Putting the Dog Back in the Park: Animal and Human Mind-in-Action

Abstract

In this article we use actual instances of human conduct with animals to reflect on the debates about animal agency in human activities. Where much of psychology, philosophy, and sociology begin with a fundamental scepticism over animal mind as the grounds for its inquiries, we join with a growing body of work that examines the continuities between animals and humans, and accepts the positive possibilities of anthropomorphising animals. We are interested in the reason and intelligence that animals display in their activities with humans. Inverting the typical approach of explaining canine reason by reference to the behaviour of their wild counterparts, we describe human-canine action as it occurs in the widespread, historically assembled, and spatially situated activity of dog walking in parks. We treat dog walking as a living accomplishment of owner and dog methodically displaying intent and producing social objects. THE PLACES OF HUMAN-ANIMAL MIND Philosophers, ethologists, neuroscientists, builders of robots, animal rights groups, and others have fiercely debated the relations between animal mind and human mind (Bekoff & Jamieson, 1990; Griffin, 1992; Midgely, 1983; Nagel, 1986). A persistent impulse in these debates has been the delimitation of what an animal is and what a human is, or if you like, the boundary between animal being and human being. Related scientific investigations of canine mind and human-canine psychology (Bergler, 1988) have proceeded mostly from the premise that dogs are quite naturally different from humans. Although we do not deny the difference between dogs and humans, we are wary of the next move that is made by many ethologists, psychologists, zoologists, and neuroscientists to sunder dogs from their place beside us as fellow subjects. In her reading of Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, Crist (1999, 2002) recovered a positive and bold anthropomorphism as a constitutive stance in Darwin's studies of animals and insects. For Darwin there was an "evolutionary continuity" (Crist, 1999, p. 49) between all animals that in turn unavoidably included mental and behavioural continuities, and this came with the further implication

An Examination of the Possible Benefits for Well-Being Arising from the Social Interactions that Occur while Dog Walking

“…With respect to loneliness, Laurier, Maze, and Lundin (2006) argued that dog walking provides dog walkers with an opportunity to meet new people, which helps to reduce feelings of loneli ness and social isolation. Along a similar vein, Robins, Sanders, and Cahill (1991) concluded that dogs further contact, conversation, and the develop ment of friendships among dog caregivers who were previously unacquainted.…”

Exploring the Emergence of the Subject in Power: Infant Geographies

“…Engaging with the lives of infants and babies ties into broader methodological endeavours to unravel aspects of everyday life that are difficult to represent in established modernist frames of reference, such as the emotional and 'affective' (Bondi, 2003;Merchant, 2011;Pile, 2010;Smith et al, 2009) and/or research with non-verbal (in human terms) actors, such as animals (Laurier et al, 2006;Lewis, 2001;Nosworthy, 2010;Philo and Wilbert, 2000;.…”

Lost and hound: The more-than-human networks of rural policing

“…Likewise, although significant literature has explored explore humaneanimal relations in rural spaces (Jones, 2003), curiously little has been written about the place and role of dogs in the countryside (Brown and Dilley, 2012). This is despite a growing literature on the ways that the humanedog relations shape, and are shaped by, urban environments (Laurier et al, 2006;Power, 2008Power, , 2012Urbanik and Morgan, 2013). In a rural context, Brown (2014) has examined how legal and moral norms are mobilised to regulate the behaviour of pet dogs in the countryside.…”