dogears

pinboard

2011-12-22T18:39:00.001-05:00

I recently started keeping my daily readings at Pinboard, which describes itself as a "bookmarking website for introverted people in a hurry." A kind of anti-Facebook, it has an ascetic, frill-less interface. The only two modes of organization (as far as I can tell) are chronology and tags. I'm liking it so far!

limited good

2011-09-14T00:11:00.004-04:00

* A couple sentences tweaked 12:44am September 14, 2011

This essay by Christopher Newfield (Remaking the University; Unmaking the Public University) has stuck with me since I first encountered it in early August, in the throes of the debt ceiling "crisis." Especially this paragraph:

In reality, our extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, nearly as much on the right as on the left. But once the banana republic has been established, low taxes make individual sense, and in the U.S. they function as a kind of political booby prize. With the stock and housing booms over, most people feel they can't increase their own incomes through known legal means, and since virtually no one thinks they can make America more egalitarian, low taxes on our modest incomes can look like the next best thing.

Newfield's insight here reminds me of the concept of "limited good," which I learned in a weirdly old-fashioned, out-of-touch Anthropology course in college. LG is a world view ascribed by Western anthropologists to non-industrialized societies, as Wikipedia helpfully explains:

The term limited good is a concept from anthropology describing the theory commonly held in traditional societies, that there is a limited amount of "good" to go around. In other words, the amount of good luck, money, etc. available is held to be finite, so every time one person profits, another loses. Societies that subscribe to this philosophy tend to display strong levels of equality among members and to be strongly resistant to social change.

The term was coined by George M. Foster in his 1965 article, Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good, "American Anthropologist." [Original punctuation and syntax - i.e., don't blame me!] The concept has been described by [Tim] Allen as the rural counterpart of the culture of poverty. The Mexican peasants (in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán) Foster studied were seen by him to lack interest in new opportunities because of their perception of the word as a "competitive game." This led to a high level of distrust and envy and fragile and constantly shifting patterns of alignment.

This seems to me an ironically, uncannily prophetic description of Tea Party America: A "traditional society" "resistant to social change," beset by record poverty rates and a "see no evil" political culture. Thus goes the right-wing self-destruct pact: with so little hope of making America more egalitarian, let's make sure it's as unequal as possible. If we can't have equality, then no one can.

totem animals

2011-06-18T08:14:00.004-04:00

Over at Village Dog ( scroll view | mosaic view ) I've been keeping a list of "totem animals" - kind of a journal in animal images, or animal avatars perhaps. The idea came from the late great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who would start off a seminar by asking students to take turns naming their "totem animals," and going around the room reciting each other's totems. I had the privilege of taking my very first graduate course with Eve in the olden days. My totem that day was completely uninspired - I think I just said my Chinese zodiac sign. So this is my attempt to do better. Another day (or two, or three), another ice-breaker.

Here are a few recent entries (strange that sleeping and sound technology seem to be on my mind lately):

#68: Lucian Freud, Eli

#67: Todd Baxter, Fox on Reel to Reels (toile pattern based on photograph)

#65: Charles Dury, young grizzly cub born in Cincinati Zoo, 1870s

#62: Toadfish, from the Reanimation Library visual archive

All 68, altogether.

gold star for settler colonialist paranoia

2011-06-10T09:58:00.001-04:00

American culture really hurts my brain sometimes. Imagine poor Catherine Jourdan getting this as a reward for her academic labor.

From Princeton Library's collection of Awards of Merits from the 1820s onward - not sure exactly of the date for this one. Less pedagogically twisted examples here.

flipper, we are not in san diego anymore

2011-06-04T23:56:00.001-04:00

Another military animal story: this time a photo essay at Mother Jones. Some of the images are quite surreal. As is the final quote in the caption below. I guess we all have different opinions of what San Diego is like?

"like ghosts, dogs are enigmas"

2011-06-04T22:25:00.002-04:00

I'm posting what I hope will be the first of a few passages from Colin Dayan's engrossing new book The Law is a White Dog (chapter 1 available for download).

Dayan's dogs are quite a different lot from the flak-jacketed K9's that have been in the news of late, or the progressive modern pets that grace the pages of the Bark. In this book we find dogs in the company of slaves, prisoners, and detainees - "extraneous persons" on the precipice between being subjects and being nothing. Here we find canis familiaris outside the ideological safe house of sentimental (or, for that matter, military) domesticity...

Howling through the shadows at Hecate’s crossroads, sitting at Pontius Pilate’s feet, snarling at Jesus crucified, or accompanying the souls of the dead to the other side, dogs inhabit both divine and demonic realms. Like ghosts, dogs are enigmas. So speaks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, haunted by his own thoughts:

Then, suddenly, I heard a dog howl nearby.
Had I ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts raced back. Yes! When I was a child, in my most distant childhood:
—then did I hear a dog howl like this. And I saw it too, bristling, its head up, trembling in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts.

Ghosts like dogs are drawn to the familiar, the everyday, even as they tend toward the paranormal and supernatural. They appear as if somewhere between the real and supernatural, returning as a nightmare white phantom, a silent shade, or heavy with flesh, overripe and in need. In the meeting of the actual and the imaginary, ghosts and dogs bear down on the world of social relations and morality. Dogs and ghosts constantly cross boundaries, visit what they coveted most in life, counting on the heaviness of things to give them pleasure, to make them grieve. Ultimately, no matter how much they suggest the impalpable or transcendent, ghosts always come in bodies. They never obey the command to be wisps of air, some kind of steam, wet in the night or voices on the wind. (pp 15-16)

war animals, finny and furry

2011-05-30T10:41:00.000-04:00

A while ago I started a "military animal" bibliography on Zotero to share with a friend who's also interested in the social and cultural studies of dogs. It's definitely dog-heavy, though crows and camels also put in cameos. Most of the items are news stories from the past few years (lots of Bin Laden commando dog stuff of late). Here are a couple gems I've added recently. The first is more humorous ephemera, the latter, less so.

i. WWII submarine insignia
Via All My Eyes: "Due to the stealth nature of submarines, a logo is not displayed on the vessel itself, but it is printed on stationery, made into jacket patches, mess hall items, and home-port flags."

ii. K-9 Storm
Via Amaki09's Tumblr (click images for direct links). Google K9 Storm for more.

the weirdest people in the world?

2011-05-23T20:44:00.006-04:00

WEIRD as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

I'm so excited about this acronym, I'll readily admit to not having read the source article yet! Here's the abstract by psychologists Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Found via Andrew Goldstone's "Race, Ethnicity, Brains" - which is in turn a response to this really intriguing "fairy tale" on cultural neuroscience by Paula Moya. Goldstone and Moya both teach at Stanford.

* Image: inspired illustration of Henrich, Heine, Norenzayan's research by Only Dead Fish.

paperwork explosion (1967)

2011-05-21T19:56:00.000-04:00

This is one of the most frightening depictions of technology and work life I've ever seen. Even though it's supposed to be selling a new labor-saving office product. For IBM no less. And it's made by Jim Henson. Vertigo-inducing, yes.

I came upon it via this blog post by the media historian Ben Kafka (not sure of relations to Franz - either way how could he not be interested in paperwork??) The film has a frenzied incantatory quality that Kafka captures perfectly here:

The voices continue to explain the various features and benefits of IBM office equipment: cordless dictation, error-free copy, improved typography, increased productivity. “IBM machines can do the work — so that people have time to think — machines should do the work — that’s what they’re best at — people should do the thinking — that’s what they’re best at.” Once again the music accelerates as a series of faces and voices speed across the screen: “Machines should work — people should think — machines — should work — people — should think — machines — should — work — people — should — think.”

Because, god knows, THEY HAVE A PLAN.

fear of a black senate; or, birtherism, 1868

2011-05-19T20:13:00.000-04:00

From Princeton's Graphic Arts blog:

The composite image [racist text not shown - quoted below] documents the implementation of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which redesigned the governing bodies of the southern states after the American Civil War. Not only did African Americans have the right to vote, but also serve within the government. When South Carolina rejoined the Union in 1868, they had the first state legislature with a black majority.

Created to frighten the white population, this image was widely distributed in many sizes and formats. One of our copies includes the text: These are the photographs of 63 members of the reconstructed South Carolina Legislature, 50 of whom are negroes or mulattoes and 13 white. 22 read and write (8 grammatically), the remainder (41) make their mark with the aid of an amanuensis. Nineteen (19) are tax-payers to an aggregate amount of $146.10, the rest (44) pay no taxes, and the body levies on the white people of the State for $4,000.00.

quick notes: deadly dualisms

2011-05-18T23:30:00.000-04:00

Kim TallBear, opening comments at the "Why the Animal? Queer Animalities, Indigenous Naturecultures, and Critical Race Approaches to Animal Studies" symposium (April 12th, 2011):

[The symposium speakers'] critical approaches make the link between dualisms and the relegation of certain humans to the realm of less-than-human, to the realm of the animal. Violence against animals is linked to violence against particular humans who have historically been linked to animality. There are real implications... for who and what gets to live, and who and what gets to die when the human/animal split is made.

being hunted

2011-05-17T23:09:00.005-04:00

{ I }

Val Plumwood, "Being Prey," 1995 (reprinted in the Utne Reader as "Surviving a Crocodile Attack" in 2000)*:

It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices—the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sand flies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria.

This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we cannot imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end.

Before the encounter, it was as if I saw the whole universe as framed by my own narrative, as though the two were joined perfectly and seamlessly together. As my own narrative and the larger story were ripped apart, I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being. The thought, This can't be happening to me, I'm a human being. I am more than just food! was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. Reflection has persuaded me that not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things. I was a vegetarian at the time of my encounter with the crocodile, and remain one today. This is not because I think predation itself is demonic and impure, but because I object to the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.

{ II }

Edouard Duval-Carrié, The Duel

Not being prey is not always a sure thing for humans - not all humans anyway - in Western history. In New World slavery, for example, one can be meat for animals without necessarily being food. Or perhaps the correct word is flesh? Among other hideous things, racism is a system which has historically made some people's flesh subject to animal violence.

{ III }

Dog bite genealogy: more images along this vein I've been collecting over at Tumblr.

- - -

* Plumwood's memorial website has a Word version of this essay, which is how I first read it. But the file ended up crashing my computer - so avoid it!

publish, perish - or phish

2011-05-17T18:16:00.004-04:00

Surprised they didn't ask for your social and bank account number too!

"you're fired"; or, the grotesque cog of power

2011-04-30T12:49:00.002-04:00

Michel Foucault on "grotesque sovereignty" in the West (source):

Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, and has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and, even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous.

This grotesque mechanism of power, or this grotesque cog in the mechanism of power, has a long history in the structures and political functioning of our societies. There are striking examples of it in Roman history, especially in the history of the Roman Empire, where the almost theatrical disqualification of the origin of power in, and the coupling of every effect of power with, the person of the emperor was precisely a mode, if not of governing exactly, at least of domination: a disqualification that ensured that the person who possessed maiestas, that is to say, more power than any other power was, at the same time, in his person, his character, and his physical reality, in his costume, his gestures, his body, his sexuality and his way of life, a despicable, grotesque, and ridiculous individual.

We know that ethnologists... have clearly identified the phenomenon in which the person to whom power is given is at the same time ridiculed or made abject or shown in an unfavorable light, through a number of rites and ceremonies. Is this a case of a ritual for limiting the effects of power in archaic or primitive societies? Perhaps.

However, I would say that if these rituals still exist in our societies, their function is completely different. I do not think that explicitly showing power to be abject, despicable, Ubu-esqu or simply ridiculous is a way of limiting its effects and of magically dethroning the person to whom one gives the crown.

Rather, it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited.

word cloud #2: domestications, multispecies resettlement, barbarians

2011-04-27T22:32:00.001-04:00

Another "words (and ideas) that caught my attention" post, apropos of the "origins of human rule" from entry #1 below. Here are the titles of a set of upcoming lectures at Harvard by the the political anthropologist James Scott:

Four Domestications: Fire, Plants, Animals and… Us

The Late Neolithic Multi-Species Resettlement Camp

The Long Golden Age of Barbarians, a.k.a. Non-State Peoples

Which reminds me, I need to read James Scott!

word cloud #1: human rule, before present

2011-04-27T22:16:00.014-04:00

Almost everyday I come across interesting turns of phrase or figures of thought that make me pause and think: "oh, I should jot this down somewhere." So I'm going to start collecting them here. This will also double as a public bookmarking system since, more often than not, I won't actually have had the chance to study the source of the phrase yet.

My first two entries are from the "Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles since 13,000" mapping project at Hypercities. I don't know enough about either to explain what they are, so I won't fake it. But I do plan to read through the "Ghost Metropolis" materials, a crazy ambitious history of (what we now know as) L.A. In the course of skimming through the first couple screens these phrases wormed their way into my brain:

1. The Origins of Human Rule of Southern California: which, I learned, began "13.1 to 13 thousand calendar years BP" on Santa Rosa, one of the Channel Islands (when you click on the geolocate button you swoop in from an outerspace view of the planet earth to this reedy blue dot on a desolate virtual landscape. It's not so much breath-taking as heart-breaking). But to the point: what struck me is this phrase "human rule." Not (just) "human presence," but "rule." I'm intrigued with the idea of politicizing early human life through a multispecies frame. More on this another time.

2. BP / Before Present: I noticed that the "13,000" in the project title doesn't have "BCE" or the old-fashioned "BC" attached. In the body of the text I came across this curious (and perhaps unfortunate) abbreviation, BP. Trusty wikipedia tells me this means "before present." But evidently this present, among the scientists who use this time scale notation system, is not the present per se - but 1950, the point at which modern carbon-dating methods became standard.
There's a certain shabby beauty in the idea that 1950 somehow constitutes an eternal now (though Wikipedia further informs me that "to account for the concern that the year 1950 has by now moved away from the present significantly, the abbreviation BP has also been re-interpreted to mean Before Physics.") But I wish the idea is as relativistic as the term BP implies. That rather than being a series of fixed points, the past is always relative to the present, always on the move.

micro-cross-blogging: barely verbal

2011-04-23T20:03:00.008-04:00

Maybe it's a nano-addiction that will pass, but I've spent a fair amount of time lately on my tumblr Village Dog. Mostly, I just post pictures there. Here are a few very short bits of writing I've done over yonder (linking to them here because, quaint as it may seem, I think of this as a my writing outpost):

On writer's block (appropriately enough) - inspired by the abstract collages (example below) of Hawaii-born, Chicago-based artist Ray Yoshida, 1930-2009.
On the uncanny liveness of artificial animals in visual art - one on a leopard, one on a giraffe.
And conversely, on the "caught-ness" of real animals on google street view photography, an interesting emerging subgenre.
An explanatory note on "totem animals," a part-serious, part-fluffy series of animal avatars

And finally:

Barely verbal, an image-essay on pictograms, miniatures, and representing the unrepresentable in the post-Katrina world of New Orleans artist Bruce Davenport, Jr.

dialectics of domestication

2011-03-09T08:46:00.000-05:00

An interesting Radiolab piece with evolutionary biologist Brian Hare on Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev's celebrated silver fox domestication experiment. Belyaev's foxes have gotten a fair amount of play in popular media - as a part of the origin story of dogs. (Here's something I'm starting to think about: the canids who make dogs dogs, so that dogs can, as the saying goes, make us human. Another example would be the captive wolves, human-raised or not, who stand in as the foil of dogs in studies of social cognition, for example these by Brian Hare.)

What I found most striking about the RadioLab version of the story: the cartoonish, disturbingly repetitive gun shot sound effects that point up the role of culling in selective breeding (plus, these foxes were raised for fur in the first place...)

Related posts on free-range dogs and undesireable dogs.

Image courtesy of http://www.gmilburn.ca/

Note: I tried posting an earlier version of this on Village Dog, my Tumblr experiment, but had some technical difficulties. It seems to fit better here, anyway.

this week in posthumanism: elfoid v. yaxley

2011-03-05T14:11:00.004-05:00

i. humanoid phone

The Elfoid phone is a miniature version of the Telenoid R1 robot developed last year by a research team led by Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. The current prototype measures 20 centimeters (8 in) long, is covered in a soft fleshy urethane skin, and has the same genderless and ageless appearance as the Telenoid. The control buttons are embedded in the chest, which glows green when the Elfoid is in use...

Equipped with a camera and motion-capture system, the Elfoid phone will be able to watch the user's face and transmit motion data to another Elfoid phone, which can then reproduce the face and head movements in real-time.

(via Pink Tentacle)

ii. cable company "live chat analyst"
(click image for larger version)

eponymous #1

2011-02-28T21:23:00.028-05:00

3/1/11, 1:00am: Totally revised because I was half asleep when wrote this the first and second times.

What's the point of this blog if I don't post anything for months on end? So here are some things I bookmarked (or yes, dogeared) the last couple days, in no particular order:

"When do domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, start to understand human pointing?" (sub. req. - sorry!) There's been a lot of scientific literature - and media attention - on the ability of dogs to comprehend human social gestures, particularly pointing. This study takes a skeptical look at theories that, through the millennia-long process of domestication, dogs have evolved a "human-like" social cognition that's distinct not only from wolves, their closest relatives, but also from chimps, our closest animal kin. To make this point, the authors take a two-pronged approach, questioning the wolf's supposed insensitivity to human social forms on one hand and, on the other, reminding us of dogs who don't quite fit the ideal of the perfectly accommodating Fido, e.g. shelter dogs, ferals, etc. Do we learn more about dogs if we stop assuming they're predisposed, in an evolutionary or even cosmic sense, to be "our" best friends?
"Activists fight plan to deport Moscow's stray dogs": Speaking of dogs who live on the fringe of human society: I first read about Moscow's famous subway-riding dogs in this widely circulated 2010 article. These dogs are going places, at least virtually: they even have their own wikipedia entry. In the analog world, it looks as though they are facing the grim reality of a cull.

Photo by Vladimir Filonov

"Man's Best Friend" and "Peacocks": two sculpture series on animal forms by the artist Laurel Roth, whom I randomly discovered this weekend (how did I not know her work before). The artificial selection of dogs has never seemed... so artificial. Neither have avian courtship and sexual selection.

Laurel Roth, Great Dane, 2008

walnut, gold leaf, swarovski crystal

Mary Gaitskill, "The Other Place": Short story in the New Yorker about a creepy guy who fantasizes about killing women in an incongruously, unsettlingly philosophical voice. Here's a very Gaitskillian sentence that captivated me: "He is interested in crows because he heard on a nature show that they are one of the only species that are more intelligent than they need to be to survive. He does beautiful, precise drawings of crows."

That's it for now. I hope this gets me back in the habit of writing and posting...

tumblr

2011-02-12T00:02:00.000-05:00

Started a tumblr a while ago and didn't really know what to do with it...

sarah palin & the aesthetics of violence

2011-01-09T19:53:00.001-05:00

A startling 2009 portrait of Sarah Palin by painter Daisy Rockwell (aka Lapata), based on this photograph. Rockwell's statement about the work is eerily prescient in light of recent events:
The rasa of violence, featuring Sarah Palin

Himsa means ‘violence’ in Hindi/Sanskrit. These paintings depict the disturbing and fascinating former/future politician and television personality Sarah Palin in poses of violence, one of her preferred rasas. Though it is amusing to see an attractive woman posing with guns or dead animals, we must also remember that her iconography is far more powerful than her less than coherent use of language. For those who adore Palin, it is images such as these that speak louder than words, and her self-presentation as a warrior princess that could have disturbing consequences in the era of the War on Terror.
Other images from the series here. Related: the difference between Sarah Palin and pit bulls.

2011

2011-01-03T11:40:00.000-05:00

Here's to the continued possibility of newness in this crazy world...

lost

2010-09-19T21:38:00.000-04:00

Shuichi Nakano, "Searching for Paradise" - more at my Tumblr outpost and at the always excellent Pink Tentacles

This should be animated...

2010-09-18T17:30:00.002-04:00

From Aristotle's History of Animals, Book IX:

There is enmity between such animals as dwell in the same localities or subsist on the food...

There is enmity also between the owl and the wren; for the latter also devours the owl's eggs. In the daytime all other little birds flutter round the owl-a practice which is popularly termed 'admiring him'-buffet him, and pluck out his feathers; in consequence of this habit, bird-catchers use the owl as a decoy for catching little birds of all kinds.

The so-called presbys or 'old man' is at war with the weasel and the crow, for they prey on her eggs and her brood; and so the turtle-dove with the pyrallis, for they live in the same districts and on the same food; and so with the green wood pecker and the libyus; and so with kite and the raven, for, owing to his having the advantage from stronger talons and more rapid flight the former can steal whatever the latter is holding, so that it is food also that makes enemies of these. In like manner there is war between birds that get their living from the sea, as between the brenthus, the gull, and the harpe; and so between the buzzard on one side and the toad and snake on the other, for the buzzard preys upon the eggs of the two others; and so between the turtle-dove and the chloreus; the chloreus kills the dove, and the crow kills the so-called drummer-bird.

The aegolius, and birds of prey in general, prey upon the calaris, and consequently there is war between it and them; and so is there war between the gecko-lizard and the spider, for the former preys upon the latter; and so between the woodpecker and the heron, for the former preys upon the eggs and brood of the latter. And so between the aegithus and the ass, owing to the fact that the ass, in passing a furze-bush, rubs its sore and itching parts against the prickles; by so doing, and all the more if it brays, it topples the eggs and the brood out of the nest, the young ones tumble out in fright, and the mother-bird, to avenge this wrong, flies at the beast and pecks at his sore places.

It's been a while...

2010-09-18T17:09:00.000-04:00

... because I've been spinning my wheels - or, the wheels have been spinning me.

(Wretched cat!)

state birds

2010-06-05T14:11:00.004-04:00

"Pelican in her piety": the state flag of Louisiana depicts a mother Pelican wounding herself to feed her young with blood

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal speaking to reporters at East Grand Terre Island - with oil-drenched pelican dubbed "The Governor's Bird"

dog links: antiquarian & posthuman

2010-06-04T20:09:00.000-04:00

Two totally disparate recent discoveries:

* The National Sporting Library in Virginia has just opened an exhibit of their canine-relate materials, Lives of Dogs Viewed Through Literature, Art and Ephemera.

* Experimental musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson has composed a 20-minute musical piece for dogs - it will debut at the Sydney Opera House on June 5 for a mixed human and canine audience.

spares no one

2010-05-25T01:29:00.002-04:00

Apropos my recent posts here and on Tumblr on the histories of fish and humans in the Atlantic world, today I came across a grim report from the Louisiana Coast on the ecological, economic, social disaster looming over already fragile African American oystering and shrimping communities:

Ironically, one approach to keeping the oil away could itself finish off the black fishing community here.

State officials have opened Mississippi River diversions, such as the White’s Ditch Siphon, hoping that a strong outward flow of water will keep the oil out of the bayou and marsh where it could persist for decades, and ruin the already brittle wetlands . But emptying that much fresh water into the oyster beds throws off the delicate salinity balance the bivalves need to survive.

When the White’s Ditch Siphon was installed in 1963, it destroyed most of the oyster beds owned by African Americans, said Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oysterman Association. Encalade says he had close to 1,500 acres of oyster beds before the White Ditch intrusion and now has about 200 acres. At peak, blacks owned almost 10,000 acres collectively, but now maybe 1,500, he said.

As this sadly beautiful photo-essay from ColorLines puts it: the oil spill spares no one.

the sea is history

2010-05-19T22:43:00.000-04:00

I have a new Tumblr picture post on the monstrous, predatory fish in British artist J. M. W. Turner's famous 1840 painting The Slave Ship. The task seems daunting and overwhelming, but I wonder if it would make sense to think the histories of Atlantic slavery and Atlantic sea life alongside each other? The waves of transpecies disasters threatening the Gulf of Mexico, from Katrina to the BP oil spill, would seem to demand it.

Image From Greenpeace Flickr stream

free range

2010-05-18T03:46:00.000-04:00

I've been scavenging lately through Indian biologist Sunil Kumar (S. K.) Pal's decade-plus research on free-ranging dogs in Katwa, West Bengal (you'll need institutional subscription to access most of these titles, sorry...) The statistics in these articles frankly hurt my poor little humanist brain a bit - nevertheless I'm learning lots about filiative and affiliative behavior among these hard-scrabble creatures. Maybe I'm delusional, but behind the ='s and %'s I think there's a certain stark poetry in narrative passages like this:

Of all pups (N = 35), only 13 survived to the age of 3 months showing 63% pup mortality. Of all pup deaths (N = 22) recorded in the study, 2 (9%) were due to adverse weather, 5 (23%) from various diseases, 4 (18%) from collisions with automobiles, 2 (9%) from predation by adult dogs, 3 (14%) from malnutrition (interviews with area residents), and 6 (27%) deaths were caused due to removal of pups as pets by the children particularly of the lower-class section.

- "Parental care in free-ranging dogs, Canis familiaris,"
Applied Animal Behaviour Science 90 (2005)

Charles Darwin thought that domesticated species in non-Western, non-industrialized societies were more likely to have to fend for themselves, find their own food in the lean seasons, etc. As such, they were subject to greater pressures of natural selection than their European counterparts, who were shaped primarily by human-orchestrated artificial selection, by "man's wants and fancies." I'm struck by how "natural" and "artificial" dangers commingle in Pal's account of pup death - how dog life is imperiled by human technology (automobiles) and human desire (pet-seeking children) alike.

* image from Are you a Pariah Dog fan?

quality of mercy

2010-05-01T23:03:00.004-04:00

* originally titled "dead dogs" - revised March 20, 2011

Things I've been reading recently, about the precarity of dogs in human society, especially those branded as "vicious," "unadoptable," or plainly, "pit bull":

* "Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, preemptive justice" by Colin (aka Joan) Dayan: in grad school I read some of Dayan's work on race, slavery, and prisons. I also saw her give an amazing talk on "cruel and unusual punishment": still the only time I've heard an academic speaker whisper to mark points of emphasis, in almost mesmeric decrescendos that pull the audience forward, body and all. Then I discovered that she is a dog person via an elegant, unflinching essay simply titled "The Dogs." Part memoir, part philosophy, the essay tracks the liminality of dogs in Judeo-Christian thought through a terrible personal memory: under disorienting circumstances, Dayan had agreed to have her 11-year-old dog Dogie put down for a sudden, mysterious illness, a "good death" she later came to doubt. She's one of a small handful of critics/writers I know who has grappled with the fact of dehumanization under racism - of people being treated "like dogs," "like animals" as a matter of state policy and coordinated race and species violence - while treating animals as well as humans as social beings. [Updated May 2: forgot to note that the "Dead Dogs" article mentions the case of Oreo, the pit bull who survived being thrown from a six-story building only to be diagnosed with terminal aggression by the ASPCA and put to death.]

* Pit Bull Patriarchy: a tough and beautiful blog which explores the life-and-death consequences of breed phobias, co-authored by spotted dog farm (also a photographer - Flickr stream here) and redvelvetfemme. Mulling over SDF's recent post on her "dog bite embroidery" project, it strikes me that maybe pit bull fear is, at bottom, a fear of non-human sociality, of a sociality acted out with bodies that are irreconcilably alien to our own, despite our attempts to make them conform to human desires:

A bite is a most basic form of communication. I mean, dogs don't have hands, or English. What are they trying to say? I've seen dogs bite out of love. Extreme love, and the desire to be close, and to play. My dog bite embroidery is a series of linens that have been "altered" by Kaya, the artist, and then embroidered with phrases that I think she might be feeling while she's shredding my linens. The words are a reminder that dogs want family, a lifelong commitment; they are not bodies to be dumped when mistakes have been made, fear sets in and anger shows its teeth.

pigs, 3 ways

2010-04-25T19:05:00.011-04:00

i. Pig as food pet.

~~~

ii. Pig as pigoons (fictional and non).

~~~

iii. Pig as oracle bones to the human past, pigoons of history:

Tracing the roots of pig domestication may help in tracking past human migrations and cultural development, said study lead author Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Durham in England.

Though they are not the earliest known domesticated species — dogs beat them out for that title — pigs were bred in large enough numbers as a food source to leave plenty of bone remnants to study. Domesticated dogs, in contrast, were so limited in number that it's harder to cull information from the few remains they leave behind, Larson said.

Using animal DNA to study human history is easier for several reasons, Larson said. For one thing, the animals outnumbered their human owners and thus left more bones behind to be analyzed. For another, digging up and testing ancient human DNA is ethically problematic.

"Local cultural groups are not super keen for us grind up the bones [from burial sites] to see what their signatures are," Larson said.

- From "Domesticated Chinese pigs' ancestory goes back at least 8,000 years," Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2010

origin stories

2010-03-27T15:55:00.004-04:00

New York Times: New findings put origins of dogs in Middle East...

The Onion: Yes, but dogs were first turned into surrogate children in the Western Hemisphere during the mid-20th century.

transience

2010-03-27T15:44:00.006-04:00

I. Shanty town in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China
(Source: image / article)

II. Tent city on a golf course in Pétionville, Haiti
(Source: image / article)

dog tree of life

2010-03-18T22:07:00.002-04:00

Why is it a circle? I don't really understand this but I'm mesmerized.

Cross-posted at tumblr (sort of)

skunk & cat

2010-03-03T22:18:00.002-05:00

... sharing a free meal and the suburban ecosystem:

(Screen shot from Is That Skunk?)

russian dogs from Pavlov to now

2010-03-03T21:52:00.006-05:00

It's been months since I've posted anything here! In the interim, it has belatedly dawned on me that Russia is where it's at with dog studies. Duh.

First there's the fascinating case of post-Soviet subway dogs...

(image from English Russia)

... whose increasing detachment from human homes (though not from human-built environments) seems to suggest some kind of cosmic reversal of Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev's Cold-war era silver fox domestication experiment...

(image from Thoughtful Animal)

... Around the same time that Belayev's foxes were being aggressively selected for tameness, Laika was being immortalized (and mortalized) as the first dog in space...

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

... And of course, before Belayev, there was Pavlov and his salivating dogs:

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

... one of whom is seen here at the Pavlov Museum, borg-like with surgical implant - and stuffed.

categories, or, "soul of the new south"

2009-12-10T11:02:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted from my Tumblr image blog Village Dog (such as it is - and where you can see the subtitle of the magazine more clearly). Also see this earlier post on dogs and guns and other accoutrements of Southern history.

cruel death, good death

2009-11-28T15:06:00.004-05:00

"Oreo the Abused Pit Bull is Euthanized," New York Times, November 13, 2009:

Oreo, a dog that was nursed back to health after surviving being thrown off the roof of a six-story building, was killed Friday by lethal injection.

A 2-year-old pit bull, Oreo was euthanized in the New York City headquarters of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals after the organization rebuffed last-minute pleas to spare her life. The organization called the dog a danger to the public.

On Friday morning, Oreo received a last meal of “premium quality” kibble and canned dog food. She was then given a sedative, though she appeared “content, alert and panting,” according to an organization spokesman. Oreo was injected in the leg with an overdose of sodium pentobarbital and was pronounced dead shortly after 3 p.m.

Oreo broke two legs in the fall. News reports of the incident, accompanied by photos of the brown and white dog with her front legs in casts, triggered a flood of adoption offers and financial donations to help pay for the medical care.

However, as Oreo recuperated from her injuries under the care of the A.S.P.C.A., she was increasingly viewed as a danger — difficult to control and “unpredictably aggressive,” according to an organization spokesman.

News of Oreo’s death provoked angry reactions among supporters who had been frantically lobbying the A.S.P.C.A. to delay the euthanasia and allow time to negotiate a deal to transfer Oreo to an animal sanctuary in the Hudson Valley.

Oreo’s case came to public attention in June, when her owner, Fabian Henderson, threw her off the roof of his apartment building at the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn. Mr. Henderson was convicted of animal cruelty and was scheduled to be sentenced in December.

[ . . . ]

The A.S.P.C.A. rejected [pleas to delay the euthanasia], citing the evaluation of staff members and an outside veterinary behaviorist who said that Oreo could not be rehabilitated. “Animal cruelty isn’t pretty and doesn’t always have a happy ending,” said the society’s president and chief executive, Ed Sayres. “It is ugly and sad and, ultimately, tragic.”

Seven staff members were present during the euthanasia procedure. But the dog’s former owner, Mr. Henderson, was not on hand to witness his pet’s final moments.

* * *

A curious mixed-up creature Oreo was. A pit, a pet. Aggressive, abused. Nursed back to health. Put back to death. Content and alert, ugly and sad. Panting. White on the inside.

* Revised Dec 2, 2009

how the other half lives

2009-09-19T14:22:00.006-04:00

Two snapshots of dogs in Southern social history courtesy of my hometown public library's North Carolina Collection:

Industrialist and early Duke University trustee Julian S. Carr with goat cart, children, dog, and African American servants in fore- and background (ca 1920's, likely at Carr family's Occoneechee Farm)

Five African American women and girls - and photo-crashing dog - in Brookstown area of Durham (ca. 1940)

See full citations here and here; information about Occoneechee Farm and Brookstown courtesy of the superb local history/geography blog Endangered Durham.

ghost dog

2009-09-03T21:53:00.002-04:00

Sniff from karolina sobecka on Vimeo.

Sobecka calls Sniff an "interactive public projection." In her artist's statement, she asks the viewer/reader to imagine an urban interspecies encounter:

As you walk down the street you are approached by a dog. He cautiously and curiously sniffs you as he gets closer. He is on his guard trying to discern your intentions. He will follow you as you walk on and interpret your gestures as friendly or aggressive. He will try to engage you and get you to pay attention to him... As the viewer walks by the projection, her movements are tracked by a custom computer vision system. A CG dog comes up in the projection and sniffs her, following her as she moves in front of the display.

What's being narrated here is a multisensory meet-and-greet between two free-roaming agents - something which is happening less and less, I think, in our leash-lawed, obedience-trained streetscapes. Indeed, as the piece is actually staged, Sniff is not loose on the sidewalk but trapped behind a window. Despite his name, he can follow you but never actually sniff you. The "interaction" here ends up being decidedly one-sided: with Sniff always pacing, jumping, reacting, beseeching.

When I posted this on facebook my friend Paul commented: "shelter dog behavior." In his perceptive reading, Sniff is a projection not so much of dog-human social reciprocity as its opposite.

dogs of mississippi, 2009

2009-08-30T15:32:00.007-04:00

* Also see dogs of mississippi, 1947

From "A World Away, Close to Family," a New York Times piece on African American city kids who spend their summers with relatives in the South (story by Robbie Brown, photos by James Patterson):

The sight of a menacing dog outside her Brooklyn apartment would send Amya CaJoie Stewart skittering inside for safety. But not the Rottweiler that prowled the gravel road at her aunt’s house in this sun-cooked rural town. In a flash of bravado, the prim 10-year-old lured the dog with a dish of water, lashed it to a post and named it Sam.

“That’s what you do in Mississippi,” Amya explained. “You tie the dogs in your yard.”

* * *

The matriarch of the family, Estella Mae Oaties, 81, supervises Amya during the day. Behind her house, she keeps several dogs as pets, and it is Amya's job to feed and water them. When she grows up, Amya says, she might want to become a veterinarian.

dogs of mississippi, 1947

2009-08-30T15:31:00.001-04:00

* Also see dogs of mississippi, 2009

William Faulkner and his fyces (photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson, courtesy of Iconic Photos)

more eyes that have looked at jim crow

2009-08-02T16:44:00.000-04:00

Just looked again at the photographs in my previous post about the early-20th century African American photographer Michael Francis Blake - was struck, suddenly, by the strange elision of dogs in that post. When I talked about the "eyes that have looked at Jim Crow," I was implicitly talking only of the eyes of the human beings in the pictures. Is it nonsensical to think of the dogs as also having witnessed segregation? To ask what racism among humans look like to dog - or perhaps, more apropos, what it smelt and felt like?

seeing nature at monterey bay aquarium II

2009-07-16T19:59:00.002-04:00

Everything is illuminated...

seeing nature at monterey bay aquarium

2009-07-16T19:02:00.012-04:00

eyes that have looked at jim crow

2009-06-16T20:26:00.016-04:00

In the timeless traditions of the internet, I stumbled upon a wonderful digital collection of early 20th-century African American photography at the august institution where I work (see credits below - also see this related post on historical photos of Chinese dogs). The website doesn't provide too much information about the photographer, Michael Francis Blake - only that he opened ~~the first~~ one of the first black photo studios in Charleston, South Carolina. Which, of course, is saying quite bit. {Corrected & updated: 1:12am, June 17, 2009}

I was delighted to see that two of the ~170 photos in the collection feature dogs. I love the shadow of the photographer (?) in this one:

The vast majority of the images of the collection are posed portraits, studio or outdoors. Without exception, Blake's clients were impeccably dressed for the occasion. This is a beautiful image that makes me almost want to cry: the elegance of the women, the sweet openness of the boy's face, the alertness of the little dog.

In these images, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, we are looking at eyes that have looked at Jim Crow. Or, in the case of the unidentified woman below, stared back and perhap even glared at it at choice moments. This is my favorite dogless photo in the lot. I just love the tilting of the chair, the insousiance of the gesture.

Image credits (from top): "snapshot, dog lying down, unidentified," "Seated elderly woman holding a small dog, standing child and two standing women, unidentified," "Standing woman outdoors, unidentified" from Michael Francis Blake Photographs, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

dogs & the plantation order(s) of things

2009-05-14T15:19:00.012-04:00

{ I }

Dog and Gun; A Few Loose Chapters on Shooting

- Title of 1856 book by Johnson Jones Hooper, Alabama writer known for his humorous sketches of frontier life in the swamps and forests of the Old Southwest (i.e. inland Deep South of AL, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc.)

{ II }

"Field sports provided [antebellum white planter-class] men an identity based on their demonstrated expertise with horses, dogs, guns, and slaves."

- from Stuart Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White, 1991

{ III }

"Slavery's roots as a form of captivity... entailed the strictest control of the physical and social mobility of enslaved people, as some of the institution's most resonant accouterments - shackles, chains, passes, slave patrols, and hounds - suggest."

- from Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, 2004

{ IV }

"[To an enslaved person newly sold to the deep South] the whole world must have seemed to throb with slavery - with the shouts of owners railing about distinctions that only they could understand; with the hushed and hurried advice of slaves who had already survived their "seasoning"; with the quick hiss of the lash and the low baying of hounds that marked the boundaries of the permissable; with loneliness, uncertainty, and fear.

- from Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market, 2001

dog cartography

2009-05-08T17:46:00.008-04:00

My love of dogs and love of maps converged in a Dog Whisperer episode I caught this afternoon (apologies for the iPhone/TiVo freeze frame photography):

Cesar's client in this episode is dog-phobic dad Ernesto - a hulking Mr. Clean look-alike - who desperately wants to overcome his traumatic memories of a childhood dog attack, so that his kids can get a family pooch. In the middle of the episode, Cesar breaks out this dog energy map, wherein his "team" has detailed the location and energy level (High, Medium, Low) of every dog in Ernesto's neighborhood. So if he's not feeling sufficiently "assertive" one day, he can simply chart a course avoiding the high-strung big dogs, etc.

Millan's dominance-based method of dog-training has been criticized, rightfully so, by progressive trainers and behavioral scientists. This 2006 article in the San Francisco Chronicle lays out the arguments nicely. But behind or alongside the whole macho "leadership" claptrap, there also seems to be something incongruously - or may be charlatanically? - new age about his approach. I mean, energy map? (I also suspect there's more interspecies subtlety and give-and-take in his actual techniques than he lets on - but that's an admittedly unscientific observation.)

In any case, this amusing detail of Millan's map pretty much describes the energy-scape of my household:

find of the day

2009-05-08T14:13:00.006-04:00

Funny-looking (and inaccurate) illustration for a talking (not reading) dog story in the Nov/Dec 1831 issue of Juvenile Miscellany, a children's lit magazine edited by the trail-blazing feminist abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child.

skunk in headlights

2009-04-26T11:54:00.004-04:00

Outside Locopops on Hillsborough Road, Durham, NC

back to the land of horrible dogs

2009-04-19T11:31:00.016-04:00

A friend and fellow dog/dog studies person alerted me to Sara E. Johnson's disturbing article in the latest issue of American Quarterly, on the widespread use of dogs in slave repression/anti-maroon warfare across the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries, from Cuba to Haiti to Jamaica to the United States. The illustration here, depicting the goading and training of slave-hunting hounds, is from the English sea captain Marcus Rainsford's 1805 An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, one of Johnson's main sources. (Access to the full article is limited to institutional subscribers, unfortunately.)

I approached the article as a way of jump-starting my own on-going project on dog-human relations in the shadow of slavery. And what a jolt it was! I'm not a newbie to the general span of historical materials Johnson examines (see, for example, this study by John Campbell for comparison). But you just don't get desensitized to eye-witness accounts of dogs disemboweling human beings. Especially when you live with dogs.

Johnson gestures towards this deep cognitive and affective dissonance when she writes near the end:

… during the recent media frenzy surrounding NFL player Michael Vick and his dog-fighting ring, public outrage was palpable concerning the vicious, inhumane treatment of animals bred to fight and kill one another for their owners' profit. It is almost impossible for a contemporary audience to imagine that dogs were once similarly and purposefully abused in order to train them to attack human beings, all in the name of maintaining the slave economies that were the foundation of modern capitalism in the Americas.

I find myself simultaneously objecting to this polarized framing of the history of dogs and racial slavery – that history is more complicated, as histories are wont to be, and as I’ve blogged about here, here, here - and appreciating its starkness and provocation. As someone who’s interested intellectually and personally in multispecies co-flourishing a la Donna Haraway, I feel more responsible than ever to do the most rigorous scholarship possible on alternative forms of sociality that enslaved people forged with the dogs that lived alongside them – alternatives not only to the extreme terror cultivated by slave regimes, but also the culture of sentimental pet-keeping that we inherited from the Victorian age.

I presented some of my preliminary findings and thoughts in the "Canine America" panel at the American Studies Association last October. I’m still revising the thing, but this paragraph - which follows a section that looks at the highly conventionalized representations of slave-hunts that circulated in the Abolitionist press in the US pre-Civil War, specifically those in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is - kind of gives a snapshot of where I’m at on this issue:

But the fugitives in the stories told by Weld’s informants are as much stick figures as the dogs: defenseless in the face of an implacable animal malevolence, they are utterly without power, agency, or the interspecies resource to deal with dogs. Accounts of “slave hunts” told by ex-slaves complicate such views of dogs as well as views of slaves. Interspersed among harrowing tales of failed escapes are many stories of failed pursuits. People describe throwing dogs off their scent by, for example, treating their shoes with various pungent substances, from peppers and herbs to dirt from freshly-dug graves.* Some fugitives are overtaken but manage to elude capture by misdirecting the dogs to keep chasing [e.g. here and here]. One WPA informant claims to know a fugitive who succeeded in “making friends” with the dogs sent to hunt him down, even traveling all the way up north with the dogs in tow [see page 2 of this narrative]. These modest tales of tricksterism give us glimpses into vernacular knowledge about dogs in slave communities – and, strikingly to me, the specific interplay of fear and familiarity that seems to animate this knowledge. In these stories, knowledge of how to interact with dogs, even to play with them, is inseparable from the knowledge of how to guard against them.

* Here I drew from both contemporary/antebellum and postbellum sources - will gather up some of these for a future post.

baboons

2009-04-18T18:12:00.006-04:00

An image from A Journey around My Skull, a wonderful blog on illustrated books I recently discovered via twitter. More where this came from...

dog as social media?

2009-04-04T22:01:00.008-04:00

My stamp-collecting father wanted to visit the National Postal Museum while we were in DC last weekend, so we went! (By the way I would recommend the place for kids - and for kidlike adults.) For some strange reason, though I often feel like my life depends on e-mail, facebook, and now (maybe) twitter, I haven't thought much about - or have simply forgotten - the social and affective dimensions of good old regular mail.

Affect and sociality are very much front and center at the museum. The poem engraved above the entrance makes it pretty unmistakable:

Messenger of Sympathy and Love
Servant of Parted Friends
Consoler of the Lonely
Bond of the Scattered Family
Enlarger of the Common Life

* Evidently this is only half the poem - the rest is here

So, the mail is like... dogs? Indeed dogs are everywhere in the museum: from the various incarnations of Owney the official USPS mascot (in bronze, in kid's books, as stuffed animal, and just plain stuffed!) to canine figurines in a cute postal diorama. I don't have anything smart or interesting to say about this curious conjuncture of mail and dogs, but will keep thinking about it. In the meantime, some images that caught my eye:

animal - technology

2009-03-29T14:06:00.010-04:00

I happened to be looking through the comics artist Anders Nilsen's blog (as compensation for not having read nearly enough of his print work), and came upon this eerie and beautiful image by his friend and collaborator Todd Baxter:

The encounter Baxter stages here - between the curious, gently nudging tapirs and the somewhat ridiculous shipwrecked astronauts, lumbering around with their age-of-plastic milk crate - reminded me of the recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, where space-age humans also find themselves, unexpectedly, in the midst of wild animals. But of course, I mean "reminder" only in the sense that Baxter's diorama is an elegant counter-example to the absurdly unreconstructed, colonial safari vision that BSG foisted upon us.

Here's another image I found on Baxter's own website:

Revised March 29, 2009, 2:21pm EST.

they have a plan

2009-03-29T13:04:00.007-04:00

In its series finale, Battlestar Galactica revealed itself to be Journey of Man...

... and Out of Africa:

Here I thought the final season of BSG would be about letting go of old illusions - nationalist, civilizationalist, humanist - and about the difficult but necessary work of building a new society - one that would be human, cylon, hybrids thereof - from the rubble of mutual all-out war. Up until the end I thought the show was sticking to its guns: with the almost socialist-realist backdrop of 6's and 8's calking Galactica together with cylon resin; with the restructuring of political representation from the 12 colonies to the ships in the fleet, which also means the inclusion of cylons in the political process; with Adama ordering an altruistic mission to rescue the Pearl-like cylon-human child Hera from the bad (ethnic-absolutist) cylons. But no!

poodle ESP

2009-03-26T02:06:00.007-04:00

An irresistible photo: from the archives of Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, now Rhine Research Center, subject of an interesting-sounding recent book.

RIP John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

2009-03-25T21:11:00.015-04:00

Duke has a nicely put-together memorial site that documents Dr. Franklin's life and work. The photo here is by Derek Anderson, from this 2007 Independent Weekly article.

Updated with water-marked image 3/29/09

random dog kitsch

2009-03-24T16:15:00.008-04:00

$12.50 bobbleheads on display at the Mark Jacobson Toyota dealership in Durham (proceeds to go to the local Animal Protection Society).

sad animals

2009-03-21T16:55:00.004-04:00

Adam Meuse, author of the wrily absurdist Sad Animals, is doing a signing at Chapel Hill Comics today. Besides the self-castigating sea horse below, some of my favorite panels feature a jelly fish thinking, "I think too much" and a tiny caterpillar, dangling from a tree, wondering if it's "living a lie."

dogs & public sentiment

2009-03-09T14:55:00.008-04:00

Seen at a Durham restaurant, homemade flyers from the Coalition to Unchain Dogs (subject of this earlier blog entry):

ghost cheetah

2009-02-26T17:58:00.004-05:00

moth, ghost

2009-02-14T17:13:00.009-05:00

When I was a kid I had a deathly fear of moths. I had seen an episode of a Twilight Zone-type horror TV serial in Hong Kong, in which a moth, possessed by the vengeful ghost of a murder victim, haunted its/her murderer. I have no memory of how the haunting worked in the plot - especially given the physical limitations of the lepidoptera. All I remember is a backlit close up of a moth at rest with folded, mottled wings, and an eerie female voice-over intoning... something.

Perhaps I don't even really remember that. But for years I hung onto a vague but tenacious belief that moths were so many human spirits in insect form, flitting through the night or, worse, perched silently on one's bedroom walls, nursing some unreadable, malevolent intent.

Also in the flying ghost category: ghost pigeons.

president dog

2009-02-08T17:04:00.004-05:00

From the flickr photostream of the comic artist and illustrator Andrice Arp.

in the spirit of the inauguration

2009-01-17T22:25:00.010-05:00

Courtesy of the hubster, a bit of fun with Paste Magazine's obamacon generator.

dogs of tongli

2008-12-31T18:28:00.009-05:00

A few random pictures of dogs we encountered in Tongli, an old canal town outside Suzhou that's been turned into a "living museum" type tourist site. A large banner at the entrance to the city announces itself as one of Ten Most Glamorous (有魅力) Places in China - a rather weird bit of over-exertion that doesn't really jive with the groggy, half-heartedly kitschy feel of the town.

Here's a stray hanging out in front of a tourist shop:

This dog belongs to a shopkeeper who sells cakes and sweets:

A portly little guy on his late morning stroll, keeping clear of us:

sounds of shanghai

2008-12-19T22:27:00.006-05:00

Circa 4:00 am, dogs snarling near Nanjing Dong Lu.* Reminds me of my crazy dogs back in the states, safely - but may be not too happily - sheltered in the kennel.

* Link added Dec 31, 2008: serendipitous flickr find, not my pics!

goat, monkey, dog

2008-12-11T20:28:00.002-05:00

A happy find from a google image search loosely inspired by the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn's 2007 essay "How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Nature and the Politics of Interspecies Engagement":

Kohn's elegant and brilliant article is about conceptions of animal sentience among the Runa people of Ecuadorian Amazon, especially Runa beliefs in the profound, intricately textured awareness that different non-human species - for example, dogs and pumas, dogs and agoutis - have of each other. The article abstract is here. I think I searched for "dog" and "Ecuadorian Amazon" and this photo came up.

dogs & chains

2008-12-09T22:33:00.003-05:00

I have wanted for some time to learn more about the Coalition to Unchain Dogs, a local animal welfare non-profit that I still only know through their website and this Independent Weekly article.* In their own words, the group has a "three-tiered mission":

1. Raise money and build fences for chained dogs in the community

2. Provide support to and educate the community as to why chaining is cruel and dangerous and raise awareness of the physical, mental and emotional needs of dogs

3. Advocate for the passing of laws that disallow or severely restrict the chaining of dogs

Not unlike earlier humane movements in US and British history, the organization targets a practice that's disproportionately associated with working class people - which, here in Durham, also means people of color. What's interesting about the Coalition's approach is its emphasis on community outreach/support along with advocacy and education. Watching the YouTube testimonial below - and others like it on the group's website - I was struck by how clearly dog-chaining is presented as an economic issue, not just a moral or, worse, "cultural" one. As the dog owner in this video tells the interviewer (and us, the audience), people don't chain up their dogs because they are indifferent to animal well-being, but often because they can't afford to fence in their yard or provide other kinds of outdoor activities.

It's interesting to contrast this mini-documentary with the Animal Cops reality show franchise on Animal Planet. Hydra-headed in the manner of CSI, the show has set up "precincts" in seven US cities: I've seen Animal Cops: Detroit, Animal Cops: Houston, and Animal Cops: Miami, but evidently there are shows based in New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and San Francisco as well. Having watched around 12-15 episodes in the series, my impression is that the you get a lot of graphic scenes of neglect and cruelty in urban neighborhoods, with very little context. The cop's-eye-view approach means that the pet owners who make it on screen are either criminal or abject or very often both. To me the Coalition's work - in the community as well as on the web - strikes a really heartening counterpoint.

* I have a very personal interest in the issue of chaining. About ten years ago we found one of our dogs Marley - the yellow one in these pictures - roaming the streets, bone thin, dragging a chain and combo lock. In a fit of Victoriana, Gary named him after Jacob Marley, whose ghost lumbers to a visitation with his old business partner Ebenezer Scrooge with a heavy iron chain "clasped about his middle... wound around him like a tail." (So no, despite his part-yellow lab phenotype, he's not named after that Marley.) To this day our Marley has fear aggression issues that may (or may not) be related to being tethered at some crucial developmental stage.

"ghost pigeons"

2008-12-07T21:04:00.007-05:00

Eerie. From Notes from the Technology Underground, via Boing Boing.

the zodiac according to sarah palin

2008-11-23T10:33:00.005-05:00

December 25 - February 28
MOOSE: This holiday season: dress to kill!

February 29
PIG: Don't forget the lipstick!

March 1 - April 1
WOLF: Put your best foot forward.

April 2 - October 30
POLAR BEAR: Your dazzling personality will melt their hearts.

October 31 - November 26
PIT BULL: See PIG - and WOLF, too

November 27 - December 25
TURKEY: All is forgiven!

first dog material?

2008-11-08T12:25:00.008-05:00

President-elect Obama, I submit for your consideration, two mutts from the newly blue state of North Carolina:

puppies for obama (or, a puppy for the obamas)

2008-11-05T20:33:00.010-05:00

For some reason I had pictured the Obamas as cat people. But according to our President-elect's speech in Chicago last night, the first kids will be moving into the White House with a puppy.

I hope they choose a pit bull. It would be a nice bit of poetic justice!

Another thought: Without the lipstick, please.

sunday renee french

2008-11-02T08:41:00.004-05:00

Not sure if this is a dog or, maybe, a mouse? See more images here.

uncanny monkeys

2008-10-27T22:41:00.004-04:00

Chalk this up as yet another entry in the prolific "bizarro Japan" genre of western reportage (this story comes from the British network ITN). If a small-town pub somewhere in England had "employed" a couple monkey waiters, it would probably be seen as a mark of the proprietor's eccentricity (endearing or creepy, depending). But this being Japan, it becomes yet more "proof" of the irreducible weirdness of Japanese people in general.

I have to say these macaques walking around in people's clothes, fetching people beer for edamame, are cute at first sight - but then the whole thing starts to feel a little funny, and not necessarily in a haha way... It reminds me of the concept of "uncanny valley," which the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined to describe the sense of unease - of "negative famliarity" - that humans feel towards robots as they become more and more human-like, maybe too human-like.

race, class, & dogs

2008-10-01T23:18:00.003-04:00

As part of my research on human-animal relationship in the social world of American slaves, I've read way more accounts of "slave hunts" - of dogs tracking down, treeing, sometimes attacking and mutilating human beings - than is good for my psychic health as an anti-racist dog person. But the most disturbing of all the versions I've encountered so far is actually a "comic" one written, no less, by someone with keen interest in animals.

Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815-1878) is best known today for his "Old Southwest" humor writings, particularly "The Big Bear of Arkansas," a minor masterpiece of backwoods myth-making that gets included in quite a few American Literature anthologies. In 1854, he published a purportedly "reformist" novel about slavery under the pen name Logan (selected chapters are supposed to be available here - though the site doesn't seem to be working). The fact that this response to Uncle Tom's Cabin is called The Master's House should tell you quite a bit. The "master" in Thorpe's title is Graham Mildmay, a Northern-educated and, as his ridiculous surname telegraphs, politically moderate Louisiana planter with a cute New England wife, "happy slaves," adoring animals, etc. Mildmay is not much of a protagonist, and much of the novel is taken up with subplots involving the lower class whites in his orbit - slave traders, slave catchers, overseers, backwater colonels, riffraff with names like "Toadvine." The basic premise of the novel is that unpropertied whites have made slavery unsustainable. Their lazy, vicious, and corrupt life style offends the sensibility of their genteel neighbors and, more importantly, endangers these neighbors' property, i.e. their slaves. Appropriately, the pivotal event in the book is the accidental killing of a slave by an inept, drunken overseer, who is later acquitted by a jury of his socio-economic peers, over the impotent objection of Mildmay and his planter friends.

In the "funny slave hunt" episode, the slave-catcher Stubbs, on the prowl for a local runaway, crosses path with a young aspirant in the business. The older man launches into an extended meta-tale of Duckeye and Blass, two slave-hunters and their respective dog packs, who also run smack into each other while trailing an escaped slave. The dogs got to the fugitive at about the same time:

The row was tremendous, and they would have sent the [slave] to kingdom cum, if the dogs, being strangers, had not got to fighting among themselves... While the dogs was going it among themselves, and the [runaway] was crying and yelling, old Duckeye and Blass got to quarrelling about who [made the catch]... so they got to swearing and scrimmaging, and tucking into each other their bowies, and yelling and cursing, the dogs fell on 'em both, and such a row ensued as never was afore.

In the commotion, the fugitive slipped away. Blass was stabbed and killed. In a turn that anticipates the trial in the novel's main frame, Duckeye got away with murder, since "it was agin the law to use the dogs and the [blacks] to swar again a white man in court." Again, typical of the novel's ideological sleight-of-hand, Thorpe takes an iconic image of racial sadism and turns it into an occasion to ridicule lower-class whites. The runaway avoids getting caught here, but he is also divested of any substance and humanity.

A couple other things worth noting here: unlike the dog in the illustration above, trotting neatly by its master's side, Duckeye and Blass's hounds are undisciplined loose cannons. Just like their fractious owners, they lose focus on their human quarry as soon as other dogs come into the picture. Belief in the social and moral isomorphism of dogs and their humans - e.g. that dogs of poor people also lack "class," etc. - is quite typical of planter class worldview, as the hunting scholar/historian Stuart Marks has shown. The mark of an antebellum gentleman hunter is a well-bred pointer or setter, a dog who moves - and stays still - with choreographic precision.

If they don't fit Thorpe's idea of a proper dog, Blass and Duckeye's packs are also rather different from the terrifying bloodhounds in abolitionist literature. Those dogs, too, carry out their master's command with perfect obedience, almost mechanistic accuracy. There is much more to say about how abolitionists imagine/represent dogs and the slave system. But for now, here's an incomplete thought: planter class advocates/apologists think that dogs ought to be perfect servants. Abolitionists think that dogs - at least the only dogs that matter in their understanding of slavery - are perfect servants, though dedicated to the wrong masters. This tells me that unpredictable, "doggy" dogs might pose a problem for the political ethology of both groups.

the difference between sarah palin and michael vick

2008-09-28T03:17:00.006-04:00

It seems cruel to pile on Sarah Palin now, post-Couric interview and what not. But Chris Rock does a good bit here (about 3:16 into the clip) on Sarah Palin's moose-killing vs. and Michael Vick's dog-killing:

He doesn't bring up the pit bull with lipstick line, but it's pretty clearly in the subtext/context. He does a similar bit in his interview with Larry King (1:46 in), in which he plays off King's racial cluelessness to pretty hilarious effects.

cuteness relief

2008-09-23T23:38:00.005-04:00

Custom wool "portraitures" from AmeliaMakesArt. More where this came from on the blog Cute Overload! [Original exclamation!]

slaves as animals, animals as animals

2008-09-21T12:49:00.022-04:00

It might seem counter-intuitive to ask how African Americans related to non-human animals in slavery times. To some this question might sound trivial, perversely obtuse even, given everything else slaves, as well as free people of color, had to contend with. Then there's the pervasive, persistent animalization of blacks in Western racial discourse and practice. The literary and cultural critic Jennifer Mason, who has written a really interesting book on the cultural and literary effects of the US animal welfare movement, sums up the problem this way:

... arguments about blacks’ affinities with or status as animals were used to justify their enslavement before the Civil War as well as the denial of their civil and political rights after it. Consequently nineteenth- century black writers necessarily took up the task of opposing Western civilization’s long history of categorizing people of African descent as subhuman animals – a task that would seem... to entail distancing African Americans from the animal world in order to establish their status as full members of the human race.

The ideological deck does seem to be stacked that way in antebellum anti-slavery literature, by black and white writers alike. Mason quotes a famous example from Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography:

We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination.

Mason rightly points out that the language and logic of this passage are steeped through and through in the ideology of "Great Chain of Being." It derives its moral force from the belief that human beings are superior to mere "brute creation." The post-humanist in me twinges a bit when I read a passage like this: not so much because it assumes human superiority, actually, but because the animals here are so... clean. So disembodied. Following Donna Haraway's dictum that animals are "not here just to think with," but "here to live with" - you would have to say that Douglass's horses, sheep, and swine are decidedly of the first, "just to think with" species.

One thing I've started to notice in my recent readings are the rhetorical animals that have clearly consorted with creatures who were "there to live with." Consider these examples:

From Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (1837), after an escape attempt by Ball was foiled by slave-catchers: "They then bound me with cords, and dragged me by the feet back to the house, and threw me into the kitchen, like a dead dog."

From an 1840 account of the experience of James Curry, born a slave in North Carolina, published in the Liberator, describing the vicious and fatal whipping of a slave on a neighboring plantation: "His flesh, at length, would draw and quiver all over his body, like newly killed beef, and finally it appeared as though it was dead. The poor creature was all the time shrieking, and begging, and pleading for mercy; but it had no more effect upon them than would the squealing of a hog they had been killing."

From an 1852 interview with the escaped slave James Smith in the Voice of the Fugitive, conducted by the well-known fugitive-turned-abolitionist Henry Bibb, again after Smith had been beaten after an unsuccessful attempt to run away: “The next morning about 9 o'clock when he awoke from this half dead state, bathed in blood, he found himself bound with strong cords, lying in a horse cart (like a slaughtered hog)”**

Like a dead dog, like a slaughtered hog, like newly killed beef: these are raw, pungent figures that don't point to some rarefied universal order or neatly graduated "scales" of being. Rather they give us glimpses into a world in which slaves lived alongside - and died with - animals under the most unsentimental circumstances possible. What's striking, too, is that these analogies don't just show us how humans are treated as animals in slavery, but also how animals are themselves treated like animals. How they are made killable, disposable, their carcasses thrown with impunity into the death pits of history. (Hat tips, as they say in blogospherese, to Haraway again, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben.)

** I first learned of Ball and Smith's narratives from the historian John Campbell, whom I've cited a couple times in this blog and whose two articles (that I know of) on dogs and slavery have been indispensable sources. Both Ball and Smith had dogs who figured prominently in their life under and away from slavery, which I hope to blog about soon. Smith's story has apparently been turned into a children's book.

two cat skins and a whipping

2008-09-14T13:20:00.011-04:00

For the last few months, I have been working on and off on a new research project on humans and non-humans in the social world of antebellum American slavery. Specifically, I'm interested in how enslaved people lived with, thought of, felt about animals. Now as in slavery times, it's common sense that slaves were treated like animals. But I'm interested in pushing that common sense a bit, and asking how such a thing happened in a world filled with actual non-human animals - cows and sheep that the enslaved tended as part of their daily labor, hogs and chickens that their masters sometimes let them raise, horses and oxen they drove, dogs they hunted with, dogs that hunted them.

So I've been collecting bits and pieces of this vast but largely overlooked realm of historical experience. The first ever post on this blog - which has since strayed off in various directions - was actually about a South Carolina slave and his dog, a mysterious and poignant episode unearthed by the historian John Campbell.

Last week I tried my unpracticed hand at some archival research, and turned up this odd fragment from the papers of a Georgia tannery owner named Elbert Baynes. Some context first: it seems that Baynes's customers generally procured their own animal skins and sent them to him for tanning and shoe-making. His papers included a number of paper scraps from customers, detailing what types of hides they sent, how many, what was to be done with them. This one was dated October 3, 1863,* from a certain Mr. William Roby:

All well, I send you by the boy Reuben one beef hide and 4 goat skins and 2 cat skins. Send Reuben back rite away whip him if dont start Tell Mr. Cofer to be sure to mark and book thes hids to recollect I have lost 2 hid by carelessness. (One big sic for original spelling errors)

Here we have a glimpse of a cat-skinning slave-owner who also appeared to have been a dickering, if not bullying, customer (Baynes's records showed that he owed Roby money). But then there is the faint but strangely luminous figure of "the boy" Reuben: skins in hand, himself threatened with whipping, likely by cowhide. How was he like or not like the "2 hid lost by carelessness" to his master - in this claustrophobic economy of hides, human and non-human?

What were these skins to him - and the animals they were before? Perhaps he also tended this cow and these goats. Perhaps there was no love lost between him and the cats. My very modest point here is that, whatever his feelings, they were a meaningful part of his existence, of his experience of being human on the edge of humanity.

* Quick follow-up (9/25/09): The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. By law, Reuben should have been free at this point - though in practice, this clearly was not the case.

when pigs and pit bulls write political speeches

2008-09-14T12:32:00.012-04:00

In his preface to Frederick Douglass's watershed 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips famously begins:

You remember the old fable of "The Man and the Lion," where the lion complained that he should not be so misrepresented "when the lions wrote history."
I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history."

Let's give Phillips's animal metaphor a literal twist, and apply it to our own historical moment: what might pigs and pitbulls say about lipsticked humans who use animals as political trophies if they made campaign speeches?

the difference between sarah palin and pit bulls

2008-09-05T21:26:00.025-04:00

What is it with Sarah Palin and animals?

For the sake of my blood pressure, I skipped Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night (yeah, I know, so "me first, country second"). When I came across a reference the following morning to that line about hockey moms, pit bulls, and lipstick, I thought for sure that it was something out of the Colbert Report. It had to be... right???

My incredulity was partly a reaction to the odious gender posturing (I guess she's both more butch and more femme than the rest of us). But part of it was plain cognitive dissonance. The last time I checked the American cultural imagination, the pit bull is the quintessential "gangsta" dog - i.e. violent, criminal, underclass, hypermasculine, and, above all, black. When the story of former NFL star Michael Vick's dog-fighting arrest broke in 2007, the media was awash in breathless insta-reports on pit bulls and black subcultures, as well as lots of poorly framed, zero-sum discussions of racism "versus" animal cruelty, civil rights "versus" animal rights. The feminist and animal ethics scholar Kathy Rudy has a good op-ed piece that addresses the problems with these facile dichotomies.

The dogs in the Vick case were very lucky in that they were seen as traumatized victims from the outset and ultimately granted a reprieve from group execution. (Coincidentally, Palin's pit bull quip comes just as Michael Vick's dogs are on national TV again, in not one but two specials about their rescue and rehabilitation.) But this efflorescence of public sympathy happened against a backdrop of persistent pit-phobia which imagines the breed as congenital killing machines unfit for human society. Pit bulls (and sometimes other bully and mastiff type dogs) are subject to breed-specific bans and disproportionate rates of euthanasia in public shelters. Sometimes the cyno-eugenics cavorts openly with human racism and classism, as this story about a recent breed ban in a Colorado suburb shows.

So how is it that, all of a sudden, we have a conservative white politician - the GOP's newly coronated spokesperson of "small town America" no less - claiming this hated urban beast as a mascot for "hockey moms"? In this Daily Show clip (about 3:10 in), Jon Stewart cuts to the quick: "one is unfairly maligned in spite of evidence that it is no worse than any other dog, and one is an artificial demographic that is no better or worse than any other mom." (Stewart, I just learned, is a pit bull person.)

I know this is just one soundbite, one small thing in a big election. But it does seem fitting that Palin would jokingly identify herself with an animal that's popularly imagined to be killers of other animals - and be more or less tone deaf to the reality of its systematic persecution by humans. After all, here's someone whose "executive experience" in human-canid relations includes support for aerial wolf gunning.

friday bizarro blogging

2008-08-29T17:27:00.005-04:00

John McCain's VP pick Sarah Palin communes with Alaska's charismatic megafauna...

Courtesy of my favorite animal-named feminist blog, Pandagon.

smart animals

2008-08-21T09:10:00.011-04:00

From the BBC, my favorite source for critter news, two 21st-century entries in the venerable "sagacious animals" genre**:

1. "Wild" Australian dolphins develop "tail-walking culture"!
It seems weird to call a dolphin that lived close enough to humans to get trapped in a marina lock, rescued into a dolphinarium, then subsequently released to be closely observed by a team of scientists "wild." We humans sure have strange cognitive needs, don't we?

I never got around to seeing Happy Feet, but I can see this story being captured by Hollywood and genetically modified into a break-dancing cetacean flick. Or an even more anthropocentric version of Ratatouille, in which animals don't just want to become human, but aspire to be the funhouse version of themselves that humans want them to be.

2. Magpies can recognize mirror reflections of themselves!
And apparently they don't mind having random stickers stuck on their bodies as long as they can't see them.

** I'm using the term "sagacious animal" pretty loosely here, to refer to the kind of sometimes scientific, sometimes sentimental, sometimes a bit of both stories about smart animals and their funny ways that you'd find in the news and other popular sources. Harriet Ritvo, author of the wonderfully learned Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England, gives a much more rigorous account of the concept of "animal sagacity" in the history of science:

... well into the last part of the nineteenth century "sagacity" was the standard term for intelligence demonstrated by animals. An individual animal or species might be described as "intelligent," but the term "intelligence" itself was generally reserved for strictly human capacities. (Conversely, if "sagacity" was attributed to human beings, it often had an ironic or less than flattering connotation.) The phrase "animal sagacity" in the title of a book or article often signaled an abstract discussion of instinct or intellect, the kind of discussion that might conclude by appreciating the intelligence of apes. But in the more common usage of naturalists, sagacity indicated not the ability to manipulate mechanical contraptions or solve logical problems, but a more diffuse kind of mental power: the ability to adapt to human surroundings and to please people. A somewhat circular calculation made the most sagacious animals the best servants. So dogs might not only rival apes in the mental competition, but surpass them - closest to their masters in mind as well as in domicile.

"The ability to adapt to human surroundings and to please people" - that may not be the official measure of animal cognitive capacities in 21st-century science, but it certainly still seems to be a potent force in the popular/pop-scientific imagination.

conquest of dogs, conquest of everything

2008-08-03T12:35:00.007-04:00

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.

dogs in early 20th-century china

2008-07-14T16:07:00.007-04:00

The Special Collections Library at Duke recently launched a digital collection of the photographs of the early 2oth-century sociologist and China scholar Sidney G. Gamble. I have barely skimmed the surface of the collection, but did turn up these two striking images of dogs and children:

The bibliographic records for the photos are here and here.

murmuration of starlings

2008-07-12T16:56:00.011-04:00

An addendum to my last post about the comic artist Kevin Huizenga's re-takes of Audubon and the genre of natural history. I compared Huizenga's squirrels to Audubon's pigeons, but didn't mention Kevin H's own wonderful swarming birds story, "The Curse," which is part of a 3-part cycle on the mysteries and miseries of suburban life. Salon ran a great review of these and other works in the collection Curses back in 2006.

In "The Curse," the bird in question is the starling, an imported "old world" species that has thrived in North America, not unlike the highly invasive human suburbanites they now torment, with their ceaseless chirpings and - true to the spirit of the departed passenger pigeons, perhaps - voluminous droppings.

Here's a post from Huizenga's own blog about the latest in starlings (well, latest as of April 2007) .

squirrels & pigeons

2008-07-12T15:48:00.010-04:00

A very funny page from the mini-comic Or Else #4, by one of my favorite comic artists Kevin Huizenga (image from Beguiling, the on-line comic art store):These fictional squirrel marauders of yore have always reminded me of John James Audubon's description of the now extinct passenger pigeon:

In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson, on the banks of the Ohio, on my way to Louisville. In passing over the Barrens a few miles beyond Hardensburgh, I observed the Pigeons flying from north-east to south-west, in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before, and feeling an inclination to count the flocks that might pass within the reach of my eye in one hour, I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I travelled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.

The last bit is probably the most charmingly gross passage in the annals of American letters.

friday monkey blogging

2008-07-04T14:02:00.001-04:00

I don't really blog regularly enough for this "friday [insert your favored species here] blogging" to make sense, but here it is anyway.

From the Guardian's "The Week in Wildlife" series: "A golden langur – one of the world's most endangered species, found only in a few pockets in western Assam and adjoining Bhutan – and a Hanuman monkey in playful mood at the zoological park." Looks like monkey fight to me!

updates

2008-07-01T08:43:00.004-04:00

I noodled around with two earlier posts about the "turnspit" dog. Apparently I'm kind of obsessed with it!

friday interspecies blogging

2008-06-20T10:16:00.004-04:00

From BBC: tiger cub born in captivity gets adopted by mama dog. Video here.

"hoop, hoop!" / more on the turnspit dog

2008-06-03T20:48:00.013-04:00

I posted last week about the turnspit, a variety of now-"extinct" small English working dogs used to turn meat on spits and perform other tasks involving repetitive circular motion. When I learned about these dogs, the following scene from Frank Norris' classic - or, as I prefer to categorize it, crazy - naturalist novel McTeague immediately came to mind:

The Sieppes lived in a little box of a house... In the backyard was a contrivance for pumping water from the cistern that interested McTeague at once. It was a dog-wheel, a huge revolving box in which the unhappy black greyhound spent most of his waking hours. It was his kennel; he slept in it. From time to time during the day Mrs. Sieppe appeared on the back doorstep, crying shrilly, "Hoop, hoop!" She threw lumps of coal at him, waking him to his work.

In this early scene, the titled character is visiting his girlfriend Trina at her family home - both blissfully unaware that her greed and his supposedly "crude, primitive nature" are about to converge in a horrifying spiral of death and destruction. Elsewhere in the book, McTeague's BFF/worst enemy Marcus has an odd job escorting rich people's dogs to and from an animal hospital. Against the backdrop of this emerging veterinary and pet-pampering modernity, the Sieppes' turnspit marks them as decidedly "backwards" people.

(Revised June 30, 2008)

the turnspit

2008-05-25T17:41:00.012-04:00

Wikipedia find of the day: the turnspit, a type of working dog that, the entry tells us, went "extinct" after industrialization. The turnspit - or "turnespete," to use the 16th-century spelling - is one of 17 varieties described by Johannus Caius' 1570 treatise Of Englishe Dogges (Google has helpfully digitized the 1880 reprint of the English translation). It's not a "breed" as we understand the term now, but a functional category that basically describes small dogs trained to run in a wheel and perform various menial tasks involving circular motion - butter-churning, flour-milling, and as its name suggests and this sad-funny illustration confirms, turning meat on a spit. Now I'm going to think of my dog Timmy every time I see a gyro machine...

The wiki entry links to this photo with the irresistible caption, "Whisky, the last surviving specimen of a turnspit dog, albeit stuffed" on a Welsh cultural history site:

I'm not sure it makes much sense to talk about the turnspit as "extinct" - presumably dogs like Whisky continued to exist in Great Britain, people just stopped using them as rotisserie motors. What does seem to have died out, at least from the post-industrial United States, is the idea that dogs could be rigged to up to a machine like in this way. Kind of steam punk - or something...

(Revised June 27, 2008)

dogs & the economy

2008-05-23T11:55:00.000-04:00

An interesting story from BBC about pet dogs and hard times in Yorkshire.

Update: A video report on a similar trend in Cumbria of people giving up their animals - in this case goats and other livestock - because of rising food cost and worsening economic conditions.

facts in dog history

2008-05-21T21:24:00.002-04:00

In 1859, the South Carolina General Assembly, after years of vigorous lobbying by sheep farmers, instituted a fine on any dog owner whose canine charge kills or injures a sheep. While they were at it, the legislators also imposed an annual $1 tax on "every dog kept by a slave," and $2 for one belonging to a free person of color. Whites could own their dogs for free.

The "slave dog" tax was actually levied on the slaveowner. In this fascinating article, the historian John Campbell tells the story of a slave named Henry whose owner refused to pay the tax ($1 in 1859 is equivalent to roughly $25 today), but (magnanimously) did not object to his slaves keeping their dogs if they covered the fees themselves. According to the owner's ledgers, Henry turned over $1 from his personal earnings for his dog. But then, for reasons now lost to us, Henry changed his mind. He was "credited" $1 in his master's books. His dog was killed.

It's a strangely haunting story of the petty, everyday cruelties of slavery.