The motivations to minimize and regulate the presence of dogs in public space have been myriad. In urban areas, fear of rabies and other diseases has historically been a major factor in limiting the freedom of dogs to roam. More recently, as documented in Alan Beck’s study The Ecology of Stray Dogs, the significant public health hazards posed by free-ranging dogs in cities revolve more around their excrement, overturned garbage, and the possibility of aggression against humans. When residents discuss dogs in public space, though, some of the extreme positions that emerge suggest that more than these reasonable health and safety concerns are at stake. In New York’s Poop Scoop Law, Michael Brandow documents how, when the law was proposed in the 1970s, some people felt that it would not be enough and that dogs should be banned from New York City altogether. More recently, a few states have modified the regulations that typically don’t allow dogs in restaurants; in June 2015, for example, the New York State legislature passed a bill allowing restaurants the option of permitting customers to bring their dogs into back gardens and onto sidewalk patios. Opponents expressed concerns about hair, dander, and fleas contaminating their meals as well as the spectre of dogs stealing food and fighting with each other (Yee 2015, A13),

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though veterinarians consulted in these cases uniformly agree that health risks are minimal as long as dogs’ waste doesn’t come into contact with food. And of course, these very slight modifications to existing practices don’t represent any revolutionary shift in dogs’ essential status, especially when we consider that most restaurant owners who backed the New York bill did so in hopes of using it as a new way to attract customers (PIX11, 2015). Nevertheless, even these modest proposals, like the poop scoop law and virtually every issue relating to dogs’ presence in public space, seem inevitably to evoke deep-seated, emotional responses equating dogs with contamination and chaos in a way that suggests they are ultimately deemed incompatible with civilized life. Paradoxically, given this view, dogs are not particularly welcome in many “natural” areas, either; in these environments, they are seen as a disturbance to peace-seeking humans and a threat to wildlife. According to the website for Big Bend National Park in Texas, reasons that dogs are not permitted on trails include stress to wildlife, since even when leashed, the dog “presents the image and scent of a historical predator”; the possibility of dogs transmitting disease to wildlife; the fear that dogs will become lost, since they are unable to survive in the wilderness on their own; and the chance that the dogs will interfere with the experience of other human visitors to the park, who come to enjoy its “vast silence” and wildlife. In fact, areas that provide habitat to endangered wildlife have been the scenes of some of the most bitter struggles about dogs’ access to off-leash recreation, conducted both in the courts and in the court of public opinion as reflected in letters to the editor and public comment sessions. In these cases, the concern goes beyond the impact dogs might have on wildlife to the damage they may inflict on fragile habitat that endangered species need to survive. From the Trout Brook Valley nature preserve in Connecticut to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, environmentalists and dog owners have squared off, with dog lovers fighting back “in the name of freedom and recreation” (Schaeffer 2009, 48), sometimes in extremely wellorganized advocacy groups with pricey lawyers. While there is no easy resolution to these issues, it bears noting that if human beings had not dramatically reduced and degraded wildlife habitats and the kinds of relatively unspoiled landscapes preserved in national parks through industrialization, development, and other activities, the presence of dogs would not make such a crucial difference to

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the survival of other species. In a sense, they are serving as scapegoats for our transgressions. It’s a different argument against dogs in places such as national parks that is the most revealing, though: they are believed to ruin some human visitors’ experience of unspoiled nature, a view that assumes dogs don’t belong in “nature.” The upshot is that our dogs are perceived as neither civilized enough to go with us into stores, restaurants, and workplaces nor natural enough to belong with wilderness and wildlife. They are often denied even the tiny, segregated space of dog parks. Categorically stranded somewhere between wild animal and cultured human, dogs in contemporary American society are in many ways left with nowhere to be dogs – in a “no dog’s land,” one might say. While ours is not the first society to place restrictions on which kinds of dogs can go where – in medieval Europe, the tails of dogs belonging to the lower classes were sometimes docked so they could be distinguished from the hunting dogs of the nobility, who were the only dogs allowed in royal game preserves (Thurston 1996, 71) – the intolerance for dogs in public spaces that I have described has markedly intensified in recent years. Many of the authors of contemporary dog memoirs recall things being different in their childhoods. In What the Dog Did, New Yorker Emily Yoffe describes her beagle Sasha’s tendency to run off and the fact that when she does, she immediately stands out as a “lost dog.” While this results in kind strangers returning her to her home, Yoffe also notes that it shows “how different today’s canine world was from the one I grew up in. Back then no one would have noticed an unleashed dog unless it was in the last stages of rabies, like Old Yeller. Dogs had the day to themselves, then came home for dinner” (2005, 102–3). Donna Haraway, in her hybrid work of theory and memoir, When Species Meet, remembers the leash laws introduced in the 1950s as enclosing “the commons of [her] childhood dog-human world” (2003, 128). My own childhood dog, Cory, was a beagle mix who frequently ranged loose in the woods behind our house, baying as he chased rabbits and other wildlife. Even though leash laws were in effect (this was the 1970s) in our semi-rural neighbourhood, we paid little attention to them unless someone saw the dogcatcher’s truck. And Cory wasn’t likely to be caught, since he was always away from the roads in the woods. Once or twice he was gone for up to three days. Several times he came back injured – shot by a pellet gun, torn up by a raccoon, and once mysteriously punctured in the chest – but he always came home, and we always managed to get him patched up and nursed back to health.

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It was a dangerous life, I suppose, though not an unusual one for a dog in that time and place, but he lived to be thirteen and enjoyed himself immensely. I still remember him sitting in the living room on one occasion, staring out the window as though our house were a prison. Though he was an affectionate pet and technically a housedog who slept indoors, we all knew that his great passion was the hunt, and I still feel glad that he had the chance to do what he loved best so often. As Cory’s life attests, free-roaming dogs are certainly at risk in many ways – they can be hit by cars, shot by aggravated neighbours, bitten by other dogs or wild animals, and inadvertently trapped or poisoned. However, it’s not clear that the common fate of many urban and suburban dogs – eight to ten hours alone in a crate or house at least five days a week – is preferable to the risks of roaming. One of the most outspoken advocates for dogs’ need for autonomy and freedom to roam is writer Ted Kerasote, author of Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. Kerasote originally found his large, mixed-breed dog Merle living on his own in the desert. Merle impressed Kerasote with his independence, confidence, and ability to learn, qualities that Kerasote credits to Merle’s early life on his own in the wilderness; the tremendous amount and range of experiential input quite simply made him smarter, Kerasote argues, citing studies that show that “the freedom to roam a large, object-filled space” improves neural development in rats (2007, 63). Kerasote brought Merle home to Kelly, Wyoming, a small rural community, and installed a dog door in his house so Merle could come and go as he pleased. For Kerasote, the door came to symbolize the egalitarian relationship he and Merle achieved, more of reciprocal friendship than the typical situation in which a pet is completely dependent upon its owner or guardian (if you prefer that term). Based on his experience with Merle, Kerasote critiques the entire notion that dog owners should be dominant, alpha pack leaders. This extremely popular idea, promoted by Cesar Milan of Dog Whisperer fame, among others, comes from the belief that wolf packs are rigid hierarchies. However, as Kerasote points out, the research that produced that belief was based on studies of captive wolves and has been supplanted by a new, more egalitarian picture of wolf culture based on studies conducted in the wild. Accordingly, he speculates that a relationship where the human insists on complete dominance actually “often produces a simmering conflict between the social ambitions of the maturing dog and the human who believes that the dog sincerely welcomes staying a perpetual

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child” (2007, 253). He argues that our typical treatment of dogs gradually reduces them to “a state of quiet capitulation, a softened version of the Stockholm Syndrome … [in which] the activities they enjoy – roaming, seeing other dogs, and exploring interesting odors – are constantly thwarted by the demands of modern civilization and training methods that have been designed to bring about … ‘the reversal of millions of years of evolution and genetic propensity’” (2007, 257). The ideal partnership between human and mature, self-sufficient dog that Kerasote describes may not always be enough, of course; what works in rural Wyoming will not work everywhere, and above all the human making the decisions about how and when and where a dog can run free needs the objectivity to evaluate these risks and weigh them against the potential benefits. Peter Martin’s 2001 memoir A Dog Called Perth: The True Story of a Beagle is a particularly strong testament to the ways romantic human notions can override concerns about the dangers faced by free-roaming dogs. When Martin and his wife Cindy discuss getting Perth as a puppy in the 1960s, they vow that “[s]he’ll always be free to run” (2001, 7), reasoning that if she grows up off-leash, she will develop the abilities and instincts that will keep her from getting lost, being hit by cars, or falling into the clutches of people who might harm her. According to Kerasote, they are not completely off-base, but Martin gives away their true motivation for letting Perth roam wherever she desires early in the book: “This theme of freedom was important in our lives” (7), he confesses, explaining that he and Cindy wanted a life where they could travel and were not tied to desk jobs or nine-tofive schedules. And the priority they place on doing what they want does not always work out well for Perth, who is loaned to a Vermont summer camp (despite a history of biting!) when Martin and Cindy want to travel overseas and can’t find anything else to do with her. Sent elsewhere by the director after she snaps at the campers, Perth escapes and spends months roaming the woods before she is taken in by another family and, miraculously, eventually returned to the Martins (to whom I must give credit for the thoroughness and perseverance of their search even as I question their judgment for leaving her in most unsuitable circumstances). Perth, who died at twenty-one, clearly lived a good and extraordinarily full life, but the Vermont incident is just one example of the many ways Martin’s own priorities blinded him to the risks his dog faced while living out Martin’s own fantasy of absolute freedom.

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Dogs, Dirt, and the Compulsion towards Cleanliness Despite the uncertainty about how much freedom to roam is in any particular dog’s best interest, the larger question remains: why have we banned dogs or restricted their freedom of movement in our public spaces to such a degree in recent years? One answer is that we’re living in significantly more crowded conditions, with over 324 million people in the US as opposed to roughly 210 million in 1970 (according to the US Census Bureau). Because more people means more houses, schools, stores, roads, and other infrastructure, there is literally less room today for dogs to roam without running into – or causing – trouble. A simultaneous upswing in concern about safety means family dogs as well as children are less likely to be allowed “free range,” while unattended dogs are more likely to be viewed as sources of danger. However, the hyperbolic responses that sometimes emerge to reversing this trend and allowing dogs more latitude – the fears and objections that seem to assume that dogs necessarily equal filth, chaos, and threats to humans’ safety – suggest that that there is an ideological motivation as well. In fact, the growing tendency to keep dogs at home, on-leash, or otherwise contained can be seen as part of another recent preoccupation: a move towards cleaning up our public spaces by removing whatever is seen as dirty, ugly, inconvenient, and unsafe. The recent campaign to “clean up” New York City during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration stands as an example, scouring away both literal and metaphoric filth, as William Cohen points out in the introduction to Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life: as a result, “there was less garbage on the sidewalks (including the end of the plague of dog droppings); gone too were the squeegee men, the embodiment of urban poverty …; befouling city streets with crimes from drunkenness to public urination was no longer tolerated; and X-rated (‘dirty’) movie theaters and sex shops were aggressively driven out” (2004, vii). As the reference to dog droppings suggests, there is an association between dogs and dirt. James Serpell, an expert on the behaviour and welfare of companion animals, lays out the dirty side of dogs, explaining that “much of the dog’s normal behavioural repertoire, its gluttony, sexual promiscuity, olfactory preoccupations, toilet habits, and occasional naked hostility towards strangers and visitors, can be a source of disgust and embarrassment to many owners. And even the dog’s characteristic loyalty, its

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fawning eagerness to please, appears to be the subject of mixed feelings” (1995, 252). The ecologist Paul Shepard reminds us that revulsion towards the dog is an ancient and culturally widespread phenomenon, springing in large part from the dog’s association with death and disease, which has given it a place in the human imagination as “the spoiler of human graves and the eater of corpses, the keeper of hell’s gates, the carrier of rabies, the mad dog of August Heat, the black death as ‘hellhound,’ and the half-wild howlers like the winter wind” (1996, 62). This association with death helps us see how the dog so often lands in the category of dirt or filth. As Cohen explains, “Objects are filthy – polluting, infectious, fearful – the nearer they approach the ultimate repositories of decay and death, feces and corpses” (2004, ix). Decay and death challenge one of our most treasured distinctions: the boundary between self and not self. Death turns the self, “me,” into a corpse, “not me,” and the sign and continuation of this transformation is decomposition. Excrement is produced by the self, but then literally transgresses the boundaries of the self, exiting the body. Commenting on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Christopher Hamlin explains that “[w]e label as polluting – as filth – whatever threatens the categories we use for the normal conduct of social business. We are particularly threatened by matters that obscure important social categories, such as the border between self and nonself” (2004, 5). Our tendency to see dogs and their habits as dirty and dangerous clearly distances self from other, us from them, reinforcing the boundary between nature and culture by firmly depositing the dog, with its troubling tendency to sneak under or over that particular fence, on the other side. The Anglo-American cultural response to the perceived dirtiness of dogs has been brutal, consistently linking that dirtiness with the social undesirability of certain groups of people. As Harriet Ritvo and other historians (such as Pemberton and Worboys) have pointed out, fear of rabies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England was a major phenomenon, with the horrific nature of the disease and uncertainty about how it was transmitted combining to spawn a panic seemingly far out of proportion to the number of documented cases. As Ritvo writes, “Like cholera and bubonic plague, rabies was a ‘shock disease,’ and like them, it was associated with dirt, disorder, and sin … Rabid dogs were viewed as not only dangerous, but also unclean; their disease was

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a kind of pollution” that could be spread to humans (1997, 174). Certain kinds of dogs, such as the aggressive sporting and hunting dogs kept by the lower classes, the pet dogs of the poor, and homeless mongrels (176), were considered most likely to be sources of rabies (Ritvo 1997, 177) and so poison was left out for homeless dogs and police were ordered to bludgeon to death any unleashed and, at certain points, any unmuzzled dog they found (Thurston 1996, 218). Today, the widespread sense of danger associated with pit bulls and other “bully breeds” cannot be divorced from the cultural marginality of the people who tend to own them, as poet, philosopher, and animal trainer Vicki Hearne (1991) cogently argues in Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog. While these and other cases say volumes about how we project our social values onto dogs, catching them up in the process by which we construct and marginalize other human beings, dogs live (and work, in some cases) so intimately with so many of us that mainstream society can’t completely “other” them, either. Their presence in our lives – and public spaces – could be viewed as a wonderful opportunity to come face to face with dirt and the otherness of nonhuman animals, one that the environmentally minded among us need just as much as anyone. Despite the importance of potentially “dirty” topics such as compost to contemporary environmentalism, Anglo-American environmental discourse has been marked by an intolerance for dirt and a concomitant desire for purity that come out in two ways. Traditional nature writing in the Romantic tradition holds up “nature” as a place pure of the corrupting influences of society, a tendency critiqued by Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature. Morton argues that the traditional concept of nature as something beautiful, distant, and completely separate from the human observer is an impediment to developing a truly ecological view of the world. In its place, he proposes a “dark ecology,” which he argues goes beyond “positing a nondualistic pot of gold at the end of a rainbow” (2007, 205). Dark ecology, “a perverse, melancholy ethics that refuses to digest the object into an ideal form,” involves what Morton describes as jumping down into the mud instead of trying to pull the world out of the mud (195). More contemporary environmental discourse is often preoccupied with the fantasy of keeping the human body safe and pure from pollution and toxicity in the environment. As Catriona Sandilands discusses in “Eco Homo: Queering the Ecological Body Politic,”“dominant environmental discourses [in conjunction with

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corporate agendas promoted through advertising] continue to produce ideally bounded bodies in the midst of the increasingly obvious reality of their leakiness and vulnerability” (2003, 30).

Cultivating Dirt, with the Help of Dogs Could the humble dog help deconstruct the desire for control and purity that distinguishes Western industrialized cultures and marks even environmentalist discourse? Dogs are the dirty, impure face of nature, not due just to their more “bestial” habits but also because their liminal status challenges our ability to distinguish our civilized human selves from animal others. Donna Haraway calls dogs a companion species, a category which encompasses not just domestic animals but also rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora – all species that “make life for humans what it is” (2003, 15) through a co-constitutive relationship in which the members “make each other up, in the flesh” (1). In this view, as dogs and humans evolved together, they shaped each other in a process of “becoming with” (17) that still goes on today, and a recognition of this co-constitutive relationship means accepting that we are as impure as they are. As Timothy Morton pointed out in a 2008 lecture, we have bits of viral material mixed up in our DNA, the very “blueprint” of who we are as humans; we share 35 percent of our DNA with daffodils. But dogs are more often welcomed across the nature/culture boundary than viruses or even daffodils (when have you heard either of them described as members of the family?). Because dogs teeter on the edge between these two categories that we so often use to structure the world, they have a special potential to lead us beyond neat, damaging dualisms to a place where the walls we like to erect around humanity crumble, leaving us instead as part of “a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (Haraway 2007, 11). So, what exactly am I suggesting? I am not taking a specific stance against leash laws or any other regulation governing the role of dogs in public space. As a dog lover, I can see the many ways leash laws protect dogs from harm. As a reasonably respectable member of human society, I understand the ways free-ranging dogs can threaten wildlife and public health and want to prevent those things. But I also believe that dogs need to run and exercise some autonomy and independence, and that we, as dogs’ companions, have a great deal to gain from being

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able to walk (and run) with them off-leash. How can they teach us that there is a three-dimensional web of odours infusing the terrain that we are limited to experiencing almost exclusively with our eyes, a web filled with information about the world around us, if they never get a chance to go anywhere without us directing them? How can we really respect them as a companion species, rather than substitute children or toys, if we never allow them to lead the way? The case I want to make is that yes, as so many people have argued for so long, dogs are messy. They are literally messy, pooping, peeing, and throwing up where we don’t want them to, dragging corpses of other animals around and rolling in them, even killing small animals on occasion. They are also culturally and conceptually messy, in terms of troubling the nature/ culture boundary. Instead of always trying to prevent and control the messiness, on both levels, what might we gain if we tried to embrace it, at least to some extent? One way to begin to answer this question is to imagine how a vision of hybridity and co-constitutive relationships might play out in the practical arena of off-leash walking and dogs in public space. Some versions of this vision are almost utopian: Kerasote holds up Chamonix, Switzerland, as an example, describing the way dogs are free to roam off-leash without seeming to create undue chaos; he argues that when dogs are allowed access to public space, they learn how to behave in such spaces. Needless to say, achieving such an ideal depends upon humans taking responsibility for socializing their canine companions as well as communicating human social expectations to them, and most communities in the US seem far from ready to see if their residents are up to this challenge. Then there are dog parks. While some dogs and their human companions find great satisfaction in dog parks, they are an extremely limited and unsatisfactory option on their own. Think of it: for all the dogs and their human companions in a particular area, we’re willing to set aside a few patches of land, often only what is undesirable for all other purposes, and segregate it from the rest of the social life of the community. In St Louis city and county, for example, we have roughly 550,000 households, and if we’re true to national averages, 220,000 of them have at least one dog. In the city and county combined, there are about fifteen dog parks, most under an acre. This is not integrating dogs into public space in a way that challenges us to embrace messiness. This

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is a quarantine, a sop to those of us afflicted with the disease of dog love. A more ambitious alternative has emerged in certain progressive towns in the US, such as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado: off-leash areas that are unfenced and open to multiple use so dogs and their human companions aren’t segregated from the rest of society. This trend doesn’t seem to be catching on, though, perhaps because so few humans cultivate the required sight and voice control over their dogs. As the many memoirs treating this issue of walking dogs off-leash attest, there are few neat solutions. But perhaps that is part of the messy, uncontrollable nature of our relations with dogs – living with them can keep us a bit off balance and prevent complacency about our relationships with them and the rest of the world. Take J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, set in 1950s London. Ackerley spends large chunks of the book detailing how he handles the dirtiest aspects of living with his beloved German shepherd in the city: excrement, sex, reproduction, and Tulip’s desire to run in the woods and kill small animals. His second chapter, titled “Liquids and Solids,” focuses on the many challenges related to Tulip relieving herself, which Ackerley explains that he always gives her the chance to do in “places relatively inoffensive to humanity before entering the busy streets of crowds and shops” (1956, 34). But, as he lays out in exquisite detail, this is not enough. As he notes, dogs often have “a number of bowel actions during the course of a walk” (36), and once they are in a crowded area, his options are limited. Signs all over town admonish dog owners to restrain their dogs from fouling public footpaths; in other words, they are suppose to “curb” them, or pull them into the gutters along the edges of the street. Pointing out the impracticality of this idea (by the time you drag the dog into the gutter, it’s often too late), Ackerley also explains that he has taught Tulip that the sidewalk is a safer place to walk than the street and has no intention of confusing her with exceptions. Ackerley never feels he finds a perfect solution and constantly struggles to balance his and Tulip’s need to “get along” in the public spaces of respectable society with the need to honour her autonomy and biological nature. In one instance, he exchanges insults with a cyclist who yells at him to take Tulip off the sidewalk as she is emptying her bowels (when the cyclist asks what streets are for, Ackerley yells, “turds like you”), but in another he volunteers to clean up the mess she has left in front of a greengrocers’ shop – no small sacrifice in a time well before

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poop-scoop laws, when cleaning up after your dog was almost unheard of. Ackerley doesn’t even like the shop owners, but he considers that “no doubt they had their burdens like the rest of us, and Tulip’s gift would not help to uplift their hearts to a sweeter view of life” (1956, 38). He also spends part of the chapter attempting to present Tulip’s “sanitary habits” from her point of view, defending her attraction to rotting animal corpses and agonizing over an instance when he misinterpreted her request to go outside, forcing her to go inside. The chapter ends with his description of her adding his urine, which he had been “obliged to void” while walking in the woods, “to the other privileged objects of her social attention,” a development which leaves him feeling touched and honored (55). Ackerley’s book is remarkable for many reasons: its direct confrontation with so many aspects of dog life normally considered dirty, his desire to look at them from the dog’s perspective, and his deep commitment to negotiating his sometimes conflicting obligations to Tulip and to society. But perhaps the most instructive aspect of My Dog Tulip is its conceptual messiness. Whether dealing with defecation, sex, birth, or predation, Ackerley never feels he has figured Tulip out or found the perfect solution. He makes mistakes, learns from them, agonizes over his choices, and generally muddles through, with his regard for Tulip the touchstone of the process. Haraway describes him as “striving to fulfill the messy conditions of being in love,” noting that “[t]he misrecognitions were as important as the fleeting moments of getting things right” (2003, 35). As Cate Sandilands argues in her book The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy, avoiding the sense that we have “gotten it right” is key to keeping democratic conversations that include all parties, human and nonhuman, going. And the messiness of Ackerley’s approach leaves openings for Tulip to contribute to the process; on more than one occasion, Ackerley notes the ways that Tulip herself helps resolve his dilemmas. For example, he does not want to spay her but feels terribly guilty about limiting her time outside when she is in heat; he is determined to avoid her becoming pregnant, though, since he has already gone through the difficulty and anguish of trying to find good homes for her first (and only) litter of mixed-breed puppies. Eventually, though, he realizes that she repels the advances of most male dogs on her own, and so by allowing her a voice in the decision,

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so to speak, he ultimately finds a workable solution to the problem (see Armbruster 2010 for a more extensive analysis of Ackerley’s complex approach to Tulip’s sexual/reproductive nature). Ackerley’s kind of painstaking love has a clear payoff for the dog. But what of the human? The authors of at least some dog memoirs suggest that they, too, benefit from letting their dogs off-leash, both literally and metaphorically, by opening themselves up to behaviours, experiences, and places that might otherwise be seen as filthy or impure. Though set in Germany around the time of World War I, Thomas Mann’s Bashan and I provides a lovely and still-relevant testament to the ways that excursions with a free-ranging canine companion can impact one’s relationship to nature. Mann devotes over half his book to describing various aspects of his regular walk with Bashan (whom he describes as mostly or all German short-haired pointer), a ritual that led him into a deep intimacy not only with Bashan but also with the place he calls their “hunting-ground,” a wooded area along a river. Mann is clear that this place is no unspoiled wilderness but rather “a poor, limited, and even crippled bit of nature” (2003, 113): the fen that once existed has been drained, the woods are criss-crossed by paths and trails, and the area even encompasses an abandoned, half-finished housing development with cleared lots, paved roads, and street signs only gradually being reclaimed by plant life. And yet the need to give Bashan the intense joy of exploring woods and fields led Mann to know and love what seems like every inch of this decidedly impure environment: he confesses that “[t]his strip of land is as dear to me as it is to him – it is intimate and full of meaning – like himself” (99). Given how much of the planet today is marked and even “crippled” by our human activities, we could gain a great deal by learning how to love the less pristine parts of our environment as Mann did, following in the footsteps of a dog. Needless to say, much of the time they spend in this “hunting-ground” is devoted to indulging Bashan’s deep-seated desire to chase or follow the trails of various small mammals. Mann revels in his dog’s joy and deep sense of purpose as Bashan trails field mice and moles, sometimes even trying to help unearth them with his walking stick. One day he is rewarded for this engagement by a remarkable experience when Bashan chases a young rabbit right up Mann’s legs; the little creature lands on his chest, giving him the chance to “feel the pounding of his harried little heart” (2003, 218) and exchange glances with it for a second. Feeling

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tremendously honoured, Mann comments how strange it is “to see [the rabbit] thus plainly and to have him so close to me, the little familiar spirit of the place, the secret throbbing heart of the landscape, this ever evasive creature which I had seen only for a few brief moments in its meadows and downs as it went scudding comically away” (218). At other times these excursions bring Mann face to face with an extremely unsettling aspect of Bashan’s nature: on the occasions when he catches a mouse, he devours it alive, “with hide and hair” (2003, 175). Mann confesses the horror and chills he feels at witnessing these scenes of barbarity, but nevertheless describes a typical episode in unrelenting detail, even imagining the mouse’s all-consuming fright before being “converted into pap and pulp” (176). By confronting and accepting even the more shocking ways Bashan engages with his environment, Mann gains a fuller sense of his own place in the world around him, explaining that he has been “inwardly enlightened by the brutal humour of life” (177). Arguably, the remarkable bond he develops with his dog and the place they walk is fuller and stronger in the end not only because of delightful, almost magical experiences such as the moment with the rabbit but also because of the challenges to attachment sometimes posed by the impurity of the landscape and the raw appetites of the dog – challenges that Mann overcomes due to the steady pull of his affection for Bashan. But embracing the dirty side of life with dogs can occur within the privacy of the home as well as the public space of streets and walking paths. In Rhoda Lerman’s In the Company of Newfies, Lerman finds that immersing herself in her dogs’ birthing and puppy care processes – a experience that is nothing if not dirty, leaving her covered with urine and other bodily fluids and utterly exhausted – eventually opens her up to the more physical, primal aspect of her dogs’ lives. In turn, this openness allows her to gain a sense of what she describes as her “own double nature, which lies someplace between animal and human, unintegrated, often at odds, going in different directions” (1996, 18), the kind of sense of self that is open to “becoming with” our companion species. Ultimately, this is the kind of inner transformation that is possible when we open ourselves up to the messiness of dogs, unleashing their potential not only to break up our accustomed sense of what it means to be human but also eventually to draw us into a more closely felt integration with other species and the rest of what we think of as “nature.”

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Given the value in remaining open to the ways dogs dis-order our spaces and lives and rub our noses in the dirt of nature and biological existence, it seems worth finding ways to coexist with some of their messiness rather than always trying to close them out or clean them up. It’s true that embracing the dirty, dangerous side of life with dogs may turn us into criminals, not just through violations of the leash laws but also violations of more deeply held cultural mandates that define the human against the animal and insist that humans must master and control what we see as nature. If we become renegades in this sense, though, we can give up the ultimately impossible quest to protect nature’s purity from our contamination or to safeguard ourselves against its pollution, instead recognizing that dirt and risk are the price of being alive in a web of co-constitutive relations. Perhaps no one has captured the wisdom of this perspective more succinctly than the famous early-twentieth-century conservationist Aldo Leopold, who once wrote about his hunting dog as a professor who tutored him in the art of tracking partridges. Knowing how much can be learned from a dog, perhaps, led him to an even greater insight – that in our drive to control nature, “too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run” (1966, 141).

References Ackerley, J.R. 1956. My Dog Tulip. London: Secker and Warburg. Armbruster, Karla. 2010. “Into the Wild: Response, Respect, and the Human Control of Canine Sexuality and Reproduction.” jac: A Journal of Advanced Composition 30, nos. 3–4: 755–83. Beck, Alan M. 1973. The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-Ranging Urban Animals. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Bernikow, Louise. 2000. Bark if You Love Me: A Woman-Meets-Dog Story. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin. Brandow, Michael. 2008. New York’s Poop-Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Cohen, William A. 2004. “Introduction: Locating Filth.” In Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, vii–xxi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eighner, Lars. 1993. Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Foster, Stephen. 2006. Walking Ollie, or Winning the Love of a Difficult Dog. London: Short Books.

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Gilbert, Matthew. 2014. Off the Leash: A Year at the Dog Park. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Grimm, David. 2014. Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs. New York: Public Affairs. Hamlin, Christopher. 2004. “Good and Intimate Filth.” In Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, 3–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. – 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hearne, Vicki. 1991. Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog. New York: HarperCollins. Katz, Jon. 2003. The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family. New York: Villard/Random House. – 2012. “Gracie’s Last Walk.” In Dancing Dogs: Stories, edited by Jon Katz, 3–17. New York: Ballantine Books. Kerasote, Ted. 2007. Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Leopold, Aldo. 1966. A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books. Lerman, Rhoda. 1996. In the Company of Newfies: A Shared Life. New York: Henry Holt. Mann, Thomas. 2003 [1923]. Bashan and I. Translated by Herman George Scheffauer. Philadelphia, PA: Pine Street Books. Martin, Peter. 2001. A Dog Called Perth: The True Story of a Beagle. New York: Arcade Publishing. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. – 2008. “Creativity in the Face of Climate Change.” Berkeley, CA: Lecture, University of California Berkeley, October. https://www.uctv.tv/shows/ Creativity-in-the-Face-of-Climate-Change-The-Role-of-the-Humanitiesin-Awakening-Societal-Change-15519 (accessed 26 March 2019). National Park Service. “Pets.” Big Bend National Park website. http://www. nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/pets.htm (accessed 21 September 2015). Pemberton, Neil, and Michael Worboys. 2007. Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. PIX11 Report. 2015. “UwS Restaurant Owner Welcomes Dogs as Bill Awaits Cuomo’s Signature.” wpix tv website, 18 June. http://pix11. com/2015/06/18/uws-restaurant-owner-welcomes-dogs-as-bill-awaits-.

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Ritvo, Harriet. 1997. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. Sandilands, Catriona. 1999. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 2003. “Eco Homo: Queering the Ecological Body Politic.” Social Philosophy Today 19: 17–39. Schaeffer, Michael. 2009. One Nation under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Serpell, James. 1995. “From Paragon to Pariah: Some Reflections on Dogs.” In The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behavior, and Interactions with People, edited by James Serpell, 246–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shepard, Paul. 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC: Shearwater Books. Thurston, Mary Elizabeth. 1996. The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs. Kansas City, mo: Andrews and McMeel. Yee, Vivian. 2015. “Hold the Mimosa. I’ll Have a Biscuit.” New York Times, 25 May. Yoffe, Emily. 2005. What the Dog Did: Tales from a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. New York: Bloomsbury. Zeaman, John. 2011. Dog Walks Man: A Six-Legged Odyssey. Guildford, Ct: Lyons Press.

CHAPTER FIVE

Post-Human Families? Dog-Human Relations in the Domestic Sphere Nickie Charles

I begin this chapter with three contrasting views on dogs and the practices whereby their lives are entangled with those of humans. In his book Sleeping with Dogs, Brian Sewell writes of Penny, the dog with whom he had “grown from boy to man”: She had never been my toy, nor had there been anything of the brotherliness of my relationship with Prince, nor did I ever think of her as an adopted child satisfying a frustrated parental urge; she was my dog and we were man and dog in a primeval bond, and that was that – though I believe that I was a kinder and more considerate boy for having her, and a more compassionate man. (Sewell 2013, 25) In this passage Sewell asserts a connection which recognizes the differences between dogs and humans and involves compassion, kindness, and consideration – positive qualities that are a direct outcome of closeness between him and his dog. He also criticizes the idea that dogs can be commodities (therefore disposable) or substitute children. The other views appear in the Huffington Post and take opposing positions on the relationship between companion animals and their humans: one takes exception to the idea that humans are ‘parents’ to ‘pets’ while the other sees nothing wrong with it. Steven Kurlander asserts, “It’s really stupid to equate parenting with pet ownership …

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Pets, and animals too, are not humans, and should not be considered or treated as such” (Kurlander 2015). Marie Carter, in contrast, argues that “[o]ur pets should be classified as members of our family and not bundled in with the rest of our property. We are pet parents and not pet owners, after all!” (Carter 2015). Kurlander objects to the humanizing of animals and asserts that the pet-human relationship is one of ownership rather than parenting. Carter, in contrast, and in common with animal rights advocates (Tester 1991), asserts that it is time this legal definition was overturned; she backs up her argument with evidence that people regard their pets as members of their families. In this chapter I address some of the issues raised in these extracts. I explore the ways in which dogs and other companion species become family members and engage with the argument that this indicates the emergence of post-human families. I approach this question from a sociological perspective, a discipline in which, until recently, there has been little work on families as multi-species groups. I first review the literature on post-human families and companion species, situating it in the context of an increasing interest in the post-human. I then ask what a post-human family would look like and whether it makes sense to talk in such terms, before presenting my own empirical data on the ways in which humans and dogs live with each other and the “daily practices of kinship” which constitute them as kin (Charles and Davies 2011, 89). Finally I reflect on the usefulness of the term ‘post-human’ to understand the relationality and practices of human-animal kinship.

Post-Human Families? There is an increasing interest in post-humanism as a philosophical approach which challenges both Humanism and the meaning of the category ‘human.’ It is particularly influential amongst researchers exploring human-animal and human-technology relations (see e.g., Haraway 2008) and can broadly be understood as a displacement of the centrality of the human and a recognition that the nonhuman is an essential part of (post-)human life. This approach challenges anthropocentrism and the idea that humans are superior to and different from all other living creatures. It also unsettles those disciplines which look at human activities as if they take place in a purely human sphere. Sociology is no exception; hitherto it has taken society as its focus without recognizing

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that animals are incorporated into social relations with humans, that ‘human’ societies would not have developed in the way they have if this had not been the case (Shipman 2011), and that the anthropocentric social relations in which animals are entangled systematically disadvantage them (Carter and Charles 2013). And it has also regarded families as purely human affairs. Post-humanist approaches to families, in contrast, recognize that animals are an integral part of many families and ask whether the emergence of post-human kinship relations can be identified empirically. Thus scholars have suggested that the existence of multi-species households and the increasingly widespread practice of pet-keeping in post-industrial societies are indicative of a shift to post-human sensibilities and kinship practices. And, as Carter claims, there is a growing body of research showing that humans regard the animals with whom they share domestic space as family members (Carter 2015). An Australian study (Franklin 2006) found that 88 percent of respondents ascribed family status to their companion animals, while in the US the proportion is 91 percent (Harris 2011). Qualitative studies have found that animals are considered family because they provide emotional support and because they need humans to care for them (Charles and Davies 2011; Power 2008). Children especially regard pets as kin (Tipper 2011) and recent research shows that children are “more likely to confide in pets than siblings” (Coughlan 2015). Indeed, people of all ages report feeling closer to their dogs than to other family members (Cohen 2002; Pew 2006). Dogs are particularly important in providing support which is “comparable with levels [of support] from human relationships” (Bonas, McNicholas, and Collis 2000, 232; Enders-Slegers 2000; Hart 1995). And even though households with children at home are more likely than other types of household to include companion animals, anthropomorphism and levels of attachment to these animals are higher in single-person households and those where children have left home (Hart 1995). This is particularly the case for dogs. Some suggest that ascribing family status to companion animals is a new phenomenon and that it indicates the emergence of post-human families (Cudworth 2010; Franklin 1999; Smith 2003). Undoubtedly pet-keeping increased during the twentieth century. In 2014, 24 percent of households in the UK contained at least one dog and the dog population was 9 million (Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association 2014); this has

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doubled since 1963, when the dog population was 4.4 million (Franklin 1999, 89). There has been a move towards keeping animals inside rather than outside the house, and it is now commonplace for dogs to share intimate spaces within the home, including beds (Smith et al. 2014; Thomson et al. 2014). On the basis of these trends, Franklin argues that, since the 1970s, there has been a move to new forms of intimacy between humans and companion animals which results in “hybrid” households (Franklin 2006). It is, however, contentious to claim that pets being “companionate family members” is a new phenomenon (138); there have been intimate connections between humans and other animals, especially dogs, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Indeed, “[i]t was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the farmhouse became an exclusively human residence” and, prior to this, “there was … an intimacy and interconnection between humans and animals (wild and domesticated) which it is now hard to comprehend” (Benton 1993, 73). At the same time, the practice of giving pets human names and keeping them indoors became widespread amongst the middle class, especially in urban areas (Thomas 1984). Franklin argues, however, that since the 1970s the family “has affected a significant shift from a humanist to a post-humanist form” although it is not altogether clear what is distinctive about this form (Franklin 2006, 139). In a similar vein, Smith writes about her mode of living with rabbits and her attempts to perform human-pet relations that are not based on dominance and subordination (Smith 2003). Here we have two different definitions of post-human: one that is based on domestic practices which include other animals as well as humans and the other that explores the possibility of performing human-animal relations in a more egalitarian way. These ways of understanding human relations with companion animals are part of an attempt to grasp changes in human-animal relations which are said to be characteristic of post-modernity (Franklin 1999) or post-domesticity (Bulliet 2005). It is argued that we are now in an era where human exceptionalism is being challenged and a more emotional attachment between humans and other animals is emerging and becoming prevalent, and that this is reflected in family practices. For Franklin, the claim that companion animals are family indicates both a breakdown in the species barrier and the “surrogacy of animals for significant human relationships” (Franklin 2006, 142).

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Power offers a third understanding of post-human families. She argues that dogs are incorporated into families as dogs and not because they are seen as human; the ways in which this is accomplished can both reinforce and challenge anthropocentrism. Humanist models of the family shape and mould dogs to fit in; dogs are incorporated into families either within a caring, parental relationship or as pack members, and, in both cases, relations of dominance and subordination prevail. Post-humanist family practices entail an accommodation of the “dogginess of canine companions” (Power 2008, 541) with dogs actively participating in the “everyday practices” of family and thereby contributing to the shaping of the home (536). Here we have a notion of a ‘more-than-human-family’ which involves a change in everyday practices of kinship such that dogs’ and humans’ needs are catered for (see also Smith 2003; Charles and Davies 2011). Moreover, “belonging is not … contingent on human status” and “both people and dogs [are] altered by the experience of cohabitation” (Power 2008, 552). The incorporation of dogs into families, therefore, does not necessarily mean a “post-humanist abandonment of binaries” although it troubles them (Charles and Davies 2011, 73). Thus it has been argued that pets occupy a liminal space, sometimes being regarded as human and sometimes as animal (Fox 2008; Charles and Davies 2011), and when they are regarded as animals they are disposable; this may happen if domestic circumstances change or dogs behave in ways that humans deem unacceptable (Power 2008). This not only sits awkwardly with their status as kin (Fudge 2008, 109) but also renders that status provisional (Shir-Vertesh 2012). Similarly, it has been argued that while pets are grieveable they are replaceable, thus confirming their ambiguous status as both human and nonhuman and how they “can be regarded as persons included in a human moral community while human exceptionalism remains intact” (Redmalm 2015, 32). Emerging from these discussions are three arguments that are important for the question of whether we are witnessing the emergence of post-human families: (1) that close connections with companion animals disrupt human exceptionalism because companion animals are either understood as possessing ‘human’ qualities or are regarded as ‘other’ and therefore unknowable; animals’ possession of ‘human’ qualities questions the uniqueness of these qualities as human while their unknowability undermines the idea of an all-knowing human subject – both, in different

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ways, question human superiority (Fudge 2008); (2) that companion animals are precariously incorporated into families and this precarity or disposability maintains human exceptionalism (Redmalm 2015); (3) that extending the category of the human to include animals is merely an extension of Humanism and does not challenge human superiority because whatever is included within the category ‘human’ is superior to the excluded ‘other’ (Braidotti 2013). From this it would seem that post-humanism does not simply mean multi-species households; if it did, there would be no question that families are and always have been post-human. It also means establishing human-animal relations that are not based on a human-other distinction. In what follows I argue that practices of kinship blur the species barrier but that human-dog relations take place in the context of unequal power relations which are an inevitable consequence of dogs’ incorporation into families as dependents (Carter and Charles 2013).

The Study To develop this argument I draw on two sets of data: responses to a Mass Observation directive on “Animals and Humans” which was sent out in the summer of 2009, and twenty-one interviews carried out with people who shared their domestic space with dogs and/or other animals. The Mass Observation Project is based at the University of Sussex, UK. It was established in 1937 and its present incarnation dates from 1981. A panel of around 500 correspondents respond to three directives a year which ask them to write about different topics based on their own experiences and observation. It is “part history project, part anthropology, part auto/biography and part social commentary” and is written by “ordinary people” rather than experts (Sheridan, Street, and Bloome 2000, 12). Responses are housed in the Mass Observation Archive in Sussex. In the summer of 2009 a directive called “Animals and Humans” was sent out and in this chapter I draw on the 244 responses. Two-thirds were from women and one-third from men with the ages of correspondents ranging from 16 to 90; this reflects the composition of the MO panel at the time (MO 2009). I subsequently (over an eight-month period between 2011 and 2012) conducted twenty-one semi-structured interviews with nineteen women and twelve men whose ages ranged from the early 20s to 80.

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Interviewees were contacted through a veterinary practice, the Dog’s Trust (a national shelter for homeless dogs), Guide Dogs for the Blind, and by means of a snowball sample in a local city. In the interviews, which were semi-structured, I followed up issues that had been raised in the responses to the “Animals and Humans” directive, focussing particularly on what it is that makes animals family. Although the project did not focus on dogs, many correspondents to the directive wrote about dogs and all but one of the interviewees were living with dogs at the time of interview.

Kinship Practices One of the ways in which dogs become family is through practices of care (Power 2008; Charles and Davies 2011). Indeed, the well-being of dogs and other companion animals “is acknowledged to be an object of direct moral obligation on the part of human members of the household” (Benton 1993, 64). Caring involves responsibility for another living being and this sense of responsibility contributed to animals becoming family members. One of the correspondents to the MO directive wrote about the difference between a pet and other animals: A pet is different from other animals because it usually shares your home and garden and is part of your everyday life. Also you are responsible for it – you have to care for it and feed it and take care of its health. (J1890, F) The sense of responsibility which comes with caring for a dog could take people by surprise, particularly as it often had a significant effect on their activities. So it kind of brings out a slightly more … caring, not sure caring’s quite the right word, but it just stops and makes you think about the responsibility for … some creature that actually does depend on you, totally really. (K002M) The idea that having responsibility for another living being and having to care for them was what made them family was widely echoed in the interviews. This responsibility meant that the needs of a dog had to be

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taken into account. One woman, for instance, spoke about the dog they had when the children were small. [He] was almost like a third child in a way I suppose because he grew up with them, the two children and him, and … when we went out we would still have to think about where he went and if he came with us or not. (K005F) He became “like a third child” not in the sense that he was a child substitute but in the sense that his needs as well as those of the children had to be catered for in family arrangements. Others spoke about changing their holiday practices once a dog became part of their family. And, you know, before with just the two of us and obviously no children at home you could just pretty much do what you wanted when you wanted, but obviously with a dog you can’t. And actually we were saying, you know, it would be quite nice next time we go abroad, you know, maybe to take him with us and that would mean getting the ferry and driving which we haven’t, wouldn’t normally do because obviously that takes time and it’s not quite so easy, but we think we’d do that. Because he is part of the family really so he should be with us as it were, not all the time but if possible. And we’ve certainly had a couple of short breaks away where we deliberately chose to go somewhere where dogs are accepted. (K002M) The responsibility of caring for a dog, the need to take another living being’s needs into account, and the simple fact that people prefer to go on holiday with rather than without their dogs, all change their family practices so that they become inclusive of their canine family member. The dependence of dogs led some to draw analogies between them and children, and suggests that there are elements of a quasi-parental relationship between humans and their dogs (Power 2008). Having a dog is a bit like having a toddler but one that never really grows up or learns to speak. Although of course I talk to her as though she was a sentient human being. (A3434, F)

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Dog Parents? That the relationship can be a quasi-parental one is supported by evidence that dogs could fill the gap created when children left home. One woman wrote that with her children gone she felt “very lonely” and “decided it would be nice to have a dog for company.” She recounted the story of how two poodles came to live with her and then said: The three of us were very happy for about 10 years. We all used to go to bed together. They slept together by the side of my bed. We were all the best of friends … When they got very ill and their lives came to an end it was two of the saddest days of my life. I had as much love for those little dogs as I did for my children. (S496, F) In this case the dogs may have been surrogate children, but others made it clear that even though their children leaving home had resulted in a changed relationship with their dogs, they had not taken the children’s place. One woman told me how, when her children grew up and left home, there was a shift in the relationships in her family with the dogs moving up the hierarchy (cf. Fox 2008). I mean perhaps not they become more of the family but they almost become your, I think you have to be careful they don’t become too much your children in a way, I think it shifts a little bit when you’ve only got the dogs because when the children were living at home all the time the dogs were beneath the children and I think once the children had gone they come up a level actually in your thinking. (K005) There is care taken here not to position the dogs as substitute children which is reflected in the practices surrounding birthdays and Christmas. [W]e don’t mark their birthdays at all, Christmas they usually get one present, a chew or something wrapped up, I think we started that with Tom [dog] really and we’ve ended up, I think because of the children and it was always, but certainly no, we

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didn’t mark birthdays, I think that’s part of them not being, I don’t know, I mean I’m sure people do but we’ve never done … They’re dogs. (K005M) Practices, however, varied considerably. One woman recounted the lengths she had gone to to estimate her rescue dog’s birthday so that it could be celebrated, and another heterosexual couple told me that they gave all their animals birthday cards. These practices incorporate dogs into families as dependents for whom adults have responsibility in a way analogous to children, but many stressed that dogs are valued because they are dogs, and several said that they preferred dogs to children. I think it’s part of the family group, but I think it’s still important that they’re dogs and they’re not children, but they still have an important role but in a different way, I don’t hold with all this, you know all this stuff of putting, I don’t know, these clothes on, all – these funny things that make them not dogs. (K005M) This relationship, which is one of responsibility for a dependent creature, implies that “differentials of power and dependency are intrinsic to the relation between a pet-owner and a pet” (Benton 1993, 146). Indeed, as Tuan argues, pet-owner relationships share similarities with parent-child relationships insofar as both are marked by dominance and affection (Tuan 1984). This lends weight to the contention that dog-human relations can take a quasi-parental form.

Blurring Boundaries In order for a family to be considered post-human, differentials of power between companion animals and their humans would have to be addressed and the distinction between human and other animals, which reinforces human superiority, questioned. But to what extent is this lack of distinction reflected in the way humans relate to dogs who are family members? Are dogs regarded as equal to their human companions or is the relation one of inequality? And if it is one of inequality, do the power differentials involve domination? The dependency of dogs and the requirement, both practical and moral, that they are cared for appropriately indicate that although they are family members, they are

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not equal to those who care for them. The situation is, however, subtle and nuanced. One woman writes that her dog is not the equal of her husband and herself, and yet she also writes of the dog owning their shared home. We just have the one dog who we share our home with, although actually he seems to be the owner. He has the run of the house with the exceptions of the bedrooms and bathrooms … The relationship is different than that of mine to my husband, we try to treat each other as equals and certainly the dog is not that. (P1796, F) This implies an ambivalence about the relative status of humans and dogs; in some ways they are not equal, while in other ways they are like the “owner” – a reference, perhaps, to how caring for the needs of another may also be akin to serving them. Indeed, she writes at the end of her response that her “eldest son does get quite cross with us sometimes for the way we treat Dillon he says but Mum he’s only a dog!” (P1796, F). Their treatment of the dog, in the eyes of their son, elevates him to a quasi-human (or perhaps child) status, i.e. it raises him up the family hierarchy, which the son thinks is inappropriate. There is also an implication that he thinks his parents are humanizing Dillon. It has been argued that anthropomorphism is essential for meaningful relationships to have developed between humans and animals (Serpell 2005), and it is certainly the case that people attribute so-called human characteristics to their dogs and other companion animals. However, there is great care taken by both the MO correspondents and the interviewees to distance themselves from anthropomorphism, part of which involves keeping a distance – physical and emotional – between humans and animals. For one of the MO correspondents, it was important to maintain the human-animal distinction, and she did this by having her dogs sleep outside. [The dogs] are allowed in the house (but not upstairs). However, they sleep in an outhouse/ stable block. They are happier not being in a stuffy house; their coats are thick and glossy – and the distinction is maintained between animals and humans. (M3412, F)

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This supports the idea that animals sharing intimate spaces with humans challenges species boundaries. Interviewees reported their attempts not to let dogs get on chairs or beds in an effort to maintain the human-animal distinction. In one interview, the blurring of boundaries was explicitly mentioned. To me it’s fairer on you and on the dog if you try and maintain that distinction, it can get quite – of course – particularly if you’re sort of, you know, sitting on the sofa and the dog’s alongside of you and you’re sort of stroking the dog and you find yourselves talking to the dog about what’s on the TV, that’s quite interesting sort of, a bit of blurring. (K002M) Clearly these family practices – watching TV together and commenting on the programme – blurred the animal-human boundary which this interviewee was keen to maintain. This was also apparent when this couple were asked whether they ever gave or received cards on behalf of the dog. He said that they did not, but she reminded him – saying “liar, liar, pants on fire!” – that he had in fact given her a card on her recent birthday signed from the dog. There is a clear feeling that these practices are of dubious moral value and that it may be better not to admit to them, particularly as they blur the boundary between dog and human. By the same token, efforts to avoid what is seen as anthropomorphism were not always effective. The same couple reported that they had tried to avoid a human name for their dog because “it’s not a human … and yet we ended up choosing Dylan but it just seemed right” (K002M). He went on to stress that although the dog was part of the family he was not human. He’s one of the family but he’s not a human … He’s a dog, yeah, I mean I think that’s quite important to keep that distinction because I think if you treat him as a dog he will be happier and he will fit into the family better. He’s not a human and I think that’s quite an important distinction. (K002M) They wanted to “respect him as a dog and not [try] to make him something he isn’t” (K002M). This entails respect for his dog-ness and could

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be seen as displaying a post-human sensibility. On the other hand, it could be seen as a rationalization of their relationship with their dog in light of the perceived moral disapprobation attracted by the admission of too close a relationship with companion animals and the blurring of boundaries that the male interviewee had already admitted to in their kinship practices. This sort of response was more common in interviews than in the written MO responses, where there was more openness about the intimacy of relationships with companion animals. Many, however, maintained an uncompromising belief in human superiority. One MO correspondent, for instance, commenting on the idea that a dog is a person’s best friend, wrote: I regard humans as being superior to animals – so given the choice of a dog or a man as my best friend – it will be the man. (C3603, M) And in a slightly different vein, one of the interviewees spoke about his relationship with his guide dog and “its place in the household.” [W]ith me it was more … as I was saying sort of working partnership, master and dog kind of thing but again … I mean I felt my dog was integrated into the family, you know, I wouldn’t say it was part of the family, that’s a bit sentimental for me but it was certainly integrated into the household and, you know, had its place in the household and its respect in the household. (K010M) There were differing views about the superiority of humans over dogs but many recognized that family practices could either reinforce or blur the dog-human boundary. Keeping a dog outside reinforces their dog-ness, while letting them on the settee blurs boundaries. And in the interviews especially people were at pains to distance themselves from anthropomorphism. There seems to be a distinction between what is publicly acceptable and practices that go on in private, reminiscent of Cornwell’s distinction between public and private accounts (Cornwell 1984). This emerged in the interviews but the written responses were much more open about these private aspects of the relationship, its intimacy (Charles 2017).

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Selfhood and Agency One of the things that disrupts the category ‘human’ is evidence that animals share many qualities that have been defined as uniquely human. Thus it is argued that dogs (and other animals) “have elements of a core self that becomes present to us through interaction with them” (Irvine 2004, 3; see also Hills and Butterfill 2015). They are seen as “having a mind, beliefs, and desires, just as we do” (Irvine 2009, 332) and, because they “have agency and the other dimensions of the core self, they can choose courses of action” (Irvine 2009, 337). Dogs are related to as “quasi-persons” (Benton 1993); they are individuated, experienced as actors exercising agency and as having an understanding of other creatures’ intentionality. This way of relating to dogs has parallels with the way hunter-gatherers engage with one another and with nonhuman beings “as entire persons” (Ingold 2012, 41); personhood applies to “human and non-human animal (and even non-animal) kinds” (42). This way of engaging with the world can be understood as post-human insofar as so-called human characteristics are not confined to biologically human beings, and was a characteristic of the descriptions of dog-human interactions in my samples. In these descriptions, dogs appeared as individuals with distinct characters and personalities which were observed in detail. One interviewee talked about his dog’s personality with the following words: laidback, calm, friendly, mischievous, inquisitive, playful, obedient, stubborn – terms which could just as easily be applied to a human person (K002M) and which are “vitality affects,” “important vehicles of the core self” (Irvine 2009, 335). Another interviewee described Mollie, who was old, cantankerous … did what she liked … she was not a dog, she thought she was human. (K001M) There is an idea here that Mollie thought she was human, implying that she had human characteristics and perhaps was entitled to be treated as a human. And some suggested that it was because dogs had characters and personalities – that is, they were persons – that they were part of the family. One MO correspondent wrote about the pets she lived with as a child:

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They might not have been equal members of the family but they were still part of it … my family and I have often felt that our pets have been part of our family. However this has only really happened with our larger pets, i.e. our cats and dogs. I don’t know why this is, probably because you get more of a reaction from them and they all seem to have their own characters. (G3988. F) This comment alerts us to the importance of a dog’s ability to react and respond. Their ability to communicate is an aspect of their personhood and an indication of the interior life that many who live with dogs and other animals recognize (Fudge 2008). Dogs were not only persons in their own right but also had a sense of self. Irvine argues that a sense of self requires agency which “implies subjectivity, in that an agentic being … has desires, wishes, and intentions, along with a sense of having those things” (Irvine 2009, 332). There were many reports of dogs shaping interactions with their humans. This was commented on by a woman who had a small rescue dog, Danny. He’s got to be with you. I mean if you’re sitting having your breakfast in the kitchen he’s got to be on your lap which is a blooming nuisance when you’re trying to eat breakfast, say ‘no Danny wait’ and then he bumps you with his nose if he doesn’t get your attention. No, he’s got to be on your lap which is very strange but, oh no, so he has to go out for his walk now, ‘no, I’m having my breakfast, you just wait.’ (K011F) This quote points to the active engagement of dogs with their human companions in order to get what they want and supports the claim that they have a sense of self which involves agency, intentionality, and mind (Irvine 2004). This small dog “bumps you with his nose if he doesn’t get your attention” and insists on being on his human’s lap when she is eating breakfast even though this is something that she finds a nuisance. There were many examples like this, in both the written responses and in the interviews. Several interviewees spoke about how their dogs did not like it when voices were raised; this usually resulted in them trying not to have arguments in front of the dogs, and in some cases, dogs would intervene in order to stop the argument (see Carter and Charles 2013).

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One woman wrote about dogs wanting to do everything that human family members do and, in the process, becoming “almost human.” Animals that you love are definitely part of the family. They just gradually become part of the family so that in the end they are almost human! They want to do everything that you do and even sometimes to share your bed! (J1890, F) Dogs therefore have desires and wishes that they make known. They are active agents in their engagements with their human companions, though they exercise this agency in the context of social relations which place them as dependent on their more powerful human companions (Carter and Charles 2013).

Emotional Connections Fudge argues that relationships with pets are “potentially compassionate” and that imagination is required to feel compassion for another living being (2008, 67). This is reminiscent of the ideology of kindness which emerged in nineteenth-century America as a means of civilizing children; ensuring that they were kind to animals was one way of doing this (Grier 2006). It has also been argued that the connection with animals has contributed to the development of qualities such as “compassion, empathy and communication skills” and that these are endangered when humans do not live with animals (Shipman 2011, 275). The view that animals make ‘us’ better people was expressed by MO correspondents and interviewees as well as Sewell, who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. As well as making humans better people, dogs often provide emotional support, which is one of the elements that constitutes kinship (Charles and Davies 2011). A young man wrote in response to the Animals and Humans directive: In my late twenties I went through some mental and physical trouble which I tried to hide from my family. But I used to talk to Sandy about my issues and she saw the real me. I think she knew I wasn’t very well at the time. I lost interest in life and my well being for a few years but my devotion to her never wavered. Her

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love back was unstinting as always – I keep a picture of her in my bedroom. (H3784, M) Here we have the idea that Sandy, his dog, knows him better than his human family does – “she saw the real me” – a view which was echoed in other accounts. And a man who had separated from his wife wrote about the support he got from his dog. The best relationship I ever had with an animal was my dog … He helped me get over the break up of my marriage just by being around while it was all happening … Relationships with animals are different from those with people because you can rarely trust people absolutely. You always know what a dog is thinking. Dogs have no hidden agenda. (M4463, M) There is also evidence in these accounts that animals feel an emotional connection to their humans. The young man above talked about Sandy’s love for him, and another man recounted a heartrending story of how a German Shepherd who had accompanied him and his wife on a move from Latin America to Britain subsequently pined to death. “Sadly” the writer moved to a new posting in the Far East and had to leave the dog behind with his mother. I was told that the moment my wife and son left the house he lay beside some luggage we had left behind and simply gave up on life, dead within the month. I have since grieved over the death of that same child, but scarcely more deeply than I did, and do, over Lucky. (R2143, M) Such understandings of dogs loving their humans can no longer be dismissed as anthropomorphism (see e.g., Sheldrake 2011). Ethologists have shown that dogs form affective bonds with particular humans, which demonstrates the “reciprocal nature of human-animal interactions” (Topàl and Gàsci 2012, 182). Furthermore, they suggest that families are “mixed-species groups [which] should be regarded as natural entities. Attachment between dogs and their caregivers is an indispensable characteristic of this social system that has a bi-directional nature” (181).

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Emotional connection means not only that dogs pine and die because their people leave them but also that people grieve when dogs die. One of the MO correspondents wrote: Dogs especially can easily become part of the family and it is for this reason that we can sometimes grieve so much when they go to the great lamppost in the sky. We talk to them, we understand their thoughts and intentions in the same way that they often understand ours, and some people (my late father included) allow them to share the bed (on top of the blankets, I hasten to add) and lick their faces. (D1602, M) This raises the question of dogs’ alleged replaceability and the contradiction between this and dogs being family members. It has been argued that dogs’ replaceability renders them nonhuman, the implication being that humans are irreplaceable. For many, however, an individual dog is not replaceable even though this may seem to be the case because another dog is acquired; it may as well be argued that someone whose human partner dies and who subsequently re-partners is replacing them. The fact that a human partner is ‘replaced’ does not make that partner any less human, but, in the case of dogs, it is said to demonstrate their liminal status (Redmalm 2015). Moreover, dogs are often not ‘replaceable,’ as this man’s response indicates. Our family had a dog (a nondescript mongrel) when I was a lad. Officially it was my sister’s dog – but I spent most time with it. I talk [sic] it walks on a daily basis – and fed it. Sadly, it started to have fits – and had to be put down. I took it on its last walk to the vets. Although that was over 50 years ago – I still remember the anguish I felt. It was so horrible to be parted from ‘Scamp’ that I have never owned a dog since then. I love dogs – but cannot bear the thought that they don’t live for ever. (C3603, M) The grief experienced when a dog dies is, for many, too distressing to enable them to have another dog, and in these cases the dog is not, in any sense, replaceable. For others, however, the remedy for grief is to get another dog; this woman makes clear that the personalities

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of the dogs that have died are often talked about with friends, which suggests that having another dog does not necessarily mean that it is replacing its predecessor any more or less than re-partnering is replacing a human partner. Each time one of my pets’ [sic] die I am devastated, but experience has shown me that the best way to heal and get through the first year is to have another animal within the first month. The new pet has to be cared for and loved, fed and walked; gradually you start to heal, never forgetting the ones you have lost … My friends and I often talk about the personalities of the pets we have loved and lost. (H1836, F) Furthermore, dogs can sometimes ‘replace’ humans who have died, although this is often met with moral disapproval (Charles 2014). This seems to have happened in the following case. When I was growing up my mother had 2 pugs – Poppy and her less appealing son Percy. Poppy had been given to my mother to cheer her up after the death of my older sister and she, the pug, was an incredibly important member of the family … Poppy lived to 17 which is very old for a pug. My siblings and I were on holiday with my father when she died and we were all devastated – even my father. She is buried in the orchard at my childhood home – it was one of the things my mother most minded about when she sold the house. (A3434, F) Here the emotional attachment to the dog can be seen not only as an attachment to her but as a connection with the dead daughter, and the selling of the house is so upsetting because it symbolizes the severing of that connection. Sometimes dogs are expendable even though they are part of the family. This is explained in terms of the relationship with them being different from the relationship with a human family member. In a sense our animals were an extension of the family, but always secondary to it and when the dachshund developed incontinent [sic] problems, there was no question that she had to go, since the

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safety of our two young children was paramount. Of course it is a different relationship. (W2322, M) And, as a cursory glance at a dog rescue site will show, changed family circumstances are often the reason that dogs are looking for new homes. But often they are not expendable, even when they are difficult. As one interviewer said: [Y]ou can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends and it’s a bit like that with, well, certainly with Flo … she’s a nightmare but that’s our responsibility. (K001M) Flo was family and was not expendable. But, despite the adage of not choosing your family, there is evidence that people do choose who counts as family and that “the boundaries between relationships that are ‘given’, in terms of consanguineal and/or affinal links, and those that are ‘chosen’ are not necessarily salient in understanding how definitions of family and kin are constructed” (Charles and Davies 2011, 88). So replaceability and expendability may not only be applicable to animals, but when experienced by humans do not raise questions about their human status.

Discussion The evidence that emerges from these written and spoken accounts shows that kinship practices blur human-animal boundaries but that considerable effort is expended to maintain the human-dog distinction. So, while feelings of responsibility and caring practices incorporate dogs into families in a quasi-parental relationship (Power 2008) and analogies are drawn between dogs and children who never grow up, dogs are not necessarily regarded as surrogate children. On the contrary, they are respected and loved as dogs, and interviewees go to some length to distance themselves from the idea that dogs are replacements for children. Second, although kinship practices blur the boundaries between human and animal, there is often a reluctance to admit to practices of intimacy in interviews. People take care to explain that they are maintaining a proper distinction between themselves and their dogs in order to avoid charges of anthropomorphism. This distancing is

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much less evident in the written accounts, which are more open about the closeness and intimacy between humans and their dogs (Charles 2017). Third, dogs are understood as responding to humans and engaging actively in relationships with them. Again this blurs the human-animal boundary because animals are experienced as having capacities which have hitherto been defined as quintessentially human. And the imaginative leap required to establish relationships with animals makes humans better people – kinder and more compassionate. So the issues raised at the beginning of this chapter are present in the way people talk and write about their relationships with dogs: a quasi-parental relationship, a distinction between humans and animals that is blurred in the practices of sharing domestic spaces with dogs, efforts to maintain that distinction by resisting anthropomorphism, and both respecting the dog-ness of dogs and asserting the superiority of humans. So where does this leave the idea of post-human families? The first argument, that human-animal boundaries are blurred in the practices involved in sharing a home with dogs, is supported by my data. Thus whether dogs are regarded as exhibiting what have previously been seen as exclusively human qualities – and there is increasing ethological evidence that they do – or as other, the practices in which dogs and their human companions are enmeshed blur human-animal boundaries. In this sense these practices could be seen as post-human because they undermine notions of human superiority and exceptionalism. The second argument, that dogs’ replaceability means that human exceptionalism remains intact, has been shown to be problematic because the notion of replaceability does not necessarily imply nonhuman status. The third argument, that the extension of the category ‘human’ to other species does not unsettle notions of human superiority, may be valid but appears not to be relevant for understanding cross-species kinship practices because boundaries are blurred rather than shifted. Finally, while it may be possible to identify post-human practices in multi-species households, they exist alongside practices which reinforce the human-animal boundary. Furthermore, it is difficult to approach equality in dog-human relations because of the responsibility humans hold for their companion dogs and their position of power in relation to them; in this sense, families are a long way from being post-human. Indeed, given the unequal relations of entanglement within which humans and animals interact, and the ambivalent status of companion

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animals as both human and nonhuman, attempts to identify empirically a post-human family seem problematic. What can be said, however, is that a post-human approach to kinship practices highlights the porousness of the category ‘human’ and alerts us both to the deep connections between humans and other animals and to the profoundly unequal ways in which animals are incorporated into social relations with humans, even when they are loved as unique, agentic individuals and seem to rule the roost.

Note A version of this chapter was published as N. Charles (2016), “Post-Human Families? Dog-Human Relations in the Domestic Sphere,” in Sociological Research Online 21, no. 3: 8. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/21/3/8.html. doi: 10.5153/sro.3975. All rights reserved. © Sociological Research Online.

References Benton, Ted. 1993. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice. London: Verso. Bonas, Sheila, June McNicholas, and Glyn M. Collis. 2000. “Pets in the Network of Family Relationships: An Empirical Study.” In Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships between People and Pets, edited by Anthony. L. Podberscek, Elizabeth S. Paul, and James A. Serpell, 209–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bulliet, Richard W. 2005. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia University Press. Carter, Bob, and Nickie Charles. 2013. “Animals, Agency and Resistance.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43, no. 3 (September): 322–40. doi: 10.1111/jtsb.12019. Carter, Marie. 2015. “What’s So Wrong with ‘Pet Parenting’?” Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/marie-carter/pet-parenting-whats-sowrong-with-it_b_7079174.html (accessed 28 April 2015). Charles, Nickie. 2014. “‘Animals Just Love You the Way You Are’: Experiencing Kinship across the Species Barrier.” Sociology 48, no. 4 (January): 715–30. doi:10.1177/0038038513515353. – 2017. “Written and Spoken Words: Representations of Animals and Intimacy.” The Sociological Review 65, no. 1: 117–33.

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Charles, Nickie, and Charlotte Aull Davies. 2011. “My Family and Other Animals: Pets as Kin.” In Humans and Other Animals: Critical Perspectives, edited by Bob Carter and Nickie Charles, 69–92. Basingstoke, Uk: Palgrave. Also published in Sociological Research Online 13, no. 5 (2011). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/4.html. Cornwell, Jocelyn. 1984. Hard-Earned Lives: Accounts of Health and Illness. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul. Coughlan, Sean. 2015. “Children ‘More Likely to Confide in Pets than Siblings.’” bbc Education, 7 May. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ education-32608771. Cudworth, Erika. 2011. Social Lives with Other Animals. Basingstoke, Uk: Palgrave Macmillan. Enders-Slegers, Marie-Jose. 2000. “The Meaning of Companion Animals: Qualitative Analysis of the Life Histories of Elderly Cat and Dog Owners.” In Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships between People and Pets, edited by Anthony L. Podberscek, Elizabeth S. Paul, and James A. Serpell, 237–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, Rebekah. 2006. “Animal Behaviours, Post-Human Lives: Everyday Negotiations of the Animal-Human Divide in Pet-Keeping.” Social & Cultural Geography 7, no. 4 (August): 525–37. Franklin, Adrian. 1999. Animals and Modern Cultures. London: Sage. – 2006. “‘Be[a]ware of the Dog’: A Post-Humanist Approach to Housing.” Housing, Theory and Society 23, no. 3 (February): 137–56. Fudge, Erika. Pets. 2008. Stocksfield, Uk: Acumen. Greenebaum, Jessica. 2004. “It’s a Dog’s Life: Elevating Status from Pet to ‘Fur Baby’ at Yappy Hour.” Society and Animals 12, no. 2 (January): 117–35. Grier, Katherine C. 2006. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harris Poll. 2011. “Pets Really Are Members of the Family.” The Harris Poll. https://theharrispoll.com/americans-have-always-had-interestingrelationships-with-their-pets-whether-that-pet-is-a-cat-dog-parakeet-orsomething-else-the-pet-industry-is-thriving-and-for-good-reason-morethan-three-in-f/ (accessed 21 December 2012). Hart, Lynette A. 1995. “Dogs as Human Companions: A Review of the Relationship.” In The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People, edited by James Serpell, 161–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hills, Thomas T., and Stephen Butterfill. 2015. “From Foraging to Autonoetic Consciousness: The Primal Self as a Consequence of Embodied Prospective Foraging.” Current Zoology 61, no. 2 (April): 368–81. Ingold, Tim. 2012. “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment.” In Animals and the Human Imagination, edited by Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, 31–54. New York: Columbia University Press. Irvine, Lesley. 2004. If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. – 2009. “Animal Selfhood.” In Between the Species, edited by A. Arluke and C. Sanders, 329–38. Boston: Pearson. Kurlander, Steven. 2015. “A Pet Peeve Against ‘Pet Parenting’ – Time to Push Back Against Equating Animals with Children.” Huffington Post, 24 March. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-kurlander/a-pet-peeveagainst-pet-parenting----time-to-push-back-against-equating-animals-withchildren_b_6919270.html. MO. 2009. The Mass Observation Archive Annual Report, no. 31. Sussex, Uk: The Mass Observation Archive. Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association. 2014. “Pet Population 2014.” http:// www.pfma.org.uk/pet-population-2014/ (accessed 28 February 2019). Pew Research Center. 2006. “Gauging Family Intimacy.” Pew Research Center Publications, 7 March. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/303/gauging-familyintimacy. Power, Emma. 2008. “Furry Families: Making a Human-Dog Family through Home.” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 5 (March): 535–55. Redmalm, David. 2015. “Pet Grief: When Is Non-Human Life Grievable?” The Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (February): 19–35. Sewell, Brian. 2013. Sleeping with Dogs: A Peripheral Autobiography. London: Quartet. Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Bloome. 2000. Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literacy Practices. Cresskill, Nj: Hampton Press, Inc. Shipman, Pat. 2011. The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Shir-Vertesh, Dafna. 2012. “‘Flexible Personhood’: Loving Animals as Family Members in Israel.” American Anthropologist 114, no. 3 (August): 420–32. Smith, Bradley, Kirrilly Thompson, Larissa Clarkson, and Drew Dawson. 2014. “The Prevalence and Implications of Human-Animal Co-sleeping in an Australian Sample.” Anthrozoos 27, no. 4: 543–51.

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Smith, Julie Ann. 2003. “Beyond Dominance and Affection: Living with Rabbits in Post-Humanist Households.” Society and Animals 11, no. 2 (January): 181–97. Tester, Keith. 1991. Animals and Society. London: Routledge. Thomas, Keith. 1984. Man and the Natural World. Harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin. Thompson, Kirrilly, and Bradley Smith. 2014. “Should We Let Sleeping Dogs Lie … With Us? Synthesizing the Literature and Setting the Agenda for Research on Human-Animal Co-sleeping Practices.” Humanimalia 6, no. 1: 114–27. Tipper, Becky. 2011. “‘A Dog Who I Know Quite Well’: Everyday Relationships between Children and Animals.” Children’s Geographies 9, no. 2 (May): 145–65. Topàl, József, and Màrta Gàsci. 2012. “Lessons We Should Learn from Our Unique Relationship with Dogs: An Ethological Approach.” In Crossing Boundaries: Investigating Human-Animal Relationships, edited by Lynda Birke and Jo Hockenhull, 163–86. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1984. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER SIX

Connected and Interconnected: Bali People and Bali Dogs Kim McCreanor, Stephen McCreanor, and Agra Utari

Bali is a densely populated island within the Indonesian archipelago. Ranked as a top tourist destination for 2017 (Trip Advisor 2017), it is worldfamous for its volcanic mountains, iconic beaches, lush rice paddies, and astoundingly unique culture. Home to over four million people, the island is also inhabited by a large population of canines, including the indigenous Bali Dog. Prior to a rabies incursion in 2008, the island had one of the highest dog to human ratios in the world (Widyastuti et al. 2015, 3). Unprepared rabies management systems and inexperienced veterinary and medical professionals (Susilawathi et al. 2012, 5) saw the local government authorities respond to the incursion by mass culling, using teams armed with strychnine-laced baits and blow darts (Putra et al. 2013, 648). This mass elimination of free-roaming dogs drew the attention of international animal welfare agencies and media and shone a spotlight on the Bali Dog. This attention in turn spawned a growth of formal and informal animal welfare groups on the island as foriegners sought to end the culling and to save the Bali Dog from annihilation (CBS News 2010). Bali Dogs have lived alongside Balinese people for thousands of years. Theirs is a unique reciprocal relationship entwined in scripture, ceremony, and mutual obligation, a relationship that does not align with the Western cultural context of pet ownership. Within this nonalignment is where the greatest threat to the Bali Dog lies. Foreign-initiated sterilization programs, rescue activities, and adoption appeals abound

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throughout the tourist areas. The majority of these are underpinned by the Western context of responsible pet ownership and openly demand human behavioural change – for Balinese people to emulate the Western model of pet ownership. This chapter strives to show a canine-human relationship that is not the same as a pet-owner relationship in the Western context, and yet is strong as it is deeply rooted in ancient cultural and religious practices. In order to demonstrate this understanding of the canine-human relationship within Balinese culture, we unpack the role of the Bali Dog by drawing on local mythology, stories, interviews with a local priest and landlord, and our observations as animal welfare and humane educators. We will begin by describing a few significant aspects of Bali’s cultural context.

Bali’s Cultural Context According to legend, a long time ago a small village on Bali Island was experiencing a long drought. Its people were suffering from extreme hunger and thirst. On another island, a holy man was meditating on the top of a mountain with his companion, a dog. Through his meditations, he realized that it was he who had to do something to help the suffering village. He asked his dog to run to the village, taking with him a few grains of rice. The dog, carrying the rice in his mouth, swam through the ocean, climbed mountain after mountain, scaled cliff walls, and traversed jungles before eventually arriving at the village. He carefully put the grains of rice in between cracks in the dried earth, mixing it with his saliva. The people watched the dog. Then they waited, and waited. Soon drops of water began to run through the cracked soil. The flow became stronger and it streamed towards the hungry people. In shock they jumped, rolled, and danced in the streams. The water was enough to wet the soil and grow rice paddies, the very same rice paddies that are now the main attraction of Bali. The island became greener and greener with enough food and water for all the people. This all came about because of a dog. This myth is still passed on to children in the villages around Batukaru Mountain in Bali. The people in this region hold their Bali Dogs in high regard, knowing that without them they would have no life. Some villages still hold onto the old ways of giving the family Bali

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Dogs the privilege of the first rice cooked from the rice barn. Not the gods, not the father, not the baby, but the Bali Dog. Unlike most of Indonesia, over 80 percent of people in Bali practise Hinduism. This belief is reflected in every aspect of their social and cultural life, including dog ownership and management (Arief 2014, 1). Twelve-year-old Gung Dewi and her family have adopted over thirty Bali Dogs over the past two years. They dedicate their lives, energy, and resources to providing their Bali Dogs with a kind life, food, and shelter. This story began when Gung Dewi was hospitalized. Her condition was rapidly worsening and her family feared that she would die. Her father, on his way to visit his daughter in hospital, found a small black puppy on the road. Desperate to cheer his daughter up in some small way, he took the puppy with him on the visit. As soon as the puppy was placed on her bed, Gung Dewi responded. She sat up with a smile, hugged the puppy, and requested a meal. Soon after this she made a full recovery and returned home. With the puppy. Gung Dewi and her family believe that the puppy saved her life and therefore they owe a debt of karma to all Bali Dogs, which they are repaying by dedicating their lives to saving abandoned and unwanted Bali Dogs from around their village. Every year on the anniversary of their meeting, the family celebrate through a ceremony where they offer their continued thanks to the now-adult Bali Dog. They prepare tumpeng, a traditional cone of turmeric rice with eggs, chicken, and peanuts placed around it. The Bali Dog receives the first serving of rice, hand-fed by Gung Dewi, in keeping with the legend of King Yudhistira as told in the Hindu epic of the Mahabharata. The Yudhistira story (see the end of this chapter) is a powerful influencer of attitude and is reflected in the relationship between Balinese people and their indigenous dogs. Widyastuti et al. (2015, 6) found that the Mahabharata was continually invoked by study participants as an explanation for why Balinese people respect and accept so many free-roaming dogs within their communities. One of the participants from their study described Balinese people’s relations with Bali Dogs quite well: Keeping dogs for the Balinese is just part of the way we are … we respect dogs due to the story of Yudhistira … they have a number of functions but many times people just want dogs around and they feel that life is quiet, or something is missing or not complete

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if a dog is not there. We are used to having so many dogs around since we were young. (Widyastuti et al. 2015, 6) A quote from a participant in another study on Bali Dogs succinctly captures the relationships: “You are not Balinese if you don’t have a dog” (Arief 2014, 12).

Bali Dogs as Working Dogs Bali Dogs are first and foremost working dogs. They have a definite function within the community and fulfil several important roles. If they fail to perform these roles or if they step outside their boundaries, they are dealt with swiftly and sometimes cruelly. This approach and attitude is not unlike the usual social norms of a Balinese banjar (village). There are expectations placed on each community member; if these are not adhered to or lived up to, then punishment ensues. Guarding their family compound is the primary function of the Bali Dog; in fact they are known for their guarding skills (Corrier et al. 2018, 2). Their classic pose is sitting or lying on the compound entrance steps with their legs dangling over the edge. When strangers approach, they jump to attention with a full-faced snarl. They are without doubt impressive, intimidating, and very good at their job. This guarding function is not limited to intruders of the human kind. The Bali Dog is responsible for warning their family when spirits are roaming the village or have entered the compound. It is said that some dogs have differing barks for different spirits and that these particular dogs are true professional Bali Dogs. There are some Bali Dogs that are said to be able to sense and repel black magic. Particularly sought after, these dogs are also said to be able to sense when someone within the village will die. “A Dog is a type of alarm bell for spirits because it is more sensitive than people to negative powers. On some sacred days such as Kajeng Kliwon when the spirits roam you find the dogs howling like mad” (Widyastuti et al. 2015, 7). Another ancient story depicts Bali Dogs as both reliable guards and excellent hunters and explains why they are allowed to eat the many offerings placed out for the gods several times a day in Bali. This story also offers an explanation for the night-time noise, the chorus of howling

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that is often cited as troublesome by tourists but is known by many others as the song of the Bali Dog. This is captured in mythology and expressed by Balinese artist Ida Bagus Made Togog (Togog 1937). The story goes that the King of Klungkung Regency had two Bali Dogs, Blang Uyang and Blang Suun. These dogs were remarkable hunters; no jungle animal was safe from them. This made the other animals of the jungle alarmed and angry. They called a meeting to ask, “how can we kill these two dogs?” The Anteater said, “If you make me the King of all the animals I will kill them dead.” All the animals were happy to hear this and agreed with his request.  The Anteater climbed to the top of the royal pavilion whilst the King was dining. Blang Uyang and Blang Suun were seated at the King’s feet. They both saw the Anteater and, acting in protection of the King, they jumped up to attack him, but in so doing they knocked over the King’s dinner. The King was furious; he jumped up and cut off the heads of both his dogs and two of his servants. Other servants came running and tried to put the heads back on. In their haste they put the wrong heads on the wrong bodies. The heads of the dogs were placed onto the bodies of the humans. The legend tells us that every full moon the dogs of Bali mourn. They see shadows of dogs’ heads with human bodies and that makes them sad. The story also explains that Bali Dogs are permitted to eat offerings because they were correct when they tried to protect the King (Geertz 2016, 112). Bali Dogs also work alongside and with rural farmers and villagers in the mountainous regions of the island, protecting rice fields and livestock and as ancient partners in the hunt for food. Naturally small and slim with strong legs and long tails, Bali Dogs are natural-born hunters and in some rural areas Balinese families are dependent upon them for this function. Their body shape is aerodynamic and they show little fear in tracking prey along the edges of cliffs and high ridges. The ‘owners’ ensure their hunting dogs are filled with the energy required to hunt and bring down deer, porcupine, or boar. No special training is undertaken; rather, puppies learn from their elders. On seeing the tools of the hunt, the nets and boots, they change from family dogs to soldiers. During the hunt itself, the Bali Dogs read their human companions. Fuelled with eggs and honey, the pack, usually consisting of three to five Bali Dogs, all know their position and the rules of the hunt. Once prey is spotted they circle and threaten. They will not bite

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or kill the prey; they herd it towards the human’s net, after which their job is done. An equally important but more utilitarian function is to keep their family compound snake-free, or at the very least to alert the humans when there is a reptilian breach of the compound walls. This is an essential role and protects their family’s chickens and eggs as well as protecting the children of the family by ensuring snakes are dispensed with before small children find them an interesting, yet deadly, plaything. The Bali Dog also serves as a disposal unit, keeping down the piles of trash and offerings that accompany human life in a Balinese compound and village. Without Bali Dogs to perform the role of mobile garbage disposal, the trash and leftover offerings soon pile up and provide a ready food source for rats. Left unchecked, the rat population will multiply rapidly, causing the risk of disease, eating food supplies and crops, and attracting snakes into compounds. In summary, Bali Dogs have utility within Balinese community life. They are expected to work by performing the duties of guard (physical and spiritual), playmate, and rubbish disposal unit. They are seen to be independent beings who are not reliant upon their human companions for food, shelter, or direction (Orr 2016, 69). This understanding and relationship contradicts the Western concept of pet ownership, where it can be reasonably expected that even working dogs will have their basic needs taken care of by their human owners. In 2004 the Balinese government repealed a law that had been issued by the Dutch colonialists in 1926. This law, Staatsblad No. 451, was put in place to stop the spread of rabies into Bali from other islands within the archipelago. The regulation prevented any mammal from being imported into Bali and was strictly enforced. Whilst there were instances of expatriates illegally importing their breed dogs into Bali prior to the mid-2000s, it was very rare to see a dog of any type other than the Bali Dog. That is, until the law was repealed. After the repeal, the population of Western breed dogs has continued to rise rapidly in parallel with the growth of the expatriate community. These two changes have impacted upon the Bali Dog and feed into the challenges they face today. Western breed dogs are seen by Balinese people as a symbol of wealth or affluence and for these reasons are highly desired, with the Bali Dog being considered second best and not needing or being worthy of the attention of a breed dog. The expatriate community have also

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imported their Western pet ownership perspectives and expectations of what a dog-human relationship should look like. Westernization of canine-human relations, however, has not quite undermined Bali Dog–human relations, which are more collaborative ones, based on Bali Dogs as working dogs. An excerpt from our interview with the Head of Village where the authors reside captures this. He has a breed dog, a Golden Retriever, but his family compound is also home to six Bali Dogs. When he was asked why this is the case, the reply was quick and uttered in a way that suggests it is obvious. “Breed Dogs are not as clever as Bali Dogs. We need Bali Dogs to protect our home and family. The Breed Dogs are fun, and they look pretty but they are not Bali Dogs.”

Acquiring Dogs One difference between Balinese and Western dog-human relationships can be seen in the process of acquiring a dog. In the Western context, acquiring a new dog for the family is usually a task done over time and with care. Research is undertaken into the needs of different breeds, debates are held about adopting or purchasing from a breeder, and advice is sought from others before a decision is finally made. When Balinese seek a dog for their family, they use the expression “collect dogs”; let us use this expression here. Balinese will collect Bali Dog puppies from within their village or from the local market, or be gifted one by a neighbour or friend. Males are favoured over females as they are believed to be better guard dogs and cause less problems because the family does not need to find homes for litters of puppies in the future. The collection of the pups (this simply means that they go and get one or two dogs) is not always random or allowed to happen by chance. There is an ancient system and mechanism for how to select the right Bali Dog puppy for one’s needs. A set of breed standards for the Bali Dog have been recorded in ancient scriptures and are used to judge whether the puppy collected from the local market or obtained from a relative will be a professional dog or if it will be trouble. Balinese Mangkus (priests) are a source of knowledge about the breed standards and will be able to offer advice on the type of dog one has selected, based on a set of measurements, body posturing, colouring, and tail alignment. These categories are based on a Balinese sacred scripture called Lontar Carcan Asu.

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Gong Sabarung

This dog passes wind every time it barks. He carries wisdom and is respected by animals and spirits.

I Puser Taun

A dog that has a parallel hair whorl on both right and left side of its neck, or under its chin. This dog is feared by black magic practitioners and is sensitive towards negative energies.

I Blang Uyang

A dog with a black tongue, skin, and hair. These dogs can also have extra toes on either or both of their back legs. This dog is believed to be the incarnation of the God Dharma and is the King of Dogs. A rare and valuable Bali Dog, highly sought after. He can bark at squirrels or birds and they will fall instantly to the ground. This dog is treated differently from other dogs because he is so rare. Unfortunately, this dog does not live long.

Blang Bungkem

Contrary to Indian Hinduism, the Balinese use animals in their religious sacrifices, including dogs. For sacrifice a brown/red dog with black on his snout is required. The dog represents God Rudra (the God who protects the creatures). The reddish brown represents orange which is the colour of Rudra. This ceremony is performed to protect a new family compound. After being sacrificed the dog is skinned. His pelt is stretched into a kite shape; the meat is used as a satay along with other animals that have been sacrificed. The sacrifice ‘kite’ is dragged along the edges of the compound to create a seal of protection before being buried on the northwest side of the area with the other satay meat. The burial is symbolic to enable the compound and family to receive protection from the dog and other animals.

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Asu bulu barak layah bolong

A red and brownish dog who has either black stripes or a hole in his tongue. This dog can neutralize negative energy and is effective at guarding the house.

Asu selem

Black dog with red ear tips. This dog brings luck. He is the destroyer of unfortunate events.

Asu rajeg wesi

White and black dog with black eyes. This dog destroys black magic that enters family compounds.

Asu tulus

White dog with one black nail on his right paw. This dog has the power to make all people of disrepute behave nicely to his owner. He will save his owner’s life.

Asu barang

A dog of any colouring with a flip-flop ear. This dog is believed to be the King’s favourite. He will bring peace and harmony into the area.

In addition to selections based on such criteria, there are also times when, just as in Western countries, Balinese people keep a Bali Dog simply because he or she arrived at their house and stayed. If this happens, then the dog symbolizes something special; it is said in Bali that the dog is the carrier of peace and prosperity. Another example of how Balinese people view their relationships with dogs differently from those in the West can be seen in the idea of sacrifice.

Bali Dogs as Sacrifice The topic of sacrificing dogs is a subject that often draws negative attention from outsiders. In order to explore this topic further, an interview was conducted with a Balinese Mangku (priest), I Made Sudarya, about the topic of sacrifice. He was asked to elaborate on the use of animals in Balinese Hinduism ceremonies. His response was as follows:

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The rich and ancient tradition of Balinese Hinduism leads to an inevitable action of offering flesh to the almighty by sacrifice. The sacrifice tradition comes from our animistic and dynamistic roots that are influenced by Bhairava and the Goddess of Kali.1 The action of sacrifice has been done for thousands of years and has involved many animals such as chickens, ducks, goose, goat, cows, buffalos, male pigs, tortoises, and of course Bali Dogs. Humans have various purposes for offering animals to deities and specific animal sacrifices are associated with differing ceremonies. Bali Dogs, for instance, are sacrificed for the mecaru ceremony, which involves purification of a new compound or a new temple. This purification process is an offering for the ground-level spirits (Bhuta Yadnya) so that they will not bother the humans who will stay in the new place in the future. The sacrifice also has a purpose for the animals used; it is to elevate their form and ensure their rebirth into a better life – that is, human. In Balinese tradition, it is believed that humans, as the highest creature on earth, have the responsibility to carry these other animals to rebirth into a nobler creature.2 As gory and unpalatable as it may seem, this purpose of elevating another creature to the same level as humans shows that the division between humans and other animals may be set in physical terms but not spiritually; thus, the understanding of these practices differs from the Western perspective.

Bali Dogs as Independent Subjects No matter which way a Bali Dog is chosen or arrives at a compound, there is a unique and ancient system used to tell the personality, or character, of the dog. This system, performed only on puppies and known as Guna Jaya Kala Paksa, involves a complex ritual using pieces of coconut leaf. The puppy’s nose is measured, from the tip to between the eyes. This basic measurement is then used as the foundation ruler which dictates the number of folds that can be obtained from around the coconut leaf. Folds are counted whilst saying out loud “Gunya, Jaya, Paksa, Ketek, Kiul.” The word spoken on the last fold tells of the character of the puppy.

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Guna: Jaya: Paksa: Ketek: Kiul:

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Useful for hunting and guarding, very loyal dog. Will bring the owner good luck, a charismatic dog. A dominant dog who is very loud and assertive. This dog is dirty and has a large appetite. A lazy dog who will be hard to train.

Bali Dog puppies are petted, cossetted, and nurtured, but changes in these socialization patterns begin when an adolescent dog is able to run and shows an interest in leaving the compound. The household now considers the dog responsible for his or her own provisioning. Unlike Western dog owners, Balinese people will rarely interfere with Bali Dogs’ interactions with each other on the streets, only becoming involved when a neighbourhood dog enters their compound uninvited. The lack of provisioning and the importance of the independence of inter-canine social and biological relationships illustrate how Balinese people relate to the Bali Dogs as independent subjects in their own society and not as subordinates in a dependent relationship with a human being (Orr 2016, 69).

Rabies Outbreak in 2008 No tale about the dogs of Bali can be told without addressing the subject of rabies, a disease that has shaken the ancient relationship between Balinese people and their Bali Dog to its core. Rabies was first confirmed on the island in late November 2008 (Putra et al. n.d., 1) and is thought to have been carried by a dog accompanying a fisherman from the island of Sulawesi. At the outset of the incursion Bali had no policies for rabies PEP and no dog bite surveillance systems, rabies diagnostic facilities, or vaccines for dogs or humans available (Putra et al. 2013, 648). Seemingly overnight a bite from a dog, a not uncommon occurrence, shifted from being an unpleasant and undoubtedly painful experience to a possible death sentence. As humans began to die from this disease, so the Bali Dog began to be seen as a threat to be feared and eliminated. Balinese people found themselves in conflict with their culture, their government, each other, and their indigenous dog. There were incidents of widespread dog culling of unconfined dogs in areas with confirmed rabies cases by local government authorities using strychnine-laced baits and blow darts (Putra et al. 2013, 648). People reported anger and

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sadness at having their dogs killed but were unable to retaliate, as the culling was local- and provincial- government-driven. An equal number of people reported being relieved to have the dogs killed as they were fearful of the disease (Widyastuti et al. 2015, 12). Whilst it has been scientifically proven through numerous studies that to break the rabies cycle 70 percent of a dog population must be vaccinated (Putra et al. n.d., 2), the free-roaming nature of the Bali Dog made them hard to catch for vaccination, and during many of the early Ngo-run vaccination campaigns, Balinese would hide their dogs from the teams, fearing that they would kill them. The emergency response strategies put into place failed to contain the outbreak, and by September 2010 rabies had been confirmed in 221 villages around the island (Putra et al. 2013, 648).  Vaccinating dogs against rabies was not a common practice in Bali until 2010. A success story in controlling rabies utilized the common local knowledge of Bali Dogs as being excellent guard dogs and their natural guarding behaviour in general. Knowledge of legends, behaviour of dogs, and existing cultural norms have been effectively used by some villages’ Pecalang (community police force) to promote vaccination for rabies in Bali. Each Pecalang consists of men from within the village who volunteer to maintain the security of the local area and who perform traffic control during events and ceremonial activities. This cultural norm and reflected canine behaviour have been used to explain to local community leaders by Ngo educators the concept of herd immunity in the fight against rabies. Herd immunity refers to the fact that those animals who are vaccinated protect those who are not by acting as a barrier for the incoming disease (McDonald 2017). Imagery of the village Bali Dogs forming a pack and guarding the community from outside, against other dogs who are possibly infected with rabies, aligns the foreign concept of herd immunity with Bali’s cultural norm, manifested in the Pecalang. Placing collars on vaccinated dogs that mirror the colouring of the cloth worn by the Pecalang further strengthens this essential public health message. In the years since the rabies outbreak, vaccination campaigns have continued, and this example shows that one of the more effective way to introduce foreign practices of vaccinating dogs to Bali people is by utilizing local practice and knowledge. There is considerable work still to be done to bring the disease under control. More education programs are needed to ensure that people know what

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to do in the event of a dog bite from a suspect animal. For example, Widyastuti et al. (2015, 15) found that only 62 percent of respondents to a survey believed that washing a wound from a suspect dog bite was necessary, due to a widely held belief (pre-rabies) that dog licks could heal wounds. Because of the rabies outbreak, government policies, and tourists’ expectations, there is increasing pressure to change the relationship between the Balinese people and their dogs towards the idea of individualistic dog ownership. Today people keep fewer dogs. Dogs now wear collars, something that would not have been seen prior to 2008. A collared dog indicates an owned and vaccinated dog. The Balinese government decreed in 2009 that dogs be chained and caged in an attempt to restrict the movement of animals and therefore the spread of rabies. This decree has resulted in suffering for both dogs and humans, with Balinese people protesting that confining a dog is against the spirit of the Bali Dog (Widyastuti et al. 2015, 6). Thus, when visiting a banjar these days, you will still see free-roaming Bali Dogs, the vast majority of whom will be wearing the distinctive purple collar indicating their vaccinated status and also that they belong to someone. Local dog owners confirm that their dogs are rabies-vaccinated and ensure that dogs have collars in order to keep them safe from any culling activities. All of these reinforce the importance of valuing and working within the cultural context. Widyastuti et al. (2015, 4) emphasized that “improving animal management practices without stigmatizing community beliefs on the importance of dogs requires a better understanding of community attitudes and beliefs.” In other words, rather than emulating the Western model of pet ownership, policies should be based on understanding of local attitudes and beliefs; empowering locally driven choice by giving people skills and resources is essential to ensure mutually beneficial Bali Dog–human relationships. This chapter has demonstrated that Bali’s canine-human relationships differ from individualistic dog ownership in the Western context and are rooted in ancient cultural and religious practices; yet, the canid-human relationship in Bali is evolving because of the fear of rabies, tourists’ expectations, and changes in government policies. Although cultural beliefs about the relationship seem to persist, it remains to be seen if the story of Yudhistira and his dog will continue to be told and

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enacted throughout coming generations. We end this chapter with this influential story of King Yudhistira, which illustrates the basis of the relationship between Bali Dogs and Bali people. Yudhistira finally stood at the god Indra’s chariot. Indra loomed over Yudhistira – a noble and skilled man – and his trusty companion, an ugly dog that had joined him one day on his trek while he was resting under a tree, alone and tired. He had lost his brothers on the journey – one by one they died – from starvation, the bone-chillingly cold nights, and the brutality of the heat during the day. One by one they were taken from him. It was when his last brother perished that he found himself at his lowest, under that lonely tree, when the dog appeared to him and never left. They had been searching for Indra’s chariot on that mountain to take them the final way to the gates of heaven. Yudhistira and his brothers had heard finding this place, this paradise, would bring them peace. They were brave men and many believed they could make the journey through the treacherous mountains but in the end it was Yudhistira alone, with his trusted dog, who made it. Together he and the dog had passed over jagged rocks that cut them, hot sand that burned, painful thorns from unwelcoming bushes, and deep mud that threatened to suck them in and not let them go. When they found food – sometimes Yudhistira finding it, sometimes the dog – they always shared it. When neither found food, they starved together. And as sometimes only loneliness can bring to two creatures, it brought Yudhistira and his dog love. He trusted the dog with his life. His dog was looking up at him and he patted his head. They had finally made it to the place they were searching, and Indra’s voice bellowed out to him, “Oh, you finally arrived! I have been waiting for you so long! It’s a pleasure to have you here in my chariot, let’s fly to heaven.” Yudhistira and his dog took a few steps toward the chariot when Indra raised a hand, “but … the dog can’t come, look at it, it’s old and thin. It’s not worthy of my heaven.” His dog stopped and Yudhistira looked down at him. The dog lay down at Yudhistira’s side, resting its head on his cracked paws. Yudhistira looked back up at Indra, “I’m sorry, if the dog can’t come with me,

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we will turn around and go back now. I thank you for your invitation, but I cannot leave this animal. He has been my faithful companion during this journey.” Yudhistira headed back down the mountain, the long arduous path they had just come. “Stop.” Indra cried out. Yudhistira turned and discovered not his dog on the ground where it had been, but the dog transformed back into its real shape: the God Dharma. “Now you can come, this was your final test and you showed that you deserve to come with me.” Indra opened the doors to the chariot and Yudhistira stepped in. Indra closed the doors and off they went.

Notes 1 Sudarya, I Made (Mangku), interview by Agra Utari, 16 January 2018. 2 Ibid.

References Arief, Riana Aryani. 2014. “Dog Demography and Populations Estimates for Rabies Control in Bali, Indonesia.” Fort Collins, Co: Master’s thesis, Colorado State University. CBS/AP. 2010. “Killing 200,000 Dogs Doesn’t Halt Rabies in Bali.” cbs News, 2 August. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/killing-200000-dogs-doesnthalt-rabies-in-bali/. Corrieri, Luca, Marco Adda, Adam Miklosi, and Eniko Kubinyi. 2018. “Companion and Free-Ranging Bali Dogs: Environmental Links with Personality Traits in an Endemic Dog Population of South East Asia.” PLoS One 13, no. 6 (June): 1–12. Geertz, Hildred. 2016. Story Telling in Bali. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. McDonald, Fiona. 2017. “This Short Animation Perfectly Explains Why Your Kid Still Needs to Be Vaccinated Even if Everyone Else’s Is.” Science Alert, 25 February. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-quick-animation-nailshow-herd-immunity-works. Orr, Yancey. 2016. “Interspecies Semiotics and the Specter of Taboo: The Perception and Interpretation of Dogs and Rabies in Bali, Indonesia.” American Anthropologist 118, no. 1 (March): 67–77.

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Putra, A.A.G., I. Gunata, D. Dharma, and H. Scott-Orr. N.d. “Rabies on the Move in Indonesia – Incursion into Bali and Response.” Proceedings of the 12th Symposium of the International Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics, 152–4. Durban, South Africa. Putra, Anak Agung Gde, Katie Hampson, Janice Girardi, Elle Hiby, Darryn Knobel, I. Wayan Mardiana, Sunny Townsend, and Helen Scott-Orr. 2013. “Response to a Rabies Epidemic, Bali, Indonesia, 2008–2011.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 19, no. 4 (April): 648–51. Susilawathi, Ni M., Agus E. Darwinata, Ida B.N.P. Dwija, Nyoman S Budayanti, Gusti A.K. Wirasandhi, Ketut Subrata, Ni K. Susilarini, Raka A.A. Sudewi, Frank S. Wignall, and Gusti N.K. Mahardika. 2012. “Epidemiological and Clinical Features of Human Rabies Cases in Bali 2008–2010.” bmc Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1: 1–8. Togog, Ida Bagus Made. 1937. “How the Ant-eater Defeated the King’s Hunting Dog, Asu Belanguyang.” Los Angeles: The Virtual Museum of Balinese Painting. http://sydney.edu.au/heurist/balipaintings/10891.html (accessed 28 February 2019). Trip Advisor. 2017. “Top 25 Destinations – World.” https://www.tripadvisor. com/TravelersChoice-Destinations (accessed 21 January 2018). Widyastuti, Maria Digna Winda, Kevin Louis Bardosh, C. Basri, Sunandar, E. Basuno, A. Jatikusmah, R.A. Arief, A.A.G. Putra, A. Rukmantara, A.T.S. Estopangestie, I. Willyanto, I.K.G. Natakesuma, I.P. Sumantra, D. Grace, F. Unger, and J. Gilbert. 2015. “On Dogs, People and a Rabies Epidemic: Results from a Sociocultural Study in Bali, Indonesia.” Infectious Diseases of Poverty 4, no. 1: 1–18.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Street Dogs, Rights, and the Pursuit of Justice in India’s Dogopolis Lisa Warden

Free-roaming dogs abound in Indian cities. They exist in a context very different from that of their canine counterparts in the West. Many are free agents,1 and have not been intentionally procured or bred by humans for purposes such as companionship, commerce, or task-oriented objectives such as hunting, guarding, and fighting. Laws in India govern human interaction with street dogs.2 Here, I examine the case of street dogs in urban India in the context of the premises of elementary animal rights theory, look at beliefs indigenous to India in which street dogs’ unique legal status emerged, and briefly compare that tradition to its Western counterpart that denies nonhuman animals membership in the moral community. I then consider recent legal rulings pertaining to nonhuman animals, indicating that India’s traditional spiritual values still inform attitudes toward nonhuman animals, in spite of the paradoxically devastating reality of conditions for nonhuman animals3 there. I make the case that while full personhood has clearly not been granted to other animals, street dogs benefit from a unique position such that India approximates a “dogopolis,” a society in which street dogs have been granted de facto denizenship.4 I note the far-reaching potential of spiritual traditions as catalysts for trans-species social justice, and end by considering which tools are most effective in efforts to abolish the exploitation of nonhuman animals.

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This chapter meanders, much like a free-roaming street dog, rather than restricting itself, like a controlled companion dog, to a single yard of thought. This is intentional. The universe of the Indian street dog is complex and multi-dimensional. My aim is to introduce an array of issues that shape street dogs’ lives. The objective is not to advance a singular argument or prove a specific thesis per se, but rather to familiarize readers with the complex reality in which street dogs exist, to provide a glimpse into factors that affect them, and to offer thoughts about strategies for effecting change. My hope is to inspire increased appreciation for India and its street dogs, and highlight subjects for further study. I limit my focus in this chapter to street dogs in urban India. The situation in villages, in terms of issues such as population density, dog-human relationship patterns, and conflict dynamics, differs significantly.

Elementary Animal Rights Theory and Its Relevance for Indian Street Dogs Let us begin with a brief look at some pertinent aspects of elementary animal rights theory. As long as nonhuman animals are legally considered property, their interests will always be secondary to those of humans. According to Gary Francione, the key to ending the exploitation of other animals is to grant them “personhood” (Francione 2000, 101). As with the abolition of human slavery, granting personhood to other animals would mean they would no longer be regarded as personal property, and would benefit from rights and protections as full members of the moral community. Personhood is the mechanism by which their release from property status is secured. In Western philosophical discourse, nonhuman animals have traditionally been denied membership in the community of those considered eligible for rights for various reasons, such as their incapacity for speech and reason. Such attributes, however, have long been dismissed as prerequisites for membership in the community of those deserving of rights. Take, for example, the case of speech-impaired or severely mentally challenged individuals. Modern Western jurisprudence and ethical thought support their claims to the same rights and protections as those granted to other humans. When it comes to nonhuman animals, however, there remains a deeply entrenched rejection of their right to certain basic protections, the

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fundamental one from which all others follow being the right not to be property. This is a clear example of speciesism. The term “speciesism” was coined in a 1970 pamphlet by Richard Ryder. Like racism or sexism, speciesism is a “prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species” (Singer 1975, 6). Francione posits nonhuman animals’ eligibility for personhood on sentience – their ability to suffer. That nonhuman animals have the capacity to register pain and suffering is no longer disputed. It is this capacity – to feel pain, to try to avoid it, and to seek their own fulfillment – that means other animals have interests. As fellow interestbearers, this makes them members of the moral community. Ability to suffer is the necessary and sufficient condition for membership in the moral community. Because they are members of the moral community, we cannot deny them the right not to be means to others’ ends; they are ends in themselves, deserving of legal status that affirms this. Donaldson and Kymlicka, in Zoopolis (2011), suggest a framework for moving toward a society in which other animals’ rightful status is restored. The mechanism they propose is citizenship: nonhuman animals become co-citizens in society, hence the term “zoopolis.” They reject the notion that citizenship is tethered to linguistic agency, maintaining that citizenship includes all who are present and affected. Contrary to the post-abolition split between human and nonhuman animal spheres envisaged by Francione, in which other animals and humans live totally independently of each other, in the zoopolis other animal–human relations will exist, with no clean human–nonhuman animal divide. It will be an interspecies community, and can be a just one if nonhuman animals are granted citizenship rights of different sorts according to the nature of their relationships with humans. Outlining new relationships consistent with nonhuman animals’ rights, Donaldson and Kymlicka suggest three broad groupings: co-citizenship to nonhuman companion and domesticated animals, denizenship to nonhuman liminal animals, meaning urban wildlife who live among us but not directly under our care, and sovereignty to wildlife. Zoopolis reflects an appreciation of the complexity and inevitability of interspecies relationships. It is unrealistic to believe human–nonhuman animal relations will not exist in the post-abolition world. It is not a given that humans should exist completely separated from nonhuman

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animals, or that such relationships cannot ever be just. Particularly in the case of street dogs who do not and cannot exist apart from human settlements, it is precisely animal rights theories elaborating the nuts and bolts of interspecies relationships that give us something to work with. A theory of animals’ rights predicated on a conception of justice that demands that humans and other animals each withdraw to separate camps leaves street dogs out in the theoretical cold. While according to Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework, Indian street dogs would fall under the nonhuman liminal animal umbrella, they share features of nonhuman companion animals. Unlike other urban wildlife, street dogs often enjoy human company and seek them out for this, not just for resources such as food. They exist along a dynamic spectrum between nonhuman liminal and companion animal categories, demonstrating the need for theories allowing for complexity and flux. For theoretical purposes, I place street dogs in the liminal category, while cognizant that many play a companion role to varying degrees and move within the nonhuman companion animal niche. They can be considered liminal because, apart from those adopted into people’s homes, they are not owned, in a strict, private property sense. They receive varying degrees of care from people, but are left to go about their lives independently. Further, street dogs have not been selectively bred for human ends. As such, as a group they differ significantly from the nonhuman companion animal category. Unlike bona fide wildlife, however, although we have not created them for our ends, they are dependent on humans – specifically, on our waste and handouts – for survival. In the zoopolis, the category of citizenship to be granted to nonhuman liminal animals is denizenship. Street dogs share urban space with us and must be recognized as having the right to live among us, the right to have their interests considered, and the right to be accommodated in pursuit of their ways of life. We will assess to what degree Indian street dogs have, in effect, been granted denizenship. In India, there are millions of free-roaming dogs,5 many connected, to varying degrees, to people and/or locations. Although some have a referral household or physical space where they are frequently fed, most are not owned in the private property sense of the term. If, for example, the human inhabitants of the referral household moved elsewhere, the dog, unlike the family motorcycle and radio, would not be taken along.6 These dogs, whom I term “street dogs,” are “commensal”

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with humans, meaning they live among humans, even if not as closely as dogs who reside inside people’s homes and are under their direct control. Literally, the word “commensal” means that two parties sit down at the same table and share a meal. This depicts a key driver in dogs’ self-domestication – greater availability of food in proximity to human settlements (Coppinger and Coppinger 2001, 60). Street dogs evolved as “opportunistic animals” – deriving greater benefits from contiguity with people than from remoteness and separation (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 219). In many societies, street dogs play a valuable ecological role. In societies where waste management is not highly developed and a significant amount of edible waste goes uncollected, street dogs are among the nonhuman urban animals who clean it up, while attempting to meet their survival needs. Although they obviously do not do so out of a sense of duty, the daily scavenging of edible waste by nonhuman urban animals – essentially a waste-processing function – can provide a valuable service by decreasing health risks associated with poor sanitation (Clifton 2001). It is important to appreciate the role of urban scavengers. Garbage is habitat, and some scavenger will always arrive on scene where edible waste is to be had. Of the usual characters – dogs, rats, monkeys, pigs, and snakes – dogs are the species whose relationship in proximity to humans is least problematic (Clifton 2007). The presence of free-roaming monkeys and pigs in urban India provokes significantly greater human– nonhuman animal conflict than does the presence of dogs, whereas rats bring greater health risks, and attract snakes, often venomous and deadly. Humans opposed to dogs occasionally attempt their removal, sometimes with unintended consequences. One such case occurred in Surat, Gujarat, in 1994. Responding to public pressure, city authorities decided to kill thousands of free-roaming dogs (Thomas 2009). Faced with reduced competition for the city’s daily food waste and fewer canine predators, the rat population exploded. An epidemic of plague subsequently broke out, infecting hundreds of people. Officially, fifty-six human deaths were recorded, although the number was likely higher (Woodall 1994; Burns 1994). From an instrumentalist view, then, even based just on public sanitation, it is in humans’ interests to coexist peaceably with street dogs. But what about the point of view of the dogs themselves? What

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challenges do they face? Why might the severity of those challenges make limiting their population an ethically sound alternative? Hardships for them are many. Illness and injury are rife. Most puppies do not survive their first year (Reece 2005, 59). Disease, starvation, predation, and traffic accidents kill and maim innumerable dogs every year. For survivors, extreme hardship is often the norm. Human-dog conflict is exacerbated when nursing females in densely human-populated areas act to defend their young, often provoking violent retaliation from humans (Humane Society International 2010, 21). Similar acrimony can surface when dogs challenge each other for mates, or battle over territory. People are bitten, particularly in areas with high human and street dog densities. Rabies, deadly for both humans and dogs, is transmitted principally through the bites of infected dogs. Human-dog conflict, due to rabies outbreaks, fear, and aggression, not infrequently leads to the killing of dogs by authorities and the public, usually using brutal methods such as strychnine poisoning or beating to death. Although life in proximity to humans has benefits for street dogs – and is in fact the only way they can survive – its costs are very high. Existence for street dogs in urban India is comparable to life for humans in the state of nature famously described by Thomas Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short (though not solitary). Street dogs’ suffering is painfully, ubiquitously evident. On this basis, we can reasonably justify intervening on their behalf to both control their reproduction and work to eradicate rabies, which is a key factor in animosity and cruelty in societies with large numbers of free-roaming dogs (Townsend et al. 2013). Furthermore, while street dogs are not intentionally bred for human ends, their population is related to ours and we bear some responsibility for their existence and well-being.7 Forced sterilization historically is associated with unjust political regimes that deny reproductive rights to certain human populations. In such cases, forced sterilization functioned to limit or eradicate populations deemed pestilent or problematic. While a genocidal impulse certainly exists in the discourses of groups wishing to address population issues through the mass elimination of dogs,8 it is evident that many who advocate mass sterilization do so out of a drive to minimize dogs’ suffering and improve their well-being. In India, efforts to get street dog sterilization and anti-rabies vaccination implemented as national policy were driven by influential figures, such as Maneka Gandhi, Pradeep

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Nath, and Chinny Krishna, who have long records of campaigning to alleviate animal suffering. Dog population management as a professional field of endeavour, by contrast, tends to be highly anthropocentric. The agenda for common objectives such as “disease control” and “population management” is driven by human concerns rather than by canine suffering. The UNDP’s adoption of dog population management programs in Bosnia is a case in point. They have done so because they identified free-roaming dogs as a threat to human security, not because dogs are suffering and need help (UNDP 2015). If street dogs lived in a utopia where scarcity and cruelty were nonexistent, the principle of ‘live, let live, and let reproduce’ would be fine, and population control measures unnecessary. However, life for street dogs in India is clearly dystopian, largely because of human actions. We have the ability to mitigate that, so we must.9 India’s legislation concerning street dogs is unique, reflecting tolerance for coexistence. Instead of dealing with a perceived “over-abundance” of dogs through killing, on paper at least, the only legally sanctioned method for managing street dog populations is surgical sterilization to prevent reproduction (“ABC,” or Animal Birth Control). The ABC program includes anti-rabies vaccination at the time of sterilization. According to rule 6 of the Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules, 2001, enacted under India’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1960), “If the Municipal Corporation or the local authority thinks it expedient to control street dog population, it shall be incumbent upon them to sterilize and immunize street dogs” (Government of India 2001, 3). Killing dogs for population control is prohibited by law. Municipal authorities that perceive an over-abundance of street dogs are legally bound to sterilize the dogs and vaccinate them against rabies. I note the irony that such a law exists pertaining to street dogs while the human population continues to expand, resulting in far greater societal costs than those accrued by the plethora of street dogs – whose very existence and population density are related to those of humans. The dog population control legislation in India is based on the joint World Health Organization (wHo) – World Society for the Protection of Animals (wSPA) publication advocating sterilization in lieu of mass killing (wHo and wSPA 1990). In theory, managing India’s street dog population through ABC is straightforward: to prevent further increase of free-roaming dogs, 70 percent must be sterilized (Mackie 2003). If over 70 percent of the

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street dogs in each part of a given city are sterilized as that city’s ABC program proceeds, the population should eventually decrease, as long as the number of sterilized dogs stays over 70 percent. Considering sterilization as a form of immunization against the “disease” of fertility helps us understand why the 70 percent threshold figure works with regard to population control in the same way that it works for disease control. Another factor in the equation is habitat, and if it is left unaddressed, the carrying capacity for urban scavengers remains unchanged. In such cases, dogs will breed back up to the habitat’s carrying capacity, or some other urban scavenger will. Public sanitation must also be carefully considered, because if food sources disappear suddenly, it would result in tremendous suffering – death by starvation – an unacceptable option in any ethically defensible population management program. While managing free-roaming dog populations may seem straightforward, in reality it is incredibly complex. The sterilization rate is only one aspect of the equation, and this, in itself, is also complex.10 Other relevant aspects include available food resources, longevity and disease rates, breeding patterns, dog movement and migration patterns, human attitudes toward dogs, companion dog ownership patterns and practices, local policies and practices, etc. Although rabies is an important subject due to the numbers of people and dogs that die in India every year because of it,11 detailed discussion is outside this chapter’s scope. It is relevant, however, to make the point that the best defense against rabies is not to eliminate street dogs, but to vaccinate them (Townsend et al. 2013). Mass culling, the default response of many regimes, has actually been proven to be detrimental in rabies control efforts (Kartal and Rowan 2018). It is not the absence of dogs that achieves rabies eradication, but the presence of dogs – vaccinated dogs, that is. A vaccinated dog population functions as a barrier to the immigration of potentially rabid dogs, and constitutes an essential part of sound rabies control strategies. Street dogs are territorial in settings where resources allow them some stability. They oppose the entry of unfamiliar dogs into their territories. If most dogs resident in any one area have been vaccinated, those dogs and their herd immunity act as a defensive barrier against rabies. That barrier protects not only local dogs from infection, but human inhabitants too, since rabies in humans is caused predominantly through the bites of infected dogs.

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If in addition to vaccination, sterilization rates are maintained and reproduction is diminished, the dog population will be healthier and numbers will eventually decrease (Kartal and Rowan 2018). Note that the average life expectancy of sterilized street dogs in Indian cities is under four years (Reece et al. 2008). The other benefit of a sterilized dog population is stability. Fewer potentially unvaccinated dogs come from elsewhere looking for females in heat, fewer pups are produced, and there is less subsequent migration of grown pups into other areas. A stable, healthy dog population is more likely to live in harmony with its human cohabitants than an unstable, unhealthy one (Häsler et al. 2014). This is key, as human attitudes lie at the heart of human-dog conflict, misguided policies, and cruel practices. Conscientiously implemented, sustained interventions that lead to stable, healthy street dog populations can yield positive results for both dogs and humans. Therefore it is in the interests of both dogs and humans to manage street dog populations through ABC intervention. Historical successes demonstrate that it works where properly implemented (Times News Network 2011). In areas such as south Mumbai, the sterilization rate has surpassed 90 percent (Lukose 2014; Welfare of Stray Dogs 2010). In these wards, free-roaming puppies are rare. Successful cases are well documented, and include Jaipur, in the north (Reece and Chawla 2006), Kalimpong, in northeastern India (kAS 2009), the northeastern state of Sikkim (SArAH 2009), and the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan (Kartal and Rowan 2018). It should be noted that these success cases occurred under conditions not present everywhere in India and, as such, may be difficult to replicate. Key factors in successful ABC include sustained, consistent interventions lasting years, exceptionally competent and committed staff and management, and adequate financial resources, often involving support from foreign donors. Nevertheless, evidence demonstrates that properly run ABC programs function in the interests of both humans and free-roaming dogs by decreasing suffering and conflict through preventing rabies deaths and decreasing the numbers of free-roaming dogs (Kartal and Rowan 2018). Problems emerge when ABC is improperly implemented. In such cases it not only fails to stabilize or reduce the street dog population, attenuate human-dog conflict, eradicate rabies, or mitigate dogs’ suffering; it can make things much worse. Elsewhere I have detailed problems with ABC implementation (Warden 2014). These range from

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simply not having good ABC programs in enough cities, to a veritable catalogue of horrors in some places where it is implemented. Offenses include corrupt, profit-driven operations, both at Ngo and government levels, that put revenue ahead of dogs’ welfare; poor quality surgeries with improperly trained staff that result in post-operative complications, infections, and painful death or injury; inhumane catching techniques; post-operative release of dogs in the wrong neighbourhoods, which destabilizes local dog populations and leads to increased dog-dog and dog-human conflict that in turn can fuel rabies transmission and culls; abuse and killing of dogs en route to and from sterilization centres by transporting them in intense, unbearable temperatures without adequate protection; and starving to death of dogs at ABC centres by unscrupulous, profit-driven operators. Although ABC as a strategy for managing the street dog population is ideal in theory, and has succeeded in some places, in practice, often it amounts to a veritable street dog torture program. The knee-jerk (and understandable) reaction in response to such instances is to suspend the entire program until methods are found to prevent abuses. However, the grim reality is that to do so would cause reversion to killing dogs as the official form of population control. Although some argue that, for dogs, ABC gone awry is a fate worse than death, death by strychnine poisoning or electrocution, which is how killing would inevitably be carried out, would not be any less horrific.12 A return to the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of dogs annually by barbaric methods would constitute a massive step backward. There is no going back. The only option is to proceed with ABC, build capacity to do it well, and implement stringent standards and judicious monitoring. There are efforts to this end, although not nearly as effective or efficient as they need to be. Cases in which ABC is brutal, oppressive, and even deadly for street dogs constitute a betrayal of the program’s intentions and standards. This devastating aspect of a sound policy must be successfully addressed.

Nonhuman Animals in the Moral Universe: East versus West Notwithstanding brutal aberrations in the program, that ABC is law and policy in India is remarkable when compared to how “surplus”

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dogs are dealt with elsewhere, and points to an enlightened ethos at work. I point this out in full awareness that although the policy is progressive, law enforcement is poor, corruption is endemic, nonhuman animal exploitation is rife, and authorities in some districts continue to kill or displace dogs.13 Nevertheless, the cultural backdrop against which the unique legal status accorded to street dogs in India developed merits closer examination. Specifically, we might ask whether there is anything distinct about the Indian ethos that is conducive to inclusion of nonhuman animals in the moral universe such that a policy like ABC, that affirms the rights of street dogs to coexist in cities, would become national policy. It is a question worth exploring. Hiranmay Karlekar argues that the Indian ethos, rooted in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, lends itself to inclusion of nonhuman living beings in the moral universe, and that speciesism stems from Judeo-Christian and Renaissance-Humanist traditions (Karlekar 2008). Nanditha Krishna argues that India’s spiritual legacy includes respect for all lifeforms, and that the deification of nonhuman animals served to prevent their exploitation, although that tradition is under siege (Krishna 2010). We gain deeper appreciation of India’s unique cultural context that produced a society in which nonhuman liminal animals essentially have denizenship rights by briefly comparing it to historical human–nonhuman animal dualism in the Western tradition. Considering cultural antecedents that excluded nonhuman animals from the moral universe in the West helps us to appreciate those that functioned to the contrary in India.14 Anthropocentrism, the view that human beings are “primary and central in the order of things,” is fundamental to Western philosophical thought (Steiner 2005, 1). A logical extension of anthropocentric thinking is that nonhuman animals exist for human use and benefit. Aristotle, for example, argues that because nonhuman animals lack reason and speech, they are no different from inanimate objects in any ways that matter; they exist solely for the sake of humans (Aristotle 1981, 69). Although pro–nonhuman animal streams exist in both early Jewish and Christian traditions (Patterson 2002, 21), the anthropocentrism characteristic of Greek philosophy came to dominate the theology of influential Christian thinkers such as Augustine, who maintained that the biblical injunction against killing could not be extended to nonhuman animals because they do not share the faculty of reason (Augustine 1999, 26).

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It is due to Augustine’s influence that Western Christianity can be seen as “anti-animal” (Sorabji 1993, 2). In my own view, and that of theologians such as Andrew Linzey (1994; 1998), Christianity is not, in fact, “anti–nonhuman animal” but grew into that misguided position through the influence of thinkers such as Augustine in error, who on this subject were heavily influenced by the early Greeks. In fact, because of Christianity’s emphasis on intervention on behalf of the oppressed and the powerless, its self-sacrifice of the higher for the lower, and its representation of the saviour of creation by an innocent lamb unjustly slain, Christianity holds immense liberationist potential for nonhuman animals. This has yet to manifest in contemporary Christianity, but the seeds are certainly there. As a worldview, Christian thought has yet to cast off the speciesist shackles that have so deformed it. Thomas Aquinas, another key intellectual whose thought further entrenched speciesist bias in Christian dogma, aimed to reconcile classical Greek philosophy with Christian theology and justified killing nonhuman animals on the basis that they existed for humans. Like Aristotle and Augustine, Aquinas based his devaluation of nonhuman animals on their alleged lack of reason (Aquinas 1995, 3, 146). The displacement of faith in favour of reason that accompanied the ascendance of Humanist values did nothing to reverse Christian thought’s nefarious influence on the status of nonhuman animals in the West. Philosophers such as Descartes regarded nonhuman animals as automata, relegating them to a subordinate and instrumental position. He maintained that they did not have souls and were incapable of suffering (Steiner 2005, 132). This granted humans complete license to objectify and exploit them. Although the Western human–nonhuman animal divide through which other animals have been excluded from the moral universe because they are supposedly unintelligent, devoid of reason, and incapable of suffering has been convincingly challenged, it remains dominant and serves to legitimize widespread speciesism in the West. By contrast, India’s spiritual traditions predispose it to a worldview in which nonhuman animals are regarded as participants in a common moral universe. Veneration of nonhuman animals in India derives from indigenous spiritual traditions. Intrinsic to Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist thought is the central notion that Brahman, the Supreme Being, is present in everything. Not only nonhuman animals, but the earth itself is deserving of respect. Krishna writes that “the ancient

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religions of India … have never differentiated between the soul of a human being and the soul of an animal” (Krishna 2010, 1). Central to the subcontinent’s dominant spiritual ethos are the concepts of dharma, karma, and the transmigration of souls. Dharma can be defined as “right conduct” (Karlekar 2008, 161). Karma comprises one’s deeds and actions, and consequences that ensue from them (163). One’s successive incarnations through births and rebirths are determined by their karma. Laws of karma apply not only to humans but also to nonhuman animals. Salvation through good works and penance is available not only to humans, but to other animals. Another key tenet of Hindu theology is that the Supreme Being incarnates himself in the form of various species (Krishna 2010, 6). The human species is not sacrosanct. This marks a stark contrast to the exclusion of nonhuman animals from a shared moral and spiritual universe that characterizes the theology of Christian thinkers that has been so influential in Western thought. In Hinduism, not only do spiritual laws apply equally to nonhuman and human animal worlds as far as otherworldly matters are concerned; they are pertinent to issues of justice and policy here and now. In the Ramayana, a dog who has been beaten and injured by a sanyasin (an ascetic mendicant) seeks justice from the king, Rama. After hearing the case and weighing it, with input from the dog, the mendicant, and his court, the king rules in favour of the dog, and the offending mendicant is sentenced to a fate which involves rebirth as a dog in his next life. The case affirms several profound points: the dog has interests that can be articulated, the mendicant’s actions were unjust and deserving of punishment, and the dog is entitled to justice. Most significantly, for our purposes, “in the eyes of Rama, whose reign has been held up in the Hindu tradition as an example of the best form of governance there could ever be, a stray dog and a sanyasin had the same claim to justice” (Karlekar 2008, 172). In the Mahabharata, the story of Yudhistira also emphasizes inclusion of nonhuman animals in the moral community (see details in chapter 6). This is one of many examples that show Hindu gods assuming the form of nonhuman animals, which by extension implies that nonhuman animals are not of lesser status than humans. It also reflects the view that human and nonhuman animals are co-members of a single moral universe, and that humans have the same responsibilities to nonhuman animals as to other humans (Karlekar 2008, 182–3).

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Is the traditional Indian ethos of reverence for all lifeforms still operative on any significant level? Many would say no. Nanditha Krishna writes that India’s rich heritage of respect for all lifeforms “has been destroyed” (Krishna 2010, xii). Activist and writer Rukmini Sekhar maintains that while India has some of the world’s best nonhuman animal protection legislation, this has not prevented a drastic rise in systemic cruelty and brutal abuse of nonhuman animals (Sekhar 2014, 72). Karlekar argues that transgression of the ethos of reverence, evidenced in mass dog culls, animal cruelty, and commodification of nonhuman animals in India, constitutes abandonment of the inclusive worldview that historically informed that civilization (Karlekar 2008, 234). The rise of capitalism, under which nonhuman animals are objectified as “resources” for human use, has only furthered their exploitation and the erosion of belief systems that granted them some degree of status, not only in India, but globally. Street dogs have been somewhat shielded from the more pernicious effects of rampant capitalism due to their position outside direct economic relationships with humans. However, in a world in which nonhuman animals’ interests are subordinate to business interests, street dogs are frequent casualties. One need only look at urban “development” and “renewal” initiatives the world over to find attendant mass killing and/or forced relocation of street dogs, such as the mass removal of free-roaming dogs from urban areas ahead of major sporting events and political summits (for example, the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi and the 2011 South East Asian Games in Palembang, Indonesia). As John Sabonmatsu writes, “animal liberation and capitalism are in sum not merely in tension with one another, they are mutually incompatible modes of civilizational development” (Sanbonmatsu 2011, 26). Capitalism’s impulses and its ascendance in India have done much to eclipse the traditional Indian ethos that included nonhuman animals in the moral community.

Nonhuman Animals and the Law in India While the Indian constitution stops short of guaranteeing to nonhuman animals the right not to be used as property, it does mandate “compassion” to them, and this makes it unique. Article 51A reads, “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to have compassion for living creatures” (Constitution of India, Article 51A[g]). In spite of the plethora of horrors

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readily apparent in the treatment of nonhuman animals in India, recent legal rulings indicate that some of the Indian value of reverence for nonhuman animal life still obtains. For instance, in 2011, Gujarat high court judge M.R. Shah ruled that keeping birds in cages constitutes illegal confinement and contravenes the birds’ fundamental right to move freely. During a raid, police seized almost five hundred birds and other animals from commercial pet sellers, who subsequently petitioned the court for their custody. “The high court was apprised with the fact that the birds were kept in small cages, their tails were cut and cello-tape was put on their wings and there were rings on their legs so that they could not fly. Justice Shah observed, ‘Everybody is talking about fundamental rights of the citizen, such as, right to live freely, right to food, right to move freely etc. A day has come to think about the rights of the birds and animals, because of such acts even the birds have vanished,’” reported the Times of India (Times News Network 2011a). The ruling has since been used to issue instructions to municipal administrations, forest conservators, and animal husbandry departments in the states of Karnataka, Punjab, and Haryana (Government of Karnataka 2014). A subsequent case in 2015 in Delhi transpired similarly. In a case against a bird seller, Delhi high court Justice Manmohan Singh ruled that birds have “a fundamental right to fly,” and that the commercial trade in birds constituted a “violation of the rights of birds” (Hindustan Times 2015). In August 2014 the Madras high court in Tamil Nadu upheld the ban on cockfighting that had been skirted around for years via exemptions to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PCA) Act granted on the basis of constitutionally protected religious rituals (Imranullah 2014). Attorney S. Suresh, representing the Animal Welfare Board of India, argued that cockfighting is prohibited by Section 11 (1)(n) of the PCA Act. The judges agreed. The court referred to an earlier ruling, also in Tamil Nadu, in which the judge refused to grant permission for a cockfight at a temple in Madurai (Subramani 2014). In that case, Justice N. Kriubakaran stated that the “court is custodian of not only the rights of citizens, but rights of voiceless non-humans as well,” and referred to the “torture, injury, hurt, discomfort, trauma, agony, pain, distress, disturbance, sorrow, suffering, harm, shock, bleeding, brutal attack” experienced by the birds during cockfights.

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Some Indian judges have viewed themselves as vehicles for the achievement of justice not only for humans, but for nonhuman animals as well. This emancipatory legal project is considered part of India’s spiritual tradition. For example, the late Indian Supreme Court justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, an adherent of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature, wrote: “Justice to animal citizens is as basic to humanism as social justice is to an exploited people … Every time cruelty is practiced on man or beast or bird or insect, we do violence to the Buddha and Mahavira.” His designation of nonhuman animal cruelty not just as a crime but as a sin reveals the overlap between legal and spiritual thought (Iyer 2005). That the spiritual traditions that include nonhuman animals in the moral universe still apply today emerged strikingly in a Supreme Court case in May 2014 regarding the banning of jallikattu, the sadistic sport of bull “taming,” in Tamil Nadu. The court ruled to ban the practice, which supporters argued was an important “religious” tradition (The Hindu 2014).15 In the ruling, Supreme Court Justice Radhakrishnan argued: “As early as 1500–600 BC in Isha-Upanishads it is professed as follows: ‘The universe with its creatures belongs to the land. No creature is superior to any other. Human beings should not be above nature. Let no one species encroach over the rights and privileges of other species.’ In our view, this is the culture and tradition of the country” (Animal Welfare Board of India v. Nagaraja 2014, 70). That the case pertains to nonhuman animal rights, and not simply to prevention of cruelty and hence regulation of potentially exploitative practices, is clarified at the outset: “We are, in these cases, concerned with an issue of seminal importance with regard to the Rights of Animals under our Constitution, laws, culture, tradition, religion and ethology” (2). It further recognizes that the PCA Act was enacted precisely to recognize the “intrinsic value and worth of animals” rather than simply to regulate how they are treated (71). Justice Radhakrishnan proceeds to lament that the United Nations has worked for human rights while totally ignoring those of other species, and includes in the judgment that “the international community should hang their head in shame for not recognizing their rights all these ages” (71). Of the judgment, Hiranmay Karlekar writes: “[it] extends the frontiers of the global discourse on the place of all living beings on earth and whether and to what extent

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the rights of humans can override those of non-humans. In the process, it displays rare acquaintance with the underlying moral/philosophical concept … of ‘speciesism’” (Karlekar 2014). These cases indicate that the PCA Act is increasingly taking precedence over other laws, and that it is a mechanism interpreted to recognize the inherent value of nonhuman animals rather than just to proscribe bad treatment. The language used by the judges themselves accords rights to nonhuman animals and implies that Indian spiritual values are an inherent part of the fabric that rightfully informs the governance of interspecies relationships. With regard to street dogs specifically, the valiant battles waged on their behalf in individual cities, and the relationship with and influence of Indian spiritual values on those battles, would make fascinating chapters in their own right. Here I limit myself to one brief example. In Mumbai in 1994, after years of effort and lobbying on behalf of street dogs by activists, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BmC) decided to stop killing dogs for a five-year trial period (Alvares 2009).16 The BmC made several attempts through the courts to restart killing but never succeeded. Interestingly, in Mumbai both Jains and Parsis played key roles in advocating on behalf of street dogs. Jains share with Hindus and Buddhists the value of ahimsa, or non-violence, belief in the transmigration of souls, human and nonhuman, acceptance of the operating principles of karma and dharma, and the interrelationship of all lifeforms as part of the Supreme Being (Krishna 2010, 1). Jains also believe that no nonhuman animal should be kept in bondage. Parsi beliefs are quite different, but of significance to the engagement of the Parsi community in Mumbai on behalf of street dogs is the high status ascribed to dogs in Zoroastrianism (Krishna 2010, 109), and the remarkable sense of philanthropy displayed by the Parsi community (Dadrawala 2011). In the Bombay High Court, the pro-dog side was represented pro bono by top-notch legal counsel such as Aspi Chinoy, himself Parsi. In a key case in 1998, in which the BmC sought to resume killing street dogs – and lost (Viniyog Parivar Trust v. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai 1998) – both the petitioners and the judge, Justice Shah, were members of the Jain community. Effects of the judgment were far-reaching. Attorney Norma Alvares notes that the ban on dog killing in the neighbouring state of Goa (People for Elimination of Stray

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Troubles v. State of Goa 2008) came about as a direct result of Justice Shah’s 1998 judgment in the BmC case, and that it laid the foundation for the ABC program in Maharashtra and Goa (personal communication to author, 22 October 2014). Of course this does not constitute proof that Indian spiritual values have driven the quest for the rights of street dogs. However, some advocates working in spay-neuter and rescue at the time believe it would be disingenuous to deny the role of religion in securing an improved legal position for street dogs (personal communication to author, 20 August 2012 and 18 October 2014). The Mumbai case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which in 2009 stayed an order of the Bombay High Court permitting the killing of “nuisance” dogs (Prakash 2009). The stay stands, and the chairman of the Animal Welfare Board of India, General Kharb, has tirelessly expressed, in countless letters to offending municipalities, that the Supreme Court ruling applies nationally, and that the killing of dogs by municipal bodies is thereby prohibited.17 That there is a relationship between Indian spiritual values and the unique legal status granted to street dogs would be difficult to deny. The issue merits further study, as does the potential of religious influence generally in efforts to abolish exploitation of nonhuman animals. While the slaughter and abuse of countless nonhuman animals worldwide continue to be justified on the basis of religious precepts, religious beliefs have played decisive roles in emancipation movements such as the abolition of slavery, and there is every reason to assume they can in nonhuman animal liberation advocacy as well. To recap, in spite of the many ways in which they experience tremendous suffering and cruelty, street dogs in India have been granted unique legal status. Under Indian law, they can be neither killed nor displaced. While these do not amount to positive “personhood” rights, they constitute a significant degree of protection when compared to how “surplus” dog populations are addressed elsewhere. Street dogs in India do not fall under the category of “property,” nor do they, like cattle or goats, exist as part of an economic relationship that benefits humans. The case can be made that, to some degree, their protection and status under the law stem from recognition of their inherent value: they exist, therefore they have a right to exist. They are granted, in law at least, the right to occupy their existential niche without human interference.18 When their presence is deemed problematic due to sheer numbers,

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diseases such as rabies, or some other source of conflict, their removal or eradication is not permitted; only sterilization and vaccination are allowed. This does not amount to full-blown personhood as advocated by abolitionists, of course. After all, dogs in India can still be owned, bought, and sold (though this tends to concern “purebreds” rather than street dogs). Street dogs in India, because they fall outside of property and commercial categories, and because they are accorded unique rights, can be viewed as possessing soft-core denizenship, an intermediate step in the evolution of the legal structure on the way to a genuine dogopolis.

The Ingredients of Trans-Species Social Justice If, for argument’s sake, we agree that India’s street dogs have been granted denizenship, and yet they continue to suffer ill treatment, what does this tell us about legal reform as a tool for the attainment of trans-species social justice not only for India’s canine denizens, but for nonhuman animals generally? What it shows, in painfully sober fashion, is that legal strategies – even when accompanied by a significant degree of enforcement – are simply insufficient to establish justice or to guide public attitudes to protect nonhuman animals from human cruelty. Legal changes, such as prohibition of the killing of street dogs, or even potential constitutional amendments that grant nonhuman animals full personhood, will not bring about the utopia that animal rights advocates seek. The drama of Indian street dogs should be enough to illustrate this point. If it is not, one only need look at the example of human slavery. This has been legally abolished, and there is general consensus that it is ethically indefensible. Nonetheless, today there remain millions of human slaves, over 14 million in India alone (Global Slavery Index 2014). Legal solutions have not been a sufficient corrective to human slavery, nor will they be to the injustices that frame the lives of nonhuman animals. Just as the abolition of slavery did not bring racial equity or even freedom from bondage, and the granting of women’s rights did not bring gender equity, so the granting of interim denizenship, or even full personhood, to dogs is insufficient to liberate them from the shackles of speciesist oppression. The study of other emancipation movements is very useful for assessing what strategies might prove effective in efforts to achieve greater justice for nonhuman animals. In most cases, legal strategies play an important but by no means dominant role. Activism, public education,

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consciousness-raising, direct action, reconciliation efforts, structural change, economic redress – all of these, along with legal reform, are spokes on the wheel that turns the vehicle of progress toward a compassionate, just society. Legal and philosophical prescriptions start at utopia – how things should be – and work backwards to try to get reality to catch up. Other strategies, such as rescue and individual acts of compassion, take place in the living dystopian hell and push forwards. All are needed, and none on their own is sufficient for abolition of injustice. Here, I have made the case that India’s street dogs have already been granted de facto denizenship, and that India is, to some degree, a dogopolis.19 Has this led to a more just existence for them? It is inaccurate to claim it has, considering the oppressive conditions in which they continue to live and die since killing street dogs was legally prohibited. Legal reform is only one of the pillars required to support a foundation of justice. In my own limited experience as an observer, commentator, activist, advocate, and implementer of street dog population management efforts in India, while the legal framework prohibiting killing and mandating humane management methods has been very important, the influencing of public attitudes has been even more significant. In my experience, public attitudes are far more effectively influenced through direct personal engagement with the community than through top-down legal edicts. I am not alone in this view. The International Fund for Animal Welfare’s (IFAw) Humane Community Development initiative, for example, uses a stakeholder engagement model when designing and implementing nonhuman companion animal projects in communities around the world. They see community participation as a necessary component of successful interventions (IFAw 2018).20 Some of India’s most successful nonhuman animal protection programs trace their success to participation from members of communities in which they are based; that is, they do not just tend to the needs of nonhuman animals, but also to the needs – and attitudes – of the humans with whom those creatures must coexist. The Visakha Society for the Care and Protection of Animals in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, for example, has a program that regularly provides vegan meals to the city’s poorest street people, which those people share with their street-dwelling nonhuman animal companions (vSPCA 2010). These street dwellers, in turn, act as de facto nonhuman animal protection deputies, keeping the vSPCA informed about people and other animals in need of assistance in their areas. Likewise, in addition to its tireless

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work saving sick and injured street dogs, cows, donkeys, and more, the main thrust of efforts by the Rajasthani organization Animal Aid Unlimited includes fostering the development of nonhuman animal protectors in their local community in Udaipur (Animal Aid Unlimited 2012). Such efforts, over time, work to catalyze opinions at the grassroots level and lead to profound shifts in public attitudes about relationships with nonhuman animals.

Geeta and Shakespeare I will close with a personal anecdote about the power of community participation. In 2010 in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad, India, three non-profit groups, one of which was mine, joined hands to implement a humane dog population management project on the campus of the Indian Institute of Management (IIm-A) (Meitei 2010). I was attending a class there, and a professor asked me if there was anything that could be done to address the increasingly antagonistic relationship between some members of the human community and the resident campus dogs. Our plan was to survey the habitat, do a dog population census, observe human and canine behaviour patterns, spay and/or neuter the dogs, and vaccinate them against rabies. Additionally, we would interact with the human community at IIm-A regarding concerns and questions about the free-roaming dogs and hold public education sessions. People were divided about having dogs on the campus but Indian law did not permit their removal. Attitudes ranged from vehemently anti-dog to supportive of the canines’ right to coexist peacefully in the community. Part of our work was to respond to questions and complaints from humans pertaining to their canine co-habitants. The first call I received, before the program was officially launched, was from a young doctoral student I shall call “Geeta.” Geeta contacted me in February 2010 in distress about a dog she said was dangerous. The dog, named “Shakespeare” because of his customary position outside the library, had growled at her on several occasions. She deemed him a threat to her safety. She was afraid of him, and wanted him immediately removed. I agreed to meet Geeta, have her show me the dog, and discuss the issue. It turned out that Geeta was sympathetic, in theory, to the dogs’ plight, and supportive of our intervention to reduce human-canine

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conflict to create an environment conducive to peaceful coexistence. She had little experience with street dogs, and grew up with a mother who warned her to avoid them because they spread disease. In spite of that, Geeta liked docile dogs. She only had issues with dogs she perceived to be overtly aggressive towards her. As I walked with her across campus to Shakespeare’s turf, it became apparent that the issue was one of fear due to lack of understanding. Arriving at the central common, she pointed with trepidation to a brown dog basking in the sun. “That’s him,” she said. I told her to come with me, stay calm, keep breathing, and do exactly as I did. We walked in Shakespeare’s general direction calmly and slowly, making sure to avert our gaze. When we got to within about ten meters, we stopped, stood still, and continued chatting. Shakespeare noted our presence, but remained relaxed. After a few minutes, Geeta and I squatted down and continued talking, seemingly ignoring Shakespeare. I brought out some biscuits, and we each ate some. That got his attention. I broke off a piece and lobbed it, not directly at him, which would have been perceived as a threat, but off to the side. Shakespeare looked at us, smelled the biscuit, got up, ate it, and waited for more. I continued breaking off bits of biscuit and tossing them so that he had to come closer and closer to get them. Geeta became increasingly nervous as Shakespeare came closer, but I told her he was fine, only interested in the biscuits, and to keep calm. Shakespeare was not a shy dog, but he was wary. Soon he was eating from my hand and accepting caresses. Eventually, Geeta worked up the courage to hold out her hand and let Shakespeare approach and smell it. She then took a deep breath and let him take a piece of biscuit from her hand. She squealed with nervousness and then delight. Presto! An epiphany. It turned out that Shakespeare was a friendly and affectionate dog who had had some unpleasant run-ins with the campus security guards. As an overly enthusiastic young dog, he had jumped up on people in pursuit of play and affection. Some people had not welcomed the exuberant displays, were terrified of him, and mistook his overtures for aggression. They had screamed, in response to which the campus guards came running and hit Shakespeare with their lathis, or bamboo sticks. Thus began Shakespeare’s relationship of antagonism with the guards. On one occasion Geeta found herself boxed in in a corridor in the company of a defensive and frightened Shakespeare, who was being

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threatened by a hostile security guard. Shakespeare mistakenly came to associate Geeta with the guards and growled menacingly at her in self-defense on subsequent occasions. Thus set in the negative spiral in their relationship. As we sat feeding and interacting with Shakespeare, and Geeta encountered his real personality – the dog he was when not under threat or attack – she quickly realized he was a loving, vulnerable being who simply wished to survive and coexist in peace if only given the chance. Geeta understood that she, and many others, had misjudged Shakespeare, that it was not he who was the threat, but the other way around. To witness the change in Geeta  – the evaporation of fear, the dawning of understanding and compassion, the growth of a genuine relationship of affection between her and Shakespeare and other dogs she previously found intimidating – was profoundly moving. I was in need of a volunteer to assist with the campus dog census, and after her exhilarating experience with Shakespeare, she quickly agreed. Geeta regularly accompanied me across both campuses of the hundred-acre institute, showing me areas where dogs were found, where food sources were, where that year’s puppies were tucked away, and generally filling me in on the community’s pro- and anti-dog politics and practices. Using the biscuit bribery and befriending techniques I had demonstrated, Geeta and I documented and got to know each of the sixty-odd dogs who made IIm-A their home. Shed of the oppressive weight of fears she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying for so many years, Geeta morphed into an infatuated schoolgirl, giddy with excitement at the prospect of interacting with her newfound canine friends. Geeta became our number one student volunteer as we carried out the spaying, neutering, vaccinating, and after-care of the campus dogs. For weeks afterward she assisted me, rolling up her sleeves and bathing and medicating dogs suffering from mange, helping me treat dogs with other ailments, and serving as unofficial campus liaison for our program. Not only was her conflict with Shakespeare resolved, Geeta became an active advocate for the dogs, rising to their defense when they were unjustly targeted by haters, and helping to spread the message of coexistence and tolerance through understanding and hands-on experience. Months after Geeta first called me to complain about Shakespeare and demand his removal, after my role in the IIm-A dog project was

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complete, I received an email from her that serves as a poignant illustration of the single most potent weapon in the arsenal against nonhuman animal exploitation: not legal reform, not better enforcement, not public relations campaigns, not lectures, not protests. These are all essential aspects of the battle, but one strategy consistently stands out from the rest: that of simple discipleship – coming alongside a person, acknowledging and sharing their burdens, and demonstrating to them an alternative path, one of peaceful, respectful understanding and interrelationship in the multi-species community. Geeta wrote: [This has] been an amazing inspiration to me. I have befriended so many dogs now … thanks to you – you rejuvenated my soul :) Whenever I feel sad or frustrated over something … I rush to these cuties and I smile :) Their unadulterated expressions – love, growl … whatever – makes me happy because I know that these are real. Shakers is ok with me now. He comes to me, wags his tail, is quite moody though … but that’s ok … he’s my darling! … I miss those fun campus rounds we did ogling dogs :) God bless you. There are so many souls awaiting your healing touch and so many like me awaiting your touch of inspiration. (email message to author, 28 May 2010) What truly blessed Geeta was not me. It was the dogs. I simply happened to be in the right time and place to open the door for her to a world she had shut out due to fear and misunderstanding. That world – the glorious world of street dogs who, given the basic inputs of kindness and consideration, will shower a person with affection, companionship, loyalty, and blessing – had been there all along. Coming alongside those people who, for whatever reason, have become alienated from our nonhuman animal co-citizens, opening the door to their world so that a reconciliation of sorts may take place and the cohabitants can step forth and coexist in a spirit of mutual regard and affection, is the most potent weapon in the battle against speciesism. By all means let us pursue legal reform. Let us demand better enforcement of the laws. Let us document and protest injustice. Let us devise and implement consciousness-raising campaigns. Let us refrain from consuming nonhuman animals and products derived from their exploitation. Let us rescue and tend to the sick and injured, and let us ensure sterilization

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programs are implemented to the highest standards. Let us pursue structural change so that the sphere of those considered morally and politically relevant is no longer limited to that of human producers and consumers. But in all these, let us function as disciples on the path of reconciliation in what will always be an interspecies community. Dominant paradigms will shift away from acceptance of nonhuman animal exploitation as we come alongside those who have been alienated from sensitivity and respect for the nonhuman animal world and help to open the door for them to a newfound sensibility. Under current conditions, the most powerful tool to bring about a collective transformation in the consciousness of the society towards a just, humane and peaceful society that has adopted sustainable lifestyle choices is through the integration of an effective humane education program. Humane education at its very essence is based in “ahimsa” or the adoption of non-violence in thought, word and action. It is thus a path of spiritual evolution … Some of the common problems of inhumane treatment being witnessed in our society today – especially that of violence towards women, children, animals and the environment can be effectively solved only through establishing a culture of consciousness to practice compassion, first in one’s own life and then to all sentient beings in one’s own neighbourhood. The culture of being compassionate, whether to other sentient beings like the mammals and the birds or towards the earth and the environment or to other human beings is rooted in practicing the dharma of “ahimsa” or non-injury in thought, word and deed. Kindness is a language the deaf can hear, the blind can see and animals can feel and reciprocate. (Kharb 2013, 1)

Notes 1 By “free agents,” I mean “unowned.” The terminology is problematic. Some studies (e.g., Morters et al. 2014) argue that most free-roaming dogs are “owned.” That research, done in Bali and South Africa, does not necessarily apply to the Indian scenario. One crucial distinction lies in differing terminology to describe connections between people and free-roaming dogs.

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Morters et al. did not define “ownership” in detail, and considered a dog “owned” by someone if that person feeds the dog every day. For our interest, requirements for “ownership” are more stringent. For example, if someone moved to a different city, would they take the dog? Do they pay for medical care? Would they accept legal liability for damage caused by the dog? From the standpoint of legal and political theory, regular feeding does not imply ownership. Indian law clearly distinguishes between “pet” dogs and street dogs, and the rights of people to feed street dogs (whom they agree they do not own; see note 7 below) are protected. Relations between street dogs and human feeders/carers in India more closely resemble kinship than ownership in the private property sense. Further research and precision regarding terminology to describe relationships between street dogs and people would be beneficial. I use “street dogs” interchangeably with “free-roaming dogs.” Some private property dogs roam freely, but I consider them “owned free-roaming companion dogs.” Ultimately, there is no clean division between “owned” and “unowned” dogs. As the 2007 ICAm dog population management guide says, “In reality, what constitutes dog ownership is highly variable and fits along a spectrum of confinement, provision of resources such as food and shelter and the significance of companionship” (ICAm 2007, 5). Humans are animals, a fact often forgotten and which serves to further entrench a hegemonic and exploitative self-other distinction based on accepted notions of human exceptionalism. To undermine this oppressive dualism, I use the admittedly cumbersome terms “nonhuman animals” and “other animals.” I acknowledge Donaldson and Kymlicka for inspiring my term “dogopolis.” Tamara Kartal and Andrew Rowan estimate the number of street dogs in India to be between 30 and 40 million (Kartal and Rowan 2018). In Indian cities, some people feed street dogs regularly. My February 2015 survey of 57 Delhi-area street dog feeders illuminated these relationships. Feeders regularly fed over 1,300 street dogs; 91 percent fed the same dogs daily. Approximately three-quarters also had “inside” companion dogs. None regarded street dogs they fed as their property. However, 74 percent referred to all or most street dogs they fed as “their” dogs. When asked if they would take the street dogs with them if they moved, replies included “no, because the local vendors are attached to the dogs” and “the dogs live here.” Responses indicate that when a person describes a street dog they feed as “my dog,” it does not imply ownership. Ninety-six percent of respondents

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who referred to street dogs they fed as “their” dogs said they meant “my dog” as in “my relative” or “my family member.” What materialized were relationships of connection, or kinship, between feeders and street dogs that defied commonly received, dualistic notions traditionally used to classify dogs as owned vs unowned, confined vs free, pet vs stray, tame vs feral, etc. Instead of either-or categories, there emerged continuums of connection between people and dogs, relationships of greater or lesser proximity, interaction, and care. I thank Andrew Rowan, former CEo of Humane Society International (HSI), for sharing his early unpublished data showing that street dog population density in Indian cities ranges from under one dog to five dogs per 100 people. This conclusion was drawn from analysis of human and street dog populations in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Jodhpur. In my own census in various Ahmedabad neighbourhoods in 2009–10, I found a similar density range within different neighbourhoods. HSI’s 2014 dog population survey of the state of Haryana, India, found that dog population density is significantly higher in rural areas. E.g., Stray Dog Free Bangalore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =tDQzFFFbPSY (accessed 20 March 2015). For discussion of whether sterilization violates dogs’ rights, see Boonin 2003. For example, there is no scientific consensus on the sex breakdown of the percentage of dogs that must be sterilized in each breeding season to stabilize or reduce dog population density. The human death toll from rabies in India is debated. The wHo number of 20,000 human deaths per year is disputed. See Press Trust of India 2012 for drastically lower figures. For dog electrocutions by Bangalore municipality in the 1990s, see: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWiE6vZa2FY. Death by strychnine poisoning is equally brutal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4CnYCBMd1I. Dog killing in Kerala: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrbQ1_UHS64 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEmCvP4TLSQ; in Andhra Pradesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNa2yhC-gUw; in Kashmir: http:// ibnlive.in.com/news/srinagar-authority-kills-dogs-to-check-menace/145436-3. html. Dog displacement in Gujarat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Jxr7lOebr_w. In Ahmedabad, a 2014 Right to Information (rtI) request prompted an admission by government officials that between 2003 and 2012, municipal workers had caught close to 185,000 dogs and dumped them on the city outskirts (Parikh 2014).

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14 This view is not without its critics. Rod Preece (1999), in Animals and Nature, contends that the Western cultural tradition has been misread and in fact has much to commend it with regard to nonhuman animals. He also contends that Eastern traditions concerning nonhuman animals have been interpreted without adequate critical rigour. 15 Of course jallikattu is not a religious tradition. It is simply a tradition of bullying nonhuman animals for entertainment, which supporters have tried to portray as “religious tradition” in an attempt to bypass its prohibition on the grounds of cruelty. 16 Killing street dogs was not explicitly prohibited by law until 2001. 17 For example, see Kharb 2009, AwBI letter to AmC. 18 The legal status of street dogs in India is under constant threat. In August 2015, after a fatal attack on a child by a dog in Delhi, India’s National Human Rights Commission called for debate on whether human rights should weigh above animal rights in situations where human lives are put at risk due to attack by nonhuman animals (National Human Rights Commission 2015). 19 There is even a 600-page book written by an Indian architect precisely on the subject of planning urban spaces to address human–street dog conflict (Dev 2014). 20 Public participation and engagement will not always work, of course. There are times when intransigence is such that conflict must play out in more antagonistic ways. For example, a process of stakeholder engagement would have been unlikely to have resulted in India’s independence from the British, or the abolition of slavery in the United States.

References Alvares, Norma. 2009. “Comments on the Stray Dogs Judgement by Advocate Norma Alvares.” IDA [In Defense of Animals] India. http://www.idaindia.org/comments-stray-dog-judgment.htm (accessed 28 February 2019). Animal Aid Unlimited. 2012. “People-Power for Animals in Udaipur.” Outreach & Programs blog, 2 April. http://www.animalaidunlimited.com/ blog/people-power-for-animals-in-udaipur/. Animal Welfare Board of India v. Nagaraja. 2014. Supreme Court of India, 7 May. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/39696860/.

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Aquinas, Saint Thomas. 1995. Truth. Translated by Robert W. Mulligan, James V. McGlynn, and Robert W. Schmidt. 3 vols. Indianapolis: Hackett. Aristotle. 1981. The Politics. Translated by T.A. Sinclair. London: Penguin. Augustine. 1999. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York and Toronto: Random House. Boonin, David. 2003. “Robbing PEtA to Spay Paul: Do Animal Rights Include Reproductive Rights?” Between the Species 13, no. 3: 1–8. Burns, John F. 1994. “Thousands Flee Indian City in Deadly Plague Outbreak.” New York Times, 24 September. Clifton, Merritt. 2001. “Street Dogs Keep the Developing World from Going to the Rats.” Animal People News, July/August. – 2007. “Dogs Down, Monkeys Up in India.” Animal People News, June. Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. 2001. Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Constitution of India. Article 51A(g). http://www.constitution.org/cons/ india/p4a51a.html. Dadrawala, Noshir H. 2011. “Parsi Thy Name Is Charity.” Zoroastrians.net, 17 August. http://zoroastrians.net/2011/08/17/parsi-charity-andphilanthropy/. Dev, Rishi. 2014. The Ekistics of Animal and Human Conflict. New Delhi: Copal Publishing Group. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford, Uk: Oxford University Press. Francione, Gary L. 2000. Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Global Slavery Index. 2018. “Country Studies: India.” http://www. globalslaveryindex.org/country/india/ (accessed 28 February 2019). Government of India. 2001. “Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules.” New Delhi: Gazette Notification No. 929, 24 December. Government of Karnataka. 2014. “Letter from the Department of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Services.” 7 June. http://www.arfindia.org/Files/ bird_case.pdf. Häsler, Barbara, Elly Hiby, Will Gilbert, Nalinika Obeyesekere, Houda Bennani, and Jonathan Rushton. 2014. “A One Health Framework for the Evaluation of Rabies Control Programmes: A Case Study from Colombo City, Sri Lanka.” plos Neglected Tropical Diseases 8, no. 10 (October): e3270. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0003270.

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The Hindu. 2014. “Ending Cruelty to Animals.” The Hindu, 13 May. http:// www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/ending-cruelty-to-animals/ article6002031.ece. Hindustan Times. 2015. “Birds Have ‘Fundamental Right to Fly’, They Can’t Be Caged: Delhi HC.” Hindustan Times, 18 May. http://www.hindustantimes. com/india-news/birds-have-fundamental-right-to-fly-they-cannot-becaged-delhi-hc/article1-1348209.aspx. Humane Society International. 2010. Population Survey (Census) of Stray Dog Population in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Unpublished report, project undertaken for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. ICAm (International Companion Animal Management Coalition). 2007. “Humane Dog Population Management Guidance.” http://www.icamcoalition.org/downloads/Humane_Dog_Population_Management_ Guidance_English.pdf (accessed 15 August 2012). IFAw (International Fund for Animal Welfare). 2018. “Humane Community Development.” http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/our-work/cats-and-dogs/ humane-community-development (accessed 28 February 2019). Imranullah, S. Mohamed. 2014. “Cockfight Is Banned under PCA Act.” The Hindu, 22 August. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tptamilnadu/cockfight-is-banned-under-pca-act/article6340267.ece. Iyer, V.R. Krishna. 2005. “The Rights of Our Animal Brethren.” http:// www.animalcrusaders.org/ex_focus.html (accessed 28 February 2019). Originally published in V.R. Krishna Iyer, Random Reflections (New Delhi: Universal Law Publishing Co. Ltd., 2005). Karlekar, Hiranmay. 2008. Savage Humans and Stray Dogs: A Study in Aggression. New Delhi: Sage Publications. – 2014. “An End to Cruelty of the Worst Kind.” The Pioneer, 22 May. Kartal, Tamara, and Andrew Rowan. 2018. “Stray Dog Population Management.” In Field Manual for Small Animal Medicine, 1st ed., edited by Katherine Polak and Therese Kommedal, 15–28. Hoboken, Nj: John Wiley & Sons. kAS. 2009. “Half-Yearly Brief from Kalimpong Animal Shelter (kAS).” 16 October. http://animalshelterkpg.wordpress.com/history/. Kharb, R.M. 2013. “From the Chairman’s Desk.” Animal Citizen 42, no. 1 (January–March): 1–60. http://www.awbi.org/awbi-pdf/ac_janmar_2013.pdf. Krishna, Nanditha. 2010. Sacred Animals of India. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Linzey, Andrew. 1994. Animal Theology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. – 1998. Animal Gospel. Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press.

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Lukose, Anjali. 2014. “Percentage of Sterilised Stray Dogs in City High: Survey.” Indian Express, 25 February. http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ mumbai/percentage-of-sterilised-stray-dogs-in-city-high-survey/. Mackie, W. Marvin. 2003. “Pet Overpopulation and the 70% Rule.” The Pet Press 4, no. 6 (March–April). http://www.quickspay.com/article_ overpop.html. Meitei, Dayananda. 2010. “Family Planning for Dogs in IImA.” Daily News & Analysis, 14 April. http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-family-planningfor-dogs-in-iima-1371132. Morters, Michelle K., Trevelyan J. McKinley, Olivier Restif, Andrew J.K. Conlan, Sarah Cleaveland, Katie Hampson, Helen R. Whay, I. Damriyasa, and James L.N. Wood. 2014. “The Demography of Free-Roaming Dog Populations and Applications to Disease and Population Control.” Journal of Applied Ecology 51, no. 4 (April): 1096–1106. doi: 10.1111/13652664.12279. National Human Rights Commission. 2015. “Stray Dog Menace: NHrD Calls for a Civil Society Debate on Human Rights versus Animal Rights; Also Notice to Centre and Delhi Government to Ascertain Their Views.” 14 August. http://nhrc.nic.in/dispArchive.asp?fno=13702. Parikh, Runa Mukherjee. 2014. “Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation Not to Capture Strays.” Times of India, 10 March. http://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/city/ahmedabad/Ahmedabad-Municipal-Corporation-not-to-capturestrays/articleshow/31755308.cms. Patterson, Charles. 2002. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York: Lantern Books. People for Elimination of Stray Troubles v. State of Goa. 2008. High Court of Judicature at Bombay, 19 December. http://indiankanoon.org/ doc/1139522/. Prakash, Satya. 2009. “Top Lawyers Turn Out in SC for Mumbai Stray Dogs.” Hindustan Times, 24 January. http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ top-lawyers-turn-out-in-sc-for-mumbai-stray-dogs/article1-370342.aspx. Preece, Rod. 1999. Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Press Trust of India. 2012. “WB Leads in Snakebite, Rabies Deaths.” cnn-ibn, 12 April. http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/bengal-leads-in-snakebiterabies-deaths-azad/943377/. Reece, Jack F. 2005. “Dogs and Dog Control in Developing Countries.” In The State of Animals III, edited by Deborah J. Salem and Andrew N. Rowan, 55–64. Washington, DC: Humane Society Press.

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Reece, Jack F., and Sunil K. Chawla. 2006. “Control of Rabies in Jaipur, India, by the Sterilisation and Vaccination of Neighbourhood Dogs.” Veterinary Record 159, no. 12: 379–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/vr.159.12.379. Sanbonmatsu, John. 2011. “Introduction.” In Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, edited by John Sanbonmatsu, 1–32. Lanham, mD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. SArAH. 2009. “Sikkim Anti-Rabies and Animal Health (SArAH) Programme Report.” Government of Sikkim, Department of Animal Husbandry, Livestock, Fisheries and Veterinary Services, June. Sekhar, Rukmini. 2014. “The Cruelty of Speciesism.” Economic & Political Weekly 49, no. 40 (October): 71–2. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement. New York: Harper Collins. Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. London: Duckworth. Steiner, Gary. 2005. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Subramani, A. 2014. “Madras High Court Suggests Ban on Cockfights, Denies Permission to Hold the Event at Temple Near Madurai.” Times of India, 4 June. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Madras-highcourt-suggests-ban-on-cockfights-denies-permission-to-hold-the-event-attemple-near-Madurai/articleshow/36046076.cms. Thomas, Melvyn. 2009. “SmC Aims at Making City Rabies Free, Plans to Sterilise Stray Dogs.” Times of India, 25 November. Times News Network. 2011a. “Birds Cannot Be Kept in Cages: HC.” Times of India, 14 May. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Birdscannot-be-kept-in-cages-HC/articleshow/8304048.cms. – 2011b. “Culling Only Multiplies Dog Numbers.” Times of India, 21 July. Townsend, Sunny E., I. Putu Sumantra, Gusti Ngurah Bagus, Eric Brum, Sarah Cleaveland, Sally Crafter, Ayu P.M. Dewi, et al. 2013. “Designing Programs for Eliminating Canine Rabies from Islands: Bali, Indonesia as a Case Study.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 7, no. 8 (August): e2372. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0002372. UNDP. 2015. “Lopare Implements New Dog Management Plan.” 10 March. http://www.ba.undp.org/content/bosnia_and_herzegovina/en/home/ presscenter/articles/2015/03/10/lopare-implements-new-dog-managementplan/.

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Viniyog Parivar Trust v. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. High Court of Judicature at Bombay, 5 October 1998. http://www.the-laws.com/ Encyclopedia/Browse/Case?CaseId=318991931100. vSPCA. 2010. “Vegan Meals for the Poor.” http://www.vspca.org/programs/ veganmeals.php (accessed 28 February 2019). Warden, Lisa. 2014. “Simplicity, Complexity, and Chaos in ABC: Obstacles to the Successful Implementation of Dog Population Management in India.” In Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable, edited by John Sorenson, 253–67. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Welfare of Stray Dogs. 2010. Visit to wSD Mumbai, 9 January: interview with wSD CEo Abodh Aras. wHo and wSPA. 1990. “Guidelines for Dog Population Management.” wHo/ zooN/90.166. Geneva: World Health Organization (wHo) and World Society for the Protection of Animals (wSPA). Woodall, Jack. 1994. “Update: Human Plague – India.” PromeD Mail, International Society for Infectious Disease, 25 October. Archive No. 19941025.0062.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Gone Stray: A Journey of Gou Mama and Their Fur-Kids Chia-ju Chang

Introduction1 In many big cities, free-roaming dogs – whether they are feral, semiferal, stray, abandoned, or outdoor house pets – living on the streets in densely populated urban centres, either in separate colonies or in close contact with humans, are a fairly common sight.2 The existence of these dogs constitutes a contentious site between humans and nonhumans in Asian societies such as China, India, South Korea, and Vietnam, to name just a few. The issues involving street dogs vary from culture to culture, ranging from dog abandonment, theft and trafficking, illegal farming and trade, slaying (e.g., by trap or poison), to human and nonhuman interspecies tension, concerns for public safety and health, etc. The sustained stray dog problem in Taiwan results from a combination of the following forces: 1) the mass reproduction of dogs and their abandonment in the private puppy mill sector; 2) the lack of a consistently pursued spaying and neutering practice; 3) pet abandonment; and 4) the rapid procreation of stray dogs (Chien 2002). From the 1990s, the Taiwanese government began to adopt measures to control the stray dog population. In 1996, the government implemented a “garbage-does-nottouch-the-ground policy”; in 1999, the Legislative Yuan passed an animal protection law, adopting the US animal shelter policy of euthanasia. While the Taiwanese government continues to control the population growth of these dogs by way of systematic extermination, instead of

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adopting other means of control such as tNvr (trapping, neutering, vaccinating, and releasing) or more innovative means such as building “dog condos” as in Thailand, their effort, however great, has not been effective (Jennings 2007). To protest the government’s ineffective way of handling the stray issue, several voices have emerged to intervene. These include the growing population of pet lovers, writers, and animal protection groups. Animal protection organizations such as the roC Animal Protection Association (Taiwan dongwu baohu xiehui), Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan (EASt; Taiwan dongwu shenhui yanjiushe), and Life Conservationist Association (Shengming guanhuai xiehui), to name but a few, have been campaigning to reform inhumane animal control practices, to improve animal shelters, to promote responsible pet ownership, and to draw up and implement animal protection legislation. Celebrities and writers have turned their gaze upon this group of animals; they not only write about stray dogs and cats, but also organize press conferences to help raise awareness. Among these stray animal advocacy groups, the most low-profiled and marginalized (both silent and silenced) are the so-called “dog mothers” (gou mama in Mandarin). The term is used to describe these “caretakers” who are on the frontline of stray dog carework. To date, substantial critical attention in the West has been devoted to dogs in the categories of pets or companion animals, dogs in animal shelters, training dogs, and dogs performing other conventional canine roles (so-called “dogological studies,” a term invented by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas), but little attention has been paid to abandoned or free-roaming dogs in the street,3 nor to “stray studies.” The stray finds no space in domesticated or wild animal categories, and hence constitutes an example of what Jesse Arseneault (2013) calls the political “non-concern.” Such negligence within Western critical animal studies is understandable, as in the US or other Anglophone cities the stray dog issue is an almost nonexistent one, or at least not a site of interspecies conflict. Usually when an ownerless dog is spotted, someone will take it in and put up posters to find its owner, or report it to animal control, which will send out an officer to bring it to a shelter. Then, if no one comes to claim the dog, it will be euthanized in approximately ten days to two weeks. What we see on the streets in most Western cities are leashed dogs; the invisibility of stray dogs and their colonies forms

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a sharp contrast between, say, Taipei and New York, and explains this critical void in Western cultural animal studies. Although this article focuses on the urban stray dog problem and the gou mama phenomenon outside of Anglophone contexts, the existence of stray dogs and gou mama’s carework or social performance in a broader sense prompt us to reflect on a universal question of what constitutes collective happiness and well-being in the global Capitalocene Age (a term better suited to address the objectification and capitalization of animal life). In this essay, I attempt to answer the following questions concerning Taiwan’s stray dogs and gou mama: Where do these strays come from? Who are gou mama and what are the differences between gou mama and the “animal hoarders” known in the West? What makes gou mama care for these dogs? What is the Taiwanese public’s perception and reception of gou mama? How do we make sense of the gou mama phenomenon? Are they just an unconnected group of individuals, or is it possible to regard the gou mama as a kind of indigenous animal advocacy social movement? Before answering these questions, allow me to provide a very brief historical account of dogs in Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Dogstory Dogs existed in Taiwan long before modernization took place and, like other species such as deer and butterflies, form part of the country’s indigenous pre-colonial and colonial history and identity. On the island of Taiwan, the aboriginal peoples had long kept dogs (the Formosan Mountain Dog or Taiwan Canis) for hunting purposes, and the practice can be documented from as far back as the fifteenth century, before the Han migrated from China to Taiwan. Unlike the native aboriginals, the agrarian Han settlers raised dogs as watchdogs. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch colonists imported a hunting dog (known as the “flying dog”) to Taiwan to hunt the native Formosan sika deer (Cervus nippon taiouanus). Under Japanese occupation (1895–1945), the Japanese imported Japanese dogs and these began to cross-breed with native Taiwanese dogs. From the 1950s, people began to trade dogs, particularly German Wolfdogs, and this marked the beginning of the post-war commodification of dogs. Large-sized dogs such as German Wolfdogs were popular because of their pragmatic functions as guard, rescue, and hunting dogs, as well as their economic value, i.e. the profit owners made

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by breeding them and selling their pups (Chien 2002, 5). From the end of the 1970s through to the 1990s, the marketplace shifted and became dominated by smaller-sized dogs. In the late 1990s the importing of pet ideology from the West via the commercial arena began to reshape the perception of animals as a commodity, plaything, fashion, or other type of accessory symbolizing social status. It subverted the island’s former pragmatic relationship with and perception of the dogs. With the importation of Western pet ideology, culture, and industry, the human-dog relationship went through another dramatic transformation. This new, highly commercialized form of human-pet relationship engenders a new, restrained perception of love, or what Yi-fu Tuan calls “domination with affection” (1984, 99). Pet dog cultural practice not only incites this new form of domination in Taiwan, it also promotes at least two forms of discrimination. The first is the so-called “breed stereotype” (Scott and Fuller, quoted in Hare and Woods 2013, 201) or “breedism.” Breedism can be regarded a subcategory of speciesism, which is equivalent to racism; it is contingent upon the animal’s “fashion value” (to borrow Baudrillard’s term), either decided by the market or based upon the popularization of a certain breed in mainstream popular culture. Selecting members of the canine species based on their breeds (mainly the dog’s physiological traits and appearance) constitutes and fashions collective taste and consumption, which contributes to the increase of the stray dog population. The second form of discrimination is one that militates against less attractive animals, a factor known as “cutism” (as in the context of East Asian culture, i.e., kawaii-ism) or “lookism.” Lookism is a form of discrimination focused less on breedism or fashion value but more on the attractiveness of an individual animal. Like breedism, lookism has made animals which are not pedigreed or attractive, or are less bodily abled (e.g., old, sick, in some way blemished, etc.), vulnerable to excommunication. In the absence of any mature animal rights or care consciousness, these two forms of discriminatory practice become exacerbated by a prevailing non-kill sentiment, and end up spawning a culture of hypocrisy and irresponsible pet ownership. A culture’s penchant for animal lookism, cutism, and healthism tells more about the culture itself, including insecurity and ambivalence toward a genuine interspecies intimacy with the nonhuman other in the age of capitalist modernity. Such a taste is universal, though it may vary from one culture to the other. As has been aggressively promoted

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by the pet advertisement industry, “petism” creates an insurmountable chasm between reality and representation within one culture or among different cultures. For anyone visiting Taipei in the 1980s, especially those from a country where orderly streets and parks were reserved for human pedestrians and their well-groomed, manicured, and perfumed pooches complete with pink ribbons tied neatly in their hair (domination with affection in disguise!), a glimpse of the following scenes might jolt Westerners out of their imagination of human-dog interspecies relationship: a recently abandoned stray, nervously looking for his or her owner, only to be shooed away by the human and then captured by the dog squad; a pack of not-so-presentable stray dogs prowling the streets; a starving, mange-stricken, but well-behaved stray dog waiting next to a busy stinky tofu stand hoping to get a share of the treat from the customers, and yet no one even seems to acknowledge the creature’s existence. Below is a description provided by an American woman outlining her impressions of Taiwan’s stray dogs in the 1980s, reflections that epitomize the overall Taiwanese attitudes toward dog and human-dog relationship as they then prevailed: When we came here in the 1980s, we did indeed find the condition of street dogs shocking back then, because they were so sick and often terrified of humans – not because they were running around without collars. Many of the urban stray dogs we saw here were nearly hairless from an uncontrolled mange epidemic … The other thing that really shocked us was seeing dogs living their entire lives in tiny cages. At the time, German Shepherds were in fashion. We used to walk by some that were kept in 3'×3' cages their entire lives – their bodies were slack for lack of exercise. At that time, many locals seemed to believe that dogs would rather live in a cage and be fed regularly than live on the street and risk starvation. I believed they were projecting their own preferences onto the animals – security mattered more than freedom. When I walked on the street with my dog on a leash, parents warned their children, “Xiao xing! Gou gou hui yao ni!” (Be careful! The dog will bite you!) Sometimes the children were interested in the dog, but then held back. Sometimes they were already trained into this kind of fear and cried at the mere sight of a dog. Many people regarded dogs as filthy – not to be touched.4

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Why such fear of dogs and the outside world? The premodern Chinese culture provides another clue. Roel Sterckx (2002), in The Animal and Daemon in Ancient China, discusses dog sacrifices in ancient China and proposes that the ritual was linked to the perception of dogs as demonic creatures “operating in the liminal or transitory realm between the domestic and the unknown, danger-stricken outside world” (233). Here the “collective unconsciousness” speaks aloud fears of canine otherness, animality, and spatial transgression, as dogs served as mediators “on the boundaries between domesticity and wildness, inner and outer” (231). Here is another description in Liu Kexiang’s Hill of Wild Dogs, an animal ethnography documenting a group of wild dogs in the 1990s: The tiny frail white dog is named Little Winter Melon, a large crimson rash exposed on the furless skin of her back. Any veterinarian treating a house dog would offer their advice upon seeing this symptom. Their diagnosis would go something like this: left untreated, the festering area will eventually spread over the back and then to the rest of the body. At that point, as in a favus-ridden dog scalded by hot water, inflammation and skin peeling will appear all over, leaving little fur. After that, the body will weaken at an accelerated rate, culminating in a filthy and disease-ridden death. (2007, 16; translated by the author and Steven Mai) The above animal ethnographic texts from the 1980s and 1990s give some insight into the realities of life as a stray. Today, there are fewer stray dogs on the street, as most of them are either rounded up or have shifted their colonies to the fringes of cities, places such as wooded shrubland, riverbanks, or mangrove wetland areas; the lesser visibility of strays on the street is accompanied by an improved interspecies relationship and perception toward stray dogs. On 26 June 2016, the killing of a stray by marines hit Taiwan’s headline news in a story that enraged the public, especially incensing the pet-owning middle class (Jennings 2016). There are still some stray dog abuses and incidents that hit the news in Taiwan. The hostility is, first of all, associated with the public perception of stray dogs as a nuisance; they are vectors of human disease and, as observed by the noted animal ecologist Alan Beck, “[t]he role of the dog is widely recognized in the spread of rabies” (1973, xi). More often than not, stray dogs are considered to be a menace to the urban social order. In

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the media, we hear reports about stray dogs attacking children in places such as China, Taiwan, India, or Mexico. As a result, this high-profile coverage – similar to reports of shark attacks – tends to highlight or exaggerate the danger of wild, untamed animals, these events often being magnified and serving as a pretext for species extermination. Instead of seizing the opportunity to educate the public how to live and share space with wild or semi-wild animals, most media tend to create a disastrous spectacle to improve ratings.

Stray Dog Lexicon In this section, I review the local lexicon of stray dogs to get a sense of the different perceptions and attitudes towards dogs. The words for stray dogs included here are yegou (feral or wild dogs), liulang gou (stray, free-roaming, wandering dog), jiegou (street dogs), and mao haizi (fur-kids). I should first note that the differentiation between feral and stray, as often found in Western scientific literature, is not straightforward within the cultural-linguistic context of Taiwan. While the term “feral” refers to the progeny of formerly domesticated animals that have lived all their lives apart from people, the term “stray” pertains to semidomesticated dogs that have at some point been in contact with humans but became lost or were abandoned and can, therefore, easily be reintroduced to human community. One hypothesis is that given how densely populated Taiwan is, one is unlikely to spot truly feral dogs and colonies. Yegou means “wild dogs.” This somewhat outdated term that can be traced back to the colonial era, when the native Formosan Dogs were referred to as yegou. Here ye literally means “wild” or “barbaric,” so the native Formosan Dogs were called yegou to connote their undisciplined nature, as opposed to the well-trained military dogs the Japanese brought to the island or the well-behaved house dogs. Yegou later morphed to refer to ownerless, free-roaming dogs on the streets with a derogatory connotation and gradually went out of fashion. Now the term is rarely used, except when referring to stray dogs negatively or, metaphorically, to an “insane” person. Having said this, however, the Taiwanese nature writer Liu Kexiang’s animal ethnography called Hill of Wild Dogs (Yegou zhi qiu) attempts to rectify the term’s negative association with the notion of wildness. Here, his careful choice of the word yegou over other terms aims to re-enchant the dogs’ wild nature with a totality of their own

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lifeworld that, according to Liu, is missing or castrated in domesticated pet/companion dogs. Liu would go so far as to oppose neutering or spaying yegou, since this would deprive them of their vitality and ability to pursue what Hannah Arendt calls “a life of action.” Challenging the public and activist perceptions of stray dogs on the streets as a mishap, Liu contends in his creative animal ethnography that, for all the adversities stray or semi-feral dogs may face, they still fare better than their confined cousins, and that it is more natural and dignified (a humanist term) to live as a “wild dog” than as a castrated pet dog – an ambiguous and intermediate category that the anthropologist Edmund Leach called “man-animals” (Leach quoted in Fudge 2014, 8). The second word in the lexicon for ownerless street dogs is liulang gou, or “free-roaming or wandering dog.” It is the most commonly used term, referring to both feral and stray. Despite its popularity, Liu Kexiang opposes the use of liulang gou to describe this group of dogs, as the term liulang, which literally means “wandering around from one place to the other,” carries an inaccurate portrayal of dogs’ biology, in that they are not wanderers but are in fact quite territorial and protective of their colonies. The name liulang gou derives from the other term liulang han, which refers to a homeless person who lives on the street. In my view, liulang/wandering suggests more of an existential state of homelessness, rather than the literal spatial mobility of moving about from one place to the other. The next word in the lexicon is jiegou; it literally means “street dog.” The rise of animal rights awareness in Taiwan has engendered corrective naming practices over the past two decades. For example, activists have promoted calling domesticated animals “companion animals” instead of pets to redress the ills of cutism and breedism. Jiegou is another friendly and politically correct term for ownerless dogs on the street in urban centres. Like liulang gou, it is directly inspired from another politically correct term for homeless people, jieyou (street friends). Here jie means “street,” so jiegou pertains to dogs that live and sleep on the street. The intention is to counteract the sense of stigma and hostility associated with the labels we impose on these animals. The last one on the list is mao haizi, a term directly adopted and translated from the English term “fur-kids.” In general, mao haizi mainly refers to pets or companion animals. It is also used to refer to dogs and cats in animal shelters, either surrendered by their owners or captured

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from the street. Dog animal activists have been popularizing this term in public, as for instance during dog adoption campaigns, in a conviction that the naming of animals in a positive light helps boost the adoption rate, which has been far below other methods of acquiring dogs. Mao haizi enables the public to imagine shelter dogs as our children in Confucian family-based moral epistemology. The rhetoric of humanizing or anthropomorphizing the dogs is strategically instrumentalized to advance an animal advocacy cause. Activists even appropriate commercial branding strategy to “repackage” stray dogs. For example, some activists came up with the idea to brand mutts as a new breed called “mikesi,” which is a phonetic translation of “mix” as in “mixed breed.” These strategies have proven to be quite successful in “selling” stray dogs to the public, especially the ones that are not purebred, cute, healthy, or bodily abled. In the case of renaming stray dogs as mao haizi, it helps build a bridge to interspecies kinship, asserting that they are our own children (only with fur) regardless of how they look, but not in the manner of objectifying pets by trivially anthropomorphizing them by dyeing their fur, making them wear shoes, etc. The list runs the gamut of appellations for stray dogs from the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras and reflects a shift of Taiwanese society from a hunting, agrarian, and colonial economy to an industrial and capitalist society. These synonyms denote different material and phenomenological aspects of being an “ownerless” dog in the eyes of different groups of people. Some perceive them as urban objects without any forms of agency that deserve to be rounded up and exterminated. Some, as in the case of Liu Kexiang, see their existence as vibrant and a part of Taiwan’s urban ecology; urbanites must accept their existence and grant them their right to live. Some see them as an embodiment of suffering that demands action to create change. Though this essay centres on the stray body, I shall nonetheless highlight the fluid status of a dog’s “identity” or label as pet, stray, or shelter dog. For example, a pet (companion) dog who was born on a puppy farm and landed in a pet store can be purchased and doted on for a short period of time and then abandoned by the owner or break loose within a month, and then find herself wandering the street and fed by a street vendor. Later she may be captured by a dog squad and end up in an animal shelter, then get adopted, and then get abandoned or run away to live on the street again. Thus repeats the cycle for her and her pups.

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Let me provide my recent encounter with a stray dog. Last year while I was in Guandu, a district north of Taipei, I noticed a well-groomed but nervous-looking black dog who constantly appeared and wandered about in the area near the Guandu mrt station. This dog was probably a mutt with some traits of a Formosan Mountain Dog. He entered a Starbucks and was greeted by the barista and some customers, including me. Obviously he felt comfortable around humans. Later I found out that a local woman, who owned a bicycle store across from the Starbucks, had been feeding him, the same as the baristas. He survived by transforming into a community dog. Just as I learned about the woman’s decision to adopt him and offered to help take the dog to a vet to make sure it was properly vaccinated and neutered, he disappeared on the day of the vet appointment. Rumour has it that he was captured by a dog squad and sent to an animal shelter, where his fate was yet to be decided. This all happened within less than three weeks, in which he dramatically changed from a pet/companion animal to an ownerless stray dog, and then a street dog, and then a shelter dog. And we still don’t know the whole dogstory, before and after the brief moment of encounter. It becomes clear that a dog can wind up a stray in several phases of her life. In this sense, I find it fruitful to reframe our perception of “stray” or “stray-ness” not simply as an identity that punctuates a particular moment or moments of a dog’s life but a condition of life itself, which includes both nonhuman and human beings, in the economy of commodity fetishism.

Life Gone Stray: Gou Mama and Dogs What exactly are gou mama? How does one actually become a gou mama? Imagine this scenario: one day, on the way home from work, you buy a bun from a street vendor and, while you are about to enjoy the snack, from the corner of your eye you spot a skinny, miserable-looking, hungry dog, so skinny that its body shows the contours of its ribcage. It looks at you and your food desperately, your heart softens, and you decide to share your bun with this poor creature. The very next day, this selfsame dog comes to the same spot patiently waiting for your arrival. This time, she brings all her pups with her. And you can’t bear to disappoint their expectant looks. The next day, a pack of dogs is waiting for you … Eventually, you become attached to them, starting to worry about whether

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your “fur-kids” are fed or whether they are ill, how they are doing on a typhoon day, their overall safety, and whether they will be rounded up by the dog capture squad. Quite a few Taiwanese women find themselves becoming a gou mama at one or several points in their lives, and most of them do not intend to be one. Although gou mama (a.k.a. aixin mama, meaning “kind or loving mother”) cut across marital and maternal statuses, class, occupation, age, even nationality (i.e., Taiwanese, South Asian, and US and European expats), the majority of these women are either middle-aged or elderly (possibly even retirees), working class, and do not have higher education.5 Their primary work involves feeding and rescuing dogs, and even taking care of them when they are sick. If they can afford it financially, they also provide tNvr. While most of them feed the animals outdoors, some take animals home, some build shelters, and some even quit their jobs in order to become full-time caretakers. Due to the lack of familial and social support and understanding, exacerbated by their constant financial neediness, many of them are, over the years, overwhelmed, ultimately suffering from so-called “compassion fatigue” (Figley and Roop 2006). However, this is not the same as animal hoarding, which is a pathological phenomenon that has emerged more commonly in Western hypercapitalist societies. Animal hoarding behaviour is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, attributed to the early or sudden loss of a loved one, often termed “emotional bereavement,” and an inability to let go (Lockwood 1994, 18–21). Animal hoarding, according to one study, is practised primarily by females, as often reflected in the Western stereotype of the old “cat lady” who lives in relative isolation in urban areas (Patronek 2008, 220).6 Westerners who have never encountered a Taiwanese gou mama might immediately identify them with animal hoarders and mistake their sheltering of dogs for a form of obsession. On a superficial level, there appear to be striking resemblances between gou mama and animal hoarders in terms of gender, involvement with stray animals, social marginality, and a sense of bereavement. In actuality, however, gou mama are quite different from animal hoarders. As pointed out by Lin Yi-shan, director of the Taiwan Animal Equality Association, who interviewed over four hundred gou mama, most of them do not actually start to feed and care for dogs out of “a compulsion to collect stray animals in such numbers that they eventually overwhelm the person’s ability to provide them with adequate care” (Serpell 1996, 32).

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Unlike animal hoarders, whose collecting behaviour is linked to their love of or obsession with animals, some gou mama in Lin’s fieldwork show that gou mama’s involvement with stray dogs has more to do with a sense of responsibility, empathy, and guilt for the dogs, rather than “love” or obsession. Let us take Zhuo mama (Mother Zhuo) as an example. She originally began to care for a stray in response to an entreaty from her son. And the experience of caring for the dog has since led to a path of carework stretching over a period of more than twenty years. She singlehandedly built a private shelter, now home to forty dogs, to provide adequate outdoor space for the animals. When I visited her shelter, her dogs were all very boisterous, happy, clean, and healthy. In our interview, she talked about each individual dog (all with their own names) with great passion, suggesting she has found meaning and satisfaction in her life as a dogs’ caretaker. Many gou mama in Lin Yi-shan’s fieldwork report that they felt apathy, even disgust and fear, toward dogs before becoming involved. A gou mama even confessed to her fear and dislike of dogs, just like the majority of the Taiwanese people, and to even having eaten dog due to poverty (Lin 2006). Here one might ask: what prompts these women to care for the stray dogs? The answer may lie in what Kenneth Shapiro calls “disgust affect,” that is, a feeling of disgust toward injustice, here the inhuman treatment of animals, so intense that it propels one to take action. According to Shapiro, “disgust affect” is ranked highly among animal activists (1994, 145–65). While this provides useful insight into the gou mama’s motivation for their carework, yet, as it is a localized collective and gendered phenomenon, one still needs to examine other factors to explain this predominately woman-centred animal carework phenomenon in Taiwan. In order to do so, I must first situate both stray dogs and gou mama in a broader capitalist economic context. From the perspective of the production chain analysis, dogs in Taiwan become caught up in pet consumerism and ideology and become objectified from the production “source” to “end of line,” subsequently being disposed of as garbage. Strays in Taiwan are deemed as urban excess, or literally as “living garbage,” in that the job of capturing stray dogs is handled by members of the garbage collection squad. This was true up until recent years. Now the task of dog capturing has gradually shifted to the jurisdiction of the Council of Agriculture (CoA), a government body under the Executive Yuan that is in charge of overseeing

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the affairs of animal welfare and protection. Such conceptualization of stray animals as garbage is also found in other parts of the world. For example, in the documentary Earthlings (Monson 2005), there is a scene in which a garbage collector in an unspecified country literally throws a live dog into a garbage truck, the compactor swallowing up the struggling dog and crushing it together with the garbage. Turning living animals into garbage requires a rethinking of the word “stray.” According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, “stray” as a verb means “to move away aimlessly from a group or from the right course or place”; hence, as a noun, it pertains to a person or animal that has wandered away from the designated course, or becomes homeless or ownerless. Framing “stray” from the perspective of the normalized course of capitalism, being a stray can mean a subject who deviates from the norm charted by the designated capitalist order of life. Capitalist civilization is predicated on the commodification and abstraction of living beings where the shadows of sickness, decay, ugliness, disability, age, and death are eradicated to sustain the illusion of an everlasting cornucopia brimming over with boundless natural resources. Consumers are therefore perpetually trapped in the delusion of a youthful, materialist paradise, a world of life-denying artificiality that feigns the nonexistence of suffering and injustice. Short-term gratification, convenience, and entertainment, together with escape from the stresses and strains of life, have produced a class of self-entitled human subjects who are incapable of perceiving subtle forms of eco-suffering. Denial, indifference, and inaction with respect to the living garbage – that is, letting stray animals live and die on the street – is none other than a form of “slow kill,” or what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” What needs to be examined here is the general public’s acceptance of the normalization of insensitivity; indifference and ignorance are no longer perceived as being a form of inhumanity. Life is its totality either in the sense of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, Jacques Derrida’s “being-outside-law,” or Zygmunt Baumen’s “wasted lives” or “disposable lives” (here I expand the centrality of human lives to include all living creatures), which encompasses every aspect of the dog’s journey, whether in a puppy mill, incarcerated in a pet store on display, living as a companion dog, being a stray, or confined to a shelter. While the techno-engineered urban space, such as streets, public squares, and areas around public buildings and shopping malls, is

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conventionally conceived of as men’s turf, the presence of stray dogs, with their shaggy appearance and excreta, is deemed as an ultimate expression of civil transgression, a sight of barbarity that has to be cordoned off or systematically eliminated by the government. Gou mama’s alliance with stray dogs in urban space inadvertently make them part of the cohort of social deviation, transgression, and defiance, hence a “stray suspect.” They defy demarcation of the urban spatial order. Any defiance of this urban order will be carefully put under surveillance, if not punished. This explains why the public is inclined to lavish accusations on gou mama as ringleaders in the stray dog problem. It is a form of collective scapegoating of stray dog caretakers, women in particular, for transgressing urban, androcentric values and boundaries, whereby animals become the indirect victims of such antagonism, or vice versa. Seeing it through a more culturally specific lens, gou mama caring for nonhuman animals does not accord with urban, middle-class family values, which, in Taiwan, are essentially Confucian. Advocating animal rights, civic responsibility, and interspecies care for this group of animals is difficult to defend, especially in places that view these animals as commodities instead of offspring procreated along patrilineal lines. Women’s involvement with stray dogs weaves together at least two interrelated issues in contemporary Taiwanese society that are deserving of an ecofeminist analysis of multi-species oppression and violence. That is: aggression toward, and marginalization of, both gou mama and stray dogs. Carol Adams’s vegetarian ecofeminist analysis, for example, points out the underlying logic and overlapping objectification and exploitation of women and animals under patriarchy and capitalism, as well as women’s alliance with animals based on a shared experience in capitalist society (1996, 170–96). This gendered disparity reaffirms ecofeminist observations relating to women’s participation in the animal advocacy movement and caregiving, irrespective of whether such a capacity is a patriarchal byproduct or an outcome of a gendered bio-instinct. As many gou mama turn their dog-feeding into a lifelong commitment or lifestyle choice, a constructive theorization of their carework needs to be in place. What now follows is a consideration of gou mama’s carework as a “function of social practice” (to borrow Sarah Ruddicks’s term), accompanied by an analysis of the gou mama phenomenon as a social movement, or a form of activism that is ultimately a step towards the building of a multi-species, ecological community.

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Gou Mama’s Practice as Social Movement and Performance Street dog feeding is a common but marginalized social practice among many Taiwanese women, permeating all strata of society. The initial act of dog-feeding is not merely a subversive performance; it also heralds the beginning of a social movement. When we think of a social movement, we tend to think of a group of people who volunteer to cooperate, to get together to fight for a common cause. One example would be the Occupy Wall Street (owS) protest movement, which is a well-organized group with a clear, specific agenda and goals, and which boasts its own slogan: “We are the 99%!”“Social movements,” write Goldwin and Jasper, “are conscious, concerted and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of the society by using extra-institutional means. They are more conscious than fads and fashions” (2009, 3). According to the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Injustice, “social movements are agencies of the civil society and are reactions against existing social order or attempts to change the social order. In this sense, it is the discrepancy or imbalance between the civil society and social order that generates social movements, and their radicalism or extent of change desired depends mainly on the extent of the perceived imbalance or discrepancy” (Anderson and Herr 2007, 1307). From this example, and that of the Taiwanese feminist-environmental groups, we can conclude that one of the defining traits of a social movement is the notion of collectivity, a group of people getting together to fight for a common cause. What distinguishes gou mama from any sort of social movement is their lack of such a collective will, even though in dog mothers we see a conscious, concerted, and sustained effort, as well as the use of extra-institutional (or even anti-institutional) means to address an urban problem. Although their dog-feeding activity is not necessarily an attempt to change the social order, the act itself is nonetheless a reaction against rigid codes of modernity and civic consciousness with their strictly gender- and species-specific rules of behaviour. Gou mama, unlike organized groups such as anti-nuclear campaigners or the movement opposing the service trade pact with China, are highly individualistic and seemingly apolitical from the standpoint of their desired outcome (meaning they are not trying to change society). Moreover, they tend to maintain a low media profile for the

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protection of the dogs. Accordingly, their actions are discreet, and tend to be perceived by outsiders as eccentric, insane, or ridiculous. Yet what they do is motivated by strong emotions. Being a dog mother for some women is like an inescapable fate, a rite of passage or initiation into a very complicated trans-species identity. It is transformative, and yet at the same time traumatizing. The absence of terms to properly address their activity results in a lack of legitimacy. I would therefore like to propose that their acts be seen as a form of individuated social performance. First, I view social movements (including both loosely defined and more activist, structured ones) as a form of art or performance. In doing so, I am in agreement with the editors of The Social Movement Reader: Cases and Concepts, who equate social movements with artmaking: [S]ocial movements are a bit like art: they are efforts to express sensibilities that have not yet been well articulated, that journalists haven’t written about, that lawmakers have not yet addressed. We all have moral sensibilities – including unspoken intuitions as well as articulated principles and rules – that guide our action, or at least make us feel unease when it is violated. (Goodwin and Jasper 2009, 5) In addition to the assertions that social movements express moral sensibilities which have yet to be articulated, being still devoid of form, and that this process is similar to artistic intuition, social movements are also likened to the power of art in terms of their ability to pose questions and to provoke public opinions without making a political statement. Moreover, viewing social movements, activism, or practice of any sort as an art form allows us to give emotional affect a rightful, legitimate place. It speaks of the ineffable, which can make it more powerful than logical persuasion. It can evoke strong public reactions, and hence has potential for social change. Given dog carework’s strong inherent social, activist, and performative components, and despite its unintentionality, it makes sense to scrutinize the phenomenon under the rubric of performance studies and to examine care-based social practice as a post-humanist/feminist performance or happening. This can be done using performance studies as an organizational umbrella under which a variety of perspectives and different disciplines can converge. With regard to the core “value” of performance studies, writes Richard Schechner, “[as a field], performance

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is sympathetic to the avant-garde, the marginal, the offbeat, the minoritarian, the subversive, the twisted, the queer, the people of color, and the formerly colonized” (2002, 4). So it follows that any project within performance studies “acts against strictly ordered or settled hierarchies of ideas, organizations, or people” (4). To consider gou mama’s dog-feeding as a performance is to consider, in a non-conventional sense, the way this inadvertently incites strong public gut reactions such as disgust and debates. This entails not only gender marginalization within the public urban domain; female experience that includes emotions is likewise pushed to the edge and rendered invalid, as well as animality (especially the post-capitalist living bodies) in urban space. Their involvement with stray dog care makes it hard for them to lead a “normal” social life. A dog mother puts it this way: Why do I say I am marginalized? After I started doing this [caring for stray dogs], I felt pretty depressed after getting involved and I can’t have a normal conversation with people. Whenever people mention dogs, I will immediately inquire whether the dog is neutered. Gradually, people get annoyed with me and I can only befriend dogs. As a result, I have no friends but dogs. (Lin 2006, 18; my translation) Another dog mother states: It is like a destiny, as if I owe these dogs from my previous life. Now reflecting on why I took this path, I think it has something to do with my childhood living conditions. Whenever I go to a place and see a dog scavenging garbage, if I have any food in hand, I will definitely feed it. My family was very poor … so I am familiar with the misery of having no food to eat. Compared to other dog mothers, I am not among those who love dogs. Because my family was so poor, I ate everything: rabbits, rats, and also dogs. (Lin 2006, 40; translated by the author) The dog mother who attributed her actions to her experience of growing up hungry and poor identifies with the animals out of a shared experience of suffering or, more specifically, poverty and hunger. This dog mother’s invocation of destiny suggests predestination, which is not the kind of free, political, agential choice that some Western academics

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like to acknowledge or celebrate. In most cases, being a dog mother is not a conscious, political choice or personal preference in the sense that one can put a banner on the woman’s head and make a proud announcement about it. Such a sense of karmic inevitability calls to mind Judith Butler’s words. In one interview, Butler clarifies some misunderstanding of her gender performativity by declaring that “[p]erformativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms … This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in” (Kotz 1992, 84). By the same token, the phenomenon and “activism” of a dog mother or kind/loving mother is unfortunately locked into the tragedy of a capitalist society that is unable to reflect on its material fetishism and consequence. Now, with the help of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., there have been the first signs of a notable shift of concepts away from animal commodification to the idea of “companion animals” (tongban dongwu). While one can argue this is a new commercial strategy to target the growing demand among urbanites for emotional support, in Taiwan local people are now more open to adopting stray animals, thanks to the documentary Twelve Nights (Raye 2013), which exposed the lives of stray dogs in a public shelter and prompted the Legislative Yuan to pass a new law called “Twelve Nights,” or “Zero Euthanasia.”

Conclusion In theorizing a critical discourse on the stray subject or body, Jesse Arseneault (2013) points out a critical negligence pertaining to this very canine body of strays within cultural and animal studies. “Cultural theory and animal studies have devoted much work to the figure of the dog but comparatively little to the figure of the stray, in spite of its global ubiquity” (137). This stray body finds no space in domesticated or wild animal categories, and hence constitutes an example of a political “non-concern.” In this light, to consider this line of “stray discourse” to be a subset of animal studies is to acknowledge a lack of recognition devoted to strays in the global animal cultural imagination. The very sight of women feeding stray dogs unveils an inconvenient truth about capitalist hypocrisy. That is, it is normal to purchase a dog incarcerated in a small iron cage without knowing where it comes from and to dump it when considering it inconvenient or to lose it as a result

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of negligence, while feeding hungry street dogs is considered a source of social discord. The story of dog mothers and their fur-kids demands that we think about what it means to be a stray and to go stray in a capitalist society. A co-shared life of gou mama with a stray dog not only narrates human solidarity against capitalization of animal life, it shows the meaning and value of humanity. The gou mama’s compassion-based carework rejects her complicit role in engaging in “slow violence” against nonhuman animals, i.e. the total commodification of animal lives as disposable items like a piece of furniture. They shoulder the responsibility that their society dumps on them, just like a child dumps the puppy on his mother once he grows bored with caregiving. Together gou mama and their dogs weave a shared stray life, which is an outcast journey of co-suffering and joy. If anything, it is the capitalism in which our lives are implicated, like the air we breathe, that has gone stray. What gou mama teach us is how to love and co-suffer in the Capitalocene Age of the disposable. As paradoxical as it may seem, this interspecies co-suffering and identification is crucial to the survival of humanity in the twenty-first century, as a way of redeeming the essence of what humans fundamentally are.

Notes 1 Please note that all Chinese names are shown in accordance with Chinese word order, i.e. family name followed by given name. 2 There are, of course, feral, semi-feral, and stray dogs in rural areas. This chapter chooses, however, to focus on urban spaces only, since it is in this limited and predominately human and highly anthropomorphized space that the tension between human and nonhuman is more poignantly manifested. 3 Numerous books have been devoted to companion animals, among them Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Hidden Life of Dogs, Erica Fudge’s Pets, and Donna Haraway and Matthew Begelke’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, to name just a few. 4 From a private email correspondence with American expat Stefani Pfeiffer. I would like to express my gratitude to Stefani for her feedback. 5 This presents an interesting contrast with animal rights activists in the US, or the studies of the animal rights movement, where most activists tend to have much higher levels of education. See Gaarder 2011, 4.

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6 According to the 1999 study, HArC (the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium) found that among 2,000 cases of hoarding, 76% of hoarders are female and more than half live alone. Also see Patronek 2008, 220.

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– 2016. “Hanging of Dog on Taiwan Military Base Stirs Outrage, Reform Pledges.” Los Angeles Times, 29 June. Kotz, Liz. 1992. “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler.” Artforum 31, no. 3 (November): 82–9. Lin, Yi-shan. 2006. “Craziness? Love? Dog Mothers’ Caring Image and Social Situation” [“Gou mama de zhaogu tuxiang yu shehui chujing”]. Master’s thesis, National Tunghua University. (In Chinese) Liu, Kexiang. 2007. Hill of Wild Dogs [Yegou zhi qiu]. Taipei: Yuanliu Publisher. (In Chinese) Lockwood, Randy. 1994. “The Psychology of Animal Collectors.” Animal Hospital Association Trends Magazine 9, no. 6: 18–21. Monson, Shaun, dir. Earthlings. 2005. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=u4r2GXdi7lg (accessed 28 February 2019). Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence: The Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press. Patronek, Gary J. 2008. “Hoarding of Animals: An Under-recognized Public Health Problem in a Difficult-to-Study Population.” In Social Creatures: A Human-Animal Studies Reader, edited by Clifton P. Flynn, 220–9. New York: Lantern Books. Prystay, Cris. 2004. “In Buddhist Bangkok, Even Stray Dogs Have Their Day.” The Wall Street Journal, 24 March. Raye, dir. 2013. Twelve Nights. Taiwan: Atom Cinema. Ruddicks, Sara. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward A Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Serpell, James. 1996 [1986]. In the Company of Animals: A Study of HumanAnimal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, Kenneth. 1994. “The Caring Sleuth: Portrait of an Animal Rights Activist.” Society and Animals 2, no. 2 (January): 145–65. Sterckx, Roel. 2002. The Animal and Daemon in Ancient China. New York: State University of New York Press. Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. 2010. The Hidden Life of Dogs. New York: Mariner Books.

CHAPTER NINE

Caring for Istanbul’s Street Animals: Empathy, Altruism, and Rage Kimberly Hart

The dogs could tell, and that was why they barked at him and tried to corner him. What should he do? “It IS Not ABoUt PrAyErS or vErSES BUt ABoUt yoUr HEArt’S INtENt,” said the Holy Guide. “Boza seller, have you been doing anything recently that may have disturbed people’s lives?” “I have not,” said Mevlut. He didn’t mention that he’d become embroiled in the electricity business. “Perhaps you have and you don’t realize it,” said the Holy Guide. “Dogs can sense when a person doesn’t belong among us. This is their God-given gift. That is why people who want to copy the Europeans are always afraid of dogs.” (Pamuk 2015, 458)

In Pamuk’s recent work, A Strangeness in My Mind, street dogs terrify an itinerant yogurt seller in his walks through the narrow roads of the city’s neighbourhoods. He notes how even as he is afraid of the dogs, they are a barometer of social change as the city experiences gentrification and urban transformation. As the city modernizes, the dogs find themselves unwelcome. Whereas once they were the night wardens of the city and served many useful purposes (İşın 2016; Mazak and Güldal 2011), dogs now become a threat, as do people like him, a poor migrant from rural Anatolia. Despite the views of many who want Istanbul to become a modern Westernized or modern Islamic city, marked by cleanliness and order, there are residents and citizens who attend to the needs of

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street animals, dogs and cats. Many of these individuals feel empathy for all the marginalized beings who live on the streets. In fact, some of those who care for animals are themselves homeless, refugees, ruralurban migrants, or marginal in some way. Despite human suffering on the streets, many do not regard the animals as displaced refugees but as creatures for whom Istanbul is a natural habitat. Indeed, historical accounts by travellers and others demonstrate that they have lived there for many centuries (Austin 2001; Boyar and Fleet 2010; Pinquet 2010; Topçuoğlu 2010). Dogs inhabit the green spaces of the city: around mosques and tombs, on university campuses, in cemeteries and parks, in the rapidly disappearing forests to the north and east, and in the semi-developed periphery where thousands of dogs have been dumped by municipalities. This chapter is on some of my informants in Istanbul who dedicate their lives to the care of street animals without institutional support. Though there are many organizations, such as HAytAP (Hayvan Hakları Federasyonu, Animal Rights Federation), which assist street animals and work to rehouse them, or in Turkish, “to give them an owner” (sahiplendirmek), the informants I discuss here are not attempting to house street animals but rather to assist their lives on the streets. These caring individuals’ conceptualization of where dogs and cats should live is connected to cultural notions of urban space, the right of animals to live outside, and the role of humans in assisting them. I argue that these notions are grounded in a cross-section of ideologies, but mainly in vernacular understandings of Islamic practice and secularist notions of rights encoded in law. These debates are not new but have been active in Turkey for a hundred years (Pinguet 2010; Schick 2010; Topçuoğlu 2010). Further, the contentiousness of these understandings of correct Islamic practice and modern urban space, whether of a pious or secularist orientation, leads to debates and disputes, mobilization and protests. For my informants in this chapter, these contentious tensions lead to arguments, attacks, and legal cases. In this chapter, I am concerned with the empathetic moment in my informants’ accounts of when they noticed that the street animals were needy and saw that they could help. My informants described how they were spurred to empathy for street animals due to a personal crisis and often were further motivated by feelings of hopelessness towards the increasingly authoritarian government. Though Turkey has experienced

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many political upheavals over the ninety-five years of its existence (since 1923), the academic year 2016–17, when I was in Istanbul supported by a Senior Fulbright Scholarship, was particularly contentious, with terrorist attacks perpetrated by the Pkk, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and ISIS almost every two weeks in either Istanbul or Ankara. Meanwhile, there were major military operations in majority Kurdish cities in the southeast (Lepeska 2016) and an influx of over 3.4 million Syrian refugees as of January 2018 (International Crisis Group 2018). My final day in Istanbul was 15 July 2017. Upon arrival in Boston, I learned that a military coup was underway. Needless to say, these acts of terror and the growing authoritarian power of President Erdoğan (Cook 2016) led to a grim atmosphere on the streets. Given this situation, many might find the lives of street animals a trivial matter. However, others noted that the political situation intensified their empathetic actions because improving the animals’ lives is relatively easy whereas improving the political situation is impossible. Further, some noted that international attention may help lead to more balanced reports on street animals and the political situation in general.

Spaces and Policies: Method I have decades of experience in Istanbul, but this fieldwork pushed me to explore neighbourhoods I had never ventured into before. As I walked through the city, I began to see where dogs and cats found habitats. I then started to understand where humans fed them, as I found bowls of water and piles of dry food in crevices and corners. Piles of bones in cemeteries indicated that dogs were being supported in these green spaces. Small shelters, some homemade and others produced by municipalities, dot the landscape, along the borders of green spaces, in parks, and in the backstreets. Walking through neighbourhoods taught me when people fed animals, often in the morning and evening. While walking, I found people feeding animals and approached them, hoping to engage in conversation. These people led me to others, friends or acquaintances, or people they had heard about feeding animals in particular neighbourhoods. I was attentive to municipality because each of the thirty-nine has a different set of policies to manage street animals (BiPati n.d.). With my assistant, a graduate student at Sabancı University, I gathered information on municipal policies from various districts.

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Before I turn to my informants, I will discuss the 5199 Animal Protection Law passed in 2004. This law is used as a guide for structuring the management of animals. This law outlines the protection of animals of all types: pets, livestock, animals used in scientific testing, and stray animals. In ordinary speech, street animals, the dogs and cats who live on the streets of cities and towns throughout Turkey, are referred to as sokak hayvanları, literally “street animals.” Sokak köpekleri are literally “street dogs.” This law, however, refers to street animals as sahipsiz or “ownerless animals” (Ch. 1, Art. 3, f). This term is meant to transform the meaning of street animals from animals who live on the streets to animals who should be owned by humans. This law specifies that local authorities, with the input and assistance of voluntary organizations, must build shelters (Ch. 1, Art. 4, j). According to Article 6, ownerless animals should be brought to shelters, held under observation, “sterilized, vaccinated and rehabilitated … registered and released into the environment that they were taken from.” Though this law refers to animals in general, in practice, only street dogs are managed in this way. Muncipal workers do not take cats off the street for sterilization or vaccination, but residents can bring cats to municipal clinics for these services. In Istanbul, there are two levels of management. On the first level are municipalities. The second level is the IBB or Istanbul Metropolitain Municipality, the İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi. I will discuss the IBB’s plans in the last section of this chapter. Generally speaking, among the thirty-nine municipalities, most have a policy for managing street animals (BiPati n.d.). Services range from municipal veterinary clinics which will spay and neuter street animals for free, to ambulances that can be called to collect an injured or sick animal, to shelters. Some municipalities have all these services; some have none and rely on services provided by the IBB. Dogs and cats are treated differently because dogs are considered a public health threat. Rabies was a problem in Istanbul’s past and cases still occur (Johnson et al. 2010). When municipal workers round up street dogs, they take note of the address where they were picked up so that they can be vaccinated against rabies, spayed or neutered, and returned to the same place. In this way, dogs are treated as if they have a residential address and are members of a neighbourhood. After treatment, vets attach a large plastic tag to one ear. The tag is coded by vaccination year and municipality. As I learned from students working with the dogs on their campus, municipalities can refuse to treat

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dogs if their ear tags indicate that they reside in a different region. I do not know if this is official policy or if this was a peculiar instance. In any case, the dogs are considered by many to be neighbourhood residents and they often have personal names and are known, looked after, and fed in the region where they reside. Yet many dogs disappear. Despite the fact that the 2004 Animal Protection Law indicates that dogs are supposed to be returned to the street address where they were found, the semi-developed periphery and the forests are filled with thousands of dogs because municipalities dump them illegally without spaying, neutering, or vaccination (Alkan 2016; Zeybek 2014). At this point in my research, I do not have evidence that the law caused the dogs to be dumped, nor if the law accelerated the practice. Though dogs have a bad reputation for being territorial, most I met were like the ones Mark Twain saw in 1867, sleeping on the sidewalks (1980). However, I did encounter packs of dogs in the developing regions in remote lots, at construction sites, in the undeveloped periphery, and in forests. These dogs confronted me with defensive barking. Most people would be afraid when encountering these packs. Due to the fact that rabies cases occur, a healthy fear is a good strategy to avoid being bitten, but excessive fear can also be a problem. On one occasion, I encountered a woman running from a dog who, in a friendly and nonthreatening manner, was wagging his tail at her. As she slipped into a café where I was buying coffee, she breathlessly asked for my assistance as I approached the door. I assured her that I would accompany her down the road but pointed out that the dog’s tail wagging indicated his friendly intentions. She was astonished that the dog could communicate at all. This small example of misunderstanding and fear is multiplied many times over. University campuses are contentious sites where students and administrators fight over the future survival of dog and cat populations. Different campuses are known for having either dogs or cats primarily. Şehir University, for instance, had a struggle over street cats, as did Boğaziçi, while Bilgi and Özyeğin both have significant populations of dogs. Because different schools are known for specializing in dogs or cats, many people adopt a pet and then abandon it on a campus where they expect it will be cared for. Further, as I learned from several people who help assist street animal populations on their campus, people treat university campuses as dog shelters. They drop off their dog while they go on vacation and pick it up when they return. Clearly, some people

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are callous towards dogs and cats, even those they have adopted as pets, while others, of all age groups, feel empathy for animals who they do not expect need to be adopted at all. The end results are public policies which ignore cats and, while they attempt to manage dog populations, fail to fully enforce policies relating to dogs. The Istanbul Chamber of Veterinary Surgeons estimates that there are three hundred thousand street dogs in and around the city (Hürriyet 2016). Unlike policies relating to dogs, municipalities and the IBB expect neighbourhood residents to manage street cat populations. There is an expectation that someone will take it upon him- or herself to feed and care for the neighbourhood cats. As one person mentioned offhandedly, every neighbourhood has a teyze (aunt) who cares for cats. Though this practice is often associated with elderly women, men too take care of street animals. Many individuals I interviewed objected to singling out a species for care and some noted that they cared for whomever they found: dogs, cats, and birds. It is not uncommon, however, to find individuals who do identify themselves with a species. A kedici, for instance, is a cat person and a köpekci is a dog person. More generally, people refer to themselves as hayvan sevenler, an animal lover. Because cats are not under surveillance by the state, individuals take it upon themselves to reduce the neighbourhood population by trapping cats and bringing them to municipal veterinary clinics for free spaying and neutering. Many of the individuals I interviewed about their efforts to feed and care for street cats were overwhelmed by the burden of the task and the complications and expense of catching and transporting cats to a municipal vet. For this reason, many neighbourhood private veterinary clinics give discounts for the treatment of street animals, dogs and cats, and they provide payment plans and running tabs for settling bills. In short, dogs and cats live on the street but dogs receive more medical care because they are regarded as a threat to public health.

Interviewing People As I found people feeding street animals, I discovered many who felt threatened. My informants often suffer from verbal, physical, and legal attacks. They are sworn at, beaten, threatened, and sued because they assist the survival of street animals. I met and interviewed about eighty people from a wide range of backgrounds. Individuals who help dogs

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are more threatened than those who care for cats. One woman, for instance, in the conservative neighbourhood of Yenibosna explained how people attacked the street dogs and her too because she helped them. I found her in a small park. Her pet dogs were friendly with street dogs in the neighbourhood and they were all hanging out together. As I approached her, the dogs, her own and the street dogs, defensively barked at me and she intervened only after I assured her from a distance that I had friendly intentions. She apologized and as the tone of our discussion shifted, the dogs relaxed and accepted me. She explained that many people attack the dogs, some out of fear and some out of hostility. She claimed that dogs suffer more than cats because people attack them, believing they are dirty. This, she said, was particularly the case in the poorer neighbourhoods inhabited by conservative Muslims, especially the Shafi. Because the Kurds are mainly Shafi (Olson 1984), I took these statements with trepidation, realizing that saying a population is hostile towards dogs could be a way of expressing prejudice against a marginalized and embattled ethnic minority. In other words, a prejudice against dogs might be interpreted as a way of justifying prejudice against Kurds. For this reason, I will be conducting a large survey to gather more objective data on attitudes towards animals by sectarian, ethnic, gender, and class differences. Another woman, a retired architect living in a well-off neighbourhood in Beşiktaş, explained that creating a welcoming environment for dogs and cats required teaching the public through example. She walked through the streets with a street dog who had become a quasi-pet, and knew others in the neighbourhood by their name and character. She pointed out, as we walked together, that it was only by being a positive example, and demonstrating how animals were deserving of care and not a threat to human public health and safety, that over time she could help change people’s attitudes. Others were not in a material position to be a positive role model in a neighbourhood, such as the Syrian refugee boy whom I also met in Beşiktaş, while he was living on the street and surviving with a street dog. While I met many residents and citizens who loved animals, cared for the ones in their neighbourhood, and defended their right to live on the street, others were activists. One young woman in particular was passionate, ambitious, and well educated. As a vegan, fluent in English, with extensive international experience and inspired by social justice

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and rights movements, she had created a foundation for the care of injured street animals. As well as living with a small population of handicapped dogs and cats in her apartment, she organized trips to feed dogs in the forests and in the city’s underdeveloped periphery. As well as being driven by a sense of social justice for animals, she organized supply drives to care for humans in eastern towns, such as Cizre, that had been destroyed by the Turkish military in battles with the Kurds. In these drives to assist people, she did not overlook the animals who had been injured in battles or who had lost the care of empathetic individuals who had fled as regions were bombed. She worked with another woman in the neighbourhood who cared for anyone she encountered, she said, dogs, cats, and all manner of birds. I noted that the dogs in that region were especially well regarded. Each wore a collar, with a tag indicating the dog’s name and his/her personality and special medical needs. Though I met many pious Sunni Muslims who describe mercy and compassion as key motivations in their efforts, more of these individuals cared for cats than for dogs. However, it is important to note that historical sources on the street dogs of Istanbul clearly indicate that during the Ottoman Empire, before radical secularization, modernization, and Westernization policies were enacted at the foundation of the Republic (Zücker 2005), a prejudice against dogs and a preference for cats seem not to have existed. In fact, as many scholars of the street dogs argue (İşın 2016; Pinquet 2010; Schick 2010; Topçuoğlu 2010), the pious neighbourhoods cared for the street dogs and protected them when modernizers during the late empire attempted to eradicate them. Based on discussions with informants, the contemporary purified version of Sunni Islam (popular among those who support the ruling AkP) advocates for a modern, rational urban landscape free of roaming street animals. It is not, therefore, the Shafi alone who are hostile towards street animals but other groups as well, such as Sunni who believe in a purified version of Islamic practice. I discuss this dynamic later in the chapter. One question I asked people was when and why they had begun to feed street animals. Some became empathetic for personal reasons and others were motivated by political reasons. Of course, the two motivations are often mixed together in complex ways. The pressure to meet basic needs was often mentioned. People identify with animals’ marginal lives and the struggles they face to find food because they too are poor and hungry. One day I was walking in the back streets of Cibale

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Mahallesi near Balat, a poor and conservative neighbourhood in the Fatih municipality. I was there because many informants and friends predicted that my research would only yield material from the wealthy, the upper middle class, and women, who they assumed would be the sole providers of care. Because people kept telling me this, I searched out regions which were lower-middle-class, predominantly Kurdish or Alevi, and devoutly Sunni, as well as upper-middle-class and secular. Walking through Cibale, I came across many piles of stale bread mixed with rice and bones that were left as feed in open lots between buildings for street dogs, cats, and birds. In wealthier neighbourhoods, piles of animal food were common, yet these piles of bread clearly demonstrated that the poor made an effort to care for street animals though they could not afford animal food. Passing through a neighbourhood market, I saw that fish sellers shared some of their wares with street cats who ran off with tiny fish in their jaws. Clearly, people were attentive to the street animals. Noticing many yogurt containers along the wall surrounding the compound of an eighteenth-century mosque, I asked a young man exiting the mosque about who was feeding the animals. He roused an elderly man who lived in the former tekke. (Tekkes housed Islamic brotherhoods, much like monasteries.) Officially, these orders were disbanded by Atatürk, founder of the Republic during the 1920s (Kezer 2016, 100). Often the tekke buildings were left to collapse. The fact that this order’s buildings were intact suggested that this congregation might not follow the purified version of Sunni Islam established by the state. I waited and after a few minutes, an elderly, thin, and frail man emerged from the building. It was clear that he was destitute. As we sat on a bench in the courtyard, he said that he took care of the dogs and cats who lived there. He remarked that while he cared for both, he preferred dogs. I asked him about dogs as an issue in Islam. Like the woman in Yenibosna, he said that the Shafis have a problem with dogs but that he, as a follower of the Hanufi school, which is tolerant of dogs and cats, did not. The Shafi are one of the four schools of Sunni interpretation. The Kurdish minority are mainly Shafi (Olson 1984, 424–5), while the official school of thought in Turkey is Hanufi (Heffening and Schacht 1971, 163–4). In Turkey, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet, contains and controls Sunni religious practice, yet there is a diversity of Islam, though unofficial and unrecognized by the government (Hart 2013). While this elderly man expressed his tolerance of dogs and cats, even the most

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tolerant are unlikely to imagine that dogs should live indoors with people. He remarked that his son asks, “father, why are you spending all this money taking care of the dogs and cats?” I asked him why and he said that he felt uncomfortable when he saw them go hungry. He remarked several times throughout our conversation about their hunger and him meeting this basic need.

Life Orientation and Ideological Dimensions Islamic practice encourages empathy for the needy, stewardship for animals, and compassion and mercy. Many pious Muslims are motivated by Islam to care for animals. As an elderly man working at a tomb instructed me, the reason why people feed the animals is because, “in our religion, no one should be allowed to go hungry.” He said that in Islam the issue of real importance is compassion (merhamet) and kindness (şefkat). He said that one can pray all the time but it will mean nothing if one does not express mercy, and this includes compassion for animals. His view is not uncommon among pious people, yet there are more dimensions to attitudes about animals among people who identify with Sunni Islam and the state. Clearly, Turkey is becoming more publically pious and political Islam is influential, though many seemingly secular Turks are also privately pious. However, Islamic worldviews can work for and against street animals. As noted, Shafi interpretation creates hostility towards animals because they are regarded as dirty. Though many claim that Islam is a foundation for supporting care and compassion for animals, both people who support and oppose street animals use Islamic discourse to bolster their positions. People’s reliance on Islam to support the right of animals to live on the street, then, should be viewed as a component of vernacular practice. Many people in Turkey believe that animals have a right to live on the street, whether this right is derived from Islam, secular law, or some combination of sources. Additionally, people are willing to fight the state and other residents of the city in public to support this right. Arguments and fights on the street, in the court system, and among neighbours demonstrate this conviction, as do organized protests to protect the rights of street animals to live outside. In 2012, when a proposal was made which would have removed the requirement in the 5199 law that dogs be returned to the street after sterilization, over ten

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thousand people demonstrated against it across the country (Yur and Büyüktetik 2012). Further, the belief in this right motivates many to care for animals’ survival on the street. It is not the case that people who care for street animals believe that they are doing so because these dogs have yet to be safely “rescued” and “adopted.” Rather, as I was told repeatedly, despite the fact that I pointed out that dogs are domesticated animals and not “wild,” many believe that dogs’ “natural” habitat is the outside, and in this case, the streets. On the other hand, many recognize that street animals are having a particularly difficult time surviving because they are losing urban habitat due to development and urban renewal (Alkan 2016). The understanding that state policies are eliminating street animals’ habitats is in part what motivates many animal rights groups to demonstrate against urban renewal policies. The notion that dogs have a right to live on the street is not a position held by most North Americans and Western Europeans who think dogs are pets who are in need of being “rescued and adopted.”

The Modern City While some people are empathetic towards street animal survival for personal reasons, many are inspired by political ones. Because dogs and cats are constructed as essentially different by the government, those who support dogs tend to do so for more pointedly political reasons than those who support cats. Cats, in short, are not a marginalized, politically maligned population. Dogs, on the other hand, are regarded as dangerous and are under surveillance. Neither dogs nor cats fit into the design schemes for a renewed and modern Istanbul, but dogs are differentially affected. These plans are leading to a dramatic renewal of urban neighbourhoods (Buğra 2017; Candan and Kolluoğlu 2008). While humans are being uprooted and exiled, so are dogs (Alkan 2016; Zeybek 2014). Though animal rights activists, animal welfarists, and others who support the street dog populations are critical of how dogs are dumped in the forests, they protect the right of animals to live on the streets. Mark Twain’s observations demonstrate that this is unchanged from the Ottoman era: The people are loath to kill them – do not kill them, in fact. The Turks have an innate antipathy to taking the life of any dumb

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animal, it is said. But they do worse. They hang and kick and stone and scald these wretched creatures to the very verge of death, and then leave them to live and suffer. (Twain 1980, 267) The 5199 Animal Protection Law forbids the killing of street animals (Article 6). Therefore, the government cannot create a policy which would round up the street dogs and eradicate them, as it attempted during the Ottoman era (Topçuoğlu 2010). Instead, a new scheme seems to have been hatched. In the sleepy fishing town of Kısırkaya, to the east of the airport project and the planned canal, is a newly constructed animal shelter. This is an IBB shelter, not a municipal one. Therefore, it can serve dogs from any region of the city, but it only manages those on the European side. Many activist campaigns make a connection between the Nazi concentration camps and the shelter (Özgüner 2015). In February 2016, I joined a group from IFEA (Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes) to visit the Kısırkaya shelter. From a distance, it looks imposing and its location on the coast beside a beach is puzzling. It is vast, surrounded by a double chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and a sign on the outside says one cannot enter without permission. There are guards with walkie-talkies. The place, in other words, is not inviting and it is not possible to enter casually, for instance, to adopt a stray dog. We were let into the office where we met two of the staff veterinarians. We had a formal and awkward conversation. The vets stressed that this was one of the country’s best animal shelters. We wondered why it was mostly empty. They both said that one could complain about the location, right on the sea and very remote, and the style of construction, which is massive and looks threatening, but they praised their work spaying and neutering. As I mentioned, the IBB’s goal is to spay and neuter all the dogs of Istanbul. They said the dogs in the shelter are handicapped, but those we saw seemed able-bodied. Though they described the care they took in returning the dogs to the locations where they were picked up initially, using gPS and monitoring their workers, we wondered about the need for such a massive facility if the goal was to return the dogs to the streets. After our awkward discussion, they took us on a tour of the facility. We saw some dogs in fenced areas but we were not shown the majority of the shelter. In conversation with one of the vets, I mentioned that I had seen many terrible photos online of dogs who were suffering

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in the shelter. He said it is good that these photographs are out there because it makes people more aware, adding, “I cannot do it because I work here” and that “everything is politics.” From this brief and carefully controlled visit, it seemed the vets were sincere, the place clean, and the animals well taken care of. The vets did not seem to think that there was a conspiracy to collect all the street animals and house them in Kısırkaya. Later in conversation with my fellow travellers, we arrived at the conclusion that though the vets seemed sincere, they may not know the real plan. Also, since the infrastructure for housing thousands of animals is in place, it seems plausible that it would be used. Additionally, the location, the facility’s forbidding nature, and the difficulty of entering all add up to it not being a place which would promote animals being adopted by the public. Rather, it is a place where animals will be hidden from sight, much like the millions of displaced residents from undesirable neighbourhoods in Istanbul now living in highrise developments on the city’s periphery. Indeed, in October 2017, the Hürriyet newspaper wrote a story about a municipality shooting street dogs with tranquilizer darts. According to the story, over a hundred dogs were tranquilized and loaded into trucks to be taken to Kısırkaya, even though most of these dogs were sterilized. Along the way, some of the trucks never reached the shelter and many of the dogs disappeared. Animal rights activists believe they were dumped in the forest (Hürriyet 2017). None of these actions followed official policies or the law. There is another rumour circulating among animal rights activists that the IBB will build another massive shelter on the Asian side. Both shelters will be used to house the street dogs. Though dogs and cats alike are attacked by cruel residents, it is only dogs which are and have been the objects of state control from the late Ottoman era on. In the early twentieth century, dogs were rounded up and exiled to an island in the Marmara Sea, where they died horribly from starvation and thirst (Pinquet 2010; Schick 2010; Topçuoğlu 2010). Artists and filmmakers working on this historical event associated the exiled and exterminated dogs with the Armenians who suffered exile and extermination during the same era (Cahill 2015). Today, street dogs are associated with other marginal populations: Kurds, street children, refugees, and the homeless. Therefore, among the empathetic and passionate people who care for

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street animals, some are motivated by personal reasons and others by political reasons. Sometimes, these motivations are mixed together because people feel psychologically stressed by social and economic injustice, political violence and terror, and the pressures of authoritarian power and suppressed public expression. In addition to the many pressures in Turkish society and sources of pain and suffering, there is the destruction of the environment, which is part of urban renewal, instigated by the threat of an earthquake (Angell 2014). Many understand that this destructive urban renewal process is part of a state land grab, and involves unchecked (Buğra 2017), even insane development projects, including the world’s biggest airport, the clear-cutting of forest for a new highway, and the plan to cut a new Bosphorus through to the Black Sea. Istanbul’s rapid transformation is leading to the erasure of the forests, yet municipalities dump dogs on the periphery of the city. Thus, like marginalized populations which have been displaced by urban renewal – such as the Roma uprooted from their neighbourhood of Sulukule, where they had lived for millennia, to a far-off district on the western edge of the city (Schoon 2014) – dogs too are rounded up and dumped. Like the wild boar who have swum across the Bosphorus when their habitats were destroyed by the construction of a massive highway through the forests (Ocak 2013), some view the transformation of the city as a loss of habitat for street animals. Thus, their feelings of empathy relate to the animals, the environment, and a sense of loss over the erasure of the cultural memory of the city.

Conclusion Istanbul is a massive, rapidly expanding city of fifteen million people. The streets are filled with thousands of dogs and cats. Though both species are regarded as street animals, dogs and cats are categorized and managed differently by the state. Dogs are under surveillance. The government attempts to reduce their population with the aim of eliminating them from the streets in the future. Municipal policies have not been successful in achieving this goal because many shirk their duties and dump dogs in the forests and in the undeveloped margins of the city. Because these dogs have not been neutered, there are thousands of dogs living in the peripheries. The IBB, in an effort to rein

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in this population, seems to have developed a new policy for containing dogs by imprisoning them in massive shelters. Animal rights activists and animal lovers suspect that the government is developing these plans and are agitating against them. Furthermore, people repeatedly mention the attempts by the late Ottoman administration to eliminate the street dogs. It was clear that these historical events were recalled as traumatic memories, and people drew a parallel between them and the contemporary government’s new plans to isolate and imprison the dogs. Furthermore, people mentioned the 2012 demonstrations against the proposed amendment of the 5199 Animal Protection Law, which contained segments that could be interpreted to mean that the animals should be removed from the streets. Though animal lovers and activists are threatened, beaten, and sued for their work feeding and caring for street animals, many pointed to the fact that if the government made a move to eradicate them again, the public would rise up in opposition. That is, devoted empathetic residents believed their work was supported by thousands. These individuals had many motivations: emotional and psychological, spiritual and religious, and political and rights-based. These passionate individuals motivated by love and a sense of justice come to the aid of needy animals every day, feeding them and administering first aid. This sense of justice can be considered trans-species social justice in action, “social justice beyond the limit of concern for human animals” (Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018, 15), which unites individuals to fight for powerless others. While the state hatches plans to transform urban space, some look forward to a clean Islamic and/or Western-style city, while others feel empathy for the victims of these plans. Social pressure, authoritarianism, political violence, economic and social injustice, radical urban renewal, and environmental destruction shape human lives. Few expect that the street dogs will survive these upheavals. Yet residents oppose the kinds of solutions which were implemented in Western cities in the past: the removal of street dogs and their destruction. They also often oppose spaying and neutering. Instead, expressions of compassion and mercy are highly valued, and animals in many neighbourhoods are well fed even if their futures are uncertain.

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References 5199 Animal Protection Law. 2004. http://www.lawsturkey.com/law/5199animal-protection-law. Alkan, Ayten. 2016. “Deportation as an Urban Stray Dogs Management Policy: Forest Dogs of Istanbul.” Lex Localis 14, no. 3 (August): 615–38. Angell, Elizabeth. 2014. “Assembling Disaster: Earthquakes and Urban Politics in Istanbul.” City 18, no. 6 (November): 667–78. Austin, Michael, trans. 2001. Domenico’s Istanbul. Edited by Geoffrey Lewis. London: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust. BiPati. 2018. “İstanbul Hayvan Barınakları-Barınak Adresleri ve Telefonları” [Istanbul Shelters – Shelter Addresses and Telephones]. http://bipati.co/ genel/istanbul-hayvan-barinaklari/ (accessed 12 February 2018). Boyar, Ebru, and Kate Fleet. 2010. A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buğra, Ayşe. 2017. “Two Lives of Developmentalism: A Polyanyian View from Turkey.” In Development as a Battlefield, edited by Irene Bono and Beatrice Hibou, 37–60. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. Cahill, Zachary. 2015. “Interviews: Michael Rakowitz.” Artforum, 18 August. http://www.artforum.com/interviews/michael-rakowitz-speaks-about-hiswork-for-the-istanbul-biennial-54249. Candan, Ayfer Bartu, and Biray Kolluoğlu. 2008. “Emerging Spaces of Neoliberalism: A Gated Town and a Public Housing Project in Istanbul.” New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (Fall): 5–46. Cook, Steven. 2016. “How Erdogan Made Turkey Authoritarian Again.” The Atlantic, 21 July. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2016/07/how-erdogan-made-turkey-authoritarian-again/492374/. Faroqhi, Suraiya, ed. 2010. Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul: Eren Publishers. Hart, Kimberly. 2013. And Then We Work for God: Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heffening, W., and J. Schacht. 1971. “Hanafiyya.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. III, 163–4. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. Hürriyet Daily News. 2016. “Battle to Care for Istanbul’s Stray Animals Continues.” Hürriyet Daily News, 18 April. http://www.hurriyetdailynews. com/battle-to-care-for-istanbuls-stray-animals-continues-97951. – 2017. “Forced Relocation of Stray Dogs in Istanbul Angers Animal Rights Activists.” Hürriyet Daily News, 26 October. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.

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com/forced-relocation-of-stray-dogs-in-istanbul-angers-animal-rightsactivists-121473. International Crisis Group. 2018. Turkey’s Syrian Refugees: Defusing Metropolitan Tensions. Europe Report #248. Brussels: International Crisis Group. http://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/westerneuropemediterranean/turkey/248-turkeys-syrian-refugees-defusingmetropolitan-tensions (accessed 16 March 2018). İşın, Ekrem. 2016. Dört Ayaklı Belediye [Four Legged Municipality]. Istanbul: Istanbul Araştırma Enstitüsü. Johnson, N., H. Un, A.R. Fooks, C. Freuling, T. Müller, O. Aylan, and A. Vos. 2010. “Rabies Epidemiology and Control in Turkey: Past and Present.” Epidemiology and Infection 138, no. 3: 305–12. Kezer, Zeynep. 2016. Building Modern Turkey. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Lentz, Hanna. 2012. “Amending Turkey’s Animal Welfare Law Would Be Bad News for Street Dogs.” International Fund for Animal Welfare, 26 September. http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/news/amending-turkeysanimal-welfare-law-would-be-bad-news-street-dogs. Lepeska, David. 2016. “The Destruction of Sur: Is This Historic District a Target for Gentrification?” The Guardian, 9 February. http://www. theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/09/destruction-sur-turkey-historicdistrict-gentrification-kurdish. Matsuoka, Atsuko, and John Sorenson. 2018. Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-Species Social Justice. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Mazak, Mehmet, and Fatih Güldal. 2011. Tanzifat-i İstanbul: Osmanlı’dan Günümüze Temizlik Tarihi [Istanbul’s Garbage Collection: A History of Sanitation from Ottomans to Our Day]. Istanbul: Yeditepe Yayınevi. Ocak, Serkan. 2013. “Domuzların Kentsel Dönüşümü [Boar’s Urban Renewal].” Radikal, 12 October. http://www.radikal.com.tr/hayat/ domuzlarin-kentsel-donusumu-1155301/. Olson, Robert. 1984. “Kurds.” In Muslim Peoples: A World Ethnographic Survey, vol. 1, edited by Richard Weekes, 424–5. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press. Özgüner, Burak. 2015. “Kısırkaya ‘Hayvan Hapishanesi’ [Kısırkaya ‘Animal Prison’].” Bianet, 15 January. http://bianet.org/bianet/hayvanlar/161598kisirkaya-hayvan-hapishanesi. Pamuk, Orhan. 2015. A Strangeness in My Mind. Translated by Ekin Oklap. New York: Knopf.

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Parkinson, Joe. 2015. “Why Istanbul Should Be Called Catstantinople.” Wall Street Journal, 18 April. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-istanbul-shouldbe-called-catstantinople-1439942244. Pinquet, Cartherine. 2010. “Istanbul’s Street Dogs at the End of the Ottoman Empire.” In Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire, edited by Suraiya Farouqhi, 353–71. Istanbul: Eren Publishers. Schick, Irvin. 2010. “Istanbul’da 1910’da Gerçekleşen Büyük Köpek İtlafı: Bir Mekan Üzerinde Çekişme Vakası [The Realization of a Dog Massacre in Istanbul in 1910: The Debate over Space].” Toplumsal Tarih 200 (2010): 22–33. Schoon, Danielle van Dobben. 2014. “‘Sulukule Is the Gun and We Are Its Bullets’: Urban Renewal and Romani Identity in Istanbul.” City 18, no. 6: 655–66. Topçuoğlu, Ümit Sinan. 2010. Istanbul ve Sokak Köpekleri [Istanbul and Street Dogs]. Istanbul: Epsilon Yayıncılık. Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Başkanlığı [Turkish National Assembly]. 2004. Hayvan Koruma Kanunu [Animal Protection Law]. http://www.tbmm. gov.tr/kanunlar/k5199.html (accessed 1 April 2018). Twain, Mark. 1980. The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrim’s Progress. New York: New American Library. Yur, Damla, and Ceren Büyüktetik. 2012. “Hayvan İnsan Elele Yasaya Karşı Yürüyüşte [Animals and Humans March Together Hand-in-Hand against the Law].” Milliyet, 1 October. http://www.milliyet.com.tr/hayvan-insanelele-yasaya-karsi-yuruyuste-gundem-1604776/. Zeybek, Sezai Ozan. 2014. “İstanbul’un Yuttukları ve Kustukları: Köpekler ve Nesneler Üzerinden Istanbul Tahlili [What Istanbul Swallows and Vomits Up: An Analysis of Dogs and the Subjects of Istanbul].” In Yeni Istanbul Çalışmaları, edited by Ayfer Bartu Candan and Cenk Özbay, 263–82. Istanbul: Metis Yayınevi. Zücker, Erik J. 2005. Turkey: A Modern History. New York: I.B. Tauris.

SECTION THREE

Exploitation

CHAPTER TEN

Eating Dogs John Sorenson

Consumption practices operate not only at the material level but are constitutive of, and reinforced by, cultural, economic, social, and political meanings. Animal-derived food products, in particular, are powerful signifiers of such meanings and ideologies and markers of identities (Adams 2000; Willard 2002). These meanings and identities are further differentiated by the consumption of particular species. Historically and today, dogs function as powerful symbols in discourses of difference and identity. Controversies about consuming dog-flesh provide a striking example of the complexities and contradictions involved in human relations with other animals and provide opportunities to rethink not only canine-human relationships but those with other animals as well.

Consuming Dogs Throughout history, humans have used dogs as food. Although most think our ancestors domesticated wolves, transforming them into dogs, for companions and helpers, Pang et al. (2009) suggest this interpretation is based on the perspective of non-dog-eating Europeans, arguing that humans originally domesticated wolves in southern China under 16,300 years ago to have them as food. Archaeological evidence does demonstrate a long history of human consumption of dogs. Geneticists have found the oldest North American evidence of dog consumption from 9,260 years ago in a Texas cave (Tito 2011). There is archaeological

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evidence of post-medieval dog butchery in England continuing to the eighteenth century, although the flesh may have been fed to other dogs rather than being consumed by humans (Wilson and Edwards 1993). Historically, some Indigenous societies in North America ate dogs, although others did not or consumed dogs only due to hardship and starvation (Stands In Timber and Liberty 2013, 71) or for religious purposes (e.g., Moon 1937, 4). During their famous 1803–06 expedition to extend American control across what is now the western United States, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark obtained dogs for food from various Indigenous groups, and other Europeans who lived among Native American societies in the nineteenth century wrote about eating dogs (e.g., Belden 1974). While most North Americans classify dogs as “pets,” in some African and Asian countries they are also categorized as “food animals.” Citing the World Society for the Protection of Animals (now World Animal Protection [wAP]), the Australia-UK group Say No to Dog Meat (2013) states that each year 25 million dogs are raised and killed for food; 10 million of these are in China, including 100,000 at the annual Yulin summer festival (Harris 2008; Huang 2015). Like other animals used in such ways, they suffer at every stage of the process: farming (or capture), confinement, transport, sale, and slaughter. These practices are subject to international condemnation and campaigns to stop them. These campaigns and reactions to them raise provocative questions about our relations with canids and other animals.

Transgression In Western societies, where consumption of other animals is commonplace, eating dogs is transgressive and highly controversial. It is considered a marker of depravity and backwardness, frequently racialized. For example, consumption of dogs served as a sign of barbarism in Hollywood representations, exemplified in D.W. Griffith’s 1913 silent film The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, where Native Americans’ villainous savagery is demonstrated by a dog feast and attempts to kill and eat puppies belonging to white children (Griffiths 2001). More recently, after President Barack Obama described childhood experiences of eating dogs in Indonesia, rightwing blogs circulated economist David P. Goldman’s (2012) essay “Dog Eating and Obama’s Identity,” which

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portrayed Obama as an America-hating “dog-eater … who identifies with the Third World.” White supremacists outraged at the very idea of a Black president incorporated this into pre-existing racist discourse already rife with animal imagery. Although Westerners see eating dogs as barbaric, cruel, and repulsive, some join other cultures’ consumption of dogs, in symbolic performances of domination and mastery (Huhndorf 2001). For example, in the nineteenth century, US Army officers ate dogs and joined Native American ceremonies such as the sweat lodge, both to indulge a masculine “desire for … the wild and primitive” and to gain knowledge about Indigenous societies, which they put to use as “advance agents of an aggressively expanding empire” (Ostler 2004, 94). Today, Western tourists use online blogs to describe their experiences of eating dogs while travelling in Asia. Just as the nineteenth-century US Army officers joined dog-eating ceremonies to demonstrate mastery of Indigenous groups, at their core, these contemporary tourist practices are neo-colonial narratives of racist power, proclaiming ability to penetrate the extreme practices of other cultures. Western tourists in Vietnam help fuel the dog-flesh trade as guides encourage them to experience cultural practices of eating dogs (Razak 2016). Tourists document their adventures on YouTube, representing themselves as transgressive daredevils violating cultural taboos. By eating dogs, they construct “edgy” self-images, crafted selves perfectly reflecting neoliberal values: individualism, consumerism, apolitical relativism, the idea that identities can be expressed and enhanced through the purchase of commodified experiences, and the disparagement of compassion, including towards other animals. Neoliberal and neo-colonial values are celebrated in television series such as the BBC’s Cooking in the Danger Zone, in which the program’s star visits various places and eats exotic food, the more outrageous, the better. Similarly, the Food Network features Extreme Cuisine with Jeff Corwin, who also hosts several programs on the Animal Planet channel, and is “renowned for his expertise in wildlife and conservation” (Food Network n.d.), although “that doesn’t mean Corwin doesn’t eat the same sort of animals he plays with on his show” (Associated Press 2005). The online media company Vice features numerous sensationalist videos about consuming dogs in Asia, along with lurid reports from individual tourists such as “I Ate a Dog in Hanoi” (Phillips 2013) and “I Ate Dog Soup and It Was Shamefully Tasty” (Ferra Garcia 2017). Among foodies,

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eating dogs is considered thrillingly provocative. For example, chef Lauren Shockey (2011), promoting her cookbook, describes my edible adventure of eating dog meat – yes, little Rover – in Vietnam. Now, before you get all PEtA activist on me, you should know that dog is actually a specialty in Vietnam, and I wanted to experience the local culture as much as possible, which meant getting out of my culinary comfort zone and eating like the Vietnamese. Shockey’s rhetorical strategy is to, simultaneously, shock readers by callously announcing that she has eaten “little Rover” and mock emotional attachments to dogs as sentimentalism, dismissing ethical objections as being “all PEtA activist,” bothersome and ridiculous. She rationalizes her actions by saying that “dog is actually a specialty in Vietnam,” as if the existence of the practice provides its own justification and constitutes sufficient reason for sophisticated tourists to dig in. This is a contemporary restaging of colonialism’s theatrical performances described above: one demonstrates one’s cosmopolitanism, one’s ability to infiltrate and master other cultures, one’s power, by engaging in practices normally considered unthinkable. The oppressive nature of such posturing is demonstrated by substituting other types of obvious exploitation with exoticism as rationale: “I visited Thailand to experience child prostitution first-hand.” Identifying contradictions causes controversy, as British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did in 2011 by suggesting that eating dogs was no more morally objectionable than eating pigs. Now vegetarian, FearnleyWhittingstall previously courted publicity by eating unusual foods such as “placenta pate, curried fruit bat, giraffe and calf testicles” (Telegraph 2011). Asked about eating “loin of Labrador or cat liver,” he responded: Not unless I was on the point of starvation. In principle, but not in practice, I have no objection to a high-welfare organic puppy farm. You can’t object, unless you also object to the farming of pigs. It’s an artificial construct of our society, a cultural decision, to make pets out of dogs and meat out of pigs. Both animals could be used the other way round, although pigs probably do make better meat than dogs and dogs better pets than pigs, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. (Telegraph 2011)

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Indeed, this is a relevant ethical question: why object to killing and eating certain species and not others? Pigs are as intelligent as dogs, have individual personalities, enjoy their lives, and want to live just as much as dogs do. Nevertheless, newly invented pig-flesh festivals such as Italy’s Porchettiamo are celebrated in the New York Times as “a declaration of love” for culinary tradition (Moskin 2016) and “rib fests” based on the consumption of pig corpses are held across Canada, while China’s Yulin dog-flesh festival is considered backward and barbaric. Some animal protection groups are ethically and logically consistent in campaigns that ask: “why love one but eat the other?” For example, Korea Animal Rights Advocates opposes South Korea’s dog-flesh industry while promoting veganism. Non-vegan objections to consuming dogs illustrate the contradictory thinking involved in speciesism, where we create a hierarchy of animals, elevating some as more deserving of consideration. Those who consider it cruel to eat dogs should recognize that cruelty is standard practice in industries that use other animals. Thus, to denounce consumption of dogs while consuming other animals is the exercise of one’s prejudices and a form of cultural imperialism. Keeping such cultural imperialism in mind is essential when examining the industry, especially since the Asian dog-flesh trade is the focus of international controversy.

Tradition and Identity Frequently, killing particular species is defended as a symbol of “tradition” and a marker of identity. For example, it is acknowledged that Koreans have eaten dogs for centuries (Kim 2008). According to Rakhyun E. Kim (2008), dog meat is the fourth most commonly eaten meat in the Republic of Korea (henceforth South Korea or Korea) after pork, beef, and chicken, and constituted a two-billion-dollar industry in the early 2000s; a report published in 2004 found 62 percent of the population noted having had dog meat at least once in their lives. Surveys conducted in the 2000s through Empas, the most popular web portal in South Korea, found that respondents do not support banning dog meat (Kim 2018, 208). Kim (2008) says that Koreans did not keep dogs as pets until the 1980s and since then have differentiated dogs into two categories: one as edible (“ddong-gae”) and the other as pets. Some have perceived moral consistency in dog-eating since “[w]e only eat ddong-gae, specifically bred for food just like pigs” (Yong-Geun 2008

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cited in Kim 2008, 205). However, these distinctions are often ignored and purebred dogs are in demand as food, fetching higher prices than regular “shit dogs” bred for consumption, because it is believed that the flesh of pedigree dogs is more potent and more medically effective, while the ability to purchase these more expensive animals works as a symbolic device to demonstrate one’s social status, negotiate social hierarchies, and gain social capital (Dugnoille 2018, 225–8). Nevertheless, canine-human relations in Korea have been changing since the 1980s. Economic prosperity brought “a huge pet boom during the 1990s” and 20 percent of households owned a pet dog (Kim 2008, 207). Today pet dog ownership has jumped to one-third of households and a public survey indicates about 70 per cent of adult Koreans and 80 per cent of teenagers do not eat dogs (Kang 2018). This is a drastic change even within a decade. It suggests that eating dogs neither forms the national identity nor is a tradition to be kept. However, research by the Justice Party in South Korea found 17,000 dog farms in 2015, and this had not decreased in 2017 (Kang 2018). This apparent contradiction requires a quick review of historical controversies on the dog-flesh industry in South Korea starting around the 1980s for further understanding. Responding to an international campaign that denounced dog consumption as cruel and savage, in 1984 the South Korean government acknowledged this by passing its Sanitation Law, which categorized dog-flesh as “disgusting” or “repugnant” food (Podberscek 2009, 620). Seoul’s municipal code also adopted this classification. The government banned it as unsanitary, along with other foods such as snake- and lizard-broth. But this was unenforced and many continued eating dogs. When the 1988 Olympic Games were held in Seoul, advocacy groups took the opportunity to renew their campaigns. The International Fund for Animal Welfare described the dog-flesh industry as a “crime of inhumanity” and South Korea’s government agreed, describing the industry as “shameful” (Crabb 1988). As a result, a few restaurants closed or relocated while others renamed dishes to make them sound better to foreigners: dog soup became “seasonal soup” (Podberscek 2009, 620). In other words, sales were removed from sight. Concerned about its image and wanting to present the country as modern, South Korea’s government took a political action to make the industry less visible to outsiders. In 2002, the FIFA World Cup was held in South Korea and Japan. This time the industry was more aggressive, with the National Dog

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Meat Restaurant Association planning to give free dog-soup samples to foreign tourists. Industry pressure encouraged the government to reject international criticism and defend the trade. Member of Parliament Kim Hong-shin declared: “Foreign criticism of dog meat reflects lack of understanding of our nation’s ancient culture. It is blasphemy, not criticism” (McElroy 2002). The government rejected international criticism as racism, correctly identifying the hypocrisy and cultural imperialism of Westerners who objected to eating dogs but considered it acceptable to eat other animals. Government and industry defended eating dogs as tradition, claiming it as something sacred and vital to culture and identity, appeals that resonated with ideologies of speciesism and Korean ethnic purity and with ideas about the healing potency of dog flesh (Dugnoille 2018). According to Oh and Jackson (2011), industry propaganda and calls to kill dogs to defend culture sparked renewed interest, a new chain of dog restaurants opened, and a dog-flesh festival was created. The industry invented new products including oil, wine, soy sauce, candy, and cosmetics (Podberscek 2009, 621). Consumption increased after the 1988 Olympics, encouraged by nationalistic discourse that valorized eating dog-flesh as resistance to cultural imperialism (Oh and Jackson 2011), and the industry profited by manipulation of identity politics, but not without conflict. A national newspaper advertisement for franchise opportunities for dog-flesh restaurants to further popularize consumption met with swift and extensive public condemnation (Kim 2008, 212). Thus, dog meat consumption is controversial and challenged, despite a surge of consumption in response to industry and nationalist propaganda. It is also important to realize that even when the pro-dog-flesh industry’s claim of cultural imperialism is sound, it is only sound from an anthropocentric world view. From a perspective beyond speciesism, the pro-dog-flesh industry is guilty of its own form of cultural imperialism, along with hideous violence, against dogs. The hegemony of speciesism – in other words, the taken-for-granted idea of human dominance over other animals – must be questioned. When a sports correspondent, Grohmann (2014), expressed a cultural imperialist view by suggesting that dog consumption could be “embarrassing” for South Korea’s 2018 Games, the organizer Kim Jin-sun said dog-eating had declined: There would have been some people eating dog meat back in past days, maybe during the 1988 … Seoul Olympics but now

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even around me I do not see anyone eating dog meat … there is no practice of eating dogs in Korea … Actually Koreans have this love of animals so this cannot be an issue. Kim sought to downplay potential controversy; however, in fact, the biggest dog market was closed in 2017, partly because of the urbanization of the locale from a poor migrant town to “a rich bedroom community” (Koo 2017), and restaurants are closing (Kang 2018). Nevertheless, despite Kim Jin-sun’s assurances, Grohmann found dog-flesh being sold in restaurants, and during the 2018 Olympics, international media showed dog-flesh restaurants operating near sports venues. The international media also publicized the rescue of dogs by athletes such as Canadian figure skater Meaghan Duhamel and US skier Gus Kenworthy. Also reported was the controversy created over Dutch speedskater Jan Blokhuisjen’s call for South Koreans to “treat dogs better in this country”; he apologized on Twitter (Rogers 2018). Thus, consumption of dog-flesh is unsettled from without and within. Changes in canine-human relations will certainly happen, if Kim Jin-sun’s observation is correct that “Koreans have this love of animals so this cannot be an issue.” However, an ethnographic study conducted in 2012–13 in Seoul showed that distinctions between edible dogs and pet dogs are not so clear-cut. Purebred dogs are kept as pets but are preferred for eating because their perceived purity supposedly delivers more powerful medicinal effects; others keep them as pets but serve them as “pedigree dog meat” to honour special guests (Dugnoille 2018, 228–9). The symbolic power of consuming dog-flesh, invested as it is with ideologies of ethnic purity, and its utility for demonstrating wealth and social capital can trump emotional relationships with companion animals. Dugnoille (2018, 229) describes how a younger generation faces pressure to continue the practice; for example, suggesting that men may consume dog-flesh to gain promotions at work and women may eat it to secure a prospective husband. Thus, it is questionable whether the practice is based on identity and tradition or merely a performance to align with dominance to secure economic and social status. Time will tell if love or domination will prevail in these complex canine-human relations in South Korea. Impressive changes from within are suggestive. Numerous Korean animal protection groups such as Coexistence of Animal Rights on

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Earth, Free Korean Dogs, and Korea Animal Rights Advocates campaign to ban consumption. Younger consumers increasingly view dogs as pets and their ideas about food differ from those of older generations who endured poverty after the Korean War. Even those who do eat dogs are less open about doing so, as the practice is increasingly considered socially unacceptable (Lee 2014), dog-flesh becoming less popular, and restaurants closing or selling different animals’ flesh (usa Today 2014). Some Koreans now visit dog cafés, not to eat dogs but to enjoy their presence in a petting-zoo-like context. Although the new practice is also problematic in terms of the commodification of dogs, changing canine-human relations do not support eating dogs as a valued tradition or identity of Koreans. Today, the centrality of dog-flesh to cultural identity and tradition has been unsettled from within. Arguments about tradition miss essential points not only about the malleability of those traditions but about class and social justice. In China, most people do not eat dogs, and even in the ancient past, consuming dogs was considered dirty and distasteful, with some emperors attempting to ban the practice (Cao 2015, 100–20; Li 2017). In China’s more recent history, keeping dogs was discouraged as Western decadence; with fewer dogs around, few people ate them. However, with China’s recent economic growth, the number of dogs increased, and since the 1980s the dog-flesh industry has grown, mainly in southern and northeastern China, while central China is a main processing area. Li (2017) demonstrates that the industry reflects economic, social, and political changes; the adoption of reform policies and state capitalism increased the commodification of nonhuman animals, exemplified by government encouragement of the farming of bears, tigers, and rhinos, as well as dogs. The government rejected anything considered an obstacle to economic growth. The dog-flesh industry is mainly operated by rural people who have been marginalized, such as peasants who lost their farms because of government development policies. A great divide exists between urban and rural populations, as urban-based development policy and land policy have created large numbers of impoverished disenfranchised peasants, while most of the resources for health, education, and income support went to the urban areas. Thus, peasants lost land and became poorer and parents were forced to migrate to cities for work, leaving their children behind to attend meagerly resourced rural schools as they are ineligible for city schools (ibid.). Li (2017) shows that lack of

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education, health care, and viable sources of income created an environment where working in the dog-flesh industry may be their only choice, so they take risky jobs stealing, transporting, killing, and processing dogs. Similarly, those who consume dogs are also marginalized: older, uneducated, rural, migrant workers. Thus, in China, dog consumption is less a matter of identity and tradition than of economy and unjust public policy which distributes resources and maintains class and geographical divisions. Considering the situation in South Korea, if prosperity spreads and people can afford dogs as pets, and positive canine-human relations develop, then canine-human relations will shift. At the same time, the South Korean situation shows that the line between edible dogs and pet dogs is not clear-cut and that canine-human relations are used for identity politics which is based on ideas of tradition and includes maintaining hierarchical power relationships in professional and personal domains. Unfortunately, however, economic prosperity does not always work in favour of declining dog meat consumption and reducing the exploitation of canines. Further complexities of canine-human relations can be seen. In Vietnam, the market for dog-flesh has grown since that country’s economy has taken off. Animal protectionists estimate that a million dogs per year are eaten in Vietnam (with some estimates being much higher) and the trade is worth hundreds of millions of dollars (Shadboldt 2013). To meet demand, abduction of dogs is widespread. Dogs are sold for food at prices that encourage theft, but the law places their value at a level that does not warrant serious criminal charges, so thieves only face small fines. Nevertheless, stealing dogs is not without risk. Many Vietnamese do not eat dogs and consider it repulsive, for both religious and compassionate reasons (Avieli 2011). Furious residents may deal with thieves themselves, instead of calling police. For example, at a village in Nghe An province, residents found thieves cramming dogs into a sack; they blocked the road to prevent escape, burned the thieves’ motorcycle, and beat one thief to death, blocking police from rescuing him (Lan 2013). Violent reprisals against dog thieves are common (Avieli 2011; Chien 2016; Thanhnien News 2013). As elsewhere, some portray the trade as cultural tradition despite the fact that many Vietnamese do not eat dogs and see flesh-consumption as a violation of Buddhist principles (Avieli 2011, 67). The flesh of dogs is more expensive than that of pigs in Vietnam and sells for high prices in upscale restaurants, so this is not

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food for impoverished people but rather a luxury commodity for those who can pay more (Hodal 2013). As in South Korea, consuming dogs is a means for individuals to advance their social capital and curry favour with elites. Based on an ethnographic study in Hoi An, a town in central Vietnam, Avieli (2011) found that people do not consider eating dogs as their tradition or national identity; rather it is used to express alliance with the government – based in the North, where eating dogs is popular. Thus, eating dogs is a means to an end – a performance to express loyalty to the regime. Canine-human relations changed in Vietnam from within through the discourse of political power. Eating dogs is now used as a symbolic means to represent class and political affiliation while any concerns about cruelty and exploitation of canines are muffled. With growing demand, dogs are trucked into Vietnam from northeastern Thailand. The trade is illegal in Thailand but cross-border smuggling is booming. Most of Thailand’s population is Buddhist; they oppose the industry, consider it cruel, and want it stopped. A 2009 Ipsos Asia Pacific poll found ninety percent of Thais reject the idea of eating dogs (Winn 2009). However, in northeastern Thailand where strong Vietnamese influences exist, a few restaurants sell dog-flesh, mainly to Vietnamese living there. Dealers and consumers claim that dogs are killed humanely, no differently from how other animals are slaughtered, and defend their practices as traditional ones (Fuller 2014). However, an editorial in the Bangkok Post (2014) rejected this, saying, “there is no tradition of either consuming or butchering dogs in Thai history, outside of tiny groups of minorities,” and called for an end to the “disgraceful” trade. Groups such as Thai Animal Guardians Association oppose the trade, calling dog-flesh “food for teenagers and drunks,” and argue that the trade should end not because of imported Western ideas but because it is morally right to oppose these practices (Winn 2009). Strong local opposition to these practices can also be found in China. For example, Humane Society International states that the infamous Yulin dog-flesh festival only began in 2010, organized by dealers as a means to increase profits. The event drew not only international protests but much opposition within China. In 2016, Chinese and international animal advocates presented a petition with eleven million signatures demanding an end to the festival. Most Chinese do not eat dogs and oppose the industry. For example, in 2010 Professor Chang Jiwen of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences called for new laws, saying:

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“Cats and dogs are loyal friends to humans. A ban on eating them would show China has reached a new level of civilization” (Chang 2010). Such a ban, in China or elsewhere and not applied only to dogs and cats, would indeed demonstrate opposition is not because of any emulation of Western attitudes. In fact, rather than emulating Western attitudes or behaviours, Chinese advocates have taken more impressive forms of direct action: e.g. in October 2011, Chinese activists saved 800 dogs in Szechuan province and another 580 were rescued in Beijing in April 2011, as hundreds of activists blocked roads to stop trucks filled with dogs being sent to slaughter. In August 2014, in the biggest rescue to that date, Chinese activists stopped nine trucks and rescued at least 3,280 dogs in an operation involving a 300-km chase (Humane Society International 2014). Humane Society International representative Peter Li said: I am truly impressed with the organization and mobilization skills of these activists, many of whom were born in the 1980s and 1990s. They managed not only to halt the trucks, but to ensure aid and supplies from across the country were quickly sent to the scene. They have polished their negotiation skills with the Chinese government and they are versed in Chinese policies regarding trans-provincial live dog transport and animal disease control and prevention. This was an amazing rescue and a huge blow to China’s dog meat industry. China’s young people are our greatest hope! Dog-flesh itself is legal in China, although laws prohibit trucking dogs across borders because of rabies concerns, so the trade is illegal under existing rabies control laws, and could be stopped immediately if those laws were enforced (Cao 2015, 100–22). This legal foundation allowed activists in China to intercept and rescue truckloads of dogs and cats being sent to markets by thieves and private animal control contractors in other parts of China, mostly in Guangdong. But in the April 2011 rescue the driver had the necessary paperwork, meaning this shipment was legal and intercepting it was comparable to activists in Canada stopping a truckload of pigs being sent to slaughter (see Purdy and Krajnc 2018). In this case, activists bravely refused to let the trucks pass, faced down police, and finally negotiated payment of $17,606 to rescue

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580 dogs tightly packed in the truck. They were dehydrated, suffering from injuries and parvo-virus; one died in the truck. Rescuers took them to an animal hospital where they were given medical treatment and then sent to Qiming Center and Home of Love, sanctuaries where they would receive care and protection. Cao (2015, 148–63) highlights several rescue efforts since 2011 in China. Many are reported by ordinary people who love animals spotting transporting trucks on highways, reporting them to the police, and using Chinese social media to recruit volunteers to protest the transports. These actions are remarkable demonstrations of commitment from both activists and citizens in a state where police repression is notorious. Actions are ongoing. Animal Equality and Last Chance for Animals conducted an investigation into the trade, working with the Volunteer Centre of Guangzhou. Their undercover video helped close thirty-three stalls at Nanhai Market and a dog slaughterhouse (Last Chance for Animals n.d.). None of the stalls selling dogs had documentation for them, and probably many were stolen pets. Chinese police seized six hundred dogs and cats from the market and closed it, citing health concerns. The organizations provided videos of dog markets in other cities and two breeding and fattening farms for dogs. At Shandong puppy farm, where dogs were bred for flesh and fur, hundreds of animals were shown crammed into cages so tightly they could not move (ibid). Investigators reported puppies were sold to fattening farms at three weeks of age, brought to the desired weight, then had their throats cut or were sent to a slaughterhouse, where they were kept in darkness without food or water until being stabbed or beaten to death. Although puppy farms and breeding and fattening farms seem to exist, the extent of farming dogs in China is debated. After a fouryear investigation looking at fifteen cities in eight provinces where dog consumption is most prevalent, Animals Asia (2015) found “no evidence of any large-scale breeding facilities in the country.” They considered that any farms they did locate were not large enough to supply the industry. Similarly, Li (2017, 121) finds “no evidence that such farms exist.” Many dogs are stolen pets or free-roaming animals; many rescued dogs are purebreds, are friendly and socialized, and have collars and jackets. Possibly, more farms existed previously, but Cao detailed how economically unviable farming dogs is, as it costs more than the market price for their flesh, and concluded that “no cats or

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dogs are being bred commercially for meat” (Cao 2015, 119). Animals Asia (2015) concludes that the industry can only operate as a criminal business where roving gangs steal pets, thus the illegitimate industry cannot be regulated. Indeed, their survey of 771 villages in 28 provinces and municipalities found 70 percent had experienced theft of dogs, as well as violence towards humans who tried to protect their dogs. Such widespread illegalities provide further grounds for local opposition. In 2010 China did introduce draft legislation to ban the trade; it remains unenforced but Chinese activists have continued their efforts to stop the industry. In July 2017, activists rescued over 1,300 dogs and cats from a truck headed to Guangzhou slaughterhouses; the driver had only a single health certificate for all animals rather than the required individual certificates. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Peter Li’s assessment that “[w]hat has made this rescue of far-reaching significance is that hundreds of young people from Guangzhou, the once so-called ‘world capital of dog and cat meat consumption,,’ have participated in the rescue. These young activists are the hope of a new China that will be free of the dog-meat trade cruelty” (Jacobs 2017). Although sustaining protests is difficult as the problems are enormous, and even rescued dogs face dangers from disease as shelters are overburdened and under-resourced, the movement is growing and consumption of dog flesh as tradition has been challenged. Li, Sun, and Yu (2017, 530), based on their survey research on dog consumption, declared that conflict over eating dogs is not a conflict between China and other countries, nor is it a case of imposing cultural values on China; rather, the changes are happening from within because of the human–companion animal bond, which is not a Western but a trans-cultural value. This observation also reflects the changing situation in Korea where the human–companion dog bond is growing.

Cruelty Flesh consumption in general is a gendered practice, associated with domination of both nature and women (Adams 2000; Fiddes 1991). Throughout Asia eating dogs is associated with hegemonic masculinity, and in Vietnam it also serves as a means for men to express political allegiances and is associated with sexual exploitation of women (Avieli 2011). Dog-flesh is considered special food for men, who consume it with alcohol, imagining it will heighten their sexual powers.

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In South Korea, according to Podberscek (2009), dogs are considered food for men, especially farmers, and eaten during the hottest months (“dog eating days”) to maintain strength (622) and processed in various ways: boiled, roasted, made into sausages, or used to create soups, broths, or tonics. However, Dugnoille (2018, 218) finds that dogs are killed and eaten throughout the year. Dogs are killed in the most vicious ways because it is believed that causing fear and pain improves the flavour by increasing adrenalin flow; thus, a typical way to kill dogs is to hang them by their necks and beat them to death. Dogs are boiled alive, electrocuted slowly with electric shocks to their genitals, stabbed (although butchers are careful not to stab them in the heart so they will bleed out slowly), burned to death with blowtorches, or skinned alive (Dugnoille 2018; McElroy 2002; Morrison 2012; wSPA 2011). Some believe that killing dogs slowly and painfully, torturing them to death, not only makes their flesh more tender and healthy but also increases its power as a stimulant and aphrodisiac (Tao 2003, 348). Magical thinking imagines miraculous benefits, believing that eating a dog’s heart alleviates depression, eating a dog’s penis cures impotence, or eating dogs’ flesh increases men’s virility (Podberscek 2009, 619). Dogs are abused intentionally to gain sexual stamina (Dugnoille 2018, 222). Deliberate cruelty and violence not only maintain symbolic masculine domination but are considered part of national identity (224). According to Tao (2003), in South Korea each year two million dogs are killed for food and dog stew “can be found at any roadside vendor” (347). Dog farms supply the industry, producing the preferred large goldenfurred dogs who are killed at one year of age as they are considered most delicious when young (ibid.). Just as in any factory farm, conditions are appalling. The industry fails to meet even the abysmal standards of other flesh industries, which are themselves extremely unhygienic and dangerous not only for the nonhuman animals killed but also for workers and consumers. Because such conditions breed disease, farmers use antibiotics to keep animals alive until they are slaughtered; some traders inject flesh with steroids to provide customers with a sense that it has marvelous health benefits (Czajkowski 2014, 55). Because of these conditions, many dogs die before they are scheduled to, and are fed to those who survive. A Korean Animal Rights Advocates’ investigation (n.d.) documented dead puppies being fed to caged dogs. The dangers created by such practices are clear. For example, in the West,

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industrialized production turned herbivorous animals into cannibals as cows were fed the remains of others of their own species, causing the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”). No species boundaries exist to the effects of cruelty. In 1991 South Korea’s Animal Protection Law made it illegal to kill animals in cruel ways but did not prohibit killing animals classified as “livestock.” Dogs were not classified as livestock under the Livestock Processing Act; however, the Animal Protection Law did not protect dogs from being killed. Confusingly, the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries did classify dogs as livestock under the Sewage Disposal and Livestock Waste Act (Podberscek 2009, 620). The government seemed satisfied to keep classification ambiguous and the Animal Protection Law was not enforced to protect dogs; they are killed in cruel ways and eaten, as are other livestock animals. The source of dogs is not limited to dog farms; dealers in Korea, as in China, capture street dogs and cruise rural areas, purchasing strays from farmers who have captured them. Stolen guard dogs and pets are funnelled into the industry as well. Keeping dogs as pets became fashionable after South Korea’s economic surge in the 1990s, and this pet boom also supplied the flesh industry as some people acquired pets because they considered it fashionable but did not understand dogs or tired of them, so many animals were abandoned. Pet stores that could not sell their stock sold dogs to the flesh trade. They face the same cruel death (Podberscek 2009, 625). The case of South Korea shows that although cruel direct physical acts are committed by the industry, anthrocentric consumers, those who treat sentient dogs as commodities, and the government which does not enforce the animal protection law are all complicit in these actions. Furthermore, intentional cruelty toward dogs who are eaten is not limited to South Korea. Reports describe dogs kept in small “stress cages” and skinned alive in Thailand (Shadboldt 2013). John Dalley of Soi Dog Foundation in Thailand, which works to stop the trade in South East Asia, describes dogs being force-fed when they get to Vietnam, a bit like foie gras … They shove a tube into their stomach and pump solid rice and water in them to increase their weight for sale.

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Brutality is rife in Hanoi, Vietnam, as well: [Owner Nguyen Tien Tung operates a killing station beside] pens containing five dogs each, all roughly the same size, some still sporting collars. Nguyen reaches into one cage and caresses the dog closest to the door. As it starts wagging its tail, he grabs a heavy metal pipe, hits the dog across the head, then, laughing loudly, slams the cage door closed. (Hodal 2013) While there is abundant evidence of cruelty in Asian dog-flesh industries, cruelty to food animals is found in North American slaughterhouses as well (Eisnitz 2006). Regardless of location, unless we take an ethical and political stance based on veganism, as proposed by those protection groups who are consistent in their approach, we are complicit in these cruelties.

Rethinking Canine-Human Relations through Examining Eating Dogs No HUmANE wAyS to kILL wSPA Canada (n.d.) used the South Korean dog-flesh industry in its fundraising, seeking to “an end to the industrial scale suffering and slaughter of dogs killed for their meat.” However, while demanding “an end” to these practices, wSPA consistently refused to take the same position concerning other animals. Both as wSPA and wAP, the organization has not sought abolition of animal exploitation and refused to endorse veganism, or even vegetarianism, only suggesting “organic and free-range food options” (wAP 2014), while World Animal Protection Canada (2014) endorses so-called “humane slaughter” of other animals, which it notes is “better for business.” This is cultural imperialism. In criticizing the dog-flesh industry in Asia while not doing the same for other meat industries in their own countries, these organizations are forcing their own speciesist hierarchies on others. During the 2002 FIFA World Cup, South Korea tried to legalize sales, suggesting reclassification of dogs as livestock and industry regulation (Podberscek 2009, 621). Welfare groups opposed regulation with a sound point; the rSPCA stated: “We would oppose any legalisation of

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the practice as we believe there is no recognised humane method of killing them,” and noted that legalization would increase consumption and create “more welfare problems” (McElroy 2002). Unfortunately, the rSPCA does not apply the same standards to other animals and refuses to promote veganism or even vegetarianism. “Animal welfare” should mean protecting animals’ lives. Instead, the rSPCA states: “We understand that the majority of the general public do eat animal products and, therefore, one of our aims is to raise awareness of how farm animals are reared, transported and slaughtered and the welfare issues of farm animals” (rSPCA n.d.). Clearly, however, the rSPCA (or any other welfarist organization) could continue to “raise awareness” while promoting veganism. Industry propaganda deploys the term “humane slaughter” to present killing as acceptable. The term “humane” suggests actions that are benevolent, compassionate, kind, or merciful. The term “slaughter” denotes the process of killing someone. Arguably, it may be merciful to agree to euthanize someone who is incurably ill, in agony, and wishes to die, but this does not describe the industrial killing of billions of young, healthy animals for food. Governments establish regulations to ensure these animals killed for food are healthy. Killing someone who is healthy and does not want to die is the ultimate form of violence, oppression, and domination. It cannot be considered a benevolent, compassionate, kind, or merciful act. Welfarists adopt Singer’s (2002) position that it is not the killing of animals but, rather, their suffering that constitutes an ethical problem. Singer makes the dubious claims that other animals have no interest in continuing to live and that as long as they are killed painlessly and replaced by other animals, there is no ethical dilemma, supporting these notions with another equally dubious assertion: that other animals lack mental continuity, inhabiting an eternal present with no awareness of the future. Direct observation of other animals contradicts Singer’s assessment, while recent work in cognitive ethology demonstrates that he is wrong (Hills and Butterfill 2015). Rights advocates reject such notions, arguing that all sentient animals do have interest in continuing to live (Regan 2004). As the rSPCA (n.d.) stated in the quote above, there is “no recognised humane method of killing” dogs. Killing without pain cannot be achieved in the context of industrialized mass slaughter and advocacy groups have

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provided extensive evidence demonstrating animals’ suffering. Even industry-friendly studies show that many animals are not stunned into unconsciousness but are only paralyzed so they are still conscious and feel everything that happens to them (Grandin 1998). An advocacy group (Animal Aid n.d.) filmed nine randomly chosen slaughterhouses in Britain between 2009 and 2011 and found evidence of cruelty and lawbreaking in 8 of them. The problems are serious and widespread. Our films revealed animals being kicked, slapped, stamped on, and picked up by fleeces and ears and thrown into stunning pens. We recorded animals being improperly stunned and going to the knife while still conscious. We filmed animals deliberately and illegally beaten and pigs burned with cigarettes. Even where no laws were broken, animals still suffered pain and fear. And ‘high welfare’ plants, such as those accredited by the Soil Association and Freedom Food, were no better than the standard ones, and were guilty of breaches of the welfare laws. Animal Aid believes that whether ‘conventional,’ organic, kosher or halal, all slaughter is unnecessary and immoral, and the only way to prevent such suffering is to go vegan. Although this investigation reveals conditions in Britain, one can imagine that the situation throughout Asia is no better.

Collaboration Animal activism is growing across Asia and includes calls to stop the dog-flesh industry. Protection groups Change for Animals Foundation, Humane Society International, Animals Asia, and Soi Dog Foundation formed the Asia Canine Protection Alliance to collaborate internationally. However, in all countries, cruelty to animals is considered less significant than crimes against humans, and typically, institutionalized cruelty for profit is not even recognized as abuse. Many treat abuse of animals as a joke. Recognizing that appeals to compassion may not be successful, the Alliance emphasized anthropocentric concerns and stressed health dangers, such as rabies, which had reached “epidemic”

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proportions in Vietnam. Their focus has been on stopping the supply from Thailand and demand from Vietnam. Alliance members argue that ending the illegal trade will not only save dogs’ lives but is a major public health concern and a vital part of national programs to eliminate rabies (VietnamNet 2013). Tuan Bendixsen, Vietnam director of Animals Asia, said: “The trade in dogs for meat encourages the large-scale and illegal movement of dogs of unknown disease and vaccination status, and is impeding rabies elimination efforts in the region, posing a significant risk to the pledge made by the health ministers of Southeast Asia to eliminate rabies by 2020. Attempts to control and eliminate rabies will fail without addressing the trade in dogs for human consumption” (ibid.). In September 2013 Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam agreed to a five-year ban on dog imports into Vietnam. Animal protectionists were encouraged but skeptical, noting that although all South East Asian countries required documentation for imports, those importations had continued, and that the trade is already illegal under China’s anti-rabies law but this law goes unenforced. Thus, they considered it unlikely that a temporary ban on importation and sale would end the trade. They emphasized a need for the Thai government to reduce supply by reducing street dog populations through sterilization and vaccination. Meanwhile, dealers immediately sought to bypass this agreement by killing dogs in Thailand and trucking their corpses to Vietnam rather than transporting live animals. Such “catch up” endeavours will continue unless the movement makes it clear that the dog-flesh business is based on violent exploitative relationships with human and dogs. Violence and exploitation are forms of oppression (Young 2011) and challenging them is the basis of trans-species social injustice (Matsuoka and Sorenson 2014). When we rethink canine-human relations, we should envision institutional conditions free from oppression. This means the movement must be grounded in a philosophy to address this fundamental injustice. Condemning exploitation of dogs’ bodies while promoting exploitation of other animals used for food in the West is cultural imperialism. Rather than adopting an approach that is both speciesist and culturally imperialist in its selective concern for particular types of animals, when we rethink canine-human relations in the dog-flesh industry, we must recognize that justice cannot be achieved unless we make veganism our everyday practice.

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Conclusion The dog-flesh controversy encourages us to rethink the complexities of our relationships with dogs but should also lead us to consider our relationships with other animals. Like other forms of commercial animal exploitation, the dog-flesh trade is a brutal business premised upon violence by humans, the suffering of dogs, and ultimately dogs’ deaths. Suggestions that dogs, or other animals, can be farmed and slaughtered “humanely” are absurd; the industry should be abolished. Movement to change canine-human relations is happening from within various Asian countries as people develop close bonds with dogs as companions and oppose cruelty, violence, and exploitation. At the same time, the pressure is on from without by international advocacy and protection organizations. However, such pressure can be cultural imperialism if one opposes eating dogs but does not oppose the slaughter of all animals for food. Killing other animals is the ultimate expression of our speciesist domination, based on our determination to see them as food and as commodities, not sentient beings with their own social groups; thus, it constitutes cultural imperialism over these other animals. It is a form of oppression and a barrier to trans-species social justice. If we consider that canine-human relations should be just relations, we should not stop with concern for humans but must include other species.

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Tao, Betsy. 2003. “A Stitch in Time: Addressing the Environmental, Health and Animal Welfare Effects of China’s Expanding Meat Industry.” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review 15, no. 2: 321–57. Telegraph. 2011. “Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Eating Puppy Is No Worse than Pork.” 11 October. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/ foodanddrinknews/8818975/Hugh-Fearnley-Whittingstall-eating-puppymeat-is-no-worse-than-pork.html. Thanhnien News. 2013. “Mob Beats Dog Thief to Death in Central Vietnam.” 10 June. http://www.thanhniennews.com/society/mob-beats-dog-thief-todeath-in-central-vietnam-2229.html. Tito, Raoul Y., Samuel L. Belknap, Kristin D. Sobolik, Robert C. Ingraham, Lauren M. Cleeland, and Cecil M. Lewis. 2011. “Brief Communication: DNA from Early Holocene American Dog.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 145, no. 4 (August): 653–7. VietnamNet. 2013. “Vietnam Is One of the Key Dog Meat Markets in South East Asia.” 18 June. http://www.eco-business.com/news/vietnam-one-keydog-meat-markets-southeast-asia/. usa Today. 2014. “A Flavor out of Favor: Dog Meat Fades in S. Korea.” 28 August. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/08/28/dogmeat-popularity/14724623/. wAP. 2014. “Animals in Farming.” http://www.worldanimalprotection.ca/ ourwork/animalsinfarming/default.aspx (accessed 28 February 2019). Willard, Barbara. 2002. “The American Story of Meat: Discursive Influences on Cultural Eating Practices.” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 1: 105–18. Wilson, Bob, and Peter Edwards. 1993. “Butchery of Horse and Dog at Witney Palace, Oxfordshire, and the Knackering and Feeding of Meat to Hounds during the Post-Medieval Period.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 27, no. 1: 43–56. Winn, Patrick. 2009. “The Dog Meat Mafia.” Global Post, 27 November. http:// www.globalpost.com/dispatch/thailand/091123/eating-dogs-dog-meatmafia-conscience. wSPA. 2011. “The Cruelty of the Dog Meat Trade.” https://www.facebook. com/notes/world-animal-protection-uk/the-cruelty-of-the-dog-meat-tradein-numbers/10150367276047137 (accessed 28 February 2019). wSPA Canada. N.d. “From the Desk of Josey Kitson Executive Director wSPA Canada.” http://support.wspa.ca/site/MessageViewer?em_id=1923.0&dlv_ id=5767 (accessed 28 February 2019). Young, Iris Marion. 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Beagle Freedom Project: Activism, Advocacy, and Awareness Tim Fowler

For Penelope, my rescued beagle. Rest in peace, old friend.

Introduction The Beagle Freedom Project was founded in December 2010 by Shannon Keith. She had received information that beagles who were used for animal experiments were to be given a chance at freedom (Beagle Freedom Project 2014). From there, the Project grew, and continues today with its mission to rescue and find homes for beagles used in laboratory research. This essay provides an in-depth look at the work of the Beagle Freedom Project (BFP), outlining its development, the projects it undertakes, and the strategies it uses. The chapter argues that the BFP’s mix of activism, advocacy, and awareness contributes to its great success. Beagles are the most popular breed of dogs used for laboratory testing. As anybody who’s known a beagle as a companion animal is aware, these dogs tend to be friendly, docile, trusting, and forgiving, and to wish to please people. These attributes, which make beagles wonderful companions, also make them top choices for laboratory testing. Beagles, according to the research industry, adapt well to living in a cage, and they are inexpensive to feed (Beagle Freedom Project 2014). Most research beagles are bred specifically for this purpose – they are obtained from commercial breeders who sell the dogs directly to scientific institutions. Most of these dogs will never know the outside world. According to the Beagle Freedom Project, nearly 70,000 dogs were used in American labs alone in 2012 (Beagle Freedom Project 2014). Most

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dogs used for animal testing, 96 percent of which are beagles, will never know life after the lab. Most dogs are destroyed by the labs after the tests of which they were the subject are completed. Some labs, however, attempt to find homes for adoptable and healthy beagles. This is where the BFP comes in – working directly with labs, the Project removes the beagles from the labs, transports them to foster care, and eventually adopts them out to new and loving homes. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first provides an overview of the animal testing industry and the work the BFP does to rescue the victims of animal testing. The second examines the political advocacy of the BFP, namely the “Beagle Freedom Bill,” a legislative act designed to ensure that the victims of animal testing have a life after labs. The third section details the social media work the BFP does, which seeks to raise awareness about animal testing and the BFP in general. The chapter argues that the mix of all of these three strategies have contributed to the ability of the Project to have a meaningful impact.

Activism: Rescuing the Victims of Lab Testing Dogs are used for numerous reasons in animal testing. They are used to test new medical treatments, cosmetic products, or household goods, and minor surgeries are performed on them. In some jurisdictions, animal testing is required by law; in others, it is simply an industry standard. Animal testing is a severely flawed scientific practice: in many cases it simply does not work. Besides being dangerous for humans due to the flawed science, it also is tantamount to torture for the animals involved; surely it constitutes cruel and unusual behaviour towards the dogs involved. This section will review some of the pertinent literature regarding the abject failures of animal testing. Simply put, animal testing does not work. It is profoundly unsafe and does not produce reliable and replicable scientific results. Rowlands argues that “there are fundamental problems involved in extrapolating results obtained from animal experimentation to human beings, and attempts to do so have often had tragic results” (2002, 137). Sorenson (2010) lists a host of medications – including Opren, isoprenaline, practolol, and many others – that were deemed safe after animal trials but resulted in injury or death to humans. “There is always a less than fiftyfifty chance that a medication tested on animals will provide the same result in humans … usually much less. This is not science. It is expensive

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and dangerous gambling” (Greek and Greek 2000, 48). Medication will often be tested on animals and deemed safe when there are no observable side effects. Medication that has been deemed safe after animal testing, however, does not necessarily result in safety for humans. Approximately 160,000 people die yearly from drugs tested safe on animals (Beagle Freedom Project). What’s much more problematic, less than 2 percent of human illnesses are ever seen in animals (Beagle Freedom Project), meaning that it is very difficult to correlate medicines that may work on animals back to humans. Animal testing has not prevented adverse reactions in humans. Sorenson (2010) notes that medicines such as nimodipine, chloramphenicol, isoprenaline, practolol, zipeprol, thalidomide, Vioxx, and hexamethonium were all cleared safe for human consumption after testing on animals. The side effects of these medicines ranged from seizures, comas, and birth defects to heart attacks, organ breakdowns, gangrene, and thousands of fatalities. Most of the findings of animal testing are scientifically and medically useless: “92% of new drugs that pass preclinical testing, which routinely includes animal tests, fail to reach the market because of safety or efficacy failures in human clinical trials[;] adverse drug reactions detected after drugs have been approved for clinical use remain common” (Knight 2011, 40). Indeed, Knight found that when a systematic review of the human clinical utility of animal experiments was undertaken, with cases selected at random and without bias, there was no evidence to suggest that animal testing was useful or “reasonably predictive of human outcomes.” Animal testing and human results agree less than one quarter of the time, leading Hawthorne (2013, 144) to conclude that “animals simply are not reliable predictors of how people will respond to a drug or treatment.” One of the reasons animal testing fails so miserably is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to track any neurological or psychological side effect of a medicine or treatment. Chemicals and medicines tested on animals may alter behaviour or damage the nervous system and brain. Finding these effects and side effects is “difficult or impossible since animals cannot, for example, explain whether or not they are having recurring headaches, difficulty seeing, are feeling tired, depressed, nervous, or nauseous” (Fano 1997, 55). The laboratory environment does not mirror a “real life” environment where results may be useful. The laboratory environment is profoundly psychologically damaging to dogs, which are sentient and

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self-aware. “Animals confined by themselves in cages for long periods develop a variety of abnormal behaviours, including pacing, rocking back and forth, head swaying, and constant rubbing against cage bars even as the flesh becomes bleeding and raw” (Hawthorne 2013, 127). The psychological damage that animals suffer in laboratories makes it nearly impossible to track which side effects are caused by the proposed treatment, and which by the animal’s incarceration. Animal testing does not work, and it is dangerous for the animals involved. This is where the Beagle Freedom Project comes in. The BFP has performed rescues all across the United States, rehoming former victims of laboratory testing in areas as spread out as Florida, Texas, the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, New York State, Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, and Boston. At the time of writing, the BFP has rescued over 141 beagles (which includes 43 beagles rescued in Spain and flown to the United States), 36 rabbits, 18 non-beagle dogs, 17 cats, four pigs, three goats, and two goldfish. The BFP works with the vivisection industry to save animals that have been tested upon. While most animals that are the victims of testing are euthanized after the process, a lucky few are saved. In most cases, laboratories will contact the BFP and let them know of animals that they are willing to release – however, in some cases, the BFP will contact labs and let them know their service is available (Keith 2014). The rescues, fosters, and adoptions are done at the expense of the BFP – the Project signs confidentiality agreements so the particular labs will never be named, it assumes full responsibility if anything goes wrong with the dog, and it pays for the travel and veterinary care of the dogs (Chase 2014). Contrary to what many assume about lab animals, “every single one of them is just a regular dog, a regular cat, a regular member of the household, just like any other” (Keith 2014). The Beagle Freedom Project exists at a strange juncture in the world of animal testing. While the BFP makes no secret about its vehement opposition to the use of animals in laboratories, the Project must, nonetheless, maintain working relationships with the labs that do test on animals – as much of its rescue work relies on connections with labs. Many labs will not work with the BFP, claiming they do private, in-house adoptions only, a claim that the Project assumes is not true (Keith 2014). It is because many labs will not work with the BFP, and because of the mediated relationship the BFP has with the vivisection industry, that its work goes well beyond “simply” rescuing animals – the BFP works for systemic, political change to better the lives of animals as well.

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Advocacy: The Beagle Freedom Bill Most labs will not co-operate voluntarily with the BFP, or any other rescue group; they would rather kill the animal after the testing is completed. Therefore the Project has put together a legislative program, in the form of the Beagle Freedom Bill (Chase 2014). The bill would require that any institution which receives taxpayer funding – a university or NIH-granted research facility – offer animals up for adoption after the conclusion of testing (Chase 2014). If the research did not require euthanasia or necropsy, the lab would be required to get in touch with a non-profit rescue organization to see if those organizations had the capacity to rehome the animals. The bill was first passed in Minnesota. In the Minnesota form, any dog or cat used in laboratory testing had to be provided an opportunity to be adopted at the conclusion of research (Simons 2014). In popular imagination, animal rights/welfare/liberation is viewed as a cause of the political left, and, indeed, as an anti-systemic social movement, animal advocacy movements are overwhelmingly on the political left (Wilde 2000). What makes the story of the bill interesting is that it received widespread bipartisan support. In Minnesota, the legislation was introduced by a progressive Democrat, but it received co-author support from Republicans as well (Chase 2014). Once introduced, the bill was pushed forward by the BFP, which included Kevin Chase, the vice president of the Project, personally lobbying state senators and Representatives in Minnesota, as well as the use of paid lobbyists. Minnesota became the test case for the bill, and after its successful passage, interest in the legislation was sparked in many states across the country, where legislators sought out the BFP, asking for a copy of the legislative language from Minnesota, to be introduced in those states (Chase 2014). At the time of writing, the bill is pending in California, Connecticut, Nevada, New Jersey, and New York; the BFP hopes to one day introduce the bill as national legislation. The response to the bill has been overwhelmingly positive. When the bill was debated by the Higher Education committee for the Assembly in California, it received a unanimous vote, and members of both parties sought to attach their names to the bill as co-authors. In New York, the bill was introduced by a Republican senator, and it passed the New York senate with unanimous bipartisan support. In New Jersey, the assembly member and senator that introduced the bill

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were Republicans, in California, Nevada, and Minnesota, the bill was introduced by Democrats. With animal advocacy generally being a political cause of the left, and in an environment where state legislatures are deeming animal advocates and environmentalists terrorists (Potter 2011) and where many legislatures are passing restrictive “ag-gag” bills designed to restrict the activities of animal advocates, how can the success of the Beagle Freedom Bill be explained? The answer lies, in part, in Gary Francione’s concept of ‘moral schizophrenia.’ While we claim to take animals’ interests seriously, we regularly ignore the interests of animals and subject them to suffering, pain, and death (Sorenson 2010). We share our homes with certain animals – dogs and cats – while at the same time eating and wearing pigs, chickens, and cows. The idea of ‘moral schizophrenia’ would suggest that it is easy for legislators to, on the one hand, show unanimous bipartisan support for a bill that would protect the animals we think of as companions and members of our households; and simultaneously, on the other hand, easily pass legislation restricting the rights of those who wish to help pigs, chickens, and cows. The BFP partially bridges this divide by being an organization fully committed to veganism. The BFP advocates for veganism on their website and in their social media. Fundraisers and events hosted by the Project are all vegan. While the organization is based around rescuing and adopting dogs, as well as other animals that have been tested on, it advocates for all animals. As part of the veganism of the BFP, as well as part of its anti-vivisection work, the Project developed the Cruelty Cutter app for smartphones. The app allows users to scan an item when shopping and determine if it has been tested on animals or not, and then share the item via social media. The Project hopes to track the data from the app over the course of six months to a year, and then present the data to companies to show how much revenue and market share has been lost due to policies of animal testing (Chase 2014). Advocating for veganism, and using the Cruelty Cutter app as part of this, also ties into the general advocacy work the BFP does, largely through the use of new social media.

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Awareness: A Savvy Use of Social Media The literature on the political uses of new social media (NSm) is quite vast, and it is ever-growing. Still, there are some findings about the ways that organizations can use NSm which are quite useful to understanding the BFP on NSm. Fundamentally, NSm can be used to raise awareness, to mobilize, and as a means of action (Vegh 2003) – all activities the BFP undertakes. According to Morell (2014), “animal causes and social media seem to be made for each other.” Indeed, the 2011 study “Who Rules Social Media” found that the Humane Society of the United States or the ASPCA, as well as other animal advocacy groups, had much higher success rates and were more actively engaged on NSm than other nonprofit groups. When it comes to raising awareness, NSm provides a means of extending citizen engagement. NSm use by activists can serve as a means of identity formation and as a source of collective power – people interested in a cause are able to engage with one another when geographically separated (Fowler and Hagar 2013). Links can be drawn between the nebulous idea of ‘raising awareness’ and other political activities: numerous studies suggest that online participation leads to greater political involvement (Boulianne 2009; Bucy and Gregson 2001; Hardy and Scheufele 2005; Shah et al. 2005). The way that NSm is used matters a great deal when it comes to the effectiveness of both ‘getting the message out’ and encouraging and increasing political involvement ‘offline.’ Using NSm statically – as a broadcast mechanism for previously published online content in other platforms (newspaper articles, websites, etc) – is not nearly as effective as using NSm as a dynamic two-way communication tool (Small 2010). Interactive, near-realtime, two-way communication where the roles of the sender and receiver of information are interchangeable is very important to maintain effective NSm use (Kiousis 2002; McMillan and Hwang 2002; Hagar 2011). Effective NSm communication requires regular use, interactivity, and the creation of engaging content: regular updates, posts, and replies are important to keep information fresh and relevant and to maintain user engagement (Fowler and Hagar 2013). Building a community is also important to sustained success on NSm. Community-building tweets and Facebook posts facilitate the creation of online social groups, doing so by generating content that

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encourages interaction and conversation. Building a community allows NSm content providers to lead to calls to action – encouraging followers to donate, to attend events, or to otherwise participate in campaigns (Lovejoy and Saxton 2012). One of the crucial elements to using NSm well for animal advocacy groups – any nonprofit group, really – involves what, exactly, the group produces online. Drawing from visual culture theory, we can note that what is excluded from an image is often as significant as what is included. Cronin, Fowler, and Hagar (2014) found that, in an online campaign by the Tuxedo Party to support stray and feral cats, it was the absence of images of stray and feral cats, images of disease, overpopulation, and premature death, that contributed to the success of the campaign. Showing cats in their natural environment, rather than showing images of suffering, helped the campaign achieve the success it did. Indeed, Edwards (2013, 96) argues that “when [faced] with pictures of overt pain and suffering, people’s physiological response can be to move faster, shut down and otherwise turn off.” The Beagle Freedom Project excels in all the areas that make NSm use successful. One of the most important aspects of the NSm use of the Project is the imagery it chooses to use. By and large, the BFP tweets and shares photos of the dogs it rescues “being dogs” – playing outside, cuddling with their companions on couches or beds, playing with other dogs, interacting with other animals and humans around the house, etc. The images are overwhelmingly positive and the decision to post mostly positive images was a clearly conscious choice by the BFP (Chase 2014; Keith 2014; Moore 2014). The positive imagery helps remind followers of the Project on NSm that the beagles who undergo animal testing are the same as the beagles who share homes as companions. The use of positive imagery is also designed to “draw in and engage the public” with the goals of the BFP, as undercover video from laboratories are “too gory, too bloody, and a little too hard for the public to watch” (Chase 2014). These comments were echoed by Ryan Moore, who does the social media for the BFP, noting that pictures of animal testing are “pretty tough” to watch (2014). By choosing to leave out the gory and bloody images that are all too common in social media posts by other animal advocacy groups, the BFP is able to show that the victims of animal testing are no different from companion animals found in households worldwide. The images of the dogs exploring

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freedom – coming out of their shells and experiencing grass or sunlight for the first time in their lives – adds a further “subtext, a subtle reminder of where they’ve been and what it is all new to them” (Chase 2014). The imagery of the BFP can be contrasted to that of other animal advocacy organizations which show ‘behind the scenes’ images of factory farms, slaughterhouses, or, indeed, animal testing. These images tend to be exceptionally gruesome, showing dying and dismembered animals, or animals full of fear and pain. Shannon Keith reflected on these images, noting, “that’s how people learn … but we decided to take a different approach because we have the happy endings” (2014). The use of positive images helps “get people on board and listen,” as the majority of BFP supporters are “not animal rights activists, they’re not vegans, they’re not vegetarians, they’re average citizens who are horrified that this is going on” (Keith 2014). The use of positive images as part of a successful animal advocacy NSm campaign is not unique to the BFP. Besides the aforementioned case of the Tuxedo Party in Halifax (Cronin, Fowler, and Hagar 2014), one can easily highlight the example of Esther the Wonder Pig. Esther, adopted by people who thought she was a micropig, grew into a full-sized pig. Esther’s adopted companions started a Facebook page to share her adventures around the house with their friends and family, but the page quickly went viral, growing to over 180,000 “likes” worldwide. Esther’s NSm feed shows her as just another member of the family, and highlights that a pig is no different from a dog – and the images tweeted and posted on Facebook are always positive, showing a happy pig. To contrast with the positive images on the BFP’s NSm, the Project will “occasionally post something that’s hard to look at” (Moore 2014). The images of a dog in a cage, or a dog undergoing animal testing, are designed to remind followers of the Project about the realities of animal testing, and why the BFP exists; these images are often in “the context of something the BFP is already talking about” in an ongoing campaign (Chase 2014). What is very interesting about these “negative” tweets is the response they garner. According to Ryan Moore, the social media director for the project, these tweets get a “much, much, much bigger response” (2014). By contrasting the freedom of the beagles in their life after labs to the life that animals undergoing animal testing are going through, the BFP underscores its goal to end animal testing, and to rehome animals that have been victims of testing.

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Besides the imagery of the BFP, there are other factors that lead to its social media having an impact. The Project has a high degree of interactivity on its NSm feed – its members maintain active, two-way communication with their followers, something that stands out from many other animal advocacy groups on NSm. Ryan Moore attempts to respond to all tweets and Facebook messages left for the BFP, something which has surprised many of the Project’s followers, who are not used to responses on social media (Moore 2014). The Project responds to “pretty much almost everything on Twitter … and private messages on Facebook” (Moore 2014). This has allowed the BFP to build up a strong community on NSm, where followers are actively engaged with the Project and its goals. The BFP will frequently retweet tweets from followers, helping to build up a community, and allowing BFP followers globally to interact with each other. The BFP also maintains a Facebook group for fosterers and adopters, so those who have fostered or adopted an animal can talk about the “challenges and frustrations” that come with rescuing a lab animal. These animals suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and many of them will be initially terrified of their surroundings or will have difficulty with walking on a leash or with potty training (Moore 2014). NSm allows those who adopt or foster an animal to help trade stories of what works, to build a strong and supportive community. The use of NSm also helps the BFP find adopters and foster parents: about 20 percent of those who foster or adopt an animal from the BFP find the Project, initially, through NSm (Keith 2014). The Project is also very active on NSm, posting to Facebook and Twitter daily. Regular use also helps build a community and keep followers actively engaged in the work of the organization – something the BFP does quite successfully. Indeed, the BFP receives a number of likes, comments, shares, tweets, and retweets comparable to the statistics of much larger animal advocacy organizations such as Mercy for Animals or PEtA (Moore 2014). This is, in part, due to the regular online presence of the BFP. Besides the main account for the BFP, many of the rescued dogs have individual pages, keeping track of that specific dog’s life after animal testing. These pages are created and maintained by the fosterer or adopter of that individual dog, but the BFP will often share updates from that individual page. This helps to both create a larger community and contribute to regular postings, both of which make the BFP’s online presence impactful.

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Conclusions The Beagle Freedom Project is a small but wide-reaching animal advocacy organization. The primary work of the Project is to rescue and rehome dogs, and other animals, that have been subjected to animal testing. To this end, the Project has been greatly successful, saving hundreds of animals. The Project is also dedicated to ending animal testing as a practice, so, to this end, is engaged in a number of other activities. The Beagle Freedom Bill, a legislative initiative designed to help find homes for the victims of animal testing, is slowly gaining steam across America, having become law first in Minnesota in 2014, followed by versions in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New York, and Rhode Island. At the time of writing, the BFP was supporting similar bills in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. The BFP also makes exceptionally savvy use of NSm, which has helped to build a very strong community of followers, which in turn helps contribute to the Project’s reach and impact. The successes of the BFP can be measured in many ways. Primarily, it has been very successful by saving the lives of hundreds of animals through its direct rescue work. However, it has also been successful through its dedicated lobbying to support its bill, and by sparking a debate about animal testing, and helping to build a strong community, through the use of NSm.

References Beagle Freedom Project. 2014. “About Beagle Freedom Project.” http://www. beaglefreedomproject.org/about (accessed 24 September 2014). Boulianne, Shelley. 2009. “Does Internet Use Affect Engagement? A MetaAnalysis of Research.” Political Communication 26, no. 2 (May): 193–211. Bucy, Eric, and Kimberly S. Gregson. 2001. “Media Participation: A Legitimizing Mechanism of Mass Democracy.” New Media & Society 3, no. 3 (September): 357–80. Chase, Kevin. 2014. Personal communication, 3 September. Cronin, Keri, Tim Fowler, and Douglas Hagar. 2014. “When Neglect Isn’t Working Anymore: The Unlikely Success of the Tuxedo Party.” Presentation at 2014 Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association. St Catharines, oN: May.

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Edwards, Holly. 2013. “Pain in Public.” In Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins, 88–100. New York: Routledge. Fano, Alix. 1997. Lethal Laws: Animal Testing, Human Health and Environmental Policy. London: Zed Books Ltd. Fowler, Tim, and Doug Hagar. 2013. “‘Liking’ Your Union: Unions and New Social Media during Election Campaigns.” Labor Studies Journal 38, no. 3: 201–28. Greek, C. Ray, and Jean Swingle Greek. 2000. Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals. New York: Ny Continuum International Publish Group. Hagar, Douglas. 2011. “The Use of Social Media in the 2010 Niagara Municipal Elections.” St Catharines, oN: Brock University and Niagara Community Observatory, March. http://www.brocku.ca/webfm_ send/16552 (accessed 28 February 2019). Hardy, B., and D. Scheufele. 2005. “Examining Differential Gains from Internet Use: Comparing the Moderating Role of Talk and Online Interactions.” Journal of Communication 55: 71–84. Hawthorne, Mark. 2013. Bleating Hearts: The Hidden World of Animal Suffering. Winchester, Uk: Change Makers Books. Keith, Shannon. 2014. Personal communication, 25 September. Kiousis, S. 2002. “Interactivity: A Concept of Explication.” New Media & Society 4, no. 3: 355–83. Knight, Andrew. 2011. The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments. Houndmills, Uk: Palgrave MacMillan. Lovejoy, Kristen, and Gregory D. Saxton. 2012. “Information, Community, and Action: Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 17 (2012): 337–53. McMillan, Sally J., and Jang-Sun Hwang. 2002. “Measures of Perceived Interactivity: An Exploration of the Role of Direction of Communication, User Control, and Time in Shaping Perceptions of Interactivity.” Journal of Advertising 31, no. 3: 29–42. Moore, Ryan. 2014. Personal communication, 25 August . Morell, Virginia. 2014. “Causes of the Furred and Feathered Rule the Internet.” National Geographic, 14 March. http://news.nationalgeographic. com/news/2014/03/140314-social-media-animal-rights-groups-animaltesting-animal-cognition-world/. Potter, Will. 2011. Green Is the New Red. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

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Rowlands, Mark. 2002. Animals Like Us. New York: Verso Books. Shah, Dhavan V., Jaeho Cho, William P. Eveland Jr, and Nojin Kwak. 2005. “Information and Expression in a Digital Age: Modeling Internet Effects on Civic Participation.” Communication Research 32, no. 5: 531–65. Simons, Abby. 2014. “Beagle Freedom Law Makes History in Minnesota.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2 May. http://www.startribune.com/beaglefreedom-law-makes-history-in-minnesota/260128011/. Small, Tamara. 2010. “Canadian Politics in 140 Characters: Party Politics in the Twitterverse.” Canadian Parliamentary Review (Fall): 39–45. Sorenson, John. 2010. About Canada: Animal Rights. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood. Vegh, Sandor. 2003. “Classifying Forms of Online Activism: The Case of Cyberprotests against the World Bank.” In Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, 71–97. New York: Routledge. Wilde, Lawrence. 2000. “‘The creatures, too, must become free’: Marx and the Animal/Human Distinction.” Capital & Class 24, no. 3: 37–53.

SECTION FOUR

Wild Canids

CHAPTER TWELVE

Becoming “Us” Sandi Mikuse

This is a story about my personal experience with a family of coyotes and how humans in my community reacted to wildlife in their midst. This encounter led me to evaluate my own attitudes, beliefs, and relationship with these coyotes and with wild animals in general. We either conduct our lives fairly oblivious to the existence and plight of other animals, or we have some awareness of and empathy for them but remain largely detached. Many of us see ourselves not only as separate from wildlife but as superior, a viewpoint that leads us to both fear them and believe in our innate right to exploit them. Some of us, however, are aware that we humans are just one of a myriad of species that inhabit this Earth. We see ourselves not as separate from but united with animals in our struggle to survive, protect our young, and endure the suffering that is inevitable for living beings. My understanding of the ways in which humans relate to wildlife was never so clear as when I witnessed the reactions of a neighbourhood to the arrival of a family of coyotes one summer. While I learned much about how humans relate to animals by observing the reactions of my community to their new canid neighbours, I also came to understand my own relationship with animals, more specifically wildlife, as it evolved from “me and them” to simply “us.” My relationship with animals was shaped by childhood experiences and my family’s attitudes. I was born in Jasper, Alberta, a small town in Jasper National Park. We lived in a camp on the outskirts of town. I

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grew up with stories about how my mother would bundle me up in my stroller and head to town along a trail that wound along “Cabin Creek.” A mother bear lived nearby and my mother frequently encountered her and her cub at a certain bend in the trail. My mother would stop and they would exchange looks as if to say, “I won’t hurt your baby if you don’t hurt mine.” With this understanding established, my mother would carry on down the path. While my father was a great outdoorsman and grew up hunting, fishing, and trapping, my mother was from an urban centre and living near wildlife was new for her. However, she had no choice but to adapt. It was a transformative experience for her. My father underwent his own transformation over the years. He laid down his gun and never picked it up again, confiding that he could never kill another animal and that he felt immense regret and sadness about those he had killed when young. We relocated to a small city in the interior of British Columbia where we were more removed from wildlife, but our relationship with domestic animals grew as we adopted countless dogs, cats, and horses. I do not remember a time without some connection to animals. This early exposure to animals shaped me and was largely responsible, I think, for my later response to the coyote family. However, one other incident contributed to my thoughts and feelings about animals long before the coyotes arrived. While I grew up respecting animals and benefiting from having them in my life, I had never closely examined this relationship. I took animals for granted. However, something happened that forced me to re-examine my relationship with “the others.” I live in a residential area bustling with four-lane thoroughfares, blocks of housing, and small shopping centres. We had never even seen a squirrel in the neighbourhood, never mind a wild animal. Imagine my surprise when my husband and I discovered a black bear asleep under our cherry tree early one morning. I was not afraid of this visitor and in fact was concerned about his predicament. I worried that he would wake up and move on but would be ill-equipped to deal with traffic in the area. I also realized that children would be walking to school and did not want any harm to come to them. I needed to make a decision. I had heard of “conservation officers” and that people had called them in similar circumstances. I was sure they would come, tranquilize my new friend, and transport him away from harm. I called. They arrived. With a dog. And big guns. I was now questioning my decision to call them but it

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was too late. I asked what they intended to do and they explained they planned to kill the bear. Horrified, I told them they could not do this. I asked them to tranquilize him and relocate him. They replied that this was too expensive and ineffective because most bears returned despite efforts to relocate them. I was madly trying to determine how to save this poor creature when a shot rang out and two officers dragged this majestic animal by the legs through my yard and into the back of a pickup truck. The bear was dead and he was going to the dump. As the officers left, one by one my neighbours called or came by, and I expressed my outrage. But I was in for a second shock. Not one shared my horror at the outcome. They all expressed relief that the threat had been taken care of and resumed their day as though nothing significant had occurred. I, on the other hand, was awash with guilt, shame, and a gut-wrenching sadness that I could not shake. And so I began a quiet campaign to fight for the protection and rights of animals. It wasn’t until years later, however, that I would find myself once again in direct contact with a wild animal and would feel my oneness with nature so strongly that I would choose to fight passionately to protect what I now feel is a part of myself.

Encounter with Coyotes One early June morning in 2012, my friend Claudette and I looked out her kitchen window and saw some movement near a culvert in the back of her half-acre lot. It looked like a small puppy. Out came the binoculars. “It’s a coyote pup,” my friend exclaimed excitedly. Coyote pups are extremely cute and this little guy was no exception. He was hiding in the culvert but every so often would pop out, look around, and disappear again. I was delighted to see this little fellow, as was my friend. She lives on the edge of town; half a block away are sagebrush-covered hills, miles of hobby farms, and open space. Across the road is a huge field where deer often graze and the odd bear saunters through. She has spotted the occasional coyote in the field and once saw one in her front yard. Normally we were made aware of their presence by a loud and eerie yipping at night, somewhere in the distance. Today, however, they were obviously very close and had deposited their little charge in what they thought was a safe place while they went to hunt mice in the field. At least that is what we suspected. At first, we worried that the pup

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had been abandoned and was an orphan. Then I remembered seeing fawns tucked away in tall grasses while their mothers went to feed; I assumed adult coyotes did the same. We decided to watch closely and see if the mother would return.

Conservation Services and Neighbours Our first inkling that things would not be allowed to run their natural course came when Claudette called her neighbour whose house was also close to the culvert. The neighbour was aware of the pup but showed no interest in him; she said Conservation Services had been alerted and gave us the name and number of the officer in charge. It seemed strange that anyone would have bothered to call Conservation Services as this little fellow certainly did not seem to be a threat. Perhaps someone was concerned for his safety as we were, I mused. Claudette telephoned the officer, believing erroneously that he, too, would be concerned for the pup’s welfare. A Conservation Services Hotline receptionist said they were aware of the coyotes but as long as there was no damage to property or threat to people, they would not intervene but would monitor the situation. Sometime later the officer did call back. He said two people had called and that two cats had been killed in the neighbourhood. He reiterated that pets were not considered property and hunting pets was not considered a reason to kill a coyote. However, he seemed concerned with moving the coyotes and was considering pepper-spraying the pup out of the culvert. We worried that if the pup was chased away, how would his parents find him when they returned? We suggested giving it some time, offering to monitor the situation and keep him advised. He agreed to wait until the end of the week. That day we overheard two neighbours discussing the situation, one of them very agitated. He had seen a coyote in his yard and was afraid they would kill his cats. When Claudette suggested keeping them indoors as a sensible solution, he became even more agitated, saying he had every right to let his cats out without fear of them being killed by a coyote. He was adamant that these coyotes be “gotten rid of.” When he said he would block the culvert, Claudette told him the conservation officer had agreed to leave things alone until the end of the week. He left, unhappy, declaring that he would be watching. Our concern for this pup was growing and we hoped that the parents would get him, and themselves, to safety soon.

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That night we stationed ourselves at the window, binoculars in hand, staring hopefully into the dark. Finally, we saw a large male coyote, a smaller female, and a smaller juvenile approach. We breathed a sigh of relief. The hunting party had returned and they would surely head back into the hills. We agreed that they had not made the wisest decision to have deposited their pup in such a populated area and hoped they would not return. The next morning our hearts sank. There was more activity in the culvert, only this time there were two pups. We noticed people gathered on the road nearby. When they saw us they asked excitedly if we had seen the pups. We suggested that everyone leave them alone as the parents had left them there for safekeeping and would surely return that night to collect them. As the day progressed there was heightened awareness of these pups in the neighbourhood and we became increasingly afraid for their safety. Now there was talk that the parents had been spotted in broad daylight in the field. We realized their presence was causing quite a stir. While we were delighted to view them at such close range, the fact that their lives were in jeopardy was starting to sink in. We had kept a respectful distance, attempting not to interfere with them. We reasoned that in a semi-rural area, this was an example of how coyotes and people are coming face to face more often as we invade their territory with housing projects, roadways, and malls. Since we had intruded upon their habitat, the least we could do was to live in peaceful coexistence. It was becoming evident that our human neighbours did not see things this way at all. The next morning the pups were not in the culvert and we enjoyed a sigh of relief. We spotted the adults in the field throughout the day and occasionally saw the pups peeping out from a treed area. We hoped that now the pups were in a less obvious place and the adults seemed intent on hunting mice, the commotion would die down and the neighbourhood would return to normal. In reality, things were just heating up.

The Coyote Family From the coyotes’ perspective, they were just going about their business as usual. I learned from conservation officers and the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals (Fur Bearer Defenders) that coyote pups are born in spring and raising them continues into the fall. A

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family may consist of up to five or six coyotes, including parents, one or two yearlings, and the pups. The pups are kept in a den and venture short distances until fall when most leave the family, although some may remain. During pupping season, the adults are very active and visible as they focus on hunting and providing for the pups. They are also more territorial and more vocal at this time. We can attest to this as we were serenaded nightly by their eerie, haunting yipping and howling. They often responded to sirens going by on the highway during the daytime as well. I cringed when I heard them because while we knew this family consisted of only the two adults, a yearling, and the two pups, it sounded like there were twenty of them when they began their plaintive cry. I felt this certainly wouldn’t help their case, as the perceived threat would be exaggerated. Their eating habits were also garnering further animosity. Normally, coyotes feed on small rodents and occasionally bring down a deer. However, they are opportunistic, dining on fallen fruits, berries, vegetables, human garbage, pet food, and even small pets, when available. Experts told me that coyotes rarely become aggressive towards humans, but when they do, it is almost always in situations where people intentionally or unintentionally feed them. Coyotes become accustomed to human-related food and begin to aggressively demand it. They lose their fear of humans and become “habituated.” It is in this kind of situation that conflict erupts.

Anthropocentrism The coyotes were increasingly visible as they hunted in daylight and ventured into yards surrounding the field. They were spotted across the highway and in the nearby schoolyard. Now everyone was talking about them. Yet, people were surprisingly resistant to take necessary precautions. People let their pets out unattended, providing a veritable banquet of easy pickings for the coyotes. One morning, we spotted an adult coyote trotting through the yard. A little later we heard a high-pitched barking from the same area and saw the neighbour’s Chihuahua standing there, alone, sounding off like a little dinner bell. Astounded, we ran out, picked him up, and walked around the block to the neighbour’s front door. When they finally answered we told them that their little dog had left their yard and we were concerned as we had just spotted a coyote. They sleepily thanked us, took him, and closed the

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door. A few hours later he was back out there. Nothing we could say or do could convince people to take precautions for their pets’ safety. In fact, several responded with hostility, insisting that it was their right to let their pets out unattended without having to fear that they would be killed. We began getting a sense of humans’ egocentricity. Although we lived in an urban-wilderness interface, they felt that only their rights mattered. They wanted what they wanted and would not let anything stand in their way. This belief was so strong that it amounted to their right to let their pets out versus the coyotes’ right to live. Over the years many neighbours had reported that their cats had “gone missing,” another way of saying they had become dinner for a coyote, owl, or some other predator. This did not discourage them from replacing the pet with another and letting that one out too. As nonsensical as this seemed to us, we could not convince our neighbours to see it this way. It is unbelievable that a community in an urban-wilderness interface area would not accept the fact that wild animals will come through at times, taking advantage of any easy food sources. Coyotes can thrive in large urban centres so it is unsurprising that they would frequent these suburban areas. However, there was growing tension and opposition to this family and virtually no support for coexistence. This ongoing hostility had a significant impact on Claudette and me. We felt desperate but still believed that if we could only talk sense into our neighbours, if we could somehow make them feel compassion for these animals, we might avert the disaster we now knew was coming. Time was of the essence and we were running out of it. We could barely concentrate on anything else. We felt isolated as we realized that out of an entire community we were the only people fighting to protect this coyote family. Two or three neighbours intimated that they did not wish to see the coyotes killed, but they did not speak out. Not only were we alone in our defense of this family but many neighbours refused to speak with us. When they did, it was to admonish us about our support for what they considered a threat to the neighbourhood’s safety. People we had been friends with for years were now either avoiding us or hurling criticisms. We were dumbfounded. Surely out of a community of over two thousand, more than two people would advocate for the lives of this coyote family. However, none did. We were it. The full responsibility for their protection was ours. We felt the weight of this responsibility like a ton of stones around our necks.

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Protest Then came the added pressure of contending with Conservation Services. As community members demanded to have these coyotes dealt with, Conservation Services was pressured into responding. Every day we saw conservation officers tromping with their dog through the field. They always wore pistols and sometimes carried rifles. Every time we saw them we headed into the field to question them. This became an exhausting, full-time endeavour. The officers were visibly annoyed with our continual questioning. They said they were getting complaints about coyotes becoming aggressive and were there to monitor the situation. When we asked if they were there to kill the coyotes, they denied it. They confirmed that while they were getting complaints about missing cats, pets were not considered property, so if coyotes killed a pet, it would not be reason enough to exterminate them. Still, we suspected they were simply placating us and that their true agenda was to eliminate the family. Day after day we trudged into the field and made our presence known. Day after day we were greeted with contempt, thinly veiled impatience, and scorn. The officers made it clear that we did not understand these animals and the threat to the community and that it was in everyone’s best interest for us to leave it in their knowledgeable hands. Constant vigilance on our part was wearing us down and our anxiety increased daily, but we could not allow the coyotes to be so carelessly annihilated. We had been watching the pups grow and adventure playfully away from the safety of the trees in the field and our hearts went out to them. They were innocent, oblivious to the fear and hatred that they were eliciting. We wanted more than ever to protect them and to somehow make our neighbours and the conservation officers understand that coexistence and compassion were more civilized, humane, and ethical approaches than violent eradication. We were fighting for this family’s right to live and thrive but felt an impending sense of doom. While the community expressed opposition to the coyotes, one individual instigated full-out war. While we had worked for weeks to advocate for these animals, this man secured their demise overnight. We noticed over a few days a vehicle slowly cruising by the field, stopping there for long periods. The driver occasionally got out and walked toward the field as if looking for something. We were constantly concerned that people might take matters into their own hands. Recently we had seen a young boy, no older than twelve, carrying a baseball bat and storming across the

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field towards the pups. We ran out and asked him what he intended to do. In a hate-filled voice, he said he was on his way to kill the coyotes. We recognized him as the son of one neighbour who was pushing to have the coyotes “dealt with.” We were astounded. As much as I had been taught to have respect and compassion for animals, this child was being taught to fear and hate them. The level of his venomous animosity was utterly distressing. His intention to harm them was strikingly clear. Therefore, when we saw the man in the vehicle surveying the field so intently, we decided to determine exactly what he was up to. When Claudette asked him what he was doing, he began yelling angrily that he was there to kill the coyote that had killed his dog. He was so enraged that she was not sure what he would do. Did he have a gun? Would he actually kill one or all of the coyotes? Not only the coyotes but the human residents of the neighbourhood would be in danger if he began shooting. Claudette returned home and contacted the rCmP. An officer called back to say he had spoken with the man, and that his many firearms were legally registered and he knew when he was permitted to use them. The officer explained that the man was justifiably upset about the death of his dog and that as good neighbours we should show him our support. The officer expressed no concern about the coyotes’ welfare. He stated that he had told the man to leave the situation to conservation officers to “handle.” Initially we did not understand what this meant. During the following days the man continued to return to the field. When we approached him he was smiling, suddenly very happy. It was then that we realized what was happening. The conservation officers had stepped up their presence. When we spotted them, rifles in hand, we asked if they intended to kill the coyotes. This time they did not attempt to placate us but replied that the decision had been made to kill the entire family. They had already killed the father and now intended to kill the others. We now understood that the rCmP and conservation officers had agreed to kill all the coyotes to pacify the man who had lost his dog. That was why he had appeared so jovial. He had won, and “we” had lost.

Blurred Boundaries and Unequivocal Beliefs of Domination At this moment I realized what the word “we” truly meant. It not only meant Claudette and me, but the coyote family too. I was no longer fighting for “them,” I was fighting for “us.” The distinction between their

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family and my own blurred. I understood the interconnectedness of living species and how we all struggle to live, how we all have the right to thrive, to protect our families. It became clearer than ever that a small coyote pup would be affected by the loss of its father, that an adult coyote would feel the impact of losing a partner or pups. And while believing otherwise would assuage the guilt of those who senselessly exterminated this family, I knew I would never see animals as “them” again. It was now only “us” and I felt as though I were fighting for my own life, my own family. And every day that we fought, every time we looked out towards that field, I saw it in Claudette’s eyes as well. The only hope these coyotes had was if the other humans participating in this unfolding scenario had a similar realization, and that was highly unlikely. We stood there, momentarily silenced. The officers said killing the coyotes was a “public relations move.” Due to “public perception that these animals are dangerous” and the fact that some community members were afraid, the decision was made to eliminate the perceived threat. They said they had received many complaints and could not ignore them. People had complained about coyotes refusing to be scared out of yards and following them as they walked their dogs. Others said coyotes had attempted to attack their dogs while on leash and many cats were reported missing. The officers said that due to the mounting fear, they were duty-bound to kill the family. They concluded with the argument that the man whose dog had been killed was demanding that people should be able to let their pets out unattended and know that they were safe. The easy way out was to placate the community and simply destroy the coyotes. Suddenly, their story had changed: because coyotes were damaging “property,” the conservation officers were justified in killing them. Their justification rang hollow to us. We were filled with despair. We wanted to introduce reason and compassion into a situation aflame with reactive anger, hostility, and fear. We wanted our community to move from its adversarial, oppositional stance towards one of empathy and unity. What we did not know was the decision had been made and nothing we could have said or done could prevent the coyotes’ annihilation. Instead we rallied, hopeful that if we could just present a case for coexistence, we could stop the slaughter. The key contributing factor to the problem was the readily available food source in the form of domestic pets. If people would keep their cats indoors and their small dogs leashed when outdoors, the coyotes would return to the only food option available, the rodents in the field. I told

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the officers that it was a matter of educating the public, teaching them how to coexist with these animals. I suggested they hold a community meeting to educate the public on how this could be accomplished. The officers shook their heads. People wanted to let their pets out unattended and there was no funding for education. The easiest, most cost-effective solution, they said, was just to kill the coyotes. Just as we were standing there, a coyote came loping across the field. We held our breath, unsure of what the officers would do. Our anxiety was palpable. As the coyote approached, the officers appeared consternated. They were armed but seemed unsure for a moment. Then the coyote was past us, heading into the hills. The officers warned, “She lives today, but we’ll be back to get her.” We realized they had been unable to shoot because it would have been dangerous to fire with us so close by. We determined right there and then we would watch even more closely for the daily arrival of the officers in the field and be physically present to prevent them from shooting the coyotes. We felt it was now useless to try to convince them to stop their assault. As we were leaving, heavy with sadness and unable to comprehend how unaffected these men appeared about killing this coyote family, we asked one final question. “Why did you decide to become conservation officers and spend much of your time killing animals?” One answered that he loved animals and had thought that a conservation officer’s duty was to protect them. However, he said he soon found out that his job was more about killing animals than protecting them. I wondered how many had joined Conservation Services with similarly noble ideals, only to succumb to the compulsory suppression of compassionate feelings and thus become desensitized to killing.

Seeking Allies We laboured under various misconceptions. Initially we felt we would find an ally in local media. Surely journalists were trained to be unbiased and would give our side of the story equal attention. We naïvely agreed to a few newspaper interviews. The first article that appeared was devastating. Five columns long, it devoted four to justifications of killing the coyotes, with one column covering our plea for coexistence, reason, compassion, and education. Emphasis was on the loss of our neighbour’s dog and on how coyotes were hunting pets. It concluded by reinforcing the inspector of BC Conservation Services’ rationale for destroying the

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coyotes: “It’s a classic case of wildlife versus people and their pets. And unfortunately, the wildlife usually loses.” The editor even titled the article “Coyote Ugly.” The inspector’s comments were telling: “conservation officers are trying to get rid of a family of coyotes … It’s going to take some time … There are some people unhappy about what we’re doing. We’re trying to be discreet.” In other words, they had made their decision despite our attempts to reason with them, and just wanted to complete their task with as little interference as possible. This meant the killing would be done clandestinely, when we were not watching. The voices of those clamouring for the coyotes’ death had been acknowledged and their demands acted upon while our pleas for coexistence and the rights of these animals were discounted completely. We were simply bothersome, unreasonable, naïve idealists who had to be worked around. We now knew we had never been taken seriously. Another article was titled “Coyotes Spook Dallas Residents.” Again, we knew as soon as we read the title which perspective would be given a voice. The article was dominated by the story of the man and his dog and the fear-inspired comments of other residents, as well as Conservation Services’ justification for killing the coyotes. Our concerns were only briefly stated at the very end. We knew we would not find allies in the media. We gave one final interview, pleading with the reporter to consider both sides fairly before writing her article. It was never published; we concluded that not only were our neighbours demanding the coyotes’ extermination, but they had managed to bring the local media on-side and we were shut out. No one in the media would go to bat for the coyotes. In fact, their rights were never once even alluded to in the few articles that did appear. Instead, media echoed the sentiments of our neighbours and the conservation officers, describing the coyotes solely as dangerous intruders whose presence could not be tolerated. I decided to reach out to other communities in the province and beyond. I wondered how other communities dealt with this issue. I was determined to find out and share my findings with my own community.

Connecting with Experts Elsewhere By consulting experts elsewhere I gained a broader understanding of urban wildlife–human relations. The way our community reacted was not how many others dealt with coyotes. Other communities were

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committed to coexistence and had protocols governing how the rights of coyotes are protected, while providing for people’s safety. Surprisingly, some of the most advanced thinking was found in larger city centres and heavily populated areas. Discussions with the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals and the Stanley Park Ecology Society (SPES) in BC’s Lower Mainland revealed an entirely different perspective on coyote-human relationships. The SPES told me of a 1997 survey in the greater Vancouver area. In that study, ninety percent of respondents found the presence of wildlife in urban areas so appealing that they were willing to adjust their behaviours to allow for peaceful and respectful coexistence. It also showed strong support for non-lethal solutions. By 2001 a “Co-existing with Coyotes” program was established in the City of Vancouver. It takes a multi-pronged approach to public education and coyote-human conflicts. They distribute informational brochures and hold community presentations on how to coexist safely and peacefully with coyotes. School programs educate about coexistence and a website provides extensive information. Throughout the city, wherever coyotes are frequently seen, large, permanent signs have been erected providing information about how to interact with them in a way that keeps humans, pets, and coyotes safe. What caught my attention, however, was the “coyote hotline.” Whenever people call the Conservation Services, rCmP, City Hall, fire department, or any animal welfare group, they are automatically referred to the “coyote hotline” which provides information on how to deal with the situation, including instructions on how to scare off coyotes and remove attractants that may entice them into the area. Occasionally CwC staff partake in hazing to ensure the animals do not return. If an animal remains a problem, Conservation Services are called. However, even then CwC staff are involved in deciding how to handle the situation. Lethal force is rarely used. Many similar programs exist across Canada and the US. This approach contrasts with what I experienced in my community, where calls concerning wildlife are referred solely to Conservation Services. Experts confided that how wildlife encounters are handled in communities such as mine depends largely on the attitudes of the local conservation officers and their leadership. Conservation Services is in a position to educate and influence community members and municipal governments. In communities where Conservation Services values the

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existence of wildlife and instills this sense in the community, where everyone has a desire to coexist with wildlife, great efforts are made to make this happen. In such communities the first response to the presence of wildlife, even animals exhibiting more aggressive behaviour, is not to exterminate the animals but to engage in various activities aimed at keeping both the community and the animals safe. The onus is placed on individuals to modify their behaviour to prevent escalation. When humans take responsibility, coyotes rarely become enough of a problem to warrant using lethal means. In these more informed communities, the municipality invests in waste disposal systems such as animal-proof bins as opposed to curbside pickup. Fruit-picking programs further reduce attractants. Community awareness programs are offered, and printed materials are distributed educating the public on the value of having wildlife in urban areas and how to coexist successfully. In one of these communities, the fate of our coyote family would have been very different. They would not have been considered dangerous intruders but beings in their own right, with inherent value and positive attributes to contribute to the web of life. People would have willingly kept their pets in and removed other attractants. This is a key point, as every expert I spoke to explained that the greatest contributing factor to coyote-human conflict is the presence of food sources (including unsupervised pets) that draw coyotes into an area. Once attractants are removed, the animals have no reason to remain and will move on.

Seeking Leadership from Conservation Officers I was hopeful that I could present the above-mentioned knowledge, experiences, and solutions to our local Conservation Services and to my community. A change in consciousness and awareness could stop the slaughter of the remaining coyotes. I just had to get my community up to speed with the more progressive mentality of coexistence. I was willing to do my best. Attempting to connect with the Inspector of Conservation Services in our region became an exercise in futility. Each day as we watched officers arrive with guns and dogs, we desperately tried to directly contact their superiors. We wanted to present our case for coexistence and hoped to find a sympathetic ear in upper management. Every attempt was blocked, however. While those in the community wishing to complain about the coyotes could do so through the hotline and receive an immediate response, it was made

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virtually impossible for us to contact the Inspector. As soon as it was obvious that we were attempting to protect the coyotes, all avenues of communication were shut down. We obtained addresses for the Minister of Environment and the acting inspector and wrote emails pleading for rational discussion. However, we received either no response, automated responses, or short, pat answers explaining that while they understood our concerns, we did not understand the seriousness of the threat, and that their decision to kill the family was therefore justified and non-negotiable. Finally, we found the Inspector’s email address and I sent him a long message outlining the information I had received from wildlife experts as well as suggestions on how to handle the situation in a way that would keep community residents and the remainder of the coyote family safe. I received no response. Meanwhile officers continued their daily patrol and our frustration rose. We contemplated visiting the office in person but were told that it is locked to the public unless one has an appointment with an officer, and it was not possible to contact an officer directly in order to make an appointment. We turned to another option.

New Protests Finding no support amongst local media, we engaged in a fervent campaign of letters to the editor. In these we stated that while our Conservation Services had resorted to annihilation, more progressive communities had a much saner, more humane way of dealing with urban coyotes. We detailed those protocols and appealed to the compassion and reason of our own community and local Conservation Services to adopt these policies and embrace the concept of coexisting to the betterment of both wildlife and the human community. Two neighbours agreed to write letters, and family members did the same. We even enlisted the executive director of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals in Burnaby, BC, to write a letter to our local paper. We felt that since she lived in an urban area that was successfully coexisting with coyotes and since her organization had been gathering data with regard to coyotes for some time, her voice of authority and reason would have an impact. Her letter stated: Across Canada, coyotes are living in urban and semi-urban communities … Regarding coyote attacks on humans, they are extremely rare. Statistically speaking, you are much more likely

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to be injured by a garden hose … Panic and hysteria surrounding coyotes is fueled by misinformation. Killing coyotes solves nothing. While killing coyotes may bring some temporary … relief to someone who lost their pet to a coyote, in the long-term, more coyotes will simply return to the area. As long as there is a food source (garbage, fallen fruit, outdoor pets and pet food) you will have coyotes in your area … If [you want] to crack down on coyotes, [you] first [need] to crack down on the citizens … who intentionally or non-intentionally feed these animals. Education, not killing, is key … Municipalities including Vancouver have a city-wide coyote program to help manage people’s perceptions of coyotes … We must guard against taking extremes … We can find a balance and the answer is co-existence.1 These letters drew limited response. A few people expressed support for coexistence. More expressed fear and loathing towards the coyotes. One letter summed up the attitude: “Coyotes … have their place in nature, but not in my neighbourhood … they definitely have no place in town, and should be scared away or eliminated as soon as they come in … This is MY territory.” During the summer, other coyotes were killed in the city after reports of so-called aggressive behaviour. There was no outrage about these killings either. The public was either completely disinterested or supported the removal of perceived threats. Again, we were lone voices striving to change deep-rooted, unreasonable fears. We could not drum up empathy for the coyotes on any scale or convince people that coexistence was the sanest approach. There was no receptivity to changing behaviours to facilitate peaceful coexistence. We tried other tactics. We gave ourselves a name, “Advocates for Urban Wildlife,” put an ad in the local newspaper, and distributed a printed notice to our neighbourhood stating that “we would like to network with like-minded people to move our local Conservation Services towards the more progressive approach of not killing urban wildlife but supporting an approach of coexisting with urban wildlife animals instead.” No one called. When walking around the neighbourhood we handed out cans filled with pebbles, instructing people to carry them and shake them to scare off any coyotes. We suggested people carry bear spray if they worried about encountering an aggressive coyote. There was

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such a feeling of fear in the air and so many stories circulating about the dangers of coyotes that we ourselves began to feel the anxiety. We began looking over our shoulders and expecting a big coyote to lunge out from the bushes intent on attacking us. However, we saw them only at a distance, loping through the field or the backyard early in the morning. We remained cautious and Claudette accompanied her dog outside, never leaving him unattended. He was always leashed when out for a walk. We carried bear spray and noise-maker cans. We picked up fallen fruit and kept our garbage cans in the locked garage. Yet, for all the fear permeating the neighbourhood, we never once felt that the answer was to kill the coyotes. We may have found adapting to the situation bothersome, but it was a small price to pay to ensure that the coyotes would not be given opportunity to become problematic, giving conservation officers reason to kill them. Unfortunately, most did not see protecting coyotes as important and were unwilling to adjust their behaviour. We distributed an information sheet to homes in our area. Titled “Wildlife Smarts for Urban Areas,” it outlined common-sense procedures such as supervising pets and removing garbage. This information would have been more readily received from an authority such as Conservation Services, but since they were unwilling to commit resources, we did the best we could to educate our community. Since we were perceived as idealistic troublemakers devoid of any authority or understanding of the true threat these coyotes posed, our attempts were ignored. It was exhausting, and the coyotes were disappearing one by one and no-one but us seemed to notice or care. We now heard reports of bears entering suburban areas. The same scenario of fear and demand for extermination played out all over the city. By September we rarely saw or heard coyotes and wondered how many were left. As days grew shorter and the sun began to lose its heat, we felt sad and powerless to effect any change. We had not been able to contact the head of Conservation Services, although we wondered how much that would even matter now. However, we always held a sliver of hope. One day we heard that the Inspector would be nearby, setting up bear traps. As a last-ditch attempt, we headed out early and found him and his team readying traps alongside a road about a half hour from our city. We approached and introduced ourselves. His response was one of discomfort. He had received all our emails and phone messages and knew who we were as

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soon as we mentioned our names. We approached him in a friendly way and explained we only wanted to talk with him at his convenience regarding the coyote situation.

Anthropocentrism, Again The head of Conservation Services agreed, and we arranged a meeting. There, we came to understand the true purpose of our local Conservation Services as the inspector saw it. He informed us that while it was their duty to protect both animals and people, ultimately their job was to protect people. He stated: “whenever people and animals are in conflict, the animal always loses.” He acknowledged that conflict almost always results from humans knowingly or unwittingly leaving attractants around which entice animals into neighbourhoods where they normally would not go. To change human behaviour is the only answer, the Inspector insisted, saying the only way to do this is “to appeal to their humanity” through education. However, due to massive staff layoffs caused by lack of funding from the Ministry of Environment, they could only “put out fires” and had no time for education. The most cost-effective solution was to shoot “offending” animals. Any responsibility for education would have to be undertaken by members of the community, such as ourselves, not Conservation Services. In short, they were washing their hands of this responsibility and concentrating on eliminating any wildlife perceived to be a threat. He also said the coyotes were a threat to people’s pets, which he now considered their property (contrary to Conservation Services’ earlier statement that pets did not constitute property), and any animal threatening property was to be eliminated. He stated that there had been such a barrage of complaints about the coyotes from the public and the fellow whose dog had been killed, that it was his duty to make a public relations move and kill the coyotes. Any attempt to steer discussion towards the coyotes’ right to live met with a reiteration of these points. Clearly, the rights of wildlife did not enter into the equation. The bottom line was that it was all about humans feeling safe. We left feeling defeated and alone. It was apparent that if we chose to continue to try to change the behaviours and mentality of our community, we would be doing it on our own. Also, since we did not have the authority or credibility of Conservation Services behind us, we would not be taken seriously. We understood,

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too, that the meeting had just been the inspector’s way of placating us, and that nothing we could have said or done would have changed his course of action. While he pretended to be understanding, his orders to have all the coyotes killed remained. Without support, exhausted from our constant vigilance throughout the summer, we retreated. The summer heat had dissipated and the fires of hostility and fear amongst our neighbours were reduced to embers as sightings of coyotes stopped. The words “and then there were none” reverberated off the sage-covered hills. The papers were filled with accounts of Conservation Officers killing bears in response to complaints from around the city as the bears showed up looking for fruit and other food sources to fatten up for the coming winter. The coyotes were all gone and soon so were all the bears. Winter settled in and all was still. Next spring and summer we saw no coyotes at all and heard no coyote serenade from the surrounding hills. In fact, since then we have neither seen nor heard a single coyote in the area. The neighbourhood returned to normal. The neighbours talk to us again as if nothing happened, and they still let out their cats and dogs. The only thing that has changed is us. We will never see ourselves as separate from our wildlife neighbours ever again. We still carry pain and sadness in our hearts for that coyote family. We also feel a great sense of guilt on behalf of our human family for our shameful, anthropocentric way of being in the world. We know that if our community really wanted to coexist with these animals, if it was our priority, we would figure out ways to do it so that both coyotes and humans could be safe, could both live and thrive. In communities where this is a priority, there have been great strides in accomplishing these goals (Burnaby, Whistler, and Vancouver, BC, and Jasper, AB, just to name a few2). We will continue, to the best of our ability, to promote ideals of coexistence in our community. We may not see immediate change, but we will not give up hope that someday our provincial and municipal government, our Conservation Services, and the residents will come to value our wildlife neighbours and will accord them the same right to live and thrive that we believe is ours. Other communities have developed ways to successfully, safely, peacefully coexist with wildlife and we hope that every community will soon adopt these practices. Until then, I will remain ever grateful to that family of coyotes for transforming my relationship with them and all wildlife from one of “me and them” to one of “us.”

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Notes 1 Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals in Burnaby, BC. Personal communication, August 2012. 2 I spoke with Dan Straker, the Stanley Park Ecology Society, Vancouver, BC. They run an “Existing with Coyotes” program which aims to educate the public regarding urban coyotes. He says downtown Vancouver is teeming with coyotes and they are largely accepted. Lesley Fox, with the Association for the Protection of Fur Bearing Animals, Burnaby, BC, concurred with what Vancouver does. They aim to educate the public regarding urban wildlife. Bears, coyotes, and other urban wildlife are prevalent in the city and are largely accepted. I also spoke with Sylvia Dolson, of the Get Bear Smart Society in Whistler, BC, throughout that summer and fall and have kept in touch with her over the years since. In Whistler they do not have curbside garbage pickup, but large bear-proof bins that the community uses. Their society is very active in educating the public and addressing issues that may create conflict between wildlife, such as coyotes, and the residents of the community. In Jasper, AB, according to John Wilmshurst, then the resource conservation manager for Jasper National Park, they have no curbside pickup, just bear-proof bins. They do a lot of public education aimed at reducing conflict between wildlife and the community. The presence of wildlife in the town is expected.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Time to Rethink the Wolf: Reflections on Captivity Rob Laidlaw

For a very long time, biologists, wildlife managers, and wolf enthusiasts have known that wolves were wide-ranging animals. Experience had shown that when wolves were severely reduced or eliminated in one area, as long as there were healthy wolf populations in adjacent regions, new animals would move in, sometimes travelling substantial distances to fill vacated habitat. But one wolf, named Pluie, really helped us understand just how wide-ranging wolves can be.

Pluie Pluie was a five-year-old alpha female wolf who was captured and fitted with a radio collar in Alberta’s Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, just southwest of the City of Calgary, in June of 1991. The satellite transmitter in her collar sent details of her location to the scientists who were tracking her during the following two years. As Pluie went about the business of being a wolf, the scientists watched in amazement. Pluie headed into southern Alberta, across the Canada/US border, and into the state of Montana. Then she travelled west, across the northern portion of Idaho, crossing into Washington and almost reaching the City of Spokane, before heading north back into Alberta and then British Columbia. She was moving through an area approximately 40,000 square miles (103,600 square kilometres) in size. In 1993, Pluie’s

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collar stopped transmitting, apparently because of damage by a bullet. That might have been the end of Pluie’s story, except she wasn’t killed when that happened. She lived for another two years before being shot, along with her mate and three pups, near Fernie, British Columbia. Pluie’s journey provided tangible proof that the idea of how wolves live and the amount of space they require needed to be reconsidered. Her travels made protected areas, such as parks and reserves, seem tiny and inadequate, and changed the way conservationists thought about wolf conservation. Since Pluie’s time there have been other studies tracking the travels of grey wolves. A study of wolf movements in Minnesota found that they travelled as far as 306 miles (494 kilometres) from their home territories before returning (Merrill and Mech 2000). A paper about movement patterns of wolves in Manitoba describes seasonal travel distances of 237–2,819 miles (383–4,538 kilometres) in summer and 555–3,889 miles (894–6,260 kilometres) during the winter, averaging from 5.67 to 17.59 miles (9.13 to 28.32 kilometres) per day (Scurrah 2012).

Kitchee As I was writing this chapter, a coywolf (a coyote-wolf hybrid) named Kitchee, here in my home province of Ontario, was on his own remarkable journey, made even more astonishing because he has only one rear leg. Kitchee had been caught in a snare and his leg was severely damaged. He was taken to the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, where veterinarians determined that his leg could not be salvaged, so it was amputated. After months of rehabilitation and careful deliberation by sanctuary staff and wildlife officials, a decision was made to release Kitchee. He was outfitted with a radio transmitter so his travels could be tracked. Not only would his case add to the body of knowledge about wolf travels, he was an excellent case study in the release of three-legged animals. Kitchee was set free in August of 2014. After a period of moving to and from his release site, he headed north through Algonquin Provincial Park and beyond. Traversing a diversity of terrain, he managed to swim across a major river and then headed west. He travelled hundreds of kilometres and was still on the move when I wrote this chapter. He may have been travelling back to his original home range.

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Iconic Animals – Wolves Not every grey wolf will travel as far as Pluie or Kitchee. A range of factors can affect wolf movements, such as food availability, obstacles to movement (e.g., very wide rivers, large areas of urban development), and weather, and there may be different motivations for dispersal over long distances, such as finding mates or establishing new territories. But one thing is absolutely clear: grey wolves inhabit very large spaces and travel substantial distances as they go about the business of being wolves. That fact raised eyebrows in the world of wolf conservation, but it should also make anyone who keeps wolves and other wide-ranging animals in captivity step back and think. A couple of weeks before I wrote this chapter I was visiting a western Canadian zoo. It was a hot August day as I stood at the exhibit watching two wolves pace back and forth. Their living space was small and both of the animals remained close to the rear fence, the furthest distance they could achieve from the visitor viewing station where I was standing. The pattern they paced was worn into the earth substrate, an indication that this was something they did over and over again. During the time I was standing at the exhibit, more than two dozen visitors walked by. They stopped and looked for a moment. A couple of them glanced at the cage sign, but it provided only a few throwaway facts about wolf biology and range, and not much else. There was nothing to hold the attention of visitors, so after a few seconds, without saying a word, most of them just moved on to the next exhibit. I can’t say that I’m surprised. Other than sitting around or pacing, the wolves couldn’t do very much. The exhibit was small and boring, and the design, a roughly rectangular area of fenced ground, did little, if anything, to showcase the wolves or to create a sense of awe about them in the visitors who walked by. The interior consisted of some trees, rocks, logs, and small areas of grass cover. There was little to facilitate or encourage natural wolf movements and behaviours, so the visitors who stopped didn’t see anything except a couple of wolves lying at the back of the enclosure or pacing along the back fence. There wasn’t a great deal that could be learned from this display, except perhaps the size, shape, and colour of the wolves. It was just another exhibit for people to look at, check off their mental zoo checklist, and then move on. Equally as problematic as the living

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conditions, if one truly believes that captive animals in zoos and other public display facilities are ambassadors for their counterparts in the wild, there was no attempt to make visitors aware of the past and current persecution of wolves, both in Canada and elsewhere, or to explain how, if one were so inclined, wolves could be helped. While this particular wolf exhibit was substandard, from my own observations of zoos and other captive wildlife facilities around the world, it was not unusually so. My experience indicates that wolf enclosures, particularly in urban zoos, often lack the space and complexity to properly satisfy the biological and behavioural needs of wolves. Fewer still actually make an attempt to present the reality of wolf life, including the challenges and threats that wild wolves face today. Wolves are iconic animals and one of the most successful mammals ever. The most widespread is the grey wolf (Canis lupus), originally found throughout North America, Eurasia, and northern Africa. The grey wolf was once the world’s most widely dispersed mammal, but persecution by humans has reduced grey wolf numbers substantially and the species has been extirpated from many areas of its former range, including substantial portions of Europe and most of the United States and Mexico. Today, there are two universally recognized species of wolves: the grey wolf (C. lupus) and the red wolf (C. rufus). A third species may be the eastern wolf (C. lycaon), also called the Timber wolf or Algonquin wolf, but not all scientists agree that the eastern wolf is a true species. Some consider it a subspecies of the grey wolf (C. l. lycaon). Regardless, the eastern wolf has been designated a species of Special Concern under Canada’s Species At Risk Act. The Ethiopian wolf (C. simensis) is considered by some to be yet another species of wolf, but that idea is not universally accepted. The grey wolf in North America is made up of five subspecies, while the grey wolves of Europe and Asia comprise up to a dozen subspecies. In North America, the grey wolf subspecies are the Mexican wolf (C. l. baileyi), Great Plains or Buffalo wolf (C. l. nubilus), Rocky Mountain wolf (C. l. occidentalis), Arctic wolf (C. l. arctos), and, possibly, the eastern wolf (C. l. lycaon). At least two other distinct subspecies, one found on the prairies and one on the island of Newfoundland, were totally exterminated. Today in Canada an estimated 50,000–60,000 grey wolves can be found, and their numbers are relatively stable. Grey wolves in the United States are estimated at approximately 8,000–10,000 in Alaska and more

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than 5,000 in the lower 48 states (International Wolf Center n.d.). Red wolves (C. rufus), a smaller endangered species of wolf, can be found in some of the southern states, but their numbers are extremely low. The decline of wolf populations has slowed down and in recent years there have even been attempts to increase wolf numbers by reintroducing them into parts of their former range. Perhaps the most famous of these initiatives has been the release of Canadian grey wolves into Idaho and into Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The reintroduction led to a beneficial trophic cascade, a series of changes to the Greater Yellowstone Area’s food chain and ecology. This has forced a reexamination of the ecological role of apex predators around the world. Further south, Mexican wolves (C. l. baileyi) have also been reintroduced into parts of their former range, principally Arizona and New Mexico, although their numbers remain extremely low and the long-term success of the reintroduction is not assured. The numbers of grey wolves have also increased in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Germany, and several other countries. About 2,000 wolves exist in Romania and there are small populations in a number of other Eastern European nations, with the potential for future expansion into vacant habitats. In total, an estimated 13,000 wolves are currently thought to reside in Europe, and an additional 30,000 wolves may exist in Russia (International Wolf Center n.d.). While they are presumably at nowhere near their historical levels, and even though some regional populations are in trouble, grey wolves as a species are holding their own. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has categorized grey wolves as a species of Least Concern, while recognizing the perilous stature of some populations. Wolves have suffered during their long relationship with humans. Considered competition to pastoralists, they were mercilessly hunted and killed in large numbers. Irrational, exaggerated fears about the danger wolves pose to humans also fuelled many killings. More recently, wildlife managers have targeted wolves in misguided attempts to protect caribou, moose, and other ungulate populations. Humans have been tough on wolves, but while much of our relationship with them has been bathed in blood, there are some emerging bright spots in it. Today, wildlife watchers flock to see grey wolves or to participate in wolf howl events in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park, and other parks and reserves. These kinds of activities

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are the closest encounters many people will have with wild wolves and most of them are thrilled by the experience. Since wolves are the progenitors of the domestic dog, or at least so it has long been assumed, they have a direct, if somewhat distant, relationship to a significant segment of the human population. It’s thought that thousands of years ago wild wolves were attracted to ancient human encampments, presumably to scavenge for leftover scraps of food. As the tolerance level between wolves and humans increased, the relationship deepened. Eventually it led to both behavioural and physical changes in the wolves. They became more dog-like. This process of domestication was one that most scientists thought would take a very long time, but an experiment involving captive foxes conducted by Russian scientist Dmitry Belyaev (and continued by others after his death) has challenged aspects of that belief. Starting in 1959 Belyaev bred captive foxes, but only those animals that were friendliest to humans. He did the same with each successive generation, breeding only those individuals who were friendliest to people. The foxes started to change more rapidly than was anticipated. In time they developed floppy ears, curly tails, and different colour patterns. They wagged their tails, loved to be stroked, and sought out human attention (Trut 1999). The timeframe for these changes suggested that wolf domestication may have occurred more rapidly than previously thought. There’s no doubt that the social proclivities of wolves would have helped make them potential candidates for domestication. But if it did occur rapidly at certain times, there had to be a perfect storm of conditions for it to happen, as a process of natural selection would still have been in play and there are many potential obstacles to the domestication process. One such obstacle was recently highlighted by University of Massachusetts biologist Kathryn Lord. She studied the responses of seven wolf pups and forty-three dogs to various stimuli to find out why dogs seem able to develop social attachments (including to humans) very quickly, while wolves remain less able to do so. Lord discovered that while wolf and dog pups both develop their sense of smell at two weeks of age, hearing at four weeks, and sight at six weeks, wolf pups actively investigate their environment from the two-week period, while dogs wait until all three senses have developed. The wolf pups are subjected to a range of presumably frightening stimuli at this very early age, setting them on a different developmental path from dogs (Lord 2013, 110). This

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difference in how wolves and dogs relate to the world during a critical period of their early social development may be why dogs can make good companions to humans, while wolves usually do not. There is some dispute as to where and when domestic dogs first arose, but it’s likely the ancestors of modern dogs first emerged in the Middle East and/or China and then spread to other areas. It’s possible they also independently emerged in other parts of the world and died out. The remains of one prehistoric pet dog in Siberia have been dated to approximately 33,000 years ago (Dell’Amore 2011). Human and dog bones were uncovered in a European burial site from 14,000 years ago (Pappas 2013), while the oldest dog remains in North America date to about 20,000 years ago (Lupo and Janetski 1994). Dholes, also known as Indian wild dogs (Cuon alpinus), have a very long history with humans. While they have been tamed and/or kept captive, they have not been domesticated. Dingos (C. l. dingo) have also had a very long association with humans measuring in the thousands of years. Estimates of their introduction into Australia range from 4,600–18,300 years ago and many people believe they accompanied early human travellers who came from Asia. Dingos are not domesticated.

Encountering Wolves While wolves have been a part of human history and culture around the world, the majority of people who see wolves in the flesh will do so at a zoo or wildlife captivity facility. Wolves are a ubiquitous part of the zoo world and are routinely found in both the largest and the smallest zoo facilities. Despite being common in captivity, wolves have seemingly existed under the radar of people concerned about, or interested in, wildlife in captivity. They haven’t attracted the attention that animals such as elephants, dolphins, or big cats have. In fact, it’s often taken an escape, maiming, or death to thrust captive wolves into the spotlight. One such incident took place on 18 April 1996 at the Haliburton Wolf Centre in Ontario, Canada. Wildlife biologist Patricia Wyman, assigned to look after a pack of four adult wolves, was found dead in the centre’s wolf enclosure. An investigation concluded that Wyman was probably encircled by the wolves and may have accidently tripped over one of the branches on the enclosure floor, triggering an attack. The death generated worldwide media coverage (Klinghammer 1996).

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A similar incident occurred in June 2012 when a female employee at the Kolmarden Wildlife Park in Sweden was killed by a pack of wolves she had helped raise. The eight resident wolves attacked after the woman entered their enclosure, something she had been doing for many years. What triggered the attack was never determined (Rosenfeld 2012). Other kinds of incidents also generate considerable media and public interest. In November 2013, five wolves at the Colchester Zoo managed to escape through a hole in their enclosure’s chain-link fence. Two of the wolves were quickly recaptured, while another pair was shot dead a short while later. The surviving fifth wolf was killed after an intensive search of the area (Stevens 2013). Employees at Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo found five wolves walking around the zoo’s new polar bear enclosure one July 2014 morning. Apparently the wolves had dug under the barrier separating the two exhibits (Fieldberg 2014).

Concerns for Captive Situations and Animal Welfare While wolves don’t usually attract much attention outside of these kinds of sensational incidents, there has been growing general interest and concern about the keeping of all kinds of animals in zoos and other types of captive situations. This shift in concern about the welfare of animals in captivity has partially been generated by members of the captivity industry, but much of it has come from external pressure by animal protection organizations, members of the public, and the media. There is little doubt that zoos and other captive facilities have invested a great deal in the development of new exhibits and management strategies, but my own observations indicate that much of it is still heavily focused on human needs, such as aesthetics and keeper convenience, and not on animal welfare. Despite claims to the contrary, traditional menagerie-style zoos are still largely entertainment attractions and promote themselves as such to maintain or increase gate numbers and revenue. Media coverage of new zoo acquisitions, fancy new exhibits, new attractions and rides, and special events such as concerts and marathons are routine wherever zoos are found. However, zoos also promote themselves as deliverers of a public good, which they most often articulate as conservation, education, and research. Since animal health and welfare has become a mainstream issue of public concern, the more savvy zoos now attempt

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to reflect and demonstrate that concern to maintain good standing in the eyes of the public and thereby maintain their own legitimacy. But in practice, animal welfare is often a subsidiary concern, and proof of that can be found in many of the new “improved” exhibits that zoos are constructing. In many cases, they focus more on the visitor experience than they do on the needs of the animals. I’ve visited a great many of the high-profile new zoo exhibits, some that cost tens of millions of dollars to construct, and I usually leave disappointed. The space for visitor pathways, seating areas, fancy viewing stations, washrooms, concession stands, restaurants, kids’ attractions, staff service areas, off-exhibit holding areas, maintenance buildings, etc. often exceeds what is actually provided to the animals. And the animal living spaces are often highly artificial, comprising molded granite rock, fake trees, and electrified vegetation, with little that is natural. They are often modified and/or slightly improved versions of the cages and enclosures that preceded them. Based on my own experiences, I have no hesitation in saying that the needs of the visitors usually trump those of the animals. In Toronto, where I live, news media recently covered the opening of a Zipline ride at the zoo’s Tundra Trek exhibit complex. A large tower was constructed so visitors can pay a fee to ride the Zipline down past the exhibits, including one with Arctic wolves. How zoo visitors flying along on an overhead cable, many of them kids screaming or shouting while doing so, will affect the wolves and other animals is unclear. Many wolf keepers suggest that visitors be quiet and respectful, and not look directly at the animals. Is the Toronto Zoo Zipline a case of visitor entertainment and revenue generation trumping animal needs? I believe the answer is obvious. While discussion of animal welfare has grown, many people are not entirely clear what animal welfare actually is. A definition of animal welfare is the state of an animal as it attempts to cope with its environment. Animal welfare scientist Dr Jake Veasey (Calgary Zoo n.d.) says “animal welfare is essentially the study of the happiness of animals – how they feel.” Good welfare usually means that an animal’s physical, behavioural, and social needs are being satisfied. But animal welfare exists on a continuum, and being qualitative, it is subject to some degree of interpretation. Several methods have been put forward to help define and assess welfare, with the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare being probably the

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best known. Developed by a committee chaired by Professor Roger Bramble in the United Kingdom in 1965, the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare are not specific standards but instead describe ideal states. They are now recognized and used around the world as a framework for animal welfare discussions and are frequently referred to in discussions of captive animals. The Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare are: 1

Freedom from Hunger and Thirst – by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour. 2 Freedom from Discomfort – by providing an appropriate environment. 3 Freedom from Pain, Injury or Disease – by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment. 4 Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour – by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind. 5 Freedom from Fear and Distress – by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering. Other welfare assessment methods have also been advanced over the years. They include looking at behavioural indicators of animal welfare, such as stereotypic behaviours, hyper-aggression, hyper-sexuality, and lethargy, that can lead to negative emotional states, discomfort, stress, and suffering; measuring physical indicators of stress and suffering such as respiratory rates, blood flow, hormone levels, body temperatures, and other bodily processes, as well as the presence of illness, injury, and disease; and comparing the activity budgets of captive animals to those of their wild counterparts, to name just a few. Since no one can ever know precisely what animals are thinking or feeling, determining their actual welfare status can be a challenge. So understanding an animal’s behavioural ecology and natural history can be of enormous help in determining what an animal’s actual needs are. Knowing what an animal does in the wild can facilitate the identification of behaviours and movements that animals are highly motivated to perform or that may be essential to their health and welfare in captivity.

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Space Should Be a Critical Consideration According to Michael K. Stoskipf and Edward F. Gibbons, Jr in Naturalistic Environments in Captivity for Animal Behavior Research (1994, 154), “Knowledge of the range and frequency of species-typical behaviors is fundamental in the use of behavior as a health assessment tool … studies conducted in the wild and in captivity can be important sources of information for the determination of the range and types of behaviors expressed by a species.” Of course, it’s easy to say to look at the wild state of animals, but it may be much harder to do in practice. Since grey wolves are wide-ranging, typically inhabit remote areas, and often avoid contact with humans, observing and understanding what they actually do on an hourly and daily basis can be challenging. Those difficulties are why some behavioural studies have focused on captive wolves, even though they may be physically and behaviourally different from their wild counterparts. A substantial body of literature exists discussing the behavioural, morphological, and physiological differences between wild and captive or domesticated animals. Behavioural changes in captive and domesticated animals can include an inability to recognize predators, a lack of hunting knowledge, poor social skills, etc. There can also be morphological differences in captive animals (O’Regan and Kitchener 2005), including changes in overall size, brain and organ size, or body shape, to name a few. A 2014 paper entitled “Comparative Skull Analysis Suggests Species-Specific Captivity-Related Malformation in Lions (Panthera leo)” describes an investigation into the differences between wild and captive lions. 575 lion skulls were compared, with 63 coming from captive lions and the rest from wild lions. The review found that the foramen magnum (the hole that connects the brain to the spinal cord) was significantly smaller in the captive animals. This may be why many captive lions suffer from tremors, head tilting, and other issues (Saragusty et al. 2014). A study involving electrocardiograph examinations of eleven free-ranging wolves in Alaska and captive wolves in Minnesota revealed that the wild wolves had hearts up to two times larger. During the study’s observation and capture period the wild wolves travelled an average of 40 miles (64 kilometres) each day, including one overnight distance of 80 miles (128 kilometres), while the captive wolves were more or less sedentary (Constable et al. 1998). The idea that we should

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be looking to the wild is not new. The late Heini Hediger, Swiss zoo director, biologist, and the founder of modern zoo biology, introduced many new ideas and concepts regarding the keeping of wildlife in captivity during his long career. Key among them was the idea that the life of an animal in its natural state should be studied so we can understand how to provide that animal with appropriate conditions in captivity. To put it another way, an animal’s natural life should inform its keeping in captivity. Unfortunately, many animal keepers and custodians overlook, ignore, or dismiss aspects of natural life. One idea that repeatedly surfaces is that animals, including wide-ranging species, only travel to find food. Therefore, if food is provided, animals don’t require very much space. This is something I have heard repeatedly throughout the years. Recently, I encountered it yet again. In An Introduction to Zoo Biology and Management, author Paul Rees (2011, 98) says, “animals kept in captivity may have all their resource needs (food, shelter, etc.) fulfilled in a relatively small space, thereby allowing large groups to be maintained with a relatively small home range.” It’s unlikely that anyone would argue against the suggestion that a wild animal’s home range may be smaller if resources are close by and available year-round. But there may be many other benefits to movement, such as physical exercise, mental stimulation, cultural exchange, locating mates, range expansion, etc. In fact, a great deal of movement may not be motivated by food. In addition, even the smallest home ranges of free-roaming animals are still hundreds, thousands, or millions of times bigger than the biggest captive environments. In my view, any suggestion that the severely compressed living spaces of captive animals are anything like the smallest natural home ranges of their free-ranging counterparts, particularly for wide-ranging or migratory species, is absurd. What we now know about the substantial home range sizes and long-distance travels of grey wolves should tell us that these animals require very large spaces in captivity. It is a product of grey wolf evolution and part of who they are. In fact, I would suggest that space should always be a critical consideration when keeping wild animals in captivity. My own experiences, including sitting in on zoo exhibit planning sessions, have convinced me that the size of captive animal living spaces is routinely dictated by the footprint of the facility, finances, husbandry convenience, or preconceptions about a species and its needs, and not

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by the behavioural ecology and natural history of the animals. Instead of making the cage fit the animal, most institutions try to make the animal fit the cage. As we now know, the home ranges of grey wolves can be enormous. Even at the low end of the scale, they are measured in the hundreds of square kilometres. While it’s obvious that captive wolves cannot be provided with anywhere near that amount of space, it may be that enclosures once considered expansive for wolves in captivity are in reality grossly undersized and inadequate. To their considerable credit, this is a perspective I have heard articulated by a number of sanctuary operators. According to Howard Smith, big game biologist and Executive Director of the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Ontario, “While our wolf enclosures measure in the acres and are very large when compared to many other facilities, we still hope to expand at some point in the future. Wolves are exceptionally wide-ranging animals that can move for miles in the blink of an eye. In captivity, they need as much space as possible. A cage for a wolf can never be big enough.”1 When considering space allocation for any animal in captivity, providing enough space for them to express normal movements and behaviours and to feel secure is critical. And the consequences of not providing enough space must be carefully thought through. There is no upper limit on cage or enclosure size. It is always better for animals to have more space than they need, than to need more space and not have it. The rationale for this is that there is no downside to the former, but a big downside to the latter. For most animals, bigger really is better; however, it is also important to realize that a large but barren enclosure can be as damaging to an animal’s well-being as an enclosure that is too small. While enclosures should be as large as possible, they should also be high in quality. My own observations and experience suggest to me that the highestquality captive environments tend to be large, natural spaces. The best are inherently complex, flexible, and provide innumerable opportunities for animals to express normal movements and behaviours on their own time. The animals are not forced to adhere to a regimented arbitrary lifestyle where everything occurs on a schedule, nor are they sequestered in off-exhibit holding areas during non-business hours. Large natural enclosures allow freedom of choice and an ability for animals to make a meaningful contribution to the quality of their own lives. Quality

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enclosures provide conditions similar to those an animal would experience in the wild; however, not every enclosure can be large and replicate real-life conditions. In those situations, careful attention to enclosure design, structural enhancements, furnishings, objects, substrate types, food presentation, and other husbandry considerations can increase quality of space and therefore an animal’s quality of life. The standards of the various professional associations address, to varying degrees, environmental and behavioural enrichment of this kind.

Wolves’ Social Environment and Space There are other facets of grey wolf life that must be considered as well; key among them is the social context in which they live. Wolves are highly social animals that generally live in cohesive family groups made up of two adult wolves (the breeding or alpha pair) and their offspring from the current year and, in some cases, two or three previous years. Unrelated wolves may also be members of a pack. Wolf pack sizes are fluid and impacted by numerous factors, such as success in rearing pups from year to year, mortality due to hunting by humans, vehicle collisions, natural dispersal to other areas, and prey abundance. In areas of plentiful small prey animals, wolf packs may consist of two to ten members, while in areas with predominantly larger prey animals, such as deer or moose, packs can be as large as twenty individuals or more. This makes a lot of sense as bigger prey animals are more difficult and dangerous to hunt, so additional pack members will make it easier and spread the risk. While some captive facilities do expend considerable effort to create more natural social environments for wolves, the challenges of creating an appropriate social context can be daunting. Deficiencies can include inappropriate or deficient housing and care conditions that do little to facilitate normal wolf behaviour, hybridization issues, etc. Sanctuaries and rescue centres may also have to deal with abused, unwanted, or abandoned wolves who are physically or psychologically damaged, who may have trouble adjusting to life in a group situation. For wolves in captivity, excessive aggression is an often significant issue. In fact, captive wolves are often thought to be more aggressive than wild wolves. Presumably it’s because wild wolves have mechanisms to mitigate inter-individual tensions and aggression, such as space to move away either temporarily or permanently, whereas captive wolves do not.

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In her 2001 thesis paper entitled “Wild and Captive Wolf (Canis lupus) Aggression in Relation to Pack Size and Territory Availability,” author Annie B. White suggests that another significant influence on aggressive behaviours in captive wolf packs is the number of wolves in an enclosure. She says: This supports previous studies that pack social order becomes more complex and therefore more volatile as the number of wolves in a pack increases … As pack size increases, there is an inherent rise in competition for resources. This causes an increase in the need for aggression to be used as a tool in implementing the social hierarchy. (White 2001, 29) White also says, “This points toward the importance of social factors, such as relatedness, age, hybridization, resource competition and stability of the pack, in the cause of higher aggression in captive wolves than in wild wolves.” In captivity, a variety of strategies can be employed to mitigate aggressiveness between individuals. They include simply keeping aggressive animals in separate enclosures or rotating them so they are never together. Other methods include creating escape outlets and providing visual barriers so animals can remove themselves from each other’s view, but there are limits to what can be done, especially in small enclosures. In addition to dealing with other wolves, a significant number of captives must also learn to coexist with their human caretakers and the public. Zoos and some other open admission facilities typically allow the public unfettered access to view wolves, so the wolves have no choice but to adjust as best they can to the presence of visitors. Many facilities also practise free contact (hands-on) management and straddle the thin line between professional zoological facility and entertainment attraction by utilizing wolves in educational presentations, shows, photo shoots, and similar kinds of activities, both on and off site. Some facilities also remove pups from their mothers so they can be hand-reared. Proponents of free contact wolf management say socialization of captive wolves is highly beneficial because it reduces stress to individual animals by habituating them to humans. They say the animals are easier to approach, routine maintenance is facilitated, and medical care or emergency treatments can be delivered with minimal

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stress (Gunning n.d.). They also suggest that it provides opportunities for enrichment, such as when a wolf is taken for a walk outside of its usual enclosure or is brought out to a presentation. While there may be some truth to these statements, there can also be serious drawbacks that outweigh the potential benefits. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries’ (gFAS) Standards for Canid Sanctuaries recognizes the drawbacks and is concerned that many situations in which socialized canids are used may be distressing, negatively disruptive, or exploitive, or may suggest to onlookers that wild canids make good pets. In the section of their standards titled “Policies: Public Contact and Restrictions on Use and Handling of Canids,” gFAS (2013) prohibits direct contact between the public and canids, the removal of canids from their enclosures for non-medical purposes, unprotected human/canid contact (such as would occur during a medical procedure) in public view, and, with few exceptions, the portrayal of canids as tractable in text, photos, video, or other media. Current knowledge about the behavioural ecology and natural history of grey wolves should inform how they are kept in captivity, but, as we have seen, in many situations that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are legions of cages, enclosures, and exhibits that seem to pay little or no attention to the reality of wolf life. The world of a great many captive wolves, such as the two I described previously in this chapter, seems to consist of little more than a small space, some basic furnishings, shelter, food, and water. Some professional associations have developed standards for large canids in captivity, including grey wolves, that reflect, at least in part, some of what is currently known about their behavioural ecology and natural history. Whether these standards are actually sufficient to address the needs of captive wolves is open to debate. They do provide a benchmark of sorts and a starting point for future discussion, and that’s important; however, it is critical that standards continually evolve and improve as knowledge grows and attitudes and ethics change. The US-based Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AzA) publishes a Large Canid (Canidae) Care Manual (acm) that was prepared by the AzA Canid Taxon Advisory Group in association with the AzA Animal Welfare Committee. At 140 pages plus appendices, the acm covers a broad range of topics including Habitat Design and Containment, Transport, Social Environment, Nutrition, Veterinary Care, Reproduction, Behaviour

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Management, Program Animals, and Research. The gFAS Standards for Canid Sanctuaries cover many of the same issues. They comprise sections dealing with Canid Housing, Physical Facilities and Administration, Nutrition Requirements, Veterinary Care, Well-Being and Handling of Canids, Staffing, Governance and Financing, Financial Records and Stability, Education and Outreach, Policies, Public Contact and Restrictions on Use and Handling of Canids, and Canids Being Released to the Wild. Since it is not possible in the space allotted to this chapter to review every aspect of both standards, I will focus briefly on their space and social environment provisions only. I am also not examining the many state/provincial or federal standards in Canada and the United States, as these are typically lower than those of the professional associations. Even though they represent very different kinds of institutions, both the AzA and the gFAS recommend similar space standards for large canids. The AzA acm recommends that the size of a primary enclosure for the long-term housing of a large canid (pair) be at least 465 m² (5,005 ft²), with an additional 93 m² (1,000 ft²) for each additional animal (AzA 2014, 11). The gFAS (2013, 4) also recommends 465 m² (5,005 ft²) for large canids housed as pairs (or trios), while a minimum of 929 m² (10,000 ft²) is suggested when large canids are housed as a pack. The AzA acm’s Introduction states that it provides “a compilation of animal care and management knowledge that has been gained from recognized species experts” and that it is “based on the most current science, practices and technologies used in animal care and management and are valuable resources that enhance animal welfare by providing information about the basic requirements needed and best practices known for caring for ex-situ large canid populations.” As well, the acm notes that the information does not represent required AzA accreditation standards, except where indicated in the document. The content is intended “solely for the education and training of zoo and aquarium personnel at AzA-accredited institutions” (AzA 2014, 5–6). Both the AzA and gFAS standards focus some attention on the social environment provided to grey wolves and other canids, and both contain numerous statements in that regard. For example, the first sentence on page 11 of the acm states, “Careful consideration should be given to exhibit design so that all areas meet the physical, social, behavioural and psychological needs of the species.” The second sentence goes on to say,

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“Animals should be displayed, whenever possible, in exhibits replicating their wild habitat and in numbers sufficient to meet their social and behavioural needs (AzA Accreditation Standard 1.5.2).” Later the acm section on social environment states, “Careful consideration should be given to ensure that animal group structures and sizes meet the social, physical, and psychological well-being of those animals and facilitate species-appropriate behaviors. Large canids express a wide variety of social preferences, from seasonal monogamy in maned wolves, to large, multigenerational packs of some dholes, African wild dogs, gray wolves, and red wolves … There is social flexibility within many species related to environmental conditions, territory size, prey availability, and prey size. Social relationships within a group are determined by age, sex, breeding season, dominance ranking, and may involve extreme aggression. Dominance interactions in an aggressive predator like a large canid can be lethal.” Pages 23–4 contain information and recommendations regarding different kinds of social groupings, including breeding pairs with young, contracepted pairs, contracepted alpha pairs with pups, same-sex groups, uncontracepted single adults with pups, single animals, and post-reproductive pairs. Unlike zoos, which focus a great deal of attention and resources on visitor experiences, gFAS member institutions are focused more on animal welfare and the rescue, rehabilitation, and occasionally release of animals that may have been seized by official agencies, abandoned, debilitated by injury or disease, psychologically compromised, otherwise impaired, or orphaned before reaching the age of independence. Sanctuaries also do not promote or facilitate breeding, so opportunities to create socially intact families or packs may be limited or absent. Recognizing that fact, the gFAS standards focus more on the compatibility of individual animals and on the provision of appropriate features, furnishings, retreat areas, etc. to rectify social tension issues rather than the creation of natural social groupings, although this is encouraged where possible. It appears clear that housing incompatible wolves together, especially in poorly designed, undersized spaces that do not allow for the expression of natural movements and behaviours and that provide little or no opportunity for the animals themselves to mitigate conflict situations, will lead to tension, stress, suffering, injury, and/or death. Negative emotional states, discomfort, stress, and suffering may manifest in a variety of ways, including abnormal behaviours such as

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stereotypic pacing, spinning, hyper-aggression, excessive grooming, and lethargy, to name a few. Physical manifestations may include weight loss, hair loss, sores, abscesses and other skin conditions, poor appetite, increased susceptibility to illness and disease, etc. I’ve observed indicators of stress and suffering in wolves in many captive facilities. I’ll never forget two grey wolves I saw on several occasions at a now-defunct wildlife display in Ontario, Canada. They were housed in a relatively small, bland, chain-link enclosure. Unbeknownst to most visitors, whenever anyone approached the exhibit, one of the wolves started pacing in a rapid repetitive figure-eight pattern around two shelter boxes situated in the rear portion of the enclosure. The other wolf paced quickly, in no discernable pattern, throughout the exhibit before rapidly approaching the front of the enclosure, stopping suddenly with a foot stomp. At that precise point a large mound of earth had built up against the fence-line, suggesting the wolf had done this dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. Over the years, I have observed many similar kinds of behaviours in zoos and wildlife facilities around the world. Both the AzA acm and gFAS standards appear to recognize key facets of the behavioural ecology and natural history of large canids. They also indicate that when large canids are kept in captivity, there are a broad range of variables that may affect their health and welfare, and that these should be carefully considered. However, while the published organizational large canid standards provide recommendations for captive housing and management, they should always be viewed as minimum standards only. If wolf captivity is to be informed by the behavioural ecology and natural history of wolves, then every effort should be made by wolf custodians to facilitate captive wolves living lives that are more like those of their wild counterparts, including being able to move about in extremely large spaces. It may be that achieving a standard at which captive wolves can behave substantially like free-roaming wolves is more aspirational than practical. However, that should not stifle moving forward toward ever larger spaces and improved conditions. There is no denying that some things have improved for some grey wolves held captive in North American zoos. The old-style concrete-floored cages are less common than they used to be and more attention is being paid to housing, care, and management issues. There has been an effort to increase the size of wolf exhibits and to provide enhanced levels of environmental

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complexity, but it should be recognized that many exhibits still fall short of achieving anything meaningful in that regard. While the relatively modest improvements for wolves in zoos are welcome, we have to look elsewhere to see the direction that we should be heading. Certainly, no captivity facility is perfect, but some of the specialist wildlife parks, wolf centres, rescue centres, and sanctuaries can, at the least, lead us in the right direction. The UK’s Highland Wildlife Park, a zoo specializing in Scottish wildlife (Zoolex n.d.), displays wolves in a multi-acre natural pen constructed at a cost of just gBP 40,000 (USD $66,400). The Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary’s two-acre wooded enclosures (constructed for only a few thousand Canadian dollars2) for rescued, non-releasable wolves are much better than most zoos, but, according to the sanctuary, are still not good enough and will be expanded. The Wolf Mountain Nature Center in Smyrna, New York is planning a nine-acre Wolf Woods enclosure. The Haliburton Wolf Centre displays a wolf pack in a fifteenacre wooded enclosure, while just outside of Winchester, Idaho, the Wolf Education and Research Center’s pack resides in an even larger twenty-acre enclosure. There are many other similar facilities in North America and elsewhere that are providing natural conditions and even larger spaces for their wolves than most zoos do.

Who Advocate for Wolves? Earlier in this chapter I expressed disappointment that the wolf exhibit at a western Canadian zoo offered no information about the plight of wolves in the wild. Another zoo I visited during that same trip left me equally disappointed, and since that time, others have as well. Interestingly, the second zoo had a great deal of information about highway overpasses, constructed to prevent wildlife from being killed by vehicles. The display material described how a wide range of animals, including wolves, used the overpasses. It was a non-controversial, “feel-good” display, and I was unable to determine whether or not the zoo actually had anything to do with lobbying for the overpasses or paying for them. Regardless, there was yet again no mention of the numerous threats facing wolves (except vehicle collisions), in Canada or elsewhere, or how zoo visitors could help. The wolf exhibit itself was not overly large and the animals just sat at the back. Their presence wasn’t educating anyone

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and it certainly wasn’t creating wolf advocates and conservationists. The wolves were there but, other than being just another display, had no purpose that I could see. While wolf exhibits in zoos vary in size and quality, I have not encountered any that compare favourably to the better non-zoo facilities that provide large spaces and natural conditions. And despite their conservation rhetoric, I have not encountered a zoo that vigorously promotes the protection of wolves and tries to engage and encourage visitors to get involved like non-zoo facilities do. In many of the specialist wildlife parks, wolf centres, rescue centres, and sanctuaries I’ve visited, I have encountered displays, exhibits, presentations, websites, and other materials that not only provide a comprehensive education on wolf biology, behaviour, and lifestyle, but also talk realistically about the plight of wolves and actively encourage everyone to get involved helping. These facilities and the people who operate them are true wolf advocates, actively trying to satisfy the needs of the individual wolves in their care and working to change attitudes, policies, and laws to protect wolves in the wild. The grey wolf is a remarkable creature that deserves better treatment. The zoo world often seems to focus on the minutiae of captive management and to make mostly incremental improvements to wolf housing and husbandry, often at staggering cost. Perhaps it is time for zoos to phase out, with few exceptions, the keeping of grey wolves and other wide-ranging carnivores altogether. The best specialist facilities, sanctuaries, and rescue centres seem to be making some headway. It may be time to follow their lead and to rethink the wolf. While I was finishing this chapter, local media reported that a wolf had escaped from its enclosure at a small private zoo in Ontario, Canada. A woman driving in the area videotaped the animal, who, apparently, had been on the loose for a couple of days. The story generated considerable local public debate about the keeping of the wolf and its companions in a small zoo enclosure, in addition to raising concerns about public safety (Della-Mattia 2018). Unfortunately, these kinds of stories are still far too common, as many wolves are still kept in rudimentary, unsafe conditions in public and private zoos and other situations in Canada, the US, and elsewhere. Given what we now know about wolves, there is no reason for this state of affairs. For the sake of the wolves and ourselves, we must do better.

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Notes 1 Howard Smith, personal communication, 10 August 2014. 2 Howard Smith, personal communication, 1 August 2014.

References AzA Canid Taxon Advisory Group and AzA Animal Welfare Committee. 2014. Large Canid (Canidae) Care Manual. https://www.aza.org/ uploadedFiles/Animal_Care_and_Management/Animal_Programs/ Animal_Programs_Database/Animal_Care_Manuals/Large%20Canid%20 Care%20Manual%202012.pdf (accessed 20 July 2014). Calgary Zoo. N.d. “Animal Welfare, Our Commitment.” http://www. calgaryzoo.com/animal-welfare/our-commitment (accessed 1 August 2014). Constable, Peter, Ken Hinchcliff, Nick Demma, Margaret Callahan, Bruce Dale, Kevin Fox, Layne Adams, Ray Wack, and Lyn Kramer. 1998. “Electrocardiographic Consequences of a Peripatetic Lifestyle in Gray Wolves (Canis lupus).” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A 120 (3): 557–63. Della-Mattia, Elaine. 2018. “Councillor Considering Reconsideration Motion after Wolf Escape.” Sault Star, 27 March. http://www.saultstar. com/2018/03/27/councillor-considering-reconsideration-motion-afterwolf-escape. Dell’Amore, Christine. 2011. “Ancient Dog Skull Shows Early Pet Domestication.” National Geographic News, 19 August. http://news. nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110819-dogs-wolves-russiadomestication-animals-science-evolution/. Fieldberg, Alesia. 2014. “Wolves Dig into Polar Bear Enclosure at Journey to Churchill Exhibit.” ctv Winnipeg, 10 July. http://winnipeg.ctvnews. ca/wolves-dig-into-polar-bear-enclosure-at-journey-to-churchillexhibit-1.1907350. Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. 2013. “Standards For Canid Sanctuaries.” Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. June. http://www. sanctuaryfederation.org/gfas/for-sanctuaries/standards/ (accessed 5 August 2014). Gunning, Nadia. N.d. “Welfare and Conservation in Captive Canids: Analysis of Enclosure Use and General Activity in Socialized and Unsocialized Wolves (Canis lupus).” BIoL 3001: Personal Research 381753. https://ukwct.org.uk/ files/dissertations/Gunning-Dissertation.pdf (accessed 5 August 2014).

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International Wolf Center. N.d. http://www.wolf.org/wow/canada/ (accessed 1 August 2014); http://www.wolf.org/wow/europe/ (accessed 1 August 2014); http://www.wolf.org/wow/russia/ (accessed 1 August 2014). Klinghammer, Erich. 1996. “Captive Non-Human Socialized Wolves Kill Caretaker in a Canadian Forest and Wildlife Reserve.” Wolf Park. http:// web.archive.org/web/20080322230933/http://www.wolfpark.org/Articles/ Wyman.html (accessed 1 August 2014). Lord, Kathryn. 2013. “A Comparison of the Sensory Development of Wolves (Canis lupus lupus) and Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris).” Ethology 119, no. 2: 110–20. doi: 10.1111/eth.12044. Lupo, Karen D., and Joel C. Janetski. 1994. “Evidence of Domesticated Dogs and Some Related Canids in Eastern Great Basin.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 16, no. 2: 199–220. Merrill, Samuel, and David L. Mech. 2000. “Details of Extensive Movements by Minnesota Wolves (Canis lupus).” usgs Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, Paper 76. O’Regan, Hannah J., and Andrew C. Kitchener. 2005. “The Effects of Captivity on the Morphology of Captive, Domesticated and Feral Mammals.” Mammal Review 35, nos. 3–4: 215–30. Pappas, Stephanie. 2013. “Old Dog, New Origin, First Pooches Were European.” Livescience 14 (November). http://www.livescience.com/41221dog-domestication-origins-in-europe.html (accessed 5 August 2014). Rees, Paul A. 2011. An Introduction to Zoo Biology and Management. West Sussex, Uk: Wiley-Blackwell. Rosenfeld, Everett. 2012. “Swedish Wolves Kill Zookeeper Who Raised Them.” Time, 18 June. http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/18/swedishwolves-kill-zookeeper-who-raised-them/. Saragusty, Joseph, Anat Shavit-Meyrav, Nobuyuki Yamaguchi, Rona Nadler, Tali Bdolah-Abram, Laura Gibeon, Thomas B. Hildebrandt, and Merav H. Shamir. 2014. “Comparative Skull Analysis Suggests Species-Specific Captivity-Related Malformation in Lions (Panthera leo).” plos one 9, no. 4: e94527. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094527. Scurrah, Fiona Elizabeth. 2012. “Gray Wolves (Canis Lupus) Movement Patterns in Manitoba: Implications for Wolf Management Plans.” Victoria: Master of Science Thesis, Royal Roads University. https:// dspace.royalroads.ca/docs/bitstream/handle/10170/572/Scurrah_fiona. pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 1 August 2014). Stevens, John. 2013. “Three Wolves Shot Dead after Being Cornered by Police when They Escaped Zoo through Damaged Fence.” Mail Online,

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26 September. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2513842/ThreeColchester-Zoo-wolves-shot-dead-escaped.html#ixzz3C5ThoJmU. Stoskopf, M.K., and E.F. Gibbons. 1994. “Quantitative Evaluation of the Effects of Environmental Parameters on the Physiology, Behavior, and Health of Animals in Naturalistic Captive Environments.” In Naturalistic Environments in Captivity for Animal Behavior Research, edited by Edward Gibbons, Everett Wyers, Everett Waters, and Emil Menzel, 140–60. Albany: State University of New York Press. Trut, Lyudmilla. 1999. “Early Canid Domestication, The Fox Farm Experiment.” American Scientist (March–April). http://www. americanscientist.org/issues/feature/1999/2/early-canid-domestication-thefarm-fox-experiment/1 (accessed 5 August 2014). White, Annie B. 2001. “Wild and Captive Wolf (Canis lupus) Aggression in Relation to Pack Size and Territory Availability.” Boulder, Co: Honours thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder. http://www.graywolfconservation. com/Research/Thesis.pdf (accessed 15 August 2014). Zoolex. N.d. “Highland Wildlife Park, Wolf Territory.” http://www.zoolex.org/ zoolexcgi/view.py?id=430 (accessed 25 August 2014).

CHAPTER 14

Of Bounty and Beastly Tales: Wolves and the Canadian Imagination Stephanie Rutherford

Wolves have long captured the imagination in complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways. Much loved or much maligned, wolves have acted as flashpoint for debates around the importance of wildlife (and the capacity to have a wild life), the role of conservation in modern society, the rights of ranchers and farmers to protect their property, and the distinctions we draw between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ animals, environmental heroes and vermin. Let me illustrate this through two recent examples.

The Fort St John Wolf Contest In 2012, a group of local businesses in Fort St John, British Columbia, organized a wolf contest. Arguing that the agricultural area in northeastern BC was plagued with packs of between fifteen and twentyfive wolves, the North Peace Rod and Gun Club (2012), along with a real estate agent, a taxidermy business, a fishing and hunting retailer, a landscaping firm, and an oil equipment rental company, co-sponsored a wolf hunt running from November 2012 to March 2013. This was the third year in a row that such a hunt took place. As part of the contest, the sponsors set prizes for hunters who killed the biggest wolves in the range of $250–$1,000 Canadian. They also included a prize for the smallest wolf caught. All enrolled hunters had a three-animal entry limit; approximately sixty hunters entered the contest (Pynn 2012).

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This wolf hunt generated both heat and light, especially with the publication of an article on the contest in the Vancouver Sun, which brought the issue out of northeastern BC to a more urban audience. Many in the Fort St John community suggested that the wolf hunt was necessary to reduce predation on livestock, pets, and prized game species, such as caribou, moose, and deer (Pynn 2012). As the North Peace Rod and Gun Club argued in their statement about the contest, “Our objective in reducing wolf populations by hunting is intended to reduce both agricultural and wildlife losses.” And yet, even while suggesting the goal was not wolf extirpation, the sponsors of the contest drew upon longstanding and potent cultural fears to publicize the event, with posters depicting a snarling black wolf baring its rather fearsome teeth (Gage n.d.). Echoing the bounties of old, the narrative picture put forth by the sponsors of the contest was not protection of game, but rather extermination of a dangerous foe. Given these characteristics, one would imagine that hunting wolves is almost a public service. Indeed, Paul Paquet of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation asserted (Gage n.d.) that rather than predator control, the contest was more visceral: “It’s hunting from a motivation of hate.”

The Quest for the Perfect Wolf-Dog At the other extreme in human-wolf relationships, we find people who own wolf-dogs, what Durham and Fletcher (1996, B5) name “the latest fashion accessory among macho dog-lovers.” For instance, Sun Valley Wolf Kennels is a dog breeding operation also located in British Columbia. Sun Valley is taking reservations for “high-content” puppies expected to be born in spring or summer 2016, at approximately $3,000 per ‘cub.’ According to Sun Valley (2015b), “high content” means a dog that is 98 percent gray wolf or Arctic wolf hybrid. This desire to own a wolf seems to come from a place of deep admiration and love. For example, Jordanne, quoted on the website (Sun Valley 2015a), gushes: “I realized how incomplete my life is without these wonderful canines. Bred properly they can become good family citizens and care takers. I want to have one in my life once again, I forgot the love these animals can give uniquely compared to domestics. They have their way of completing the family function and creating home, Sun Valley

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Wolf Kennels has one in store for me.” Similarly, Teresa comments that “I want to tell you that I feel that I am the most proud mommy of my cub, his name is Dragon Wolf and he is absolutely priceless and funny and precious and the love of my life. He brought so much joy to my life that I could not live anymore without him” (Sun Valley 2015c). What these wolf-dog owners suggest is that there is something about owning a wolf-dog that is more authentic, more rewarding, than building a relationship with a domesticated dog. Indeed, as Nicole Wilde contends, “they want to own a piece of the wild” (Vallery 2015), and wolves, mythologized as independent spirits inhabiting the last of a vanishing wilderness, seem to fit the bill. However, what’s tricky in this story of human-wolf love is that these wolf-dogs often have minds of their own, and are not easily managed by their human companions. This is especially the case as the wolf-dogs achieve sexual maturity, when, as the International Wolf Center suggests (Fuoco and Harlan 2006; IwC 2015), captivity can lead to aggression and, in some cases, this desire to own a piece of the wild has proved fatal. These two examples highlight the manner in which the wolf has become a kind of furry container that humans fill with a range of feelings; some people experience deep hatred, fear, dread, and loathing at the thought of a wolf, while others are overcome with love, admiration, attachment, and something that can border on worship. Either way, wolves evoke the strongest of emotions. This chapter attempts to make sense of these complex reactions by looking at the ways that wolves have migrated through space and time in Canada, and in doing so, moved people in particular ways. The chapter charts this important history in broad strokes, suggesting that colonial politics and practices informed attempts at wolf extermination, particularly through the establishment of bounties. And yet, wolves survived repeated attempts at forced extinction. Indeed, as the wolves have become fewer in number and more remote in location, their cultural currency has grown. Drawing on the example of the public Wolf Howl in Algonquin Provincial Park, I suggest that this kind of affirmative encounter, which accepts the possibility of both wolf agency and human contingency, may offer a new kind of politics for humancanid relations.

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Post-Contact Colonial/Wolf Relations It is a difficult task to chart the history of wolves in Canada in a coherent way. Not only must we contend with a series of provincial and territorial jurisdictions (as well as federal entities such as Parks Canada), but there are also three different species of wolves in Canada: the gray or timber wolf (Canis lupus), the Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos), and the Eastern wolf (Canis lupus lycaon). However, some broad generalizations can be made. From the 1700s until the late 1950s in Canada, wolves and brush wolves (now coyotes) were understood as obstacles to the building of a nation – animals that stood in the way of progress, symbolizing the untamable character of the land that came to be called Canada, rather than an orderly march toward “civilization” (Jones 2002). Wolves had been largely extirpated in the lands from which these settler colonials travelled, and as such, many sought to replicate the same human-canid relations here. This meant that for settlers to make the land their own, land which was taken from Indigenous people, wolves had to die. This quest for total annihilation makes an awful kind of sense when you consider how settler colonials intended to establish their livelihoods: largely through farming, ranching, hunting, and trapping. Wolves encountered a landscape in transition; large tracts were cleared for farming, game species were hunted beyond reproduction rates, and livestock were introduced. Cows and sheep, ungulates far less prepared to deal with the realities of predation, often found themselves on the wolf’s menu. Of course, it was the fact that humans had modified the ecosystems that wolves had prowled for millennia that caused such prey switching; wolves adapted to their new conditions of possibility. But for farmers and ranchers, the fact that wolves ate their livestock was understood as theft. Indeed, as Jon Coleman (2004, 11) notes in the American context, wolves represented the most pernicious of boundarycrossers: beasts that stole human property and thus inverted the natural order that placed humans at the top of the food chain. The anxiety that permeated the early frontier – fear of running out of food or becoming food – made such transgressions intolerable. Similarly trappers and hunters saw wolves as competition for game. Combined with the mythology of the wolf, rooted in European folklore about its demonic, cowardly, greedy, conniving, and vicious ways (Coleman 2004), the establishment of wolf bounties across Canada was perhaps inevitable.

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And so, settlers chose not to adapt to wolves, as they were required to adapt to us. Humans refused the understanding of nature that wolves offered. Rather than encountering the wolf in all its complexity, white settlers chose to kill them. It is these sentiments that drove provincial wildlife policies, as well as the hearts and minds of most newly minted Canadians, until the 1950s and 1960s.

The Bounty System in Ontario In order to lend some specificity to these arguments, I will focus on the wolf bounty in Ontario. Established in 1793 in what was then named Upper Canada, the first wolf bounty offered the sum of six dollars for proof of a dead wolf, steadily ratcheting up to $10 in 1892, $15 in 1900, $20 in 1918, and $25 in 1931 (Omand 1950, 426). In 1931, pelts were also returned to the bounty seeker so they could be sold for additional profit. During this same period, a bounty of between $5 and $10 was paid on wolf pups. If we take but one high year – 1928 – we see that 6,173 applications were filled in Ontario upon which bounty was paid, costing the Ontario government $91,297.27 CAD including administrative expenses (ibid., 429). Moreover, counties often provided an additional bounty on wolves killed in their jurisdictions. For example, Northumberland County in southern Ontario paid an extra $25 on each wolf, bringing the bounty total to $50. On average, the number of wolves killed per year in Ontario during the bounty period was approximately somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000. Clearly the wolf bounty was a mechanism of wildlife management, at least of a particular kind. But the deeper question is: what ideological and affective work did the bounty do? How did it produce specific ways of understanding the relationship between human and canids? What I suggest is that the bounty created populations of animals to be managed: the categories of vermin and valued species, wolves and deer respectively. Indeed, the wolf bounty was often framed as way to save the deer from extinction, from the ravening horrors perpetrated by wolves. This panic over wolves exhausting the supply of deer can be found in the pages of Rod and Gun in Canada, the magazine dedicated to the pastimes of hunting and fishing. For example, the opening article in the October 1900 (339) issue addressed this supposed crisis head-on: “An authority estimates that on an average each wolf kills one deer every ten days.

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Assuming for argument’s sake that the time is doubled and there are but two hundred wolves in the province [Quebec], the result would be 200 × 18 = 3,600 deer, an immense annual sacrifice which should be prevented.” This narrative emerges time and again in the archival record. Indeed, in the 1933 Report of the Special Committee on the Game Situation commission by the Government of Ontario (Black 1933, 23), the author singles out the wolf-deer dynamic for special consideration: “No leading deer State or Province has the wolf problem in so menacing a form as Ontario.” Similar concerns were expressed about buffalo populations in the Northwest Territories (Rod and Gun 1904, 263). It is worth noting that these kinds of arguments have not disappeared, even as scientific evidence has largely discredited them (see below). For instance, we now see the same practices in Alberta, where government-mandated culls have taken upwards of 1,000 wolves in an effort to protect the boreal caribou (Marris 2015). The sharp distinction drawn between undesirable and desirable species remains with us today. But the vilification of the wolf was not limited to its categorization as an eater of valuable game species. Instead, the wolf – not so different from the dogs that bounty seekers might use to hunt – had to be made into an agent of moral corruption and inversion. This, of course, has a much longer history. One need only turn to the Bible to read stories of wolves in sheep’s clothing or the Brothers Grimm and their tale of the big, bad wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, saved by the huntsman in search of a pelt. These were cultural sources from which those who supported the bounty drew. Those who emphasized the necessity of the bounty articulated the wolf’s character in a variety of ambivalent ways: cowardly yet intelligent, fiendish though craven, an indiscriminate killer but also an elusive prey. A few quotes illustrate the complexity of the bountied wolf clearly. For instance, a March 1904 (517) article in Rod and Gun in Canada paints the wolf as a pusillanimous killer: “The North American wolf is savage, and he is also chronically hungry, but he is such an arrant coward that he will not attack even a deer while it remains in the shade of the bush.” In another issue, J.W. Misner (1907, 157), in a vigorous response to an article that suggested that hunters with dogs may be the real reason for a decline in deer populations, contends that wolves are wanton slaughterers, unable to stop a deer massacre “until the whole herd is exterminated.” An echo of these assertions could be heard as late as 1973, with the Ontario Deer Preservation Committee arguing

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the ungulates were on the edge of extinction in Ontario as the result of wolf predation (Wildlife Branch 1973): “who has spent much time in the wilds knows they are slinking, furtive, cold-blooded killers. Oftentimes they kill far in excess of their needs, and for the sheer lust of killing. The claim they kill only the sick and aged is an out-and-out falsehood. They extend no mercy.” These assertions about the wolf were not confined to Ontario, of course, with Parks Canada collecting newspaper accounts of packs of wolves obliterating deer in eastern Manitoba, butchering 100 pigs in High Prairie, Alberta, and destroying 300 sheep in Gatineau, Quebec, and marauding wolf packs, the size of which had never been seen before, in central British Columbia (Library and Archives of Canada 1930–52). The construction of such narratives ensured the menace posed by wolves necessitated their destruction. And yet, along with the descriptions of a wanton and profligate beast, there is also evidence of an almost grudging respect for the wolf. Cleverness and calculation, along with cowardice, were included as facets of the bountied wolf. Indeed, there was some suggestion that the bounty itself fostered smarter wolves; or, at least, those that eluded the trap, the poison, or the shotgun were hardened by the chase. In an article about the Canadian Pacific Railway Wolf Hunt in 1907 (Rod and Gun 1907, 675), the author affirms, “I think that it has been proven beyond doubt that the intelligence of the wolf is increasing more rapidly than that of his would be slayers, and that the wolf is increasing so because of the ineffective hunting and trapping that is being carried on.” However, for this writer, the solution was to incentivize the more experienced hunter through an increase in the bounty (ibid.). Similarly, though some forty years on, a weekly news release of the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests tells the story of the “Phantom Killer of Mono Hill,” a wolf-dog hybrid that, according to the account, terrorized the Orangeville area for five years. It, too, proved wilier than its would-be captors, until the “marauder fell victim of his contempt for humans and a sweet tooth for suckling pigs and young dogs … Officers reported, however, that ‘the animal died in silence, a sure sign that plenty of wolf blood ran in his veins’” (Ontario Department of Lands and Forests 1950, 3–4). In both these cases, we see the wolf as a complex figure, but one that ultimately is tracked down and made to submit to the will of humans. The bounty, then, re-established the natural order of things; as Jon Coleman (2004), drawing on Richard Slotkin, asserts, the kind of

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brutality done in the name of bounties and organized wolf hunts was a form of regeneration through violence. As such, if the wolf was accused of engaging in blood lust, so too were its hunters, who dispatched their quarry with strychnine and cyanide poisoning, evisceration, setting hounds upon them, pit traps, leg holds, and hamstringing. At the heart of the kind of sadism perpetrated on the wolf was a sense that if it could be subdued, so too could the wilderness that these men encountered. And so, the bounty was both a mechanism to alleviate anxiety and a marker of the ability of (some) humans to conquer anything that stood in the way of a particular vision of progress. However, one should not imagine that the bounty went without critique. As early as 1902, there were rumblings that both the narrative of the marauding wolf and its repression via the bounty were not achieving their desired aims. James Dickson (1902, 8), writing about Ontario’s game laws in the pages of Rod and Gun, suggested that “Mr. Wolf” was a victim of libel, a scapegoat blamed for the decimation of deer, when, in fact, it was the hunting practices of men which offered true “black crimes” against these ungulates. While few initially took the side of the wolf in the Canadian context, beginning in the 1930s, there rose a growing chorus of voices that argued that the bounty was ineffective; it did not actually reduce the number of wolves. Many of these critics drew on the language of biology and ecology to support their positions. The work of Adolph Murie (1944) on the wolves of Mount McKinley, Alaska, proved an important intervention as he showed that even with significant efforts at trapping wolves, their numbers stayed relatively even. It appeared that what the bounty did was remove excess rather than reducing the core; wolves simply bred up to the gaps in their population. Indeed, E.C. Cross (1937, 19) argued that wolf bounties produced the opposite of their intended effect; by controlling surplus populations, the bounty made predation easier for the remaining wolves. He called for an end to the “useless harrying of the wolf” (ibid.). By the 1950s, it was becoming clear that bounty’s value was questionable in terms of reducing wolf populations, and the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests began considering its repeal. In the department’s weekly news releases, the question of the wolf bounty appeared again and again. In 1954, the department demonstrated, via the use of statistics, what many already knew (Wildlife Branch 1954): the bounty was simply not reducing wolf populations: “It will be seen that the percentage of the

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estimated population removed is very small varying from 4% to 12.7%. If the estimates of timber wolf populations in these Districts are accurate it is clear that the bounty is completely ineffective in stimulating the annual removal by man of a number approaching surplus.” Enter Douglas Pimlott. Pimlott was a biologist hired by the Department of Lands and Forests in 1958 to research how wolves affect wild game and livestock. His research centred on Algonquin Provincial Park, and for the period between 1958 and 1962, wolves were protected within its borders as he and his team collared and tracked Algonquin’s population. This research confirmed much of Murie’s work in Alaska: that wolves preyed selectively on the old and weak, particularly in the winter (they kill what’s easy to catch); that wolf overkill was the exception rather than the rule; and that wolves have a ceiling to their population, usually one wolf per ten square miles (Pimlot 1963). His work also demonstrated two important facets that supported the elimination of the bounty. First, he noted that the annual take via the bounty in Ontario actually made no difference to a population of 10,000. In his article in the Fish and Wildlife Review, he concluded that if there were 3,500 breeding pairs, each producing approximately five pups per pair, wolves would always be able to make up for the loss. But he also asked the more interesting question of what the population would be like had there never been a bounty; or, more specifically, what difference would it make if no wolves had been killed in Ontario between 1925 and 1960? His answer: “virtually nothing! We would probably have about the same number of wolves – the average age might be a little higher” (21–2). As such, Pimlott proved an important figure in the re-imagining of wolves in Ontario; his research gave scientific legitimacy to the idea that the bounty should be eliminated and lent support to a newly burgeoning emphasis on the role of predators in ecosystem stability. In place of the bounty, Pimlott, much like David Mech, John Theberge and other wolf biologists, called for management, where management in some contexts might mean control and, in others, would equal wolf protection. In the end, Douglas Pimlott was particularly important to Ontario’s wolves. His research set the parameters for thinking about wolves differently – not as noxious vermin, but rather as valuable components of a healthy ecosystem. So why did the wolf bounty remain in place in Ontario until the early 1970s, even in the face of evidence that it was a complete failure? It endured because rather than acting as a practice to regulate wolves,

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it was more valuable for the work it did on humans. Put another way, it was politics by other means. The bounty did what it has always done: it sought to alleviate anxiety and reassert human control over an unmanaged wild. But instead of worrying about becoming prey, as early settler colonials had, by the 1950s and 1960s the hunters, trappers, and farmers who pushed for the continuation of the bounty sought to uphold their way of knowing the land in the face of the incursion of science. Of course, the bounty provided an income stream for rural Ontarians. But historian Tina Loo contends that the bounty remained in contradiction to mounting scientific and anecdotal evidence of its inefficacy because it was central to rural culture and knowledge. Loo (2006, 152) asserts that this knowledge was “impervious to change by scientific opinion.” And this knowledge categorized wolves, along with bears and cougars, as “varmints”: creatures not only useless, but actively destructive. An assault on the bounty, which occurred all across the county during the 1950s and 1960s, drew the distinction between rural experience and scientific and bureaucratized wildlife programs into sharp relief. One had to give way to the other. Rural will held stronger in Ontario until 1972, where the bounty was replaced with the Wolf Damage to Livestock Compensation Act. As part of this change, wolves became fur-bearers to be managed, rather than vermin to be extinguished. As the reader will note, this change was a long time in coming; the accrual of scientific studies and attempts at bureaucratization of wildlife management under agencies such as Parks Canada and the Department of Lands and Forests reached a threshold point in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Moreover, the rise of the environmental movement shaped the discourse around all predators, including wolves. And, as historians such as Coleman and Loo have pointed out, by the 1970s, most people were no longer farmers, even if they remained hunters; their relationship to wolves had become less about property. Wolves had survived the bounty to encounter a new time, where they had the chance to be valorized rather than demonized. So how did their fortunes change?

A Howling Good Time If Pimlott was an important figure for the scientific recuperation of the wolf’s image in Ontario and beyond, he was also central to the public’s re-enchantment with all things Canidae. As part of his research

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at Algonquin Park, Pimlott found that wolves would respond in kind to howls simulated by humans (Quinn 2002, 60); simply put, if you produce a reasonable facsimile of a wolf howl, chances are, they will howl back. For Pimlott’s work, it was a helpful tool in locating wolves so they could be tracked, their kills assessed, and their movements documented. But this discovery gave rise to one of Algonquin’s most important vehicles for nature education: the Wolf Howls of August. Every Thursday in August since 1965, Algonquin Park naturalists gather and give a public lecture to those assembled about the biology and ethology of the Eastern wolf, the species found in the park area. Then, if naturalists have been able to track wolf packs two days previously, all who listened to the talk, usually numbering around 2,000 people, get into their cars and assemble along the shoulders of Highway 60, the main artery running through the park. Everyone exits their cars and remains silent. One of the park staff then begins to howl. Everyone holds their breath and waits. Will there be a response? If not, another howl is sounded. Then another. And those 2,000 people wait silently under the bright stars of Ontario to get a chance to hear something which scared settler colonials so badly that they set about destroying its source completely. Times have changes so fully that the Destination Canada, our national tourism marketing organization, has named Algonquin Park’s Wolf Howl a “Canadian Signature Experience.” This moniker is awarded to experiences offering “once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences found in Canada” and is seen as important to building Canada’s ‘brand’ (Destination Canada 2015). This is quite the shift in how we think about and encounter the wolf. As mentioned above, this migration of the imagination has much to do with the ways we live our lives in the twenty-first century. The majority of the world has become urban. In the North American context, this means that you are more likely to encounter a canid of a different kind: the coyote (Canis latrans). This is because coyotes, unlike wolves, are animals far more comfortable on the fringes of human settlement. By contrast, the chances of encountering a wild wolf are very slim; as I have explored elsewhere, almost every close-up image we see of wolves has been taken in captivity (Rutherford 2011, 126). Wolves are wary of humans, a trait that has ensured their longevity, given that we are their most fearsome predators. It is this very elusiveness that has made the wolf’s transformation to wilderness ambassador so dramatic. Renato

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Rosaldo (1989, 68–87) coined the term “imperialist nostalgia” to describe the phenomenon of longing for that which has been destroyed, while simultaneously obscuring the nature of its destruction. In particular, Rosaldo used the phrase to talk about how agents of colonialism lamented the loss of the ‘traditional’ cultures which they themselves attempted to obliterate. In this move, there is a claim to innocence, and an attempt to wash clean the stain of guilt associated with this effort at annihilation. Similarly, and as I have argued elsewhere (Rutherford 2011), we now mourn that which we have destroyed in wilderness. This mourning has become embodied in charismatic megafauna, and in the North American context, the wolf is a symbol of the wild that was. So, the wolf is no longer craven but noble, no longer bloodthirsty but an ecosystem ally, no longer skulking but the essence of a wilderness almost lost to the ignorance of their human foes. With this resumé, who wouldn’t want one for a pet (tongue planted firmly in cheek)? As a result, this newfound love animates the popularity of Algonquin’s Wolf Howl. To some degree, the desire to own part of wilderness in the form of a wolf-dog hybrid is of the same piece as listening to them howl in a provincial park. That said, there are important differences in the two practices. What’s most interesting about the Algonquin Wolf Howl, and others like it, is its contingency: in this experience, wolves choose whether or not they answer the calls made by humans. The naturalists do their best to ensure the event will be a success. In tracking the wolves on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the howl, they try to ensure that they will be in close enough proximity to achieve their desired end. They also rely on the wolf biology pioneered by Douglas Pimlott, which demonstrated that wolves will remain in close proximity to their pups for most of the summer, who remain in a den or what’s known as a rendezvous site (Runtz 1997, 43–4). This means that once they have been located, naturalists can be confident they will remain close by. However, as Rick Stronks, Chief Park Naturalist, expressed in an interview, even if the wolves are located, even if the park staff do all the steps necessary to open up the possibility for a wolf response, they may simply choose not to.1 In some ways, this offers the possibility for the wolves of Algonquin to choose their enmeshment with these humans who hail them. Most certainly, it demonstrates their agency in a way that is difficult to deny. In this space created by the complex interactions between tourism, Crown land,

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and forestry that we call Algonquin Provincial Park, these wild wolves, shaped by encounters with humans and living within their political constraints, are hailed and sometimes choose to respond. Humans do not have complete control over the process. And indeed, what the Wolf Howl lays bare is that even when there is an attempt at complete human control – for example, the bounty – this always remains an elusive fiction. I think there is an element of letting go to the Wolf Howl, of leaving nature up to chance, which would have been unthinkable even fifty years ago. Moreover, there is a human investment in maintaining this wildness, so that wolves can choose when and if they interact. Our distance from wolves has allowed us to make particular ethical attachments to the idea that some beings are best left alone. Or, put differently, perhaps humans have made it so that in order to live fully, such creatures require distance from us. And so in the Wolf Howl, we have the possibility of a kind of affirmative encounter with wolves that approaches them on their own terms, that does not ask them to be either villain or martyr, but rather to be themselves. Humans have allowed themselves to be moved by wolves as they are, rather than as we imagine them to be.

Conclusion: The Possibilities of Encounter Wolves have played an active role in the lives of humans for millennia, even as we spent centuries trying to eradicate them. Indeed, there is evidence of the domestication of wolves since at least the Neolithic period. But what is perhaps interesting about this story is that new research contends that wolves domesticated us, rather than the other way around. The notion that wolves approached us first, perhaps hanging around the edges of a cooking fire in 10,000 BCE, suggests a kind of ‘survival of the friendliest’ which is marked by our relationship with dogs today (Hare and Woods 2013). In the end, we have co-evolved. Throughout much of the history of our relationship with and to wolves, we have attempted to deny this co-evolution, this multi-species assemblage. Some wolves became dogs, and others remained resolutely part of the wilderness that needed taming. When values changed, wolves still remained part of the wilderness. But their roles shifted. Because many (particularly urban) people sought to protect the nature that once needed taming, wolves were allowed more space to maneuver, at least in limited pockets contained within

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national and provincial parks or wilderness reserves. We afforded them the possibility of a life less encumbered by human fear and anxiety about that which we do not fully understand. Even within this moment of affirmation, however, in some quarters, wolves remain less adored. Beyond the example the wolf contest given at the beginning of this chapter, recent years have also witnessed the re-institution of the wolf bounty in Alberta, as a mechanism to save the boreal caribou. One imagines Douglas Pimlott rolling in his grave. And so, it appears that as long as wolves remain distant from us, a creature to visit rather than one with which we have co-evolved, then we can extend both love and some degree of protection. Returning to the two examples at the beginning of this chapter, neither the wolf hunt nor the owning of a wolf-dog offers a genuine encounter with wolves as they actually are. Instead, they offer either fantasies of control or, conversely, imaginings of your very own furry piece of wilderness, running around the house. Both have more to do with humans than with the animals we purport to hate or love. This is why events such as the Algonquin Wolf Howl remain vitally important. In the Wolf Howl, we can see a kind of affirmation of enmeshment, of the potent possibility that entanglement, while complicated, doesn’t always have to work against the nonhuman. Perhaps what the Wolf Howl offers, in a small way, is an openness, a prospect of being otherwise in our relationship not only to wolves, but to all of the natural world. In the end, this is a very good place to start.

Notes 1 Rick Stronks, personal communication, 21 August 2013.

References Black, W.D. 1933. Report of Special Committee on the Game Situation. Toronto: Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Coleman, Jon T. 2004. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press. Cross, E.C. 1937. “Wolf! Wolf!” Rod and Gun in Canada 38, no. 8 (1937): 18, 19, 32–3.

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Destination Canada. 2015. “Canadian Signature Experiences Collection Backgrounder.” http://en-corporate.canada.travel/sites/default/files/pdf/ sec-ced/2015_cse_backgrounder_en.pdf (accessed 23 June 2015). De Vos, A. N.d. “Wolf Facts and Theories.” Information Circular #46, Division of Fish and Wildlife, Fur Management Policy File, Box 14, Coll. RG 1-442-2, Archives of Ontario. Dickson, James. 1902. “Ontario’s Game and Game Laws.” Rod and Gun in Canada 4, no. 1 (June): 5–9. Durham, Michael, and Ian Fletcher. 1996. “Wolf Hybrids Are ‘In’ Pet for Smart Set; Britons Warned that Crossbreed Can Pose Peril for Children.” The Gazette, 21 January. Fuoco, Linda Wilson, and Chico Harlan. 2006. “Wolf Dogs Kill Owner, Autopsy Determines.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 19 July. http://www.postgazette.com/local/westmoreland/2006/07/19/Wolf-dogs-killed-ownerautopsy-determines/stories/200607190197. Gage, Andrew. N.d. “Legality of Wolf Kill Contest.” West Coast Environmental Law. http://www.pacificwild.org/media/documents/resources/ bcgaming12dec12.pdf (accessed 23 June 2015). Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. 2013. “We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us.” National Geographic News, 3 March. http://news. nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130302-dog-domestic-evolutionscience-wolf-wolves-human. International Wolf Center (IwC). 2015. “Wolf-Dog Hybrids.” http://www.wolf. org/learn/basic-wolf-info/wolves-and-humans/wolf-dog-hybrids/ (accessed 23 June 2015). Jones, Karen R. 2002. Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves along the Great Divide. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press. Library and Archives of Canada. 1930–52. “Universal – Animals – Wolves – Clippings.” Park/subject classification system. Microfilm reel T-16472, Coll. RG84-A-2-a, Library and Archives of Canada. Loo, Tina. 2006. States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Marris, Emma. 2015. “Wolf Cull Will Not Save Threatened Canadian Caribou.” Nature, last modified 20 January 2015. http://www.nature.com/ news/wolf-cull-will-not-save-threatened-canadian-caribou-1.16734. Misner, J. W. 1907. “Why Our Deer Are Disappearing: A Reply to Mr. J.A. Hope.” Rod and Gun in Canada 9, no. 2 (July): 156–60.

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Murie, A. 1944. The Wolves of Mount McKinley. Washington, DC: U.S. National Park Service Ser. No. 5, U.S. Government Printing Office. North Peace Rod and Gun Club. 2012. “Statement from the North Peace Rod & Gun Club Regarding the Wolf Contest.” Last modified 21 December 2012. http://nprg.ca/2012/12/statement-from-the-north-peacerod-gun-club-regarding-the-wolf-contest/. Omand, D.N. 1950. “The Bounty System in Ontario.” The Journal of Wildlife Management 14, no. 4 (October): 425–34. Ontario Department of Lands and Forests. 1950. Weekly Press Releases. March 6, Box 1, Coll. RG 1-243. Archives of Ontario. Pimlott, Douglas. 1963. “Wolf Control and Management in Ontario.” Fish and Wildlife Review 2, no. 2: 20–8. – 1967. “Wolf Predation and Ungulate Populations.” American Zoologist 7: 267–78. Pynn, Larry. 2012. “Contest Offers Cash Prizes for Wolf Kills in Northeastern BC.” Vancouver Sun, 19 November. http://www.vancouversun.com/ technology/Contest+offers+cash+prizes+wolf+kills+northeastern/7572936/ story.html#__federated=1. Quinn, Norm. 2002. Algonquin Wildlife: Lessons in Survival. Toronto: Natural Heritage Press. Rod and Gun in Canada. 1900. “Editorial.” Rod and Gun in Canada 2, no. 5 (October): 339. – 1903. “Our Medicine Bag.” Rod and Gun in Canada 5, no. 6 (November 1903): 258–63. – 1904. “Our Medicine Bag.” Rod and Gun in Canada 5, no. 10 (March): 513–19. – 1907. “The C.P.R. Wolf Hunt.” Rod and Gun in Canada 9, no. 7 (December): 675. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Runtz, Michael. 1997. The Howls of August: Encounters with Algonquin Wolves. Erin, oN: The Boston Mills Press. Rutherford, Stephanie. 2011. Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sun Valley Wolf Kennels. 2015a. “Available Litters (Upcoming)/Puppies for Sale.” http://sunvalleywolfkennels.com/puppies-available-now/ (accessed 23 June 2015).

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– 2015b. “High Content Wolf Cubs.” http://sunvalleywolfkennels.com/98wolf-content-cubs/ (accessed 23 June 2015). – 2015c. “Wolf/Wolf Hybrid Comments.” http://sunvalleywolfkennels.com/ wolfwolf_hybrid-adoption/ (accessed 23 June 2015). Vallery, Anna. 2015. “So You Want a Pet Wolf? Here’s Why You Should Probably Reconsider.” Last modified 19 February 2015. http://www. onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/so-you-want-a-pet-wolf/. Wildlife Branch. 1954. “Ontario Wolf Inventory.” Wildlife Branch Wildlife Program Moose/Cariboo Files 88 Chapleay to 88-BC Other Studies, Box 14, Coll. RG 1-443-2, Archives of Ontario. – 1973. “Bulletin 5: Predation Manitoulin Island (Espanola) Pellet and Dead Deer Surveys to 88-9F-Algonquin Forest Authority.” November. Wildlife Branch Program Files, Container 21, Coll. RG 1-443, Archives of Ontario.

CONCLUSION

Canid-Human Relations, Speciesism, and Overlooked Interlocking Systems of Oppression John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka

A half century ago, Richard Ryder (1970) coined the term ‘speciesism.’ Since then, scholars and activists continue to emphasize the centrality of nonhuman animal-human relations; yet anthropocentricism dominates. Within this context of domination, canid-human relations are significant parts of the everyday lives of many human animals. Through this book, we aim to highlight, and help readers to rethink, canid-human relations, in their material and representational forms, as playing important roles historically and currently in establishing, maintaining, and perpetuating dominant discourses that justify oppressive and unequal social, economic, and political conditions, not only limited to the human world but with all other beings. Such recognition opens opportunities to modify our everyday practice to make these relations and conditions less oppressive and more just. This book has concerned itself with examining the variety of canid-human relations and how these relations both reflect and shape key conditions, social, economic, political, and cultural, in time and space in various human societies. Reflecting our own past research and experience with various rescue organizations and our participation in various conferences organized by the Asia for Animals coalition over more than ten years, several of the chapters here have a focus on different Asian societies, but we have endeavoured to give the book a broad scope. We have long considered dogs, in particular, to have a special place amongst us, as demonstrated by Franco’s chapter here on ancient Greek and

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Roman societies and Charles’s chapter on contemporary Western society. Adopting a Critical Animal Studies perspective, one of our primary concerns is about how conceptual systems shape material practices and the effects of human ideas on canids themselves, as discussed in the chapters by Armbruster, Chang, Charles, Fowler, and Warden. However, this book has also been concerned about how ideas about canids operate as part of systems of thinking about human societies. For example, as Wallen, in his chapter on the aesthetics of dog-breeding, and Bathgate, in his chapter on dogs and foxes in pre-modern Japan, demonstrate, these canids provided a kind of code for articulating expectations about class relations and human relations with nature generally. As Bathgate, Mikuse, and Rutherford point out in their chapters here, this code functions to express human fears and desires regardless of the behaviour of actual canids themselves, which may have very little to do with how they are deployed in human imaginations. The variety of their physical forms and behaviour is matched by the multiple meanings that humans manufacture for them. If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964, 89) famously observed, animals are good to think with, we find canids particularly interesting and useful signifiers. This book shows that, historically and regardless of geographical differences, they are good to think with for the sake of humans’ needs and wants, but such thinking often entails very little benefit for these animals themselves. We contend that this invites rethinking – we need to recognize this and challenge many of the social practices that involve violence towards, and exploitation of, canids.

Much Needs to Be Done This book examines social representations and meanings of canids. Although this volume has attempted to provide a mix of contexts in which some of the complexities of these socially constructed relationships can be considered, it has not been possible for us to discuss all such contexts, and, of course, there are many further avenues to be explored. For example, we have not been able to include an adequate discussion of human relations with a variety of wild canids. Some of these animals are among the least-known and most endangered. Like other species of wildlife, these canids are threatened by human population growth and relentless resource extraction. Dholes, for example, have been pushed towards extinction due to the destruction of Asian forests by the logging,

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mining, and palm oil industries. Like other wild canids, they have also been hunted because they are considered a threat to the livestock industry. Little research has been done on these and many other wild canids even in terms of basic scientific knowledge, and even less attention has been paid to their interaction with humans. Much research remains to be done in other areas. For example, although Van Sittert and Swart (2008) offer a discussion of dogs in the history of South Africa, very little has been written about canid-human relations in Africa generally. Yet certainly there is much to be considered. In terms of actual canids, the situation for species such as the Ethiopian wolf and the African wild dog is dire, as they face shrinking habitats and pressure from growing human populations. The survival of these species, as for wildlife and biodiversity generally, is entangled with key political and economic issues concerning the operations of capitalism, ideologies of endless growth and consumption, relentless resource extraction, human population increase, global warming, and the potential for the collapse of global ecosystems. Just as we can trace the material dangers threatening Africa’s wildlife to the grim, violent, and deeply rooted histories of Western imperialism there, so too can we detect particular resonance in the imagining of canids in the entangled discourses of racism and speciesism in Africa. Just as McCreanor, McCreanor, and Utari and Wallen point out in their respective discussions of Bali Dogs and of dog-breeding in England, canids in Africa have been pressed into service as representatives of human group identities. In apartheid South Africa, dog breeds such as the Rhodesian ridgeback were valorized as symbols of racial and settler-national identity; not surprisingly in a society organized according to an ideology of white supremacy, there was much attention devoted to ideas of canine purity and miscegenation. While wild canids were exterminated as vermin, selective breeding also focused on producing large, fierce dogs that could guard and protect white property and privilege. Such dogs were also widely employed by the police and military in their efforts to repress the majority, so that dogs became “a symbol of white oppression” and a “metaphor for apartheid” (Van Sittert and Swart 2003, 158, 166). While a commercialized pet-keeping culture developed among the white middle class, the dogs of the majority Black population were disparaged as mongrels inferior to desirable purebreeds and a heavy government tax was imposed on them (162). Here, we can recall Wallen’s chapter in this volume to further

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understand how the classification and hierarchy of dogs went handin-hand with establishing and maintaining the class system among human animals. The deployment of canids to distinguish human groups has continued in South Africa’s post-apartheid context. In 2012 South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma created international controversy with his assertion that owning a dog as a pet was un-African and that those Black South Africans who cared for dogs, by walking them and providing veterinary care, were suffering from a colonized mentality that made them emulate the culture of white people (Conway-Smith 2012). Many Black South Africans objected to this characterization of affectionate canid-human relationships and responded by posting online photographs of themselves with cherished pet dogs. Novelist Zakes Mda tweeted: There are many different ways of being African. Of being black even. Those who love animals are not less African/black than those who don’t … Africanness is diverse and varied. It cannot be universalized from one perspective of a tribal man from one small corner of Africa. (Dixon 2012) As this book shows, canid-human relations have been used in attempting to justify class divisions, imperialism, colonialism, and other economic exploitation. The book shows that canid-human relations are shaped by, but also shape and maintain, economic and political relations. This implies that an examination of strategies for decolonization must incorporate understanding of such relations, and that these strategies must be more than simply reverting to old symbolism and relations. Intertwined classism, racism, speciesism, and other systems of oppression need to be understood in their full complexity. Outside Africa, dogs have played a significant role in the intertwined discourses and practices of racism and speciesism, with dogs often used as instruments of oppression against Black humans and conflated in images of danger as in the association between the savage pit bull and the Black thug (Boisseron 2018). In the United States, the conviction of star football quarterback Michael Vick in 2007 on charges of dogfighting created a controversy that followed Vick until his retirement a decade later, with many claiming that the outrage directed against him was driven less by concerns about the treatment of dogs than by

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racism. For example, when Vick was hired by the Philadelphia Eagles football team after spending twenty-one months in prison, Fox News commenter Tucker Carlson asserted that Vick should have been executed for killing dogs “in a heartless and cruel way” (Norman 2010). African Americans expressed their own outrage at demands from Carlson and others for harsh punishment of Vick, noting that those convicted of killing of racialized humans often received light sentences or escaped punishment altogether, and they argued that white Americans cared more about the suffering of dogs than about the suffering of Black humans (e.g., MadameNoire 2011). However, the issue is not one of placing concern for dogs over concern for humans but of developing a consistent ethical framework that values both human and nonhuman lives. This helps us to see that Vick’s brutal treatment of dogs was essentially no different from the consumption of billions of farmed animals for their flesh, since both involve the infliction of suffering and death for enjoyment and are facilitated by the status of animals as property (Francione 2011). Speciesism prevents us from understanding the systems of oppression, hidden in plain sight, that operate to legitimize certain social practices which include acts equally as violent as killing dogs, while racist systems of oppression further muddle our perception of these intertwined forms of oppression that constitute the structure of violence, making it harder to address key issues in solidarity. When the Black Lives Matter movement identified how this structure of violence continued by protesting the 2014 killing by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police used dogs to send their own symbolic message by allowing one to urinate on a makeshift neighbourhood memorial (Follman 2014). Just as in apartheid South Africa, the police use of dogs as weapons remains vivid in the consciousness of African-Americans, extending back to the use of these animals to recapture those who sought to escape slavery or to mobilize for their civil rights. Real and symbolic uses of dogs are marshalled to maintain the structure of violence through racism and speciesism. Unless we incorporate speciesism into our understanding of oppression, strategies for untangling interlocking oppression will not work. More studies are needed to understand how canid-human relations are employed to enforce current economic, political, cultural, and social conditions. Dogs continue to be powerful signifiers in discourses of identity and modernity. For example, in September 2018, the vice-mayor of Hanoi,

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Nguyen Van Suu, posted a message on the city’s website telling residents to stop eating dogs and cats because this “negatively impact[s] the image of a civilised and modern capital” as well as involving the risk of rabies (Rahim 2018). Concern for such an image is not limited to Vietnam. In the same month, citing concerns about cruelty and public health in Asia, the US House of Representatives passed Resolution 401, urging all nations to outlaw the dog and cat meat trade and to enforce existing laws against such trade, and affirmed the United States’ commitment to animal protection (United States Congress 2018). The House also passed the Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act of 2018 banning possession and sale, transportation and slaughter of these animals for the purposes of human consumption, although an exception was included for Indigenous groups who use them in this way for religious purposes. In his statement on the legislation, the bill’s co-sponsor Congressman Alcee Hastings (2018) noted: “As the House of Representatives also calls for the end of the dog and cat meat trade globally, it is important to that we hold ourselves to the same standards we wish to see in others.” These initiatives are admirable ones, although it is already illegal in the United States for slaughterhouses to kill and process dogs and cats and for stores to sell the flesh of these animals, meaning that the trade is limited to a small number of individuals, typically in minority communities, who kill dogs and cats for sale. Thus, the initiative does not pose any threat to major commercial operations that profit from the killing of other animals, notably cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and fish, and the sale of their flesh is normalized and considered acceptable, a speciesist, capitalist, and colonialist contradiction that passes without comment in media discussions about the legislation. While Sorenson’s chapter in this book focused on the Asian context for its discussion of the exploitation of dogs for their flesh and the ways in which controversies over eating dogs intersected with racist ideas, dogs are also eaten in some African societies. Somewhat surprisingly, the consumption of dogs in Africa has attracted far less international attention and condemnation than in Asia. Dogs are eaten in parts of Ghana and Nigeria, where markets and restaurants sell dog flesh openly, although opinions are divided about consumption. Some are enthusiastic about eating dogs, believing this prevents malaria and increases men’s sexual power; others reject the idea of eating dogs because they are seen as pets (Murray 2007). In 2013 the Global Alliance for Rabies

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Control reported that butchering dogs increased rabies risks. A study in southeastern Nigeria, where people consume dogs in their traditional diet, found rabies virus in the saliva and brain tissue of 5 percent of slaughtered dogs (Mshelbwala, Ogunkoya, and Maikai 2013). Mshelbwala et al. found that all cases were from seemingly healthy dogs who showed no symptoms and that dogs spread the virus through their saliva during the butchering process. Butchers take few precautions, seizing and handling frightened, struggling animals with their bare hands without protection against bites. Few vaccination programs exist for humans or dogs and few butchers seek medical treatment for bites they receive. These practices put butchers at high risk. As well, rabies and other viruses can be transferred if fluids or nervous tissues of infected animals come into contact with humans who have wounds or breaks in their skin. Because butchers cannot screen out infected animals and because dogs are eaten, handling infected flesh has serious implications for regional public health. Mshelbwala et al. (2013) advised health officials to focus on the dog slaughter industry as a significant source of rabies transmission. Similarly, a study of the trade in southern Nigeria identified it as a major factor causing many human deaths (Ekanem, Iyong, Philip-Ephraim, Eyong, Adams, and Asindi 2013). These researchers called for education and the killing of stray dogs, a common response but one which is unlikely to solve the rabies problem. Consumption of dog flesh is also suspected as a factor in the 2015 ebola outbreak in Liberia (Toweh and Giahyue 2015). The spread of ebola has been linked to infection from various other animals, such as bats, nonhuman primates, and pigs, and forms of avian influenza such as H5N1 have become increasingly dangerous for human populations due to intensive poultry production. From a Critical Animal Studies perspective, we can see that the violent exploitation of nonhuman animals creates dangerous consequences for humans, especially the most impoverished who lack access to health care. Exploitation of canids is tied in with the marginalized health of lower classes. Even from an anthropocentric perspective alone, it is evident that stopping the consumption of dogs and other animals is beneficial for health. Others have found additional reasons for not eating dogs. While the Australian-based group Fight Dog Meat (Brown 2016) states that dogs are eaten in twenty African countries, there has been little international attention given to the issue compared to campaigns against the trade

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in Asia. However, local groups such as Liberia Animal Welfare and Conservation Society have mobilized against eating dogs and against all forms of cruelty to animals (Brown 2018). Given Liberia’s recent history, involving decades of war, it seems remarkable that concern for nonhuman animal welfare would emerge as a concern for the thousands of people who have participated in LAwCS programs. However, the group’s founder, Morris Darbo, recognizes the links between violence against animals and against humans, and advocates for nonviolence through humane education programs for children, hoping this will create more compassionate communities in the future (Cotroneo 2018).

Countering Speciesist Social Representations and Meanings of Canids: Veganism and Revealing Truncated Narratives While the African dog meat trade has been widely ignored, denunciations of the practice of eating dogs in Asia has continued to attract the involvement of celebrities. For example, Simon Cowell, a judge on television programs such as America’s Got Talent and American Idol, donated $42,000 in October 2018 to the Humane Society International to rescue dogs from South Korean dog meat farms. Campaigns against eating dogs depict the practice as particularly cruel and evil. Comedian Ricky Gervais, in a 20 April 2018 YouTube video posted by Care for Animals, denounced the Yulin dog meat festival as “the most horrendous thing I’ve ever heard of … fucking mental.” The killing and consumption of dogs at Yulin is, indeed, horrendous. However, media focus on the comments and contributions of Western celebrities overshadows popular opposition to these practices within Asian countries. For example, Xinhua News (Xiang and Suwen, 2016) reported that the majority of Chinese people oppose the dog meat trade and activists express embarrassment that much of the world believes violent practices such as the Yulin dog meat festival are an essential part of Chinese culture. In the West, the issue of eating dogs continues to be part of a truncated narrative. Legislation such as the 2018 Farm Bill in the United States prohibits the slaughter of cats and dogs for commercial sale of their flesh but does not address the continuing operation of massive factory farming operations that entail the killing of billions of other animals. Many, such as rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman (2010) for example, defend

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such double standards and reject vegan arguments about the moral equivalence of dogs and other animals, by asserting that eating dogs is indefensible because we have a special relationship with these animals. Such an argument supports speciesism (differentiating ‘food’ animals from dogs and human from other animals) and colonialism (exercising colonial epistemic privileges), which serves to defend Niman’s own financial interests as a rancher. Western abolitionists such as Gary Francione (2016) denounce campaigns that focus on condemnation of particular practices such as the killing and consumption of dogs, arguing that they are racist, single-issue initiatives that actually hinder the achievement of animal rights by focusing on reforms of specific practices that are presented as being particularly immoral, rather than emphasizing veganism as a moral requirement. Francione acknowledges that animal advocates could legitimately campaign against particular practices if they declared their opposition to all forms of animal exploitation. In fact, many individual vegan activists have spoken out against the dog meat industry. Activists such as Jill Robinson (2018), founder of Animals Asia, herself a vegan, regard opposition to the dog meat trade as a gateway to greater awareness of animal rights issues generally. Obviously, all vegans oppose the consumption of dogs the same as other animals. In doing so, they counter speciesist truncated narratives and offer a more inclusive vision of trans-species social justice (Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018). Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (2016) argues that we ought to think of eating not simply as a practice of directly ingesting the bodies of other animals but as a matter of swallowing cultural ideas. Considering the operations of the animal industrial complex in the form of Australia’s sheep industry, she points to two “interrelated ways of eating animals … farming them directly for their flesh … and mak[ing] all the other animals on the peripheries subject to this anthropocentric want” (Probyn-Rapsey 2016, 1). In order to protect industry profits, various wild animals must be eliminated. Thus, she argues that the culturally approved consumption of sheep actually comes with “a side dish of dingo,” facilitated by Australia’s National Wild Dog Action Plan, which is backed by the ranching industry and intended to drastically reduce the number of dingoes to prevent their predation on the commodified sheep. The argument can be extended elsewhere to include coyotes, wolves, and animals of other species that are considered to be inconvenient.

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Therefore, she argues, even where eating dogs is regarded as a taboo, canids are consumed. The global livestock economy is lethal not just for those animals who are consumed directly but for canids such as dingoes, coyotes, and wolves who are killed because they are seen as potential threats to the profits of the industry. This applies not only to canids who are considered predators. Speciesism allows us to view nonhuman animals as things to own and prevents us from seeing them as sentient beings who belong to the land. To understand these situations beyond how they are represented in speciesist narratives, the concept of a ‘truncated narrative’ of dominance is useful (Kheel 1993). Crucial parts of the narrative are missing, because they have been systematically excluded, and these elements’ absence severs our attention from the roots of the problem. The ideology of speciesism conveniently truncates the narrative of our dominance of other animals. This volume mines such truncated narratives and shows the centrality of nonhuman animal–human relations in social, economic, and political interactions, but more narratives must be told to counter speciesism and oppression.

Time and Space Attending to canid-human relationships across time and space allows us to see both wild and domesticated animals in relation to structural issues, global influences, the agency of canids, and similarities and inconsistencies in representations. It also shows us that even those known as “man’s best friend” are subjected to a wide range of violent practices, and that capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism work to modify animals’ relationships with land and space. Street dogs who live alongside human communities face a complex and precarious existence, as demonstrated in the chapters by Chang, Hart, McCreanor, McCreanor, and Utari, and Warden. These chapters draw on stories from today’s Taiwan, Turkey, Bali, and India. They show how canid-human boundaries are used to develop the imperial Metropolis which is based on Western knowledge of what civilized cities/towns should look like, i.e., empty of street dogs. From the perspective of Western law, dogs are considered property, and as street dogs often do not have owners, they are considered out of place and a drain on resources. But in other parts of the world, such as Bali, India, and Turkey, street dogs have been seen differently for centuries (see chapters 6, 7, and 9). These perspectives understand that street dogs belong to the

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land, the street, and the communities. In the case of Turkey, Hart in this volume observed that people consider street animals to have rights to be on the streets. The Turkish case demonstrates how a hegemonic view of street dogs clashes with more traditional understandings of canidhuman communities and imposes exterminationist policies towards these animals. Protests against such violent state power are a mirror image of people protesting the expansion of neoliberal/imperialist economic and political power. In Bali, McCreanor, McCreanor, and Utari show the effects of modernity and continuing colonialization on how we see dogs and canid-human relations. In this way, changing knowledge about, and power relations with, dogs shape what Bali Dogs are and who Bali people are. As Chang demonstrates in the case of Taipei, a violent “garbage-does-not-touch-the-ground policy” eradicated street dogs, eliminating their food supply and thus starving them to death. These universalized canid-human relations, which privilege Western knowledge, threaten and inferiorize local Asian canid-human relations and identities in the name of civilization, in spite of the fact that places such as India and Turkey have animal protection laws that are more progressive than those in the West. Such views are excluded from global knowledge to maintain complex unequal hierarchies of societies and normalize Western-based canid-human relations. In Canada, as Mikuse shows, wild canids face the loss of their habitat and are identified and killed as dangerous intruders when they venture into human-claimed spaces. Land is considered to be for humans, more specifically for settlers, and animals do not have rights to occupy the land we have claimed. As Mikuse’s story demonstrates, within this dominant anthropocentric paradigm, particular institutions enact a lethal policing of these boundaries, by dismissing the agency of animals. Canadian conservation services are characterized by a “trigger-happy, pro-hunting culture” that operates virtually without oversight (Quan 2018). In addition to an organizational culture that valorizes the killing of nonhuman animals, the militarization of Canadian conservation services and the use of high-powered weapons creates fear and intimidation among Indigenous communities (ibid.). Nonhuman animal–human relations are not simply what they appear to be. In order to understand how dominance is maintained, speciesism cannot be overlooked. Rutherford in this volume, examining wolves in Canada, maintains that wolves and humans have co-evolved, although humans have either

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ignored or vilified the agency of wolves. Historical wolf-human relations have been characterized by violence against wolves in the context of colonial exploitation of land and Indigenous people. However, more recent practices such as the Algonquin Park Wolf Howl, while emerging as a form of imperialist nostalgia, also acknowledge wolves’ agency and suggest new possibilities of less-anthropocentric coexistence. Other forms of violence toward, and consumption of, dogs are described in Fowler’s chapter on the use of dogs in laboratories. This is pervasive and continuing. For example, the United States government decided in November 2018 that it would go ahead with using dogs in experiments for the Veterans’ Affairs department, removing sections of the animals’ brains, severing their spinal cords to investigate their cough responses, and implanting pacemaker machines to study induced abnormal heart rhythms. While the government defended the experiments as a means to treat wounded soldiers, critics denounced them as backward, cruel, and unwarranted, noting that the government had also contracted the National Academy of Sciences for a $1.3 million study to determine if the tests actually were necessary (Wyatt 2018). Former vivisector Lawrence Hansen (2016) described his shame at having participated in medical experiments on dogs that he describes as scientifically useless: From a scientific perspective, the problem is that dogs, monkeys and mice are not simplified versions of humans. This is why the NIH reports that 95 percent of drugs that pass animal tests – often including beagles – fail in humans because they don’t work or are dangerous. In my specialty, Alzheimer’s disease, the drug failure rate is actually 99.6 percent, and the use of animals has recently been referred to as “a cliff over which people push bales of money.” According to NIH, every drug or treatment that fails in human trials after passing animal tests represents 14 years and $2 billion wasted. Yet the agency continues to dedicate nearly half of its $32 billion research budget to animal research. This vast disconnect between scientific evidence and resource allocation reliably wastes billions of taxpayer dollars every year and prolongs suffering of those desperate for relief. Experiments on dogs aren’t scientifically “necessary,” especially when we have superior research technologies like human organs-on-chips to model diseases and test drugs.

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Greenwald and Woodhouse (2018) outline the cruelty and waste involved in these and other unnecessary and unethical experiments on dogs. Even less defensible is the use of dogs and other animals in gruesome tests of commercial products. These studies are not conducted for any purpose of saving human lives but are done simply to provide corporations with legal protection and to perpetuate the careers of researchers and the profits of the corporations that supply the animals. Exploitation of canine bodies continues as part of the animal-industrial complex under capitalism. However, the animal rights movement and the viewpoint of compassion for animals seem to be making some headway. While they do not challenge the use of animals as research objects, modest reforms such as Maryland’s 2018 “Beagle Bill” now require laboratories to release dogs and cats for adoption if they are no longer needed for research purposes, while in the same year California became the first state in the US to ban the sale of cosmetics tested on animals. Institutes such as the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods, University of Windsor, and other similar organizations are funded to shift away from animal testing. When regarded as objects of entertainment in zoos, wild canids are oppressed in conditions that can never meet their own needs, as Laidlaw demonstrates in his chapter on wolves in captivity. Even when incorporated into human families as pets, domesticated canids face danger from domestic violence, and stories of abuse and cruelty to dogs are commonplace in media reports and online, while rescue groups organize to repair and rehome survivors. As pets, dogs and other animals exist at the whim of the humans who legally own them. They may be abandoned or killed if they become old, too expensive to maintain, undesirable, or simply inconvenient. They are imagined and created within manufactured hierarchies as made-to-order commodities, identity markers, and status symbols, marketed to satisfy the tastes that have been created through advertising and popular culture and shaped by discourses of class, gender, nationalism, and race. The violence that canids experience at the hands of humans leads us to rethink how we ought to characterize and organize our relations with them. These are political questions, matters of justice. As Critical Animal Studies scholars have argued, structures of violence are fundamental and pervasive in our society as nonhuman animals have been commodified under capitalism, reduced to things with monetary value with no regard

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for how these individuals may value their own lives. Commodification of animals has intensified, even as some of them are accepted as family members. Considered our property, they are subjected to our power as we control their reproduction, modify their bodies, constrain their movement, and put them to death to satisfy our desires. Employing speciesist ideology, we have normalized these structures, simply assuming that it is our right to dominate other beings. Wadiwel (2015) maintains that we should most realistically describe our relations with other animals generally in terms of war. He points out that our relations with other animals are ones of power, involving violence to the point of the complete domination of many species and the extermination of others. This includes activities such as the breeding and killing of farmed animals, hunting for food or sport, culling in the name of wildlife management, pest control, and vivisection, as well as eugenicist efforts to manipulate reproduction to create desirable living commodities. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, canids of all species, including those we identify as “man’s best friend,” have been subjected to all these forms of violence. To understand the violence directed at canids, and nonhuman animals generally, we may look to the fundamental material aspects of their oppression as a part of a ‘truncated narrative’ of oppression. Oppression is mainly motivated by material objectives and humans exploit canids for economic gain. We see this clearly in the commodification of canids for food, as laboratory resources, and as pets, as well as in the violence that is directed towards them because they are regarded as predators that interfere with the profits to be derived from farming and ranching other animals. Oppression is legitimized by speciesist ideology that champions human exceptionalism and excludes other animals from moral consideration and justice. While oppression is best understood in a political-economic framework, these ideological legitimizations generate an impressive variety of forms and serviceable images, such as the ravenous wolf, the wily fox, the lapdog, the mad dog, the craven cur, and so on. These images not only work to create particular subject positions for canids but can also be deployed in related discourses of racism and sexism to denigrate other groups of humans as a rationale for their oppression. As the contributors to this book demonstrate, canids – even within the same species – are conceptualized in a variety of ways, as food,

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members of post-human families, and symbols of wilderness. Their peculiar status in this regard makes them particularly interesting to consider in relation to Wadiwel’s concept of a war against animals. Canids are regarded both as the targeted enemy and as collateral damage, and, as pets, we might see them as prisoners of war or as refugees. As the contributors to this book show, it is possible that our relationships with these refugees may encourage us to develop more compassionate relationships with other animals as well, but the fundamental fact remains that these are all relationships that occur within structures of power and it is our moral and political obligation to confront and challenge those structures. Doing so will lead us to compassionate and trans-species social justice – justice beyond humans.

References Boisseron, Benedicte. 2018. Afro-Dog. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, Michele. 2018. “Liberia: Stop All Forms of Violence against Animals.” Fight Dog Meat, 11 January. https://fightdogmeat.com/2018/01/11/liberiastop-forms-violence-animals/. – 2016. “Africa: Dog Meat in Over 20 Countries in Africa.” Fight Dog Meat, 2 February. https://fightdogmeat.com/2016/02/02/africa-dog-meat-in-over20-countries-in-africa/. Conway-Smith, Erin. 2012. “Jacob Zuma Says Owning a Dog ‘Is Not African.’” The Telegraph, 27 December. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/9767644/Jacob-Zuma-saysowning-a-dog-is-not-African.html. Cotroneo, Christian. 2018. “The Way Animals Are Treated in Liberia Is Changing, and Children Are Leading the Way.” Mother Nature Network, 22 June. https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/liberiaanimal-welfare-morris-darbo-children. Criss, Doug. 2018. “A Shelter Dog Was Beaten to Death in Prison. An Animal Rescue Group Wants to Know What Happened.” cnn, 5 September. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/05/us/rescue-dog-death-trnd/index.html. Dixon, Robyn. 2012. “South Africa’s Jacob Zuma: Pet Dogs Are Part of ‘White Culture.’” Los Angeles Times, 27 December. http://articles.latimes. com/2012/dec/27/world/la-fg-wn-southafrica-zuma-dogs-20121227. Ekanem, E.E., K.I. Iyong, E.E. Philip-Ephraim, M.E. Eyong, E.B. Adams, and A.A. Asindi. 2013. “Stray Dog Trade Fuelled by Dog Meat Consumption

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as a Risk Factor for Rabies Infection in Calabar, Southern Nigeria.” African Health Sciences 13, no. 4: 1170–3. Follman, Mark. 2014. “Michael Brown’s Mother Laid Flowers Where He Was Shot – And Police Crushed Them.” Mother Jones, 27 August. https://www. motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/ferguson-st-louis-police-tactics-dogsmichael-brown/. Francione, Gary. 2011. “What Michael Vick Taught Us.” Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach, 6 April. https://www.abolitionistapproach.com/ what-michael-vick-taught-us/. – 2016. “Why Welfare Reform Campaigns and Single-Issue Campaigns Necessarily Promote Animal Exploitation.” Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach, 19 March. http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/14542-2/. Greenwald, Glenn, and Leighton Akio Woodhouse. 2018. “Bred to Suffer: Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.” The Intercept, 17 May. https://theintercept.com/2018/05/17/inside-the-barbaric-u-sindustry-of-dog-experimentation/. Hansen, Lawrence. 2016. “Lab Experiments on Dogs Cruel and Unnecessary.” San Diego Union-Tribune, 15 December. http://www.sandiegouniontribune. com/sd-utbg-dogs-experiments-cruelty-20161215-story.html. Harris, R. 2014. “Vulpes ferrilata.” The iucn Red List of Threatened Species 2014: e.T23061A46179412. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2014-3.RLTS. T23061A46179412.en. Hastings, Alcee. 2018. “Hasting’s Statement on Passage of the Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act.” Washington, DC: Press release, 12 September. https://alceehastings.house.gov/news/documentsingle. aspx?DocumentID=399045. Kheel, Marti. 1993. “From Heroic to Holistic Ethics: The Ecofeminist Challenge.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, edited by G. Gard, 243–71. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1964. Totemism. London: Merlin Press. MadameNoire. 2011. “Understanding the Frenzy over Vick and White Folks’ Love of Dogs.” 3 January. https://madamenoire.com/106822/do-whitepeople-love-their-dogs-as-much-as-black-people/. Matsuoka, Atsuko, and John Sorenson. 2018. Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Mshelbwala, P.P., A.B. Ogunkoya, and B.V. Maikai. 2013. “Detection of Rabies Antigen in the Saliva and Brains of Apparently Healthy Dogs Slaughtered for Human Consumption and Its Public Health Implications in Abia

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State, Nigeria.” isrn Veterinary Science, vol. 2013, Article ID 468043: 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/468043. Murray, Senan. 2007. “Dogs’ Dinners Prove Popular in Nigeria.” bbc News, 6 March. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6419041.stm. Niman, Nicolette Hahn. 2010. “Dogs Aren’t Dinner: The Flaws in an Argument for Veganism.” Atlantic, 4 November. https://www.theatlantic. com/health/archive/2010/11/dogs-arent-dinner-the-flaws-in-an-argumentfor-veganism/66095/. Norman, Joshua. 2010. “Tucker Carlson: Michael Vick Deserves to Die.” cbs News, 29 December. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tucker-carlsonmichael-vick-deserves-to-die/. Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona. 2017. “Eating Dingoes.” Australian Zoologist 39, no. 1: 39–42. Quan, Douglas. 2018. “Animal Welfare Activists Worry Pro-Hunting Culture Is ‘Militarizing’ Provincial Conservation Agencies.” National Post, 23 November. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/animal-welfare-activistsworry-pro-hunting-culture-is-militarizing-provincial-conservationagencies. Rahim, Zamira. 2018. “Vietnam Capital Hanoi Tells Citizens to Stop Eating Dog Meat Due to Rabies Risk.” Independent, 12 September. https://www. independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/vietnam-dog-meat-ban-hanoi-rabiesrisk-asia-dog-cat-meat-rabies-a8533821.html. Robinson, Jill. 2018. “Dog Meat, Yulin and Veganism: Is There a Double Standard?” Animals Asia, 14 June. https://www.animalsasia.org/intl/social/ jills-blog/2018/06/14/dog-meat-yulin-and-veganism-is-there-a-doublestandard/. Toweh, Alphonso, and James Harding Giahyue. 2015. “Liberia Investigating Animal Link after Ebola Re-emerges.” Reuters, 2 July. https://www.reuters. com/article/us-health-ebola-liberia/liberia-investigating-animal-link-afterebola-re-emerges-idUSKCN0PC0WJ20150702. United States Congress. 2018. “H. Res. 401 – Urging All Nations to Outlaw the Dog and Cat Meat Trade and to Enforce Existing Laws against Such Trade.” https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/houseresolution/401/text (accessed 28 February 2019). Van Sittert, Lance, and Sandra Swart. 2003. “Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of Southern Africa.” South African Historical Journal 48: 138–73. – 2008. Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

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Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2015. The War against Animals. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill/ Rodopi. Wyatt, Tim. 2018. “US Government to Go Ahead with Fatal Experiments on Dogs.” The Independent, 5 November. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/americas/us-politics/dogs-experiments-veterans-affairs-usgovernment-fatal-animal-congress-a8616861.html. Xiang, Luan, and Yuan Suwen. 2016. “Poll: Majority of Chinese Oppose to ‘Dog Meat Festival,’ Call for Its End.” Xinhua, 19 June. http://www. xinhuanet.com//english/2016-06/19/c_135448611.htm.

Contributors

kArLA ArmBrUStEr is professor of English at Webster University (St Louis, mo), where she teaches American literature and environmental and animal-studies courses, including one on human-animal transformations in literature, film, and folklore. She also directs Webster’s sustainability studies minor. She is co-editor of Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (University of Virginia Press, 2001) and The Bioregional Imagination: New Perspectives on Literature, Ecology, and Place (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Her essay “The Gaze of Predators and the Redefinition of the Human” is part of the volume On Active Grounds: Agency and Time in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Robert Boschman and Mario Trono (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2019). mICHAEL BAtHgAtE is professor of religious studies at Saint Xavier University (Chicago, IL), where his research focuses on the uses and structures of didactic literature in medieval Japan, and the pedagogical implications of sharing that literature as part of the Catholic Liberal Arts. His published work includes The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore (Routledge, 2004), “Jakushin’s Dogs and the Goodness of Animals: Preaching the Moral Life of Beasts in Medieval Japanese Tale Literature,” and “Who Decides? Encountering Karma and Catastrophe in the Catholic Liberal Arts.”

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CHIA-jU CHANg is professor of Chinese at Brooklyn College of City University of New York. Her research is in “environmental humanities,” with strong commitment to Chinese Critical Animal Studies and ecocinema studies. Her book, Global Imagination of Ecological Communities: Chinese and Western Ecocritical Praxis (Jiangsu University Press, 2013), won the 2013 Bureau of Jiangsu Province Journalism and Publication award in China. Her many articles (in English and Chinese) have been published in the US, China, and Taiwan. With Scott Slovic, she co-edited Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (Lexington, 2016). She edited a special issue on animal writing in the journal Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series. Recent work includes Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). NICkIE CHArLES is director of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick, Uk. In her recent research she has explored how companion animals become family members and the effects of introducing therapy dogs into universities. She is currently principal investigator on a Leverhulme-funded project, “Shaping inter-species connectedness: training cultures and the emergence of new forms of human-animal relations,” which engages with a more animal-centred methodology and draws on expertise from disciplines in the social and natural sciences. She has published two books on related topics: Nature, Society and Environmental Crisis (co-edited with Bob Carter, Wiley Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 2010), and Human and Other Animals (co-edited with Bob Carter, Palgrave, 2011). tIm FowLEr teaches political science at Brock University (St Catharines, oN). When he is not busy looking after his four cats, he researches the way social movements use new social media to communicate with supporters and advance their interests. He also has a long-standing interest in the political economy of the capitalist state, and his research on social movements fits into his larger research question about the interaction between coercion and legitimation in advanced capitalist democracies. CrIStIANA FrANCo, PhD in anthropology of the ancient world (2000), is associate professor of classics at the University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy. Her scholarship foregrounds animal presence and agency in ancient

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Greek and Roman cultures and societies. She is author of Shameles: The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece (University of California, 2014) and Il mito di Circe (Einaudi, 2010; French trans. Le mythe de Circé, Paris, 2013); and she edited Zoomani: Animali, ibridi e mostri nelle culture umane (Siena, 2007). Taking an anthrozoological approach to the ancient evidence, her research ranges from the role of animals in the naturalization of gender and morals, to the influence of human-animal relationships on animal imagery in literature (“Animals,” in M. Bettini and W.M. Short, eds., The World through Roman Eyes: Anthropological Approaches to Ancient Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2018), to the vocabulary of human-animal interactions in ancient languages (“Greek and Latin Words for Human-Animal Bonds: Metaphors and Taboos,” in T. Fögen and E. Thomas, eds., Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, De Gruyter, 2017). kImBErLy HArt is an associate professor in social-cultural anthropology at the State University of New York (SUNy) Buffalo State in Buffalo, Ny. Her book, And Then We Work for God: Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey, (Stanford University Press, 2013), is based on a decade of ethnographic research on village life. After extensive rural work, Hart has begun to study the street animals of Istanbul. Her multispecies work engages the animal-human relationship in urban spaces. Hart works in visual media as an ethnographer and as a printmaker. roB LAIDLAw has spent nearly forty years working around the world to protect animals and nature. His efforts have included a broad range of investigative programs, legislative campaigns, public awareness initiatives, litigations, and animal rescues in locations as diverse as tropical Asia and the Canadian North. He is executive director of the international wildlife protection charity Zoocheck, a biologist, a specialist in wildlife captivity issues, and an award-winning author of ten children’s books about animal welfare and protection, as well as many reports, articles, blog posts, and other materials. He is a regularly consulted media pundit and has presented to tens of thousands of people of all ages throughout the world. In 2014, Laidlaw was awarded the prestigious Frederic A. McGrand Lifetime Achievement Award for substantial contributions to animal welfare in Canada.

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AtSUko mAtSUokA is a professor in the School of Social Work at York University, Toronto. Her current research examines trans-species social justice, social justice beyond human animals, and social work and animals from Critical Animal Studies perspectives, and it is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The current book is the third volume in a trilogy of edited works on CAS, which also includes Defining Critical Animal Studies: An Intersectional Social Justice Approach to Liberation (co-edited with Anthony Nocella II, John Sorenson, and Kim Socha, Peter Lang Publishing, 2014); and Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-Species Social Justice (co-edited with John Sorenson, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). kIm mCCrEANor is the co-author of the Bali Street Dog website, a project borne out of many years of working in animal welfare on the island of Bali and an increasing frustration with the lack of understanding of, or respect for, the place held by the Bali Dog within local culture and the deep connection between local people and their Indigenous dogs. Kim recently completed a three-year term as the CEo of Animal Management in Rural and Remote Indigenous Communities (AmrrIC), where she worked with Indigenous people and their dogs, work that was based upon respect for culture, connection, and community. Having recently returned to Bali with her husband Stephen, she continues to explore the many facets of the Bali Dog and Bali people’s relationship whilst studying for her Master’s in Public Health. StEPHEN mCCrEANor co-authors the Bali Street Dog website, having discovered a passion for the unique Balinese canid-human relationship whilst living in Bali, which is where he also discovered a hidden talent for rehabilitating traumatized street dogs. Having spent over thirty years of his working life with marginalized people and communities, being immersed in the world of street dogs and their people is a natural progression. In recent years Stephen has discovered a passion for interpreting these inequities and imbalances through the Bali Street Dog website. SANDI mIkUSE is a passionate, lifelong advocate for the rights and welfare of all non-human animals. Speaking out for those who cannot speak for themselves, her commitment to reducing the suffering of all animals,

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protecting the environments they live in, and educating others about their intrinsic value and inalienable rights is an ongoing part of her daily life … as are her four rescue cats Luke, Miko, Prince, and Dexter. StEPHANIE rUtHErForD is an associate professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University (Peterborough, oN). Her research inhabits the intersections among the environmental humanities, animal geography, and posthumanism. She is currently writing a book on the history of wolves in Canada. She is also the author of Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and co-editor of Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research (Routledge, 2016) and Historical Animal Geographies (Routledge, 2018). joHN SorENSoN is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Brock University (St. Catharines, oN), where he teaches courses in Critical Animal Studies. He has written and edited numerous books and articles on animal rights and various aspects of human-animal relationships. Recent books are Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable (editor, Canadian Scholars Press, 2014), Constructing Ecoterrorism (Fernwood Publishing, 2016), and Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-Species Social Justice (co-edited with Atsuko Matsuoka, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). AgrA UtArI is a co-founder of Yayasan Seva Bhuana and has recently completed her master’s degree with the English Education Department in one of Bali’s universities. Agra’s passion for changing the perspective of animal welfare education in Indonesia was sparked while working in one of the biggest animal welfare organizations in Bali, and led her and a couple of colleagues to form their own grassroots animal welfare education program: Animal Shanti. With persistence, dedication, and many volunteered hours, Animal Shanti eventually expanded to become Yayasan Seva Bhuana. By working as an educator with Yayasan Seva Bhuana, Agra has been fortunate to combine her passions for animals and education. mArtIN wALLEN is a professor in the English Department at Oklahoma State University. His most recent book is Whose Dog Are You? The

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Technology of Dog Breeds and the Aesthetics of Modern Human-Canine Relations (Michigan State University Press, 2017). He is currently completing a book-length study of squids, along with an investigation into invasive species and species death. LISA wArDEN is a writer and independent scholar affiliated with the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria. She has a PhD in political philosophy and French literature from the University of Calgary. She worked previously in the field of dog population management in India, and in animal protection elsewhere in Asia. Her research on challenges in dog population management in India has been published in a Critical Animal Studies anthology, Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable (Canadian Scholars Press, 2014). Her current area of research focuses on parallel effects of neoliberal urban renewal schemes on street dogs and the urban poor in India.

Index

ABC (Animal Birth Control), 182–5, 193 Aboriginal people of Taiwan: and dogs, 211 Ackerley, J.R., 128–30 Adams, Carol, 222 affection, 12–13, 15, 35, 37–8, 44, 46–9, 55, 59, 63, 67, 131, 144, 198–9, 212 affects, 7; affect bonds, 151; disgust affect, 220 agency, 9, 12–13, 15, 33–5, 39, 51–5, 148–50, 170, 217, 339, 348, 364–6 aggression, 37–8, 44–5, 118, 181, 197, 322, 326–7, 330 ahimsa (non-violence), 192, 200 Algonquin Park, 23, 317, 366 Animal Aid Unlimited (India), 196 Animal Equality, 263 animal protection laws, 17–18, 365; India (Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), 190–2; South Korea, 266; Taiwan, 209; Turkey (5199

Animal Protection Law, 2004), 18, 233–4, 239, 241, 244 animal rights, 9, 191, 193–4, 203, 216, 281, 363; advocates/activists, 136, 194, 227, 240–2, 244, 255, 259, 265; movement, 3, 67, 79, 367; theory, 177–9 Animals Asia, 263–4, 269–70, 363 animal testing (vivisection), critique of, 21, 278–80, 282, 284–7, 366–7 Animal Welfare Board (India), 193 anthropocentrism, 136–7, 186, 298–9, 310, 355 Asia Canine Protection Alliance, 269–70 Asia For Animals, 355 Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, 314, 325, 332 Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals, 297, 305, 307 avian influenza, 361

380

Index

Bali Animal Welfare Association, 16 Bali Dog legend, 161 Bashan, 130–1 Battle of Elderbush Gulch, 252 Beagle Freedom Bill (US), 21, 278, 281–2, 287, 368 Beagle Freedom Project, 21–2, 277–87 Belyaev, Dmitry, 318 Black Lives Matter, 359 bounties, on wolves, 338–46 bovine spongiform encephalopathy, 266 breeders, 6, 40, 73, 277 breeding, 13, 39–40, 53, 59–79, 212, 263, 338, 356–7; interbreeding, 5, 10 breedism, 212 breeds: breed dogs, 16–17, 19, 59, 76–9, 95, 121, 165–6, 211, 277; creation of, 59–60; discourse and narrative histories, 60, 62, 69–70; of dogs, 3, 13, 16; races and, 62–3, 66, 68, 74–9 Brown, Michael, 359 Buffon, Comte de (George LeClerc), 60–3, 68–9, 75–6, 80n3 Canada Goose, 11 Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods, 367 capitalism, 15, 18, 189, 221–2, 227, 259, 357, 362, 364, 367 care for animals, 231, 239–40 Care for Animals (organization), 362 caring, 59, 139, 141–2, 145, 154, 222, 229, 231, 244 Change for Animals, 269

Chang Jiwen, 261–2 class, 9, 38, 59, 63–9, 76–9, 84, 93–5, 99, 117, 120, 125, 138, 214, 219, 222–5, 236, 259–61, 356–8, 361, 367; analogies, 76–9; and gender, 9, 38, 219, 236, 238, 367; geographical divisions, 260; and political affiliation, 261; and social justice, 259 Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth, 258 colonialism, 15–20, 23, 165, 211, 215, 217, 253–4, 339–40, 346–8, 358, 360, 363–6 commodification, 6, 9, 18–19, 189, 211, 221, 226–7, 259, 367–8 compassion, 14, 18, 20, 97–8, 102, 135, 150, 155, 189, 195, 198, 200, 227, 237–8, 244, 260, 268–9, 299– 304, 307, 362, 367, 369. See also “Edicts of Compassion” Confucianism, 97, 101–2, 217, 222; neo-Confucianism, 13 Conservation Services (British Columbia), 22, 296–311, 365 Constitution of India, 189 contamination, 47, 118–19, 132 Cooking in the Danger Zone, 253 Cowell, Simon, 362 coyotes, 4, 8, 10–12, 22–3, 293–312, 340, 347, 363–4; coyote-wolf hybrid, 314 Critical Animal Studies, 3, 6–8, 20, 356, 361, 367 cruelty, 11, 15, 46, 101, 182, 189–94, 203n15, 255, 264–7, 269, 271, 282, 360, 362, 367

Index

cultural imperialism, 19–21, 252–5, 257–8, 267, 270–1 cutism, 212 Dances with Wolves, 6 Darbo, Morris, 362 deception, 36–7 denizenship, 178–9, 186, 194–5 dharma, 188, 192, 200 dholes, 319, 330, 356–7 dingos, 319, 363–4 dire wolf, 5 dirt, dirty, 10, 115, 117, 123–32, 170, 236, 239, 259 Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act (US), 360 dog mother. See gou mama dogopolis, 17, 176, 194–5 Dogstop, 17 Dog Tax (England), 13, 60, 63–9, 77–8 domestication, 4–5, 53, 55, 89–91, 180, 318–19, 349 Donaldson, Sue, 17, 178–80 ebola, 361 ecology, 100–2, 118, 125–6, 217, 317, 344; behavioural, 322, 324–5, 328, 331 “Edicts of Compassion,” 14, 23, 95–9, 101–2 empathy, 7, 150, 220, 230–1, 235, 239, 243–4, 293, 302, 308 Esther the Wonder Pig, 285 evolution, of canids, 4 exploitation, 3, 12, 18, 20–2, 84, 103, 103n1, 106n24, 176–7, 186,

381

189, 199–200, 222, 254, 260–71, 356–67 extended appropriate interaction, 7, 53–5 Extreme Cuisine, 253 family membership, 12, 15, 21, 38, 49, 93, 116, 118, 135–56, 202n6, 285, 368 Farm Bill (US), 362 Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh, 254 fidelity, of dogs: in Greece and Rome, 41–3; in Japan, 93 Fight Dog Meat, 361 five faces of oppression, 20 five freedoms of animal welfare, 322 foxes: association with fire, 90–1; head shaving, 90; magical abilities, 90; possession, 90–1, 93; spirits, symbolism of, 87–8, 92–3, 101. See also Inari foxhound, 69–75 Francione, Gary, 177–8, 282, 363 Free Korean Dogs, 259 funerary poems, 49–51 fur, 11–12 Game of Thrones, 6 garbage, strays as, 220–1 genocide, 242 Gervais, Ricky, 362 gou mama, 18, 209–11, 218–23, 225, 227 Griffith, D.W., 252 Haraway, Donna, 120, 126, 129 Hastings, Alcee, 360

382

Index

Home of Love, 263 Humane Society International, 261–2, 269, 362 hunting, 53–5, 116, 120, 132, 368; in Bali, 164; in Canada, 296, 326, 337–8, 340–1, 344, 365; in England, 60, 64, 67–79, 125; in Greece, 35, 37; in Japan, 88, 93–4, 105n17; in Rome, 42–3; in Taiwan, 211, 217 hybridity, 4–5, 127 imperialism, 15–16, 20, 22, 357–8, 364–5. See also cultural imperialism imperialist nostalgia, 348, 366 Inari, 14, 85, 87–9, 91–2, 95, 101–2, 104nn7–8 intersectionality, 6–8, 21, 37–9, 200, 219–20, 222–7, 236, 238, 264, 358–60 Iyer, V.R. Krishna, 191 Kant, Immanuel, 61, 75 karma, 98, 162, 188, 192 Keith, Shannon, 277, 285 Kerasote, Ted, 121–2, 127 killing, 10, 13, 46–7, 67, 98, 181–2, 185–7, 189, 192–5, 214, 241, 255, 260, 265–8, 270–1, 302–4, 308, 311, 317, 343, 359–60, 362, 364–5, 368 Kit and Ace, 11 Kitchee, 314–15 Korea Animal Rights Advocates, 255, 259, 265 Kymlicka, Will, 17, 178–80

land, 60, 65–6, 68, 72, 84, 86–92, 117, 120, 127, 130, 191, 243, 259, 340, 346, 364–6; Crown land, 348; Divine Lord of the Land, 89; policy, 259 Last Chance for Animals, 263 Leopold, Aldo, 132 Lerman, Rhoda, 131 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 34, 102–3, 356 Li, Peter, 259, 262–4 Liberia Animal Welfare and Conservation Society, 362 lookism, 212 Lord, Kathryn, 318 Mann, Thomas, 130–1 marginalization, 19–20, 23, 125, 210, 222–3, 225, 230–1, 236, 240, 242–3, 259–61 masculinity, 264–5 Mass Observation Project, 15, 140 Matsuoka, Atsuko, 20 Mda, Zakes, 358 Merle, 121–2 Merrick, 10 Moore, Ryan, 284–6 Morton, Timothy, 125–6 Mowat, Farley, 12 National Dog Meat Restaurant Association, 256–7 National Wild Dog Action Plan (Australia), 363 nature, 4, 13–15, 22, 60, 63, 70, 75–9, 89–91, 101, 103, 105n13, 106n24, 120, 124–32, 191, 264, 295, 308, 347, 349, 356

Index

new social media, 282–6 Niman, Nicolette Hahn, 362–3 no-kill dog shelters, 97 North Peace Rod and Gun Club, 337–8 Obama, Barack, 252–3 Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, 343–6 oppression, 6–7, 20–4, 194, 268, 270–1, 355, 357–9, 364, 368; multi-species, 222 pampered pet theme, 115–16 Paquet, Paul, 338 parental relations, 141–4 performance, 9, 35, 73, 98, 211, 223–5, 253–4, 258, 261 personhood, 148–9, 177–8, 193–4 Pimlott, Douglas, 345–8, 350 Pluie, 313–15 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (India), 182, 189, 192 Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, 363–4 Qiming Center, 263 rabies, 16–17, 37, 43, 66, 118, 125, 270; in Africa, 360–1; in Bali, 160, 163, 170–2; in China, 262; in India, 181, 183–5; in Istanbul, 233; in Vietnam, 269–70 Radhakrishnan, K.S. Panicker, 191 Raincoast Conservation Foundation, 338 religion: in India, 186–9, 192; in Istanbul, 236–9; in Japan, 100–3 Ritvo, Harriet, 66, 124

383

Robinson, Jill, 363 Rosaldo, Renato, 347–8 rSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), 268 Ryder, Richard D., 178, 355 sacrifice, 47, 167–9, 214, 342 Sanbonmatsu, John, 189 Sandilands, Catriona (Cate), 125–6, 129 Say No to Dog Meat, 252 Serpell, James, 15, 123–4 Shakespeare (dog), 196–9 Shepard, Paul, 124 Shockey, Lauren, 254 Singer, Peter, 100–1, 268 Singh, Manmohan, 190 Smith, Howard, 325 Soi Dog Foundation, 266, 269 Sorenson, John, 20, 278–9 speciesism, 6–8, 23, 33, 99–101, 178, 186–7, 191–2, 199, 212, 255, 257, 355–68 spirits: Bali Dogs and, 172; fox, 88–90, 92, 101; possession by, 90 Stanley Park Ecology Society, 305 sterilization, 160–1, 181–5, 194, 199, 233, 239, 241, 270; in Bali, 17; in India, 17, 176–200; in Japan, 16, 95, 99–100; of street dogs, 17–20, 364–5; in Taiwan, 18; in Turkey, 18–19 Stronks, Rick, 348 Taiwan Animal Equality Association, 219 taming of samurai, 99

384

Index

Thai Animal Guardians Association, 261 transgressive, 252–3; civil, 222; power, 92 trans-species social justice, 5, 7–8, 17–18, 20, 23–4, 194–6, 244, 271, 369 truncated narratives, 362–4, 368 Tsunayoshi, 14, 23, 85, 95–102, 106n3 Tulip, 128–9 Twain, Mark, 18, 234, 240–1

war against animals, 368–9 waste management, 165, 180 wolf-dog hybrids, 5–6, 338–9, 348 wolf extermination, 23, 317 wolf howls (Algonquin Park), 23, 317, 347–50, 366 wolf reintroduction, 317 World Animal Protection (World Society for the Protection of Animals), 252, 267 Wyman, Patricia, 319

Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature, 191 urban space, 11, 17, 179, 221–2, 225, 231, 244

Young, Iris Marion, 20 Yudhistira, 162, 172–4 Yulin, 252, 255, 261, 362

veganism, 21, 255, 267–8, 270, 282, 362–4 Vick, Michael, 358–9 virtue, 41 Visakha Society for the Care and Protection of Animals (India), 195

Zoocheck Canada, 22 zoopolis, 17, 178–9 zoos, 22, 313–33 Zuma, Jacob, 358