The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S7E3 - Species Story with Mariam Fraser Motamedi
In this episode Mariam Motamedi-Fraser joins us in the show to discuss ‘species story’ a concept she developed in her book Dog Politics. We discuss how the human-dog bond has been established and maintained through modern day practices and scientific discourses which have implications for how dogs can live.
Date Recorded: 31 July 2024.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the interdisciplinary research group UCL Anthropocene, in the Department of Geography. Her research is located in the field of animal studies. She is particularly interested in the implications, for animals, of the concepts and theories that are deployed to ‘explain’ them in both science and non-science research. Mariam is the author of three monographs and two co-edited collections, and has published in a wide range of journals. Her most recent book, Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences (Manchester University Press, 2024), is a critical analysis of the idea that relationality-with-humans somehow constitutes dogs’ evolutionary destiny. The book is partly informed by her experience of volunteering at The Dog Hub, a dog training and behavioural centre in London. She is strongly committed to teaching animal studies, and to the transformative experience that learning about animals in a structured setting offers students ( m.motamedifraser@ucl.ac.uk).
Featured:
- Dog Politics by Mariam Motamedi Fraser
- The War Against Animals by Dinesh Wadiwel
- Pets by Erica Fudge
- Animal Biographies by Éric Baratay
- Wild Justice by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce
- Do Fish Resist by Dinesh Wadiwel
- S3E3: Invisibilized Animals with Paula Arcari on The Animal Turn
- Mother with Yamini Narayanan on The An
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. It can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, and Instagram Learn more about the show on our website.
Hello Mariam, Welcome to the Animal Tone Podcast. Thank you.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I'm very excited to be here, Claudia.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:as you know, yes, we've been talking for a little while in the green room Almost 20 minutes, it's funny. So I think we're not going to have any shortage of topics to talk about today. So today we're going to be focused on the idea of species story, which, when I first heard it, I was really taken aback because I felt to me like this concept captured something I've been struggling to put into words for a long time, and that's kind of the essentialization of animals in many ways. But you do this interesting move where you go backwards in time and you say well, how have ideas of animals, and in your case, dogs, been shaped through history, I suppose? So I'm really looking forward to kind of unpacking what species story is and why thinking about species story is important when we think about health, in particular dog health. But before we get into that, let's learn a little bit about you, mariam. How did you come to be interested in animals and writing this incredible book, dog Politics?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Well, I suppose there's an intellectual trajectory and there's a personal trajectory. I'm a bit wary of new destiny stories, as Vansianda Prey puts it, but nevertheless, in terms of animals in general, I come from a very animal oriented family, but not in any way that is a kind of. Animals are kind of integrated into the family without comment, so it's not something that is a big deal in the family, it's just like part of life. So I think that has been a background for me. But I do also think there has to be a moment where what is kind of even something like a second nature to you becomes you become more conscious of it or it becomes kind of clear to you. And that really happened to me.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I had a period of quite a long period of illness and I had intellectual trajectory that was kind of leading its way to animals. I started working in the field of health and then moved to the body, new materialism and affect material. I wrote a book on non-linguistic word relations, so relationships with words that aren't within the frame of language, and I always knew that that book should have had a chapter on animals in it. But I didn't feel kind of confident with the literature in order to do it at that time and that was. It was around that time, in just a few months after that book was published, that I took two years out on medical leave.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:During that period I also met Susan Close, who runs the Dog Hub in London, which is a very unusual training centre for dogs training and behavioural centre and she was very supportive and strangely asked me to volunteer at the Dog Hub. And this is what I mean by something that is second nature to you. Something needs to bring it to the foreground, to your consciousness. Because when she first said that to me should volunteer here, I was astonished. I was like me why, what have I? How, why would anyone ask me to do that?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So she probably picked up on that kind of non-conscious background and I think that was really a prompt to start formalising the relationships that I had built with various animals, but also with the kind of idea of animals. And over that period of two years it was very important to me working in the dog hub and Susan Close has been a huge influence on the way I think about animals but especially the way that I think about dogs. So yeah, I think that's kind of how it all happened. I wish I had come to animal studies earlier in my career, but on the other hand, I also think that the work that I did before, particularly a long-term preoccupation with science, has been very helpful in terms of informing the way that I come to animal studies finally, at this late stage.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think the way we all come to animal studies is kind of through. Most of us. I think it's very rare to find anyone who started in animal studies right. We've all come with kind of different disciplinary backgrounds that have brought us to animals and to thinking about animals, and some of us with a much more political intent, I think, than others. But it's an interesting story, especially what you were saying there about second nature, because one of the things guests always say is I love animals and I grew up with animals. Everyone kind of says that that I love animals, I grew up with animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But that kind of consciousness raising moments, that moment when they become apparent to you like really as individuals, not as background noise or as they are very much in themselves themselves, I think that's really something quite different. And I remember speaking to Paula Akari on the show, and it's a phrase I say often in my mind, even when I'm walking or when I find myself maybe disregarding Linus. My dog's needs is they so readily become the wallpaper of our lives? And I think that's such a profound thing, because you can live with animals, you can love animals, but still somehow the animals in our lives, like pets, our dogs, our cats can become nothing but wallpaper to our interests yeah, I think that's right yeah, yeah.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I really resonate with what you're saying there, but you mentioned the dog hub, which is a pretty remarkable place in and of itself, so maybe you could walk us through the dog hub and the work they remarkable place in and of itself, so maybe you could walk us through the dog hub and the work they do before we jump into speaking about species story so Susan set it up about I'm not sure she I think around 20 years ago.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:She worked with horses before that and then moved to dogs. She, I think, started off taking private clients mostly but moved gradually into basically to cut a long story short work very much within the communities that she lives, which is in Euston in London, which is an inner city, part of the London at London, very, very diverse community, and possibly over the period that I met her but possibly earlier I think her way of thinking about dogs in the community changed very much. Anyway, the upshot was that Camden Council, which is a local authority but the borough that she lives in, started to fund part of the dog hub and by funding that what that meant was that she became involved with council business, so whether there were things to do with social services or police or troubleshooting and so on, basically kind of being there to make assessments for on their behalf but also troubleshooting and stopping things escalating out of control or usually families situations in where dogs are are present. So to give a very neutral example before people can well, it's not neutral actually, but less new a less controversial example before people can adopt a child, for example, if they have a dog, then the relationship of the family to the dog and so on has to be assessed so that there's no danger to the incoming child, risk to the incoming child. And this led also to providing free training and support and advice to anyone who lives in the borough. So anyone who lives in Camden can come to puppy classes, can come to advanced dog training classes, can become involved in the dog hub, can bring their dogs if they've got problems, can have long-term support with their dogs and so on.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So one of the things for me that is significant about that and it relates to what we're saying about background noise, susan, is it basically meant? Means that dogs are not background, are not allowed to be background noise in that kind of way? It's that very privatised relationship with dogs which you were kind of gesturing to earlier about you living with them, they're in your house. It basically puts dogs on the map in a different kind of way. It's dogs are part of our community, we live with dogs, we all live with dogs. We live with dogs in different ways and it's a kind of form of support. So because I can't think of any kind of human relationship that doesn't have some kind of outside support. You know there are always these kind of structural things in place, whether they're schools or hospitals or whatever they are. They're always there for humans and in some ways dog hub is a bit like that. It's like a kind of public. It makes dog ownership and responsibilities for dog a public concern and not merely a private concern.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So obviously the dog hub has been very involved in Susan's very, very critical of the council. I should say you know part of their work that she does is about helping the council members, to all staff, to understand dogs differently, to understand the pressures that dogs are under differently, to understand the pressures that humans are under different differently and basically to kind of change the way in which we think about dogs. It's just like you buy one, it comes in your house and that's the end of the story and who knows what goes on. It's much more about kind of integrating dogs as part of our lives. So I think that's really a huge achievement on the part of Susan and very underplayed.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I think the fact that everything is free is also really important because the commercialization of dogs obviously is hugely significant, but also the very high costs of dog, increasingly high costs of dogs, particularly in terms of veterinary care.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So all of those there are other organizations, obviously, that provide free services, like street vets and so on, who will give veterinary support to people who live on the streets with dogs, but they are few and far between, to be honest, and I think one of the things they do is help us to understand that dogs are not background noise, that dogs truly are a part of our communities, and it's about helping people to understand that and, above all, helping the council to understand that.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So moving in there earlier, before things get out of control, stopping the council taking actions which will be damaging for the family, for families or for people, or for dogs, and so on. So it's always about thinking about it in terms of this kind of integration. And I have to say Susan as well has an extraordinary relationship with dogs in the way that she understands them, and she completely transformed the way that I understand dogs, even though everyone in my family I come from a huge family everyone in my Iranian family, everyone has dogs. My cousin brother is a word we use, my cousin brother. At one point I think he had six dogs, you know so. And yet it took meeting Susan to completely transform the way I understood dogs, so she's been very important in relation to how I think about dogs and to dog politics. I can't overstate her influence on me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, that sounds. I mean I really appreciate the dog hub kind of the civil orientation of the dog hub. I'm aware of other organizations that, as you said, provide free veterinary services but maybe perhaps aren't thinking in this kind of civil way about dogs. How are dogs part of our urban societies? I mean even people who don't, because dogs are still thought of as property. Even people who don't own dogs should be thinking about dogs as part of their societies.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think so often that conversation is put about in very like definitive terms we ban dogs or we allow dogs. It's never actually a negotiation of how we manage and work through living in a shared society. And you know, a small thing for me is about language and learning how to read dogs for people who also don't have dogs. You know, something you often see on streets of cities is people who are not exposed to dogs jumping away or afraid or terrified or screaming. And there's a lot to be said about how we can learn to have a bit more tolerance and awareness of how other species move through our cities, and of course this could go beyond dogs to other animals as well. But having an organization that does that kind of political work is really, really important.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I should say I see Susan's work as political. I'm not sure that she does. But just to go back to your point about people being frightened of dogs, so one of the things I've noticed about the dog hub is that the issue of dogs often is really not about dogs at all. It's about relations between humans in which the dog becomes a cipher, a way to kind of antagonise a problem. So just to give a really basic example, you've got one neighbour complaining about another neighbour, which is that the dog is barking all the time.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So that would be a kind of classic situation where Susan might go in and one of the things there is obviously to understand why the dog is barking and to help the dog not to bark. Because the dog is barking for a reason, we want to know what that reason is. It's usually a holistic reason, it's not to do with one thing. But before that you have to find out is the dog barking or have things turned into, have become so intense between these two houses that there might be a misunderstanding as to actually whether this dog does bark all the time? So that can just be a kind of oh my God you are resonating.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I cannot even tell you how much this has literally happened to me. We got Linus, we adopted him from the shelter in Canada and we were second story in an apartment block and this was just as COVID hit. So everyone was also home and my neighbor downstairs started just complaining about noise, but like all sorts of noise, but Linus literally didn't bark for the first six months. He was and I know that this is a common phenomenon that happens with shelter dogs. I think he maybe barked once or twice over the first six months we had him, didn't wag his tail, didn't bark. He was obviously quite traumatized. But the number of complaints she would send to our landlord about dog barking and was unbelievable and I would get so enraged and it literally devolved. At some point it became nothing to do with blindness, it devolved into just neighbors shouting at each other over yeah, anyway. So sorry I had to say like as you were talking like you're speaking about.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Yes, yes, so that is a really common issue and I mean we had an issue with one of our neighbors and, based on the experience of my dog hub, of the dog hub, my experience of the dog hub, I did actually record how many times this sound was occurring because I thought, well, you know, I'm as vulnerable to that as anybody else is.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:And in fact, it was really hugely helpful to do that diary because I realized actually, the sound that I was worried about wasn't occurring as often as I thought and it was. I had gotten to a kind of state about it. I thought, and it was, I had got into a kind of state about it. So a lot of that dog hubs work is about protecting the dog from the way in which it gets used between people and of course, this is no surprise to anybody that this should happen. So, but also, I mean, obviously, if there is a problem with the dog, then you also want to be there to try to make a better relationship in that environment for the dog so the dog can survive it and possibly even thrive in it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, yeah, Well, it seems clear to me already that this is a question of health health for society, health for communities, health for families and certainly health for the dogs and the humans that we are talking about.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I just want to say one kind of proviso. I recognise that a kind of institutional setup like the dog hub could be actually quite damaging in terms of, for example, if the dog hub were to take its prejudices to families, if the dog hub were to take its prejudices to dogs and all those kinds of things. So I'm very aware of the precariousness of this kind of setup. It happens that I think that nobody could be better suited to this than Susan, and it is not surprising to me that the dog hub should have been set up by her, because I don't think another. There are plenty of dog trainers in London, which, by the way, is an unregulated field, and that's something the dog hub works to try to rectify with other animal groups, so that we have registered dog trainers rather than anybody just so I think it comes out of years of experience and a particular kind of person that enables her to do that.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But I can see quite easily how a structure like that could also very much be open to abuse, both in relation to dogs but also in relation to households and so on. So it is fantastic, but there's a dimension of it which to some degree is it's a lucky outcome. It could so easily be another form of surveillance, another form of interference and so on. So yeah, I just thought I should put that proviso in, because it is something that I think about a lot, and it just happens that Susan is very radical and kind of, you know, fantastic in every respect, so that's great, but she might not be.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's not predetermined that something set up like this would be. And I think that's such an important point because, even when it comes to law, you know something, that something that's really I think quite important and transformative and can be really transformative to animals' lives, is precarious because it's subject to change, it's subject to the whims of what we decide is appropriate or inappropriate. And, yeah, I think we're always kind of caught in this odd dilemma of trying to set up institutions so that we can make change, because institutions and structures like these do facilitate change while at the same time kind of being cautious that they can also become damaging in their own right over time. You know, you look at institutions we take for granted today. Like you know, policing wasn't always done the way it is today. Right, it got structures.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know, in the late 19th century, police became a lot more formalized, and these change over time in good ways and in bad ways, right? So no, I think that's a really valid and important point and it doesn't mean that everyone who says I'm here for the animals is necessarily acting in animals' best interest or the communities that those animals are in. So, no, thank you so much for that, susan, and I think part of the tension and problem with talking through these structures and how it impacts dogs and humans is the species story. So maybe we can start talking about that with perhaps a broad introduction to what is it you mean when you say species story.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Yeah, so well, if it's all right, I'll just go back again a bit to, not to the dog hub, but to how the concept of a species story came about for me. I think it's incredibly difficult to talk about dogs. In fact it's obviously there's been a lot of brilliant work on dogs, but this issue, as Erica Fudge puts it, as an animal, a pet, not being an animal, or and also the kind of intimacy that humans have with dogs, or perceived intimacy that they have with dogs just dogs just are very difficult animals in some sense, precisely on account of their proximity to humans, to think about. When I was working in the dog hub, I mean I really wanted to just write a book about dogs. I was just really, but I just couldn't kind of get past something, something about what was informing the ways in which people, humans, related to their dogs. And obviously in the dog hub you do see a lot of problems, because that's necessarily a place where people go. When there are problems you go to a behaviorist. But you also see very enjoyable. You also do very enjoyable things like puppy classes, advanced training, you know all those kinds of things. But still, in every context I just felt like there's something about dogs that I can't quite get my finger on, and I was.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Also, it was difficult as well to think about the concept of species because, again, this is a very difficult concept. You know, I think, intuitively we probably don't like the concept. It's a category, it categorizes, it's a generalizing concept and all those kinds of things. So species itself has been very difficult and I think social scientists and humanities scholars have struggled a bit with that concept. You know we have tried to undermine it but somehow it's rather obdurate kind of concept that keeps coming back to us over and over again. So these two quite different and difficult concepts.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:And it wasn't that I was thinking about dogs in terms of species when I was thinking why are dogs so difficult to think through and think about? What I was actually thinking about was this story about dogs. So I wasn't thinking of dogs as a species, I was thinking there's such a very strong story that follows dogs around. I mean, I think there are other animals as well, but I'm less familiar with them. I think cats obviously in particular, but and horses, but dogs wow, I mean that story is because this word is going to come up quite a lot for some reason during this discussion.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I think second nature, I mean it's just like hardly, it's barely credited with any attention, this idea that dogs and humans have this strong relationship with each other. I think that for me was partly what fell apart in the dog hub. Even this is not to say that things were going badly wrong in the dog hub. On the contrary, things were going very well. But it was partly the amount of work that was involved in things going well, even in the most positive contexts, like you know, classes that are for enjoyment for everybody, but also my question about whether they were going well for dogs.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:In fact, you know, whether the achievement of a good relationship for a human was necessarily the achievement of a good relationship for a dog, and that just that was also something that really struck me in the dog hub. So in that environment there seemed to be a lot of contradictory and ambiguous things going on and kind of very ambivalent outcomes in some senses as well. And so this I mean I have worked on the concept of stories as a lot in the past. I've taught a course with Yasmin Gunaraknam on stories, but I wasn't again conscious of that history of my own when I came to the concept of story. It was literally that there is a story about dogs. It's literally like there is a story about dogs and it's in the room with us all the time, and that's how those three concepts came together.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, if I understand you correctly, there's this kind of taken-for-granted narrative or idea that dogs and humans belong with each other. We're good for each other. It's just kind of taken for granted. We're like, yeah, that's true, and very little critical attention has actually been given to whether or not that is in fact the case. Because dogs' story what makes a dog a dog is so entangled with being paired with humans. It's like our, our imagination of a dog outside, of a dog next to a human, or by a human.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:They no longer become a dog somehow but also it's super easy at that point, the point that you just got to there, it's super easy to say it's to do with modern life, that the problem is the conditions under which dogs live, and so I make this distinction quite early in the book between, which I take from Adrienne Rich, which is a distinction between the quantum leap and the contemporary emergency. Clearly there is an emergency for dogs and also for humans in some ways. The conditions under which we live are extremely stressful, especially in cities, which is where the dog hub is based. And we can talk a lot and in fact we have talked a lot at length about the fact that dogs are alone, a lot, the fact that dogs, you know, like humans, are becoming increasingly overweight such that it's damaging to the health. We can talk about the traffic in puppies and the puppy farms and so on. We can. Just.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:There are hundreds and hundreds of things that we can talk about which are really bad for dogs, which are which one could say is reducible to the circumstances.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So what we and the reason that that is relevant is because to frame the argument in that way is to imply that if the circumstances were to change, so if I lived in a bigger house with a big garden and I was at home all time I was retired and I could take my dog out all the time and all the rest of it, and we didn't live in a polluted environment and I fed him the right food and all the rest of it the dog would be fine, right?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So it's like the problems of dogs are not integral to the dog-human relationship. They're integral to the conditions under which dogs and humans live together today, which is a much broader problem of cities and urban life and modern life, and all of that could be changed and the kind of, like I said, the implication behind that is you change all of that and then we have this kind of very nice dog human relationship as we've always had. We've removed the kind of pressures of modern life and there we have the dog human relationship in in all its magic. So that is my problem with that argument. What that argument does is it doesn't touch the dog-human relationship as an idea at all. It keeps that idea completely intact. It's possible to make that argument and never go close to whether that relationship between dogs and humans is actually all right under any circumstances.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and this comes back to, I guess I mean, a lot of what you're saying here makes me think about a conversation I had with Yamini Narayana about cows in India, because I mean, certainly, cows in India have a very strong species story and it's one that's entangled with ideas of religion and being sacralized, and a key thing Yamini said in that interview was how the second the cow, became a god. The cow no longer became a cow. Your ability to actually see the cow standing in front of you became really, really, really difficult. And of course, this is a different context and I think we will talk about how the species stories we're speaking about with regards to dogs here is a very western species story of dogs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So often I've mentioned that 75% of the world's dogs are not in people's homes and people are flawed. The folks I talk with are like what? Dogs aren't pets. That really befuddles people. The sacralization of the cows and the kind of human-dog bond. They're kind of protected. They're above and beyond critique. You can't criticize them and I think when you get to that you often get to a really strong power relationship. What are our interests in? Really protecting this idea that human and dogs have always belonged with one another. And of course, this brings us to the question of domestication and how domestication is really political. It's not a taken for granted, easy natural thing. Domestication is really a political practice.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Just on that subject of cows, it no longer is a cow. I know in animal studies there's been a lot of criticism and rightly so of the word animal. But I think one of the things that always strikes me in parallel to what you've just said there, is how rarely people think the thought there is an animal in your house. There's an animal in your house. So actually living with really quite a large animal often in the house and think that, and what does that mean for that animal to be in the house, and think that and what does that mean for that animal to be in the house in that way, so like, say, around domestication? And the problem for dogs is that, because that relationship is naturalized, the idea that this is an animal in the house it has a complete different set of needs and desires, probably to you or to how human houses are organized makes it very difficult to kind of reconcile those two things or to even appreciate the fact that this is an animal and not and you see I don't even have a word for it. I was going to say and not a dog, you know. So this is yeah. So it's a kind of, it's a bind, it's a, it's a kind of like a trap. It's really, I do think, once you have a species story going like that, that there are pitfalls and traps all over the place, that species stories set those kinds of traps for us.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But you said western, you said western I just that's absolutely right and I agree with you. But it's also in science. I mean, the book that I wrote is very much a snapshot of contemporary science and there are lots of different ways in which you could have written that book or you could write the story of dogs and I think Justyna Flodarchik, I think, is starting a very, very interesting project and I hope she won't mind me saying this very, very interesting project on the ways, on the ways in which stories about dogs have changed are very different over time, so that you can do this in a very different way. And eric barrette as well, who I mentioned in the book, has done an analysis of kind of generations of social and cultural dogs rather than biological dogs. What I've done is very much a snapshot of the present moment and the snapshot is in science.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So you, you said Western, and that's right, and also as well as Western, also kind of the scientific canine science at the moment is very focused on Western, on the global north, dogs in the global north. Of course there is work on dogs who are free roaming and of course scientists know about those dogs. But a lot of the kind of theories about dogs or dogs' species story is developed in this science which focuses very much on dogs in the global north and in the west and who live in these in family houses and all the rest of it, as they call it yeah, and I mean, I think, I think it's really interesting when you start to compare it challenges the idea of species and the naturalization, as you said, of this human dog bond.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:When you start to compare it challenges the idea of species and the naturalization, as you said, of this human-dog bond, when you start to realize that there are just so many dogs who might rely on or be in and around human environments, but they are in no more or less ways, I think, than jackals, for example, although, that said, jackals are, maybe they're quite human adverse. They'll choose to run away from a human, whereas a dog might choose not all dogs, but some dogs might choose to see if they can approach a human to get food or something along those lines. So certainly there's interesting human-dog relationships, but they need to be looked at in context-specific ways and individual-specific ways. I think there are certainly some dogs that are very human adverse, that would choose to run away from and not be near humans, and we fail, I think, when we have this very single story of dogs as being pets, to see the complexity of dog relationships in the world.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:That's right, and I think what you said about domestication domestication, as you said, it's political. In dogs, the story, domestication, is what seems, as far as I know. It seems almost unique in some ways because the story of how dogs became a species, so the story of the becoming of dogs in science, is through domestication. So without domestication dogs would not have become a species. Put that in a really simple way for I'm just going to take this off the top of my head, I'm not sure if it's completely accurate, but let's just say wild ox. So wild ox is a wild ox, it is a species, and then it is domesticated.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:The story of dogs is slightly different to that. The story of dogs is slightly different to that. The story of dogs is that dogs were wolves until they were domesticated. Yeah, is that right? Yeah, so until they were domesticated. So basically, what is being said here is that there is domestication, is synonymous with speciation, so dogs would not have been dogs or the evolutionary story would not have unfolded. That's not the right word to use in relation to evolutionary theory, but I'm going to use it. It is in terms of a story. But the story of dogs wouldn't have unfolded in the way that it did if there hadn't been domestication. So you know, this is the argument that dogs were the original domesticates, so their domestication precedes. You know, this is the argument that dogs were the original domesticates, so that domestication precedes the agricultural revolution, which is when most other animals were domesticated. That speciation, as I've said, is connected to domestication, if not synonymous with it. So, as I said, dogs kind of transform themselves as a consequence of their relationship with humans and as a consequence of that, then we have this kind of transform themselves as a consequence of their relationship with humans and as a consequence of that, then we have this kind of unique relationship between dogs and humans.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So it's quite a distinct story in relation to domestication, one of the ways that it's very easy to capture and I use this in teaching there's a slide that I found, which is it basically shows that you know, that kind of story that is told visually of the shape of the human body as it progresses, for example, from, you know, from an ape standing more upright, exactly, and alongside that very common picture visual is a dog. So we've got the first dog howling at the moon, and that is obviously a wolf, and then it goes through kind of different shapes of dogs and we end up with a dog on the lead and a much smaller dog on the lead than some of the middle period dogs. The reason that picture is really important is because of the first position and the final position. So the dog is the wolf and the whole way through that transition that dog is standing next to a human and then it ends up being the dog in the house today.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Now I'm not sure, I can't say for sure for certain, but I don't think that there are any other species stories that have such a tight connection between the way in which an animal becomes what it is species becomes what it is and humans and what humans are up to. So domestication is political anyway, as you say. But in the case of dogs, the story that is told about dogs, the ways in which scientists make sense of what a dog is, domestication, is not not just a kind of it's kind of profoundly ontological in these stories. You can't take domestication out of the dog.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But I think the same thing with other species Like, I think again, coming back to cows, again, I think how it's positioned in the story has to be looking at where the story is being told and for who. Because, again, domestication and cows, you know, like cows, physiology changed. It would be interesting to have that same, like dialogue with cows, because cows got much smaller and then much bigger and then you've got the kind of same thing as dogs. You've got the expansion of the idea of cow through breeds, right. You've got the expansion of the idea of cow through breeds right. You've got breeding practices that really intervene in cows' bodies dramatically, so much so that today, today's cow and, you know, the auroch, both large animals, would look very, very different because a Holstein cow would have swollen udders that are too big, producing more milk than she can possibly do.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So there are these physiological changes, but the story that we've told with regards to cows and milk and human health also has sustaining power. But that's not premised, I think, in the same way as the intimacy with dogs. I feel like intimacy seems to be this key factor in the dog story that isn't as present in, let's say, a cow story or a chicken story Again, depending on the context you're in, because I would suspect in India, for example, cows would feature much more prominently in terms of, let's say, a social, cultural story of Indian communities than dogs would and this is pure conjecture, I don't know myself, but either way, domestication in both of these has been a practice and a process that has shaped both the human dogs and cultures, environments that are involved I mean it's interesting the kind of power of the scientific argument around dogs.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:It's kind of astonishing to me in a way that that story can exist, given the diversity of human relationships with dogs and how few humans are actually in relations with that, with dogs, in this way. You know, to go back to the kind of thing of background noise, I mean dogs, as you say, live everywhere all over the world and mostly they're free roaming or in or not necessarily free roaming in a pure way, but they may have very complex setups in relation to human communities. You know, it's not I don't think you can talk about a binary between captive dogs and free roaming dogs. I mean dogs are making their ways in really complicated and interesting ways for themselves. But it's astonishing how, in science, the story of domestication so this is basically the story that without domestication there would be no dog at all, we would just have wolves.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:It's kind of amazing the way that that story, the power of that story, given the empirical evidence around the world. But one of the things that I think, again, it's relatively so we can look to other forms of living, forms of dogs living to criticize that story. But one of the things that was important for me to do was to not look at those stories, to look at the dogs exactly under our noses. You know, like to really not be. How can I put it?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I think the temptation is to compare and contrast dogs in one part of the world with dogs in another part of the world, and then the evidence for the kind of tenuousness of dogs as a species story will be made clear. And one of the things that was important to me about the book and in its political dimension, was to actually look at the dogs that we live with, the dogs which apparently exemplify this intimate relationship, and to see how they are actually coping with it. So I think that's possibly the more surprising part of the book is that it's not about looking at dogs elsewhere and looking at a different relationship between humans and dogs elsewhere and different forms of intimacy or not, that you can find the kind of evidence for the difficulty of that story for dogs in the very dogs that it is supposed to describe best.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And you mentioned this already earlier when talking about the dog hub, where you said maintaining or even creating the idea of this dog-human bond takes a great deal of work. It's not just a given or a taken. There's massive interventions that make this possible even today. So perhaps you could walk us a bit through what you mean when you say that it takes work and how dogs are dealing today with these kinds of how does the species story this taken-for-granted idea of the human-dog bond? How does it impact dogs today?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Well, in terms of yeah, so in terms of the work, I spend quite a lot of time in the book talking about socialization theories and the role that they play in our understandings of dogs today. There's just so much to say about this I don't even know where to start, but let me just try and stay focused. So apparently it's a natural relationship, relationship, the relationship between dogs and humans. That's the starting point. That's the kind of outcome of dogs and species story that this relationship is somehow given in date in nature. So already we're in a really dangerous place, because that means that one might reasonably be led to expect that when you get a dog in your house you'll immediately make friends with it and everything will be lovely from that point onwards. And in fact that is often not the case. And I remember standing at a traffic light with Monk, who's the dog that I live with, when he was about eight weeks old and he was kind of squirming on the end of a lead at a busy road and a cyclist stopped at the traffic lights and she looked at me and she looked at Monk and she said God, we gave our dog up after about two months, something like that, or three months or something like that. So she basically looked at that and what she saw was work and she basically was saying in one sentence God, we kind of got it and we thought we're not going to do the work, and so I think the idea that your dog moves in everything is fine. That is, we've already got problems before we even started.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:In fact, dogs scientists would say, behaviourists would say lots of people would say dogs need a lot of socialisation in order to live in a human household and that socialisation begins possibly before they're even born, but certainly from the moment they're born and there is a massive science of socialization. I cannot exaggerate how enormous the field of science socialization is, and some of it is to do with companion dogs. So how can we enable captive dogs to not exhibit behaviors that will make them likely to be relinquished or lead to euthanasia? But a lot of it is also to do with working dogs. So dogs are going to go into the military, will have very specific forms of socialization, dogs are going to be service dogs, will have specific forms, socialization and so on, and all these theories are about working out in the most minute detail how exactly we can best enable a dog to live in a human environment and to basically to work for humans.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:That's really what a lot of that that literature is about. It's predictive. How can we not train dogs? Because it's even. It's not even at the level of training. It's kind of like sub, like a constitution. Yeah, how can we constitute dogs? Exactly how can we constitute a dog enabled to live and work with humans? So in terms of so-called natural, you know, it's astonishing the amount of work that goes into it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So that's, you know, on the science side I take your point about, even before they're born, because you just look at breeding practices, like each breed almost was like you have a species story, but kind of sub to species stories is a breed story. You hear people speak about specific breeds in such a taken for granted way oh, I got this dog because these are the types of traits they have. Or I got this dog. And it's not to say that there aren't elements of truth to that. Breeding does and can impact animals' emotions, docility I mean agricultural science has kind of gone to prove this that you can breed a certain amount of docility, but it has its limits. But I'm always astounded that people will go and buy a specific breed and I think that this is what sustains dog markets is people are not just buying a dog, they're buying a breed of dog that they hope will really fit into their lifestyle.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Think about Great Dane. People think, oh well, the Great Dane is a great apartment dog. That's a story that I know, even though I've rarely encountered Great Danes. Or you get a Jack Russell. They're really smart and active and they're a small dog that's not so small. They've got some. You know, they've got we've all. Or a boxer, they're goofballs. We've got these stories and we smile because there are elements of truth to it, but at the same time, truth to it but at the same time that's really quite damaging for for the dogs, because it's like we're buying a product and we expect that product to behave in a specific way and when they don't, we're devastated I mean mark beckhoff says mark beckhoff and jessica pierce say you know, dogs have personalities.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Breeds don't have personalities and in in some sense the concept of breed is like species, because it is a category, it's a broad thing, it's a generalizing thing and so every specificity of every in some ways you could think of it as an intensification of the category. So you, you get a, whatever the breed is into your house and you've got an expectation not only will this dog be a kind of in an intimate relationship with me, because that's what dogs are like, but in addition to that, it will be in an intimate relationship with me in this way, and you know that's obviously very problematic.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think that's nicely put there, the relationship between breed and species.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But you were talking about how much science there is on the socialization of dogs and how much this impacts dogs and dogs lives so there's the science, socialization, which is, you know, kind of formalized and institutionalized part, and that gets passed down to into dog books, dog books that people can buy and various other things as well classes. But the working classes, for example, the work at home, is huge, the amount of work that needs to be done and obviously lots of people are familiar with. Lots of people don't bother with it, obviously, but so much is so obvious. In some ways. What's perhaps more interesting is that even if you have a dog who is in inverted commas, I'm raising my fingers here well socialized at some point in their lives, maybe early on. One of the interesting things and the pandemic kind of threw this up for me quite a lot is that basically it's a dog needs to be socialized all through their lives.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Suzanne Clothier, who I really love she's a behaviorist. I've got a quote from it in the book. I absolutely love what she says. She says basically something like you know, if they don't do these things that I want them to do, I have to remember that it doesn't matter to them. You know, the reason they don't do it is because they don't care. You know they don't care about coming back, they don't care about sitting, they don't care about any of those things.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:And she's basically saying the obligation in that relationship is to make it obvious that you care that the human cares, and I think that that is often missed out, quite often in dog human relationships, and you know, humans often find it insulting when dogs don't kind of do what they've been trained to do.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But the reality is the dog doesn't care about many of the things that you care about and about how you want your relationship to look, especially from the outside. So yeah, so basically it's ongoing, this ongoing training, ongoing socialization, and the reason I'm talking about this is basically because it indicates that it's not like you socialize a dog and then they're happy in the home forever. The fact is that dogs I mean, if I could speak freely, I think probably are never really happy in the home and you constantly have to kind of make it worth it for them and kind of remind them that they're doing this and those kinds of things. And even that can be evidenced even in the most kind of again in inverted commas docile dog or dog that is apparently at ease. You know, it's a. I think it's really important to be looking at the dog throughout their life and exactly how they are responding and how are they happy in the house or are they docile, which is they're absolutely not the same kind of thing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's absolutely not the same thing and I I think so much of that species story we talk about is that the human-dog bond is beneficial. It's a win-win, it's a win-win for us and it's a win-win for them. They get a nice home and a thing you know full bellies to eat and they live these happy, full lives. And you know, I spoke to Angie Pepper on the previous season where we spoke about animals and politics and towards the end of that episode I remember her saying, you know, she's not convinced that we are good for dogs. You know that we. If you just look at the number of technologies we have in our homes, like you say, there's constant, the constant work, the leashes, the muzzles. All of these technologies are very indicative either that they don't fit into our societies in the ways we want them to or expect them to, and that they would much rather be doing something else. And I've got one of those quote-unquote problematic dogs. Linus is not an easy dog. He doesn't fit well into society or into our lives and you know, as someone who's an animal studies scholar, you know I'm very like, I'm trying and in many ways I feel like it's made this a much more difficult process for both myself and Oliver because we take Linus as Linus and we're trying desperately to respect him for him and what his needs are, but the truth is the society we live in and his other options are really quite limited and we can't just let him go because he will nip someone or bark at someone and that could lead to really devastating consequences for him. So you do, and then it can make social situations really quite daunting and then you as a human in the situation can get quite frustrated. I think, and without recognizing that, as you say, these are A not things that are necessarily important to Linus. And two, he might have not had those social experiences. It might actually have pretty negative, bad experiences that we're neglecting to take seriously in these situations.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And it's come up many times in the show that pets and the idea of pets are. The more you look at it, the more you realize it is just this. Yeah, you called them captive animals earlier and I think that that's exactly right. They are captive animals. If I had a doggy door and Linus could choose to come and go whenever he wants, that would be a very different form of relationship than me deciding when he can go out or when he can leave and if he decides to leave my house at all. You know, maybe he wants to go on and do something completely different, but his whole life is defined by myself and Oliver. Sorry, that was a bit of a diatribe, but I think it's a really hard thing to recognize that you're doing the best you can, but you might be very much part of the institutional and structural problems at the same time.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Yeah, it's a very complicated area and I think that this is one of the things why denaturalizing the kind of unfreedoms of dogs of all animals but of dogs is quite important.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So the book is quite it's got this kind of not straightforward relationship to the subject of the individual, because on the one hand, dogs are hugely individualised and on the other hand, when I'm talking about a species story, like all species categories, they kind of completely eradicate the individual because they're basically saying this is what a dog is, this is what a dog is like, so a dog should like to be with you or whatever, and if a dog doesn't, you know they're not properly a dog or whatever.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I mean, I suppose in some ways the book is a kind of classic piece of sociology. Ironically. So, never having been a very good sociologist in the past, I think ironically this is quite a sociological piece of work in the sense that I'm saying that it is a problem to reduce dogs's problems to it being a problem with the individual dog, because there is this story that. So a story that kind of erases individuals by saying this is how all dogs should be, but simultaneously turns any problems that they've got into problems that belong somehow to them, rather than to a whole set of expectations and norms and so on, which have all the powerful force of science behind them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think, as you were talking, it makes me think about in many ways how women were speaking.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think, as you were talking, it makes me think about in many ways how women were speaking. You know, when women were fighting for women's rights, you had similar kind of tensions happening People essentializing women and what it means to be a woman by saying you know, you're docile, you're in the home or you're feminine. And this kind of move to essentialize all women and all of the diversity amongst women and their experiences into this really simple, neat story amongst women and their experiences, into this really simple, neat story and that's what essentialization is is it makes a simple story that eradicates the complexity and diversity of what it means to be a woman, on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, when a woman is saying they're frustrated because they can't get promotion in the workplace, for example, oh, it's your fault as the individual because you are not working hard enough versus looking at the kind of systemic structures that might not matter how hard you work, you might never reach where it is you're hoping to get, because the system, in effect, is working against you.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:And that's very complicated in relation to dogs, because I would prefer the term captive to companion and a captive dog simply cannot, as you say, go anywhere. I mean in the past possibly. I remember my mum used to say where's the dog? The dog's walking himself, so the dog actually would walk himself, as opposed to anybody else walking him. This was I'm not going to say how long ago that was, it was quite a few decades ago.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But the thing about a dog is that they're captive in the home and so when we say you were saying you're not working hard enough, or with a dog they're being purposely, you know, not doing something or whatever. The dog doesn't have any choices. You know the dog, you know to be kind of identified as an aggressive dog, was there's no way for the dog, there's no movement for a dog in the sense that there might be. I mean, I'm not saying that women are free, but there is at least more freedom to act than a dog who is essentially captive. So you're either enclosed by the walls and the doors or you're enclosed by a lead.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to create a correlation between the experiences of women and dogs. I think I'm just more talking about the mechanism that works and is kind of scaling up to you know, the scaling up of a category on the one hand and then, on the other hand, the kind of really personal experience of how systems and laws impact your life. And I think, speaking about problems, I think when you become labelled a problem, in whatever category, your world changes right. Different policies, different practices come into place. The second you are labeled a problem, which I think is quite interesting in and of itself. As you say, it's an interesting thing that deserves to be studied. It's quite clear that this is a common practice in our societies that we should be studying and paying attention to.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So we've been speaking for an hour already. It's been really fascinating and just as a bit of a kind of to recap, I think, what we've been saying here. So I mean species story is, I think, a really effective and powerful concept for us to use to understand some of these structural dimensions that we've been speaking about for animals and particularly here for dogs, and maybe there are different characteristics to the species story that can be quite damaging for dogs, one of them being that the human dog bond is natural and it's unwavering, when in actual fact it's. It's uh, it actually requires a great deal of work and a great deal of dedication. And it's not natural.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's something that's maintained and sustained in a variety of different levels, from the family to to how it's being researched in science. That science is a very important role in the maintaining and sustaining of this narrative of the story, not only maintaining the story on paper but also putting in practice specific actions, how a military dog should behave, how a specific breed should behave, and then that gives kind of, I think, measurements against which these animals are compared. And then all of this in the species stories you've got the human-dog bond, you've got science and you've got how it's all attached back to a historical kind of moment at which dogs became dogs. That's often unquestioned, that somehow they would not be dogs unless they were attached to to humans. Is there anything that we're kind of missing here in kind of thinking through the broad, overarching idea of what a species story is?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:No not at all. That was a brilliant summary. I mean, I think we've talked. I haven't used the word violence or anything like that. I think probably I haven't tried to keep a fairly light touch on the consequences of that for dogs. But I think partly there's no need to go into that here because I think a lot of your listeners and you and me kind of know what those consequences are. But that's something that I do talk about in the book. You know what is it like to be a problem dog, in inverted commas. You know what is it like to be a problem dog. It's not great, you know. So that's just that dimension, yeah.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No and yeah, it's not great, and I think, as owners, you can find yourself doing things that you didn't expect you'd be doing.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But also the other thing I draw on Dinesh Waduwal's work in the chapter on labour and some of the consequences of dogs as species story. You know, in that chapter I basically argue that this idea of the naturalisation of the dog-human bond has implications for how we understand dogs, whether they work or not. And of course we can talk about working dogs. But I kind of go into that in quite a lot of detail in the sense that it is true that dogs are working, but it's something that humans would call work but like a dog would call being a dog. Because you're with humans. But and towards the end of that chapter I draw on Dinesh Wadiwal's work where he talks about time. So when I was saying just now we were talking about, you know, if you, if you are a problem dog or if you're a dog with inverted commas problems, I really insist on having that in inverted commas that could can potentially be a lifetime.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:So Dinesh talks a lot about time, time of labor for a dog, that can be a lifetime. That's because, you know, the entirety of a dog's life is dedicated basically to being a dog in the way that we imagine or fantasize that it might be. So it's very serious. It's not just. It's very unpleasant to be unhappy or anxious or angry or fearful or any of those things. It's that you're like unless, without intervention of some kind, you will be like that for a lifetime and and as I have really basically implied the whole way through whether intervention really works. You know, I think most people who know the dog that I live with would say that, in inverted commas he's a happy dog. You know, I don't think that. I think he's, you know, getting by. I think he's doing a great job and I think he has some happy moments. Yeah, I hope that. You know he has happy moments all the time. But you know, I would be very wary about saying that this is necessarily a dog who's living the life that he might live in other circumstances.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up Turkey here as we're talking about this, because I think this shows the power of the story and the idea that dogs not only belong with humans but increasingly belong in human homes. Because while we started at the beginning of the episode kind of saying the vast majority of the world's dog populations are not in human homes, one of the kind of beacons for this has been Turkey. For a long time it's been Turkey and Istanbul in particular. Stray was a brilliant movie that I think, without putting a human voice in it, to show the complexity and beauty of what a dog's life could be, with the damage, with the dangers, with the risks. And now, of course, they've changed the law and they are going to be rounding up and killing strays to move more towards this Western model of pets and homes.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And again, I'm not trying to romanticize what urban dogs, roaming dogs, go through or have, but I think it's the only reason I bring this up here is to show the power of the species story. It's not just this fanciful concept that we're talking about in abstract academic words. It has real purchase in legislation, in people's imaginations of where dogs belong, and we're constantly recreating it. It and it's moving to other countries and other parts of the world and I think, yeah, we're seeing more and more captive animals and and that's part of the species story, because it doesn't mention the violence of captivity- the other thing that I talk about a lot in the book is the relationship between, obviously, species and race.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But also the ways in which dogs live are racialized so and they're kind of part of so-called civilization projects and so on and that history of turkey and also istanbul, but also other cities as well where dogs are seen. You know, dogs on the streets are seen in a particular way, as as not, for example, this as a mark of a modern city and so on. But I mean those, those are very complicated stories. So, for example, in iran, pet keeping is seen as a sign of west toxification. So the iranian government regularly culls dogs in the most nasty way, in shelters and on the streets, largely, you know. So basically, dogs are like we're kind of going back to what we were saying right at the beginning dogs are caught up in all kinds of politics, whether it's the politics of a neighborhood or whether it's the politics of a nation, or whether it's politics of a kind of global geopolitical order.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know they're caught up in all of those problems and, of course, coming back to the theme of the season was kind of been implicit in a lot of what we're saying. This has huge implications for dogs' mental health, for their physical health and I would also say for societal health. Maybe I'm going too far, but I think if we're going to address many of the conflicting and problematic relationships we have with animals, both those in our homes and outside of our homes, we have to think seriously about how we treat those that are closest to us. If we're unable to really look at that and its problematic tendencies, how, yeah and I mean this is a much bigger debate that we don't have to get into here but I think it's worth saying that we really need to think seriously about how we relate to those that we say we supposedly care for. And I think we do care for them. I think in our mind we do, we are, we love them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I don't think people are lying when they say they love them. I just don't think there's been the same kind of sensitivity to what that means as you've kind of given us here in this episode today. But let's move to your quote now, if you will, mariam. Do you have a quote ready for us Mariam. I have a quote.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Like many other people, I'll say this was incredibly difficult to do. It is hard.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I didn't think it would be as hard a thing to do as when I first came up with the idea, but it's fun.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Yes, it's really fun. So I've chosen a quote that is important in itself, I think, but also incredibly important to me just in terms of my trajectory and my work. You know it's in an article that is a set text on every single course I've ever taught on animals, which is quite a lot now, and it's an article that I go back to again and again for lots of reasons. I can say why after I've read it. So the quote comes from the article Do Fish Resist by Dinesh Wadiwal. It was published in 2016. So I've done something naughty, claudia. It's a quote from the beginning and end of the article, but they're directly related. So there's a square paragraph with dot dot dots in the middle of this quote.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I argue that conflict is a starting point for thinking about relationality. We are in relation with animals, but this is a relation essentially of hostility. This conflict need not be thought of as a dead end, but can comprise a potential beginning for different and hopefully less violent relationalities. And then, at the end, fish create worlds we cannot even understand. They defy our imagination. Fish create worlds we cannot even understand. They defy our imagination. Our primary relationship with fish, at least so far, has been violent and parasitic. We have quite literally fed off their creativity for our own benefit. Recognising fish resistance might give us different ways to think about how we might relate to fish, beyond simply finding new ways to counter their resistance to us. What would our world look like if we worked with and supported the creativity of fish, rather than simply working against it?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Interesting, really, really. I mean, I'm a big fan of Dinesh's work, but I'm curious what made you decide to pick a quote that focused on and maybe this is flying in the face of the idea of a species narrative what made you decide to focus on, quote the foregrounded fish?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Well, I think it's not so much fish. I think the point is relevant to all our relations with animals. I think we are this is a huge generalisation and I hope that I don't regret saying it afterwards but I feel that we tend to think rather better of our relations with animals than they actually are, that a lot of our relationships really are very hostile, and I kind of agree I think Dinesh wrote the best title of any book ever the War on Animals, you know. So I think partly that, and the other thing that's important to me about that argument and the fact that it's fish is significant because, like you say, it's a very enormous, the very opposite of a dog, you know, a fish. It's much more difficult to create that feeling of intimacy as he says they defy our imagination than it is with a dog. But nevertheless, when I think, when I first read this article, which was quite early on, not that long after it was published, I think that a lot of the book Dog Politics is about this struggle that I've got with the concept of relationality. I think it's a really difficult concept, much more difficult than I ever thought it was. I think it's done way too much work in terms of particularly in ethics, particularly in ethics. And one of the things about this is that he's talking about relationality but he's not talking about. He's not talking about it in a positive kind of way. He's talking about relations of hostility and conflict and what that led me.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:It was such an important part of the book and in part of the development of the concept of species story, because species story is basically a form of relation. In a way, it's a form of building a relationship with a dog through a story, and I think that's what he's talking about. You know, we should look more closely at the relationality is all well and good, but the question is and nobody would really, you know, nobody would deny relationality but what is the form that those relations take? And again, mark Beckhoff talks about the form of the relationship with dogs as being a relation of captivity. So the quality of that relation, or domestication as a form of relation, the quality of that might change. As Portia says. You know, a cow can be treated, a pig can be treated well or badly, just as a dog can be treated well or badly. But that's not the point. The point is is what is the form of the relationship within which they can be either treated well or badly. So I think that's really an important part for me in relation to a species story is it doesn't really matter whether the dog is happy in the home or not. What matters is that there is a form of relationship that is organizing that life, and he captures that really well here just by not assuming that relationality is necessarily good.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:But the other reason why I chose it as well is because, exactly because it is fish, I mean, this article to me is simply brilliant.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:It just absolutely. It is a really perfect example of how you can absolutely transform an epistemic frame. You know it's such a powerful critique of Peter Singer, but there have been many powerful critiques of Peter Singer, but what he does in this article, which is really quite short, it's got a huge number of references, so my students faint because I think it's about 50 pages long. Actually it's not that long at all. But what he does in that article is make you ask the question about fish in a completely different way and to me this is such an enormous achievement and it's so powerful, partly because it is fish and of course I haven't done anything even remotely similar to that in relation to dog politics, but it is a kind of ambition, an ambition to try to transform the ways in which we see dogs and transform the way in which a very, very strong epistemic frame shapes the lives of dogs broadly yeah, and I think that's no short.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, we spoke about constitutions earlier and I think if you've only got a limited set of ways of thinking about something, you'll tend to only think you've got a limited number of tools or actions available to you. When you'll tend to only think you've got a limited number of tools or actions available to you, when you literally start to frame things differently, it can change those options pretty dramatically. Same thing as how we spoke about a problematic dog or not. Literally, the options, when you become labeled as something versus something else, change.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think there's nothing small in trying to rethink our relationships and I think people like Dinesh and a lot of the work that's coming out now and trying to imagine multi-species futures is trying to do some of that work, not always perfectly, of course, but I think rather do it and play with different ideas. That because I think reframing our relationships is not just something that's fanciful. I think sometimes think we're flying in the face of science by reimagining and doing, but it's a lot more powerful than that. You, you can ask questions that might not have even come to the fore if you, if you hadn't right exactly.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:I think that's what he does so brilliantly in that and also I think his focus in that article on that resistance you know it's very helpful it's been very helpful for me just on a daily basis with Munk is just always to kind of have the notion of resistance in my mind and what Munk is trying to say or trying to do in terms. So, rather than understanding it within any, within any epistemic frame other than a kind of I'm not saying that everything Munk does is an act of. I'm not saying that everything Monk does is an act of resistance. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that it's a different kind of frame to bring to the relationship and to see how some of the things that he does might be motivated by you know the fact that he doesn't, you know the fact that he's trying to shape his world basically. So it's been helpful to me at so many different levels this article, which is why I was really pleased to be able to choose it, even though it's about fish and not dorks no, I've no problem.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No problem with talking about fish. That was really a great, a great thing. So what are you working on now? Is there any follow-up to to this book, or what's the what's the plan?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:yeah, well, I think in some ways this quote again relates to that, this question he what would our world look like if we worked with and supported the creativity of fish, rather than simply against it?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:At the moment I'm just writing an article, that is, it takes the first half of chapter six, which is the section on the histories of concepts of race and species, and it really works that through much more slowly in relation to sets of literatures which aren't necessarily directly about animals but have a bearing on them. So Catherine Youssef's work, geologic Life, eric Barate's work on animal histories, other people's work as well. So I'm basically doing that, but I'm doing it within the context of kind of Anthropocene discourses. So trying to think through what would it look like if we imagined animals differently and imagine that we might work with them in the context of some of the climate change and environmental catastrophes that we're facing. So it's very early days, so, but it's basically taking bringing some of the literature, some of the arguments that I developed in dog politics, and bringing it to a different context which is kind of more to do with environmental humanities and anthropocene work Fantastic, and if folks want to get in touch with you, how can they do so?
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Well, you've got an email address. So I'm actually at Goldsmiths now but I'm going to be gone next week, so I've put you've got an UCL email address on the website and that is the best place to contact me, so at UCL, but because of that I'm in that moment of process. I don't have a website or anything, a web page or anything like that just at the moment. No, problem.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:If and when you do, I can update. Yeah, that would be great yeah, thank you all right well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute delight to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having much. It's been an absolute delight to have you on the show.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor to be here, claudia. Thank you you.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Dog politics is about this struggle that I've got with the concept of relationality. I think it's a really difficult concept, much more difficult than I ever thought it was. I think it's done way too much work in terms of, particularly in ethics, and one of the things about this is that he's talking about relationality but he's not talking about. He's not talking about it in a positive kind of way. He's talking about relations of hostility and conflict and what that led me. It was such an important part of the book and in part of the development of the concept of species story, because species story is basically a form of relation. In a way, it's a form of building a relationship with a dog through a story, and I think that's what he's talking about. You know, we should look more closely at the.
Mariam Motamedi Fraser:Relationality is all well and good, but the question is and nobody would really, you know, nobody would deny relationality but what is the form that those relations take? And again, mark beckhoff talks about the form of the relationship with dogs as being a relation of captivity. So the quality of that relation, or domestication, is a form of relation. The quality of that might change, as portrait says. You know, a cow can be treated, a pig can be treated well or badly, just as a dog can be treated bad, well or badly. But that's not the point. The point is, what is the form of the relationship within which they can be if they're treated well or badly?
