The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

Donna Haraway

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS CHICAGO 1

Emergent Naturecultures

From "Notes of a Sports Writer's Daughter":

M, Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells-a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margnlis call'symbiogenesis. I bet ifyou checked our DNA, you'd find some potent transfections between us. Her saliva must have the viral Vel-tors. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. Even though We share place­ ment in the phylum of vertebrates, we inhabit not jzm different genera and divergent families, but altogether different orders. How would tve sort thing.r out? Canid, hominid; pet, professor; bitch, woman,. animal, human; athlete, handler. One of us has a microchip injected nnder her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID 2 3 California driver:r license. One afus has a written , other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of Us in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty does not know her great grandparents' names. One of developmental infation called love. This love is an us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called ''pure­ historical aberration and a naturalcultnrallegacy'" bred." One afus, equal~y product of a vast mixture, is called "white. " Each of these names designates a racial This manifesto explores two questions flowing discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in OUr flesh. from this aberration and legacy: 1) how might an One ofus is at the cusp off/aminp;, youthful, phys­ ethics and politics committed to the tlourishing of ical achievement; the other if lusty but over the hill. significant otherness he learned from taking dog­ And We playa team sport called ap;ility on the same human relationships seriously; and 2) how might expropriated Native land where Cayenne sancestors stories about dog-human worlds finally convince herded merino sheep. These sheep were imported from brain-damaged US Americans, and maybe other less the already colonial pastoral economy ofAustrali~ to historically challenged people, that history matters in feed the California Gold Rm-h 49m. In layers of naturecultures? history, layers of biology, layers ofrtflturecultures, The Companion Species Manife;to is a personal complexity is the name of our game. We are both the freedom-hungry offspring of conquest, products ofwhite document, a scholarly foray into too many half known, settler colonies, leaping over hurdles and crawling territories, a political act of hope in a world on the throu~-h tunnels on the playinp; field. edge of global war, and a work perm~nently in I'm sure our genomes are more alike than they progress, in principle, I offer dog-eaten props and should be. There must be some molecular record of our half-trained arguments to reshape some stories I care touch in the codes of living that will leave traces in the about a great deal, as a scholar and as a person in my world, no mDtler that we are each reproductively time and place. The story here is mainly about dogs, silenced females, one by age, one hy surgery. Her red Passionately engaged in these accounts, I hope to merle Austrfllian Shepherd's quick and lithe tonp;ue has swabbed the tissues ofmy ton.riir, with all their eflger bring my readers into the kennel for life. But I hope immune .system receptors. Who knows where my chem­ also that even the dog phobic--Dr just those with their ical receptors carried her mesrages, or 7vhat she took minds on higher things-will find arguments and from my cellular system for distinguishing selffrom stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in. othe,~_ and binding outside to inside? The practices and actors in dog worlds, human and ',We have had forbidden conversation; we have had non-human alike, ought to be central concerns of oral intercourse; we are hound in telling .st:ory upon technoscience studies, Even closer to my heart, I want story with nothing hut the facts. We are training each my readers to know why I consider dog writing to be a other in acts of communication we bare{y understand. branch of feminist theory, or the other way around. ~ are, constitutively, companion species. We make each 4 5

This is not my first manifesto; in 1985, I the dogs to explore the birth of the kennel to help published "The Cyborg Manifesto" to try to make craft tools for science smdies and feminist theory in feminist sense of the implosions of contemporary life the present time, when secondary Bushes threaten to in technoscience. Cyborgs arc "cybernetic organisms," replace the old growth of more livable natureculmres named in 1960 in the context of the space race, the in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on cold war, and imperialist fantasies of tcchnohumanism earth. Having worn the scarlet letters, "Cyborgs for built into policy and research projects. I tried to earthly survival!" long enough, I now brand myself inhabit cyborgs critically; i.e., neither in celebration with a slogan only Schutzhund women from dog nor condemnation, but in a spirit of ironic appropria­ sports could have come up with, when even a first nip tion for ends never envisioned by the space warriors. can result in a death sentence: "Run fast; bite hard!" Telling a story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and This is a story of biopower and biosociality, as embodied cross-species sociality, the present manifesto well as of technoscience. Like any good Darwinian, I asks which of two cobbled together figures-cyborgs tell a story of evolution. In the mode of (nucleic) and companion species-might more fruitfully inform acidic millelmialism, I tell a tale of molecular differ­ livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds. ences, but one less rooted in Mitochondrial Eve in a These figures are hardly polar opposites. Cyborgs and neocolonial Out ofAfriCll and more rooted in those companion species each bring together the human and first mitochondrial canine bitches who got in the way non-human, the organic and technologiGll, carbon of man making himself yet again in the Greatest Story and silicon, freedom and strucmre, history and myth, Ever Told. Instead, those bitches insisted on the the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diver­ history of companion species, a very mundane and sity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and ongoing sort of talc, one full of misunderstandings, namre and culmre in unexpected ways. Besides, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes. Mine is a neither a cyborg nor a companion animal pleases the story told by a student of the sciences and a feminist pure of heart who long for better protected species of a certain generation who has gone to the dogs, boundaries and sterilization of category deviants. literally. Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter Nonetheless, the differences between even the most here. Dogs are not an alibi tor other themes; dogs are politically correct cyborg and an ordinary dog matter. fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; Reagan's Star W.~rs times of the mid-1980s. By the they are not here just to think with. They are here to end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do live with. Partners in tbe crime of human evolution, the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as threads needed for critical inquiry. So I go happily to Coyote., 6 7

Prehensions contributes a rich array of approaches to emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity, co-habita­ Many versions of process philosophies help tion, co-constimtion, and contingency. Dozens of me walk with my dogs in this manifesto. For feminist writers have refused both relativism and example, Alfred North 'Vhitehead described "the universalism. Subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, concrete" as "a concrescence of prehensions." For genres, and genders are the products of their relating. him, "the concrete" meant an "actual occasion." None of this work is about finding sweet and nice­ Reality is an active verb, and the nouns all seem to be "feminine"-worlds and knowledges free of the gerunds with more appendages than an octopus. ravages and productivities of power. Rather, feminist Through their reaching into each other, through inquiry is about understanding how things work, who their "prehensions" or graspings, beings constimte is in the action, what might he possible, and how each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and their relatings. "Prehensions" have consequences. love each other less violently. The world is a knot in motion. Biological and For example, smdying Yoruba- and English­ cuI mral determinism are hoth instances of misplaced speaking mathematics elementary school classrooms in concreteness-i.e., the mistake of, first, taking provi­ post-independence Nigeria and participating in sional and local category abstractions like "namre" Australian Aboriginal projects in math teaching and and "culmre" for the world and, second, mistaking environmental policy, IIelen Verran identifies "emer­ potent consequences to be preexisting foundations. gent ontologies." Verran asks "simple" questions: How There are no pre-constimted subjects and objects, can people rooted in di fferent knowledge practices and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends. In "get on together," especially when an all-too-easy Judith Butler's terms, there are only "contingent culmral relativism is not an option, either politically, foundations;" bodies that matter are the result. A epistemologically, or morally? How can general hestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of knowledge be nurmred in postcolonial worlds time trump the imaginings of even the most baroque committed to taking difference seriously? Answers to cosmologists. For me, that is what companion species these questions can only be put together in emergent signifies. practices; i.e., in vulnerahle, on-the-ground work that My love of \Vhitehead is rooted in biology, cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways but even more in the practice of feminist theory as I of living that are accountable hath to their disparate have experienced it. This feminist theory, in its inherited histories and to their barely possihle but refusal of typological thinking, binary dualisms, and absolutely necessary joint fumres. For me, that is what both relativisms and universalisms of many flavors, significant otherne.lllce of gene time, which is chemically etched in the DNA of every flow cannot be stilled. Impressed by this traHic, I risk cell, and in recent doings, which leave more odorif­ alienating myoid doppelganger, ti,e cyborg, in order erous traces. In old-fashioned terms, The Companion to try to convince readers that dogs might be better 10 11 guides through the thickets of technobiopolitics in Companions the Third Millennium of the Current Era. In "The Cyborg Manifesto," I tried to write a surrogacy agreement, a trope, a figure for living within and honoring the skills and practices of contemporary technoculture without losing touch with the permanent war apparatus of a non-optional, post-nuclear world and its transcendent, very material lies. Cyborgs can be figures for living within contra­ dictions, attentive to the natureculturcs of mundane practices, opposed to the dire myths of self-birthing, embracing mortality as the condition for life, and alert to the emergent historical hybridities actually popu­ lating the world at all its contingent scales. However, cyborg reiigurations hardly exhaust the tropic work req uired for ontological choreography in technoscience. I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species, in which reproductive biotechno­ politics are generally a surprise, sometimes even a nice surprise. I know that a US middle-aged white woman with a dog playing the sport of agility is no match for the automated warriors, terrorists, and their transgenic kin in the annals of philosophical inquiry or the ethnography of naturecultures. Besides, 1) selt~figura­ tion is not my task; 2) transgenics are not the enemy; and 3) contrary to lots of dangerous and unethical projection in the Western world that makes domestic canines into furry children, dogs are not about oneself. Indeed, that is the beauty of dogs. They are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything. They are dogs; i.e., a species in 12 13

obligatory, constitutive, historical, protean relationship scientific literature by centuries. Further, in China, with human beings. The relationship is not especially Mexico, and elsewhere in the ancient and contempo­ nice; it is full of waste, Cnlelty, indifference, ignorance, rary world, the documentary, archaeological, and oral and loss, as well as of joy, invention, labor, intelli­ evidence for dogs as pets, in addition to a myriad of gence, and play. I want to learn how to narrate this co­ other jobs, is strong. In the early Americas dogs history and how to inherit the consequences of co­ assisted in hauling, hunting, and herding for various evolution in natureculture. peoples. For others, dogs were food or a source of There cannot be just one companion species; fleece. Dog people like to forget that dogs were also there have to be at least two to make one. It is in the lethal guided weapons and instnlments of terror in the syntax; it is in the flesh. Dogs are about the European conquest of the Americas, as well as in inescapable, contradictory story of relationships-co­ Alexander the Great's paradigm-setting imperial constitutive relationships in which none of the part­ travels. With combat history in Viet Nam as an officer ners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never in the US marines, Akita breeder and dog' writer John done once and for all. Historical specificity and Carglll reminds us that before cyborg warfare, trained contingent mutability nlle all the way down, into dogs were among the hest intelligent weapons nature and culture, into naturecultures. There is no systems. And tracking hounds terrorized slaves and ioundation; there are only elephant.s supporting prisoners, as well as rescued lost children and earth­ elephants all the way down. quake victims. Companion animals comprise only one kind of Listing these functions does not begin to get companion species, and neither category is very old in at the heterogeneous history of dogs in symhol and American English. In United States English, the term story all over the world, nor does the list of jobs tell us "companion animal" emerges in medical and psycho­ how dogs were treated or how they regarded their sociological work in veterinary schools and related human associates. In A History of Dogs in the Early sites from the middle 1970s. This research told us Americas (Yale, 1997), Marion Schwartz writes that that, except for those few non-dog loving New some American Indian hunting dogs went through Yorkers who obsess about unscooped dog shit in the similar rituals of preparation as did their humans, streets, having a dog lowers one's blood pressure and including among the Achuar of South America the ups one's chances of surviving childhood, surgery, and ingestion of an hallucinogen. In In the Company of divorce. Animals (Camhridge, 1986), James Serpell relates that Certainly, references in European languages to for the nineteenth-century Comanche of the Great animals serving as companions, rather than as working Plains, horses were of great practical value. But horses or sporting dogs, predate this US biomedical, techno- were treated in a utilitarian way, while dogs, kept as 15 14 pets, merited fond stories and warriors mourned their Species dogs were and are vermin; some were deaths. Some "Companion species" is a bigger and more are buried like people. Contemporary Navajo and heterogeneous category than companion animal and dogs relate to their landscape, their sheep, herding not just because one must include such organic beings coyotes, and dog or human strangers in their people, as flce,. bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of whom specific ways. In cities, villages, and rural historically make ltfe for humans what it is-and vice versa. I want all over the world, many dogs live parallel lives areas to write the keyword entry for "companion species" to among people, more or less tolerated, sometimes used mSlst o~ four tones sirr:ultaneously resonating in the abused. No one term can do justice to and sometimes linguIStIC, hlstoncal VOIce box that enables uttering history. this thIS term. First, as a dutiful daughter of Darwin I However, the term "companion aninlal" enters insist on the tones of the history of evolutiona~ technoculture through the post-Civil War land­ US bIOlogy, WIth Its categories of populations, rates of academic institutions housing the vet schools. grant gene flow, variation, selection, and biological species. "companion animal" has the pedigree of the That is, The debates in the last 150 years about whether the between technoscientific expertise and late mating category "species" denotes a real biological entity or pet-keeping practices, with their democratic industrial merely figures a convenient taxonomic box sound the in love with their domestic partners, or at least masses over- and undertones. Species is about hiological kind, non-human ones. Companion animals can be with the and sCIentIfic expertise is necessary to that kind of dogs, cats, or a range of other beings willing to horses, reality. Post-cyborg, what counts as biological kind to the biosociality of service dogs, make the leap troubles previous categories of organism. The members, or team members in cross-species family machinic and the textual are internal to the organic speaking, one does not eat one's sports. Generally and vice versa in irreversible ways. animals (nor get eaten by them); and one companion Second, schooled by Thomas Aquinas and a bard time shaking colonialist, ethnocentric, ahis­ has other Aristotelians, I remain alert to species as generic attitudes toward those who do (eat or get torical philosophical kind and category. Species is about eaten). defining difference, rooted in polyvocal fugues of doctrines of cause. Third, my soul indelibly marked by a Catholic formation, I hear in species the doctrine of the Real Presence under both species, bread and wine, the tran­ substantiated signs of the flesh. Species is about the 16 17 corporeal join of the material and the semiotic in ways noculture become who we are in the symbiogenetic unacceptable to the secular Protestant sensibilities of tissues of naturecultures, in story and in fact. the American academy and to most versions of the I take "interpellation" from the French post­ human science of semiotics. structuralist and Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser's Fourth, converted by Marx and Freud and a theory for how subjects are constituted from concrete sucker for dubious etymologies, I hear in species filthy individuals hy heing "hailed" through ideology into lucre, specie, gold, shit, filth, wealth. In Love's Body, their subject positions in the modern state. Today, Norman O. Brown taught me about the join of Marx through our ideologically loaded narratives of their and Freud in shit and gold, in primitive scat and civi­ lives, animals "hail" us to account for the regimes in lized metal, in specie. I met this join again in modern which they and we must live. We "hail" them into our US dog culture, with its exuberant commodity culture; constructs of nature and culture, with major conse­ its vibrant practices of love and desire; its structures quences of life and death, health and illness, longevity that tie together the state, civil society, and the liberal and extinction. We also live with each other in the individual; its mongrel technologies of purebred flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies. Stories subject- and object-making. As 1 glove my hand in the are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our hope. plastic ttlm-courtesy of the research empires of In this long philosophical introduction, I am industrial chemisrry-that protects my morning New violating a major rule of "Notes of a Sports Writer's York Times to pick up the microcosmic ecosystems, Daughter," my doggish scribblings in honor of my called scat, produced anew each day by my dogs, I find sports writer father, which pepper this manifesto. The pooper scoopers qnite a joke, one that lands me back "Notes" require there to be no deviation from the in thc histories of the incarnation, political economy, animal stories themselves. Lessons have to he inextri­ technoscience, and biology. cably part of the story; it's a rule of truth as a genre for In sum, "companion species" is about a four­ those of us-practicing and lapsed Catholics and their part composition, in which co-constitution, finitude, fellow travelers-who helieve that the sign and the impurity, historicity, and complexity are what is. flesh are one. The Companion Species Manifesto is, thns, about Reporting the facts, telling a true story, I write the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly "Notes of a Sports Writer's Daughter." A sports historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, writer's job is, or at least was, to report tl,e game story. who arc bonded in significant otherness. Many are I know this hecause as a child I sat in the press box in interpellated into that story, and the tale is instructive tl,e AAA haseball club's Denver Bears' Stadium late at also for those who rry to keep a hygienic distance. I night watching my father write and file his game want to convince my readers that inhabitants of tech- stories. A sports writer, perhaps more tl,an other news 18 19 people, has a curious job-to tell what happened by connecting the Estates and how many couplings keep spinning a story that is just the facts. The more vivid sign and flesh, story and fact, together in the palaces the prose, the better; indeed, if crafted faithfully, the of positive knowledge, falsifiable hypotllesis, and more potent the tropes, the ttuer the story. My father synthesizing theory. Because my science was biology, I did not want to have a sports column, a more presti­ learned early that accounting for evolution, develop­ gious activity in the newspaper business. He wanted to ment, cellular function, genome complexity, the write the game stories, to stay close to the action, to molding of form across time, behavioral ecology, tell it like it is, not to look for the scandals and the systems communication, cognition-in short, angles for the meta-story, the column. My father's accounting for anytlling worthy of the name of faith was in the game, where fact and story cohabit. biology-was not so different from getting a game I grew up in the bosom of two major institu­ story filed or living with the conundrums of the incar­ tions that counter the modernist belief in the no-fault nation. To do biology with any kind of fidelity, the divorce, based on irrevocable differences, of story and practitioner must tell a story, must get the facts, and fact. Both of these institutions-the Church and the must have the heart to stay hungry for the truth and to Press-are famously corrupt, famously scorned (if abandon a favorite story, a favorite fact, shown to be constantly used) by Science, and nonetheless indis­ somehow off the mark. The practitioner must also pensable in cultivating a people's insatiable hunger for have the heart to stay with a story through thick and truth. Sign and flesh; story and fact. In my natal thin, to inherit its discordant resonances, to live its house, the generative partners could not separate. contradictions, when that story gets at a truth about Tbey were, in down-and-dirty dog talk, tied. No life that matters. Isn't that kind of fidelity what has wonder culture and nature imploded for me as an made the science of evolutionary biology Hourish and adult. And nowhere did tlnt implosion have more feed my people's corporeal hunger for knowledge over force than in living the relationship and speaking the the last hundred and fifty years? verb that passes as a noun: companion species. Is this Etymologically, facts refer to performance, what John meant when he said, "The Word was made action, deeds done-feats, in short. A fact is a past Hesh"? In the bottom of the ninth inning, tl,e Bears participle, a thing done, over, fixed, shown, down by two runs, with three on, two out, and two performed, accomplished. Facts have made the dead­ strikes, with the time deadline for filing the story five line for getting into the next edition of the paper. minutes away? Fiction, etymologically, is very close, but differs by I also grew up in the house of Science and part-of-speech and tense. Like facts, fiction refers to learned at around the time my breast buds erupted action, but fiction is about the act of fashioning, about how many underground passages there are forming, inventing, as well as feigning or feinting. 20 21 Drawn from a present participle, fiction is in process For example, a substitution in a string of bases in a and still at stake, not finished, still prone to falling nucleic acid can be a meta plasm, changing the afoul of facts, but also liable to showing something we meaning of a gene and altering the course of a life. do not yet know to be tme, but will know. Living Or, a remolded practice among dog breeders, such as with animals, inhabiting their/our stories, trying to doing more outcrosses and fewer close line breedings, tell the tmth about relationship, co-habiting an active could result from changed meanings of a word like history: that is the work of companion species, for "population" or "diversity." Inverting meanings; whom "the relation" is the smallest possible unit of transposing the body of communication; remolding, analysis. remodeling; swervings that tell the trutb: I tell stories So, I file dog stories for a living these days. All about stories, all the way down. Woof. stories traffic in tropes, i.e., fIgures of speech neces­ Implicitly, this manifesto is about more than sary to say anything at all. Trope (Greek: tropos) the relation of dogs and people. Dogs and people means swerving or tripping. All language swerves and figure a universe. Clearly, cyborgs-with their histor­ trips; there is never direct meaning; only the ical congealings of the machinic and the organic in dogmatic think that trope-free communication is our the codes of information, where boundaries are less province. My favorite trope for dog tales is "meta­ about skin than about statistically defined densities of plasm." Metaplasm means a change in a word, for signal and noise-tit within the taxon of companion example by adding, omitting, inverting, or trans­ species. That is to say, cyborgs raise all the questions posing its letters, syllables, or sounds. The term is of histories, politics, and ethics that dogs require. from the Greek metaplasmos, meaning remodeling or Care, flourishing, differences in power, scales of remolding. Metaplasm is a generic term for almost time-these matter for cyborgs. For example, what any kind of alteration in a word, intentional or unin­ kind of temporal scale-making could shape labor tentional. T use mctaplasm to mean the remodeling of systems, investment strategies, and consumption dog and human flesh, remolding the codes of life, in patterns in which the generation time of information the history of companion-species relating. machines hecame compatible with tlle generation Compare and contrast "protoplasm," "cyto­ times of human, animal, and plant communities and plasm," "neopiasln," and "gennplasm." There is a ecosystems? What is the right kind of pooper-scooper biological taste to "metaplasm"-just what I like in for a computer or a personal digital assistant? At the words about words. Flesh and signifier, bodies and least, we know it is not an electronics dump in words, stories and worlds: these are joined in Mexico or Tndia, where human scavengers get paid narureculrures. Metaplasm can signifY a mistake, a less than nothing for processing the ecologically toxic srumbling, a troping that makes a fleshly difference. waste of the well informed. 22 23 Art and engineering are natural sibling prac­ their humans. The Scots sculptor Andrew tices for engaging companion species. Thus, human­ Goldsworthy understands this well. Scales and flows of landscape couplings fit snugly within the category of time through the flesh of plants, earth, sea, ice, and companion species, evoking all the questions about the stone consume Goldsworthy. For him, the history of histories and relatings that weld the souls of dogs and the land is living; and that history is composed out of the polyform relatings of people, animals, soil, water, and rocks. He works at scales of sculpted ice crystals interlaced with twigs, layered rock cones the size of a man built in the surging intertidal zones of the shore, and stone walls across long stretches of countryside. He has an engineer's and an artist's knowledge of forces like gravity and friction. His sculptures endure sometimes for seconds, sometimes for decades; but mortality and change are never out of consciousness. Process and dissolution-and agencies both human and non-human, as well as animate and inanimate-­ Figure 1. In the mid-1990s, this image of a ewe reversinJ{ life's are his partners and materials, not just his themes. inequities by penning nine B()rder Collies graced a eiba-Geigy adver­ In the 1990s, Goldsworthy did a work called tisement for its sheep and cattle jlukicide and vermicide. Subject to the Arch. He and writer David Craig traced an ancient hard eye and stalk of the camera, the UK national sheepdof{ trial cham­ pion 'l'homas Longton stands on his Quernmore farm in Lancashire drover's sheep route from Scottish pastures to an ready to close the pen on his accomplished dogs, Later, without the refer­ English market town. Photographing as they went, ence to Combinex hut with a Dutch windmill airbrushed onto the land­ they assembled '111d disassembled a self-supporting red scape, a mirror image ~rthe scene cinulated widely in dogland 011 the Internet. Without credits or identifyinf{ information, the photo bore the sandstone arch across places marking the past and apt title, "Border Collie Hell. " Even without the relucated Dutch wind­ present history of animals, people, and land. The mill, the phuto was ai7])ays a cyburg cumpusite. Fur starters, two ofthe missing trees and cottars, the story of the enclosures dogs are repeatr of the same individuals, but frrmt difjerent angles; the young dogs in the rear are tied by invisible leads to the pen fence; the e7ve and rising wool markets, the fraught ties between was melded into the scene from another photo. In The Companion England and Scotland over centuries, the conditions Species Manifesto, "Border Collie Hell" signah the ironic reverxa!I' of possibility of the Scottish working sheepdog and embedded in naturecultures. Animals, peuple, landscapes, corporations, and technologies are all in on the joke. The photo also pleases those 7vho hired shepherd, the sheep eating and walking to 1) enjoyed the film Babe, and 2) work with herding dogs other than shearing and slaughter-these are memorialized in the Border Collies. Thanks to Thomas Longtun for the ad broe/mre and the moving rock arch tying together geography, history, story. Thanks aha to webs ~fJcienu Jtudies, editorial, corporate, and Border Collie people lvho helped me track everything down. and natural history. 24 25

The collie implicit in Goldsworthy's Arch is less So, in The Companion Species Manifesto, I want about "Lassie come houle" than "cottar get out." 'rhat to tell stories about relating in signitlcant otherness, is one condition of possibility of the immensely through which the parmers come to be who we are in popular late twentieth-cenmry British TV show about flesh and sign. The following shaggy dog stories about the brilliant working sheepdogs, the Border Collies of evolution, love, training, and kinds or breeds help me Scotland. Shaped genetically by competitive sheep think ahout living well together with the host of trialing since the late nineteenth cenmry, this breed has species Witll whom human beings emerge on this made that sport justly famous on several continents. planet at every scale of time, body, and space. The This is the same breed of dog that dominates the sport accounts I offer are idiosyncratic and indicative rather of agility in my life. It is also the breed that is t1,rown than systematic, tenden tious more than judicious, and away in large numbers to be rescued by dedicated rooted in contingent foundations rather than clear and volunteers or killed in animal shelters because people distinct premises. Dogs are my story here, but they are watching t1'0se famous TV shows about t1lOse talented only one player in the large world of companion dogs want to buy one on the pet market, which mush­ species. Parts don't add up to wholes in this mani­ rooms to fill the demand. The impulse buyers quickly festo-or in life in namreculmres. Instead, I am find themselves with a serious dog whom they cannot looking for Marilyn Strathern's "partial connections," satisfy Witll the work the Border Collie needs. And which are about the counter-inmitive geometries and where is the labor of the hired shepherds and of the incongruent translations necessary to getting on food-and-fiber producing sheep in this story? In how together, where the god-tricks of self certainty and many ways do we inherit in the Hesh the mrbulent deathless communion are not an option. history of modern capitalism? How to live ethically in these mortal, finite flows that are about heterogeneous relationship-and not about "man"-is an implicit question in Goldsworthy's art. His art is relentlessly atruned to specific human inhabitations of the land, but it is neither humanist nor naturalist art. It is the art of namreculmres. The relation is the smallest unit of analysis, and the relation is about significant otherness at every scale. That is the ethic, or perhaps better, mode of attention, with which we must approach the long cohabitings of people and dogs. 26 Evolution Stories tions of the research. Website addresses flew across continents bringing the news to thc cyborg world, Everyone I know likes stories about the origin while the merely literate followed the story in the of dogs. Overstuffed with significance for theIr aVId daily papers of New York, Tokyo, Paris, or consumers, these stories are the stuff of hIgh romance Johannesburg. What is going on in this florid and sober science all mixed up together. Histories of consumption of scientific origin stories, and how can human migrations and exchanges, the nature of tech­ these accounts help me understand the relation that is nology, the meanings of wildness, and the ~elations of companion species? colonizers and colonized suffuse these stones. Matters Explanations of primate, and especially like judging whether my dog loves me, sorting out hominid, evolution might be the most notorious cock­ scales of intelligence among animals and between fighting arena in contemporary life sciences; hut the animals and humans, and deciding whether humans field of canine evolution is hardly lacking in impressive are the masters or the duped can hang on the outcome dog fights among the human scientists and popular of a sober scientific report. Evaluating the decadence writers. No account of the appearance of dogs on earth or the progressiveness of breeds, judging whether. dog goes unchallenged, and none goes unappropriated by behavior is the stuff of genes or rearmg, adJudlcatmg its partisans. In both popular and professional dog hetween the claims of old-fashioned anatomists and worlds what is at stake is twofold: 1) the relanon archaeologists or new-fangled molecular wizards, between what counts as nature and what counts as establisbing origins in the New or Old World, . culture in Western discourse and its cousins, and 2) the figuring the ancestor of pooches as a noble huntmg correlated issue of who and what counts as an actor. wolf persisting in modern endangered specIes or a These things matter for political, :thical, and cringing scavenger mirrored in mere village dogs, . emotional action in technoculture. A partisan in the looking to one or many canine Eves sUTVlvmg m theIr world of dog evolutionary stories, I look for ways of mitochondrial DNA or perhaps to a canine Adam getting co-evolution and co-constitution without strIP­ through his Y-chromosome legacies-all these and ping the story of its brutalities as well as mulnform more are understood to be at stake. beauties. The day I wrote this section of The Companion Dogs are said to be the first domestic animals, Species Manifesto, news broke on the major networks displacing pigs for primal honors. Humanist te~hno­ from PBS to CNN about three papers in Science philiacs depict domestication as the paradIgmatIc act of magazine on dog evolution and the history of domes­ masculine, single-parent, self-birthing, whereby man tication. Within minutes, numerous emaIl lIsts III makes himself repetitively as he invents (creates) his dogland were abuzz with discussion about the implica- tools. The domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool, 28 29 realizing human intention in the flesh, in a dogsbody scientists favoring the more recent date because it version of onanism, Man took the (free) wolf and made allows synthesis of all the available kinds of evidence. In the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible. that case, it looks like dogs emerged first somewhere in Mongrelized lIegel and Freud in the kennel? Let the east Asia over a fairly brief time in a distributed pocket dog stand for all domestic plant and animal species, of events and then spread fast over the whole earth, subjected to human intent in stories of escalating going wherever humans went. progress or destruction, according to taste. Deep ecolo­ Many interpreters argue that the most likely gists love to believe these stories in order to hate them scenario has wolf wannahe dogs first taking advantage in the name of VVildemess betore the Fall into Culture, of the calorie bonanzas provided by humans' waste just as humanists believe them in order to fend off dumps. By their opportunistic moves, those emergent biological encroachments on culture. dogs would be behaviorally and ultimately genetically These conventional accounts have been thor­ adapted for reduced tolerance distances, less hair­ oughly reworked in recent years, when distributed trigger flight, puppy developmental timing with longer everything is the name of the game all over, including windows for cross-species socialization, and more confi­ in the kennel. Even though I know they are faddish, I dent parallel occupation of areas also occupied by like these metaplasmic, remodeled versions that give dangerous humans. Studies of Russian fur foxes selccted dogs (and other species) the first moves in domestica­ over many generations for differential tameness show tion and then choreograph an unending dance of many of the morphological and behavioral traits associ­ distributed and heterogeneous agencies. Besides being ated with domestication. These foxes might model the faddish, I think the newer stories have a hetter chance emergence of a kind of proto-"village dog," genetically of being true, and they certainly have a better chance of close to wolves, as all dogs remain, but behaviorally teaching us to pay attention to significant otherness as quite different and receptive to human attempts to something other than a reflection of one's intentions. further the domestication process. Both hy deliherate Studies of dog mitochondrial DNA as molec­ control of dogs' reproduction (e.g., killing unwanted ular clocks have indicated emergence of dogs earlier puppies or fceding some bitches and not others) and by than previously thought possible. Work out of Carles unintended but nonetheless potent consequences, Villa's and Robert Wayne's lah in 1997 argued for humans could have contrihuted to shaping the many divergence of dogs from wolves as long as 150,000 kinds of dogs that appeared early in the story. Human years ago-that is, at the origin of Homo sapiens sapiens. life ways changed significantly in association with dogs. That date, unsupported by fossil or archaeological Flexibility and opportunism are the name of the game evidence, has given way in subsequent DNA studies to for both species, who shape each other throughout the somewhere from 50,000 to 15,000 years ago, with the still ongoing story of co-evolution. 30 r 31 Scholars use versions of this story to question Co-evolution has to be defined more broadly sharp divisions of nature and culture in order to than biologists habitually do. Certainly, the mutual shape a more generative discourse for technoculture. adaptation of visible morphologies like flower sexual Darcy Morey, a canine paleobiologist and archaeolo­ structures and the organs of their pollinating insects is gist, believes that the distinction between artificial co-evolution. But it is a mistake to see the alterations and natural selection is empty because all the way of dogs' bodies and minds as biological and the down the story is about differential reproduction. changes in human bodies and lives, for example in the Morey de-emphasizes intentions and foregrounds emergence of herding or agricultural societies, as behavioral ecology. Ed Russell, an environmental cultural, and so not about co-evolution. At the least, I historian, historian of technology, and science studies suspect that human genomes contain a considerable scholar, argues that the evolution of dog breeds is a molecular record of the pathogens of their companion chapter in the history of biotechnology. He empha­ species, including dogs. Immune systems are not a sizes human agencies and regards organisms as engi­ minor part of naturecultures; they determine where neered technologies, but in a way that has the dogs organisms, including people, can live and with whom. active, as well as in a way to foreground the ongoing The history of the tlu is unimaginable without the co-evolution of human cultures and dogs. The concept of the co-evolution of humans, pigs, fowl, and science writer Stephen Budiansky insists that domes­ viruses. tication in general, including the domestication of But disease can't be the whole biosocial story. dogs, is a successful evolutionary strategy benefiting Some commentators think that even something as humans and their associated species alike. Examples fundamental as the hypertrophied human biological can be multiplied. capacity for speech emerged in consequence of associ­ These accounts taken together require re­ ated dogs' taking on scent and sound alert jobs and so evaluating the meanings of domestication and co­ freeing the human face, throat, and brain for chat. I evolution. Domestication is an emergent process of am skeptical of that account; but I am sure that once co-habiting, involving agencies of many sorts and we reduce our own fight-or-flight reaction to emer­ stories that do not lend themselves to yet one more gent naturecultures, and stop seeing only biological version of the Fall or to an assured outcome for reductionism or cultural uniqueness, both people and anybody. Co-habiting does not mean fuzzy and animals will look different. touchy-feely. Companion species are not compan­ I am heartened by recent ideas in ecological ionate mates ready for early twentieth-century developmental biology, or "eco-devo" in the terms of Greenwich Village anarchist discussions. Relationship developmental biologist and historian of science Scott is multiform, at stake, unfinished, consequential. Gilbert. Developmental triggers and timing are the 32 33

key objects for this young scien~e made possible by Love Stories new molecular techniques and by discursive resources from many disciplines. Differential, context-specific Commonly in the US, dogs are attributed with plasticities are the rule, sometimes genetically assimi­ the capacity for "unconditional love." According to lated and sometimes not. How organisms integrate this belief, people, burdened with misrecognition, environmental and genetic information at all levels, contradiction, and complexity in their relations with from the very small to the very large, determines what other humans, find solace in unconditional love from they become. There is no time or place at which their dogs. In turn, people love their dogs as children. genetics ends and environment begins, and genetic In my opinion, both of these beliefs are not only based determinism is at best a local word for narrow ecolog­ on mistakes, if not lies, but also they are in themselves ical developmental plasticities. abusive-to dogs and to humans. A cursory glance The big, wide world is full of bumptious life. shows that dogs and humans have always had a vast For example, Margaret McFall-Ngai has shown that range of ways of relating. But even among the pet­ the light-sensing organs of the squid Euprymna sc%pes keeping folk of contemporary consumer cultures, or develop normally only if the embryo has been colo­ maybe especially among these people, belief in nized by luminescent Vibrio bacteria. Similarly, human "unconditional love" is pernicious. If the idea that gut tissue cannot develop normally without coloniza­ man makes himself by realizing his intentions in his tion by its bacterial flora. The diversity of earth's tools, such as domestic animals (dogs) and computers animal forms emerged in the oceans' salty bacterial (cyborgs), is evidence of a neurosis that I call humanist soup. All stages of the life histories of evolving animals technophiliac narcissism, then the superficially had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside opposed idea that dogs restore human beings' souls by and out. Developmental patterns of complex life forms their unconditional love might be the neurosis of are likely to show the history of these adaptations, caninophiliac narcissism. Because I find the love of once scientists figure out how to look for the evidence. and between historically situated dogs and humans Earth's beings are prehensile, opportunistic, ready to precious, dissenting from the discourse of Ullcondi­ yoke unlikely parmers into something new, something tionallove matters. symbiogenetic. Co-constitutive companion species and J.R. Ackerley's quirky masterpiece, My Dog co-evolution are the rule, not the exception. These Tulip (first privately printed in England in 1956), arguments arc tropic for my manifesto, but flesh and about a relationship between the writer and his figure are not far apart. Tropes are what make us want "Alsatian" bitch in the 1940s and 1950s, gives me a to look and need to listen for surprises that get us out way to think through my dissent. History flickers in of inherited boxes. the reader's peripheral vision from the start of this 34 great love story. After two world wars, in one of those tice, linguistic or not. The misrecognitions were as niggling examples of denial and substitution that allow important as the fleeting moments of getting things us to go about our lives, a German Shepherd Dog in right. Ackerley's story was full of the fleshly, meaning­ England was called an Alsatian. Tulip (Queenie, in real making details of worldly, face-to-face love. Receiving life) was tbe great love of Ackerley's life. An important llilconditionallove from another is a rarely excusahle novelist, famous homosexual, and splendid writer, neurotic fantasy; sttiving to fulfill the messy condi­ Ackerley honored that love from the start by recog­ tions of being in love is quite another matter. The nizing his impossible task-to wit, first, somehow to permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, learn what this dog needed and desired and, second, to and the inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that move heaven and earth to make sure she got it. quest, commands my respect, whether the other is In Tulip, rescued from her first home, Ackerley hardly had his ideal love object. He also suspected he was not her idea of the loved one. The saga that followed was not ahout unconditional love, but about seeking to inhabit an inter-subjective world that is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship. Barhara Smuts, the hehavioral hioanthropologist who writes courageously about intersubjectivity and friendship with and among animals, would approve. No hehavioral biologist, but attuned to the sexology of his culture, Ackerley comi­ cally and movingly sets out to find an adequate sexual partner for Tulip in her periodic heats. The Dutch environmental feminist Barhara Noske, who also called our attention to the scandal of the meat-producing "animal-industrial complex," suggested thinking about animals as "other worlds" in a science fictional sense. In his unswerving dedication to his dog's significant otherness, Ackerley would have understood. Tulip mattered, and that changed them hath. He also mattered to her, in ways that could only Figure 2. Marco Harding and Willem DeKoenig Caudill, 11 pet Great he read with the tripping proper to any semiotic prac- Pyrenees of Linda Weisser)- breeding. Photo by the author. 36 37 animal or human, or indeed, inanimate. Ackerley's I love this bitch beyond words. She is smart and relationship with Tulip earned the name of love. proud and alpha, and if a snarl here and there is the I have benefited from the mentoring of several price I pay for her in my life, so be it (Great life-long dog people. These people use the word love Pyrenees Discussion List, 9/29/02). sparingly because they loathe how dogs get taken for cuddly, furry, child-like dependents. For example, Weisser plainly treasures tllese feelings and these rela­ Linda Weisser has been a breeder for more than thirty tionships. She is quick to insist that at root her love is years of Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dogs, a about health activist in the breed, and a teacher on all aspects of these dogs' care, behavior, history, and well being. the deep pleasure, even joy, of sharing life with a different being, one whose thought... , feelings, reac­ Her sense of responsibility to the dogs and to the tions, and probably survival needs afe different people who have them is stumling. Weisser emphasizes from ours. And somehow in order for all the love of a kind of dog, of a breed, and talks about what species in this 'band' to thrive, we have to learn to needs to be done if people care about these dogs as a understand anu respect those things (Great whole, and not just about one's own dogs. Without Pyrenees Discussion List, 11114/01). wincing, she recommends killing an aggressive rescue dog or any dog who has bitten a child; doing so could To regard a dog as a furry child, even mean saving the reputation of the breed and the lives metaphorically, demeans dogs and children-and sets of other dogs, not to mention children. The "whole up children to he bitten and dogs to be killed. In 2001 dog" for her is both a kind and an individual. This love Weisser had eleven dogs and five cats in residence. All leads her and others with very modest middle-class of her adult life, she has owned, bred, and showed means to scientific and medical self-education, public dogs; and she raised three human children and carried action, mentoring, and major commitments of time on a full civic, political life as a subtle left feminist. and resources. Sharing human language wi th her children, friends, Weisser also talks about the special "dog of her and comrades is irreplaceable. heart"-a bitch who lived with her many years ago and who still stirs her. She writes in acid lyricism about a While my uogs can love me (I think), T have never current dog who arrived at her house at eighteen had an interesting political conversation with any of months of age and snarled for three days, but who now them. On the other hand, while my children can accepts cookies from her nine-year-old granddaughter, talk, they lack the tme 'animal' sense that that allows me to touch, however briefly, the 'being' of allows the child to take away both food and toys, and another species so different from llly own with all tolerantly rules the household's younger hitches. 38 39

the awe-inspiring reality that brings me (Great Hope and Nop's Trial, are a superb introduction to Pyrenees Discussion List, 11114/01). potent relationships between working sheepdogs and their people. McCaig notes that working sheepdogs, as Loving dogs the way Weisser means is not a category, fall "somewhere hetween 'livestock' and incompatible with a pet relationship; indeed, pet rela­ 'co-worker'" (Canine Genetics Discussion List, tionships can and do frequently nurture this sort of 11/30/00). A consequence of that status is that the love. Being a pet seems to me to be a demanding job dog's judgment may sometimes be better than the for a dog, requiring self-control and canine emotional human's on the job. Respect and trust, not love, are and cognitive skills matching those of good working tlle critical demands of a good working relationship dogs. Very many pets and pet people deserve respect. between these dogs and humans. The dog's life Further, play between humans and pets, as well as depends more on skill-and on a rural economy that simply spending time peaceably hanging out together, does not collapse-and less on a problematic fantasy. brings joy to all the participants. Surely that is one In his zeal to foreground the need to breed, important meaning of companion species. train, and work to sustain the precious herding abili­ Nonetheless, the status of pet puts a dog at special risk ties of the breed he best knows and most cares about, I in societies like the one I live in-the risk of abandon­ think McCaig sometimes devalues and mis-describes ment when human affection wanes, when people's both pet and sport performance relationships in convenience takes precedence, or when tlle dog fails dogland. I also suspect that his dealings with his dogs to deliver on the fantasy of unconditional love. might properly be called love if that word were not so Many of the serious dog people I have met corrupted by our culture's infantilization of dogs and doing my research emphasize the importance to dogs the refusal to honor difference. Dog naturecultures of jobs that leave them less vulnerable to human need his insistence on the functional dog preserved consumerist whims. Weisser knows many livestock only by deliberate work-related practices, including people whose guardian dogs are respected for the breeding and economically viable jobs. We need work they do. Some are loved and some are not, but Weisser's and McCaig's knowledge of the job of a kind their value does not depend on an economy of affec­ of dog, the whole dog, the specificity of dogs. tion. In particular, the dogs' value-and life- does Otherwise, love kills, unconditionally, both kinds and not depend on the humans' perception that the dogs individuals. love them. Rather, the dog has to do his or her job, and, as Weisser says, the rest is gravy. Donald McCaig, the astute Border Collie writer and sheepdog trialer, concurs. His novels, Nop's 40 41

Training Stories wanted more tban tbat. Besides, here 1 7vas the only adult of either species present. Inter-subjectivity does not mean "equality," a literal~y deadly ga~e in d~gland; but From "Notes of a Sports Writer's Daughter": it does mean payinK attention to the conjoined dance of face-to-face significant othernej1·. In addition, control Marco, my f{odmn, is Cayenne s god kid; she is his freak that I am, I got to call the shots, at least on god dog. We are a fictive kin group in training. Perhaps 'litesday nights. our family coat ofarms would take its motto from the Marco was at the same time taking karate lessons, Berkeley Cilnine literary, politics, and arts magazine that and he was proJoundly in love with his karate master. is modeled afier the Barb; namely, the Bark, whose This fine man understood the children s love of drama, masthead read.f "dog is my co-pilot. " U7hen Cayenne was ritual, and costume, as well as the mental-spiritual­ twelve weeks old and Marco six year!" old, my husband bodi{y discipline ~f his man'tal art. "Rejpect" was the Rusten and I gave him puppy-traininK lessons for word and the act that Marco ecstatically told me about Chrz:\"tmas. With Cayenne in her crate in the car, J .from his leJ'sons, He swooned at the chance to collect hif would pick Marco up from school on Tuestioys, drive to small, robed self into the prescribed posture and bow Burger KingJor a planet-sustaining health food dinner formal?y to hh master or his partner before pe'ljrJ'rming of burgers, coke, and fries, and then head to the Santa a Jorm. Calming his turbulent first-wade self and Cruz SPCA for our lesson. Like many of her breed, meeting the ~yes ~fhis teacher or his partner in prepara­ Cayenne was a 511Ulrt and willing youngster, a natural tion Jor demanding, stylized action thrilled him. Hey, to obedience games. Like many of hh- generation raised 'was I going to let an opportuni~y like that go unused in on high-speell visual special effects and automated cyborg my pursuit ofcompanion species flourish inK?

toys, Marco was a bright and motivated trainer, a "Marco, 11 I said, "Ca..yenne is not a cyborg truck; she natural to control games. is your partner in a martial art called obedience. You are Cayenne learned cues fast, and so she quickly the older partner and the master here. YrJU have learned plopped her bum on the ground in response to a "sit" how to perform respect with yonr body and your eyes. command. Besides, she practiced at home with me. Your job is to teach the Jorm to Cayenne. Until you can Entranced, Marco at first treated her like a microchip­ find a way to teach her how to collect her galloping implanted truck Jor which he held the remote controls. puppy self calmly and to bold still and look you in tbe He punched an imaginary button; hi, puppy maKically ~yes,'y0u cannot let her peiforrn the 'sit' command.)) it fulfilled the intentions of his omnipotent, remote will. would not he enOlIKh for her just to sit on cue and for God was threatening to become our co-pilot. I, an obse.f­ him to "dick and treat. " That would be necessary, sive adult who came ofage in the communes of the late certainly, but the order was wrong. First, these two 1960.1, was committed to ideals of inter-subjectivity and youngsters had to learn to notice each other. They had to mutuality in all thin~s, certainly including dog and boy be in the same Kame. It is my belief that Marco began to training. The illusion of mutual attention and commu­ emerge as a dog traina' over the next six 1veeks. it is nication would be better than nothing, but I really also my belief that as he learned to show her the COlpO- ,.... 42 43 real posture of cross-species respect, she and he became significant others to each other. Positive Bondage Two years later out or the kitchen window I In 2002 the consummate agility competitor glimpsed Marco in the back yard doing twelve weave and teacher Susan Garrett authored a widely poles with Cayenne when nobody elfe was present. The acclaimed training pamphlet called Ruff Love, weave poles are one or the most difficult agility objects to publisbed by the dog agility-oriented company, Clean teach and to perform. I think Cayenne s and Marco j­ fast, beautiful weave poles were worthy of his karate Run Productions. Informed by behaviorist learning master. theory and the resultant popular positive training methods that have mushroomed in dogland in the last twenty years, the booklet instructs any dog person who wants a closer, more responsive training relation­ ship with her or his dog. Problems like a dog's not coming when called or inappropriate aggression are surely in view; but, more, Garrett works to inculcate attitudes informed by biobehavioral research and to put effective tools in the hands of her agility students. She aims to show how to craft a relationship of ener­ getic attention that would be rewarding to the dogs and the humans. Non-optional, spontaneous, oriented enthusiasm is to be the accomplishment of the previ­ ously most lax, distracted dog. I have the strong sense that Marco has been the subject of a similar pedagogy at his progressive elementary school. The rules are simple in principle and cllllllingly demanding in prac­ tice; to wit, mark the desired behavior with an instan­ taneous signal and then get a reward delivered within the time window appropriate to the species in ques­ tion. The mantra of popular positive training, "click and treat," is only the tip of a vast post-"discipline and punish" iceberg. Emphatically, as the back of Garrett's tract proclaims in a cartoon, positive does not mean permis- 44 45 sive. Indeed, I have never read a dog-training manual the rapid delivery of treats, toys, and liberties, all care­ more committed to near total control in the interests fully calibrated to evoke and sustain maximum motiva­ of fulfilling human intentions, in this case, peak tion from the particular, individually known pupil? performance in a demanding, dual species, competitive Where else in dogland do training practices lead to a sport. That kind of performance can only come from a dog who has learned to learn and who eagerly offers team that is highly motivated, not working under novel "behaviors" that might become incorporated compulsion, but knowing the energy of each other and into sports or living routines, instead of morosely trusting the honesty and coherence of directional complying (or not) with poorly understood compul­ postures and responsive movements. sions? Garrett directs d,e human to make careful lists Garrett's medl0d is exacting, philosophically of what the dog actually likes; and she instructs people and practically. The human parmer must set things up how to play with their companions in a way the dogs so that the dog sees the clumsy biped as the source of enjoy, instead of shutting dogs down by mechanical all good dlings. Opportunities for the dog to get human ball tosses or intimidating over-exuherance. rewards in any other way must be eliminated as far as Besides all that, the human must actually enjoy playing possible for the duration of the training program, in doggishly appropriate ways, or they will he found typically a few months. The romantic might quail in out. Each game in Garrett's book might be geared to the face of requirements to keep one's dog in a crate huild success according to human goals, but unless the or tied to oneselfhy a loose leash. Forhidden to the game engages the dog, it is worthless. pooch are the pleasures of romping at will with other In short, the major demand on the human is dogs, rushing after a teasing squirrel, or clambering precisely what most of us don't even know we don't onto the couch-unless and until such pleasures are know how to do-to wit, how to see who the dogs are granted for exhibiting self control and responsiveness and hear what they are telling us, not in hloodless to the human's commands at a near 100% frequency. abstraction, but in one-on-one relationship, in other­ The human must keep detailed records of the actual ness-in-connection. correct response rate of the dog for each task, rather There is no room for romanticism about the than tell tales about the heights of genius one's own wild heart of the natural dog or illusions of social dog must surely have reached. A dishonest human is in equality across the class Mammalia in Garrett's prac­ deep trouble in the world of ruff love. tice and pedagogy, but there is large space for disci­ The compensations for the dog are legion. plined attention and honest achievement. Where else can a canine count on several focused Psychological and physical violence has no part in this training sessions a day, each designed so that the dog training drama; technologies of hehavioral manage­ does not make mistakes, but instead gets rewarded hy ment have a staring role. 1 have made enough well 46 47 intentioned training mistakes-some of them painful am learning wbat my college teachers meant in their to my dogs and some of them dangerous to people seminars on freedom and authority. I think my dogs and other dogs, not to mention worthless for rather like ruff tough love. Marco remains more skep­ succeeding in agility-to pay attention to Garrett. tical. Scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice matters; and learning theory is not empty cant, even if it is still a severely lilnited discourse and a rough instrument. Nonetheless, I am enough of a cultural critic to be unable to still the roaring ideologies of tough love in high-pressure, success-oriented, individ­ ualist America. Twentieth-century Taylorite principles of scientific management and the personnel manage­ ment sciences of corporate America have found a safe crate around the postmodern agility field. I am enough of an historian of science to be unable to ignore the easily inflated, historically decontextualized, and overly generalized claims of method an d expertise in positive training discourse. Still, I lend my well-thumbed copy of Ruff Love to friends, and I keep my clicker and liver treats in my pocket. More to the point, Garrett makes me own up to the stunning capacity that dog people like me have to lie to ourselves about the cont1icting fantasies we project onto our dogs in our inconsistent training and dishonest evaluations of what is actually happening. Her pedagogy of positive bondage makes a serious, historically specific kind of freedom for dogs possible; i.e., the freedom to live safely in multi­ species, urban and sub-urban environments with very little physical restraint and no corporal punishment while getting to playa demanding sport with every evidence of self-actualizing motivation. In dogland, I

L 48 r 49 Harsh Beauty that behaviorist trainers and Hearne have important differences over methods, some of which could be Vicki Hearne-the famous companion animal resolved by empirical research and some of which are trainer, lover of maligned dogs like American embedded in personal talent and cross-species Staffordshire Terriers and Airedales, and language charisma or in the incommensurahle tacit knowledges philosopher-is at tirst glance the opposite of Susan of diverse communities of practice. Some of the differ­ Garrett. Hearne, who died in 2001, remains a sharp ences also probably reside in human pigheadedness thorn in the paw for the adherents of positive training and canine opportunism. But "method" is not what methods. To the horror of many professional trainers matters 1110St among companion species; "cotumunica­ and ordinary dog folk, including myself, who have tion" across irreducible difference is what matters. undergone a near-religious conversion from the mili­ Situated partial connection is what matters; the resul­ tary-style Koehler dog-training methods, not so tant dogs and humans emerge together in that game fondly remembered for corrections like leash jerks and of eat's cradle. Respect is the name of the game. Good' ear pinches, to the joys of rapidly delivering liver trainers practice the discipline of companion species cookies under the approving eye of hehaviorist relating under the sign of significant otherness. learning theorists, lIearne did not turn from the old Hearne's best-known book ahout communica­ path and emhrace the new. Her disdain for clicker tion hetween companion animals and human beings, training could be scaring, exceeded only by her fierce Adam:, 'faIk (Random House, 1982), is ill titled. The opposition to animal rights discourse. I cringe under book is ahour two-way conversation, not about her ear pinching of my newfound training practices naming. Adam h'ld it easy in his categorical labor. He and rejoice in her alpha roll of animal rights ideolo­ didn't have to worry abour back-talk; and God, not a gies. The coherence and power of Hearne's critique of dog, made him who he was, in His own image, no less. both the clicker addicted and the rights besotted, To m'lke matters harder, Hearne has to worry about however, command my respect and alert me to a conversation when human language i;n't.the medium, kinship link. lIearne and Garrett are blood sisters but not for reasons most linguists or language philoso­ under the skin. phers would give. Hearne likes trainers' using ordinary The key to this close line breeding is their language in their work; that use turns out to be impor­ focused attention to what the dogs arc telling then;, tant to understanding what the dogs might be telling and so demanding of them. Amazing grace, these her, but not because the dogs are speaking furry thinkers 'lttend to the dogs, in all these canines' situ­ humanese. She adamantly defends lots of so-called ated complexity and particularity, as the unconditional anthropomorphism, and no one more eloquently demand of their relational practice. There is no doubt makes the case for the intention-laden, consciousness- 50 51 ascribing linguistic practices of circus trainers, eques­ thinks that the intention-ascribing idioms of experi­ trians, and dog obedience enthusiasts. All that philo­ enced dog handlers can prevent the kind of literalist sophically suspect language is necessary to keep the anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal humans alert to the fact that somebody is at home in bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity the animals they work with. to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western Just who is at home must permanendy be in philosophy and political theory. question. The recognition that one cannot know the Her resistance to literalist andlropomorphism other or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time and her commitment to significant otherness-in­ who and what are emerging in relationship, is the key. connection fuel Hearne's arguments against animal That is so for all true lovers, of whatever species. rights discourse. Put another way, she is in love with Theologians describe the power of the "negative way the cross-species achievement made possible by the of knowing" God. Because Who/\Vhat Is is infinite, a hierarchical discipline of companion animal training. finite being, without idolatry, can only specify what is Hearne finds excellence in action to be beautiful, hard, not; i.e., not the projection of one's own self. Another specific, and personal. She is against the abstract scales name for dlat kind of "negative" knowing is love. I of comparison of mental functions or consciousness believe those dleological considerations are powerful that rank organisms in a modernist great chain of for knowing dogs, especially for entering into a rela­ being and assign privileges or guardianship accord­ tionship, like training, worthy of the name of love. ingly. She is after specificity. I believe that all edlical relating, within or The outrageous equating of the killing of the between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of Jews in Nazi Germany, the Holocanst, with the ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation. We are not butcheries of dle animal-industrial complex, made one, and being depends on getting on together. The famous by the character Elizabeth Costello in ].M. obligation is to ask who are present and who are emer­ Coetzee's novel The Lives ofAnimal" or the equating of gent. We know from recent research that dogs, even the practices of human slavery with the domestication kennel-raised puppies, do much better than generally of animals make no sense in Hearne's framework. more brilliant wolves or human-like chimpanzees in Atrocities, as well as precious achievements, deserve responding to human visual, indexical (pointing), and their own potent languages and ethical responses, tapping cues in a food-finding test. Dogs' survival in including the assignment of priority in practice. species and individual time regularly depends on their Situated emergence of more livable worlds depends on reading humans well. Would that we were as sure that that di fferential sensibility. Hearne is in love with dle most humans respond at better than chance levels to beauty of the ontological choreography when dogs and what dogs tell them. In fruitful contradiction, Hearne humans converse widl skill, face-to-face. She is 52 r 53 convinced that this is the choreography of "animal Bringing Thomas Jefferson into the kennel, happiness," a title of another of her books. Hearne believes that the origin of rights is in In her famous blast in Harper:" magazine in committed relationship, not in separate and pre­ September 1991 titled "Horses, Hounds and existing category identities. Therefore, in training, Jeffersonian Happiness: What's Wrong with Animal dogs obtain "rights" in specific humans. In relation­ Rights?" (available online with a new prologue at ship, dogs and humans construct "rights" in each www.dogtrainingarts.com). Hearne asked what other, such as the right to dcmand rcspect, attention, companion "animal happiness" might bc. IIer answer: and response. Hearne described the sport of dog the capacity for satisfaction that comes from striving, obedience as a place to increase the dog's power to from work, from fulfillment of possibility. That sort of claim rights against the human. Learning to obey happiness comes from bringing out what is within; i.e., one's dog honestly is the daunting task of the owner. from what Hearne says animal trainers call "talent." Her language remaining relentlessly political and Much companion animal talent can only come to philosophical, Hearne asserts that in educating her I fruition in the relational work of training. Following dogs she "enfranchises" a relationship. The question Aristotle, Hearne argues that this happiness is funda­ turns out not to he what are animal rights, as if they mentally about an ethics committed to "getting it existed preformed to be uncovered, but how maya right," to the satisfaction of achievement. A dog and human enter into a rights relationship with an animal? handler discover happiness together in the la bor of Such rights, rooted in reciprocal possession, turn out training. That is an example of emergent naturecul­ to be hard to dissolve; and the demands they make are hires. life changing for all the partners. This kind of happiness is about yearning for Hearne's arguments about companion animal excellence and having the chance to try to reach it in happiness, reciprocal possession, and the right to the terms recognizable to concrete beings, not to categor­ pursuit of happiness are a far cry from the ascription ical abstractions. Not all animals are alike; their speci­ of "slavery" to the state of all domestic animals, ficity-of kind and of individual-matter. The speci­ including "pets." Rather, for her the face-to-face rela­ ficity of their happiness matters, and that is something tionships of companion species make sometlling new that has to be brought to emergence. Hearne's transla­ and elegant possible; and that new thing is not human tion of Aristotelian and Jeffersonian happiness is about guardianship in place of ownership, even as it is also human-animal nourishing as conjoined mortal beings. not property relations as conventionally understood. If conventional humanism is dcad in post-cyborg ,md Hearne sees not only the humans, but also the dogs, as post-colonial worlds, Jeffersonian caninismmight still beings with a species-specific capacity for moral deserve a hearing. understanding and serious achievement. Possession- 54 r 55 property-is about reciprocity and rights of access. If I Apprenticed to Agility have a dog, my dog has a human; what that means concretely is at stake. Hearne remodels Jefferson's From "Notes of a Sport's Writer's Daughter," GaDher, ideas of property and happiness even as she brings 1999: them into the worlds of tracking, hunting, obedience, and household manners. Dear Vicki Hearne, Hearne's ideal of animal happiness and rights Watching my Aussi-mix dog Roland with you is also a far cry from the relief of suffering as the core lurking inside my head last: 'week made me remember human obligation to animals. Human obligation to that such things are multidimensional and siTuational, companion animals is much more exacting than that, and describing a dog's temperament takes more precision even as daunting as ongoing cruelty and indifference than I achieved. We go to an off-leash, cliff-enclosed beach almost every da'y_ There are two main classes of are in this domain too. The ethic of flourishing dogs there: retrievers and metaretrievers. Roland is a described by the environmental feminist Chris Cuomo metaretriever. Roland will play ball with Rusten and me is close to Hearne's approach. Something important once in a while (or anytime we couple the sport with a comes into the world in the relational practice of liver cookie or two), but his heart's not in it. The activity training; all the participants are remodeled by it. is not really seffrewarding to him, and his lack ofstyle Hearne loved language about language; she would shows it. But metaretrieving ;J- another matter entire~y, have recognized metaplasm all the way down. The retrievers watch whoever is about to throw a ball or stick as if their lives depended on the next few seconds. The metaretrievers watch the retrievers with an exquisite sensitivity to directional cues and microsecond of ,pring. These meta dogs do not watch the bailor the human; they watch the ruminant-surrogates-in-dog's­ clothing. Roland in meta-mode looks like an Aus,.ie­ Border Collie mock up jrJr a lesson in Platonism. His forequarters are lowered, forelegs slightly apart with one in front of the other in hair-trigger balance, his hackles in mid-rise, his eyes focused, his whole body ready to spring into hard, directed action. W'hen the retrievers sail out after the projectile, the metaretrievers move out of their intense c..ye and stalk into heading, heeling, bunching, and cutting their charges with joy and skill. 'l'he good metaretrievers can even handle more than one retriever at a time. The good retrievers can dodge the

L 56 57 metas and still make their catch in eye-amazing leaps­ r Correspondence with Gail Frazier, agility teacher, May 6, or surges into the waves, ~f things have gone to sea. 2001: Since we have no duch or other surrogate sbeep or cattle on the beach, the retrievers have to do duty jar the Hi Gail, metas. Some retriever people take exception to this }~ur pupil" Roland Dog and I, gvt 2 Qualifying multitasking of their dogs (I can hardly blame them), so scores in Standard Novice this weekend at the USDAA those of us with metas try to distract our dogs once in tl trial! ,vhile with some game they inevitably find much less Our early morning Gamblers /{ame on Saturday satisfYing. I drew a mental Larson cartoon on Thursday was a bad bet. And we were a disgrace to Agilitude in watching Roland, an ancient and arthritic Old English our Jumpers run, which finally happened at 6:30 p.m. Sheepdog, a lovely red tricolor Aussie, and a Border Saturday evenin/{. In our defense, after gettin/{ up at 4 Collie mix oFrome kindfo1~m an intense ring around a a.m. on three hours sleep to get to Hayward for the shepherd-lab mix, a plethora of motley Goldens, and a trial, we were lucky to be standing by then, much less game pointer who hovered around a human who­ running and jumping. Both Roland and I ran totally liberal individualist in Amerika to the end-was trying separate jumpers courses, neither being the une the judge to throw his stick to his dog only. had prescribed. But our Standard runs Saturday and Sunday were both real pretty, and one earned us a Jst place ribbon. Roland's feet and my shoulders seemed born to dance together. Cayenne and 1 head for Haute Dawgs in Dixon next Saturday for her first fon match. Wish us luck. There are so many way.r to crash and burn on a course, but s·o far all of them have been fon, or at least instruc­ tive. Dissecting our rejpective runs Sunday afternoon in Hayward, one man and 1 were laughing at the cosmic arrogance of" US culture (in this case, ourselves), in which we generally believe both that mirtakes have causes and that we can know them. The gods are lau/{hing.

Figure 3. Cayenne Pepper leaping through the tire obstacle. CourteJY of Tien iran Photography. 58 59 month and train at least weekly. Agility nourishes in The Game Story Europe, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and Japan. Partly inspired by horse jumping events, the Brazil won the Federation Cynologique sport of dog agility first appeared at the Crufts dog Internationale's World Cup in 2002. The USDAA's show in London in February 1978 as entertamment Grand Prix event is televised, and its videotapes are during the break atier the obedience cbatnpi~nship devoured by agility enthusiasts for the new moves by and before the group judging. Also in aglhtys pedIgree the great dog-handler teams and new course layouts was police dog training, which began in London in devised by devious judges. Week-long training camps 1946 and used obstacles like the htgh mchned A-frame attended by hundreds of students working with tl,at the Army had already adopted for its canine famous handler-instructors are held in several states. corps. Dog Working Trials, a demanding British Evidenced in the sport's glossy monthly maga­ competition that included three-foot-hlgh bar Jumps, zine, Clean Run, agility is becoming ever more techni­ six-foot-high panel jumps, and nine-foot broad Jumps, cally demanding. A course is made up of twenty or so added a third strand in agility's parentage. For early obstacles like jumps, six-foot high A-frames, twelve agility games, teeter-totters were scavenged from chil­ weave poles in series, teeter-totters, and tunnels dren's playgrounds; and coal mine venttlatlon shafts arranged in patterns by judges. Different games­ were put into service as tunnels. Men-many "guys . called things like Snooker, Gamblers, Pairs, Jumpers who worked down the coal mines and wanted a bit of with Weaves, Tunnelers, and Standard-involve fun with their dogs," in the words of UK dog trai~er different obstacle configurations and rules and require and agility historian John Rogerson-were the ong~ diverse strategies. Players sec the courses for the first inal enthusiasts for these activities. Crufts and televI­ time the day of the event and get to walk through sion sponsored by Pedigree Pet Foods, assured that them for ten minutes or so to plan their runs. Dogs hun~an gender and class would be as variable in the have not seen the course until they arc actually sport as the lineage of its equipment. . . running it. Humans give signals with voice and body; Immensely popular in Britam, agtltty spread dogs navigate tlle obstacles at speed in the designated around the world even faster than dogs had disbursed order. Scores depend on time and accuracy. A run globally after their domestication. The United States typically takes a minute or less, and events are decided Dog Agility Association (USDM) was founded m by fractions of seconds. Agility relies on fast-twitch 1986. By 2000, agility attracted tllousands of addIcted muscles, skeletal and neural! Depending on the spon­ participants in hundreds of meets around the country. soring organization, a dog-human team runs from two 'Iypically a weekend event draws 300 or more dogs to eight events in a day. Recognition of obstacle and handlers, and many teams trial more than once a \ Lpatterns, knowledge of moves, skill on hard obstacles, 60 61

and perfection of coordination and communication and participants. Ann Leffler and Dair Gillespie, soci­ ( between dog and handler are the keys to good runs. ologists in Utah who study (and play) the sport, talk Agility can be expensive; travel, camping, entry about agility in terms of "passionate avocations" that fees, and training easily run to $2500 a year. To be problematize ti,e interface between public/private and good, teams need to practice several times a week and work/leisure. I work to convince my sports writer to be physically fit. The time commitment is not father that agility should nudge football aside and take trivial for dogs or people. In the US, middle-aged, its rightful placc on television with world-class tennis. middle-class, white women dominate the sport numer­ Beyond the simple, personal fact of joy in time and ically; the best players internationally are more various work with my dogs, why do I care? Indeed, in a world in gender, color, and age, but probably not class. All full of so many urgent ecological and political crises, sorts of dogs play and win, but particular breeds­ how can I care? Border Collies, Shetland Sheepdogs, Jack Russell Love, commitment, and yearning for skill with Terriers-excel in their jump height classes. The sport another are not zero sum games. Acts oflovc likc is strictly amateur, staffed and played by volunteers training in Vicki Hearne's sense breed acts oflove like caring about and for othcr concatenatcd, cmcrgcnt worlds. That is the core of my companion species manifesto. I experience agility as a particular good in itself and also as a way to become more worldly; i.e., more alert to the demands of significant otherness at all the scales that making more livable worlds demands. The devil here, as elsewhere, is in the details. Linkages are in the details. Someday Twill write a big book called, if not Birtb of tbe Kennel in honor of F ollcauit, then Notes ofa Sport,· Writer,.. Daughter in honor of another of my progenitors, to arg>le for the myriad strands c01111ecting dogs to the many worlds we need to make flourish. Here, I can only suggest. To do that, I will work tropically by appealing to three phrases that Gail Frazier, my agility teacher, regularly uses with her students: "you left Figure 4, Roland sailing over a bar jump. Courtesy ofTien Tran your dog"; "your dog doesn't trust you"; and "trust Photography. your dog." 62 63

These three phrases return us to Marco's story, Breed Stories Garrett's positive bondage, and Hearne's harsh beauty. A good agility teacher, like mine, can show her So far this manifesto has foregrounded two students exactly where they left their dogs and exactly sorts of time-space scales co-constituted by human, what gestures, actions, and attitudes block trust. It's all animal, and inanimate agencies: 1) evolutionary time quite literal. At first, the moves seem small, insignifi­ at the level of the planet earth and its naturalcultural cant; the timing too demanding, too hard; the consis­ species, and 2) face-to-face time at the seale of mortal tency too strict, the teacher too demanding. Then, bodies and individual lifetimes. Evolutionary stories dog and human figure out, if only for a minute, how attempted to calm my political people's fears of to get on together, how to move with sheer joy and biological reductionism and, with my colleague in skill over a hard course, how to cOlTlmunicate, how to science studies, Bruno Latour, interest them in the be honest. trhe goal is the oxymoron of disciplined much more lively venhlres of mlturecultures. Love spontaneity. Both dog and h,mdler have to be able to and training stories tried to honor the world in its take the initiative and to respond ohediently to the irreducible, personal detail. At every repetition, my other. The task is to become coherent enough in an manifesto works fractally, re-inscribing similar shapes incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being of attention, listening, and respect. that breeds respect and response in the flesh, in the It is time to sound tones on another scale, nUl, on the course. And then to remember how to live namely, historical time on the seale of decades, like that ,n every sGlle, with all the partners. I centuries, populations, regions, and nations. IIere, I borrow from Katie King's work on feminism and writing technologies, where she asks how to recog­ nize emergent forms of consciousness, including methods of analysis, implicated in glohalization processes. She writes ahout distributed agencies, "layers of locals and globals," and political futures yet to he actualized. Dog people need to learn how to inherit difficult histories in order to shape more vital multi-species futures. Attention to layered and distributed complexity helps me to avoid both pessimistic determinism and romantic idealism. Dogland hlrns out to be built from layers ofloeals and globals. 64 r 65 I need feminist anth ropologist Anna Tsing to both lay and scientific documentary, oral, experi­ think about scale-making in dogland. She interrogated mental, and experiential evidence. The t()llowing what gets to count as the "global" in transnational stories are composites that, interpellating me into financial wheeling and dealing in contemporary their structures, show something important about Indonesia. She saw not pre-existing entities already in companion specics living in naturecultures. the shapes and scales of frontiers, centers, locals, or globals, but instead "scale-making" of world-making kinds, in which re-opening what seemed closed remains possible. Finally, I translate-literally, move over to dogland-Neferti Tadiar's underst,wding of experience as living historical 1>lbor, through which subjects can he structurally situated in systems of power without reducing them to raw material for the Big Actors like Capitalism and Imperialism. She might forgive me for including dogs among those subjects, and she would give me the human-dog dyad at least provisionally. Let us see if telling histories of two divergent kinds of dogs-livestock guardian dogs (LGDs) and herders­ and of institutionalized breeds emergent from those kinds-Great Pyrenees and Australian Shepherds-as well as of dogs of no fixed breed or kind, can help shape a potent worldly consciousness in solidarity with Illy feminist, anti-racist, queer, and socialist cornradcs; that is, with the imagined community that can only be known through the negative way of naming, like all the ultimate hopes. In that negative way, I tell declarative stories trippingly. There are myriad origin and beh'lvior stories about breeds and kinds of dogs, but not all narratives are born equal. My mentors in dogland taught me their breed histories, which I think honor