Abstract
In A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without People, my colleague Marc Bekoff and I pursued an extended thought experiment in evolutionary biology. 1 We tried to imagine what would happen to the billion or so dogs living on Earth if humans suddenly disappeared. Would dogs survive without our care and support? How would dogs evolve if the selective pressures of human-directed breeding were removed and dogs mated and reproduced according to their own desires? What or who would dogs eat if anthropogenic food resources such as garbage, feces, and bagged kibble were no longer available? And perhaps of most interest to human inquiring minds: Would dogs be incomplete without us?
As a species, dogs have remarkable behavioral flexibility. They have adapted to various niches that include humans and exploit these niches very effectively; they could also very likely adapt over time to novel, human-free ecosystems. Nothing about dogs, biologically or behaviorally, requires the presence of humans to make them whole. Indeed, looking around the world today, roughly 80 percent of the world’s dogs already live semi-independently, mainly in and around cities, but sometimes at some distance from human settlements. These dogs take advantage of an abundant supply of human garbage and waste and handouts, but do not live the kind of life that most people in the United States and other Western countries typically think most natural and appropriate for dogs: as humans’ pets. Dogs do not really need us; they have a past and a future all their own, and the fact that we are part of their present moment is just a matter of historical contingency.
By zooming out on a dog’s world, we hoped to offer perspective on who dogs are as animals and as members of complex ecosystems, forging their own paths, choosing their own lives. We were hoping to offer a corrective to the narrative that dogs are not real animals worthy of scientific study, but are mere artifacts, the artificial product of human domestication. Indeed, scanning through zoology textbooks and field guides during our research, we found that dogs are rarely included, and when they are, they receive only a scant paragraph in the chapter on canids. This prejudice against domestic animals is not unique to dogs and reveals something about our categorizations of other beings into strict binaries such as wild/domestic and, for that matter, human/not-human.
We looked into the future to get perspective on the present. If humans were subtracted from the picture, might we catch a glimpse of the Dog buried underneath all our preconceptions? The same question could be asked about any of the other domestic animals with whom we share close bonds and with whom our histories have been intimately entwined (really any animal, for are there any creatures on Earth whose lives have not been impacted by human activities?): How would animals “write” their own future, post-human stories?
Another equally illuminating option for understanding the present is to look backward. How, for example, did we get to this moment with dogs, a moment so highly contingent, so complex, so deeply troubled? How to explain the enormous cultural and geographic diversity in dog ecology and dog-human relations? How to explain the minutia of our daily interactions—the fact that we pick up our dog’s excrement in little plastic bags, that we clip on a leash before we head out for a walk—set as they are within structural patterns, within pathways grooved out over time? Why does dog-keeping look the way it does? Is “dog-keeping” even a sensible way of relating to another living being? What if the way we keep dogs as pets now—all the practices that are thought to equal “responsible dog ownership”—what if these were mere accidents of history, the particular coming together of a million small events, without a grand design to “make” dogs into Man’s Best Friend?
Contingency
Enter Chris Pearson’s Dogopolis. Pearson provides an exploration of how current patterns of interacting with dogs—especially the contemporary practice of what you might call “intensive petification”—are the product of contingent, intermingling events, not the outcome of an inevitable, teleological process. Pearson’s book shows how relationships between dogs and humans have varied over time, from place to place, according to gender, class, and race.
Pearson argues that what Europeans and North Americans see as a universal and natural (inevitable, even) relationship between dogs and humans is contingent upon and rooted in the particular history of urbanization in the West and a coalescing of events in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He focuses attention on the transformation of human-dog relationships in three large metropolises: Paris, New York, and London. Between 1800 and about 1930, the situation of dogs changed dramatically within these urban areas, as did the situation of people relative to dogs. “A model of Western human-canine relations eventually emerged which I call dogopolis,” writes Pearson. Dogopolis is “a provincial rather than a universal manifestation of human-canine relatedness” (p. 5).
Evolving middle-class sensibilities—about kindness, cruelty, cleanliness, and class, among other things—shaped canine lives, including canine emotional lives, in various concrete ways. Dogs were fed by modern consumerism (e.g., Spratt’s dog food, the first iteration of the now ubiquitous “kibble”), were targets of modern public health products (e.g., shampoos and flea powders), and were victims of modern technology (e.g., the lethal chamber used in shelters). A sharp class divide system for dogs was nascent in Western urban areas in 1800 but was amplified over the next century. Pedigreed or “purebred” dogs were highly valued, while dogs of uncertain or mixed background were vilified. They were given labels—loose, stray, mongrel—that marked their exclusion from society. The loathing and repression of dogs labeled as “stray” was then and is still a provincial habit. Luckily, as Pearson notes, only a minority of dogs on the planet currently live in places where the stray/pet binary exists.
Pet-keeping practices and the confinement and impoundment of stray dogs grew hand in hand, and one would not exist without the other. Consensus emerged around the end of the nineteenth century that stray dogs should be rounded up and killed. They were a nuisance, a danger, an unsettlement. At first, strays were clubbed to death or lynched on the streets. But this spectacle was disturbing to watch and generated concern from people who witnessed the cruelty. Instead, dogs were rounded up and taken to a designated site, where they were killed more efficiently and with less offense to the public. As Pearson notes, the term shelter sheds light on the evolving objectives of animal protection organizations such as the American Society for the Protection Against Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). “Its premises were seen as sheltering dogs from suffering on the streets or from ill health or old age,” argues Pearson. “Like home, shelter gave a humanitarian gloss to a site of slaughter” (p. 107).
To make the killing morally acceptable, the narrative was spun that stray dogs are better off dead. The killing itself needed to be kind, which led animal protection organizations to advocate for “humane” methods of extermination and to shift their messaging from “killing strays” to “humane euthanasia” of dogs suffering from homelessness. Although we live within this narrative today, Pearson’s bluntness is uncomfortable: “the destruction of unwanted dogs had become part of the fabric of urban life” (p. 113). And so it remains.
As for dogs labeled as pets, their lives shifted dramatically, too. Dogs could no longer roam the streets of cities, or they risked impoundment. The physical and social movement of pet dogs was increasing mediated by leashes and fences and the walls of homes within which they were held captive. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, dog care experts began to warn owners that letting dogs roam was dangerous, both for the dog and for the dog’s owner (roaming dogs might get rabies, which could be passed to owners). The advent of motor cars added to safety concerns for dogs. Leash ordinances were adopted in the late 1800s in large cities such as London, Paris, and New York. Also at this time, the ASPCA started urging owners to leash their dogs. “Like grooming,” argues Pearson, “leashing became a component of responsible pet keeping and—by physically attaching dogs and humans—cemented the difference between pets and strays” (p. 41).
Dogopolis involved, most obviously, a rupture between stray and pet dogs and the loss, for dogs, of freedom to move about cities on their own terms. The experiences of other domesticated animals in cities were quite different, and the rupture involved a physical and moral distancing from human city dwellers. Instead of being sucked up into urban life like dogs, other species of animal were shunted to the sides, kicked out of the commons. The changes experienced were as radical as those occurring within the canine world, but of a different sort.
Rupture
Andrew Robichaud’s meticulously researched Animal City recreates the story of domesticated animals’ erasure from the city, the unspooling of long-standing patterns of relatively peaceful co-existence among humans and animals, and the beginnings of what many environmental writers bemoan as a deep human alienation from nature that persists today and that stymies efforts to respond appropriately to the unfolding environmental crisis.
As Robichaud explains, in the late nineteenth century animals lived side by side with humans and were so ubiquitous in cities that their presence would have gone unremarked. Over the next five decades, animals in cities underwent dramatic shifts. Oversimplifying, there were three broad changes. First, dogs and cats were forcibly removed from public spaces; some were made into pets, while others were labeled as stray or homeless and were exterminated. Second, horses, who built cities and provided power, began to disappear from city centers as more efficient forms of energy production became available. Horses became rural animals. And third, the domestic animals who provided meat, milk, and hide were shunted to the edges of cities. Cattle yards and slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded from view; consumers of milk and meat were disconnected from the processes of raising and then killing animals. Animals were transformed into economic commodities.
These new spatial and moral divisions in production and consumption of animals were driven both by economic profit—which pressed toward violent exploitation of animals—and by discomfort with animal cruelty. Anticruelty campaigns were a defining feature of this period of transformation in cities. Public distaste for the sights, sounds, and smells of slaughter pushed this enterprise out to the edges of cities and out to the edges of our consciences and made it both less transparent and more intensively cruel (p. 9). The moral geography of food production, Robichaud argues, “required animal suffering and sacrifice in distant and invisible spaces that produced palatable and consumable products for urban residents” (p. 248). As livestock disappeared to the outskirts, animals became visible in venues of entertainment such as zoos and circuses, and as pets. Robichaud writes, “These changes increasingly turned urban animals into objects of human curiosity, kindness, and amusement: new forms of human consumption” (p. 8).
In the anticruelty laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can see the origins of the bizarre moral and legal patchwork that we have inherited: It is cruel to leave a pet dog unfed or unsheltered, or to beat a pet dog with a club. Yet withholding food and shelter from animals categorized as livestock and beating them with tools labeled as “cattle prods” is acceptable if it is a necessary part of the production schedule. Violent treatment and killing of cattle, pigs, and chickens is legally sanctioned and protected. Moreover, if you are working as a scientist within the industry of medical-knowledge production, depriving a dog of food and water and inflicting deliberate injury are not categorized as cruelty if done in the context of gathering data.
Robichaud also notes the early, uneasy partnership between humane organizations and industry. For example, the American Humane Association (AHA), founded in 1877, originated to address the cruelties of interstate transport of cattle. But the AHA chose to work with railroad companies rather than against them, an unholy alliance of advocacy and industry that persists today.
Complication
In A Traitor to His Species, Ernest Freeberg takes us inside the intensifying exploitation of animals from a different perspective: the complex human response to changing human-animal relations. “The urban industrial world that emerged in the nineteenth century,” Freeberg writes, “changed the human relationship with animals in profound ways, a transition provoked by technological revolution but mediated by men and women who organized for the first time to protect animals from the worst abuses of human exploitation” (p. 3). Entwined with increasing exploitation and commodification of animals was a movement that sought both to ameliorate the suffering of animals and to assuage our collective conscience.
No person in the nineteenth century pushed the public debate over animal rights as far as Henry Bergh, a wealthy socialite turned social reformer. In 1866, Bergh founded New York’s ASPCA, the nation’s first anticruelty organization. He promoted legislative protections for animals which became models for later laws. To his great credit, Bergh was inclusive of all animals. One of his earliest campaigns sought to address the suffering of green turtles bound for Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market, who Bergh had seen “stacked like living luggage” on a schooner. During their several-week long voyage from their ocean home off the coast of Florida to New York, the turtles were given no water or food, were flipped upside down, and stacked one atop another. “In the turtles’ punctured limbs and glassy eyes,” Brown writes, “Bergh witnessed not only weeks of physical pain and deprivation but also ‘intellectual suffering’. He thought he saw tears falling from their eyes, dappling the deck below” (p.7).
Although Bergh was moved by the suffering of animals, he primarily cared about human cruelty for its effects on us; his crusade was based on a concern for human character and decency. This emphasis on individual spiritual health is less overt now in the conversation about animal rights, perhaps because animal protectionism has become an increasingly secular endeavor. Nevertheless, redemption remains a curiously enduring theme in animal protection circles. The work of animal shelters is cashed out as “saving” animals, sometimes through the kindness of killing. The acquisition of a dog from a shelter is framed as a “rescue” and bookshelves are flooded with memoirs about the redemptive power of adopting a shelter dog badly damaged by human cruelty. Redemptive language has even infiltrated the slaughterhouse, with the popularization of welfare advocate Temple Grandin’s so-called Stairway to Heaven, a curved chute designed to reduce the terror felt by cattle on their way to the killing floor.
One of the most provocative themes in Freeberg’s book is the tension between mercy and necessity, and the acceptance of certain practices (humane killing of strays, the suffering of animals in food production and medical research) as a necessary good. The tension is established as one pitting human compassionate feelings against the necessary realities faced by animals, eliding the fact that “necessity” is entirely of our own making and reflects human needs and desires as curated by industry. Freeberg explains why current debates about animal welfare are so narrowly cast and frustrating: Human exceptionalism has deep roots.
Bergh’s legacy is complicated. Above all, “Bergh was among the first to raise many of the uncomfortable questions we are still trying to answer,” Freeberg writes. “What does it mean to claim that horses, dogs, and other animals have rights? What do we owe the creatures we kill? . . . does the way we treat animals reflect the way we treat humans?” (p. 275) Thanks in large part to Bergh, we have a vibrant, diverse conversation about animal protection, laws in place that offer small measures of protection for animals, and countless nonprofits dedicated to ameliorating suffering in animals affected by human violence. Overt violence may be less visible to contemporary city dwellers, who are unlikely to witness the beating of carriage horses, the clubbing of loose dogs, or a pile of upside-down sea turtles slowly dying of dehydration and hunger. Yet arguably, violence toward animals is more common and more insidious than a century ago. More animals than ever are caught up in the wheels of industry. Meanwhile, the proliferation of welfare science and the production of “welfare” knowledge and practices serve to further institutionalize violence toward and caste separation of animals while providing moral reassurance that efforts have been made to be humane.
Resistance
Freeberg, Robichaud, and Pearson explore how changes in human-animal relations resulted from a hodgepodge and layering of regulatory decisions, social and political division and compromise, cultural attitudes, economic forces, and the push and pull of animal advocates. What also emerges in these historical accounts is that animals were not just swept up and altered by human-shaped events, but were historical actors whose choices, agency, and resistance in turn shaped contemporary urban human life and human-animal relations.
The role of animals as actors within history is a major theme in Frederick L. Brown’s The City Is More Than Human. Cities—teeming with animal life—are more than human, and history itself is more than human. Animals are part of history, and we would not be who or where we are without their labor, their bodies, their intelligence, and their ingenuity. Brown explores the tension between seeing animals as objects of exploitation, which they most certainly are, and acknowledging their active participation.
Brown focuses on the history of animals in Seattle during the consequential period between the turn of the nineteenth century up through the mid-twentieth century. As Frank Sutter states in his forward, “For Brown, putting animals into Seattle’s history is a way of reframing urban history as a series of consequential moral engagements and disengagements with animals” (p. xiii). Animal creatures make history alongside us.
People, Brown argues, are always sorting animals into categories to assert our power. We sort into the tidy binaries of human/animal, domestic/wild, pet/live stock. “Yet people and animals have met processes of sorting with strategies of blending”(p. 7). Animals have played complex roles as friends, property, and symbols, among other things. Humans have also played complex roles as friends, caretakers, and captors. History reinforces sorting, yet has the potential to help us better understand blending.
History has traditionally been viewed as intentionally authored by humans and assumes human agency as the only force in history. It plays on sorting, on the binary of human/animal. This is particularly true in accounts of animal domestication, which are often told as stories of human dominion and the intentional shaping of other animals to our purposes. Yet domestication, if anything, is really a story about humans and animals affecting each other in profound ways, as they share physical places and emotional experiences. Non-human animals do not have domestication done to them. Rather, they do things that shape their evolution and their relationships with us; they have wills and intentions, often centering on survival, food, water, shelter, sex, and social connection, but also sometimes motivated by creativity, curiosity, and innovation. How is this so very different from what drives us?
Brown explicitly challenges the human exceptionalism inherent in history and urges other historians to make “the animal turn” by recognizing that animals not only actively shape human history but also have histories of their own. Animals have compiled their own memories of places and events and have experiences that are worth attention and recognition. History may need to be understood as species-specific. The history of dogs is radically different from the history of chickens—the two species of animals engage the world in such sensorially different ways. Similarly, an urban dog’s history of the past 150 years, including their diverse interactions with humans, might revolve around the changing landscapes of smell, while a human history of this time may revolve around images and words.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for animal agency is their history of resistance. Dogs have strained at their leashes, jumped fences, bit people who tried to take them captive, and found creative ways to evade the neighborhood boys paid a few cents to round them up and take them to the pound. Dogs enacted their own decisions about what “pet-keeping” would involve, by roaming during the day and settling in at night, associating with one home rather than another. Horses would kick and bolt and try to escape. Horses pulling carts full of wood or human commuters would, at times, simply refuse to keep going. Even brutal beatings were met with resistance. Cattle being moved toward the slaughterhouse would make a break for freedom.
Animals have been subversive and powerful. They have, through both their cooperation and their resistance, shaped what humans have and have not been able to do. Animals have directly transformed human structures, activities, experiences, and behavior. Animals have defined what is possible.
Conclusion
The point of history is not merely or even primarily to explain where we have been, but to offer perspective on the Now and to use this sharpened perspective to think us forward into a different future. An Animal’s World, perhaps? We are living within what Robichaud calls deep historical pathways of development that are often still active, though invisible or missing from the stories we tell about our cities. We are stuck in the grooves, which may be one reason it is so hard for those of us who are bothered by animal suffering to change the way we live or challenge the cultural habit patterns of institutionalized violence. To enact change, we must cut across the grooves, which can hurt. That’s the discouraging part. The encouraging part is that history is continually being written, not by historians, but by the people and animals co-creating negotiated settlements and living their lives in what we might call, following Donna Haraway, messy co-minglings. 2 We cannot undo history, but we can write a different and more species-collaborative future.
With the help of Pearson, Robichaud, Freeburg, and Brown, we can try to ask new questions. We can be reminded that the ways in which we relate to animals, especially domestic animals, are the result of millions of tiny actions, events, and contingencies. And the power of this perspective is that it frees us to imagine different futures and to believe that our own small acts of resistance or mercy, individual decisions made in relation to how we eat, what we wear, the minutia of how we walk our dog, actually do matter in the grand scheme of things.