conquest of dogs, conquest of everything

I took advantage of a transcontinental flight to finish about half of Kathleen Kete's The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris, which I've been meaning to read all summer. The book is sadly out of print, but available used. It's chock full of fascinating and often amusing historical details, from popular, highly embellished stories of animal virtue in the press (Grieving dog kills herself after master's death! Dog rescues abusive master! Etc.) to the fumbling attempts of Parisian authorities to enumerate, classify, and tax pet dogs. (My first post on this blog is actually about dog tax, too - though in the much different social world of plantation South Carolina.)

Call me a killjoy, but my antennas are always twitching for connections between dog-keeping and institutions of human-on-human dominance, especially racism and colonialism. So I was struck by these pronouncements from French naturalists that Kete cites:

From the novelist and journalist Aurélien Scholl, quoting the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, infamous autopsist of the so-called Hottentot Venus: "[the domestication of dogs was] the most useful and most remarkable of conquests, 'perhaps essential to the establishment of society.'"

A more florid version from Oscar Honoré, author of the 1863 Le Coeur des bêtes: "The dog is probably the first conquest of man, and it is thanks to him that man has conquered some tens of other species of animals without which there would be today neither city, nor road, nor nation, nor maybe mankind itself on the earth."

(For a few more examples, see Kete, pp. 50-51)

So, as a kind of "gateway" objects of conquest, dogs also enable humans - by which these guys probably meant "Europeans" - to vanquish just about everything else in the world. These passages don't refer to the conquest of other humans as such, but it's strongly implied in Honoré's reference to nation-building (and perhaps also in Cuvier's "establishment of society"). It's easy to see the ideological potency in this trope of humans and dogs in league against the rest of the world - of humans turning nature against nature, of nature willingly serving "Man" against nature.

The subtitle of Mark Derr's A Dog's History of America: How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered, and Settled a Continent is a contemporary American variation on this theme, with a more cano-centric twist. The frontier thesis triumphalism here strikes me as oddly tone-teaf, given that the book actually includes a substantial, well-researched section on the horrifying use of war dogs in the Spanish Conquest of the Americas that - how can it be otherwise? - is anything but celebratory. But perhaps the title is the marketer's handiwork.