Human-Canine Collaboration in Care

Doing Diabetes

Fenella Eason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367227777
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000709490
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Adopting an anthrozoological perspective to study the participation of non-human animals in regimes of care, this book examines the use of canine scent detection to alert 'hypo-unaware' individuals to symptoms of human chronic illness. Based on ethnographic research and interviews, it focuses on the manner in which trained assistance dogs are able to use their sense of smell to alert human companions with Type 1 diabetes to imminent hypoglycaemic episodes, thus reducing the risk of collapse into unconsciousness, coma or, at worst, death. Through analyses of participant narrations of the everyday complexities of 'doing' diabetes with the assistance of medical alert dogs, the author sheds light on the way in which each human-canine dyad becomes acknowledged as a team of 'one' in society. Based on the concept of dogs as friends and work colleagues, as animate instruments and biomedical resources, the book raises conceptual questions surrounding the acceptable use of animals and their role within society. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in human-animal interactions and intersections. It may also appeal to healthcare practitioners and individuals interested in innovative multispecies methods of managing chronic illness.

1 Multispecies care in chronic illness

Mentally ripped out of their comfort zone by the unexpected tearing of their corporeal mantle, people often are forced to discover alternative modes of social existence and other resources that enable coping with newly shaped ways of being. One method of locating these is to talk of upsetting events and experiences with psychologists and physicians and with those who have had similar disruptions in their lives. Gradually and often uneasily, the altered selves are enabled to release stories of their embodied corruption and its forceful entourage of side effects. Sarah Nettleton exemplifies the significance of personal narrative: ‘When people have the opportunity to give voice to their experiences of illness, it becomes evident that their accounts are woven into their biographies’ (2013: 73).

The voluntary participants in this study, who are accustomed through necessity to communicate personal illness and well-being issues to their family, work colleagues, and members of healthcare professions, are therefore enabled to narrate tales of medical and social upheaval in their own lives as a result of a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis. They relate personal stories of internal and external bodily damage and repair, they laugh when they might weep over the obstacles that beset them in society and at home, and they become grave when contemplating the life-changing experiences of others faced with unpredictable hurdles in similar minority groupings.

They are expert but vulnerable witnesses to the inconsistencies and uncertainties of their lives and are conscious of the need for ongoing medical and social practices. They recognise when things are ‘out of synch’ within their embodied worlds and, often, how to get the external world to intervene so they may adapt and achieve safe passage onwards. They are explorers and adventurers, consultants and chemists, who traverse the world of chronic illness and, in so doing, reveal to others their best practices of self- and other-care.

But they are also conscious of their inability to recognise when their own fluctuating blood glucose levels are rising or falling to extremes. This loss of hyper- (too high) or hypoglycaemic (too low) awareness constantly endangers their lives.

Sources of increased self-confidence and of companionship in social reintegration are the diabetes alert assistance dogs who share the human home and give advance warning when blood sugar levels enter ‘danger’ zones. Their keen sense of smell, combined with training by the charity Medical Detection Dogs (MDD) to perform active alarm signals, ensures the dogs retain a much-vaunted significance in the lives of their human partners. These are dogs (Canis familiaris) of diverse breeds and backgrounds credited by those with Type 1 diabetes with being lifesavers and confidence-boosters and as having full membership of their families and of the society in which their close interspecies relationships are situated. Adrian Franklin (2006: 142) relates this new concept, of companion animals viewed as ‘belonging’ to and becoming family, to a ‘hybridization of the family’ and not to imagined anthropomorphism whereby a dog’s qualities and characteristics are observed as ‘human-like’ (see also Milton, 2005). Importantly, the diabetes alert dogs are considered to be fully deserving of respect, recognition, and gratitude for their incomparable prowess in scent detection for human benefit. And the good-natured dogs seemingly acknowledge praise and reward, as is their wont, and accept the need to collaborate, tolerate, and enact the requisite behaviours as worthwhile and customary practices.

As Franklin contends:

Unproblematic similarities might include co-residence, enduring ties, emotional inter-dependence, friendship, company and shared activities. When this happens, it is important to realize that it is not a one-way, human-orchestrated attribution, but one built of close feelings and emotions self-evidently expressed also by the animals themselves.

(2006: 142)

‘Shared activities’ and hybridized practices are prominent in the daily routines of the species under focus here. These interactive human and nonhuman animal partners are the central figures performing on the ethnographic stage of this research into trans-species coexistences and the practices of normalising lives unsettled by chronic illness – lives in bodies that fail to function as expected and desired in a human, but also lives that enable bodily adaptation, alteration, survival, and the creation of new identities through the exceptional sensory perception of a nonhuman animal. These closely united companions are actors whose ‘lines’, spoken and unspoken, and vivid images of life in chronic illness, animate and illuminate their interconnecting biographies. Following Irvine (2013: 5), their narrations become ‘resources, helping us understand and share what we find meaningful and what gives us purpose’.

The perspective of symbolic interactionism (Irvine, for example, 2004, 2007, 2012) is employed to disentangle the shared meanings from the symbiotic practices of care inherent in the coexisting partnerships that work within the bounds of chronic illness. The ecofeminist-derived ethics of care theory (Hamington, 2008; Adams and Gruen, 2014) supports exploration of interdependency and what it might be like to care and be cared for (Taylor, 2014: 109) in a symbiotic human–nonhuman coexistence.

Ethics of care theory also enables questioning of the elastic moral boundaries that humans construct to differentiate between the use and the exploitation of others. A firm moral stance needs to be considered and activated to avoid abuse and cruelty in human–nonhuman animal interactions. Symbiosis enables the pairing of unlike couples so that at least one member of the partnership gains benefit, be it improved self-worth, nutrition, or increased ability to achieve goals and rewards. Under the symbiosis umbrella huddle parasitism, commensalism, and mutualism (refer Leung and Poulin, 2008), and it is mutualism in this canine–human coexistence that motivates and leads towards acceptance of certain morally justifiable interspecies usages. A respectful mutualistic form of usage can impel development of credible and ethical multispecies collaboration, even unification, when compared with the unethical exploitation of commodified nonhuman animal masses.

The importance of animal ‘mattering’ (Irvine, 2013; Law, 2004; Rollin, 2011) is investigated to explore the question: ‘how do chronically ill people engage with medical alert assistance dogs in their self- and other- care behaviours and in their lives?’ The responses offered by clients of MDD record and explore action and performance, the doings and reshapings of life with chronic illness, by themselves and their MDD-trained working canine companions as they together effect and experience best practices that maintain lives worth living, lives that matter to more than one lone being.

The complexities examined and resolved by these multispecies practitioners in their everyday lives enable a visible becoming of an emotional, familiar, and self- and other-respecting amalgamation – a dyad identifiable as ‘one-self’. Gazing into, and reflecting on, these harmonising coexistences enables an ethnographic contribution to the social sciences, drawing attention to innovative multispecies health care practices and raising awareness of the multidisciplinary science of anthrozoology. Anthrozoology is a recent but significant addition to the social sciences, as John Bradshaw (2017) affirms in the title of his most recent volume: The animals among us: the new science of anthrozoology. It emphasises a present and future need for an ethics that is involved in, allows for, and advocates multispecies independencies and interdependencies.

Students in this fast-developing field explore the relationships and interactions – whether collaborating or conflicting, whether bringing risk or gain to either or both – that are shared by human and nonhuman animals. An attempt is made to avoid, as far as is possible, an anthropocentric bent and an ontological assumption that the ‘other’ is an already fully known and understood being; further, there is effort to engage in self-reflection to encourage challenges to human interpretations and analyses of nonhuman animals.

Embedded in and emanating from this ‘new science’, this project studies domesticated healthy members of the canine species, who are educated to use their olfactory sensitivity in working for unwell members of the human species, and examines their situatedness, attempting also to comprehend their perspectives. Unlike anthropology, which investigates humans and their cultures and for the most part ignores nonhuman animal participants’ impact in such cultures, and sociology, which has refused acknowledgement of the nonhuman animal’s position in our society until very recently (Irvine, 2012), anthrozoology borrows evidence from many disciplines, including the aforementioned and, for example, from those of philosophy, geography, biology, and psychology to accentuate the significance of ‘other’ animal species in our evolutionary coexistences.

Research literature already published on multispecies entanglements within the field of health and illness is examined to provide a broad backdrop to the innovative influence of working scent-detecting dogs on chronic illness. This research is based on the anthropological and sociological intention to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. In the words of Raymond Madden (2014: 281), ‘we all know that a close and knowing experience with some “other” (regardless of their relative strangeness or familiarity) can be a transforming experience’. So this study aims to make a space for anthrozoological research on the shelves of social science by sourcing meanings and extending knowledge of the efforts by both dogs and humans to ‘do’ daily life better together; indeed, to do a life of vibrancy that leads to an improved method of survival in chronic illness and engenders increased enthusiasm for the possibilities of ethical transformation in those multispecies lives.

Humans and other animals: the familiar and the foreign

Humans and other animals, or human and nonhuman animals, are newly talked of as a single collective, one that enables us to imagine we are of the same ilk and of similar classification, one that enables us anthropocentrically to feel more comfortable about be(com)ing with (Maurstad, Davis and Cowles, 2013) or being alongside (Latimer, 2013) those whose discourse and gait are commonly at variance with human modes of communication and mobility.

However, there remains a pronounced divide between human and nonhuman animals encouraged by the frequent use of ‘non’; such wording segregates one species from the other just as effectively as ‘more-than-human’ or ‘other-than-human’ succeed in distancing those with whom we might want to live more closely. Hurn (2012) notes the terms nonhuman or other-than-human animal may be used to show that humans are also animals, but the good intentions also highlight an opportunity to emphasise human anthropocentricity. Talking about human exceptionalism, Hurn reminds that ‘the humanist approach has been guilty of taking humans out of context and putting them on a pedestal’ (2012: 205). However, to mitigate for such human error, she draws attention to the greater opportunity for choice and ‘liking’ among friends than our already-selected family members; thus, ‘when humans choose to take responsibility for the welfare of another animal, one of the reasons for doing so is because of some spark of mutual attraction, or a recognition of personhood across the species barrier’ (Hurn, 2012: 109).

Would we therefore perhaps be better off by talking of humans and animals as (potential) allies, colleagues and friends, and retreating from what may sometimes seem an overly fastidious attempt to make ourselves into a more-than-similar species when we anyway majorly belong to the taxonomic ‘kingdom’ of Animalia?

The use of ‘other’ can also distance humans from those creatures with whom we wish to communicate, collaborate, and coexist. ‘Othering’ produces disenfranchisement, no matter how it is induced; it highlights mental and physical differences that can lead to alienation, isolation, and discrediting of that other’s identity. It is an encouragement or stimulus of alterity that intentionally conjures more than difference – it may create distance and provoke ageism, racism, sexism, or speciesism, inviting objectification of nonhuman animals to the ‘status of lesser beings’ (Hurn, 2012: 25) and the oppression of minority groupings (also Nibert, 2002). Yet, in the perhaps comforting words of Rosa Braidotti (2009: 526), ‘a bioegalitarian turn is encouraging us to relate to animals as animals ourselves’. Such movement denounces ‘modes of embodiment, in the sense of both dialectical otherness (nonwhite, nonmasculine, nonnormal, nonyoung, nonhealthy) and categorical otherness (zoomorphic, disabled, or malformed)’ and enables ‘rich new alliances’ (2009: 529).

Involving images of the domesticated animal ‘other’, rather than the still-wild nonhuman animal, this research highlights a microcosm of society in which both human and nonhuman animals succeed in cooperating and communicating to achieve a ‘rich new alliance’, an interspecies mutualistic coexistence – a form of functioning, mostly stable homeostasis that is not only physiologically but also socially successful. This coembodied way of living negates the anthropocentric historical drive for dominance and control over domesticated companion animals explored by Ingold (2000) and Palmer (1997) and further contemplated by Tuan (2007: 148):

Power over another being is demonstrably firm and perversely delicious when it is exercised for no particular purpose and when submission to it goes against the victim’s own strong desires and nature.

Instead, the shared way of life and the inter-subjective appreciation of each other’s capabilities under discussion in these pages, also frame inter-dependency – a need by each for the other – and mutuality – an avoidance of intentional harm by one to the other. A trans-species coexistence is activated in which interconnectedness is paramount and alterity takes a more positive turn in reducing the significance of differences in appearance, linguistic skill and degrees of sentience and in illuminating the similarities and capacities for mutual understanding. The alien ‘other’ animal visage that has been expected and accepted by society instead becomes a familiar one and no longer accentuates Cartesian distinctions between human and nonhuman animals.

As postscript to this section, I draw attention to Kendra Coulter’s (2016b: 201) consideration of her readers and of the nonhuman animals of whom she speaks: ‘For linguistic efficiency, … and to avoid continuously identifying others in relation to but one of the species they are not, I use terms like people, humans, women, men, and so forth for homo sapiens, and refer to nonhuman animals as animals, or by their species or common name’. However, in this writing, as will become obvious, I have intentionally maintained the use of ’human’ and ‘nonhuman’, or ‘more-than-human’ and ‘other-than-human’ animals, as terms to illustrate how language does differentiate categories and to emphasise – irritatingly drawn-out as these identifiers may be to the reader – how such differentiation may further divide rather than meld multispecies existences.

One method of ensuring that trans-species communication is consistently shared between, for example, a horse, acting as a nonhuman animal, and an equestrienne, as a human rider, is the coembodiment of mobility and emotion in their working recognition of ‘feel’.

Becoming ‘one-self’

Global scrutiny and knowledge of other-than-human animals becomes meaningful only when there is human recognition and engagement with these ‘animate objects’ (Czerny, 2012: 8) in interpersonal relationships. Such engagement and performance, acted out between the medical alert assistance dog and the human with Type 1 diabetes, endow significance that affects both species beyond the visible partnership. Identity becomes a shared image not only in the eyes of the human partner but also under the searching gaze of society.

This study involves dogs and humans ‘doing’ diabetes (Mol and Law, 2004; Mol, 2008) and reflects Ingold and Palsson (2013) research in which he encourages demolition of Agamben’s (2004: 33–38) ‘anthropological machine’ that separates humans from ‘the continuum of organic life’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013: 8). He suggests action begins by thinking of humans and all other beings ‘in terms not of what they are, but of what they do’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013: 8, italics in text). And further, ‘to think of ourselves not as beings but as becomings – that is, not as discrete and pre-formed entities but as trajectories of movement and growth’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013: 8): becomings who work to ‘forge’ ways forward and ‘guide the ways of consociates’ (2013: 8).

In the world of assistance dogs too, there are those who ‘forge ways forward and guide the ways of consociates’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013: 8), be they diabetes alert dogs or the service dogs who ‘guide’ their sight-impaired human partners. There is a becoming of a unique entity, a becoming of ‘one-self’ that involves a mutual understanding gained through effort and practice, discovered by Rod Michalko (1999) in the always-developing symbiotic relationship conducted between himself and his assistance dog, Smokie. Perhaps this is more a ‘co-becoming’ concept that is also gaining prominence in natural horsemanship where ‘embodied collaboration’ is felt within some, although not all, human–equine partnerships (Birke and Hockenhull, 2015: 82). The coembodiment of ‘feel’ provides an important human means of gauging equine temperament and movement, the horse’s most apposite ‘way of going’. ‘Feel’ allows the nonhuman to respond to questions asked of him or her, and the human to comprehend that response so that a communication channel becomes open to an unspoken two-way flow of information.

‘Feel’ may be considered instinctive and derived through emotion, but it is also sourced through vision, from seeing and reading ‘a different look in a horse’s eyes, ear positioning and tail swishing’ (Coulter, 2016a: 35) as well as from the physically tactile, minute muscle movements continuously communicated between horse and rider, or between horse and human guardian, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Multispecies care in chronic illness
• 2 Anthrozoological and sociological perspectives
• 3 The canine sense of smell and olfactory acuity
• 4 ‘Doing’ diabetes Type 1
• 5 Dogs as biomedical resources and health technologies
• 6 Symbiotic practices of care
• 7 Endings and ‘ethical’ decision-making
• References
• Index