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Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields of the “German” Shepherd Dog
Abstract
During the first half of the twentieth century, the Shepherd Dog came to be strongly identified with Imperial and Nazi Germany, as well as with many other masters in the colonial world. Through its transnational diffusion after World War I, the breed became a pervasive symbol of imperial aggression and racist exploitation. The 1930s Japanese empire subtly Japanized the dogs who became an icon of the Imperial Army. How could a cultural construct so closely associated with Germany come to represent many different colonial regimes? Using Imperial Japan as a case study, this paper argues that this symbolic pliability is a derivative of the high functionality, wide adaptation, and conspicuous nature of the Shepherd Dog as protector, deterrent, and enforcer of social control. As a visible intermediary in hierarchal relationships between different human groups, the Shepherd Dog became a powerful metaphor of Nazi and colonial memories throughout much of the world.
... Ritvo argued that purebred dog ownership reflected the dog owners' upper-class aspirations. Other scholars continued probing the significance of this practice, and particularly its confluence in time with the rise of the importance of the notion of race in the human world and the emergence of scientific racism (McHugh 2004;Skabelund 2008;Rasmussen 2016). Claire Rasmussen adds that transforming dogs into "predictable, regulable creatures" could serve as a sign of benevolent human control of nature (Rasmussen 2016, 80-81) and -analogously to how eugenics functioned in the human context -it could also deflect anxiety related to "inappropriate" behavior by placing the blame on heredity and suggesting the possibility of eradicating threats to social order through the control of the breeding population (84). ...
... I have written of the possibility of using Foucault's concept of pastoral power to speak about the human-canine relationship as it develops in reinforcementbased training; pointing to the strong two-dimensional affective bond that arises between the two subjects, the fact that pastoral power is a "fundamentally beneficient power," (Foucault 2007, 173) that is it flows out of the desire to "do right" by the dog; it manifests itself as a feeling of duty and develops an almost overarching sense of responsibility for his flock in the shepherd. Nicole Shukin picks up on the materiality of Foucault's metaphor of the sheep-fold in order to use it to develop her reading of the military K9 as a tool of America's military power (Shukin 2013, 178-179), forming an argument somewhat similar to Aaron Skabelund's about the German shepherd serving as the enforcer of colonial law (Skabelund 2008), except that Shukin's reading adds a biopolitical dimension to Skabelund's postcolonial framework. The analogy between pastoral power and the relationship between a shepherd and his flock is, of course, strikingly direct. ...
In Genealogy of Obedience Justyna Włodarczyk provides a long overdue look at the history of companion dog training methods in North America since the mid-nineteenth century, when the market of popular training handbooks emerged. Włodarczyk argues that changes in the functions and goals of dog training are entangled in bigger cultural discourses; with a particular focus on how animal training has served as a field for playing out anxieties related to race, class and gender in North America. By applying a Foucauldian genealogical perspective, the book shows how changes in training methods correlate with shifts in dominant regimes of power. It traces the rise and fall of obedience as a category for conceptualizing relationships with dogs.
... However, pedigree became shorthand for purity of blood as time passed. As such, physical appearance (i.e., breed) became one marker for demonstrating the purity of blood and social acceptance; this belief was later redirected onto humans, thereby creating an intimate link between the concepts of breed and race (Skabelund, 2008). Approaching this link from a different direction, physical appearance became a marker for categorizing someone as an outcast or dangerous. ...
Police discharge their firearms more often at dogs than humans, and as a profession, kill thousands of dogs
every year. The number of dogs killed by police during these encounters has government officials declaring
that an “epidemic” is occurring within policing itself, with some commentators referring to this trend as
“puppycide” or “canicide.” The purpose of this article is to examine how the judiciary rationalizes canicide, or
the police killing of dogs, and the role canicide plays in the justification of police violence. To do this, the
article provides a sociolegal and ethnographic content analysis of federal court cases and legal decisions on
canicide, specifically focusing on the most important case to date, Brown v. Battle Creek Police Department.
Results indicate that the same legal frameworks used to justify police violence against humans are also used to
justify police violence against dogs. Furthermore, results suggest that the human-dog social relationship
becomes paramount in transforming the dog into a threat to officer safety. Implications of these findings are
discussed.
... The German Shepherd is known for its power and strength and is widely used in the military (Tenner 2017). According to Skabelund (2008), German Shepherds became strongly identified with Nazi Germany as well as the rulers in the colonial world during the first half of the twentieth century. Afterwards, the breed became a "symbol of political racism" and a "pervasive symbol of imperial aggression and racist exploitation" enforcing social control (Skabelund 2008, 355, 357). ...
This study examines how Otherness is constructed visually in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis. This visual rhetoric analysis examines the form, content, and function of images and explores the rhetorical strategies deployed in visualizations of the refugee crisis in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from 2015 to 2016. The data consisted of 1,473 images. The study identified six rhetorical strategies used for dehumanizing refugees: massifying, separating, passivating, demonizing, individualizing, and recontextualizing the Other. The rhetorical strategies in turn constructed four discourses related to refugees, namely those of threat and victimhood aimed at dehumanizing as well as personhood and distance aimed at humanizing the Other. The paper contributes to the current knowledge on dehumanization and humanization of refugees in public discourse by unpacking the subtle visual mechanisms through which these processes occur.
... 21 Canis lupus familiaris emerged as a subspecies when wolves adapted to scavenging human settlements, and over generations evolved to adopt symbiotic sociability with, rather than instinctive aggressiveness towards, humans. 22 Dogs developed a responsiveness to gestures within their human in-group, and were useful to bark warnings or defend their group against threats. 23 They became companions, sentinels and hunters throughout the ancient world, although war dogs were used particularly in Europe. ...
The lash and shackles remain two primary symbols of material degradation fixed in the historical memory of slavery in the Americas. Yet as recounted by states, abolitionists, travellers, and most importantly slaves themselves, perhaps the most terrifying and effective tool for disciplining black bodies and dominating their space was the dog. This article draws upon archival research and the published materials of former slaves, novelists, slave owners, abolitionists, Atlantic travelers, and police reports to link the systems of slave hunting in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the US South throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slave hounds were skillfully honed biopower predicated upon scenting, hearing, sighting, outrunning, outlasting, signaling, attacking, and sometimes terminating, black runaways. These animals permeated slave societies throughout the Americas and bolstered European ambitions for colonial expansion, indigenous extirpation, economic extraction, and social domination in slave societies. as dogs were bred to track and hunt enslaved runaways, slave communities utilized resources from the natural environment to obfuscate the animal's heightened senses, which produced successful escapes on multiple occasions. This insistence of slaves' humanity, and the intensity of dog attacks against black resistance in the Caribbean and US South, both served as proof of slavery's inhumanity to abolitionists. Examining racialized canine attacks also contextualizes representations of anti-blackness and interspecies ideas of race. An Atlantic network of breeding, training and sales facilitated the use of slave hounds in each major American slave society to subdue human property, actualize legal categories of subjugation, and build efficient economic and state regimes. This integral process is often overlooked in histories of slavery, the African Diaspora, and colonialism. By violently enforcing slavery’s regimes of racism and profit, exposing the humanity of the enslaved and depravity of enslavers, and enraging transnational abolitionists, hounds were central to the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas.
... 426). These experiences might have lasting emotional remnants for African Americans, just as the German Shepherd became a symbol to Jewish people of being hunted in pre-World War II Europe (Skabelund, 2008). Such anxiety could be passed down through generations via stories and texts, and reinforced by police use of dogs against African Americans (Spruill, 2016). ...
Historical and current literature is reviewed and social psychological theory is applied to support novel theories about African Americans’ attitudes toward nonhuman animals. Due to psychological reactions stemming from their brutal U.S. history, involving shared suffering with animals, African Americans are theorized to have either negative or positive beliefs about animals. Two studies revealed the latter: that African Americans have positive attitudes toward animals overall, as measured by a new, statistically reliable Attitudes toward Animals Scale. In Study 1, African American university students’ attitudes were somewhat less positive than White students’ attitudes, but in Study 2, older African American community members’ attitudes were more positive than Whites’. This cross-study difference, however, results from less positive White attitudes in Study 2, rather than from any important difference in African Americans’ attitudes across the two samples. The results and unique theoretical framework pave the way for future research on this important issue.
... Reconceiving the social order as simultaneously fluid and stable, dog fanciers drew a distinction between "pedigree" and "mongrel" dogs, while climbing the social ladder themselves. More recent contributions have emphasized that the history of the dog and of the dog fancy has a more directly political significance still (e.g., Cheang, 2006;Harrington, 2009;Skabelund, 2008;Swart, 2003;Van Sittert & Swart, 2008), focusing on questions of nationalism and national identity. This paper extends Figure 1 SOAN_advance_Howell.indd 3 SOAN_advance_Howell.indd 3 8/3/2012 11:12:28 AM 8/3/2012 11:12:28 AM had previously made it popular: its distinctive status as a mascot or "national dog" (Tenner, 1998, p. 75). ...
This essay examines the impact of the Great War on the breeding and showing of pedigree dogs (the "dog fancy") in Britain. Hostility toward Germany led first to a decline in the popularity of breeds such as the dachshund, with both human and canine "aliens" targeted by nationalist fervor. Second, the institutions of dog breeding and showing came under threat from accusations of inappropriate luxury, frivolity, and the wasting of food in wartime, amounting to the charge of a want of patriotism on the part of breeders. Third, the paper shows how the "dog fancy" responded to this "agitation against dogs," turning on mongrels, stray dogs, and "useless" and unpatriotic humans, exposing deep divisions within the dog breeding community. By looking at the politics of the "dog fancy" in wartime, this paper extends the discussion of animals and national identity, arguing that while dogs could be used to articulate patriotic sentiments, their conditional citizenship meant that they were uniquely vulnerable at a timeof national crisis.
Zusammenfassung
Der Aufsatz befasst sich mit der Erfindung des Rassehundes in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. In dieser Zeit etablierte sich eine kategoriale Ordnung, die Hunde neu nach ihrer „Rasse“ klassifizierte. Gleichzeitig entstand ein durch Züchtung hergestelltes „lebendes Artefakt“– der sog. „Rassehund“ –, in dessen Körper die Rassemerkmale physisch eingeschrieben waren. Meine Rekonstruktion der Erfindungsgeschichte des Rassehundes zeigt, dass die Einteilung und Produktion von Tieren nach ihrer Rasse nicht weniger kontingent und kulturell konstruiert ist wie die entsprechende Unterscheidung bei Menschen. Anhand einer Analyse der damaligen Zuchttheorien und ihrer Verschränkung mit den Rasseideologien dieser Zeit dokumentiert der Beitrag den theoretischen Gewinn einer Auffassung, die den Begriff der Tierrasse entbiologisiert, und diskutiert die Folgen, die eine solche Entbiologisierung für die Annahme einer grundsätzlichen Differenz zwischen Menschen und Tieren hat.
We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery’s Social Psychology Quarterly article, “When a Name Gives You Pause,” a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery’s article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive.
This article focuses on animals that participated in the Ottoman war effort on the front lines and in the rear areas during the First World War (1914-1918). Animals, partially and indirectly mentioned in the Ottoman Military literature, have not drawn much scholarly interest, although they played important roles in the logistics, communications and combat areas of the Ottoman war effort. On the other hand, new studies that focus on the roles of animals under military mobilization and war conditions in other contexts have been published in recent years, and monuments have been erected to commemorate the success and value of animals in wartime. This study draws attention to the presence and contributions of animals during wars of global scale on the one hand and refers to their undeniable presence
in Ottoman military mobilization from the early modern period onward on the other. The article discusses the presence of animals in the Ottoman army within the scope of the First World War, and conveys the dimensions of animal mobilization for war, as well as the living conditions of animals on the front lines. It also presents various examples of agency and subjectivity on the part of the combatant animals.
This article explores the workings of power in dog training cultures through an analysis of UK dog training manuals from the mid-19th century to the present. We focus on gundog and companion dog training cultures, investigating the dog-human relations they assume, the changing conceptions of human-animal relations they represent, and the inequalities and relations of power in which they are embedded. Rather than thinking about changing training practices in terms of a shift from dominance to positive training, or from instrumental to affective relations, we argue that training cultures reveal how inter-species inequalities are conceptualised and reproduced in a range of historical periods and cultural spaces. We suggest that dog training cultures can be distinguished by contrasting understandings of dogs as: (1) rational, thinking beings, (2) instinctive creatures, and (3) autonomous active agents as well as by the inequalities of gender, class, race and species structuring the spaces in which they are embedded. Furthermore, the modalities of power which characterise dog training cultures favour different groups of human actors rather than dogs, even in training cultures which are based on partnership and are ‘dog centred’. Our analysis shows how inter-species relations are lived and thought through the cultural practices of dog training.
Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.
Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.
In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.
By raising the “animal question” in International Relations (IR), this essay seeks to contribute not only to put animals and human–animal relations on the IR agenda, but also to move the field in a less anthropocentric and non-speciesist direction. More specifically, the essay does three things: First, it makes animals visible within some of the main empirical realms conventionally treated as the subject matter of IR. Second, it reflects on IR's neglect of animals and human–animal relations in relation to both how IR has been constituted as a field and the broader socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. Third, it explores various ways in which IR scholars can start incorporating and take animals and human–animal relations seriously in studies on international relations.
This paper offers a geographical framework for considering animal breeds as objects of knowledge and living entities and uses it to explore how ideas of breed origin constitute breeds and affect interspecies relations, human relations and the making of value. It suggests how critical animal geographers could engage more fully with breeds and breeding, though an expanded concept of breed wealth that includes the making of breeds as forms of ‘genetic capital’ through the reproductive capacity of animals, the cultural value of breeds in terms of human collective identities and differentiations, and encounter value. This geographical approach to breeds and breeding involves not only engaging with the always situated nature of breed epistemologies, practices and relations but also the geographical dimensions of what is predominately understood as a genealogically rather than spatially constituted category. A more‐than‐genealogical understanding of breeds draws attention to how place rather than pedigree alone is considered as constitutive of breeds, both in an evolutionary and immediate sense, despite the formal modern genetic definition of breeds, and how geographical origination matters in the making of breed wealth across the multiple geographies of a breed as it is dispersed from its original ‘homeland’. Addressing a national and international ‘love of a breed’ – Icelandic horses which are defined as a national breed but the focus of interest and enthusiasm both within and beyond Iceland – this paper explores how the ethical complexities of love, care and power are worked though in different ways across these geographies. Breed wealth, I argue, is a dynamic relational quality inflected by the meanings attributed to the place of breed origin.
This article takes aim at what, on its face, appears counterintuitive: the figure of the wolf in the iconography of alt-right groups in Canada and the US. In settler colonial states until quite recently wolves have historically been reviled and exterminated. Indeed, in the US and Canada, wolves were often conflated with Indigenous peoples and both were constructed as obstacles to colonial progress. This collapse of racial and species categories comes as no surprise as it has been and remains a central part of racialization and national identity in settler states. But in this case, there is a discursive reversal in the attempt to craft an alternative nationalism, one that hinges on the association of animals with white nationalism and misogyny. I use examples from two groups – one in the US and one in Canada – that have deployed wolf imagery in the elaboration of their often nativist and misogynistic mythology. Through these examples, I contend that wolves occupy a complex space in these alt-right movements, serving as ambiguous ciphers – simultaneous markers of both persecution and unbridled wildness – for their violent narratives about masculinity, alternative nationalism and white identity.
This paper draws together animal and mobility studies to develop the concept of animals’ mobilities. It identifies the parallel intellectual interests in these fields that provide the intellectual foundations for this synthesis, in mobility (over movement), affect, relational space, and ordering practices. It explores what configures an animal’s mobility, knowledge practices for researching and evoking animals’ mobilities, and how animals’ mobilities are governed. The conclusion highlights what these fields gain from this synthesis, and identifies the empirical, political and conceptual contributions that this concept makes to geographical research. The argument is illustrated with examples of large, terrestrial mammals, especially bears.
This paper examines the relations between humans and wild animals in the lands of the Bible and ancient Near East and the way in which these cultures used various creatures and their characteristics as metaphors for dangerous enemies. It focuses on three particular periods in which the sources at our disposal document human–wild animal interactions. The first section discusses the emergence of civilization in Mesopotamia as reflected in various texts, discussing their portrait of the epoch in which human culture took shape and domesticated animals began to be clearly differentiated from wild ones. The second part looks at human–canine relations—wild dogs and their domesticated counterparts—briefly surveying how the former serve as metaphors for enemies beyond inhabited regions as evinced in the Egyptian El-Amarna archive. The third section analyzes the human–animal relations portrayed in the biblical texts, reviewing the theological principles they adopt in relation to the animal kingdom and the way in which wild animals became a metaphor for both wicked adversaries and striking physical attributes.
If one were to write a biography of a nonhuman animal, a likely candidate is Hachikō, an Akita dog who became popular in 1932 when a newspaper claimed he had been awaiting the return of his master at a Tokyo train station since his owner’s death seven years earlier. That fame led to the production of an enormous variety of source material that a historian could use to reconstruct his life’s story. This chapter uses Hachikō to explore the methodological and theoretical challenges of animal biography. It argues that two new(er) kinds of primary sources—taxidermy and photography—allow Hachikō (and some other animals) to “speak” and play a collaborative role in telling their own stories.
The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects’ lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure the lives of those actors whose biosocial demands can be neither stamped out nor befuddled by propaganda. In this article we examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that could have created the totalitarian service dog: institutions that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. Our narrative begins with a recently discovered genealogical document, issued to a German Shepherd bred by plan and born during the World War II Leningrad Blockade. Reading this document together with service-dog manuals, Soviet physiological studies, archival military documents, and autobiographical narratives, we unravel the history of Leningrad’s early Soviet military-service dog husbandry program. This program, we argue, relied on a particular distinction of public and private: at once stimulating affectionate interspecies bonds between dogs and their handlers and sequestering those relationships from the image of rational, scientifically objective interspecies communication. This reduction of human-dog relations to those criteria that could be scientifically studied and centrally planned yielded tangible results: it allowed the State’s dog husbandry program to create apparently unified groups of dogs and dog handlers and to successfully mobilize these groups for new military tasks, like mine detection, during World War II.
On February 23, 1938, a Jerusalem Military Court convicted Mustafa Mansour of the unlawful possession of a weapon and for opening fire at a bus. The prosecution's key witness tying Mansour to the shooting was, however, not human but canine. Due to darkness the police could not pursue the “brigands” immediately following the incident. They returned at dawn accompanied by Doberman Pinschers. The dogs tracked footprints from the crime scene to the defendant's village, and then to his house, where the police discovered a few rounds of ammunition, some of which were spent.
British imperial writers in Burma regularly moaned about milk. They complained about the difficulties they faced acquiring it in the colony. They were self-conscious about how their consumption of it might be viewed by the Burmese population, who predominantly did not drink cow’s milk. And they worried about the quality of the supply provided by itinerant Indian dairymen, who they viewed as being neglectful and insanitary. Through these concerns the absence of milk became a marker of the colony’s difference from the rest of the Raj. At the same time, the colonial government came to recognise the importance of locally-bred working cattle for Burmese agriculture. In their attempts to protect these valuable nonhuman labourers, Indian dairy herds were represented as a problem breed that threatened the indigenous stock. The threat from foreign cattle coalesced around epizootic disease and uncontrolled crossbreeding. These concerns were coterminous with official and nationalist anxieties about the Indian human population in the colony. Building on recent scholarship uncovering more-than-human geographies, this article reveals how colonial policies designed to improve the dairy industry and protect Burmese cattle contributed to the material and imaginative territorialisation of Burma, and its eventual separation from British India.
This article analyzes the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth-century Paris, which formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal psychology, police officers, journalists, and canophiles promoted the dogs as inexpensive yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals. This article responds to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency by examining how humans in a particular place and time conceptualized and harnessed animal abilities. I argue that while nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is a danger that it might become monolithic and static. With these concerns in mind, I show how examining historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities takes us closer to the historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, and provides a better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. Attitudes toward police dogs were entwined with broader discussions of human and animal intelligence. Concerns that dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resembled contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality, resulting in individual and collective degeneration. To many, it seemed that police dogs' intelligence had not tamed their aggressive instincts, and these worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris after World War I.
The creation of canine breeds in early modern Europe, especially Spain, illustrates the different constructs against which notions of human identity were forged. This book is the first comprehensive history of early modern Spanish dogs and it evaluates how two of Spain's most celebrated and canonical cultural figures of this period, the artist Diego Velázquez and the author Miguel de Cervantes, radically question humankind's sixteenth-century anthropocentric self-fashioning. In general, this study illuminates how Animal Studies can offer new perspectives to understanding Hispanism, giving readers a fresh approach to the historical, literary and artistic complexity of early modern Spain.
Jeremy Rich uses the eccentric life of R. L. Garner (1848-1920) to examine the commercial networks that brought the first apes to America during the Progressive Era, a critical time in the development of ideas about African wildlife, race, and evolution. Garner was a self-taught zoologist and atheist from southwest Virginia. Starting in 1892, he lived on and off in the French colony of Gabon, studying primates and trying to engage U.S. academics with his theories. Most prominently, Garner claimed that he could teach apes to speak human languages and that he could speak the languages of primates. Garner brought some of the first live primates to America, launching a traveling demonstration in which he claimed to communicate with a chimpanzee named Susie. He was often mocked by the increasingly professionalized scientific community, who were wary of his colorful escapades, such as his ill-fated plan to make a New York City socialite the queen of southern Gabon, and his efforts to convince Thomas Edison to finance him in Africa. Yet Garner did influence evolutionary debates, and as with many of his era, race dominated his thinking. Garner's arguments-for example, that chimpanzees were more loving than Africans, or that colonialism constituted a threat to the separation of the races-offer a fascinating perspective on the thinking and attitudes of his times. Missing Links explores the impact of colonialism on Africans, the complicated politics of buying and selling primates, and the popularization of biological racism. © 2012 by the University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
This study centers on equestrian show culture in Ontario, Canada, and examines how horses are entangled symbolically and materially in socially constructed hierarchies of value. After examining horse-show social relations and practices, the paper traces the connections among equestrian culture, class, and the social constructions of horses. Equestrian relations expose multiple hierarchical intersections of nature and culture within which both human-horse relations and horses are affected by class structures and identities. In equestrian culture, class affects relations within and across species, and how horses are conceptualized and used, as symbols and as living animal bodies.
The current study investigated the relationship between dimensions of personality, self-reports of delinquency, mating effort, and the desire to own a dog perceived as aggressive. Seven common breeds of dog were rated by 235 participants living within the UK and North America, using
an online survey application. Participants also completed scales measuring personality, earlier delinquency, and mating effort. A clear dimension in perceived aggressiveness was found across dog breeds. Persons lower in Agreeableness, higher in Neuroticism and Conscientiousness, and of younger
age actively preferred a dog perceived as aggressive. Neither delinquency nor mating effort actively predicted this preference for an aggressive dog, although these measures were themselves correlated with Agreeableness; a regression analysis found that low Agreeableness, younger age, and
higher Conscientiousness predicted higher ratings on the aggression preference dimension. These findings show that a preference for a more aggressive dog is not necessarily driven by self-reported status display and intersexual competition so much as youth, low Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness
generally.
In October 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States will review the case of Florida v. Jardines, which revolves around the constitutionality of police canine Franky’s sniff outside a private residence. Essentially, the Court will need to decide whether or not the sniff constitutes a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes. This Article presents a review of the often-contradictory case law that exists on this question to suggest that underlying the various cases is the Courts’ assumption of a juxtaposed relationship between nature and technology. Where dog sniffs are perceived as a technology, the courts have been inclined to also define them as “searches,” thereby triggering Fourth Amendment protections. Conversely, when perceived as extensions of the officer’s natural sense of smell, dogs, like nature, are viewed with “superstitious awe” and spared constitutional scrutiny.Rather than use the dominant judicial classification of police dogs as either “natural entities” or “advancing technologies” — each of which triggering its own, usually opposite, chain of legal events — I rely on the scholarship of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to suggest treating police dogs as “biotechnologies”: co-produced human-animal hybrids. I argue that although a dog seems to have limited development capacity in comparison to a nonorganic machine, the police dog’s various breeding, improved training, increased application, and machine augmentation render it both a biological entity and an advancing technology. I also argue that despite the common use of dogs as pets, a work dog — and a police detection dog in particular — is clearly not “in public use.” Specifically, the high cost of breeding, training, and maintaining K-9s, the professional training required, the unique human-animal relationship that develops in the highly volatile police setting, and the status of K-9s as full members of the police force — all demonstrate that K-9 Franky is not, and will probably never be, Spot or Rover. Finally, I claim that such novel categorization of police dogs as both a “bio” and a “technology” should at least trigger the same constitutional protections as an infrared device. Under no circumstances should any technology go a-priori unprotected by the Fourth Amendment, even when such technology is an eight-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever named Franky.
Why do dogs behave in the ways that they do? Why did our ancestors tame wolves? How have we ended up with so many breeds of dog, and how can we understand their role in contemporary human society? Explore the answers to these questions and many more in this study of the domestic dog. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this much-anticipated update incorporates two decades of new evidence and discoveries on dog evolution, behavior, training, and human interaction. It includes seven entirely new chapters covering topics such as behavioral modification and training, dog population management, the molecular evidence for dog domestication, canine behavioral genetics, cognition, and the impact of free-roaming dogs on wildlife conservation. It is an ideal volume for anyone interested in dogs and their evolution, behavior and ever-changing roles in society. The ultimate book about the domestic dog, ideal for anyone interested in their evolution, behavior and ever-changing roles in society A new edition of a classic text, presenting the latest research on dog behavior, training, domestication, genetics and cognition Includes seven entirely new chapters by leading experts in the field, incorporating two decades of new evidence and discoveries.
Contrasting Jewish, Christian and polytheistic traditions and contemporary German attitudes regarding the treatment of animals, Boria Sax documents how Nazis manipulated these attitudes to conform to their own symbolic system - Aryan wolves and horses, Jewish pigs and apes. By equating the Nazi party with "nature", the Nazis reduced all ethical issues to biological questions. Thus predatory animals were exalted along with their human counterparts - party leaders and functionaries - while enemies were identified as sheep destined for slaughter. This history untangles paradoxes such as the Nazi's rigorous laws regarding the humane transport of cattle in the same railroad cars that carried suffocatingly packed human victims to death camps.
Dogs, like humans, are products both of culture and nature. For the past twelve thousand years they have been entangled with human societies. Dogs connect the wild with the tame. The two themes of extermination and domestication also animate the dog history of southern Africa, part of a broader process of ?bringing in the wild? first under the superintendence of Africans and, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, European settlers. Each epoch of human-canine interaction produced its own peculiar animal, literally a pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial dog, as well as its dark doppelganger, the wild, ?Kaffir? or stray dog. This chapter shows that the cynological world is invested with emotional, intellectual, financial, and political narratives, and that equally the human world can usefully be observed through canine eyes. It is now generally accepted that the principal ancestor of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is the wolf.Keywords: canine eyes; Canis familiaris; human society; Southern Africa
It is well known that the Nazis treated human beings with extreme cruelty but it less widely recognized that the Nazis also took some pains to develop and pass extensive animal protection laws. How could the Nazis have professed such concern for animals while treating humans so badly? It would be easy to dismiss Nazi proclamations on animals as mere hypocrisy but there may be other explanations for the contradiction. For example, anecdotal reports and psychological evaluations of many prominent Nazis suggest they felt affection for animals but dislike of humans. Second, animal protection measures, whether sincere or not, may have been a legal veil to attack Jews and others considered undesirable. Third, the Nazis blurred moral distinctions between animals and people and tended to treat members of even the Master Race as animals at times. This article argues that at the core of the Nazi treatment of humans and animals was a reconstitution of society's boundaries and margins. All human cultures seek to protect what is perceived to be pure from that which is seen to be dangerous and polluting and most societies establish fairly clear boundaries between people and animals. In Nazi Germany, however, human identity was not contaminated by including certain animal traits but certain peoples were considered to be a very real danger to Aryan purity.
Totem: the iconic representation of a specific ordering of plant and animal species. Clan: the representation of a group identity. Totemism: the relationship between totem and clan. From Emile Durkheim and his nineteenthcentury antecedents to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the discussion of totemism has addressed the way in which people classify themselves with reference to the animal and plant world. This discussion began with the observation among different exotic peoples of the widespread practice of arranging certain animal and plant species into a pattern that, while differing from culture to culture in content, seemed to indicate a consistent formal relationship between totem and clan. The iconic representation of so-called nature—the totem—seemed invariably the model for the representation of intra- or intergroup identity—for the clan.
Th e German shepherd dog: A genetic history
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Mentalitätsgeschichte? (Th e Germans and their dogs: A special path of the history of mentalities?). Munich: Siedler.
Th e animal estate: Th e English and other creatures in the Victorian age Animals in the Th ird Reich: Pets, scapegoats, and the Holocaust
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Kaigai ni takamaru Nihon inu kenkyû (Th e " representative Hachikō " goes to Germany: Research on Japanese dogs on the rise overseas)
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Prince enlists for a "dog" war
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Chûken no hi wa ima narinu (Th e fate of the monument to the loyal dogs
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Dogs in police work: A summary of experience in Great Britain and the United States
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Inu no gendai shi (A modern history of dogs) Tokyo: Gendai shokan. Itakura Itaru taii senshi (Captain Itakura Itaru killed in action) Asahi shinbun
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Inu no gendai shi (A modern history of dogs). Tokyo: Gendai shokan
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Th e German shepherd in word and picture
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--. (1934-1936). Doitsu shepādo inu: Kaisetsu to shashin [5 vols.]. (M. Arisaka &
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Die Deutschen und ihre Hunde: Ein Sonderweg der Mentalitätsgeschichte? (Th e Germans and their dogs: A special path of the history of mentalities? )
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Mentalitätsgeschichte? (Th e Germans and their dogs: A special path of the history of mentalities? ). Munich: Siedler.
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Can the subaltern bark? Imperialism, civilization, and canine cultures in nineteenth-century Japan
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Outline of Japanese textbooks, modern period, national language)
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Kaigo, T., Ishikawa, K., & Ishikawa, M. (Eds.) (1964). Nihon kyōkasho taikei, kindai-hen, dai-7-kan: Kokugo 4 (Outline of Japanese textbooks, modern period, national language). Tokyo:
Kōdansha.
Chûken no hi wa ima narinu
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