Living with Animals
eBook - ePub

Living with Animals

Bonds across Species

Natalie Porter, Ilana M. Gershon, Natalie Porter, Ilana Gershon

Share book
  1. 288 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Living with Animals

Bonds across Species

Natalie Porter, Ilana M. Gershon, Natalie Porter, Ilana Gershon

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Living with Animals is a collection of imagined animal guides—a playful and accessible look at different human-animal relationships around the world. Anthropologists and their co-authors have written accounts of how humans and animals interact in labs, in farms, in zoos, and in African forests, among other places. Modeled after the classic A World of Babies, an edited collection of imagined Dr. Spock manuals from around the world—With Animals focuses on human-animal relationships in their myriad forms.

This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, so Living with Animals offers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read.

If you have ever experienced a moment of "what if" curiosity—what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject, Living with Animals suggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Living with Animals an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Living with Animals by Natalie Porter, Ilana M. Gershon, Natalie Porter, Ilana Gershon in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Sozialwissenschaften & Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Part 1

Fieldwork

Chapter 1

Yuendumu Dog Tales

YASMINE MUSHARBASH
For every Warlpiri myth, fable, or folktale about a child left in camp by its parents while they go hunting, a child who then gets adopted by dingoes, who treat it as one of their own, there is a myth, fable, or folktale about a dingo pup left behind in camp by its parents, who are off hunting, a pup who then gets adopted by Yapa (Warlpiri people), who treat it as one of their own. These stories beautifully reveal the close bonds between Yapa and dingoes (and later, dogs). As Eunice, a senior Warlpiri woman, puts it, “Dogs look after you, they are family, warlalja. They get upset, they cry when someone passes away, they are like people in that way, they grieve. They worry for their humans, and they are happy when you are happy, they are relatives for you. They make us happy like family.”
And for every dog tale about dogs who help, there exists an opposite dog tale about dogs who mess things up. Take stories about dogs’ hunting expertise (“when I was little, my father had a dog called Wardalapi, and he was the best hunter! We had kangaroo almost every day!”). For each such story Yapa have another one about a dog scaring kangaroos just when the hunters are about to spear or shoot them. Curiously, people tell more stories about dogs helping or messing up a kangaroo hunt than anecdotes of dingoes hunting for smaller game such as goannas or bilbies, which they are much more adept at.
Today, Warlpiri people hardly ever use dogs for hunting any more, but dogs are still everywhere at Yuendumu. Most every camp has a pack of dogs, and their furry, barky, wet-nosy, ever-present company is an elemental if quotidian fact of Warlpiri life. References to dogs permeate Warlpiri speech: When complaining about being left behind after everybody else goes to town, one might say, “I was left like a dog!” And somebody who has indiscriminate sexual liaisons is described as “running around like a dog.” And dogs are a favorite topic of conversation in the camps, like they are for dog-owners the world over. Warlpiri people often provide a running commentary on what the dogs are up to right here right now (and each pack is a soap opera in itself). They reminisce nostalgically about dogs who have passed on, including their own dogs, their parents’ dogs, or even their grandparents’ dogs—memories of dogs reach far into the past. They sing and retell Dreaming dog stories, and they love to recount funny dog stories. In fact, it is not unusual for dog stories to be told in the same register as stories about Yapa, and sometimes—if one isn’t familiar with the protagonists—it is hard to tell if Yapa are talking about their family or about their dogs. Some dog stories are even condensed into one sentence. (This is a common Aboriginal practice, called “the word.”) Someone will say, “That time when Anton chased Marvin,” and everyone will know the story, and laugh, or sigh, or tut, depending on what the appropriate reaction is. One such “word” is “That time when Wardalapi came back from bush camp.”

Wardalapi

Barbiedog, one of Yuendumu’s first sausage dogs and possibly the bitch with the most puppies—ever—had puppies again. Her puppies were very popular; short-legged dogs were the latest craze. I had asked Barbiedog’s owner for two puppies for Celeste and myself, and when they were old enough to leave their mother, we moved them to our camp. We called them Wardalapi, after Celeste’s sister’s father’s famous hunting dog of old, and Kuntangiyi, after Celeste’s father’s brother’s dog. Kuntangiyi died while still a pup, poor thing. Wardalapi lived to a ripe old age and became a bit of a family favorite—more than just Celeste’s dog, everyone loved and spoiled him. But Toby was Wardalapi’s special human. Toby was a young teenager when Celeste got Wardalapi, and the two grew really close. A year or two later, when Toby was going through initiation, Wardalapi disappeared. We looked for him everywhere but couldn’t find him. We were worried about Toby coming out of the bush camp, eventually, a man now, only to find out his favorite dog had been 
 what? Stolen? Injured? Run over?
Then, one afternoon, as we were preparing food to take over to the ritual ground for the men to take to the bush camp to feed the initiates, Wardalapi walked into our camp as if nothing had happened. Except: He was covered with red ochre handprints. We laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. And didn’t really know why we were laughing. Probably a combination of things: relief that Wardalapi was alive after all; the silliness of worrying about how Toby would take the loss of Wardalapi when the two of them had been together all this time; and the shocking incongruity of dog (ridiculous sausage dog no less) and red ochre (which during initiation time especially stands for all that is male, sacred, and secret).
For years after, when anybody said, “Remember that time when Wardalapi came back from bush camp?,” everyone would immediately laugh uproariously. Now, that laughter is tinged with sadness as people remember Wardalapi and all the times they shared with him.

Yilyinika

Yilyinika is about six months old, brimming with energy and curiosity. In the camp, she plays with her two brothers for hours on end—chasing them, being chased by them, mouthing, play fighting—only to suddenly fall asleep, utterly exhausted. She is the runt of the litter, skinnier than the others, pups who have been claimed by Yapa and are thrown tidbits during mealtimes by their respective humans. She doesn’t look that different from her brother Wati, but where the brown markings on white fur give him a handsome, roguish appearance, her markings are grey, and to be honest, make her look eternally dirty. Wati was claimed by Polly, when he was very little, and was the first to leave his mother, over at Eunice’s camp. Polly’s grandson claimed Willi, Wati, and Yilyinika’s short-legged brother. Yilyinika came to Polly’s camp with Eunice, who came to stay with Polly for company one day as her own camp emptied because her co-residents went on a trip south. Eunice brought her dogs, and when she returned home after a week or two, Yilyinika stayed behind in Polly’s camp with her brothers.
Not much later, I returned to Yuendumu (same as every year for the past two decades) to undertake research with Yapa. I had come for shorter visits before but this was my first long-term return since my dog Kunyarrpa passed away after ten wonderful years we’d spent together. At Yuendumu (his home place) I felt the loss again, and intensely. Everybody around me had their dogs. Each camp has a pack of dogs, and out of that pack, individual dogs relate to individual Yapa (those who claimed them). As always, I live in Polly’s camp, and the pack there knows me well, so when I arrive after an absence they all run up to me, tails wagging, welcoming me with little yelps and jumps. Still, without Kunyarrpa, I felt dogless, so much so that one day, when Marion went to the shop and asked me if I wanted anything, I shouted: “All I want is a dog!” Eunice heard me and called out: “You can have one of mine, that white one!”
That is how Yilyinika, at that point still nameless, became mine (or I hers). I took her to old lady Clara to ask for a name. Every Warlpiri person has a skin name (a subsection term), which is both a term of address and a socio-centric name that allows one to configure relationships to everyone (and everything) around. Yapa also give skin names to non-indigenous people who come and stay in the desert (as service providers, or, as the case may be, anthropologists). My skin name is Napurrurla (which is also pretty much what everybody at Yuendumu calls me). Dogs, which are seen as protectors, are given one’s parents’ skin names, which made the little runty white dog a Napaljarri (my mother). Clara thought of names of Napaljarris and decided on Yilyinika. So, I now had a puppy, and my puppy had a name and a skin name. Yapa get their skin names via their parents, dogs via their Yapa, which means that had Yilyinika, Wati and Willi been human they would have the same skin name as siblings do, but as they are dogs and belong to Polly (Napaljarri), her grandson (Japangardi) and me (Napurrurla), respectively, they have different skin names. Human kinship overrides canine kinship. In fact one of things dogs are known to be ignorant about is proper kinship etiquette, witnessed yet again just today by everyone here when Ask’im copulated with his mother Nangala.
As Yilyinika and I grew closer, I began to observe her more carefully, and was thrilled to notice that unlike her brothers, she always paid close attention to the rest of the pack, even when the three of them were absorbed in play. When the older dogs run off in formation, barking, she often tentatively joins in (while her brothers continue to play). Following the pack, she joins her high-pitched puppy bark to theirs, watching her elders, trying to figure out what the commotion is all about.
Yapa do not train their dogs at all, except through encouraging toddlers to “cruel” puppies, that is rough play, pinching, throwing around, hitting, and manhandling. Harsh as this may sound, two very good results flow from it: dogs generally having healthy respect for children in particular (I have never seen a camp dog attack or annoy a child) and Yapa, generally; and Yapa in turn are very good at handling dogs and very rarely afraid of them. Even though they have no human training different dogs seem to specialize in different tasks. I often wondered how they worked out their respective responsibilities. Watching Yilyinika is instructive. I can picture her becoming quite skilled at detecting dangers because she pays such close attention and watches the Three Brothers. They are Polly’s dog Nangala’s sons, all large and the oldest males of this pack. They take turns in leading chases. While, like all dogs, they enjoy having a snooze more than most anything, at least one of them is usually on lookout (or, listen-out, or smell-out), and the other two spring up when one of them barks the alarm.
Yapa often focus more on dogs’ hearing than their nose; my friend Tamsin for example said about her dogs: “if you are sleeping and someone or something comes around at night at your place, I think they sense them, they know if something is approaching, that must be why they have the biggest ears, to listen.” And there exists a Warlpiri myth about how a husband and wife got so very annoyed by their dogs’ barking every night that one evening the husband cut their ears off so that he and his wife could sleep in peace. What he didn’t realize was that the dogs had been barking at monsters every night and through their barking had kept them at bay and their humans safe. Once their ears were cut off, the dogs couldn’t hear the monsters approach. The next night the husband and wife were killed.
Yapa say they can tell from the tone and intensity of the bark of their dogs whether they are announcing the coming of a stranger, signaling the presence of a snake, chasing horses, or defending the camp from monsters. I remember how Kunyarrpa’s bark used to change during nighttime chases with his pack: There was a different timbre to his voice depending on whether he was following or leading, and the pitch and rhythm of the barking changed depending on how close or distant he was from whatever he was chasing.
Yilyinika has much to learn: The other night I woke up only to realize that the others were all awake, sitting up on their mattresses, whispering to each other. When I asked Polly what was wrong she said that there must be a monster lurking close by. “Listen!” What I heard was a single dog at the end of our driveway rhythmically going barkbarkbark barkbarkbark barkbarkbark. When I approached a window to have a look, Polly warned me to be careful. What made me curious was that only one dog was barking. Through the window I could see that our dogs were all sleeping peacefully on the veranda near the door—surely, they’d be up, too, barking if anything as dangerous as a monster were trying to approach the camp. Then I realized that Yilyinika wasn’t there. I opened the door. The barking stopped, and Yilyinika came running up the driveway—she’d been barking at the huge full moon! Polly wasn’t sure whether to be amused or outraged to have been scared so by a pup.
I wish Wanguwangu was still alive and could teach Yilyinika. Wanguwangu was one of the smartest dogs I know, he was an old campaigner already by the time I met him, a long time ago, in one of Yuendumu’s women’s camps that I lived in. He was a proud dog, his body leather-skinned and crisscrossed by scars attesting to his fighting prowess. I wonder what he would say to Yilyinika, if they could have met, if they could have spoken. I imagine him growling out his story something like this.

Wanguwangu

My name is Wanguwangu, it means “without-without” or “bereft.” I’m Wanguwangu because the Yapa I had special bonds with passed away. The first one, Old Man, brought me up from when I was a pup. We shared our smell and our time and space and care; he threw me food, and I slept on his feet. I chased monsters away from him, and I lived with him and his Yapa mob and my dog pack for many years. I was happy. Then, he got sick, and he didn’t get better, and then, he died, poor thing. It was terrible. Human pack was wailing. I was wailing. I felt like my whole world was broken into tiny pieces, and I couldn’t find the main smell that held everything together. I wailed and wailed and wailed. I stopped eating. I just lay there, too sad to live. Old Man’s daughter felt sorry for me, and she started feeding me by hand. Normally Yapa throw food over their shoulders for us when they eat, but she kneeled down next to me, fed me water and fed me meat, and I started following her. When I felt better, she put my nose in her armpit and her smell became my smell, and I was happy again. One day, she died, in the middle of the night, just like that, under her blankets. Everyone was asleep but I knew, I...

Table of contents