Shared Lives of Humans and Animals

Animal Agency in the Global North

Tuomas Räsänen, Taina Syrjämaa, Tuomas Räsänen, Taina Syrjämaa

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351857109
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Physical Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Geography

Animals are conscious beings that form their own perspective regarding the lifeworlds in which they exist, and according to which they act in relation to their species and other animals. In recent decades a thorough transformation in societal research has taken place, as many groups that were previously perceived as being passive or subjugated objects have become active subjects. This fundamental reassessment, first promoted by feminist and radical studies, has subsequently been followed by spatial and material turns that have brought non-human agency to the fore. In human–animal relations, despite a power imbalance, animals are not mere objects but act as agents. They shape our material world and our encounters with them influence the way we think about the world and ourselves.

This book focuses on animal agency and interactions between humans and animals. It explores the reciprocity of human–animal relations and the capacity of animals to act and shape human societies. The chapters draw on examples from the Global North to explore how human life in modernity has been and is shaped by the sentience, autonomy, and physicality of various animals, particularly in landscapes where communities and wild animals exist in close proximity. It offers a timely contribution to animal studies, environmental geography, environmental history, and social science and humanities studies of the environment more broadly.

Part I

Co-Living Individuals

1Whose Agency?

Humans and Dogs in Training

Leena Koski and Pia Bäcklund

Introduction

If left to their own devices, dogs as companion animals living in human homes are not very tolerable. Their activities, behaviors, habits, and ways of communicating are those of animals; therefore, it is generally thought that their characters must be shaped and trained. The boundaries of a modern, urban dog’s controlled space and activities are quite strict; dogs are accepted into modern human communities in subordinate roles, submissive to human rules and control. Simultaneously, dogs are often expected to play an active role in their keepers’ lives. They are taken into human homes for some more or less specific purposes, such as “versatile companionships,”¹ and are expected to develop individual personalities similar to those of other family members.²

One of the fairly new roles that dogs have occupied is as companions in various dog sports. In this context, dogs are expected to act as active partners in learning and achieving the human’s chosen goals. Goal-oriented training requires the development of effective interspecies communication and cooperation between two partners in order to achieve any success. Cooperation entails the idea that the dog is capable of certain levels of cooperative communication, and is therefore in possession of some kind of agency. Our questions are therefore as follows: (1) How is the dog’s agency constructed in the cooperation process? (2) How is the dog herself displaying her agency? (3) What does interspecies cooperation mean in relation to the respective agencies of both the human and the dog? The space for a discussion on the agency of dogs is comprised here of three defining structures. First, there is a presentation of the general and historical conditions defining the lives of dogs in Finland. Second, we discuss the intensified interactions between the dog and the human, and third, we explain the simultaneous cultural discourses of humanizing, instrumentalizing, and animalizing dogs in modern societies.³

Finland was urbanized relatively late, in just the past few decades. Thus, traces of a more traditional understanding of the dogs’ social place and status as living in the countryside hunting elk, bear, squirrel, or fowl as well as managing themselves outdoors during the cold winters and guarding the barnyard are still present. The dogs as family members sharing human homes, and as present in urban, public places, are relatively new phenomena as compared to their reception in most other European cultures, which have many more years of urbanized traditions. The late urbanization in Finland implies a shorter developmental period for urban mentality as well. Therefore, dogs being visibly present in the majority of Finnish urban environments is fairly novel. Furthermore, there are tensions and conflicts leading to the demand for increasingly strict control over public places that either deny or allow dogs; dogs are not, for example, allowed onto public beaches, playgrounds, or ski tracks, inside shops or offices, or at the marketplaces. They are only permitted off-leash within fenced areas or with the landowner’s permission, and only recently have they been allowed inside restaurants with express management permission. However, the demands for more control in Finland have not yet reached the level of defining any particular breeds as more dangerous than others, as is the case in Norway, for example.⁴ Our starting point, then, is that late urbanization affects the way in which we see dogs as companion animals in general, which also affects how their agency is defined in dog sports, and what these dogs now appear to need for a good life.

Training dogs to perform highly-specified tasks is an exemplary case where the possible and actual interpretations, constructions, and representations of a dog’s agency can be traced. Training is an intensified case of interaction and interspecies cooperation. Training for a fixed goal, such as participation in official competitions with the expectation of performing certain exercises, exposes both the trainers’ and the dogs’ subtle forms of interaction and learning.⁵ Power notes that inside homes, as opposed to at competitions or other spaces outside of the home, “humans and dogs experienced a greater freedom to define their own relations and presences.”⁶ Thus, our data refer to the public sphere, where the agency or agencies are presupposed or given to the dog, and where the preconditions for the dog to display her agency are already presented.

Dogs and Agency: A Theoretical Background

Agency is one of the most troublesome concepts in the social sciences; it demarcates a contradictory space, including questions of self-fulfillment, forms of interaction, political possibilities, and restrictions in structural and everyday power relations. In the case of the dog, such a concept becomes even more difficult to define. The social space for dogs is both inside and outside of human society⁷ and we have a vague (if any) understanding of the dog’s consciousness and ideas of self-fulfillment. However, as Bekoff notes, when discussing the possibility of morality with respect to animal behavior, play and cooperation are the keys of understanding and the grounds of establishing such moral rules and behavior. Play cannot occur without rules; it requires fairness and trust on both parts. If the rules are broken, playing stops and continues only if the playmate “apologizes” to the other, who then decides whether to continue playing or not.⁸ Based on Bekoff’s ideas, McFarland and Hediger claim that play and “its underlying rules reflect animal agency,” because play requires that participants will “follow the rules (which means that they also could choose not to).”⁹ Furthermore, Bekoff highlights the importance of cooperation over competition; fairness and trust are prerequisites for play, and cooperation is a more successful resource for survival than competition or “survival of the fittest,” at least for pack animals such as dogs. Thus, play requires a kind of cooperation that drives behavior in a more productive direction than competition does.

Drawing again on Bekoff’s arguments McFarland and Hediger claim that play is the central element and common denominator of animal agency, since it “requires a choice, and choice is part of what defines agency.”¹⁰ Bekoff’s study is based on observations of domestic dogs and their wild relatives, such as coyotes and wolves, and this explains why these ideas of a basic understanding of canine agency, inscribed with its own kind of morality, are relevant as theoretical starting points for our study. As we have shown in our earlier studies, cooperation, fair play, and an emphasis on the dog’s own will in the training processes are at the very core of the hegemonic pedagogical ideas of dog training in Finland.¹¹ The pedagogy includes the idea that the dog displays her individual feelings and affectations during the training process, and that these factors must be taken into account. Thus, dogs are supposed to make choices, and these choices are indicators of their agency.

However, our data does not consist of observations of canine behavior, but instead includes the dog trainers’ descriptions of their training methods, how their dogs learn, the challenges faced while training and in everyday life, the demonstrations of educability on behalf of their canine partners, and descriptions of the ideal dog. Theoretically and methodologically, we are discussing the human interpretation of an agency “given” to, or “taken” from dogs. Therefore, we believe that discussing only how agency can be understood among the dogs themselves is not enough. What must also be considered is how dog agency is defined in relation to human agency in order to form a more comprehensive understanding of these agencies in their interspecies cooperation. Here, we turn to feminist discussions for more illumination of agency-related issues.¹²

In feminist discussions, agency is understood as dynamic and multifaceted; it is intertwined in historical and cultural conditions and power relations, and it is discursive, material, and situational. As a situational concept, agency varies depending upon the conditions of time, space, materiality, bodies, and relations to other agents and their positions.¹³ It can be suggested that when humans are interacting with dogs, the formation of human agency in this particular context is situational, related to that of the dog and vice versa in an interspecies collective. Both the trainers and the dogs have to adjust their actions to those of their partner, making situational choices that change each other’s behaviors.

Sanders identifies numerous stories describing how dogs “acted in ways that were thoughtfully intended to shape their owner’s definitions of the situation and to manipulate their subsequent behavior to desirable ends.”¹⁴ A dog “shaping” her owner’s behavior is a definition of agency. The dogs’ agency is related to the fact that dogs have a hybrid existence in the sense in which Latour defines hybridism; dogs are creatures that would not even exist as a species without human investment,¹⁵ and, as Haraway suggests, humans would not exist as they are without their historical relations with dogs: “Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships – coconstitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all.”¹⁶

Combining these ideas, it can be claimed that humans in relation to dogs are hybrids as well. Thus, not only is the way in which the dog changes the human’s behavior important, the reverse is also important as well. Latimer claims that humans are, and have always been, in “relationalities” with non-human species; she maintains that “human existence is never without life with non-human animals. This is not to stress the animal in the human, or other species as biological kindred, but to stress ‘significant otherness,’ in terms of interspecies socialities and interdependencies.”¹⁷ Franklin claims th...