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
S7E8: Pavlov’s Dogs with Matthew Adams
Matthew Adams joins Claudia on the show to talk about the dogs who were used by Ivan Pavlov in his extensive laboratory operations in St Petersburg. They discuss the importance of psychology and psychological experimentation in debates about multispecies health, also pointing to the importance of art-based research that challenges anthropocentricism.
Recorded: 10 September 2024.
Matthew Adams is an academic in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Brighton, UK. He teaches classes in ecopsychology, the psychology of human-animal relations, posthumanities and creative methods. Mathew’s research challenges conventional perceptions of animal experimentation and considers the nature of scientific work. From 2022-2024, Mathew worked as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow on a project entitled Pavlov and the kingdom of dogs: Storying experimental animal histories through arts-based research. Read more about the project in Qualitative Research in Psychology and Trace: Journal for Human-Animal Studies; or explore the online exhibition. Matthew’s most recent book is titled Anthropocene Psychology: Being Human in a More-Than-Human World, and he is currently working on another, provisionally titled An A-Z of the Anthropocene: Key Ideas for Navigating End Times and New Beginnings. Find out more about Matthew and his work on instagram (@dogsofpavlov), X (@mattadams0)and via his university profile.
Featured:
- Pavlov and the kingdom of dogs by Matthew Adams
- Ecological Crisis, Sustainability and the Psychosocial Subject by Matthew Adams
- Anthropocene Psychology: Being Human in a More-than-human world by Matthew Adams
- Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion by David W. Kidner
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. It can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, X, LinkedIn, You Tube, BlueSky and Instagram. Learn more about the show on our website.
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Matthew Adams:It's really interesting that illuminating history is really important in that sense for reflecting on how we still think about the present. If my home discipline, psychology, which has been really slow to engage with the animals and lots of these issues, if it can start to look at its own past and what seem to be kind of key figures or moments in its own past and start to pick away at the human relationships involved but look at them in a slightly critical way not slightly critical way, profoundly critical then that's potentially a way for psychologists and others engaging in that discipline to think about the present. You know that the two go together. I think for me that's been really interesting for me to think about history in that way, being engaged with historical projects, you know.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to the Animal Turn everyone. This is Season 7, episode 8. As you know, in this season we're focused on the idea of multi-species health and we've been speaking about a whole range of concepts related to health, everything from marginalized multi-species communities to healthy publics. But today we're probably focused on a figure that many of us relate or think about when it comes to animals and experimentation and also questions of health, and that's Pavlov's dogs. Now, I don't know about you, but I, as I mentioned at the start of the interview today, I have a very superficial understanding of Pavlov and the experiments he did. I think I was just taught in primary school that he rang a bell and dogs salivated and that was the end of the story, and he was a genius for figuring it out. Well, my guest today, matthew Adams, has spent a lot of time learning about Pavlov and the various experiments he did while in St Petersburg but, more importantly, learning about his dogs. You see, there wasn't one dog. There was many, many, many dogs involved in Pavlov's experiments and they were engaged in a whole host of different experimentations. Now Matthew Adams, who I'll tell you a little bit about in a moment, has done an incredible exhibition, both online and an in-person exhibition in the UK called the Kingdom of Dogs. You should definitely go check it out. The link is in the show notes. It's just beautifully done. The design is incredible. They've got all these little figurines that make you think about how the labs were arranged, the whole system of lab networks were arranged and also what the dogs were doing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, let me tell you a little bit about Matthew. Matthew is an academic in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton, uk. He teaches classes in ecopsychology, the psychology of human-animal relations, post-humanities and creative methods and, in fact, during the course of this episode today we speak a lot about the role of psychology and its relationship with the animal turn and animal studies in general. Matthew's research challenges conventional perceptions of animal experimentation and considers the nature of scientific work. From 2022 to 2024, he worked as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow on a project entitled Pavlov and the Kingdom of Dogs storing experimental animal histories through arts-based research, which, of course, we speak a lot about today. Read more about the project in the journal article Qualitative Research in Psychology, as well as TRACE Journal for Human Animal Studies or, as I said, go and explore the online exhibition. Matthew's most recent book is titled Anthropocene Psychology being Human in a More Than Human World, and he's currently working on another, provisionally titled An A to Z of the Anthropocene Key Ideas for Navigating End Times and New Beginnings.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Now we did run into a couple of sound issues in this episode You'll hear there's a little bit of clipping kind of throughout the episode, but it's not too bad. Unfortunately, near the end of the interview there was this odd like click, click, click, click, click sound that started and I found it a bit too distracting so I ended up cutting just the end of the interview where I asked him what he was currently working on. So you'll notice that the interview ends slightly more abruptly than usual, but what he did say he is working on is a standalone graphic novel about Pavlov and the Kingdom of Dogs, which is very exciting, and I'm sure more details will be available on that soon. Find out more about Matthew's work on Instagram X and via his university profile. All of the links are, of course, in the show notes. Priyashnu Thapleal joins us once again for the animal highlight at the end of the show and he speaks about a dog named Ruby, who also challenged some of Priya's ideas regarding the ethics of doing ethnographic research and how researchers and the dogs that they are investigating interact with one another and, when matters of health or life and death emerge, what role an ethnographer plays in that. It's a very generous and thoughtful highlight today and I enjoyed speaking to Priya about it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Just a reminder that the Animal Highlight is also now its own standalone podcast. If you haven't found it yet on Spotify or Podchaser or wherever it is you listen, make sure you go and check it out. It's the Animal Highlight. It includes all of the segments from the Animal Turn as well as some original content.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the last season of the Animal Highlight, I had Herodont on the show and he spoke about animals and waste and it was a lot of fun to work with him on creating that content. Also, just a reminder to go and check out our merch store. You'd be doing the show and us a really great service and help if you got a shirt or something or other for a gift or a colleague or someone who works in animal studies. And, of course, you'd be helping support myself, christian and Rebecca who are doing some of the work on the animal turn behind the scenes. And finally, just a reminder to please rate and review the show wherever you listen. These go a long, long, long, long, long way in terms of helping others to find the content and, as always, thank you to animals and philosophy, politics, law and ethics apple for sponsoring this podcast. They give us a little bit of money to, which goes a long way in terms of helping to make sure that the websites and back of house things like where the sound is stored, etc. That I have the money to make sure that that continues and, for this season's podcast, sponsor the remaking one health indies project with Krithika Srinivasan. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for all of your support.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:All right, this has been a really long intro, sorry about that. Again, a fascinating conversation talking about Pavlov's dogs and also the interactions of psychology in animal studies. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to the show, matt. It's great to have you on the show to talk a little bit about your work with Pavlov's Dogs and your amazing, amazing exhibition. I'm very excited to talk to you about it. But welcome, welcome. Welcome to the show.
Matthew Adams:Thank you. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here. I love the podcast, so it's really nice to be able to contribute.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you, I'm always delighted, I love the podcast, so it's really nice to be able to contribute. Thank you. I'm always delighted when people know the podcast and have guests on and they're like, hey, I know your show but, wow, yay, I get very excited. So you have a fascinating history and you do work at a whole bunch of really interesting overlaps, things that look at arts-based research, psychology, human animal relations. What a journey. How did you come to be interested in this kind of work?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, thanks. Well, it's been a bit of a journey, as you say. Originally my work was in social theory and critical psychology, in relation, in particular, to identity, but there I got a strong interest in what we might call a relational ontology for sure shorthand, which is kind of interested in a key proposition in critical psychology against individualist psychology, is that who we are, what it means to be a person, involves being constituted through our relationships with others, and that was seen as a challenge to kind of the mainstream history of psychology and that was part of my work and I'm mentioning that now it might seem arcane because it's something I come back to. But after doing that for a while, including my PhD in teaching and research, I kind of had an important for me pivot when I shifted towards environmental issues. Actually, after a lecture that I went to a public lecture and I kind of had an epiphany that I needed to turn my research around to focus on climate crisis, ecological crisis, much more in my own work.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, whose lecture was it? It's always amazing when you go to a lecture and it changes your course of things.
Matthew Adams:Yeah, it was actually David Kidner who was in the UK.
Matthew Adams:He was a kind of critical psychologist really looking at how social systems, social structure, politics, capitalism was central to understanding the environmental crisis, but from a much deeper historical perspective than we used to, and I'd actually done an undergraduate module with him a long time before that and just seeing it again triggered something in me that took me back to then and also kind of made me realize that I was going down a route of increasing technical, if you like, specialism within social theory and psychology.
Matthew Adams:That would have been possibly a fruitful career path, but it just kind of awakened this desire to do something I was more passionate about and interested in. So I kind of turned the bus around gradually and started to focus, probably around I think the first article I've published on these issues was around 2012, so that's a good marker of when I started to focus more on environmental issues, still in relation to identity, but also started to think about them in relation to narrative, cultural pathologies, cultural norms, and that built up towards a book I wrote in 2016, ecological Crisis Sustainability in the Psychosocial Subject Beyond Behaviour Change sustainability in the psychosocial subject beyond behavior change behavior change was probably still is a big kind of paradigm for how we think about environmental issues, particularly in psychology, and coming from a social theory and critical psychology background, I wanted to get involved with that critically and think about other ways of imagining an environmental crisis and other ways out of it and that's really that, really interesting.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So you're talking here now about, I mean, because people always feel I think a bit flustered is not the wrong. They feel inept. You know the size of the crisis, the size of the issues, and this is a psychological. It's interesting I haven't had many psychologists on the show, people that are experts in psychology, but this is inherently a psychological question how we deal with these big existential crises and the kind of actions we take. You know, whether we throw up our hands and say, well, it's beyond my control, or we jump right in, maybe without thinking about what is in our control, it's really really fascinating, fascinating work.
Matthew Adams:Yeah, yeah, thanks, and my home discipline is psychology. That's where I've ended up teaching and um, you know. So I've done a lot of work in and around psychology mainstream and on the on the margin. So I was speaking to and drawing from uh psychological work in in that book and but I was trying to draw on other perspectives outside the mainstream, like psychoanalysis, narrative studies and, towards the end of that book, post-humanism, uh, starting to engage with the animal turn, especially when I was starting to think and write about possible imaginaries that were alternatives to kind of stuck within what I only client, I think called the kind of narrative loop that we seem to get stuck in around climate oh, I love that.
Matthew Adams:A narrative loop yeah, it's like we.
Matthew Adams:It's easy to imagine the end of the world, as someone else said, you know.
Matthew Adams:Then it is to imagine different kinds of ways of imagining a future, um, beyond the climate crisis, that doesn't somehow involve minor behavior changes.
Matthew Adams:So I was looking for those kind of imaginaries and then I started to read the work of people like Donna Haraway and for the first time for me really, and starting to think much more about a relational ontology so coming back to that phrase but beyond the species boundary, beyond the species boundary, so starting to think about how we, what it is to be human, is constituted through our relationships with the species and animals, starting to think about how we, what it is to be human, is, constituted through our relationships with the species and animals, starting to think about those things.
Matthew Adams:So that was towards the end of that book, and since then, really, there's been another pivot where I focus even more on the human decentering, the human, human-animal, human-other-species relationships, especially in the context of the anthracene, critically engaging with that notion. So, again, another marker would be a book that I published in 2021 called anthracene psychology being human in the more than human world, and there I really kind of ran with specific situated human, animal and multi-species relations. That I thought helped illustrate, reflect on what it means to be human, but also what it means to think about being human in a different context.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Could you give us an example of one of those that you might have walked through?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, so in one chapter I took the example of the broiler chicken. This is what I tend to do in the chapters. I took an example to start with, so I took the example of the broiler chicken, and this is what I tend to do in the chapters. I took an example to start with, so I took the example of the broiler chicken, which is a specific kind of chicken that's produced to be eaten, and I worked with that in terms of why is that considered to be a potential marker of the Anthropocene itself?
Matthew Adams:And there are reasons for that. Seeing as a specific marker, along with things like fallout from nuclear testing, as in chicken bones that will end up under the ground and they're spread across the world, means that if any future species wanted to look back and designate our particular era through looking at geology as the Anthropocene, one of the things that would stand out would be this layer of chicken bones in the ground. And, yeah, that kind of the first time I come across something like that kind of really opened my imagination to how profoundly important our relationships to the species are, to how we understand the time we're living in in a way that is about humans changing the environment, possibly for the first time in its existence, to the extent that we are, but that is always about our profound relationships with the species and our interdependence with them.
Matthew Adams:So basically in that chapter I walk that through. But then I use it as an opportunity to talk about vegan imaginaries and meat culture and engage with kind of working outwards to bigger issues and start to think about what a vegan imaginary might look like on a wider scale. You know, if more people are engaged with it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Really really interesting and I think you know what you're talking about here, with vegan imaginaries and of course, dinesh Wadiwala said this as well that what a lot of a vegan imaginary is, or practice even is, is trying to practice a world that doesn't yet exist. Like what would it mean if you do these practices and you know in what is distinctly a non-vegan world, if you think that? You know, I think, what one percent of the world's population are vegan and it's people that are actively trying to live in a world that doesn't yet exist, trying to, through practice, create this alternative world. And it does trigger imaginaries. It makes you realize, as you said earlier, that there are alternatives, that everything isn't foreclosed. You know, the end of the world isn't predetermined, and I always find this quite interesting.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think anyone who does research with history starts to very quickly realize how what we think of as catastrophic in this moment and this is not to belittle how serious the Anthropocene is but that every generation has faced these massive crises where they've foreseen, for their purposes and their populations, the end of the world, and how adaptable we've changed or how normalized certain situations can become over time, which I think is quite interesting. I really love that you're thinking across these different imaginaries, and I also like to think with imagination, because there is a kind of bridge between imagination and what you think is possible and materiality, right what actually is. And it's easy, I think, when you start to talk about imagination, for people to think it's fluffy or it's not important, but you think imaginaries are really important, right?
Matthew Adams:Absolutely. Yeah, I love the way you put it moments ago and it's around ideas like kind of prefigurative imaginaries which we might not be able to fully envisage or articulate. Back to david kidner. He he mentioned these kind of imaginaries is ideologically occluded. I like that. You know it's like that. Sometimes there are other systems of thinking in the way, to the extent that it's hard to think about these, but it's possible and sometimes in fact they exist elsewhere already.
Matthew Adams:And another chapter where I talk about stranded whales. As the start point for the chapter I talk about indigenous imaginaries, which is a really difficult subject to engage with as a non-indigenous researcher. But some imaginaries that might be prefigurative or outside of our own everyday experience might have developed in different contexts in completely different ways. So this is not homogeneity. There are potential imaginaries, if we want to stick with that concept, that exist or have existed, that might still be broken or fragmented, but that we can draw on as well. So we do always have a foot in history or in the present or in existing materialities. I think you're right when we are trying to foster, facilitate other imaginaries.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And you can never quite know. You might have an idea of what the future could look like, but those coulds. There are multiple kind of pathways and also the idea of even one pathway is an illusion, because you know you could be reaching or doing something, but different people from different contexts would maybe draw different conclusions about what it is. This is all sounding very like abstract, but it's just to say. I think maybe, coming back to your idea of relational ontology, I suppose is also related to relational epistemology. How we know the world is also through our relations, right, and I think that this is really important in terms of how we know other animals is to realize that they don't exist depending on the animal. So a broiler chicken, for example, they don't exist outside of our relationships with them. Right, the broiler and the human relationship in a factory farm setting or in a sanctuary is very much shaped through the relationship. Does that make sense?
Matthew Adams:absolutely. Yeah, you put it better than I did, but that's also what I'm trying to get, was trying to get it in the book. Yeah, they are relational configurations. So you're absolutely right, the broiler chicken would not and does not exist out of not just humanity, but particular framing of human culture, technology, history, that that produces broiler chickens on such a scale, you know, and in such a way. So yeah, totally within that framework, is how we and those animals are configured. We're also configured at the same time as in the way that we are people that eat chickens and all the things that come with that, you know, in terms of systems that we're part of.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, really, really interesting to think about the relationships and what it means in terms of how it opens opportunities to act or forecloses opportunities to act for different beings. But now, of course, when we're talking now about imaginaries and health, I think is a particularly powerful imaginary right, like the idea of a healthy body or a healthy environment. This is also central to environmental discourse. You know, like the idea of a healthy body or a healthy environment, this is also central to environmental discourse. You know, we live in a healthy environment. That's what we want. So it's an extremely powerful discourse and imaginary.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And, of course, who we're talking about today? Pavlov. He was really a historical figure when it came to thinking about health and psychology in particular. So we're going to talk about Pavlov's dogs, but maybe we could start with Pavlov, because I think we all think we know, we're all like, oh, pavlov, you know, like everyone knows the story. He's the guy who figured out that dogs salivate when they hear a bell and it sounds all really benign. It sounds really benign. I always imagined Pavlov like standing in his garden. He was some guy who just rang a bell and realized that there was extra drool on the dog's mouth. It really was benign in my imagery, but that's not what happened. So could you tell us a little bit about Pavlov and why he features so prominently in our minds when we think about psychology and animal health?
Matthew Adams:So I think probably a couple of things to say about Pavlov in terms of that imaginary. And the first is that I was like you, you know, even though I'm rooted in psychology, the way that I'd learned about psychology, and why I teach it, was that I didn't have much more of an idea about what he did in detail. He didn't need to to kind of engage with that. But, yeah, pavlov. So he actually spent the first big part of his career as a physiologist and health was central to his work. Then he was looking at digestive processes in dogs. That's what he won the Nobel Prize for. That's not what it's particularly remembered for today, but he was and there's a there's a kind of real tension there around, if we want to think around around the way that he worked with dogs and treated them in discovering and presenting knowledge around digestive processes. You know there's an irony at least there, in that the focus was on human health around discoveries around digestive processes with dogs. The experiments on dogs that were involved in those discoveries were, you know, pretty horrendous by any standard. But then what he's remembered for today is the work that he did after the Nobel Prize, so from the early 20th century onwards, which was physiopsychological, or we might think of it as psychology today, and that's the work with dogs in terms of the condition of reflux. So by then he was getting into his 40s, maybe even 50s.
Matthew Adams:By then yeah, into his 50s he was an established scientist living in St Petersburg, which was then Petrograd, by then renamed in World War I. He had a large factory enterprise, a safe factory enterprise after the historian Daniel Tobes, because he was working on such a large scale across multiple laboratories, lots of co-workers employed by him, as well as dog handlers, multiple experiments underway at any one time, increasingly geared only towards the study of the conditional reflex, which does relate to a kind of common image of what Pavlov was doing, in that he was collecting saliva which required a kind of surgical intervention in the cheek or throat saliva gland. Initially the dog would have been presented with food and then saliva measured. How much did the dog salivate when presented with food? Then the food would have been paired with.
Matthew Adams:He never actually used a bell, but with a metronome or a buzzing sound or lots of other stimuli as well, which we don't tend to hear about, some of them which euphemism was destructive stimuli or negative stimuli, that was, the infliction of pain. Also a real kind of odd array of stimuli, such as the sound of water dripping or different shapes or different colours. So a real range of stimuli all for him, geared towards trying to discover not just learning processes but psychological mechanisms behind them as well, that he thought we could reach through this measure of saliva and changes in salivation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:What made Pavlov choose dogs for this experiment? Why dogs?
Matthew Adams:He was a real advocate of working with dogs and worked with dogs right up until the end of his life. The only other animals he really worked with at all were apes, and then he wasn't leading that research. That's because he thought they were pliable, obedient and also, at least in terms of public accounts, that he thought they, they were kind of man's best friend. So it was an honorable and historical relationship that we had this bond that no other human and animal had and that kind of made their sacrifice more honorable in a way, and that they were, and that we had this long allegiance with them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I always find it interesting how the idea that we have this bond, that we have this relationship, that somehow we've been as we were talking about earlier co-constituted, warrants us using them in that way. It seems like a bigger betrayal if that's what you believe, If you believe that we've got this really strong, not to say that any animals should be tested on or that that's fair or ethical, but there just seems to be something even more egregious when somehow you're choosing an animal who you willingly admit to being your friend and loyal, and I don't know. It just seems like a double betrayal somehow. But it's really quite remarkable looking at your exhibition. So you've got this online exhibition it was an in-person exhibition and you've done graphic novels and a whole host of posters that really, I think, bring to life the scale and the magnitude of these experiments.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And, as you said so, there wasn't even a bell, which is quite remarkable, but there were multiple dogs, hundreds of dogs, and they went through all of these. You know that, that cheek, so it's called a fistula, right, A fistula in the cheek, and you had this pipe running down the dogs, you know, running down, collecting the gastric fluids that were being sold, Like what, and and then you've got them tied up to these little wooden they seem like wooden carts where people have literally tied them in place and are feeding them and doing a range of experiments. So it's just a massive, massive, massive operation, right?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, an enterprise is what I tend to call it. Yeah, it was enormous. And yeah, you're right, he has significant state funding, effectively, and that only increased as his global celebrity increased and he recruited hundreds of dogs. And yeah, if you haven't seen the exhibition yet, if you want to imagine it, in St Petersburg there were different laboratory setups across the city, but what they had in common was this kind of standard central image of a dog tied to an experimental stand.
Matthew Adams:So when we look back at archival images, it's not kind of the pristine technology we might think of today. It seems ad hoc. So they were tied with harnesses and ropes and buckles and almost whatever they had to hand on these wooden stands. The dogs had to be held in place and, yeah, if there were dogs used for the stimulus experiments, additionally for experiments, then they would, at the very least have had a fistula attached to their cheek which was surgical, which was an operation attached to their cheek, which was surgical, which was an operation, and then another device attached so that saliva could be extracted and measured.
Matthew Adams:And then in that place there would be another co-worker sorry, a human co-worker who was assigned to the dog for a series of trials. They would run for often hours and hours at a time, and that's the repeated presentation of food initially, but then a stimuli, whatever that might be, whether it's a flashing light bulb or electrocution, and measuring the results of that again and again and again. But at least initially, there were lots of these experiments happening in the same room. Later on, when Pavlov had more resources, they might've been in separate chambers or separated partitionings within a room, and yet dozens of experiments underway at any one time, pavlov overseeing them. So not conducting any of them, but overseeing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, it seemed quite different to maybe how we think about lab animals today and maybe I'm wrong, you know this better is these animals were named. They were known individually. I really enjoyed the kind of section on the online exhibition where you spoke about was it other notes or other observations where the researchers who were paired with different dogs had to not only note the outcomes of the tests, some of which were pretty like the amount of gastric juice, so what was it? One of the dogs produced a liter of juice, like gastric juice every day for two years. I mean that's a massive amount and literally so.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:The food is falling out of the dog's mouth. He's never actually getting to consume the food. He eats it and falls out. He eats it and he falls out, which is just really tragic. But then in these notes, the people who are paired with them are writing really intimate details about the dogs. You start to get a sense of how much these experiments are changing their personalities and impacting them. Did you ever get a sense that those who are experimenting with them are uncomfortable with what's happening? Or at this stage, was it really accepted that animals are available to use in experimentation?
Matthew Adams:yeah, that's a really nice question. Um, yeah, and the first thing to say about those other observations is what we really wanted to do and what I discovered the more I delved into the detail. I didn't just want to kind of damn pavlov in retrospect. Not only that, some of the experiments were horrific, there's no doubt about it, man but I didn't just want to kind of damn Pavlov in retrospect.
Matthew Adams:Not only that, some of the experiments were horrific, there's no doubt about it. But I didn't just want to do that, I wanted to explore the complexities of the things we talked about already. You know the relationships that were involved and any contradictions or tensions there, and one of those contradictions or tensions was definitely around the naming of animals and certainly as Pavlov moved into that later work which we talked about earlier, he encouraged, in fact insisted, that the dogs were named. They all had names, and then they were assigned to a co-worker, often for months, sometimes years. So there was a named dog working with one person. So, yeah, what did that mean? How did that mean that co-workers felt about the relationship with the dogs?
Matthew Adams:We don't know for sure, because those records, lots of records, were actually lost in the siege of Leningrad in World War II. But what remains, certainly those that I've been able to find, don't really record much about co-workers' feelings towards the dogs per se. The other observations are geared towards how they conduct themselves in experiments, but also lots of commentary about their personality, so implying those, if not care, then at least an attentiveness to the complexity of a dog's personality. People often think that Pavlov, as a behaviourist, didn't want to talk about a dog's interiority. Not the case at all. It was really interesting, interesting adopts character or personality as well.
Matthew Adams:But there are other accounts from the time of, for example, students in the audience that were disgusted by um, particularly the sham feeding system that you saw. But there was also, we have to remember, a fairly, fairly nascent but already quite strong anti-bibisectionist movement, fairly fairly nascent but already quite strong anti-vivisectionist movement globally and in Russia that did call out Pavlov's methods. So it certainly wasn't the case that everyone accepted the sacrifice of animals because of some kind of acceptance of science more generally at the time. There were other voices, dissenting voices. Whether I imagine that some co-workers at least must have been aware of these and been uncomfortable to some degree in that work, whether they could then justify it to themselves or each other in a fairly straightforward way, I'm not sure we're now in the early 20th century, right?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:this is all happening early 20th century, okay, and the brown dog affair is kind of happening. There's been a lot of flare-up with the anti-vivisectionists. So I mean for sure they are aware that not everyone likes what they're doing, but oftentimes I think activists are also framed as maybe being too emotional and if you're in the business and the work of doing this work, maybe you're putting that aside. But some of these observations were really quite intimate, I think, in terms of detail. So, like you said, there was an attentiveness.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:One of them spoke about a dog who had gone through electric like an electric testing of sorts, through electric like an electric testing of sorts. I think the name was Shaolin, and spoke about how the dog was really energetic, happy and noted a change in the dog's behavior following the trials, that the dog had become apathetic since the trials had begun, that there was a marked personality change in the dog pre and post. And this seems obvious to us, right, like if you undergo torture your personality is going to change. But this is a pretty remarkable observation for the time, because animals weren't thought to have personalities, right, right.
Matthew Adams:Yeah, it's. Yes, I think you're right and it's certainly. It certainly wasn't a norm for it to appear in scientific discourse. So, yeah, that kind of the level of focus on health and harm to the dogs involved I think does stand out, even at the time, in terms of how those kinds of experiments were documented. What I'm also still curious about is whether it's still written quite flatly or, if you like, dispassionately in terms of what happens to the dogs. And that's partly what kind of still makes me feel really uncomfortable or generates an emotional response in me.
Matthew Adams:Is that? You're right, you know some of it. Of course, it's obvious the dogs have been tortured, they break what do you expect? And it's kind of, you know, you don't say come on. But it's still written dispassionately, as if this is some kind of discovery. I'm still curious as to whether, to what extent, this is just the standards of scientific writing, which, again, kavlov oversaw every public pronouncement publication that came out of the enterprise. Uh, how to extent is scientific writing? Or to what extent is it an actual reflection of people's sensibilities at the time? To some extent, that remains a mystery, but, yeah, curious.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, because this is also a time in which dogs' relationships with people in, I mean, I want to say Western cities, but here we're in Russia now as well, where dogs' relationships with people or, let's say, urbanites, is changing quite dramatically, getting more and more dogs being kept in homes, whereas maybe this wasn't the case 50 years prior, right, so there's increasing understandings, I think, of dogs, or dogs are engaged in different kinds of relationships, and maybe this is why we get so sensitive about it today, because for us in the UK and in Vienna and in Canada, and you know, dogs are pets for many of us, and in this season, so far so, we've had a bit of a quite an explicit focus on dogs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We've spoken about the health of street dogs, we've spoken a bit about the health of pet dogs and how oftentimes we don't actually know what they need. But in general, it's pretty clear that many dogs are suffering for different reasons on the streets or in homes. But perhaps neglected have been lab dogs, dogs in laboratories that are engaged in this type of labor, that are being used in these ways. In looking at the history of experimentation on dogs with Pavlov, did you also find yourself looking at experimentation with dogs today?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, again, it's a really nice question. In some ways I thought of this as a historical case today, but I've always been interested before this in contemporary human-animal relations and including in the classes I teach around psychology of human animal relations, how we treat experimental animals today, and it's certainly still a debate so, and it's certainly still something that requires critical engagement with and, no doubt, reform. I'm not I'm not sure to what extent that involves dogs, but certainly around other animals that are engaged in research in psychology and other areas of science, there's still people, academics, researchers, animal welfarists pushing for reform and that can still be around things that I talk about in this project, like things like naming, where that can be just not present as a practice, but also paying attention to how animals are housed, their daily routines, their daily lives, their health. So these are the things that have been still called for in terms of animal research today and these are the things that we drew out, and it almost feels coincidental sometimes in the historical case that these things were discovered. We start to focus on their daily lives, on the names that they were given, their relationships with the handlers, their living conditions, and these are still exactly the same things.
Matthew Adams:Often they just carry over to really contemporary arguments and debates around how animals in research should be treated if we should research them at all, which is a big question, of course but if they are, what are the protocols around it still being debated in some of the same ways? So for me it's really interesting that illuminating history is really important in that sense for reflecting on how we still think about the present. If my home discipline, psychology, which has been really slow to engage with the animals and lots of these issues, if it can start to look at its own past and these what seem to be kind of key figures or moments in its own past and start to pick away at the human relationships involved, but look at them in a slightly critical way not slightly critical way, profoundly critical then that's potentially a way for psychologists and others engaging that discipline to think about the present. You know that the two go together. I think that's been really interesting for me to think about history in that way.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Being engaged with historical projects, yeah what makes you say that psychology has been slow to the the mark when it comes to thinking about human and animal relations?
Matthew Adams:I say it's been slow because for some years at least 10 years, possibly even longer in some cases there's been an engagement with human-animal relations and the psychology of them. But I'm pretty confident in saying that in most cases that's been about human attitudes towards animals or it's been about how animals might be considered in animal assisted interventions or how they might benefit human health as companion animals. What hasn't really infiltrated psychological theory and research a great deal, though it's changing is the animal side of those relationships. What's it like for the animal? What are the animal's interests and concerns? They're not front and centre in psychological research and theory. Like I say, that's changing. But whereas in sociology, anthropology, social theory, post-humanities has been already much more of a history of a critical engagement with those kinds of issues, it's so tricky because I think animal studies almost inherently straddles multiple disciplines, right?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think, when studies almost inherently straddles multiple disciplines, right. And I think when you start to ask about the psychology of other animals, I'm sure some people and their disciplinary boundaries are like wait, wait, hang on, you're now entering the realm of ethology or ecology or animal welfare science, right? And I think maybe, if you start to speak about animal psychology, a great deal has been learned about animals' psychologies, why they act the way they do, why they respond to the ways they do. But it's often been done with a pretty instrumental lens, right? A lot of animal welfare science is informed by agricultural sciences and agricultural industries. So what role do you think you know? Is there something different psychology would do to what animal welfare science is doing? What is the contribution there? How does it push our conversations about human-animal psychology forward?
Matthew Adams:I think for me to kind of think of it as something distinctive, even though, like you say, they're overlapping it's interdisciplinary space, about psychology.
Matthew Adams:It's about the psychology of human-animal relations. So it's understanding how humans and animals interrelate, encounter each other, sociality. So thinking through those kinds of moments and encounters and psychology has been doing that, but it's been thinking about it only in terms of human attitudes towards those animals often. So I think there's a space there still to be opened up by thinking about relationships and relationality in psychology. But saying our engagement with non-human animals and other species, we ought to start to take that on board as something that psychology could be interested in, because that then expands how we think about what social psychology means or what we think scope of justice might be in psychology might extend how we think about in-groups and out-groups if we go beyond humans, start to think about relationships with non-human animals in those ways. So a relatively straightforward way is extending the concepts we use in psychology to incorporate things other than human, which it doesn't tend to do. It tends to be resolutely human, exceptionalists.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Could you give me an example, because I could see some people being worried that this is possibly dangerous ground for anthropocentrism, right when we look at our dogs and we say my dog is depressed, because a lot of people might think, oh, there's loads of psychology around dogs and dog anxiety and dog depression or whatever, which I have no doubt that that does exist in numerous cases. But yeah, could you give me an example to help me get my head around this a little?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, give me an example to help me get my head around this a little. Yeah, so, and the the kind of recent history of psychology evaluates, helps evaluate, make sense of animal assisted interventions, animal assisted therapy, let's say, to keep it straight, and that's the, the use of animals, often dogs, in therapy for humans and that that all sorts of range of different practices there. But the evaluations and the theorizations to date tends to be around how might these animals benefit human health, whether in theory or in practice. It might be before and after measurement of human health or well-being in some way it might be a broader evaluation of a project and it might also be theoretically around why is it something around biophilia, let's say, say, why do humans benefit from the engagement of dogs? Now, what's missing from that uh accident, you know, admittedly crude description so far is any consideration at all of the dogs as part, as a meaningful part, of this relationship, or the animals they're outside of the, of the kind of of the zone of consider objects. Yeah, they're objects. They might as well I've said this before they might as well be robot dogs in terms of the way that the theory and the practice is often framed.
Matthew Adams:So a relatively straightforward step for psychology but I'll come back to your point about anthropomorphism in a moment is how are the dogs? What's the dog's health or the animal's health in this situation? Are we considering that? And back to those other questions we were asking earlier, and what are their conditions before and after the moment of therapy or intervention? Is that a concern for psychologists? Well, I would say it absolutely is, and that doesn't necessarily mean we then have to engage in depth with dog psychology. We might want to work with animal welfarists or ethologists to to understand better and better interpret what a dog's health or emotional response is in that moment, as well as a history of dogs or a history of engagement in these kinds of processes. But for me, psychology to social psychology or psychology health psychology interested in something like animal, like animal assisted interventions, needs to be able to look outside that moment of the intervention and needs to look outside of it from an exceptionally human point of view.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So just to make sure I'm with you, I mean, I think that makes complete sense. So what you're saying is there's this relationship, there's this health intervention that we put forward, often saying it's good for humans. You've got this ailment where a dog is going to help you get through this and you're saying, well, hang on, there are two parties at play here. We need to understand what fostering this kind of relationship means for dog's health too. So, just like the dog we spoke about earlier, where pre and post and this was shock treatment but I mean it's come up often enough in this podcast the question of are humans good for dogs? Maybe having that question at a species level is not always helpful, but in specific, it's an empirical question. We need to go in and say, well, how often do dogs engage in this type of labor, on these types of experiments, and their psychology undergoes changes? This is an empirical question that psychologists should be interested in.
Matthew Adams:Exactly. Yeah, I mean, richard Gorman's done some nice work on this in geography animal geography I suppose you'd call it maybe, but around care farms particularly. But he asks a really simple question, which I think is brilliant, and then does a continuum, which is who benefits and how? And he asks who benefits and how, but of course he includes not just humans in that but other creatures, non-humans involved in that kind of intervention, like a care farmer. When I wrote about this I said that question is a pertinent question for all sorts of settings, specific situations. We should be asking as psychologists if that's what you are, if you're doing empirical research in that kind of area, yeah sure.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You said you wanted to come back to the anthropomorphism point, and then I interrupted you.
Matthew Adams:Yeah, so no, no, it's fine. I just think that I don't think to do work that takes animal sensibilities seriously, you don't necessarily have to go too far. I mean there's always a danger down some kind of anthropomorphism route. You don't have to say, look, the dog is really unhappy here and project all sorts of human emotions. I get that it's really complex, but we still should try at least and ask the question who benefits and how? If we are doing that and we're going to try and answer it, we need to use the tools we've got at our disposal, which may be outside of your disciplinary expertise. If you're evaluating an animal assisted intervention, for example, to make some judgment about that, you know adult welfare, for example, in that situation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I mean, I don't think again. It's come up several times on the show, but people have strong views on anthropomorphic methods. I always switch up whether I'm going to say anthropocentric or anthropomorphic, but you know what I mean and I think that I'm in the camp that says we can't understand the world outside of our brains. We just need to be. We are human. We apply these kinds of logics constantly to understand one another and to understand other animals, but we need to do it with caution. Right To appreciate that other animals experience the world with different senses. For example, dogs have really profound sense of smell, that they literally see the world. You speak to Alexandra Horowitz, right, dogs see with smell and that's a remarkably different way of experiencing the world. So to kind of hold intention that you're maybe not wrong if you see a dog, that's sad and that's an important observation, while at the same time recognizing that our ability to fully comprehend the way they experience is always going to be limited, right.
Matthew Adams:Exactly so the same. There's a divide there that can't be bridged, for me, and we should be aware of it, and that should bring some humility, which is always important. There's always something knowable about that divide, and we should be aware of it, and that should bring some humility, which is always important. There's always something knowable about that divide and it's always, with caution, always revisable, but I think if we make a move to at least try and consider other interests with care, then that's a step in the right direction.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I wanted to ask because you've clearly got a very animal focus now and earlier on when we were speaking about your history and your journey, you'd said that you'd find yourself kind of in a post-humanism camp or post-modern camp of sorts. But animal studies is obviously you're not giving kind of agency to the table and the festula that we spoke about, where you might get some other scholars that are kind of talking, maybe actor network theory for example, or where they're saying you know the table is as much an actor in this process as anything else, but you've clearly got a very animal focus. How did you find yourself coming to that point?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, I think for me it's kind of in the work that I've done so far, you have to draw some boundaries around the work that you do and I've drawn some boundaries around kind of sentient life, but that is always again revisable and I'm still learning.
Matthew Adams:So I guess what I've done in terms of engaging with the post-humanities, I've engaged with particular scholars and particular work, and that work is initially inspired by Donna Haraway, but Donna Haraway's later work, which is much more focused on kind of the mess of multi-species, and so for me I've taken that and then I've focused always on specific situated cases for the most part and they have been around human-animal multi-species relationships because it's in the context of the end of the scene, or in the case of the Pavelo Project, it's true psychology. So in a way it's a fudge. I've skirted around some of these bigger issues around. Well, if it's post-humanity, it's post-humanism, then what about the agency of, you know, not just other animals or other species, but the non-human objects, and I find that fascinating, especially at the moment now I'm trying to explore ideas around animism. But yeah, I've kind of just maintained a focus on case at the time I suppose.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I've got to say I find it a bit uncomfortable applying agency to objects, as we were talking about earlier. For me, there's something markedly different about a dog and a table, so when I'm speaking about but it's not to say that they don't have impacts on the world. Again, like you, I'm still learning from this field, but I'm quite content with my focus on animals.
Matthew Adams:Well, there's one thing that messes with that a bit for me, and that's as I start to think more about the agency of things like landscape or, let's say, rivers, or not just trees. But one chapter in Anthropocene Psychology book where I start to engage with agencies share between, let's's say, a network that involves trees but also might involve what's going on underground, so that that kind of I'm aware that I don't know enough about that. But when you start to think about the rights of nature, then you're also implying the same agency to a river or to a mountain, and that gets more complicated, doesn't it? For me it's more complicated than thinking about the agency of a river or to a mountain, and that gets more complicated, doesn't it? For me it's more complicated than thinking about the agency of a specific species or animal, or even even a specific kind of entanglement of animals, is when you start to think about an agency that obviously involves multiple species, like a particular place.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I think this is why I've always sat with the the concept of subjects instead of agent, because it's gets really. Because I mean, again going back to your early idea of co-constituted right, you could think about how a river co-constitutes particular humans or animals' behaviors, right, like it literally draws animals and humans to it, but at the same time, how the animals and humans who utilize the river change the river through their utilization. So you can definitely see that kind of co-constitutive interaction. But, yes, we're going down the philosophical road. That's really interesting and nourishing for the soul, but there is no. Yeah, it's really fascinating. While I've got you, though, I really want to talk a little bit about your methods, because you use fascinating methods. Arts-based research is a passion of yours, that you're clearly behind. The effort and energy that went into creating this exhibition was remarkable. Could you tell us a little bit about why you think arts-based research is so important and maybe a bit of the nuts and bolts that came to making an exhibition like the one you did?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think it's really important in the context of animal studies or critical animal studies or this kind of difficult to name area, especially because I think for me it tends to be. I think it's really really important area, really significant, and that's why I've, you know, pivoted towards it. But I think it can tend to feel like it's an internal academic conversation sometimes and the ideas that are developed in around the post-humanities particularly, can seem really complex and off-putting. And so I'm really, really keen on finding research methods and means of dissemination that, in all sorts of different ways, try and share those ideas with a wider audience and especially non-academic audiences. And for me, as someone who's always been interested in storytelling and visual art, then it seemed like a real natural fit to try and find, try and use methods and arts-based research to tell stories related to animal studies.
Matthew Adams:That can do that, that can reach wider audiences. And that is also why I picked Pavlov, because he's already a familiar figure, familiar, and so I think the process of making art is a really nice way of defamiliarising an audience that might have a sense of what he's about already. So, yeah, the nuts and bolts was that I'm not an artist, so this is collaborative right from the beginning. And when I did this work thanks to an AHRC fellowship, arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship in the UK and what that fellowship allowed me to do was pay collaborators to work with me to develop the art. So that meant I worked with in the case of the exhibition I worked with, I did some initial desk-based research, building on the research I'd already done, looking at biographies and archives around Pavlov's life and more detail about the dog's life, and I built from there a design brief where I start to imagine different scale models. This is the form of art that I chose. It was dioramas, often scale models involving multiple figures, buildings, scenes at different scales that would tell the story of Pavlov's working methods and his relationship with the dogs, and I decided on nine or ten of these. We ended up making seven or eight of them. We say we Nine or ten of these. We ended up making seven or eight of them, we say we.
Matthew Adams:So at that stage I started working with particularly a model maker, jim Wilson, but also a graphic designer, luna Stevens, and a printmaker, rose, and the idea there was to focus on multimedia but develop this as a kind of series of models, three-dimensional, and for each one then it was kind of iterative.
Matthew Adams:We started to build the models, we started to think about what they looked like and as we did that we went back to the scrapbooks that I'd made that were kind of a visual reference point, started to think about audience interaction with those models, started to think about how we were representing the human-animal relationships involved, the kind of tone that we were going. The human-animal relationships involved the kind of tone that we were going for. All sorts of questions come up in those moments. It was a constant back and forward, often in the physical space of a workshop, as I gained some skills around graphic design. So of course the fellowship allowed me to do that. I got involved in some of the labor of making the models, only the basic stuff, because I didn't have the skills to do the craft work and, yeah, we were lucky enough to be able to do that over the period of, say, 12 months.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Oh wow, that's pretty quick for such a remarkable canon of work.
Matthew Adams:Oh thank you, yeah, it was quite intense but yeah, once the build was on, that was then. That was. It was that toing and froing, that kind of that focus. And at the same time I was working on the text that would accompany them, working with simon smith who did some really nice audio storage that went with it and they're kind of relatively immersive in terms of the soundtrack, and working with luna on the kind of angle with the focus on the kind of constructivist aesthetic to capture the kind of time as well late 19th, early 20th century and the focus is always on bringing these together in terms of an audience experience. So yeah, we kind of maintained that progress over a year and for me, we just kept coming back to this focus on we wanted to tell the stories of the human-animal relationships involved. And yeah, we just kept coming back to this focus on we wanted to tell the stories of the human animal relationships involved and yeah, we just kept coming back to that. Luckily, we had enough kind of archival resources and textual resources to to get somewhere.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We were satisfied with that in the end I really, really enjoyed the, the dioramas, and I think I mean the complexity of them. What's what's lovely coming back to what you were saying about communication and also trying to convey the complexity is each of the dioramas seem to create an opening. Right, you put forward multiple figures. There are multiple little human figures and dog figures and trees and little bits and bobs happening that draw you in. Right, you find yourself leaning in to say, like, what is that person by that bush doing? Or what's going on over there? And I think there's something very powerful in that act of asking the question why are they throwing dogs off this wall over here? And for the audience, I think what your dioramas do quite powerfully is prompt us to ask questions, more questions than we've ever asked about Pavlov and his dogs, and I think there's something subversive in that. There's something subversive in finding yourself stopping and staring and being curious actually about this relationship.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And, of course, I didn't get to see the physical exhibition. I engaged with it online, but I still found myself zooming in and being like what are these people doing? And very much appreciated the, the audio and and the. It's very accessible. It's I very, very, very much enjoy and I hope one day to do something as cool as what you've done. Have. Have you had a good reception since launching it? Have. Have. Have you had a good response to what you did?
Matthew Adams:yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for that response. I mean that's really nice to hear that. It kind of drew you in, and we really did aim not to be too explicitly didactic or pejorative. We wanted to invite people in and represent what we discovered, because for us that was enough. Of course there was some interpretation involved, but we didn't want that. We wanted people to come to pay attention and come to their own decisions about what was going on. And that's actually considered to be one of the strengths of maybe art space research itself is that it can create, that it can allow for that space of ambiguity and attentiveness, which then can require a bit more investment and attentiveness to what they see and ask more questions and so on. People felt that they were drawn in.
Matthew Adams:We really tried to pay attention to the beauty of the thing as an object, whilst also being fully aware that some of it was repelling, as in some of the detail of the experiments, whether visually or in the text. And people often reported to us that they felt this real kind of tension. They were drawn in, they did really engage aesthetically but at the same time they were kind of repelled by some of the detail, as you said. Thankfully, lots of people said it really made them think about what they didn't know, about, what we're not told normally, about these kinds of experiments, about some of what happens outside of the moment of an encounter like this, I think, I hope in ways more powerful and more interesting than if we just said look at this, wasn't it horrible they did this, this, this and this? You know, in its simplest terms, that's what we could have done, but by using models, 3d art, design and so on. That's what we were trying to encourage that kind of a deeper maybe, maybe more unpredictable but more sophisticated engagement with the issues remarkable work.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, bringing this back to the theme, the theme of the season, why do you think stuff like arts-based research or even thinking about pavlov? Why, when we're thinking about multi-species health, should we be interested in people like pavlov or the experiments that he did on his dogs?
Matthew Adams:Yeah, it's a much bigger question, isn't it? I think that when we look at specific case studies like this, it speaks to this bigger question of multispecies health, because how we understand moments in history, how we understand the practice of science, is really important in terms of how we understand everything else. I think. So if we start to look at particular cases like Pavlov, whether you're a psychologist in your own history or not, you've got this sense of this moment that happened and, as you said right at the beginning of this interview, it's fairly benign, probably, and we tend to think of it as producing laws as well around particular psychological mechanisms that are universal.
Matthew Adams:We haven't really had a chance to talk about this today, but that's also something that's questioned in the exhibition, this idea that those studies really did produce definite knowledge. They actually didn't. It was far more advisable, and that's partly because of the liveliness and unpredictability of the animals involved in our relationships with them. So I think as soon as we start to unpack what we consider to be a contained moment like that, in terms of who was involved and what happened and the detail, then it can at least encourage us to think much more about our entanglements and our encounters with other species and other animals in science and elsewhere in more subtle and more complex ways, not least in terms of broader concepts of health around, who's involved and what the outcomes are of these kinds of practices.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean, look at what we've done here today. We've spoken about the health of lab dogs, we've spoken about history, we've spoken about arts-based research because, yeah, there's like a centrifugal force of sorts. You kind of spin outwards and think, okay, how do I think in more and also historically located ways to realize that things change over time, but they also oddly stay the same. So having these conversations is really insignificant. Do you have a quote ready for us?
Matthew Adams:I do. Yeah, so it's not about pavlov in particular. I wanted to broaden it out a little bit. This what I thought would be the stage of the conversation, so I'd like to quote the words of the remarkable australian environmental philosopher, late philosopher, val plumwood, and it's from the final words of an article that was published posthumously around 2009. And this is it. She finishes an article by saying help us reimagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to find ourselves in dialogue with and limited by other species needs, other kinds of minds. I'm not going to try to tell you how to do it there are many ways to do it but I hope I have convinced you that this is not a dilettante project. The struggle to think differently, to remake our reductionist culture, is a basic survival project in our present context. I hope you will join it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Beautiful and that so captures what we've spoken about today is how to foster imaginations that resist reduction. That's really what you've been saying throughout the conversation today Remarkable.
Matthew Adams:Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah, I'm really drawn to it again and again. So I thought something I should quote today.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. I enjoyed learning a little bit more about pavlov and his dogs and, yeah, psychology and and arts-based research, so thank you. Thank you so much for joining on the show today. Hello, priya, welcome back to the Animal Highlight. Happy, happy new year.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Happy new year, Claudia. Thank you for having me again.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm very excited actually about today's episode because we're going to be talking a little bit about methodologies, right?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yes, that's true. So I thought I'd be talking about one of my research participants, ruby. I thought I'll be talking about one of my research participants, ruby. So, just like Pavlov and his research assistants, I also spent months of my research time observing dogs and getting to know them as individuals, identifying them by their names, habits and personality traits. And, like Pavlov, I also formed what I thought of as working relationships with the dogs I was studying. So, while labs such as Pavlov's, where dogs and their bodies are actively experimented on, have been heavily criticized as such, they have become sites of regulation and critical debate. But what about conducting observations of dogs outside these lab settings? So, through the story of Ruby today, one of the dogs whom I worked with in Uttarakhand, india, I will try to unpack some of the ethical engagements of conducting multi-species ethnography. That was my methodology.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We often think, like you say, about the significance of ethics and how we conduct research in labs, even though they still get away with doing pretty awful and horrible things in labs. But research ethics is not really applied or thought about as much when it comes to the social field or doing ethnography, where we're observing animals and their social lives, not necessarily when we're conducting experiments on them. So really, really interesting.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yeah, definitely, when I was also planning my research. Also, I could not find a lot of literature on specifically talking about ethics, but I think it's a growing field. Hopefully most literature will come out on it. And yeah, so today also, I thought that it would be interesting to think about and maybe provoke some questions and reflections.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So tell us more about Ruby.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:So yeah. So Ruby is a young, slender dog with a short, brown, patchy fur. So when I first met her during my fieldwork in the winter months of 2023, she spent most of her time outside, a small tea and snack shop run by Lalitaji just outside the main market street. On my daily walks to the market, I was accustomed to spotting Ruby outside Lalitaji's shop, so when I did not observe her there for three consecutive days, I went to Lalitaji's to inquire. Lalitaji told me that Ruby had not been well for a few days. At first she thought that a leopard had taken her, but then Lalitaji found Ruby behind a haystack a few feet from her shop. I went with Lalitaji to find Ruby curled up at the base of the haystack. She was coughing profusely. Lalitaji said that her neighbour speculated that Ruby must have swallowed a fish bone that is now stuck in her throat. Must have swallowed a fish bone that is now stuck in her throat. According to her, there was nothing we could do except wait for Ruby to either cough up the bone or the bone to eventually pass through her gut.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:For the next few days, I checked in on Ruby while on my way to and from the market. She grew extremely thin and her coughing persisted, even worsening. Lalitaji kept offering Ruby food and water, but her appetite also deteriorated. Some local passers-by asked me whose dog Ruby was, as they were also concerned for her health. When I told them that she lived on the street, one of them dejectedly said that there was not much hope for her anymore, and it had started to frost at night A couple of times. On our way back from the market, my friends and I covered Ruby's body with hay to keep her warm through the night. Other times I noticed that someone else had done the same. Ruby, it seemed, had her anonymous well-wishers.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Then one morning I was walking to the market with Puranda, a local resident. When he pointed out Ruby and said that he had noticed she was sick for some time now, I told him that I had also been observing her health. When he found that out, puranda turned to me with a confused look and said, and I quote what kind of doctor are you? This dog is suffering and dying in front of you and you do nothing. It was a common misunderstanding. Even though I repeatedly made clear to everyone that I am not a veterinary doctor, people insisted on calling me Dr Sahab or Dr Sir. They expected me to take care of the dogs I was writing about. Before Puranda Abhay, a local high schooler, had also approached me about Rupu. He passionately appealed to me. Dr Sahab, the condition of that dog is very bad. Do something, otherwise she will die.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:My cluelessness and insistence on not providing any medical advice or treatment did not deter people from calling me when any of the dogs or animals got sick, pregnant or injured. It sort of became a running joke among some of my friends in the village. It sort of became a running joke among some of my friends in the village. That day, on hearing Puranda's remark, I turned and gave him my standard response, stating that I am not a medical doctor. Without a pause he rebutted, and I quote but you are studying them, you will write a PhD using them, but what do these dogs get from you in return? I have never seen you give them food or medicines. Purandar's comments stayed with me and made me uncomfortable.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:As part of standard codes of ethical research practice, I mostly tried to be distant from and indifferent towards the dogs whom I observed. I refrained from approaching any dog myself. Only if a dog approached me, I touched their face or scratched their head as a way of introductions and trust building. I never gave them any food, nor I got involved in taking care of them. I always told myself that I was here to observe and not make dogs and people dependent on my presence. If I feed the dogs and take care of them myself, what happens when I leave? What biases will my interventions in the lives of dogs create in my ability to objectively collect data about genuine human-dog interactions in my field sites? The concern for these dependencies and potential biases in my research informed how I conducted myself in my field sites, but was my stance something that my research participants, especially the dogs, agreed with?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:One evening, after checking up on Ruby, I was talking with Lalitaji's neighbour, mohan De, when I suddenly felt something pressing on my leg. I looked down to see Ruby. She was gently resting her face against my pants. Mohanji said look, she is asking you to give her food to take care of her. I told Mohanji that he shouldn't worry at all. As Ruby received food from Lalitaji's shop, I conveniently washed my hands off any responsibility. But if I take Ruby's actions as her intentions that evening, she was demanding me to acknowledge her and her needs. The reproaches and demands from my human and dog participants eventually made me change my research approach. Rather than a totally passive observer, I became more of a responsive researcher who tried to respond to the ethical claims made on me by my research participants. I sent a video of Ruby to the government vet in a nearby town. It turned out that she did not have a fishbone stuck in her throat but that she had a viral flu. I gave some medicines to her from a local chemist and personally administered some of the medicines before giving the rest to Laitaji and her neighbours. Giving the rest to Laitaji and her neighbours.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Ruby's story opens up opportunities to reflect on the ethical basis on which we conduct our research. When it comes to thinking about how animals are used in the production of knowledge, particularly as it relates to health, we frequently think about the animals who are kept and tested on labs. Like many dogs in labs today, pavlov's dogs were subjected to numerous experiments that intervened on their bodies and their autonomy. While historically it was believed that these measures are necessary to produce sound science and knowledge, these assumptions are increasingly being questioned and critiqued. But lab experiments are only one side of knowledge production Work like mine that relies on observation and participant interaction to produce data, often called multispecies ethnography, is becoming increasingly popular. I also relied on my participants to make the knowledge about multispecies health. But what ethical obligations did I have towards them and to their health? Ruby's story poses some important questions about the ethics of researching with and about animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I love, love, love this episode today. Priya, you've raised such important questions and thoughts today and I don't think that there are any clear answers to these. Right, you can definitely see how, you know, not responding, not helping Ruby, observing her plight, would offer significant insights into understanding the lives of street dogs, right, how their deaths are managed, how the ecology of when they die is managed. She dies, you know it's devastating, it's sad, sad, and you watch and respond and see how other animals and people respond to her death. Right, what happens to her remains, etc. Obviously it opens up a whole host of questions and opportunities to understand the ways in which dogs and their lives, and indeed their deaths, are part of different societies and spaces.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But of course, we are also in relationship with them, right, and, like you say, they ask us to act and you can't intervene in every instance. You know at what point do you go from being a researcher to an activist, to a welfarist. You know what is your clear role here. But also, we're people at the end of the day and I think we're allowed to feel a little bit, as long as we are open and honest about when and how our interventions take place. And yeah, I just. I mean, what would it have meant to you to have these people speak to you, to know Ruby and then to go back and find her dead and knowing you could have intervened? Really complicated, and I don't think that there is. I think you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't in this situation, to be honest. But at least the option you chose meant that Ruby had an opportunity to get well again. Right, the researchers are part of the environment.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yes, definitely. As you pointed out, it was quite a difficult decision. Yeah, you are damned if you do if you, you're damned if you don't. Like who. Whom are you responding towards? And like what kind of data are you collecting?
Priyanshu Thapliyal:For me, also, because I was very clear, uh, going into the field, that I'm not going to intervene in the lives of dogs and people and I'm just going to observe.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:And going into the field, it all seemed very simple and straightforward that I can just be a passive, non-participant observer.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:But when you're in the field and then you are, you are personally affected by, like seeing a lot of things around you and then people and these animals like, for example, ruby, my research participants they do uh like make ethical claims on you and you are often you found, find yourself or at least I found myself uh like an obligation towards them that you know what was my role in their life.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:A lot of times it was like it was important to acknowledge that, yeah, I was an agent in the field. I was already impacting the social world around it, I was part of it, and oftentimes we might think as researchers we can try to have more of a God's point of view and just detach ourselves. But we are implicated and while there is a lot of literature on, especially while doing social research, on how to account for like a researcher and researchers' subjective point of views and how it impacts the data you're able to collect, the access you're able to gain in the field sites, the relationships you're able to make, but then, especially in terms of animals like there is still not that much discussion about the ethical implication of those relationships, making those relationships or staying away and choosing not to yeah, it's, you know.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And what I find really interesting is I mean, of course, when it comes to regular ethnography, that involves different human groups and people coming from different cultures going in and observing. Historically, this was very much done with this idea that you could go in and observe different peoples to yourself and somehow obtain objective data, as though you are not part of the situation has been debunked for a long time. When it comes to thinking, beginning to think about these interactions with animals, I think so often we focus on one, this idea of dependency, and two, the practice of feeding. Right. So I can definitely understand why you don't want to enact or engage in feeding practices, right? There are numerous arguments both for and against feeding, but that's not the only way in which you are part of the system, right? It ended up being that this whole story with Ruby wasn't really about food. It was about medical care, medical health. But add to that, you know, having listened to you now throughout this series, you know your presence of just sitting and observing the dogs was impacting perhaps where the dogs were moving, but certainly, in some instances, how other people were responding to the dogs. So, even though you were not necessarily directly giving these dogs food. Others saw you watching them and were perhaps more kind or kinder towards the dogs or giving them food Not always, of course.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This is why the longer you spend in the field, the more insight you gain into these practices. But you have an impact on the situation. You're never a detached observer and I think that this is the failure in the labs as well. To return to Pavlov and Pavlov's dogs, the idea that you can kind of remove all of the various factors and aspects and whittle down into very specific behavior leads to really awful, terrible practices. Right of trying to exclude the complexity, and this reminds me of the conversation I had with Mark Beckhoff on the Animal Turn about cognitive ethology and how important it is to go into the field and watch how animals behave in their own ways in their own situations, including, I would add, how they respond to researchers being in their space. Really really interesting work here, priya.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yeah, maya, being present in the field also impacted how people also related with the dogs and other animals and how they positioned themselves towards them. So, very interestingly, in the case of Ruby also, when I started giving her medicine, I remember I got the medicine, I put it between a piece of bread and I was trying to feed her at the side of the road and then there were some people who just were walking past and they just stood and started watching. There were some school kids who came and started watching what I was doing. There were neighbors who just like, uh, there was a small crowd that gathered and was seeing what I was doing and they asked me what I was doing and whose dog it was.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:And then, yeah, some, and then people admitted, oh, we've also been watching this dog suffering and people, and they said that, oh, we always wanted to do something but they didn't. So that also happens a lot. You think that, okay, you see someone in need often, but then it's very easy, because you don't have that personal relationship, to think that it's someone else's responsibility. Yeah, there's a concept called group think.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Actually, I remember in one of my undergrad courses years and years ago, we all kind of convince ourselves that in moments of need or want, we'll be the one that responds. And the lecturer had said you know, if someone were to come and start having, let's say, a kind of attack of sorts in the front, you like to imagine that you would be the person that would get up and go and help them. But when you're amongst a crowd, what happens is exactly as you say, this diffused idea of responsibility Somebody else will do it, somebody will do it and not. Everybody tends to step up because we are in collectives in this way, which is really really yeah, it's, yeah, it's good to understand our own psychology in these, in these situations. Right, like we're not, we're not these, these perfect beings that always respond and and do things well yeah, yeah.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Now for me like that's why, like I think my relationship like deferred a little bit from everyone else's in that market. For example, I, as a researcher studying Ruby, also had a different kind of relationship with what's passing by Ruby, so I think that was important for me to take into account. As a researcher, I had some obligation also. And as a partner who was present.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Exactly. I think that's exactly right Before you go. So Ruby got better. You gave her the medication and she improved what happened to her thereafter.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Yeah, Ruby did get better. Her health improved. I was quite pleased that she was taken care of by Lalita ji. Recently one of my research participants sent me a video of Ruby from the field, from the village, and she was still roaming around the market. She no longer stays around Lalitaji's shop anymore. She has found new dog friends and she explored other parts of the market. So she has a new place where she stays now. But she is doing well, yeah, so I'm happy for her. Like yeah, I'm happy with whatever I could do.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I love these life histories and I love that you've maintained contact with some of your folks in the village so that you can kind of continue to keep tabs on how these dogs are progressing and what their lives entail. You know, longitudinal studies are really um important. Well, thank you again so much, priya, for all of your work with these animal highlights. I know we've only got one more, um Rashmi's, going to join us on the next animal highlight and then we'll be together for for a final chat. So thank you so much for all of your work on these animal highlights. I've enjoyed it. It so much.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you to Matthew Adams for being an incredible guest, to Priyash Nuthapaliel for a wonderful animal highlight, to Gordon Clark for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work and Christian Mintz for his sound editing work. This podcast is sponsored by Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics and this season by the Remaking One Health Indies Project. This is the Animal Turn, with me, Claudia Hopenington.
Priyanshu Thapliyal:I love it. For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom.
Matthew Adams:That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
