Dogopolis

How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris

Chris Pearson

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226797045
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

Dogopolis presents a surprising source for urban innovation in the history of three major cities: human-canine relationships. Stroll through any American or European city today and you probably won't get far before seeing a dog being taken for a walk. It's expected that these domesticated animals can easily navigate sidewalks, streets, and other foundational elements of our built environment. But what if our cities were actually shaped in response to dogs more than we ever realized?Chris Pearson's Dogopolis boldly and convincingly asserts that human-canine relations were a crucial factor in the formation of modern urban living. Focusing on New York, London, and Paris from the early nineteenth century into the 1930s, Pearson shows that human reactions to dogs significantly remolded them and other contemporary western cities. It's an unalterable fact that dogs—often filthy, bellicose, and sometimes off-putting—run away, spread rabies, defecate, and breed wherever they like, so as dogs became a more and more common in nineteenth-century middle-class life, cities had to respond to people's fear of them and revulsion at their least desirable traits. The gradual integration of dogs into city life centered on disgust at dirt, fear of crime and vagrancy, and the promotion of humanitarian sentiments. On the other hand, dogs are some people's most beloved animal companions, and human compassion and affection for pets and strays were equally powerful forces in shaping urban modernity. Dogopolis details the complex interrelations among emotions, sentiment, and the ways we manifest our feelings toward what we love—showing that together they can actually reshape society.

Chapter 1

Straying

In the nineteenth century, dogs roamed the streets of London, New York, and Paris. Owned or ownerless, they foraged, wandered, mated, and barked their way through the rapidly changing cityscapes. Urbanites had complained about and killed roving dogs well before that time. But after 1800, strays raised increasingly troubling questions about urban life. Were they acceptable creatures within modern cities who deserved toleration and compassion? Or should they be closely managed, even removed? Were they residues of backward urban cultures, or products of modern urbanization? For some, the answer was clear: strays were anathema to the modern and civilized European and North American city. A New York Daily Times article noted that “after we have got the west end of Long Island fairly fortified, and a grand free university established, on a firm basis, and the Central Park duly ornamented, we hope our City authorities will turn their attention to the dog-law.”1

Fears of rabies intensified the calls to contain strays, but they do not fully explain the growing condemnation of straying. In 1872 veterinarian and noted British rabies authority George Fleming regretted that “even without their tendency to become rabid, these parasites are a nuisance, and a source of waste and insalubrity.” For Fleming and many others, strays were potentially rabid and irritating pests. The clamor for their capture sprang from feelings of loathing and disgust triggered by the dogs themselves, along with metropolitan authorities’ desire to make cities cleaner and safer in the name of public hygiene. Anti-stray attitudes notably dripped with class prejudice, as upper- and middle-class commentators repeatedly blamed the poor for the dogs’ proliferation.2

Anti-stray campaigns constituted part of the histories of public health in London, New York, and Paris that marked these cities’ emergence as models of urban modernity. Public hygienists’ desire to sanitize the city, create social order, and promote health by distancing human bodies from harmful biological entities, such as rotting matter, waste, and corpses, both informed and legitimated anti-stray measures. These campaigns shared similarities with better-studied public hygiene crusades against dirt and diseases, including a class-based moralistic tone, disgust at the city’s filth, and very often disputed and incomplete outcomes. And alongside rats and other unwelcome creatures, strays became nuisance animals targeted for containment and culling.3

A growing number of middle-class commentators viewed strays with disgust and fear. Their feelings arose from their encounters with stray dogs and their wider anxieties about urban life. These observers sought to reject strays and their interventions were characterized by actual and rhetorical violence. Sympathetic Londoners, New Yorkers, and Parisians, meanwhile, defended stray dogs and argued that they deserved protection against cruelty. They depicted strays as emotional creatures who had lost their way in the metropolis and could be redeemed through enlightened care and attention. Stray dogs could—perhaps—be brought within these sympathizers’ attempt to build a compassionate city in which cruelty might be banished. On the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), its president, Henry Bergh, declared that its work had changed attitudes toward animals through practical measures: “what once seemed to be an abstract sentimental idea, has crystallized into the practice of that most engaging of the human virtues—mercy.”4 But animal protectionists and other sympathetic observers became ever more troubled by roaming dogs, particularly ownerless ones. Middle-class citizens’ love and care for dogs were increasingly directed toward pedigree and pet dogs, whom they treasured to shore up notions of civilization, domesticity, and purity within the apparently degenerate cityscape. Intensifying hostility toward straying and the associated practice of impoundment became the bedrock of dogopolis.

“Dangerous Classes” and Dangerous Dogs

Dog loathing intensified in the early nineteenth century when middle-class commentators connected strays with all that they disliked about rapidly expanding cities—disease, dirt, and disorder. They argued that these canines shared a close affinity with the human “dangerous classes,” the supposedly uprooted, filthy, and immoral underclass that undermined public security, health, and morality. Similar social conditions and concerns turned strays into canine members of the “dangerous classes” in London, New York, and Paris. Straying affronted middle-class sensibilities, provoking revulsion and fear.

Elite observers blamed the poor for producing a mass of unruly and dangerous dogs whose straying threatened public safety, order, and decency. In 1813 army officer Alexandre Roger bemoaned the more than eighty thousand “useless dogs and cats” infesting Paris. The problem apparently lay with the city’s human underclass—the canaille (a term meaning “rabble” or “riffraff” that has its roots in the Italian word for “a pack of dogs,” canaglia)—who thoughtlessly allowed the animals to breed. Dogs offended Roger especially because they spread rabies, a disease that indiscriminately affected rich and poor. It had claimed the lives of four people he knew, including one of his closest friends. The sheer number of stray dogs teeming through the capital’s “poorest areas” constituted a threat to “public and private security.” The indecent mixing of poor humans and their animals was “a disgusting spectacle.” Recognizing that it was unfeasible to eradicate dogs from Paris, let alone France, Roger suggested that police approval be a condition of pet ownership and that public charity be denied to anyone who kept animals. The urban poor and stray dogs formed a mobile, ever-expanding, and uncontrollable human-canine underclass, and Roger subsumed a whole host of social problems—disease, overcrowding, poverty, and social breakdown—into the canaille.5 The slippage between undesirable dogs and undesirable humans was laid bare. The former were imbued with the dubious moral qualities of the urban poor, while the latter were animalized.

In London, strays similarly represented danger, dirt, and disorder. Rabies again fueled middle-class condemnations of working-class dog-keeping habits. In a letter to the Times of London, M.R. of Burton Crescent, Bloomsbury, reported “witnessing the terror of a whole neighborhood, produced by one of these animals running foaming down the street.” Lamenting the lack of an effective means to prevent the spread of rabies, M.R. called on the government to pay more attention to the “preservation of general safety, by ridding our streets of these numberless dogs which are become a perfect terror to man, and nine-tenths of which are kept by those who have a difficulty in keeping themselves.” S.M., another letter writer to the Times, complained in 1825 about the “filthy vermin of cur” dogs who populated the “poor neighbourhoods” of London. The correspondent was struck by how poor Londoners’ “ignorance of breed has filled our streets with hosts of ugly and useless curs . . . propagating, to the great scandal of the ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice,’ their filthy species in the most indecent and unbounded manner in all our highways.” The dogs’ lewdness served to further cement their status as members of the city’s “dangerous classes,” whose supposed sexual immorality and depravity both fascinated and alarmed the middle classes. As a self-declared pedigree dog breeder, S.M. had presumably encountered multiple mating dogs. But without human control, and conducted on the street, the sight and sounds of canine reproduction became immoral and unacceptable. Strays, S.M. demanded, should be rounded up and their skins turned into shoes (“it is the most soft and pleasant leather imaginable”).6 This was perhaps not a wholly serious suggestion, but it hinted at the potential deadliness of anti-stray sentiments. S.M.’s letter underscores how affection for pet and pedigree dogs often accompanied a dislike of strays.

Like Londoners, wealthy New Yorkers lamented the apparent chaos spread by stray dogs. Clearly unaware of Roger’s and the Times correspondents’ concerns, they fretted that strays sullied their city’s reputation and prevented it from attaining the stature of London and Paris. They blamed immigrants and the poor for allowing their animals to disrupt orderly street life, overlooking how the pets of rich New Yorkers also swelled the ranks of dogs who roamed the streets. The links made between strays and poverty reflected and fueled fascination with New York’s immigrant populations. A New York Daily Times journalist reported on the ramshackle slums between Thirty-Seventh and Fifty-Fifth Streets alongside the Hudson River. These dwellings resembled “an Indian settlement,” whose dogs circulated among the huts of Irish and German “squatters.” The dogs were friendly to the residents, “barking gaily” upon children’s return home. But the “snarling” dogs represented potential threats to respectable New Yorkers, and the reporter was wary of “some villainous-looking dogs at the [huts’] entrance.”7 Despite its condescension toward immigrants, the reportage hints at the shared lives of dogs and humans as well as the bond that grew between them beyond the confines of middle-class pet keeping.

The scavenging, snarling, and potentially rabid stray stood in stark contrast to the feted middle-class mobility of flânerie (strolling) and promenading. These ambulatory rituals publicly displayed refinement, respectability, and creativity. They reinforced class distinctions and hierarchies in the starkly unequal societies of nineteenth-century London, New York, and Paris. Although poet and flâneur Charles Baudelaire may have celebrated the freedom-loving stray, dominant middle-class attitudes toward canine straying were disparaging. With bourgeois wealth and success rooted in the free movement of individuals and commodities, stray dogs joined prostitutes, manual laborers, beggars, and hawkers as unwelcome and physical obstacles to wealthy metropolitan lifestyles. Cast as mobile, diseased, and disruptive creatures, they had become dislocated from civilized human society.8 Campaigns to cast them from the city became early building blocks of dogopolis.

Combating Strays

Public hostility toward strays prodded politicians into action. After receiving a petition signed by 1,347 New Yorkers, the Common Council passed the Law concerning Dogs in June 1811. This legislation established the post of Dog Register and Collector, whose task was to round up and kill stray dogs. Police marshal Abner Curtis was the first to hold the post, and he was entitled to fifty cents for every dog he and his men killed. The law also encouraged the citizens of New York to play a role in ridding the streets of dogs by permitting anyone to kill a stray outside the downtown Lamp District.9

Parisians’ fears about strays bled into their worries about bulldogs. In 1840 Police Prefect Delessert ordered his men to destroy all bulldogs and related breeds because of their alleged aggression toward humans and protection of criminals. An ordinance of May 27, 1845, brought together measures against stray dogs and bulldogs, codifying the links between strays, danger, and criminality. It extended the ban on bulldogs on the public highway and stipulated that all other dogs on the street, leashed or not, must wear a muzzle and collar or risk impoundment and death. But the ordinance’s impact was muted, and the police themselves admitted that dog owners openly flouted it.10

Nonetheless, from the perspective of London, Parisian police regulations seemed firm and effective. British anxieties about strays and rabies climaxed in 1830—the “era of canine madness,” according to home secretary Robert Peel—when journalists reported how “thousands and tens of thousands of dogs kept by the Poor” wandered the streets of London, biting and harassing passersby.11 We cannot be certain that stray dogs were this abundant or mainly owned by poor Londoners. But the image of uncontainable and potentially rabid strays carried an emotional impact, and calls for violence against them came from municipal authorities. The lord mayor of London stated that “if you have the least suspicion that a dog is mad, kill it. I shall be answerable for the consequences. I wish it to be known as publicly as possible, and do not care a pin who is the owner.” Commentators denounced the national government’s lame attempts to combat “these pests to the human race.” Stung by the criticism, in June 1830 the government proposed a Bill to Prevent the Spreading of Canine Madness that would empower justices of the peace to order that all dogs within a designated area be confined indoors for a defined period. Noncompliant owners would be liable to fines, and police officers, beadles, and other guardians of public order would be instructed to impound stray dogs and kill unclaimed ones. But the bill failed to pass, and the efforts of alderman Mathew Wood to introduce similar ones throughout the 1830s came to nothing. Some attributed the lack of legislation to the influence of liberalism on British politics. The rights of dog owners had trumped public safety, unlike in France, where the “active hand of the law” was believed to be better at stamping out canine nuisances.12 Aggression toward strays did not lead to effective action on the British side of the Channel.

Financial measures represented a potential solution. Following on from the establishment of a British dog tax in 1796, which after much debate had targeted the luxury dogs of the rich and spared the dogs of the poor, leading veterinarian William Youatt demanded in 1830 that financial obstacles be placed in the way of poor people keeping dogs. In an echo of Roger, he argued that “all relief, in every shape, be denied where a dog is kept.” Every “useless” dog should be taxed, with owners forced to pay a “double penalty” if they let their dog roam. But such calls for a stricter dog tax went unheeded. In New York, meanwhile, the dog register and collector was charged with levying a three-dollar tax on dogs but claiming 20 percent of the receipts for himself.13 The French dog tax came later. In 1855 legislators revived eighteenth-century proposals for a dog tax to discourage the poor from keeping dogs. They envisaged the tax decreasing the number of dogs from 3 million to 1.5 million. Dog owners now had to declare their dog annually at the local town hall and pay tax according to whether they owned a luxury or a working dog. But dog taxes failed to consider that many owners saw their pet as an emotional necessity and a valuable protector of their home. Pet dogs were not frivolous luxuries but instead essential to happy domestic life.14

Taxes were ineffectual in reducing the number of strays, as they were all too easy t...