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
S7E9: Dogs’ Health with Jessica Pierce
In this episode Jessica Pierce joins Claudia to explicitly discuss dogs’ health. They discuss everything from end-of-life care for dogs, to breeding practices, and discourses about dogs’ purpose in society. They unfurl some of the overlapping and similar health needs of street- versus pet-dogs and surmise that in general dogs are facing a range of both physical and psychological challenges.
Date Recorded: 2 September 2024.
Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist known for her work in the field of animal ethics and the philosophy of human-animal relationships. She has written a number of books about dogs, including Who’s A Good Dog? And How to Be A Better Human, A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without People (with Marc Bekoff), and Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets. Her passionate advocacy for the well-being of dogs has sparked global conversations and driven positive change in the way society perceives and treats our canine companions. She is an Affiliate Faculty at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School. Find out more about Jessica on her website.
Featured:
- Who’s A Good Dog? And How to Be A Better Human by Jessica Pierce
- A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without People by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce
- Dogpedia: A Brief Compendium of Canine Curiositiesby Jessica Pierce
- Bioethics with Jeff Sebo on The Animal Turn Podcast
- The Lessons of Death, A Conversation with Frank Ostaseski on the Sam Harris Podcast
- A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron
- Stray by Elizabeth Lo.
- Leave a Review on Podchaser
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.
this is another iRaw podcast. That's probably part of it, but I think part of it is the way that we're keeping dogs is really bad for their health and, to unpack that a little bit, one of the things that I'm very concerned about is what I would call behavioral health, and that's we were touching on this a little while ago the capacity of a dog to be able to engage in a reasonably full range of naturals or canine specific behavioral patterns, and so much of what we do with pet dogs in terms of training and confinement are go against or confine or constrain dogs behaviorally in ways that are Welcome back to the Animal Turn.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This is season seven, episode nine. In this season we're focused on animals and multi-species health and you might have noticed throughout the season that we had a bit of a focus on dogs. This was somewhat by design. As you know, the Remaking One Health Indies project has been a sponsor of this season and a lot of their work is focused on dogs and dog health in India. So while we were learning about multi-species health and concepts that are really quite valuable beyond talking about canines and dogs, we did focus many of the conversations related to dogs and some of the differences between, let's say, pet dogs and street dogs or guardian dogs, et cetera. But in today's episode the final interview for the season, barring the grand review which is coming up next, of course we decided to focus explicitly on talking about dogs' health. So you might have noticed the arc throughout the season was speaking about multi-species health as a concept, unpacking some of the ideas regarding healthy publics, marginalized multi-species communities and really just kind of diving into different concepts and examples that help us think through multi-species health. Today we're looking explicitly at dogs' health and I'm delighted to be joined on the show with Jessica Pierce, who has written a great deal about dogs and the ways in which they interact, or are at least allowed to interact, with the world. So in this episode, jessica joins me and we speak about everything from the end of life care for dogs to breeding practices, to discourses about dog's purpose in society. That's maybe not necessarily what you immediately think of when you think about dogs' health. Maybe you're thinking about going to the vet, et cetera, and in some ways I think it's really nicely tied back to the second episode where we spoke about healthy publics. I really really enjoyed speaking to Jessica today. It was very generous and very personal oftentimes in some of the reflections with regards to dogs, and I think you'll enjoy this episode a great deal.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Let me tell you a little bit about Jessica. She's an American bioethicist known for her work in the field of animal ethics and the philosophy of human-animal relationships. She's written a number of books about dogs, such as who's a Good Dog and how to Be a Better Human, as well as A Dog's World, imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without People that one she did with Mark Bekoff, and finally Run Spot Run the Ethics of Keeping Pets, and of course, these are topics that come up throughout the show today. You know, thinking about pet keeping, I think, has also been an underlying theme throughout the season. Jessica's passionate advocacy for the well-being of dogs has sparked global conversations and driven positive change in the ways society perceives and treats our canine companions. She's an affiliate faculty at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School and you can find out more about her on her website, of course, with all of the links in the show notes. And just a reminder, while it's not part of the season, I did have Alexander Horowitz on the show just for the season and we also spoke explicitly about dogs, but they're thinking more about how dogs perceive and know the world, and that was also a remarkable conversation. So if you're interested in having a listen to explicitly focused content related to dogs, definitely go check out that bonus episode too. As always, I want to say thank you to Animals and Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple for sponsoring this podcast, as well as the Remaking One Health Indies project for sponsoring this season. It's really been nice working with people that have such an explicit focus on thinking through health and explicitly the politics of health. It's been dynamic and interesting to engage with. Just a reminder if you haven't done so already, go and check out our sister podcast, the Animal Highlight.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And speaking of the Animal Highlight, today, rashmi joins us in the final segment of the show to speak about a dog who took matters into her own hands when her owner was treating her poorly. Of course, rashmi has been focused on guardian dogs throughout the season and she speaks about a dog who had had enough and made a big decision to leave, which is very, very interesting. Rashmi and Priya, who have been doing the animal highlights throughout the season, will be joining me in the grad review in the next episode and we'll think and talk a little bit more about both their highlights as well as the themes throughout the season. So make sure you join us there and, as always, please, please, please, rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. Okay, it's a fascinating conversation, so let's get to it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hi, jessica, welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. Hi, claudia, thanks for having me. It's great to have you on the show and I'm very excited to focus today on dogs' health. The whole season has been focused kind of explicitly on dogs' health but kind of speaking more generally about multi-species health, with a bit of a slant towards focusing on dogs, and I know that you've written a great deal about dogs and dog health and the ethics of keeping dogs, so I'm looking forward to our conversation today, kind of just a general conversation about what does it mean when we say dog's health and what should we be thinking about? And this could be both practical and also, I think, academic, like what does health mean? Health seems to be one of these words that we throw around all the time, but you're an interesting person. You call yourself a bioethicist which is very cool and a philosopher, so can you tell us a little bit about you and how you came to be interested in bioethics and philosophy, with thinking about animals?
Jessica Pierce:Sure. So I studied religion as an undergraduate and went to seminary and there and there discovered that what I was really interested in was not so much what people believed per se but how people behaved. So I started studying ethics and bioethics is a kind of a it's a really interesting field, as you noted. It's kind of a strange field, like it's it's. It means a lot of different things and you can be a lot of different things as a bioethicist. And for me it's been a a way to think about and approach the biological sciences from a critical lens. And you know, in the early days I was actually my focus was a little bit broader. I was in working in a medical school teaching medical students, and I was very interested in environmental studies, and so the extension of my work in the medical center became the extension of my work in the medical center, became the extension of my intellectual interests, became sustainability in medicine and health care. Also, the imagination of my colleagues in bio was was limited to thinking that if you're going to do animal ethics it means you're thinking about animals in research settings. And I did go down that path for a while and I found it so profoundly distressing that I can't do that. I'm just like I can't do that.
Jessica Pierce:About 15 years ago, I started thinking more explicitly about animals and ethics in, I'd say, a more positive way and this might sound weird that this is that I would frame this as a positive. But my beloved dog, odie, was nearing the end of his life and he was really struggling with. He had some neurological deficits which made it was really difficult because he was not at least under the assurances of various vets. He was not experiencing physical pain. He was really struggling. He had lost control over his back end and his movements and his, his bowel movements included.
Jessica Pierce:And I'm like, how do I navigate these end of life decisions for this being who's not a human? And so I started to think about, you know, what does what does hospice mean in the context of animals and what does it mean to be in charge of the death process for this animal? Because we are really happy. Even if we take a passive I'm not going to do anything that's still an active set of moral choices. And so I just got really interested in animal hospice and end-of-life care. And you know there's this huge human literature of course, and that's really the meat and potatoes of bioethics is end of life care and you know whether people should be kept alive on artificial respirators when they are in a vegetative state, which have gotten a lot more complex in the last month or so with new research, but I found there wasn't a really robust literature in animal ethics.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's so interesting that you bring up your story with Odie and Miki and I hope you can tell us what you decided and how you navigated that. But it's really interesting because this whole season we've been focused on animals and health and thinking about dog health. But so often when we talk about health we have a tendency of focusing on life, like what is health and life and I think this goes for humans too. Somehow we often suspend death. We all know that death is this one thing that we share. No matter your class, no matter anything, we will die, and often we don't prepare ourselves for death. We don't prepare ourselves for the death of those who are closest to us, including our companions are more than our pets and it's such an important part of health.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, and I think one of the things that became really clear to me is that in end of life scenarios at least and I think this this definitely broadens out to dogs whole lifespan that a holistic approach to health is really important because you know, people get really fixated on physical symptoms, but you know a dog with physical symptoms, a, you know, two different dogs might have very different emotional reactions to or ways of responding to this, this scenario, and so if you're just looking at physical symptoms, you're missing important pieces of the picture, and I think that's that's why Odie's situation was so hard, because it wasn't.
Jessica Pierce:He was clearly engaged in psychological suffering, but it was, really it was. That's so nebulous, you know it's. It's hard enough when it's another human being to understand what somebody is going through, especially because you know we say well, we can understand other people because they talk to us and they tell us, but that's not actually. It's not that simple, because people don't tell us the truth necessarily, or they tell us what they think they want us, that we want to hear, and so forth. So it's, I think it's very complicated, and then you add that layer of species difference and and it gets even more complicated.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And, of course, because we tend to. I mean, I don't think that anthropomorphic methods are inherently problematic or wrong. I think that you know, using our own understandings of emotions and it's how we navigate the world. So I don't think it's inherently problematic. But of course there are dangers that come with anthropomorphic like, and especially now when maybe I could see how someone looking at the end of life of their dog is being inconvenienced and somehow rationalizes that the dog is suffering, when maybe they're not. So it's really difficult. Difficult not to say that someone would necessarily want their dog to die or will their dog to die, but I could imagine it happening. That it's just, it's really hard.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You've got a lot of shit to clean up. You've got a lot of. You've got to take them out in the middle of the night to pee. There's. There's just a lot more going on and maybe there are other stresses in your life and then you say, well, emotionally they're struggling, so I need to put them down. And yeah, it's not. It's not a quantifiable question, it's not a quantifiable answer, right, right.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right that quality of life assessments, which are, you know, they're a dime, a dozen now online do a quality of life assessment for your dog or cat, but they really are. They really, I think, confuse our quality of life with our animal companions' quality of life in important ways. And your example of having to, you know, an animal who has lost control of their bowels that's an inconvenience and quality of life problem for an owner, but it might not necessarily be that for the dog, or at least very manageable. And so I think it's really helpful to pick that apart and to say, yeah, the quality of life of caregivers is really important, and that kind of defines or delimits the kind of care that is possible for the animal, and acknowledging the burdens of caregiving emotional, physical, financial, etc. And not making people feel guilty for not being perfect, because nobody's perfect, but sort of acknowledging the limitations and the possibilities and then saying, ok, what can we do given that, and what does this this particular animal need, given what we know and what we can tell?
Jessica Pierce:And I think it's, you know, you see, often in the end of life literature. Oh well, animals can't talk, so they can't tell us what they want. So we have to decide for them, and I think that's really oversimplified. I think they can tell us what they want in large measure, if we're willing to do some work to figure out what they're saying. They're talking to us all the time in body language, in behavioral language, and it's just a matter of listening to what they're saying.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So what was Odi?
Jessica Pierce:telling you, I think we did end up calling the euthanasia vet. Finally, and I think you know, I struggled so much with that decision because I felt like it was, on the one hand, not fair for me to Like there's a part of me that feels that it's unethical to take a life and at the same time, I started to feel like Odie's was having more bad experiences and good that's. I guess that's the basic calculation you just are kind of weighing bad versus good, and I realized that I think I was hesitating for myself and not for him.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Sure, that's a hard thing, and I mean it's always. Even in terms of comparing human and animal deaths, I've always found it quite interesting. There are many humans that are alive, that do want to die, but we've vilified and you said you studied religion, so you certainly know like the vilification of suicide, for example, and I'm not here trying to say that anyone who is thinking these thoughts shouldn't seek help or speak to a counselor. That's not my intention here. It's more a matter of saying, particularly folks who are older and are saying, listen, I'm done and I would like assisted suicide, or folks that are really, really ill and are in a lot of pain and, as you say, experiencing more hurts than good.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's remarkable how we've got this in many contexts the sanctity of human life. No matter how much the person is asking to die, you don't kill them. And again, coming back to kind of, I know bioethics is often centered on medical qualms and I'm sure that this is one that's been picked apart, whereas with dogs or companion animals, as you said, I'm sure it hasn't been picked apart as much. You know the speed with which euthanasia is used, so at the very least you grappled with it, which I think is a significant point.
Jessica Pierce:Exactly and I think for me what became evident and I have been through the end-of-life process with a second dog and I have a third who sadly is reaching toward the end and I feel like I'm better armed with skills and information and one thing that with Odie that I think I did was kind of black and white.
Jessica Pierce:It's like either euthanize or keep him living and like there's a lot of gray in between. That, where I mean that's what hospice is, is essentially just easing that transition and maybe quickening that transition and by giving more pain medication than you might otherwise. And it's been super interesting. I haven't written about this or talked about it much yet, but I have now experienced with my mother and my father, but in very different ways. Both of them have chosen B-SED, which is voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, and B-SED is, and it's just talking about taking control and actually being at a point where death is something that you want to invite in seems more reasonable to me now, like I really have some greater insight into why somebody might do that. Anyway, that's off topic.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, I don't think it's off topic at all. I mean, yeah, I think it's just recognizing topic at all. It's it's. I mean, yeah, I think it's just recognizing. Like you said, it's not as it's not as black and white, and I listened to Sam Harris podcast ages ago where they were speaking about death and just how it is a generous thing to do for your loved ones is to also think about your own death, because many of us don't think about our own deaths and there is something. And for it to not be this it doesn't have to be this scary dark there is something really sad about it, of course but it can also be, can also be a state of your life that you can take some control over and and some enjoyment over and reflection over, which I think is quite beautiful. And same thing for our dogs as they get older too and as we recognize that they, in the span of our lives, their lives begin and end, and I think that that's a massive responsibility when it comes to dog health is recognizing that they deserve a rich life and when you plan for their death.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And that makes me emotional, thinking about when Linus will die. You know we we bought a bicycle trailer the other day, and I did it. I didn't buy a cheap one because I was like he's going to get older and I need to get him used to getting into a trailer now so that when he's older, we can be more, more mobile and make sure that he can still go out on adventures when he's older. He's nowhere near that now, but he has some some dysplasia in his elbows and and we we know that as the years go on, mobility is going to become more and more difficult for him. So this is a long-term plan, right? It's not just about thinking about that moment of death, but think, recognizing that there is a an aging process as well.
Jessica Pierce:Yes, I think that's that's that's wonderful that you're doing that. And I will say, being on the other end of that, now we have our, our dog Bella has some pretty serious mobility limitations and she has a stroller and she loves it. It just opens up the world in ways that and so that's that's so good, to plan ahead and think ahead. And I I remember a hospice veterinarian saying to me and I was really struck by this he said hospice planning, like end of life planning, begins when a dog is a puppy Like you really come to terms with the that their life span is not indefinite and if you plan ahead both for older age and also for for the end of life, you can do a such a better job with it. And I think it's really hard for people to plan because then you have to look into the abyss.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and and and also plan for your own death. If you were to die, what would happen to your dogs? Because I think many people listening so Linus comes from a shelter and shelters are often traumatizing places. They are. He was in there for a good couple of months and I think I mean he. He had a rough start prior to them. But I think shelters also have a lot of trauma baked into them and the number of older dogs that wind up in shelters either because people have moved or because people have died and there was no plan and no one was capable to take this is another thing. Is planning for your death the same we would with any other? Dependent what? What happens if you die? And that's also a hard question, especially if you've got a complicated and difficult dog, right?
Jessica Pierce:yes, right, which we happen to do to have. Yeah, it's very difficult. Luckily Bella loves our daughter, so we have, we have that out. But yeah, I think yeah's.
Jessica Pierce:I mean, going back to the human realm, my father's death was really. It was, it was heartbreaking and it was so beautiful because he chose. He was in good, he was 93, really good physical health, but he had he was progressing into really serious dementia and he knew he did not want to go any further down that path than he was and he was sort of like at this tipping point where he wouldn't. In fact I didn't think that he really could carry out a decision. Um, I didn't think he would remember, from breakfast to lunch, to dinner, to not eat, but he did, and it was one of the richest and most joyful weeks, 10 days, I mean.
Jessica Pierce:We read and my brother was there and family came or got on Zoom and and he, in large part, I think, wanted to do what he did in order to spare his family pain, the pain of having to put him in a memory care, which I don't think is necessarily. I mean, I was oh, that's so awful and I don't think it is, but he did not want that and just to to take control. But our animals can't do that, we don't let them. So I think it's even more important to listen to what they're saying in that, in that realm.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:When we, when we think about dogs, you know, something that's come up several times in this episode is, depending on who you're talking about, different imaginations click into place about where dogs are and and we've been focusing so long, so so far at least, in thinking about death and the dog owner relationship. Right, how do you, as someone who's taken on the dependence and, unfortunately in many places, property this is? This is a very distinctive type of relationship between humans and dogs that's not as widely distributed as people imagine, as people in North America and Europe imagine, it's actually rather peculiar in most of the world. So when we think about death and maybe you know something about this when we think about death of street dogs, for example, or free roaming dogs, do we know much about the ways in which they choose to die?
Jessica Pierce:Almost nothing. There was one small study that somebody did on mortality rates of free-roaming dogs on an Indian reservation in the Four Corners area, and that's really the only research I know of there probably is more but what he found was that the primary driver of mortality was humans, like 80%. I don't remember exactly, but it was like without humans, and not only humans, like with guns and being hurtful and hateful toward dogs, but also automobiles or poison, whatever, and that, yeah, that was the main, the main issue, I think, probably there.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So we don't know much about the culture they would choose or the ways in which they would foster dying.
Jessica Pierce:We don't know. We don't. I think it'd be fascinating to study it, especially, you know, as we're discovering with research on other species like elephants and dolphins and orca, whales, peccaries and all sorts of like. The more we look, the more we find in terms of, you know, death related or grieving related behaviors. So certainly that would be something very interesting to study.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and I imagine very, very difficult, because as many of these free roaming dogs and street dogs are often urban dogs. So, yes, the mortality is things like cars, or they're getting captured and euthanized because people think it's in their best interests. But it would, yeah, it would just be really interesting, you know, perhaps to look at dogs that are largely left alone, like those in Chernobyl or Fukushima, right, like, how do they, how do they navigate death? Do they do like, do they leave groups? Do they have specific places where they visit? I don't know. I mean, it's really there is so much we don't know about dogs, which is rather remarkable.
Jessica Pierce:It's fascinating how much we don't know about dogs, which is rather remarkable. It's fascinating how much we don't know and the more I know, the more I realize I don't know if that makes sense. Like it's just this vast yeah, I mean for a species with whom we arguably have like the most intimate friendly relationship. It's really a blank slate.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:How much do you think that narrative or so I have Mariam on the show and she speaks about a species story and we've got this kind of fixed idea often in our mind about this the impenetrable human dog bond.
Jessica Pierce:How much do you think this gets in the way of us being able to see dogs as dogs or to actually just see their behavior A lot a lot and I think that one of the narratives and there are probably many, but one of the narratives that seems to really have a grip on us in this country is that dogs have evolved to be our friends and that we have shaped their behavior and their, their morphology, like we have where this the hand of god, you know, reaching down and manipulating their genes to get just if just what we want behaviorally and morphologically and so on, and that I always come back to that movie and book, bruce Cameron's book A Dog's Purpose, which it's a sweet book it is also gets under my skin, because a dog's purpose in this, in this scenario, is to be a companion to a person going through various like, one life after another, until he finally comes back, as you know, the dog of the person he was meant to be with, like soulmate, and and that dogs have evolved to be pets, which I would say they have not.
Jessica Pierce:I mean, they're adapted to it in some ways, but also not, and I think it being so heavily invested in this narrative, we have a hard time seeing the ways in which dogs have not necessarily adapted to being pets or the ways in which our pet keeping practices harm them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Our pet keeping practices harm them, so it seems, if we're going to talk about dogs' health, one of the first moves we need to do is think about which dogs and how these dogs are already sitting in our societies, because the question is vastly different when we're speaking about the health I mean. So to me, there are evolutionary desires that are similar in street dogs and in pet dogs that we should be attuned to. But what street dogs need in order to be healthy and what pet dogs need in order to be healthy? Because they exist, because different structures shape their lives there there's going to be different responses like but pet keeping is not going to end tomorrow yeah, I mean you're raising a really interesting question and I would answer it in sort of opposing ways.
Jessica Pierce:Like you're suggesting that pet dogs need things, that need different things from what a free roaming dogs need, and I would argue they need the same things, or it's it's the same things that are missing from the lives of pet dogs, or you know where they're behaviorally. I'm just to take an example. You know dogs are are behaviorally motivated to to roam. That's sort of in their genetic code, as it were, this moving over a relatively large area of land freely and marking territory and engaging in relations with other dogs and other creatures. And even though we keep dogs as pets, they still have that behavioral motivation. They still have the behavioral need to hunt and acquire food on their own. At the same time, your point is spot on and that we need to look at the individual context of that's, the individual ecosystem in which a dog is trying to survive and hopefully thrive, to really figure out what that dog needs. And free roaming dogs need have different needs in some respects than pet dogs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Like it seems. I mean, breeding is definitely a big factor that's shaping the health of pet dogs. I mean, certainly many pet dogs can become streets or free roaming dogs, but you don't you kind of see street dogs often end up looking. I've had, I've been fortunate enough to travel to many parts of the world and a remarkable thing happens when you start to pay attention to street dogs is you realize they start to look very samey in many parts of the world. Their color starts to look the same, their kind of size looks the same in the shape of their ears, and I'm not saying that they're identical. They're not identical in the way you think of about breeds. Sometimes you'll see two dogs of the same breed walking down the streets and it's actually it's disturbing how similar. They're able to make cut and paste versions of animals. I think it's bothersome, but it's really remarkable when you go to various parts of the world and you see free roaming dogs tend to tend towards a specific body type.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, yeah, actually the. So Mark Beckhoff and I wrote a book called a dog's world and it was about exactly this. It was a thought experiment, like what would happen to dogs if humans disappeared tomorrow, all humans like, would dogs survive at all? And if they did, what would their evolutionary trajectory look like? And you know it's. It's seems to us, based on the you know, current scientific understanding and theories of evolution, that dogs would evolve toward this kind of what you're describing, this kind of a mean, you know that medium sized kind of. You know it's not going to be brightly colored, it'll be, you know, tawny or, you know, rust colored. And it's not going to have the extreme features like a squished in face or an extremely long nose, the features that we, for God knows what reason, find aesthetically appealing at the moment. It's going to be a dog who is functionally adapted to survival, which is not what we're breeding now. We're breeding dogs who will not survive without us.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This speaks about domestication again is like it's. It's a political, it's a political thing Every time you intervene in in terms of how animals look and like. It's not, it's not neutral, it's not, it's not without harm. And I do think it really is a decision when you, when you choose to buy a specific breed and it's an uncomfortable thing Cause once I mean, of course, once someone has a Labrador or a pug at home. They're amazing, beautiful creatures who deserve to be. They're not to be vilified. They're here. Love them, give them good homes. But we should be having conversations about whether breeding should still be allowed, whether it should still be glorified in breeding shows.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, and that's one of those. I have said that publicly that we shouldn't breed dogs and people do not take kindly to that perspective Like that's a sacred cow, so is the idea that it's that dogs want to be our pets, which is absurd. There are a lot of these sacred cows. Another is all dogs should be reproductively neutralized at the earliest age possible, which has some significant health consequences for dogs, and I could go down a long list of these sort of sacred cows or myths that I think are really embedded in dog keeping culture but are very bad for dog health. That's probably enough for now.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's really tough and I think listeners to the show have heard me go on enough about breed enough times to be like, okay, she's not a fan, so you're in safe space, you're in safe territory here in terms of those views. But I think it's important to it's not just an opinion, right, like it's important to recognize that breeding is. It's an industry and it's not just breeding of dogs, right, we're talking domesticated animals are often bred, but increasingly so are wild animals. Wild animals are kept in captivity and the logic underlying breeding is to fulfill a desire and a want of ours, and that's the, that's the crux of the matter. Like, is it ethical, Is it in the animal's best interest? And maybe often people here would say, well, oh, no, the breeding has shown that it helps them in X, y and Z.
Jessica Pierce:And maybe often people here would say, well, oh, no, the breeding has shown that it helps them in X, y and Z. I think that's a very self-serving, you know, and I hear you know, that's what you hear. I think it's very hard to make that argument about, for example, making their nose a millimeter less short so that they get, you know, die when they're 6.2 years old rather than six years old, and I don't actually think that's the trend. The trend is toward more extreme morphology and, you know, brachycephaly is just one manifestation of that. And, yeah, people, I have a hard time with that because I, you know, I have so many friends.
Jessica Pierce:Oh, my God, a golden retriever, and from this breeder, this very reputable breeder, that's what people will say. It's like, if you're saying that, if you're inserting that qualifier in there, I know you're uncomfortable with it and the fact that they have to kind of justify and you know, there there's another sacred cow slash myth that I think really needs to be debunked, which is that dogs in shelters have behavioral problems, you know, in greater percentages than dogs from breeders, which is not true statistically, you know, based on what available research there is.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We had a friend actually get a breed for a very specific reason and it's interesting how the discourse on breed operates because they got a breed for a very particular reason, because that was the type of dog they wanted and they didn't want to get a shelter dog because they'd seen how challenging.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Like we've had many challenges with Linus he hasn't but I wouldn't reduce that to his shelter experience Like he's had bad experiences. But other people get shelter dogs and things are fine. But anyway, they'd seen our experience and were like, nope, we're not doing that, we're getting a breed, we're getting this breed. But interestingly he's ended up with a whole host of behavioral problems and again it's been reduced to his breed. He has these behavioral problems because of the breed, so there seems to always be an out instead of maybe zooming out and saying, well, societally, why are so many dogs freaking out at the moment? Why, why, why, why are there? Why, like, you walk down the street and you can just see dogs are struggling, there are a lot of really well-trained dogs but if you pay attention, dogs are.
Jessica Pierce:Dogs are having a bad time they are having a bad time. I completely agree, and you know, this is really the topic of my latest book who's a Good Dog? I am profoundly disturbed by what I'm seeing in the world of dogs. Dogs are having a really hard time and you know, if you look at the veterinary literature, you know rates of anxiety, behavioral disorders are just, they're off the charts Now. Is that just because we're more sensitive to it now? So we're? You know we have the same questions about human experience. You know, is it just that we're noticing it? That's probably part of it, but I think part of it is the way that we're keeping dogs is is really bad for their health. And, to unpack that a little bit, one of the things that I'm very concerned about is what I I would call behavioral health and that's we were touching on this a little while ago the the capacity of a dog to be able to engage in a reasonably full range of naturals, of canine specific behavioral patterns, and so much of what we do with pet dogs in terms of training and confinement are go against or or confine or constrain dogs behaviorally in ways that are are harmful. I think, and you know, to take a couple examples.
Jessica Pierce:One thing that I I really am bothered by are bark deterrents. I think they're. They're very harmful to dogs. They're uniformly marketed as compassionate, humane. Humane and safe is the language you will see. And I don't think they're either of those things, because they they punish a dog for barking. But a dog who's barking is communicating. She is not being bad, she's communicating. And a dog who is obsessively barking is suffering. So the response shouldn't be to punish them. The response should be to figure out what's causing suffering, which is probably boredom, loneliness, frustration, something like that, something like that. But you see bark colors on, it seems like everywhere I look. Or these ultrasonic bark deterrents that people put on the back of their house or that neighbors put on the back of their house to control the neighbor's dogs are, I think, driving dogs crazy. Electric fences, shock collars, crates, I can go down the list.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's interesting because a sound is a different kind of mechanism. You know, we like when Linus barks we've got wear on the ground floor, so when he barks he like he runs straight for the and he goes and he's got a booming bark right Like it's huge. And of course we're also trying to navigate his bark as well as our social responsibility and social milieu with neighbors, et cetera. And I mean this is it. It's not about pointing fingers and saying you're bad, and I think there are many ways we could all behave better to help dogs. But are our societies geared? I think they're increasingly less geared towards accepting dogs and dogs barks. I don't know if you saw the movie Stray with Elizabeth Lowe, and it's so sad what's happening in Turkey now.
Jessica Pierce:Oh no, I didn't. I saw another movie called Stray, which was a comedy.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, no, this wasn't a comedy. This was Elizabeth Lowe and she followed a stray dog around the streets of Istanbul Beautiful. But what was remarkable is you saw these dogs engaging in many of the behaviors you've mentioned here Roaming, there was fighting, there was a scene where you clearly saw the dog hunt and it was distasteful, and she showed it. She showed these dogs as kind of confounding some of our understandings of who they are and also how they had loose relationships with some street children. They they did choose to hang out with some people. But what was quite interesting is it seemed to me that many of these street dogs seemed better socialized, better able to encounter and sort out agreements without things getting as nasty as they often do in dog parks or with people, without this fear-mongering.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, I think that's a really good insight. And what comes into my mind is this whole sort of behavioral category that has been created, called leash reactivity, which is sort of like, if you step back and look at it, it's really unnatural for a dog to be on a leash and they're reactive because or, if you want to even use that language, I will put that in scare quotes because it's scary to be constrained in your, in the way you move and communicate with other dogs. But instead of saying to ourselves, oh, it's hard for dogs to be on leashes, you know how can we think through giving them more freedom, we just say, oh, leash reactivity is a behavioral problem. Let's, you know, we'll have trainers and we'll have leashes that are specially designed to work for reactive dogs, like leashes with, you know that, head collars or whatever it is. So again, we're sort of compounding the suffering by creating this behavioral category problem and then treating it with band-aids.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and of course you've got to speak about the industries that are attached here as well. Right, the industry, the medicine industry. The more anxiety there is in dogs, the more medications there are to treat that anxiety, the more trainers there are to treat that anxiety, the more devices we have to treat that anxiety. The more devices we have to treat that anxiety, the more there there's. These industries are massive, massive industries, and the scale of the pet industry, not just in terms of the animals being bought and sold, but all of the appendages, is astounding. It's really astounding, and a lot of that it's in service of profits and capital.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's not in service of your dog's health, although I mean, there are really great toys and stuff out there, sure, but it's more a matter of thinking through. Yeah, like I mean, linus loves puzzles, he's a puzzle dog, he's not. He's not big on social things, but we can make puzzles out of toilet rolls. You put a toilet roll inside another roll, then you put it inside like it's. It's gotten ridiculous. We've got like six layers of things now then getting because he, he likes to unpack things and and I've yet to find a puzzle toy in the pet store that kind of serves his, his needs and interests. It required us to be responsive to him. But of course there are dogs. I'm not trying to slam on really cool toys, is what I'm saying. But I do think we need, I do need to think.
Jessica Pierce:Totally agree. Yes, there, there are products out there that are genuinely beneficial to dogs, but there are also many that are not.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and and and it's. It's kind of it's important to just take a moment to think about how we're caught up in different industries and how they're playing on our desires and our fears and our concerns, and how health is a very, very powerful motivator for us to do stuff. Okay, so we've covered quite a bit. It's been really easy talking to you and I think I've got more questions, but we've covered a number of things now with regards to thinking about dog's health. So, on the one hand, we've said, okay, when we talk about dogs, we need to think across where they are in society, to really think about their health. We need to think about practices that happen, such as breed pet keeping, and how these are part of bigger kind of structures, industries, et cetera and that all of these are often working against dog's health dog's physical health, dog's behavioral health and dog's emotional health and that what's actually required of us is a little bit more nuance and time and sensitivity to the dog in front of us. What does this dog need? What could they possibly be telling us and how could we be more receptive and sensitive, keeping in mind our different constraints and also trying we be more receptive and sensitive, keeping in mind our different constraints and also trying to be brutally honest with ourselves, how we might have these blind spots and be actually feeding into a much bigger picture. That's hurting dogs and we have a responsibility there.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:On the other hand, we've got street dogs, who often tend to be a lot more better socialized. They morphologically tend to go towards one another in similar ways. If there was a world without humans, they would physically probably look like that and in many ways, because they're able to free roam, they often seem to be a lot more socially secure. But they face a lot of physical challenges because of their urban environments. They tend to get hit by cars. Humans also are one of their biggest predators and and herds. So what these different dogs mean in terms of health? They both need to be able to engage in a wide range of species natural behaviors and the freedom to live one's life as one chooses.
Jessica Pierce:And that's a difficult one, because the essence of pet keeping is we make that decision for an animal and take away an animal's freedom. And I think people find it really upsetting when I describe dog keeping as a form of captivity, but I think it's. I think it's a helpful lens to at least entertain some of the time, to realize that that we're putting them in an environment that's very challenging for them and that they're doing their very best to adapt to it usually. And so, within the constraints that they have and I mean the way I sum it up in who's a good dog is and this is not exactly answering your question of what do dogs need, but sort of pivoting it to what can we as, as humans who are currently actively, currently actively caring for and in a caring relationship with a companion dog, what can we do to be better humans? And I came up with what I call the three C's. There's sort of like three guiding principles for how we can sort of improve our interactions and their care curiosity and collaboration. And you know, the care element is pretty obvious. I mean just actively providing the care that our dogs need to be physically healthy, like the choices we make about their food and exercise and their emotional and social health. You know what kinds of outlets we provide for them to interact with other dogs safely.
Jessica Pierce:And then curiosity to me is big Like it. We are so saturated by expertise on dogs veterinarians, trainers. You know books, videos, you know people telling us how to do things and what to do and how to think about things. And I think just stepping back from all that and having going with beginner's mind, this is sort of Zen idea. Going with beginner's mind, this is sort of Zen idea. You just forget what you know and just try to be with your dog and be curious about your dog. So if your dog barks, you know one response to that is to get annoyed Very reasonable response. You know when, when Bella barks, I get, I get a surge of adrenaline, like it surprises me. And if she does, if she barks a lot, I might start to feel irritated because it's a lot of sensory overload.
Jessica Pierce:I really have been working on trying to shift my mindset into curiosity, like, like, what is she barking at? Why is she barking? What does this bark mean? And you know, reading about dog barking, there are just I'm grabbing a number of it out of a hat, but you know nine different. There's more than this, but nine different kinds of barks. You know a bark that's warning, a bark that's saying hello, a bark that's scared and trying to be curious about the barking instead of being irritated by it, and that I think can lead to a spirit of collaboration with our dogs where you know, it's not that they have to behave like their behavior. Typically, we expect our dogs to do 98% of the behavioral modification and we might do 2%, and it really should be more like 50-50. Like we need to change the way we behave too and if you know, for example, there's a barking issue, we need to perhaps change our own behavior leading up to that and in response to it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So if the open window is constantly triggering Linus, maybe it's time to close the window, instead of saying he just needs to adapt. No, maybe I need to adapt to having a closed window. If I know that that's going to be a trigger for him and then I'm going to end up getting irritated with him barking out the window, then it's yeah, it's not a one-sided need for change.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, it's a partnership, not a. I think we can get kind of, especially from a kind of a training mindset that we're shaping their behavior. But they legitimately can and should be able to shape our behavior too and they are, but we should be open to that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And then that can lead, you said, to things like collaboration, and I mean one area where I've seen us use the device we've spoken about was with the leash I started to get.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Linus would sometimes stop on the leash and often I see when people you know, when dogs stop, people yank and they pull them along. This is the way we're going, but what's quite remarkable is when you actually is how often he uses the leash to communicate to me that he wants to go a different direction or he needs a minute to sit and smell what's going on. So his stoppages and his resistance he's learned to use the resistance on the leash to communicate very particular things to me and at first I was like, oh, come on, no, no, we're going this way. And then got curious and was like okay, well, what happens if I go and stand next to him and he leads me down a different path, which is quite remarkable and sometimes that's not possible. So I've had to figure out ways of negotiation, going to him and be like okay, buddy, I see you. Thank you, we're going to go this way now. We're not going across the highway.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And often he concedes, not always. Sometimes it takes more negotiation than I imagine, folks looking at us being like what on earth is going on, but it is. I really do like those three Cs and, if I might, I think it could be extrapolated beyond the individual human-dog relationship. I think that if politics and let's say I mean we spoke about street dogs really struggling in urban areas Imagine if urban policy and urban politicians were to apply these at a societal scale right To care across species lines, to get curious across species lines Again, not just in terms of how animals act as ecosystem services or how animals act as some sort of benefit to the city.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, it's actually get curious about the other inhabitants of the city space with you, because we've never only had a human space, it's always been more than human. And I think that if we were to foster this kind of political and civic curiosity with street dogs or with other, you know, with cat colonies, with other animals that you find in the city, there could be really remarkable feats of collaboration. Better infrastructure so that there isn't so much death and destruction, you know. Better infrastructure, better listening, better lighting, better, I just I think you could really scale those three C's up maybe alternative forms of this companion captive dichotomy.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, yeah, I like that. I think that that would be wonderful if we could move in that direction.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:A vision for the future, maybe a future paper you could write about how care, curiosity and collaboration can change the city. I like it. It would be amazing. So do you have a quote ready for us?
Jessica Pierce:I do. The quote that I picked is one that I have in this who's a Good Dog book and it relates directly to the three C's that we've just been talking about, so it is appropriate. It's a line from a Mary Oliver poem. It's called Astonishment Instructions for living a life Pay attention, pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. And so I take that as instructions for living a life with a dog. Companion is be astonished by how amazing dogs are and how amazing your dog is. Pay attention and that's the curiosity and just pay attention to who they are and what they're telling you, and and tell about it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's beautiful. That's really really lovely. Thank you so much. This has been a really wonderful interview and I think we started from death and ended in astonishment, and that's how I know I'm speaking to someone with a philosophical background. Really really wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me. Before you leave, could you tell us a little bit about what you are working on now and if people want to learn more about some of what you've done with regards to dogs, where can they go?
Jessica Pierce:So I do have a book coming out on September 10th, which is right around the corner. It's called Dogpedia and it's part of a series that Princeton University Press does. It's their pedia series. So they have a treepedia, fungipedia, dinopedia, and this is dogpedia. So it's a very brief encyclopedic A to Z exploration of who dogs are and how humans and dogs have interacted with each other, and so it covers, you know, behavior, biology, history, you know dogs in war, dogs and racism. It was really fun to write, but I will say it was probably the most difficult of the books that I've written because, as we mentioned earlier, in open another door and this whole other room and it just was like this. It was amazing. Dogs are so interesting and surprising.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I feel like that about animal studies in general and it is animal studies is. I mean, of course, it's born of biology, biology and evolutionary, like there are all of these connections to various disciplines. But I think when people start to integrate ethics and critical thoughts into their considerations of animals, regardless of the discipline they're in, you just find yourself constantly amazed and constantly also driven because it is important, it's really important work, it's important for the animals involved, it's important for our societies. It's yeah, it's, it's just really great and I'm happy you found your niche and that you enjoy it. It's really good.
Jessica Pierce:Yeah, it's, it's been fun. And yeah, I don't know. I don't know what my next project is. I have a couple of ideas. I think that domestication is really interesting and problematic, the narrative of domestication. So I'm tempted by that, but I think it would be very hard to write about and I've thought about writing a screed against pet keeping, pet keeping.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's so interesting. My husband actually said to me just the other day, cause we were. So we're in Vienna, austria, and Four Paws is a really big NGO here and they're very, very active and very good at putting up posters. You know, with factory against factory farming, against fur industry. You know, I've I've been doing a couple of interviews with regards to dogs and and the problematic nature of this kind of pet keeping thing and he was saying you know, I can imagine 10 years from now, one of these posters is going to be about, you know, like having bars and like showing, getting personally, getting in the home.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I mean this is what feminist kind of thought taught us as well is the personal is political. What's going on behind your door matters. So it is, it is. There is a mass captivity happening, but it's just been so normalized and so kept in our homes and it's not all bad. It's not like, it's not like everyone's a villain, but norms are powerful. Right, when something's normal, it's powerful. It looks promising. I'm very excited to either read about your agricultural work or your work on talking about pet keeping, or both. But thank you so much for joining me on the show. I'll make sure that I put your website in the show notes as well if people want to find your work. But thank you, thank you. Thank you for joining me.
Jessica Pierce:You're welcome. Thank you for joining me. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. It was an interesting conversation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hi Rashmi, Welcome back to the Animal Highlight.
Rashmi Singh Rana:It's your last script with us today. Yeah, hi, Claudia.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thanks for having me again. Yeah, it's been a really lovely season. I've so enjoyed talking to you and Priya about your field work, and I mean just imagining the variety of lives that dogs lead and the complexity of it has been a lot of fun. So who are we going to be, or what are we going to be focusing on today?
Rashmi Singh Rana:So today I would like to share some of my snippets from the observation that I had while being with these shepherds in this Indian Himalaya and their relations with their dogs. The story revolves around a shepherd and his 15-year-old dog, rimpii. It wasn't just her, she was also there with her daughter, who was, who was about five years old, kali, and Kali, in turn, was mother to a one year old, khushi. So this was just a grandmother, mother, daughter trio that I'm going to be talking about.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So it was quite interesting to see this relationship, and it was just the three of them, oh, and it's so nice, like how often do was quite interesting to see this relationship and it was just the three of them. Oh, and it's so nice, like how often do we actually get to see or hear about these kinds of intergenerational relations, with dogs, a grandma, mom and a daughter all hanging up, that's really, really lovely.
Rashmi Singh Rana:They're literally blood relatives in their family, but and I mean that's the reason that they form like this formidable pack, I mean with each other. And you know, they have this bond that they protect their camp, their livestock, especially at night when they're most needed. Through my informal conversations with this young shepherd about these three dogs of his, I got to wonder about, you know, the role of these dogs as active and agentive partners in these shepherd-dog relationships. So when speaking of Rimpi, who is this 15-year-old grandmother dog, I noticed that this shepherd would describe her as one might describe a long-time friend or a relative, recognizing her wisdom and her strong will that he took to acknowledge and perhaps even respect. He recounted an incident that took place many years ago when he and his livestock were camped many miles and many mountains away from his village, migrating towards the summer pastures. And on this occasion Rimpi who was much younger then and usually always listened to him, she stole some meat that was drying on the roof of the stone hut where they were camped at. And this unexpected and unusual behavior of stealing really angered the shepherd and, in an attempt to discipline her, he struck her with a stick. Rimpi's reaction was immediate and resolute. She barked at the shepherd in protest and distanced herself from him and the camp refusing to come near him for the rest of the day.
Rashmi Singh Rana:The shepherd did not pay much heed to this at that point, thinking that she would naturally return, because this was not the first time that he had disciplined her. And he did not. Really was very hard on her, in his opinion, and he was. He just waited out for her for, you know, the whole evening. But what happened was he called her out for dinner, but she was not available. She did not return to the camp, even for at night for dinner. And this is when he felt a sense of guilt creeping in, admittedly, and he realized that rimpi had not returned to the camp for the whole night. His concern grew when he did not see rimpi the following days and he realized that she was continuing to avoid him. His worry only stopped when, eventually, he received a phone call from his parents back in the village saying that rimpi had made her way back to the village all by herself.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wait, wait. So he's out in the mountains. Yeah, so how many? How far away are we talking here? Like, what kind of distance are we talking about? So she got angry with him and she left, she left.
Rashmi Singh Rana:She left the camp all by herself. She left, she left. She left the camp all by herself. And it's many, many miles away, because they cross, like they cross passes that are covered by glaciers, and it's a difficult way, not definitely not by road, but through passes might be, the distance might be shorter, but it's nonetheless.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's even more difficult because there are mountains, there's ruggedness, there's snow, but yeah, she made it, and she did this journey over a couple of days, or she did it because it sounds like it wasn't as though his parents called him the next day. They called a couple of days later, so she took it.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah, wow, a few days later, yeah, okay, yeah. There are similar stories that I've heard from other shepherds as well that sometimes their dogs, when they get lost, sometimes the dog just return to the village that they came from. When they're unable to find their shepherds in the mountain.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Incredible. Incredible I mean that sense of navigation and ability to. I mean you do hear sometimes these stories, I guess, of dogs in people's homes, where people have unexpectedly moved house or something and dogs finding a way to move across really incredible distances to find them or to find a way back to a home that they lived at previously. Which is like how do they do it? But yeah, this is really interesting. I'm surprised that the shepherd didn't immediately think that something had happened to Rumpi, that she had been attacked by you know an animal or something. He immediately thought that she might be angry.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah, because she wasn't returning for food, because that's I mean, they always come at mealtimes in the morning and the evening, but she wasn't coming for days, so she assumed that she was. She just went a little away from the camp and the evening, but she wasn't coming for days, so she assumed that she was. She just went a little away from the camp and was not coming back or finding her food herself, but not returning to him good for rimpi, good for rimpi.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well done rimpi. Sorry I interrupted, you keep going.
Rashmi Singh Rana:No, no, but it was in fact for him also. It was a very profound moment when he realized that, when he got a call saying that Rimpi is back at the village, and it seemed that it was at that moment that he truly understood that Rimpi was so deeply upset with his actions that she had decided to abandon him and refused to join him in the migration for that year. And this experience made him realize the depth of her emotional capacity and he admitted his regret, saying that you know, she's a wise dog, I should have known better. So the shepherd, reflecting on his treatment of her, acknowledged that the need to make amends in his behavior. He said that from that point onwards, he never raised his voice at her again, understanding that she demanded respect and that her actions spoke volumes about the boundaries that she was setting between herself and him. And through her actions, rimpi had communicated her disapproval and had successfully renegotiated the dynamic of her relationship with the shepherd. Through this episode, the shepherd not only accepted Rimpi's individual agency but also learned to respect her as a sentient being with emotional and physical needs, something that fundamentally altered their relationship moving forward.
Rashmi Singh Rana:This shepherd was also not just cognizant of Rimpi's distinct and individual personality or needs. But he also recognized the unique traits or character of the other two dogs, kali and Khushi. He spoke of Kali, who's Rimpi's daughter, with particular appreciation, noting that Kali had acquired and displayed many of Rimpi's qualities and, much like her mother, kali took to guarding the camp, a role she seemed to embrace. Naturally. The shepherd attributed Kali's aptitude for the job to Rimpi's influence, claiming that Rimpi had played a key role in training Kali to become quote good guardian dog. Kali, for her part, appeared willing to follow in Vrimpi's footsteps by following her to actively guard the camp throughout the night. However, in contrast, he did note Khushi as well. Khushi seems to stand apart from her mother and her grandmother.
Rashmi Singh Rana:The shepherd was quick to point out that Khushi did not show the interest in guarding the camp. She didn't seem to have the same inclination or willingness to take on the role of a protector or a guardian dog, and he wondered and worried that Khushi may not join him in his camp from the following year. It was evident to him that Khushi, unlike Rimpi and Kali, had her own distinct temperament and desires, and he seemed to understand that and accept it. And to me I found it quite striking that the shepherd was acknowledging Khushi's individuality, recognizing her personal will and choices as central to the relationship that he would build with his dogs in the camp. And this recognition suggested that, you know, their bond was not simply based on obedience or function, but also an understanding and having respect for each dog's unique nature. And it seemed that the shepherd was centering Khushi's agency in sustaining their dog-shepherd partnership and trying to deflect more on the relational dynamics that were at play at the time in their camp. And the ability of centering individual dogs within the everyday co-living dynamics between shepherds and their dogs underscores a deep relationality that shepherds may be attuned to or engaged with.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Through years of experience, some shepherds have developed a keen sensitivity to the unique attitudes and temperaments of the dogs within their camp.
Rashmi Singh Rana:And this attentiveness is not just about assigning rules based on instinct or training, but also about acknowledging the dogs as individual beings with their own capacities, their own preferences, limitations and even under the same external conditions, such as the same environment or practices and routines, not all dogs would fulfill the expected roles of guardian dogs in the same way and, despite receiving similar training and socialization, some dogs naturally excel at defending the livestock, displaying guarding skills or heightened alertness and a protective nature, while other dogs may struggle to take on this responsibility, even with the same guidance.
Rashmi Singh Rana:They might just simply not be interested in doing these tasks that are assigned to them. And this variation sort of highlights the shepherd's understanding that a dog's suitability for certain tasks goes beyond mare training or is also shaped by the dog's inherent nature, will and personality. And the shepherds have also experienced dogs, like I mentioned before, straying away from their camps, and sometimes for good, and they may search for the dogs for a few days in nearby camps or nearby villages, thinking that the dogs must have lost the shepherd's trail. But when the dogs don't show up for many, many days, the shepherds accept that the dogs did not want to join them during the migration. And in this way shepherds do exercise and adapt to the responses of their dogs in this partnership, exercise and adapt to the responses of their dogs in this partnership and in ways that may not always result in desirable outcomes but may be able to make an environment that's healthy and sustainable in these dog-shepherd relationship and partnerships. But of course this may not be true for all shepherds.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Something really important for me that you said there is that they might not fit the role that's expected of them, and I think that this is so important. I mean, I think a lot of what we do as humans when we're having conversations about justice and equality is resisting oftentimes ideas about what's expected of us and how it reduces us to something simple, right, like you are, you know you're just a girl you can't throw, is a kind of really simple, basic example of what it means when these expectations are applied to you. You resist it because you're an individual and you're not just X, right. So these dogs are not just dogs, they are not just guardians. They are so much more than what they are and sometimes they might accept and really want to take on what's expected to be guards, and other times, like you say, they might not. And the same goes for pet dogs or for street dogs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:There are a variety of different roles that dogs can take in society, which I've learned from listening to you and Priya over the course of the season. Yeah, I just think it's really remarkable and interesting to kind of think more expansively about how dogs might choose to spend their time, which is quite remarkable. But now let's say a dog like Cushy doesn't want to go to the mountains anymore. But now let's say a dog like Cushy doesn't want to go to the mountains anymore, would Cushy then just stay at home permanently? Or would this then result in Cushy kind of being left or let go from the household because Cushy's not doing?
Rashmi Singh Rana:what's expected. I think it would be kind of more of the latter. I think it would be kind of more of the latter. So they don't typically have the concept of keeping dogs as pets or keeping dogs indoors. So if the dog is not joining them in their migratory journey, they'll take them back to the village and then it's sort of Khushi might just join any free living dog back Like they're free to roam around, any free living dog back like they're free to roam around. And there are instances of dogs leaving camps and then just being close to you know, mingling with the market dogs and just staying back with the market dogs there are some instances of that as well.
Rashmi Singh Rana:So they might choose to live. You know, I mean they were living freely, or at least they were ranging uh freely with the migration and with the livestock. But they might truly start living freely if they no longer continue going with the shepherds during migration.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So these shepherds have no I guess quote-unquote control over these dogs when they're not doing migrations, like I'm just trying to understand, I guess the broader, because a lot of your highlights have been on kind of the migration time or the grazing time of the shepherd dog's journey, right, but that's only a portion of the year, so what does it look like the rest of the year? So I understand the shepherds. You know, like hearing you now, I'm almost imagining this romantic idea of the shepherds and how, like wanting to go out into the mountains to go and do their grazing, and they call across the village, you know, come, rumpi, and rumpi comes running and they go off into the mountains to do their grazing. But, um, yeah, I literally don't know what to think here. Like, what are the dogs doing when they're not guarding?
Rashmi Singh Rana:uh, so these guardian dogs are with the livestock at all times, so even when the shepherds go back home, they leave the dogs with the flock wherever the flocks are. They may have parked the flock somewhere close to a forest or away from the roads, so the dogs will remain there. So these dogs never enter, so even if they're going back to villages or close to villages, they'll stay with the flocks. They do not enter the household of the shepherd person. They're always outdoors and are the flocks fenced in.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Like so when they're back in the village, are the flocks fenced in? No, no, they're never fenced.
Rashmi Singh Rana:So the flocks are like they're over 100 or they might be 200 in number. So they're not fenced.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:They're always in the open throughout their life and with this particular flock. Was it only this grandmother, mother, daughter trio that were with the herd or the flock, or were there multiple other dogs too? No, it was just the three of them. Interesting, okay, wow. Well, thank you once again, rashmi, for an incredible animal highlight highlight. I've learned so much and I'm trying to like think about a whole bunch of different things. Thank you, this has been really, really wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, jessica, for being an incredible guest. Thank you also to rush me sing rana, for a wonderful animal highlight. Thank you to Jeremy John for the logo, gordon Clark for the bed music, christian Mentz for his editing work and Rebecca Shen for her design work. This episode was produced and hosted by myself, claudia Hertenfelder, and thank you also to Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple for their long-time sponsorship of this podcast, as well as the Remaking One Health Indies project for sponsoring this season. This is the Animal Tone with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.
Rashmi Singh Rana:For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
