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
S7E1: Multispecies Health with Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan
Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan join Claudia to kick of Season 7 which is focused on “multispecies health.” They discuss human-dog relations and how multispecies health involves components of care, indifference and violence.
Date Recorded: 7 June 2024.
Guillem Rubio-Ramonis a Research Associate in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His research integrates more-than-human geographies and political ecologies to study the reciprocal influence of animals and humans on each other's socio-cultural, economic and political lives. He is currently involved in the Remaking One Health – Indies project, which explores everyday interactions between people and free-living dogs in India. His PhD research examined how nonhuman animals, particularly those involved in pig farming in Catalonia and salmon aquaculture in Scotland, can be understood as essential actors in the nation-making projects of these regions.
Krithika Srinivasan is a Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multispecies justice. Krithika is the principal investor of the project Remaking One Health Indies. She has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning. Learn more about the ROHIndies project on their website and connect with Krithika on Twitter (@KritCrit)
Featured:
- Remaking One Health Indies Project
- Hybrid Publics of Human and Other-than-Human Life: Free-Living Dogs and the “Green” and “Healthy” City in India by Krithika Srinivasan and Guillem Rubio Ramon
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A.P.P.L.EAnimals 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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Krithika Srinivasan:I mean, one thing that has come up repeatedly in all our research in different parts of the country is that the positive aspects can kind of range. They can be quite instrumental. So, whether it's pavement dwellers or people in rural areas, they talk about local dogs as offering them some kind of security areas. They talk about local dogs as offering them some kind of security, whether it's, like you know, physiological security, in terms of physical security. You know, women sleeping on the street, for example, talk about how dogs help ward off unwanted attentions. In rural areas they talk about them as being a sort of like first line of defense against other animals that people are concerned about. So there's that kind of instrumental way in which they contribute to health. There are less instrumental and more reciprocal ways. You know, the relationships of affection and care or just companionship right, are in some ways not dissimilar to what people kind of talk about with pet dogs, those there's less control involved in people's three dog relationships relationships.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome to season seven of the Animal Turn podcast. Can you believe it's seven seasons? It's super, super exciting. Thank you, listeners, for joining me, for listening, for voting, for leaving reviews. It's really wonderful and I appreciate your support. And you're in for a treat this season.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:In season seven we're going to be focused on animals and multi-species health. This season is proudly sponsored by Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple, a long supporter of the show, and the Remaking One Health Indies project led by Kuthrika Sunivasan. The Roe Indies project investigates why rabies persists as a public health problem in India and believes the answer might lie in insufficient understandings of everyday people-dog relations. It is an interdisciplinary project that combines methods and insights from human geography, history, behavioral ecology and social psychology to study people-dog interactions, dog ecology and rabies prevention efforts in both urban and rural India. This season is greatly influenced by the goals and interests of the Roindis project. It unpacks and explores the various ways in which health can and should be understood as a multi-species practice. It also oftentimes has an overt focus on dogs. The conversations range from the philosophical and ethical to the pragmatic and discursive and will certainly give you a great deal to think about when it comes to multi-species health, especially as it relates to human-dog relations.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:In this first episode I speak to two people that are part of this project Krithika Srinivasan, who's the PI, and Grio Rubio-Ramon, who is a research associate with the project. So a little bit more about Guillaume. He's a research associate in human geography at the University of Edinburgh and his research integrates more than human geographies and political ecologies to study the reciprocal influence of animals and humans on each other's socio-cultural, economic and political lives. With regards to the Remaking One Health Indies project, he explores the everyday interactions between people and free-living dogs in India. Previously in his PhD research, he examined how non-human animals, particularly those involved in pig farming in Catalonia and salmon aquaculture in Scotland, were understood as essential actors in the nation-making projects of those regions. Really, really interesting research. You should be familiar with Krithika she's been on the show a couple of times and, if you're not just a smidge about her as well, she's a senior lecturer in human geography, also at the University of Edinburgh, and her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multi-species justice. As I mentioned, kritika is the principal investigator of the Ro Indies project and she has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, geoforum and Environment and Planning. You can learn more about the Roe Indies Project on their website and the details of which I will include in the show notes. This season's animal highlights will focus explicitly on dogs and will be done by Priya and Rashmi, fellows with the Row Indies project and, over the course of the season, the Animal Turn. They do an incredible job of flagging and highlighting the varied and different experiences and lives that dogs can lead, using some of their own ethnographic material. It's super great.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Before I let you go, just a reminder to please check out our website. Go have a look at our blog. There's loads of information on the blog. Have a look at our merch store. That's now live. And if you haven't done so already, it might be worthwhile subscribing to our newsletter on our website so that every time there's a new episode or blog entry or some interesting bit of information you can find out more.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, folks, this is it, season seven. Here we go. Welcome to the Animal Turn. Krithika and Gim. It's really delightful to have you on and it's cool. This is the first time I'm launching a season with two people, so that's very, very fun. So welcome to the show. And you guys are sponsoring this season of the Animal Turn, which is really really quite cool, and we're going to be focusing on multi-species health, which what is that? And that's what we're going to be talking a bit about today. But before we get into that, I always like to kind of give people an opportunity to tell us a little bit about themselves. Krithika, of course, has been on the show before. I think folks have a really good idea of some of her background into animal studies. So let's start with you, guillaume. Let's get a sense of who are you and what brought you to animal studies.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Yeah, Hi Claudia, Thanks for having both of us. It's really great to be here. Basically, I'm a postdoctoral research associate with Kritika at the University of Edinburgh, working at the Raw Hindi project. We're making one health project. Before that, I was a PhD student as well in geography and I looked at basically how animals make nations, farm animals make nations, especially looking at industrial animal agriculture in Catalonia and in Scotland. It's worked quite well to work with Critica in this project because I think that during my PhD I focused a lot on animals that have both these dimensions of being farmed but also sometimes escaping or being also wild, like pigs or salmon escapes, and I think that this project has been really great at sort of bridging that with also animals that have multiple dimensions, like dogs. And yes, that's basically me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, just the idea of looking at pigs and the ways in which you've connected them to nationhood, I think is quite fascinating. I think some work has been done on this in India as well how pigs and religion and nationhood are kind of entangled in India. Krithika, when you take on postdoc students, do you have you know? Are you thinking about these types of projects? You know, for I think many of my listeners are either PhD students or early career researchers, and sometimes we come from really diverse backgrounds and we don't know how to like you know, sometimes it's really complicated and hard. So is it just kind of luck that you two have ended up together? Or is it just that Guillaume showed the right skills at the right moment and you were like, yep, this is the guy. This is the guy who's going to help us understand remaking One Health in India.
Krithika Srinivasan:Well, guillaume was my PhD student Connections. He worked on the project part-time initially when he was finishing his phd and and after he finished his phd we realized it was a, you know, good fit. He enjoyed the project and so and that's how it happened. So in a way it worked out well and it I think having that trial period I think was good for both guillem and for the project, because it's very difficult to find someone with the exact set of skill sets if it's a project that's already set up, as opposed to an independent fellowship. It allows both the project and the postdoc to get a sense of whether it's a good match or not.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think what's interesting, guillaume, is you've cut across a variety of different species. Have you found that a difficult thing to do? Has it been useful in thinking about multi-species relationships? I'm sure it has or has it been really quite challenging to shift from focusing on one species in one context and moving to looking at a different species in a different context?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I think that it's always challenging to do this kind of multi or transcontextual kind of research. I initially started sort of interested in pics in Catalonia, because that's where I'm from, and then, being in Edinburgh, I realized that there was also lots of cases that were similar to my case study. So I ended up choosing, for example, salmon scotland, and I think that that sort of allowed me to understand that sometimes you can see dimensions of the of multi-species relationships in your context or in the context that you're most familiar with thanks to the other context, right. So it's like you put both contexts in dialogue and thanks to that, you can sort of understand some stuff that probably you wouldn't have thought. Obviously, that presents its own challenges as well, right, but I think that if you sort of approach it with care and also acknowledging your limitations, I think that that's sort of a way to go, I guess.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :And with free-living dogs in India, I think that it was quite helpful while doing my PhD to start thinking about how the human structures that shape these animals' lives don't end by the fact that they are farmed animals, right. Like all the animals are shaped by these structures, even free-living dogs. So it was kind of really interesting to start doing research on the project and sort of understanding. What are these structures, what are also like the different scales that shape these relationships yeah, I think that's really interesting because so often what happens?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:you know it could be the same species in a different context, but you realize how different things become visible. You know you might speak about policing structures or we'll focus on a lot today, you know, in terms of health and health management, but sometimes different peculiarities or connections emerge in different contexts that make you ask a question. You know, why was this the case here and not the case in the other context that you're looking at? And I remember Krithika, when we spoke previously. You kind of did this from your own experience of working in India and then going to the UK and thinking about how dogs experienced the UK versus India quite India and then going to the UK and thinking about how dogs experienced the UK versus India quite differently and how they were being positioned, I think, in academic literature quite differently in these different contexts. Is this what inspired you to make, I guess, dogs the focus of this project?
Krithika Srinivasan:before I answer that question, I just want to pick up on the conversation you're having earlier with Guillem about, you know, across species and you know thinking. There's one thing that's common to all these different situations or species, to salmon, to dogs, to pigs or, in my case, to elephants and turtles, and what would that be?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, power and oppression and people, so ultimately social scientists.
Krithika Srinivasan:So we are studying people, people, we are studying human society and its interactions with a range of animals. So I think in some, in some senses, it's more useful to think about what actually it is that we're studying as opposed to worrying too much about the fact that they're different species, because there are some things that cut across human interactions with all these different species, even though the particulars might vary. So that's just one thing. To note dogs it was. I must say that when this project came about the current project I had done some previous research of pilot project of a similar kind and which was to kind of build on and take forward my earlier research in different directions, because my previous research looked at the welfare of different kinds of dogs and how that is conceived of in a cross-cultural context.
Krithika Srinivasan:So I did a small piece of work back in 2014, 2015 on looking at what everyday interactions between people and dogs are like and then followed that up with with something that was more health focused, again based in chennai, and but I wasn't planning on continuing with this line of work. But I must say this this current project came about because chris pearson, the historian on the team, contacted me because we'd met many, many years ago at a workshop and where he'd heard me talk about some of my earlier work on dogs and he was interested in looking at, you know, dogs and health and in India and he contacted me and so that's how it kind of came about. I must say that it wasn't, you know, intentional in that sense.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This speaks often to how projects emerge and evolve. Often you may you might not have a clear set idea at the onset of your career. You know you kind of find these things often as you move along. But the focus on dogs is interesting for a number of reasons and I'm sure we'll get into it over the course of today's episode. The one concern I guess I have with looking at dogs is that I do wonder if dogs don't dominate the conversation when we're talking about health in general. Do you find that to be the case, that when we're speaking about health and human and animal interactions, that our relationships with dogs tend to dominate the research that's being done?
Krithika Srinivasan:I would disagree. I would say it's much more avian influenza and, you know, swine flu and it's more to do with health in the farmed animal context, I would imagine. I mean there's this body of work in rabies and infectious diseases that's kind of dominated by dog. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of work in the context of human health that's about dogs and rabies. But in the social science literature, when we're talking about health, is it predominantly dogs? I don't know. There is a lot of work on dogs and dog welfare, but is it predominantly on dogs? I don't know, what do you think?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :yeah, I think that, yeah, I would say that maybe not in terms of, for example, one health right. I would say that maybe it's, yeah, probably more connected to livestock and sort of these ideas of preventing zoonosis and and, yeah, so that kind of health, maybe more productivist visions of health in that way. But when it comes, for example, with other kinds of health right, so, for example, when it comes to mental health, maybe dogs do appear a bit more, I would say especially pet dogs and their benefits of companionship. But yeah, I guess that then it depends on what kind of health and whose health you're focusing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That brings us nicely to what the focus on today is. Is this look at multi-species health, because so often I think, when we do talk about health and whatever health is, we have this idea of human health. You know, public health is generally thought of as human health and I don't know if you would agree with that, but so often, like you say, dogs are maybe brought into the conversation about how they could be used for or useful for human health, like the benefits it brings to me having a pet in my life, you know, curbing loneliness, et cetera, et cetera, whereas perhaps free living dogs are pretty absent from this conversation. Is that something you'd agree with?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Yeah, I think that actually some of the stuff that we've been recently working on is the idea of green cities, right, and what is the green in all of these green cities?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :And actually one of the things that we were talking while we were writing a very short piece that we published a while ago was whose health and what is sort of what health and what green right, because we usually think that there's specific benefits of having green cities right, but we never think, for example, about free living dogs being that part of green right, being the green of the city. So I guess that there's always this dimension of well, even if there might be not a direct benefit right, as we can perceive with planting trees for human populations in cities or certain humans in cities with free-living dogs. Sometimes it's more difficult to map those connections directly, I would say, and I guess that the project actually is one of the things that tries to do right, to visibilize these connections I read that short piece and I'll put it in the show notes, and while I was reading it I kind of thought yeah, animals are.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So often, especially when I think it comes to these urban geographies, they're included in a really deficient kind of way, like even when you think about sustainability or sustainable transformation, you know whose sustainability are we talking about when you create.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I remember Eva Mayer saying it at one point on the show when she was talking about geese in the netherlands this kind of move towards creating green spaces also attracts specific types of animals, and if you're not thinking about how your greening of a city is also going to attract multi-species, different multi-species, interactions etc, then you you're not really thinking about how to create, I guess, a sustainable city or a green city or a city that's not only helpful, helpful for humans but helpful for for the animals who are going to be attracted to those ecologies. So I think that's really interesting, but maybe we've gotten a bit ahead of ourselves. Let's, let's take a step back. First, could you maybe just give me a synopsis of the the row indies project? What is your goal, what is it you're hoping to achieve in this project? And then, once we've kind of touched on that, we'll switch to focusing in more deeply on what multi-species health is.
Krithika Srinivasan:I will start. I would just say that there are two sets of overarching aims. One is empirical and the other is conceptual. And the empirical aim is to look at how safe cohabitation between people and dogs can be strengthened and cultivated in India. So how can health at the people-street-dog interface be achieved and what are the different aspects and dimensions that need to be taken into consideration to both understand health, health, to identify the causes of ill health and to tackle the you know the various problems that might be there, even while building on the positive dimensions of, of of that interface. So that's the empirical aim. More conceptually, I think the aim is to use this particular case of people, street dog interactions and health of that interface to understand what post-anthropocentric health might actually look like.
Krithika Srinivasan:Because, like you said earlier, we're used to thinking of health in very human terms. Even the idea of one health ultimately comes back to how we can achieve human health by intervening in animal health or planetary health as well. It's about how do you manage ecological health so as to achieve human health and well-being. So, but what we're trying to do here is to think about like, what might help beyond the human look like this is not to say that we wouldn't take into consideration human health. But if you were to think about health, you know across different, the different sort of entities that inhabit the planet. What might it look like? So, instead of just you know? So human health involves men's health, and women's health, and children's health, and blah, blah, blah. Right, so there are multiple components which sometimes are aligned, sometimes they're not. The same would go for health and we're thinking about in a multi-species sense. Right, it has multiple aspects to it which may or may not be aligned. But then how do we even begin to think of it as the bigger?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:conceptual aim and I guess, yes, often when animals are included in these health conversations with the World Health Organization or, as you mentioned earlier, agricultural animals are often included it's how do we keep the animals healthy for consumption? Not necessarily. How do we keep the animals healthy for their sake or for their own communities or collectives, which is quite, which is quite interesting. So you said the empirical. You know you've got empirical and theoretical ideas that you're grappling with. But while I was looking at your website, it seems that you're also doing quite a few interventions where you're creating videos. You're creating new media. You're, you know, talking to policy practitioners. How is that part of the project? Is that something that you envisioned from the onset or has this been a kind of emergent part of the project?
Krithika Srinivasan:It's been so because I've been doing research on this for a while. I've my conversations with various practitioners has been, you know, know it's it was built in right from the beginning. The nature has changed, partners have changed, but the fact that it's quite closely you know that a lot of the project itself is quite has always been in conversation with practitioners and with policy actors. That bit has remained quite constant, being there from, you know, from the get-go, and yeah, so we've decided not to. I mean, the usual operandi in academic projects is to like, do the research, publish it and then think about public engagement. But in this particular project we've decided not to do that because it just takes you know how long publication, academic publication takes and we felt that you know that it it wouldn't. Yeah, we, we wanted our project partners to not lose faith. So we've been feeding back and engaging with them in with kind of emerging results and findings and the kind of you know the how that can be used sooner rather than later.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And how long is the project supposed to be going on for? Like, what is the long-term vision for the project?
Krithika Srinivasan:It started in 2021, supposed to end in 2025, but it took us a couple of years to get it off the ground because of a lot of delays, so we'll probably you know it will run for a few more years.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, All right. Interesting. I'm really proud of you that you didn't immediately go to blame in COVID. I feel like anytime anything comes up with 2019 and 2021, everyone's like there were delays because of COVID. I'm sure COVID played a part in it.
Krithika Srinivasan:It was because of me. I take all the blame.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's become like this perfect, this perfect like stopgap for like why? Why was this late? Well, covid, so you know, I was waiting for that like phrase in your sentence and it didn't come up, so that was. That was quite cool. Well, I think it's a remarkable project.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I really enjoyed going through through your website and and all of the accessible content that you've made available the, the news media, the videos, the cartoons, the sketches. It's really a good case study, not only in terms of what we're talking about with regards to multi-species health, but also for how academics, and particularly people focused on multi-species and animal relations, which are really important and political and violent and need interventions sooner rather than later, could operationalize. So, listeners, make sure you go and check out their website. So our focus today and for the rest of the season is multi-species health, and I know when we started talking, karthik, I was like well, we'll just talk about health, because multi-species is implied, because everything the animal term does is multi-species, but I think there's something to be said for adding the term multi-species in there. Guillaume, maybe you can start us off here with kind of a general idea of when we're saying multi-species health. Are there specific components or things that we're focusing on. What do we mean when we say multi-species health?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I guess that there's, yeah, there's obviously like multiple components to it, but I guess that, as Kritika was mentioning before, the main focus of it would be going beyond anthropocentric understandings of health, right, which doesn't mean that human health is not included in multi-species health, but that other kind of histories and lived experiences, other kinds of relationships with other non-human animals must be included in our understandings of health. So, for example, in the project we try to focus on also, as you were talking about knowledge production, right who are we listening to and whose knowledge is reliable? What is knowledge? And I guess that in that sense, a key idea in multispecies health is who are we trying to listen to and think about when we think about health? So, for example, in our project we consider members of the public and society, people who have everyday interactions with free-living dogs, as experts in our project, just as other experts might have a say on that. In that sense, also that sort of understanding of knowledge production, it's linked to the idea that animals can also be producers of knowledge and that we have to also pay attention to the knowledge that they might produce.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :For example, there's some work on elephants, I think by Nicholas Laine and Serge Morin, on how elephants know what kind of foods they can eat for healing themselves foods they can eat right for healing themselves, that doesn't. It's sort of like a very direct application of medicine and health. But expanding that idea of animals might also teach us some stuff about how to live more healthy lives and also have more healthy relationships. And I guess that also the idea of the relationship is kind of essential here. Relationships, and I guess that also the idea of the relationship is kind of essential here. The idea of that we have to pay closer attention to what kinds of relationships we build, but also we don't necessarily actively build, but is already there, are already there right and mapping those relationships and making sure that we change them if needed or that we foster them if they are working.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it seems to me that there's also like an appreciation of complexity, because even as you were saying at the beginning, it's not just that we're speaking about like dogs on dogs everywhere, and even in the same city not all dogs have the same kind of relationships so kind of realizing the complexity of their relations and who they might be relating with in different ways they might have, like you said, the knowledge production of people who interact with dogs on a daily basis, I would assume that one dog might have an interaction with a street vendor. That's very different to an interaction with, maybe, someone who feeds them, and those are both complex interactions. But how this is connected to health, I guess, is a bit murky for me. So is this the like, the mental health of the dog, or the physical health of the dog, or the health of the community or the environment?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I guess that there's multiple dimensions, but I think that the project itself, for example, tries to focus quite a lot on the idea of health beyond these sort of individual way of thinking about self-preservation of myself, right, for example.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :So, for example, with free living dogs we have also been thinking about well, if we understand that pet dogs can be helpful for as we were talking before, for their companionship, in terms of our caring relationships with them and their caring relationships with us, how can we expand that with free living dogs? Not to say that we have to see free living dogs through the lenses of pethood, but that if we can understand and we can clearly see that, how can clearly see that? How can we see that with free living dogs in the community or in the community scale, for example, right, are we creating caring, multi-species communities with dogs or not? Because we usually would say that that's an essential part of a healthy and happy life with humans, right, creating multi-species communities with our neighbors, be them human or not. So I guess that that's where free living dogs are a good example to think about health beyond. Well, not beyond, but through different scales yeah, that's, that's super interesting.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So you mentioned earlier society. You know like multi-species society and, and now you just said, kind of multi-species community, and I had someone give this question to me last week and I didn't know exactly how to answer it. So I'm going to put it to you and see if you do better. When you talk about society and community, do you have a difference in mind between those two and scales of which they operate?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Yeah, I would say that, for example with free-living dogs, right like the way that we have traditionally or not traditionally, but historically dealt with them, especially during colonial but also post-colonial times in India, is through a very population level and through very abstract scales, right. So that would be, for example, dealing with them through various population control measures, and I guess that the society level would be that kind of level where there's the tendency to use these kind of practices and interventions to produce multi-species societies, but with communities you would see more, more, I guess, localized interventions and localized relationships that also might talk to the societal level one, but that have, I guess, specific relationships and have specific characteristics that are not necessarily defined by the society level.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, that makes sense. I think think I said something similar like society operates at a much larger scale and you're kind of talking about how it functions. Whereas you can be part of multiple communities right, you can be part of multiple smaller scale communities. Yeah, I think it's tricky. It's something I've been trying to think through myself Just now when you mentioned care. So care is something that always makes my hair stand on edge a little bit, and maybe that says more about me as a person than anything else. But sometimes I'm worried about the ways in which care is mobilized. When it comes to, you know, our relationships with animals and, as you were talking there about some of the relationships with free living or free roaming dogs, it seems to me that perhaps one of your targets here is not even necessarily care, but legitimacy, to say that there is something legitimate about free roaming dogs and their numerous interactions within Indian cities. Is that a fair thing to say?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I think that it's a fair thing to say.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Actually, one of the dimensions of the first level analysis I guess that we're producing now is that maybe care is just one dimension of these relationships.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :But that absence of care doesn't mean that there's negative interactions right. There might also be indifference, just as you are indifferent with other people as well, right, and that kind of indifference, just as you are indifferent with other people as well, and that kind of indifference is also sometimes inclusive, in the sense that you're including some living beings by not excluding them, I guess. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're having a very positive or even positive relationship to them at all. And actually, some of the people that we've interviewed have very complex views on their relationship with free-living dogs. They might not like them, but they might care for them, or they might not care for them, but they might think that they have a legitimate space and a place in their community, right. So I guess that that's also also, yeah, sort of the complexity of care and not taking it as a as a sort of homogenizing kind of concept that flattens all kinds of relationships yeah, that's super fascinating.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Krithika, do you have anything you want to?
Krithika Srinivasan:add here.
Krithika Srinivasan:Yeah, I would just build on that, saying that, like, when we think about human animal relationships, whether it's about dogs or other, we are used to thinking along the binary of conflict and care or use it's one of the three that gets theorized.
Krithika Srinivasan:Like you know, the farmed animals say we're thinking about using them in extraction and blah, blah, blah with wildlife. You're either caring for them through conservation or you're in conflict because of human wildlife conflictildlife conflict and so on and so forth. And I think what the case of dogs pre-living dogs shows is that actually those are just very kind of, they don't form the bulk of our interactions with, whether dogs or with the non-human world. Most of it is uneventful, it's just, you know, or it could be very mild degrees of either conflict or care which remains unnoticed. And if there is some sort of ethic of cohabitation or multi-species health that we want to kind of build on, I think it probably lies in that which is is already there, which is this mass substrate of just there with each other, regardless of yeah, without the extremes of you conflict or care yeah, it's not this or that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I really like kind of dwelling in the space of indifference, because there is something there is. I mean, like you say, we're indifferent to most of the people who we move and and and interact with on a day-to-day basis. We're probably indifferent to many of the birds who we hear singing in trees, etc. They're just, they're pleasant, they're there, but it's a kind of, it's a mild, yeah, it's. It's not this kind of like extreme, sensational way in which we sometimes find ourselves talking about these relationships, and I think that that's almost an indicator of legitimacy and acceptance when you find that there is this kind of level of it just is. They're here, it just is. It's kind of like it's normal, it's to use a word that's been very problematized it's natural, you know they are just kind of accepted. But there is a tendency maybe to focus on these polarizations and I think you've written about this as well in one of your, your pieces, where the sensationalization of dog attacks.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Maybe we could talk about that for for a little bit and how kind of violence from dogs is used as a as a kind of, I guess, a weapon to delegitimize their space in society yeah, yeah, definitely, and actually we did some media analysis for a couple of years, looking at two newspapers in india, and there was a lot of despolarization, right of either lots of articles about conflict showing, dog bite, incidents, mauling, etc.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Etc. But also very caring relationships, and I guess that that sort of speaks again to how we perceive some of these relationships. Even if we might know how we interact on the community level as we were talking before even at the very kind of individual level with other beings, how we understand these broader relationships is also quite important, and I guess that that's a part of it is through media, and that's one of the things that we've been trying to focus is are there ways to change these narratives or is it just something that we have to maybe deal on? Another kind of dimension, right, but I think that that's not necessarily exclusive to free-living dogs. That's also the case with, for example, with lots of, for example, with wolves in some spaces in Europe, for example, but also with dogs in the UK. Right, there's lots of conversations about attacks quote-unquote of dogs to people, dog bite incidents, people getting going to hospital.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I know, krithika, you've spoken on the show before about this kind of tension between protection and sacrifice, and it seems to be that this is the tension that's playing out in the media landscape. Is this you know, we've got to protect our children from vicious dogs and the only way to protect our children is to like euthanize dogs, and it's often done in this quite polarized way. And this is important, I think, for multi-species health, because how we think conceptually about these relationships has a way of manifesting in society. Right, we create specific types of policies that allow us to interact and intervene on animals' bodies and their environments and their lives in very specific ways. So I guess I mean this really is critical to multi-species health is the discourse we use, because really it shapes the ways in which these animals can be in our societies.
Krithika Srinivasan:And I think it also links to what you were talking about earlier with regard to the difference between society and community, and I think what's been happening is that societal responses to free living dogs tend to be focused on dogs as a whole, as a population or as a species, so on, so forth. But at the community level and the level of individuals, I think there's much more of there will. There will be exceptions, but the actually the relations are between individuals, or more so there are. So the scale is relevant not just to people but also to dogs. So, and I think what happens with cases of mauling or you know other, you know serious bodily harm, is that there is this shift between looking at the individual or the community, or the kind of the specific to, to abstracting it out to a larger whole which is dogs as a whole, or blah, blah, you know, and that's not specific to dogs. You find that. I think it's it's probably more to do. I mean, you know, and don't ask me to define what I mean by modern, but that is a kind of characteristic of a lot of our sort of, you know, societal structures and systems, and I think so, if you're thinking so Guillaume was talking about historically.
Krithika Srinivasan:He mentioned that you know, people treat dog relations of a particular kind and I think what I think what is peculiar to the current moment is that, or to the modern moment, is that previously it's not that there wasn't conflict between people and dogs, it's not that people didn't get rabies and die or get bitten or perhaps even mauled, but I think it was dealt with as individual cases which were contextually dealt with, whereas right now, the response that is considered appropriate is not contextual. It's something that is seen as being needed to be done at a more abstract, structural, societal level. Now, the assumption is that that is the right way of responding to what might consider a problem that affects society, but I think what we want to ask is is that necessarily the best way of approaching it, or perhaps we need to think about whether more contextual responses to conflict might be better?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean it's interesting because I think the inclusion of dogs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:One might argue that the fact that these very laws exist and that dogs are included in them is perhaps, like it's, an indicator of a multi-species society.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right, like some of the first legislation in Canadian and North American cities was precisely to deal with the movements of animals, right, Not dogs, but this was generally, you know, horses, cows, et cetera, but it was very much attached to the movements of animals. So the fact that these laws exist at this kind of abstract level, even though they don't necessarily get carried out or implemented in the way that the law intends, is still, I think, it's an indicator that it is a multi-species society. So, I mean, I think that there will always be these abstract laws. So then, isn't the question? I hear you that we need to respond and be more attentive to the kind of localized, contextual ways in which we can respond. But isn't there surely something that needs to be done here about how these abstract laws include animals in their their yeah, in them like how does that make sense? Like how they're actually included? Because that seems to be the, the tool that's used to mobilize any action, or most actions yes, but that again it's.
Krithika Srinivasan:It's in the context where there are abstract laws being created by someone else. So, using the case of dogs, for instance, we do have legislation that says that if you want to control dogs, you need to do it using birth control and you can't kill dogs. So you can think of that as being an example of inclusion and which in some of my own work I've argument. But a different way of thinking about it is that actually that legislation was made necessary because of an earlier legislation which said that dogs are exempt from the prevention of cruelty to animals act and you can kill them if you want to. So there's something that came before that inclusion.
Krithika Srinivasan:There was an exclusion that came before the inclusion by some kind of you know in a you a weird sense, and prior to that there was no. If you look at it historically, there was no you know societal sort of structural system for dogs or for health or so on and so forth. So you know, at some point during the colonial period you came up with these kind of you know, these wider societal mechanisms for dealing with health or dealing with dogs in this particular instance, and because you have those wider societal structures, you needed to have a legal mechanism that allowed that, because till then there wasn't this sort of like mass extermination. And then, because that was in place in, you know, in post-independence India, many years after independence, you needed another law to say no, actually we want to bring the dogs back in under the purview of the law. You know, inclusion, I think, becomes necessary only when active inclusion of that kind is made necessary by active exclusion in the first place. So yeah, I think that the question is how do we deal with that?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I don't know if inclusion is the first step, it always follows something else but I guess then the question becomes because I hear you like, policy moves and it shapes, it's never static, right? So it's not even just inclusion and exclusion, it's how one is included and excluded. It can change over time. But if you kind of focus, I guess, on this moment in time where dogs are included in policy, even even if it's just like they're there, there are policies that deal with them, but perhaps in an object like a way that objectifies them and their experiences, or this avows their experiences, because it's being done with the intention of human health, not necessarily dog health. So then that talks for the evolution of this policy once again. So then that talks for the evolution of this policy once again to become more responsive to dog's health.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But I think maybe we're I don't know if I'm going like down a different random rabbit hole here. That's a sidestep away from multi-species health. But something you guys have both mentioned at one point is kind of colonial histories and the ways in which colonization has shaped multi-species relations. In India, particularly human-dog relations and it seems like it's a key part of your project is like a decolonial approach to how we think about health and how we think about human-animal relationships. Could you maybe walk me through that a little bit. What does that mean?
Krithika Srinivasan:So we're using a very broad understanding of decolonial here, and so it's not just about colonial relations but about looking at power structures in society and with the knowledge which, and including power structures such as anthropocentrism, right? So it's not just about relations between Britain and India and so on and so forth. So how do we approach this question of health at the people-dog interface, or multi-species health in a truly decolonial sense? So part of it would be about looking at how I mean how we've come to where we are currently, and which has a very specific, particular colonial history, because dogs were framed as a public health problem during the colonial period. So it has a history in the kind of conventional colonial sense. But then there's also other kinds of decolonizing, right. Like it's about who the experts are. Is it just, you know, public health actors and policy actors? Is it lay people? Is it the dogs themselves? Right, they could also be what they have to say about their well-being and their health.
Krithika Srinivasan:So so, for example, you were saying earlier that, like you know, how do we, how we include, also matters, right, it's not just them being included in law, and you know what? What does the law say about dogs health? So the current law in India about dogs allows municipal authorities to catch them for neutering and vaccination right now. If you were to kind of really ask this question of what is good for a dog from in a kind of really decolonial way and ask the dog you know himself or herself, you find that they would actually say that, because if you go and watch a dog being caught, you'll say that you'll see that the dog is saying very clearly that the dog doesn't want to be caught and sent for neutering, right.
Krithika Srinivasan:So then this question of like so if you were to take a really decolonial approach to multi-species health, then it would call into question what is now seen, as you know, gold standard in animal welfare or so on and so forth. If you're actually asking the, if you're treating dogs as an expert and how they are communicating in the moment during the interaction, which we don't currently. So there are different ways in which the framework of the decolonial could be applied and you know I'm sure we're not thinking of all the different ways it could be done and that's a sort of like ongoing process of discovery. But yeah, that's the.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That is our very broad understanding of decolonial you know one would be inclined to say, well, like, almost be a bit paternalistic, but of course we have to, you know, euthanize them, because you know it's like, it's like people almost, I think, even myself, you get a little bit like tizzy. You're like, well, if we don't euthanize them, then they're going to breed and there's going to be more of them and then and the aggression, and and there's, and it's. It's interesting just how, like so many of us have on hand even people who are not experts in any sort of, you know, animal management, we have on hand the many reasons for why dogs should be euthanized. And so so Linus, he struggles quite a bit with, with reactivity, and it's been a, it's been a challenge. And only recently did I learn, you know, one of the reasons for his reactivity could be that he was neutered at a very young age in a shelter, because this was standard practice in Canada.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You capture, you get a dog, you take them in and you neuter them, and this kind of went against my you know, apparently I thought that if you neutered a dog it had a good effect on their. You know, it had a different impact on the kind of concerns with regards to aggression. But then I think and this makes me expand out to thinking about human health more and more human health now is showing how critical and pivotal our hormones are to living a good life. Not just in terms of aggression, but in terms of how you feel, in terms of the ways in which your body, terms of the ways in which your body ages, the ways in which your endocrine system works, hormones are really, really critical. So even beyond, I think, the dog interacting in a way to someone trying to grab them, there's a corporal argument to be made here for why it would be important for these dogs to hold on to their systems that help them live fully and and healthy lives. Not to say you have to have them to be and live.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :But I think there are many arguments to be made for, from from a dog's perspective, for why that would not be a good choice yeah, I was just thinking that that's really interesting and one of the parts that we of the, I think of the work that we do, that the project is doing this sort of genealogy of, also of concepts right and of interventions, like one health right where does one health come from?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :And I think that also critical has done a lot of work on the idea of welfare right and how certain ideas are sort of thought and imagined as good for both people and good for both animals. But then doing this sort of genealogic work and trying to discover what are the histories of these interventions and what were the main objectives, how were they justified, I think that then you can also see but you can also take your own into, like the current present day interventions more critically right. You can start seeing them as more kind of repairing technologies or repairing interventions that always have consequences, right, that will need to be repaired afterwards. So I guess that in that way that's also like an important part of the decolonial approach of looking at these histories and then understanding how to do, how to understand present day interventions in similar, yet quite different anyway, ways 100 like it kind of alerts you to the fact there are blind spots that we currently have for the things that we think are good.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know that's that this might, and I think one health is is really that's a buzzword right now. One, health and, I think, sustainable transformation are everywhere. At least in Europe, everyone's using sustainable transformation, which I hadn't heard when I was in Canada, it wasn't as big a concept. And to go back to what you were saying about green cities or healthy cities, I think the city has always been a site at which these interventions have really come to the fore. Even with regards to rabies interventions, it was like a pretty urban response in terms of how dogs were imagined. Yeah, so I like that idea, the genealogy, the kind of evolution of how we interact. So just to review kind of thinking about multi-species health here, one you've said a big part of multi-species health is knowledge production and kind of I guess, conceptual understanding, and part of your project is also contributing to and I guess, being critical of some of the ways in which that knowledge is produced. Another part is kind of ways in which you can think about safe what did you say? Safe cohabitation, ways in which humans, animals, but also animals and animals might live safely and healthfully with one another. And then I think you'd also and part of this is relationships, the numerous dynamic and complex ways in which relationships form, and you want to map those relationships. And I think something else that we've touched on here is maybe the significance of thinking through indifference and the tension between you know, thinking about these polarizations of danger and care, or protection and sacrifice, and whether those are actually as helpful in building on ideas of a multi-species health or future, whether they're as helpful as we might initially think. Anything else that you think we're missing before we start to move towards the quotes.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, that was a really good summary. Okay, so it's a lot more conceptual, like I think, when, like you said at the beginning, guillaume, when we think about health, we have a tendency of making this equation between I have a disease, I'm sick, here's some medicine, but you're expanding far beyond that You're thinking about how do we even think that something is diseased or sick, or unhealthy or dangerous in the first place, and what are the supposed solutions or interventions that are perceived to be good for that project? And yeah, I think you guys are doing this at exactly the right moment, considering the conversations that are happening with regards to One Health. So thank you so much. I think it's going to be a wonderful season. Thank you also for sponsoring the season of the Animal Turn podcast. I'm a huge fan of your work, as you can tell, so I'm delighted to be contributing in some small way to the knowledge production. So let's move on to the quotes. Do you both have a quote or did you decide to do a joint one?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Yeah, I can go first. So my quote is from nicholas linea and search moran and I'll I'll read it. It goes like this in the society of risk we're living in, where scientific knowledge is a source of uncertainty, humans should no longer be considered as the sole repositories of knowledge imposed on nature. On the contrary, they must learn to collaborate with non-humans. This means changing our view of wildlife and domesticated animals and not necessarily consider them as passive objects or, in the case of health, as victims of pathogens or guilty of transmitting them. Potentially, they are co-producers of knowledge on biodiversity. Recent developments in social science methodologies allow us to take the agency of animals and highlight the dependencies of living beings in shared territories. This type of perspective sheds light on how social and ecological processes interact with each other and build precious ecological solidarity, including plants, animals, microbes, insects and other species that can help prevent the next epidemic.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wonderful. What made you choose that quote?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I think that was basically the discussions that we've been having in the project about knowledge production, about who's considered to be the bearer of knowledge, and I think that we've been discussing this even in our project, I guess, in human terms sometimes. But I think that what we're trying to do and it's actually quite hard conceptually not hard, but kind of challenging and difficult to do, I guess is to how to expand these conversations, about how to listen to others and how to learn from others.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think I mean that's come up several times in this interview already is you've said you know the dog's knowledge and the dog's experience are important in creating this understanding of multi-species health. So do you maybe have some insights now with regards to how it's already done that, how your observations of dogs have shaped your understanding of multi-species health?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I think that probably that's a conversation that we would also need to have the behavioral ecology team here here, because they've done lots of the sort of observation of the dog's ecologies. But I think that, for example, the idea of feeding and how dogs know who they want to feed and where they want to feed, and how that's negotiated and sometimes that creates conflict, and I think that paying attention to their sort of not needs their needs too, but also their, their choices, choices exactly, yeah, and I think that that's sort of like a key aspect of healthy relationships with them right understanding. What are they telling you? What are they trying to communicate?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm happy you brought up feeding because it's quite a, I think, political and contested practice in many cities. You know you kind of talked with a variety of wildlife. Don't feed wildlife for whatever reason, because they could become a problem. Or you know, the pigeons are going to poop here if you feed them and it's kind of framed as this really problematic thing to engage in a feeding relationship with an animal and I used to subscribe to that, but more and more I'm like but why? What exactly? Particularly, if you look at some bird species, they're increasingly struggling with getting access to food. So some people are using and this is that care that kind of care and problem dynamic. Again, how have you seen this feeding dynamic emerge in some of your case studies? Do you have any specific examples that you could help us understand?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :I think that what we were discussing before about these two binaries of care and conflict are actually sort of understanding feeding as more complex than these sort of caring, or just not feeding means also not caring, or that it becomes complicated, right. But I guess that also that indifference and that sort of everyday relationship plays a key role here and we've seen that in multiple of the sites that we've been working at working in is that sometimes feeding is not even sort of like. I mean, it's intentional but it's something that you just do. Right, it's not even considered as a very caring or very kind of intentional feeding, just as, for example, you would.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I don't know, I don't have any equivalent right now in my head, but like well, I guess maybe you're sitting on a beach front and you're eating a sandwich and you see a seagull like two meters away and you're just like, you toss a piece of you, just kind of do it without thinking you like and they, they are making their presence known. They're like, hey, what you doing over there, and I guess waste as well as a feeding. You're not thinking about your waste becoming food, you're just discarding your waste. But that's actually a really valuable resource for many urban animals, or not even just urban for animals.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Definitely, and I think that, for example, sometimes in some of our interviews, like people who feed, sometimes they don't even consider that feeding right. It's like the people who actually feed lots of food or who systematically feed who are doing the feeding, whereas maybe what I do, what you were saying about tossing some bread to a seagull, that's not even feeding, that's just discarding whatever I was eating, so that's not really feeding feeding. So I guess that that's also, like you know, it makes the idea of feeding more complex, and I guess that that complexity, as you were saying, entails different scales, right, the ones that we are aware of, and I guess that the ones that we are less aware of, like our consumption and how the different structures in our cities and in our governments make waste more visible or less visible with dogs, I guess that's a key issue as well. Right, like that feeding, I guess it's less, might be less visible or might be more visible, depending on these structures.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Man, this is fascinating. I feel like I could talk to you actually just about feeding for an hour, because you know when people identify themselves as a feeder. So it seems to be the ways in which identification, like the ways in which it becomes part of your identity, matters. So if you're not, if it's just like an unthought of indifferent action, it doesn't really have significance to who you are as an actor, the person involved, but the second. You kind of think about it as being part of who you are. It has a different kind of sustenance or meaning, oh, of who you are. It has a different kind of sustenance or meaning oh, man, so interesting there were. There were other things in your quote I wanted to pick up on, like the kind of tension between victim and agents and stuff, but I think I will end up keeping you here forever and ever. Really, really great choice of quote. Thank you so much. Krithika. Do you want to tell us yours?
Krithika Srinivasan:I have a quote that's very different in character. It's very empirically based from a working paper we've produced for the project and we've circulated to policymakers. So it's very different in tone to Guillaume's quote. So it's quite simple and it kind of captures empirically what we think is needed for cultivating safe cohabitation. So public debates around street dogs emphasize human-dog conflict and overlook commonplace positive interactions. A variety of strategies are needed to address different sources of conflict, ranging from environmental management, education and neutering and vaccination. Public health initiatives also need to strengthen positive dimensions of people's street dog interactions, as these contribute to human well-being directly as well as indirectly. As socialized street dogs are less likely to be involved in conflict.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So important and I think this speaks to a lot of what we were talking about. You know, with regards to how do we include animals or think about how they're made visible in different policies. Are you being strategic here in highlighting how these interactions are positive for humans as well? Or is that just part of acknowledging a multi-species thing, Because you know you're still saying we should focus on dogs here because there are positive benefits for humans?
Krithika Srinivasan:Yeah, I mean because this is an empirically kind of oriented quote and it's directed at policymakers and I'm not going to go and convince them about multi-species health, right, so just focused on human health and safe cohabitation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Large free roaming mammals in a city are contribute, or I guess it doesn't have to. Sorry, I keep going to cities. I think about cities all the time, but in communities. How do you think that does contribute to the health of the community and the city? Does it create more sensible communities? You say here it helps with the health of the humans involved. How? How does interacting with these free roaming dogs and the positive interactions you have contribute to human health?
Krithika Srinivasan:I mean one. One thing that has come up repeatedly in all our research in different parts of the country is that the positive aspects can kind of range. They can be quite instrumental. So, whether it's pavement dwellers or people in rural areas, they talk about local dogs as offering them some kind of security. Whether it's pavement dwellers or people in rural areas, they talk about local dogs as offering them some kind of security, whether it's, like you know, physical security.
Krithika Srinivasan:In terms of physical security, you know, women sleeping on the street, for example, talk about how dogs help ward off unwanted attentions as being a sort of like first line of defense against other larger. I mean they're not large dogs, you know. You describe them as large mammals, but they're not really large. They're much larger and perhaps more risky mammals that people are or even other animals that people are concerned about. So there's that kind of instrumental way in which they contribute to health. There are less instrumental, more reciprocal ways. You know, the relationships of affection and care or just companionship right, are in some ways not dissimilar to what people kind of talk about with pet dogs, those as less control involved in people's street dog relationships. With the case of pet dogs, pet dogs don't have much autonomy, whereas street dogs get, for the most part they get a lot of autonomy and they get to choose who they enter into these relationships with. So in some ways I would say it's more reciprocal. But then that offers these kind of intangible benefits to people's psychosocial well-being.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:There's some things to be said about the joy of these different interactions and, yeah, like, whether it's dogs or other animals, we you watch humans interact and I think it's part of the reason for why it's contributing greatly to some of the concerning behaviors we see in tourism and people wanted to take photos of and touch animals, because there is this kind of. There's something beautiful and amazing about interacting with another species and walking away knowing that they've chosen you. I had a great interaction with a free-roaming dog in Mongolia. This was a rural area and we were cycling and the dog just kind of joined us for some time. We were in a tent, we were sleeping, we made an active point of not feeding her because we didn't want her to follow us or whatever it was, but she still hung out. She slept outside of our tent.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We woke up in the morning she was there wagging her tail and she followed us for about a day and then she disappeared. We named her Meadow, we were really attached to her. We were like okay, and then she was gone and then about three days later we saw her somewhere else and we'd been like cycling and she noticed us across a field. I know it sounds like a movie moment, but it really was. She got wind of us, literally smelt us and rants, and there's just absolute like joy at being chosen. Do you know what I mean? Like, this animal chose us you know, we're not making her hang out with us and then later on that day she was gone again and we did. There's something beautiful in the transient nature of that kind of interaction. She chose us, we hung out for some time and and when she was done she left. And yeah, I think even when you have these interactions with other wild animals, you find yourself recognizing your privilege in that moment. Really.
Krithika Srinivasan:And it needn't necessarily be joyful and I think a lot of the people who self-identify as feeders or carers, for example there's something about a sense of purpose. So it may not be necessarily joyful. There's nothing joyful about caring for a sick or injured or dying dog, which a lot of people do, but in other ways I think it contributes to human well-being in a way that's difficult to describe. We act of caring. So here I'm talking about caring in that kind of very focused, particular sense, not indifference.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it gives you a sense of self, a sense of purpose, in a very clear way. What's interesting about several of these kind of interactions is that animals and dogs are a very good example here often seek out humans. It's not always just humans that seek out these dogs. I think there are this of dogs who are perhaps have health concerns, that seek out help from a human. Or have you guys ever seen those videos of dogs pretending to have a limp, using, using? I don't know how true it is, again, like I don't know, but it's, it's. It's this idea that a dog could use perhaps having an injury to deceive someone, to get food or attention is really quite fascinating. Okay, thank you both of you. So I'm going to ask what are you working on now? But I'm guessing you're still working on the project. So what's next for the project? What's coming up next?
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :So basically, we are still working on some of the data that we are collecting and sort of trying to make sense of it and analyzing it. We're also trying to start comparing some of it as well with the UK to understand how different conflict and not only conflict, but different human-dog relationships can be understood and what are the similarities, differences, because sometimes there might be this idea that human-dog relationships might differ a lot, whereas they might not, or quite the opposite right. So it's like having also these mini sort of case to compare, as we were saying before, to have sort of a background to compare what we've been doing. Next step as well for me is I'm trying to work a bit more on this idea of the green city and how the green city always involves de-greening or de-animalization and then also sort of animalization and looking at the role of free-living dogs there and I guess that ongoing work as well with media and trying to understand these polarization sort of problems or wicked problems even right, of how to navigate media when there's these very contested topics ongoing. Yeah, Wonderful.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I look forward to seeing those developments.
Krithika Srinivasan:Krithika, anything to add there. Yeah, we are also now launching representative sample surveys in different parts of the country, along with Tim, the different parts of the country, along with Tim, the social psychologist on the team, to try and get together data that you know would be more palatable to policymakers. So that's another part of the project that we are now going to get started on quite soon. But, yeah, and like game was saying, we have collected a humongous amount of data and now the challenge is to sit and make sense all of all of it and see, you know, what else needs to be done, and I think one particular issue that we still need to kind of focus on is this question of, like trying to understand the conditions under which particularly serious cases of conflicts take place, like mauling, for example. Right, instead of just dismissing it as a one-off incident. Is there, is there a way of systematically studying them so that we can understand if there are conditions that lead to that? And that's something that we are trying to figure out, but again, it's more empirically focused.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Really important. So instead of just framing, oh, that dog is a vicious dog or a violent dog, there may be conditions that bring about really, really fascinating. And I think something we haven't touched on over the course of the interview that's maybe worth a last word is the multidisciplinary slash, interdisciplinary nature of this project. You, the multidisciplinary slash, interdisciplinary nature of this project. You know you've spoken here about ecology, social sciences, history. You're both geographers. What is the significance and importance of having a project that kind of cuts across disciplines in this way?
Krithika Srinivasan:Well, as you can see, there are multiple actors, human and non-human, that we are looking at, and there are multiple scales at which these interactions unfold, which makes multiple disciplines absolutely necessary to even begin to understand it, right? So there are people and there are people who are operating at different scales. There are people, there are policymakers, who are intervening at societal levels. There are individuals who are going about their everyday lives and interacting with dogs, and that needs you know, different kinds of methods, different kinds of approaches to understand these sorts of interactions, you know, and so you need qualitative research to look at what everyday interactions between people and dogs are like. You might need surveys to understand how it unfolded, the surveys at the societal scale to convince the policymakers.
Krithika Srinivasan:You need another kind of policy-based research to understand how policymakers and policy actors operate and what are the kind of framings that they bring in, so on and so forth. Then you have the dogs themselves, right, so you need the ecologists to understand how the dogs themselves inhabit their environments and the environments including people. And then all of this takes place within this longer temporal context. You know, we didn't just come to be out of nowhere, so what are the kind of historical influences that have brought us to this moment. And what does then that say about you know what we can do about this moment? Because one thing about understanding how we came to be is allows us a little more freedom in being able to kind of redo or reconfigure what we think is not okay, because otherwise, if we just think this is how things have always been, then it makes us feel more kind of restricted.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, it sounds fascinating. I'm sure it comes with some challenges thinking across these disciplinary divides because, you know, sometimes you have the same words but different, like different understandings of those words, and I think that's not only in terms of the stuff you're producing but the actual act of working across disciplines. You know people speak about interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, but it's really hard to to enact and to make sure that you're respecting knowledges, like you said earlier, and different ways of knowing. On that note, thank you both of you for for your time, for your work. I'll make sure to put the website in the show notes, as well as your contact details should people want to get in touch with you, thank you.
Guillem Rubio-Ramon :Thank you so much thanks a lot for having us thank you, claudia hello priya.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome to the animal highlight. It's so great to have you with us hi, claudia, thank you for having me it's uh, it's great. So this season, obviously, we're focused on animals and health, and it's very exciting because it's the first time with Animal Highlights that I've got two people working together to create the set of Animal Highlights. So it's you, priya, and it's Rashmi who listeners. You'll meet later on in the season, but, priya, you are currently a PhD student, right?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yes, that's correct.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Why don't you tell us a little bit about you and how you came to be interested in animals and health?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Sure. So I'm a PhD researcher at the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, I'm associated with this larger project called ROH Indies that looks at humans and street dog relationships at the intersection of public health. So in my PhD project specifically, I've been working in a Himalayan village in India and I've been looking at the everyday knowledges and relationships between people and street dogs living there and using them as a window to open up more broader issues of everyday ethics and politics of sharing life and space in inherently what is a more than human planet. So I got interested in this project because I have a background in environmental anthropology and zoology. So I have a continued interest in issues of cultural human-animal relations and I've personally in my life also I've always been interested in animals. So this was just the right fit for me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's amazing, and you're going to be focusing on dogs throughout your animal highlights, right? So we're going to be talking explicitly here about dogs and specific dogs and their relationships to health, right?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yes, that's correct. So all the stories that I'll be telling in like in the podcast, would be taken out from my field notes. These would be stories that I observed in my field site in the village that I was working in.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Amazing, amazing. Well, why don't we? Why don't we get to it? Let's start. Let's start with the first one.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:So today I thought I will be talking about Bella, a free living dog that I encountered during my fieldwork in Uttarakhand, that is, the central Himalayan state in India where I worked. So Bella or she could be called Bhura or Lali, depending on whom you ask. She resides in a rural marketplace and when I encountered her back in September 2023, she was pregnant. So Bella's pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our puppies highlights for us people, practices and knowledges that show how multi-species health stretches beyond humans and the dominant considerations of disease and contagion. So Bella, just to start off with, is a small brown dog with a thick, bushy tail that curves over her back. When she walks, the folded tips of her pointy ears bounce up and down with her gait. Bella navigates the streets of the village marketplace with confidence, like many of the other free-roaming dogs in the village who regularly visit, spend time and live in the market. She is a social dog who is adi or habitual of interacting with humans and other animals on her daily missions.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:So on an early winter morning, while having my breakfast, I received a call from Rahul, whose voice beamed as he told me Sir badhai ho, congratulations, bella came to the market today. She has given birth. I quickly finished my food and headed to the village market where I had spent the past month observing free-roaming street dogs like Bella, to understand their lives and relationships. Street dogs like Bella to understand their lives and relationships. I had been told by Rahul, outside whose shop I had often observed Bella spending her time, that she was approaching the end of her pregnancy term. Vinodda, the worker at Rahul's shop, had pointed out Bella to me and remarked that she has been crying and restless lately. That was two days ago. I had not observed Bella in the market since then.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So there were two shop workers. One told you Bella's given birth and another shop worker had told you previously that she had been restless for about two days and you hadn't seen her.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:That's correct. So there were several people who actually had a relationship with Bella in the market. She was quite a gregarious dog, I would say. For example, when I had inquired about her from Pankaj, the grocer outside whose shop Bella usually slept at night another shopkeeper in the market he simply told me not to worry, as she must have found a shelter nearby where she would be safe and comfortable during her pregnancy.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:As the non-challenged answer of Pankaj suggests, street dogs, like other free-living non-human animals, can take care of themselves and their own. I was often told that when street dogs got injured or sick, they would self-medicate using their saliva and by eating specific plates of medicinal grass. Even though these street dogs mostly led lives without human interventions on their bodies and mobilities, people, however, sometimes did get involved in taking care of them. In taking care of them. Rahul, for example, told me that last year, when Bella was pregnant, he showed her the roof of Pankaj's grocery shop. On the morning of the phone call, after we climbed the stairs to the roof, rahul pointed Bella out to me. She was in a small dark space in the terrace wall behind a clutter of discarded metal sheets, tattered clothes and wooden poles. Rahul said she has found a good spot at the back. It won't be easy for the leopard to find her children there. Then he bent down and crawled inside the space to count the puppies there were six.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:I myself hesitated to approach Bella and her pups, as Ramesh da, another local shopkeeper, had cautioned me, saying if you get close to her children right now then she might bite. She would fear that you are there to take them away. Unlike Rahul, who was Bella's self-proclaimed bada bhai, that is, big brother, I was still unsure where I stood with her. Proper interactions with street dogs like Bella required me to consider how the dogs might perceive my presence and approaches towards them. These dogs read our faces also. I was reminded once by Bharat, a local taxi driver, whom I sometimes observed playing with street dogs like Bella in the market. Evolving our understandings of safe interaction with street dogs perhaps necessitates such empathetic readings of the world to understand dogs as discerning creatures with their own life projects and relationships.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:In the days following the birth of our pups, I observed how Bella descended every day from the roof of Pankaj's shop to walk around the market. She frequented specific shops and followed particular people with whom she had a history of receiving food and affection. People who knew her gave her extra attention and food because she had recently become a mother. For example, rajuji, a local clothes retailer, fed Bella bread rolls every day following the birth of her pups because, as he said, if we do not feed her, then how will she feed her children properly? Mahesh, a local chemist, who also wanted to make sure that Bacho's mother, that is, mother of children received the leftover food he brought from home. And someone even suggested that Bella be given halwa, a sweet savory dish usually offered to new human mothers. Such practices of care towards Bella run counter to the formal public health practices geared towards making sure that street dogs like Bella do not give birth. Caring for the health of street dogs and dogs in general in much of public and media discourse often coalesces around neutering them for their own welfare. Population control measures remain a central, responsible practice for the good health of both the street dogs and humans, that is, for multi-species health.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Every day, after spending some time getting food in the market, Bella would climb the stairs once again and lie down in the dark with her puppies. The small, still-blind creatures would squeal when she arrived soon, replaced by the soft sounds of them suckling. Sometimes Bella would readjust, possibly because the sharp teeth of puppies connected with her nipples too hard, but most of the time she lay there panting as they fed or she licked them an important bonding ritual for both mother and children. Around 20 days after the birth of Bella's pups, on the coaxing of some people who wanted to adopt them one by one, rahul brought the pups out on the terrace. Bella kept close watch during the whole maneuver, pacing around, sniffing and licking the pups.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:When Dara Singh, a local restaurant owner whom Bella knew, picked one of the pups and tried going down, bella went around and stood in front of the stairs blocking his way. Dara Singh smiled and said see, she won't, let me take them away. Bella's story raises important questions about how multispecies health might be perceived differently. When the scales of consideration are changed from the health of populations to the health of individuals like Bella, we might find ourselves asking different questions regarding our collective health. While Bella might be a reservoir of disease and pose some risks to human health, she is much more than that she is an individual, a neighbor and also a mother.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Amazing. I mean, what an incredible story. And yeah, she is, she's a mother and I really appreciated there just how many people seem to be aware of her status as mother. That for me, was quite remarkable in your story that she wasn't some like anonymous dog in the market square. The number of people who seemed to not only be aware of her pregnancy but that she had puppies and had given birth just seems quite remarkable, like she was part of the community there, right.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:No, definitely. So it's often considered that these street dogs that live in these quite often crowded marketplaces or in these neighborhoods they don't have any relationships. Often the people who also knew Bella, they didn't know each other and, as I mentioned at the start that Bella was also called different names, like Bhura and Ladi, by different people, like Bhura and Ladi, by different people. So often I found out about all of these people and I got to know them and their relationships with Bella by following Bella around. So Bella would go and visit all of these different people and these people would not also be aware that Bella has all of these relationships with all of these people.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Did you find that people had relationships with many dogs like they were aware of many dogs, or was this just because Bella, like you said, was particularly gregarious, is my one question. And the other do you think and this is more of a method question do you think that because you were there as an ethnographer taking notes, that people maybe, I don't know made up relationships or made their relationships sound bigger than they are because they wanted to talk to you as a researcher?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Two very interesting and important questions. So, first of all, yeah, definitely, bella's behavior, her status as a female dog, her features as a particularly cute dog, also played a part in people showing interest in her. So most of the people in the marketplace were these men and they particularly were interested in this female dog. But their relationship with several male dogs in the market would be quite different because they they would not show that much care and affection, unfortunately, to towards all the dogs and, as I said, bella's own gregariousness, her own friendly nature and her ability to create relationships also mattered a lot because, all the dogs would not have such relationships.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:So bella was exceptional in that instance. But it also shows that how all dogs are their own individuals and have their own different personalities. So you can't just uh like extrapolate what insight from one dog to the other.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So she was a proper social butterfly who used her social skills to get food, to get shelter, interesting.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Definitely. And that also brings us to the second question that you said that, yeah, definitely, my being present there as a researcher researching dogs did drum up interest in these dogs at the start of my fieldwork. But I was there in that village for nine months and soon after, like people mostly forgot that I was there. And yeah, I often. My methodology was also often let me just be part of the crowd, so I used to observe, sometimes from the distance where people might not observe me observing things in the marketplace. But also one of the key ways to understand that these relationships were not just one of instances was that I saw Bella going to these places over and over again and people would not always be caring towards Bella. So these everyday relationships would all also fluctuate from day to day basis. Sometimes if someone's having some extra food, for example, in a shop, they might offer it to Bella, and then Bella would also sometimes persist and like she would be driven from some places and sometimes people would be neglectful or not as giving not as giving necessarily.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:So again, like my being there and then like yeah, did have an impact. So I was definitely an agent in people showing interest in these dogs at first.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I'm almost sure that your presence would have brought an attentiveness to specific dogs as well, but you had an interest in those specific dogs initially because of some of their traits and their relationships. So it's a fascinating question which I'm sure we could talk about for ages. And I just the last thing I'm really happy that you kind of brought up the relationship between motherhood and health here. I think so often when we talk about dogs and health, we speak about fertility. You know how can we prevent, you know, more dogs or street dogs from being born, but we don't actually think about the health of mothers and the mother-child, the mother-puppy relationship. And towards the end there you were speaking about people trying to take her puppies away, and it's just, yeah, it's an interesting thing so often, I think even puppies that are bought in pet stores, they're babies. They've just been taken away from their mom, they're a few weeks old and they've just taken away. That's just the end of that relationship for them and it's kind of startling.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yeah, definitely, and I think that was a key thing that also came up from my observations. And that's something when you, as I also towards the end, mentioned that when you use different scales of looking at these relationships, like if you look at how humans have related to these dogs as pets from a societal level, you look at the pet industry and how pets are like, how puppies are commodified, and then there's relationship between puppies and their mothers are usually not accounted for because they often remain hidden in larger discussions. But once you scale down to it and you actually observe how these mother dogs actually are responding to their pups and how they're relating to their pups and what happens when people try to take those pups how do the mothers actually respond to them, then there's a different kind of dynamic actually respond to them then there's a different kind of dynamic and I would say like different kind of insidiousness in that relationship that comes forth which is often not talked about enough.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I would say, yeah, I mean, like you said at the end, there definitely raises different questions. Well, thank you so much, priya. This has been really, really enlightening and interesting and I look forward to your next ones.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Thank you so much, priya. This has been really, really enlightening and interesting, and I look forward to your next ones.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank, you so much, Claudia, for having me. Thank you to Guillaume Rubio-Ramon and Krithikas Ravasan for being amazing guests, to Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the bed music. Thank you also to Priyashnu Thaprial for the animal highlight and Rebecca Shen for her design work. Huge thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple, as well as the Remaking One Health Indies project for sponsoring this season. This episode was produced by myself and edited together with Christian Lentz. This is the Animal. Turn with me, Claudia Hurtunfoldo.
