Funding informationLeverhulme Trust -Shaping inter-species connectedness: training cult.To develop and illustrate the potential for visual methodologies in conducting multispecies ethnography, we present a case study of general-purpose police dog training in the UK. Our argument is two-fold: first, we draw on STS approaches and insights for looking at training activities as material and socio-cultural devices that, we argue, constitute a training technology. Here we have been influenced by the work of Cussins and adopted her concept of "ontological choreographies" for addressing the development of the police dog-police officer bond and ability to communicate for working together. Second, we argue that visual data capture presents valuable opportunities for "less human-centred" and more symmetrical methods to approach non-human/more than human research subjects. We illustrate how photo diaries and video clips enabled us to remain attentive to the material and embodied practices of dog training, bringing to the fore the dogs' actions, tools, and devices and thus enlivening the material-cultural choreographies of the training activities. In conclusion, we elucidate how this onto-epistemological approach enabled us to investigate the material and corporeal construction of the general purpose (GP) police dog. K E Y W O R D S animal geography, dog training, human-animal relationship, multispecies ethnography, ontological choreographies, visual methods | INTRODUCTIONThis paper focuses on the experience of training for general purpose police dogs (GP dogs) and their human handlers, based on research conducted with a police force in the UK. 1 We are aware that training to become a police dog accounts only for a limited part of a dog's life and that, once dogs start to work with their handlers, a set of questions arise about how their deployment may put members of the public at risk. In fact, there is significant literature pointing to the predatory use of police dogs against African Americans in the USA (Spruill, 2016) and against black people in South Africa as a regular police strategy (Shear, 2008). While in the UK there is no evidence that such issues are so prominent, a BBC report in 2014 indicated that 150 innocent people in the UK were attacked by police dogs between 2011 and 2013. 2 However, the aim of this paper is not to discuss the use of dogs in police work, and we know that the reality of their working lives will always be affected by the dominant policies of those involved. We believe that accounts of practices that involve non-human animals (police dogs as well as other working animals) often tend to efface non-human subjectivities. How non-human animals are enrolled and learn to work with humans in multispecies practices tends to disappear and the roles of animals are often reduced to becoming instruments of human work (a toolkit) whose capabilities and subjectivities are left unexplored.
This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway's (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin.
Based upon a multi-species ethnography of companion dog training in the UK, this paper examines the training class as a site of inter-species communication through which dogs and their humans are mutually affected and transformed. We argue that dog training represents an important form of multi-species learning in which participants (human trainer, trainee and canine) shape one another, jointly if asymmetrically, through the performance of particular tasks and challenges. Successful training requires ‘attunement’ to the haptic and sensory experiences of another species and the creation of shared embodied languages through which relationships of trust and reciprocity are formed. Responding to calls for less human-centred methods we examine the possibilities of visual and ethnographic methods for capturing the ‘animal’s point of view’ and explore how deep ethnographic involvement of the researcher’s own body can draw attention to the everyday complexities of embodied inter-species communication. We consider the importance of our own embodied learning in decentring the human in the research process, engendering a corporeal understanding of the multi-sensory nature of inter-species interaction and transforming ourselves in the process. Through the use of ethnographic vignettes, photos and video stills we highlight the importance of body language, sound, touch, smell and training atmospheres in the creation of shared knowledges. In doing so we explore the possibilities of such methods for evoking the affective dimensions of human-canine interactions and attending to the complex and multiple actors and sensibilities which comprise multi-species training relationships.
This article explores the workings of power in dog training cultures through an analysis of UK dog training manuals from the mid-19th century to the present. We focus on gundog and companion dog training cultures, investigating the dog-human relations they assume, the changing conceptions of human-animal relations they represent, and the inequalities and relations of power in which they are embedded. Rather than thinking about changing training practices in terms of a shift from dominance to positive training, or from instrumental to affective relations, we argue that training cultures reveal how inter-species inequalities are conceptualised and reproduced in a range of historical periods and cultural spaces. We suggest that dog training cultures can be distinguished by contrasting understandings of dogs as: (1) rational, thinking beings, (2) instinctive creatures, and (3) autonomous active agents as well as by the inequalities of gender, class, race and species structuring the spaces in which they are embedded. Furthermore, the modalities of power which characterise dog training cultures favour different groups of human actors rather than dogs, even in training cultures which are based on partnership and are ‘dog centred’. Our analysis shows how inter-species relations are lived and thought through the cultural practices of dog training.
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