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
S7E10: Grad Review with Rashmi Singh Rana and Priyanshu Thapliyal
Rashmi Singh Rana and Priyanshu Thapliyal join Claudia on the show to discuss some of the key themes to emerge in Season 7, Animals and Multispecies Health. These include thinking beyond anthropocentric understandings of health; considering how geography and context shape health relations; and the importance of discourse in both imaginative and material impacts.
Date Recorded: 29 January 2025
Priyanshu Thapliyal is a PhD Researcher based in the school of GeoSciences at University of Edinburgh. In his project, he is thinking with and for people and street dogs living in an Indian Himalayan village to explore the everyday ethics and politics of sharing life and space on a more-than-human planet. He has an interest in cultural geography, environmental anthropology, and multispecies studies. Connect with Priya via Twitter (@priathaplial).
Rashmi Singh Rana is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Compassionate Conservation of the Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology Sydney. Her conservation research explores how the dynamic socio-ecological realities shape coexistence dynamics in the multispecies spaces of the Indian trans-Himalaya. Presently, her research interests lie in tracing the contemporary relationships between humans and dogs, and its influence on the future of safe multispecies cohabitation in agro-pastoral landscapes. Connect with her via Twitter (@RashmiSinghRana).
Featured:
- Dogopolis by Chris Pearson
- Conservation Beyond Biopolitics by Krithika Srinivasan
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring this podcast; Remaking One Health Indies for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work. This episode was produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
- Leave a Review on Podchaser
- Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
- Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.
This is another iRaw podcast. What becomes problematic is the naturalization and promotion and pushing of one kind of dog-human relationship which is where dogs and humans are together. Dogs are with humans in their homes, so pet dogs, so just that one association, one kind of association of dogs and humans being propagated which is not natural in the way that it has to be formed and it has to be worked on throughout the lives of a pet dog and a human. So I think that becomes sort of for me that is problematic, just pushing forward of that one narrative, whereas they are, from historical evolution point of view, they're different kinds of relations.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to the Animal Turn everyone. This is season seven where we've been talking all about animals and multi-species health. It's been a really interesting season. It went in directions I wasn't quite expecting, but I really think that if you've listened to the whole season, from the beginning until the end, you get a sense that multi-species health is about so much more than disease. When we're talking about health relations among animals, but also between humans and animals, you start to realize that it's an incredibly political discussion. You have to think not only about animals' bodies but also the discourses that are used to describe animals and the ways in which policies are done and research is done. Really, really, really interesting topic. Now, this season has been sponsored by the Remaking One Health Indies Project and I was delighted to work together with Krithika Srinivasan on crafting and thinking about how the season could unfold. The Remaking One Health Indies Project is doing work with street dogs in India and trying to think through some of the multi-species health dimensions of human-dog relations there. Now you would have noticed that the season has had a very strong and overt dog focus. That was by design. Working together with the Remaking One Health Indies Project, we were thinking through kind of dog relations, and that comes up a lot in today's episode as well. But before we get into the grad review and I tell you who's joining me on the show today, I think it's really important to note that while we focused on dogs in this season, the lessons that we've learned definitely translate and can be thought about in relation to a whole host of multi-species or animal relations right? So I think now, for example, about Miriam's concepts of species story. How are different animals kind of given these discursive stories that are unproblematized? How does it position them differently in scientific discourse or public or popular discourse, how we view some animals as worth protecting or worth sacrificing Another key theme that emerged over the course of the season and, of course, that we talk a little bit about today in the Grad Review, so the kind of discursive elements of not only what a specific species story is but how it's mobilized in conservation practices and the making of policy. Let me tell you a little bit about who's joining us on the show today.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:If you've been following along with the season, you'll already be familiar with both Rashmi and Priya, who have done the animal highlights of the course of the season. They've shared a whole bunch of their ethnographic insights and observations from the work they've done together with dogs in the Himalayan regions. So Priya Shn Thapleal is a PhD researcher based in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. In his project he's thinking with and for people and street dogs living in an Indian Himalayan village and he's hoping to explore the everyday ethics and politics of sharing life and space on a more than human planet. He's very interested in the relationship between cultural geography, environmental anthropology and multi-species studies. Rashmi Singh Rana is also a PhD candidate, but she is at the Center for Compassionate Conservation of the Transdisciplinary School with the University of Technology in Sydney. Her conservation research explores how the dynamic socio-ecological realities shape coexistence dynamics in the multi-species spaces of Indian Trans-Himalayan. She is presently interested in tracing the contemporary relationships between humans and dogs and the influence it has on creating futures of safe multi-species cohabitation in agro-pastoral landscapes. So their work was really interesting and we speak quite a bit about the animal highlights in this episode today and throughout the grad review they still bring in anecdotes from their field work.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:If you don't know it already, the animal highlight is and does exist as its own podcast as well. Rashmi and Priya's work will appear in that podcast later in the year. So you've got exclusive or first access content to it here. But if you haven't found the Animal Highlights, please look for it wherever you listen to podcasts, give it a follow and if you like the content, please leave a review. And if you've got time, please, please, please, I beg you, please leave a review for the Animal Turn. Sway, I'm obsessed.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I keep going and trying to search reviews of the Animal Turn, hoping that there are more reviews that exist out there, because it really does just go a long way in terms of giving the show legitimacy, and my real hope, dear listeners, is that the show will become something of a pedagogical tool, that it serves as supplementary material. So anyone who's teaching about animal studies or interested in animal studies and is maybe doing a course with someone who is teaching about animal studies, please share this podcast with them. I think it makes for fantastic supplementary material where episodes can go in conjunction with or supplement a journal article, for example. All right, I'm sorry, I'm just rambling and waffling and you've got a long episode coming up in front of you where myself, priya and Rashmi talk about some of the key themes that emerged over the course of the season. Thank you so much once again for joining me on the Animal Turn. I hope you've enjoyed this season.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hello, priya and Rashmi, welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. It's been so fun working with you over the course of the season on developing your animal highlights, and learning about dogs in the Himalayas and in India and kind of just thinking about the variety of different dog relations there are has been really illuminating for me. So thank you so much for doing those highlights and now for also joining me on the Grad Review to kind of wrap up the season and delve into some of the opportunities and overlaps and tensions that have kind of emerged over the course of the season. So thank you. Thank you so much for your work. So, just in case folks are joining here for the first time and they haven't engaged with the animal highlights and all heard you speak there, maybe each of you could tell us a little bit about your research and your interests. Priya, why don't we start with you?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :you could tell us a little bit about your research and your interests, priya? Why don't we start with you? Sure, so I'm a third year PhD student at the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. I am associated with the Rowan Dease Project and my specific PhD research is based on an empirical study of street dogs and people and their entangled lives together in this hill station and village in the central Himalayas of India, in this northern state of Uttarakhand in India, and I started out looking at, specifically, street dogs and how they lived alongside humans. But now my research is also looking at the larger multi-species collective, if you can say, of which they are part of. That includes, for example, macaques and leopards and wild boars and jackals. So yeah, that's pretty much what I've been thinking about at the moment.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And you're nearing the end of your PhD. Now, right, you're in the writing stages.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :That's correct. I'm really in the thick of all of it, like about thinking about all the empirical research that I did, like I did nine months of ethnographic work in this village and right now, yeah, I'm in the process of thinking about the larger questions also, about the ethics and politics of multi-species cohabitation and what it means to think about health, like if we think our health being entangled with other species also. So, yeah, exciting times.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Really fascinating. And you, rashmi, are on the other end of the spectrum when it comes to PhDs. So he's nearing the end of the writing stage and you're kind of at the. You've done some field work, but you're relatively in the beginning stages of your PhD, right some?
Rashmi Singh Rana:field work, but you're relatively in the beginning stages of your PhD, right? Yeah, that's correct, I just finished the first year of my PhD in December. So this year is still my first month of the second year of my PhD, but I did a bit of field work during the first year itself. My work is again, like Priya, it's in the Himalaya itself, but in the adjacent state of Himachal Pradesh, adjacent to Uttarakhand, where Priya is working, and my work is again around different dog-human relationships in different rural socio-ecological contexts. So I'm looking at free-living dogs around farming villages, but I'm not looking at them and in just in isolation.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Like Priya mentioned, it's, it's a multi-species space and I'm also looking at their interactions with humans, their interactions with the livestock that humans have sheep, goat, cows and also other wild animals like ibex or wolves, etc.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Then Then I also look at a different socio-ecological context of shepherding communities who have different relations with guardian dogs that they have along with them and they have this partnership of building a safe, secure environment wherever they are, along with their livestock, with respect to other wild animals. So I'm trying to look at these different socio-ecological contexts and these different dog human relationships to see, uh, what it means, for, you know, just the multi-species space, because, especially in india right now, there's a lot of debate about the role of, or the space of, dogs. Uh, in these, in these areas, where does the dog belong? And these perspectives are often very contradicting, polarizing, depending on which social human group you speak to. So I'm trying to disentangle these perspectives to see what it means for the future of the dogs in these spaces, and hopefully a future which is of, you know, coexistence or cohabitation so really interesting.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And you are also affiliated with the raw indies project, right? Yes, yeah, and who have you both been working with at the raw indies project? Um, if I'm not mistaken, you've been working closely with, uh, daniel right, and you've been working closely with Kritika, is that correct?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yeah, that's correct. So I've been working with Kritika Srinivasan, the PI of the project, and also Chris Pearson leads the history package of the project.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, he wrote a fantastic book called Dogopolis. I think it was called Dogopolis. Yes, it's a really interesting kind of history of dogs in city spaces, which is a bit different to where you're looking at, and it's interesting because I can hear the kind of differences. So you guys are both part of the same research group but, priya, I hear you speaking about things like collectives, whereas, rashmi, I hear you talking about things like ecologies and, of course, daniel is very much. We spoke a lot about ecology and compassionate conservation and it's just. It's been really interesting working with both of you and kind of seeing these varied interests intersecting when it comes to thinking about dogs in India and human-dog relations and, of course, their health.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So before we kind of dive straight into the main focus of this grad review, which is looking at the overlaps and tensions that have emerged through the interviews, I thought it'd be nice to maybe just spend a little bit of time reflecting on the animal highlight.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So you both worked together on the animal highlight this season. For folks who don't know what the animal highlight is, it's a segment that comes up at the end of each episode where I work together with a grad student or an early career researcher on developing scripts and stories that focus and highlight animals in particular, and oftentimes this happens at the kind of species level, but it can also happen at different kind of collective levels or even individual levels. And this season what was really remarkable is both Priya and Rashmi provided observations from their fieldwork, so they gave firsthand accounts of dogs that they'd engaged and encountered in doing their fieldwork, and they operated also at slightly different levels. Priya, you tended to give very personalized individual stories, whereas Rashmi, you tended to think about these different kind of groupings or collectives, so like town dogs or guardian dogs, which I thought was quite interesting to see your views juxtaposed against one another. So maybe we could just spend a little bit of time now first talking about the animal highlight and how you found the process.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I found the animal like there. The whole process of doing the animal highlights and writing stories about dogs from my field set quite a stimulating experience, personally as well as intellectually speaking, because while doing my PhD it's very easy to think in more broader, theoretical, conceptual terms about these broader ideas about what we're looking at. But what I did in these annual highlights the opportunity that I got was to think on a more personalized level about these dogs who were my research participants.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I was very sure, going into my research while undertaking fieldwork, that these dogs that I was going to work with they were going to be my research participants, not just research objects like that I'm going to be creating knowledge about, and that's why it was important for me to put them at the center of the knowledge production process. But while writing my, after coming back from fieldwork, while writing my thesis chapters, I wasn't sure how to bring them really front and center, like in the midst of talking about all the broader conceptual debates and theories that I was engaging with. So this animal highlight was quite a fruitful opportunity for me to have their stories being told.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think you did such a good job. You often started with a specific, you know dog, so, like Bella, whose story you told so beautifully in the first animal highlight, who was pregnant and then gave birth, you know you provided these really rich observations of Bella and how she navigated the market space and the birthing of her puppies. But then that also kind of gave us a really interesting launchpad to discussing questions of pregnancy and motherhood with free-roaming dogs and what this means in terms of health. And it was really sometimes this kind of nuanced understanding of animals' health isn't as obvious when we have these really large conceptual debates. And, rashmi, you operated at a slightly different level you kind of spoke about. You focused quite explicitly on guardian dogs, right.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah. So I think I completely agree with Priya's experience in that I experienced similarly I mean having really profound moments of looking at these stories at a personal level. So in ecology usually we try to look at patterns and generalizations and observations and these individual stories are not given as much attention and they're always outliers. But here, because of the opportunity I got with animal highlights and trying to bring stories from my field observations, I was able to actually see newer patterns from my observations in terms of looking at looking at dogs differently myself, looking at their agency, looking at how they've exercised their agency, their autonomy or boundaries that they try to, um, you know, put forward, and then people's reciprocity towards their, towards the dog's agency. I think I was able to do that when I was trying to bring out certain stories, which I don't know if I would have been able to do if I wasn't, you know, focused on each story or each dog individually, because that's not really my, not part of my PhD work per se.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Like I really loved your last highlight that spoke about how a dog was treated poorly and she said, well, you know, screw that. And she just left the camp and then she went back to her other. She went back to the house, which was a couple of days hike for her, because she didn't approve of her treatment. And there's something, I think, as a method, there's something really important here in trying to really think in a complex way about a specific situation and about a specific set of dogs, because, like you said, priya, it's quite easy to kind of get lost in the abstract and conceptual which I love I love abstract and conceptual debates but you can kind of sometimes lose sight of the animals involved. What did you see as any sort of, let's say, thematic overlaps between your respective highlights? Did you see anything where you were like, oh yeah, we're both kind of touching on these themes?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :What I could observe was, yeah, we're both kind of touching on these themes. What I could observe was, yeah, I definitely found Rashmi's observation very interesting and I could see a lot of parallels with what I was also observing in my field site. I guess the focus on dog agencies and how they were reacting to different uh scenarios obviously the contexts were quite different, but how, how their emotional agencies and their like personal, uh like preferences, their tastes and personalities, temperaments, these were coming forth, which I found quite interesting and, uh, that was something that I also, quite, on reflecting on my highlights also, I realized that that was a key theme that these like individual dogs and how they made their individualities uh like, yeah, shine and speak individualities.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Uh like, yeah, shine and speak. Yeah, I found quite interesting. Yeah, I think I think we had. I mean, with every highlight of priya's I could, you know, always it sort of uh like I remembered some other story from my field work, like there were so many parallels and so many similarities and it got me thinking about dogs in in different ways from my field observations as well. So for instance, there was, I think, bella's story about her being very protective of her puppies, naturally, and then looking at finding different places to give birth to her puppies In an urban context they're looking at concrete spaces under walls or something and giving birth there because there is this looming threat of predation by leopards in Priya's area.
Rashmi Singh Rana:So I've seen I mean I could draw parallels in my stories as well that dogs do. Even with the dogs in my landscape, I've heard stories about them hiding their puppies in such weird and inaccessible locations. And then, of course, humans, the shepherds or people who looked after those dogs, tried to take care of them or tried to bring them to other protective, protected, trying to help them. So all of these parallels really were very fascinating and also encouraging for me to look at dog stories and look at dogs' personalities and the way that they behave and want to not just humans, but also other animals in the area.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think that's a really good point. So, like you said, certainly agency is a key thing. When we look at dogs in different contexts, the ways in which they respond to their different environmental pressures, whether that's threats of predation or cars or foot traffic, there were different kind of responses that these animals had and certainly, like you say, different personalities right, Different personalities coming through. I think about Priya, when you mentioned Hadi, who was really quite meek and not very assertive in acquiring food, versus your explanations. Rashmi of Simru and Shiru, who was very exuberant and authoritative and kind of took control of an entire shepherding camp. In some ways that was Shiru. I think With these dogs being named they became characters kind of in my mind that did have different personalities. And of course then Priya, thinking about Chintu, whose exuberant personality while sick and recovering from a terrible accident, resulted in a whole bunch of volunteers then organizing and starting to create a kind of community of care for street dogs. So it really is the dog's personalities and agency certainly impact. That's one theme. But another theme which I think you also just touched on here, Rashmi, was the multi-species collectives and how important this is for understanding their health.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So often we think about health in terms of disease, but there's also questions of contextual health and practices and the different types of behaviors that dogs can be expected to engage in, whether that's acquiring food or trying to get medicine and veterinary help or chasing away potential predators. I remember, Rashmi, you talking about dogs that had those collars on those like spiky medicine and veterinary help or chasing away potential predators. I remember Rashmi talking about dogs that had those collars on those like spiky collars that face outwards as a means of protecting them from predation. So just those are definitely two themes. I think that came up throughout.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But another for me was also kind of the social organization and how we talk about the social organization of dogs, and this is maybe now switching a little bit to talking about the animal turn as well, Because when I spoke to Andita about behavioral ecology and actually also Jessica Pierce towards the end, when you ask, like what do we know about dogs and the ways in which they socially organize, Both of them were like very little there's. There's actually markedly little we know about dogs and how they organize their own families and the ways in which they would choose to have babies or the ways in which they might culturally want to die, so there's actually very little we know about dogs, which I found totally surprising yeah, that that's actually true.
Rashmi Singh Rana:I mean, and in that sense it makes me yeah, I mean, especially in India, we've been around dogs, I mean pretty much everywhere we have free living dogs around us, but we often don't know how these dogs operate, how their social worlds are created or negotiated or their conflicts are managed. And I think that's where the whole idea about health or interventions like ABC and having control over their reproductive health or reproduction or creating more offsprings or more members of their own society or species or packs sort of made me question are we interfering in their social world by? You know if their ABC programs or their, you know, neutering programs probably also has impact on their social world? And that might be. There might be shifts how they between, how they navigate, how they recruit more members in their packs, how they maintain pack formation or all of those dynamics at play. So it really got me wondering about that as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, reproduction was also definitely a key theme throughout the season. I think this idea of immediately I think again Jessica, towards the end, said it's kind of standard practice in Western countries that dogs who end up in shelters are spayed and this is a very intervening process and the idea there is that somehow if they don't have more it's better for them. And it's tricky, it's complicated because I mean, you guys know more about kind of population dynamics of dogs but there is this kind of fear factor that somehow if dogs are allowed to reproduce they'll completely run amok and what are other some key themes? So, focusing now on the animal turn season and questions of multi-species health.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I would say when we're talking about multi-species health and how specifically like this concept of multi-species health and how specifically like this concept of multispecies health, how we define it and how it can differ from previous conceptualizations of health. There are already a lot of concepts, such as one health or planetary health, eco health. So what does multispecies health does? That's different from all these other conceptualizations. I think it's interesting to think about, firstly, health beyond the human, to not just look at other species and the environment or other non-humans being instrumental to just human health, but also looking at how humans influence other like the health of other non-humans and the environment and all, how all of our health is entangled. And that brings us to like.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :The second, like key thing that I think it's important to think about in multispecies health is that the target of these like health policies or health interventions should never be individuals, but it should always think about like this in a more relational terms, because we're never actually individuals. I think that that comes to like one of the episodes in the animal turn, also about us also being holobionts, like you know, us also being a collective of these different species. So we need to always look at these collectives that we are part of, and how we, how, what? What does health become when we start thinking it in these terms, beyond the individual and beyond the human?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That was in the conversation with Oswaldo, I think right.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But we were speaking about marginalized multi-species collectives, and I think you're exactly right. I mean, when, when I put this question to Krithika and Guillaume in the first episode, one of the key things that I think Guillaume said was multi-species health is, in essence, going beyond anthropocentric understandings of health, which we find very difficult to do Like often, when we even speak about, you know, what's good for dogs. We speak about what's good for us, and I would agree that this is a key theme that's come up throughout the season, but not only that, it's also that it's a political theme, right? The idea of going beyond anthropocentric understandings of health is inherently political, and it's political in the traditional sense of yes, we need to create policies that think about other animals, but also just challenging the central figure of the human in health conversations is political.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yes, I would definitely say it is a political act and I think it's an important one to bring in power and politics into these conversations about health. Again, going back to the conversation with Oswaldo about multispecies, collectors and the idea of the marginalization of how we define our collectives, because if we just center humans, then we are again like what? From my understanding, what previous versions of these entangled understandings of health have done is create these biopolitical boundaries and these insides and outsides between, like these healthy communities and healthy bodies versus this outside of those risky bodies or unhealthy bodies, and there have been mostly uh conversations around, like biomedical intervention, uh, and this prevention of uh, these viruses, like you know, jumping from one body to the other but we don't really talk about the structural or, like you know, this power relationship that actually might create uh, the might create unhealthy conditions or environments.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :That's really important to talk about.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean this definitely came up in another season where I spoke to Steve Hinchcliffe about the idea of biosecurity and he kind of drove home how the idea of keeping life safe is inherently political. And in that same season of biosecurity I had Krithika on the show, krithika Srinivasan, and she really drove home how important this tension between sacrifice and I want to say savior and sacrifice, but it's not.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Protection and sacrifice.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Protection and sacrifice. That's it, and this is important in thinking about marginalized multi-species collectives, because there are some animals that we desperately try to protect at the expense or sacrifice of others, and it's always. I mean, I think every grad review this has come up is really complicated and difficult to do. Which species are you privileging and why, and you can't in our policies and practices? How do we privilege all of them equally? I'm just, this is, I guess this is the challenge, right?
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah, I mean throughout, especially in the whole conservation, animal conservation sphere, there's always this and, of course because in our field I think we also deal with a lot of saviors syndrome we like to save animals and in saving animals, animals, we don't mind sacrificing animals. So I mean there's protection but there's sacrifice, going hand by hand in hand and it's, and then it entirely depends on who's doing the saving and what they think is more important. Um, to you know, to save and to sacrifice. I think, again, it becomes political, it becomes it's determined by the person's ideology. And I think that's where it's interesting for us to kind of take a step back and look at the social groups involved in that decision-making, including non-human social groups, but most definitely the existing social groups, because there will be people.
Rashmi Singh Rana:For instance, just in context of dogs, there are even in India, there are, you know, polarizing views. There are people who want dog on the streets and advocate for having having free, living dogs on the street as their places, where they belong, whereas there is a strong voice that is now increasingly becoming dominant to saying that dogs do not belong in streets, they belong inside homes. So they are these different. The same issue may have different perspectives. So I think we need to take a step back and look at all of these perspectives to be able to come to an inclusive answer Okay, what is to be protected and how one is to be able to come to an inclusive answer okay, what is to be protected and how one is to be protected?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:um yeah, I think that's really important. It's not this like single idea of of protection and maybe as I forget who suggested this, but was it mariam who kind of said this idea that we are there to protect them is perhaps a little bit um, and by them I mean animals that sometimes our constant desire and need to intervene can actually foster more conflict. And that's also tricky, I mean because you do need to have responsibility. There is a point at which our policies matter, which I think is something you're pointing to here, rashmi, is that there are different stakeholders with different interests and policies need to reflect that. Some of these stakeholders are not human and their interests need to be protected.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And a couple of times what's going on in Turkey came up this season, because I think it's a clear indicator of how, when policies change dogs' lives, it can have real, material, significant implications for the animals involved and in this case, the kind of mass murder of dogs in a place where they were once free, roaming and welcomed participants. So I think the discourse that you're talking about, that's happening in India, sounds, at least to me, like it's ringing true to what's happening in many other countries where it has been normal for dogs to roam. Why do you think these changes are happening? What's prompting this kind of change? Now, do you think, go ahead.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :So I think this battle over public spaces that I would call it uh, that definitely stems from this idea of uh development of uh, these ideas of especially what cities or urban spaces need to look like.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :There is this like very ingrained idea of urban spaces being this bastions of culture, and they are human centric and human dominated spaces. Because if you think about dominant urban policies, also the infrastructure, the architecture that's all catered toward human needs and human desires, uh, there is a there's like very rich literature around uh, like this urban versus rural and urban versus this quote-unquote, like the unruly wild nature that you need to protect humans against. And this idea of humans needs to be insulated from these risks and vulnerabilities of living with, like other non-human beings. So, non-human animals, like or other beings, might be accommodated in urban spaces, but it's mostly, I would say, a contingent accommodation and it can and their, their claims to space can be taken away as soon as they become a nuisance. And again, it's mostly stems from these cultural stories we have about what, how humans should live, live and like what is this growth trajectory for humans?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :on our planet like that. We need to extract ourselves from this, like you know, animalistic condition of living as part of like this, like multi-species society, and like you know, for human health, for, again, like health concerns and you know, prolonging human life, or it's just like this idea of like insulating and risk, I think is a huge factor but again it also brings to like aesthetics of control and like what kind aesthetics we want, not undue.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Policing was definitely a key kind of theme here throughout the season that health requires a lot of policing. So who is thought to be health, like you said in the beginning, this kind of inclusion, exclusion, who's kind of included in the imaginary of a healthy society or a healthy societal body? And this brings to mind for me the conversation with Mariam about species story and how really important the discourses we have about dogs are, but also the conversation with Melanie Rock and Gwendolyn Blue about healthy publics right, that this is, it's really needing. So we can speak about collectives, and one of my concern with the idea of collectives is that it is prone to sometimes romantic and romanticization. Right, we're multi-species collectives everyone's wonderful love and peace and joy, which I don't inherently disagree with. Like, we are multi-species collectives it's a biological fact, right.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But sometimes the discourse from there can kind of spring in ways that are quite romantic and that are not very helpful, whereas I think trying to think about the politics and the materiality of these collectives or entanglements, whichever word you prefer, can be pretty productive. And I think this is where the work of Melanie Rock and Gwendolyn Blue is quite helpful, because they they do speak about health in very tangible ways saying well, there's a specific health scare here. How does this have ramifications for variety of different beings, right? I don't know, how did you guys conceive or think of healthy publics when, when you encountered that concept? Yeah, rashmi, go ahead.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah, I am Sorry. I'm getting confused between whether I'm not unmuted myself or not.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You're welcome to just leave yourself unmuted, right? I'm just muting myself because Linus is walking in and out, so you're welcome to leave yourself unmuted and feel free to interject at any point, right? Like, just jump in if you, if, if one of you says something that the other things is interesting, feel free to just have a conversation, okay, yeah all right yeah, um, yeah.
Rashmi Singh Rana:So about, uh, healthy publics, I think for me not just for healthy of the episode from the healthy publics, but because the themes were quite interconnected in that way what I really took from it was that we need to acknowledge animals as individuals as well. There needs to be an individual acknowledgement and then we cannot look at animals just as mere collectives and reduce them to as mere collectives and sort of apply or give policies to the blanket policies for the animals. So in context of dogs, because of this very I won't say inherent, but a very publicized scare around rabies or disease that that dogs are carriers of, we're just we use a blanket approach of trying to, you know, um, vaccinate dogs or neuter them. So basically, a program that acts at, that, acts on them to to, of course, neuter them but vaccinate them and to prevent any health risks that are there. And I think that from these conversations and from my experiences, these are very urban in nature these health scares or these disease risks, especially from dogs, I did not see them in rural settings, I haven't seen them growing up in rural settings and even in my field experiences I haven't. There isn't such a scare, even when there are, you know, minor disease outbreaks.
Rashmi Singh Rana:So, for instance, in one of the a couple of villages villages that have become towns now in my field site in Kelong, about two years back in 2022, in the winters of 2022, there was an outbreak of what they later found out was a canine distemper. There was an outbreak of this disease among the free living dogs there and a lot of dogs died. There were a lot bigger population of dogs than there are today and a lot of dogs died. Implementation, or this care of, you know, having the dogs evacuated, or killing the dogs or having them, getting them vaccinated, or conducting these abc programs so this concept of these disease outbreak and them being harmful agents and something they need to be eliminated, eradicated at all, it's not common, or is I didn't see it being present in rural spaces. So I see these as a very urban idea, very modern, urbanized ideas that have been sort of now become really prominent in even Indian urban space.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Such a valuable point because I do think geography, or geographies, did emerge throughout the season as a key theme, not just in terms of the rural-urban divide, so how different dogs manage you know, whether it's the kind of guardian dogs who are managing very rural spaces or rural villages and towns, versus urban dogs, but also just the different spaces within cities, right, how that the home becoming something of a political space you know thinking about pet dogs as captive dogs, as something political but also the street became a space that came up often throughout the course of the season and, priya, of course, with you also the marketplace, that there's a geography to thinking about these dog relations. But also importantly, which I didn't know, as you say, that these kind of health scares are. Perhaps this is a very urban phenomenon, urban response to try and like control dogs in these ways.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :These health scares get a lot of media attention, become prominent in public debates. Hates in that, like there is this idea of this is what the public wants, or like the public is scared of uh, these uh like diseases of dogs and the public does not want dogs there, or the public wants dogs there, the public hates dogs, or public loves dogs. So these publics are represented in media and then you have somebody speaking on behalf of the public. But yeah, in actuality, when we talk about public and that comes from the idea of like what Melanie Rock and Gwendolyn Blue were talking about there are these like material interactions that happen on an everyday basis, through which publics are formed on an everyday basis, through which publics are formed on an everyday basis in these shared spaces. And then, yeah, how Claudia were talking about, when we talk about these sharing of spaces as collectives, it's not always harmonious and there is inherent risk involved in it. And sharing space with another human being also, we don't know what another human being will do, like you know, like in shared spaces, but there is kind of an obligation to share as being, like you know, living beings or sentient beings, all part of this social space, if you want to say so, if I think of like in my field work in the marketplace, almost everyone I talked to, everyone knew there was risk in being with these free roaming dogs on the street.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :People did not really talk about rabies, but when I used to push them they used to talk about, they used to call it venom. They used to say these dogs have venom in their mouth and if they bite us we will have to get an injection. So people had this idea that there is risk. But it was interesting to see that dogs were not just looked at as carriers of disease, but they were more than that. People did not automatically go on demonizing the dogs, but they actually understood that why would these dogs bite if we don't do anything? And they would differentiate between different dogs and they would have their own management ways. Or observing that, oh, that dog has become mad, they would say, and then that dog would be driven off. But it won't be a blanket approach, as Rashmi mentioned, for all the. So there would be a case-by-case basis and an individual understanding, contextual understanding.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:When you started speaking then you were like the public, like dogs, or the public don't like dogs, and I thought, well, these sentiments are often also just so human-focused, right? So it's a matter of like. What would the dogs want in this situation Isn't even like on the register of having the conversation. But also, when you were speaking there about health, something I thought that was quite valuable over the course of the season was the disruption of health as only being something that is to do with sickness. Right, so, to have like a body that is sick, whether it's a disease, and that's what health is. Health is preventing a disease. No, I think health was presented in a much more complex way by the guests. So there was this idea of behavioral health, psychological health, social health. It was a much more, as you said, contextual and complicated and varied way of understanding dogs' health. So not just saying, oh, dogs are getting sick with rabies, or dogs have this disease, so they're contextual and complicated and varied way of understanding dog's health. So not just saying, oh, dogs are getting sick with rabies, or dogs have this disease, so they're dying, but also are dogs able to? How different dogs are able to express their desires and their wants their desire to search for food, for example, and how, depending on the societies different dogs are in, they have different kind of constraints on their ability to be socially or behaviorally healthy.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Based on our conversation so far and correct me if I'm wrong, but some of the key themes that have emerged in the season are one, and I think this has come up in every season of the Animal Turn is a question of scale. Are we talking about individuals, collectives, species, and how, once you start to think across these different categorizations, things get a lot more complicated. Two, as you mentioned, priya, the idea of beyond anthropocentric understandings of health. That once we start to think outside of the human or without the human, health becomes a lot more political, a lot more complex. Three, that geography and space matters, so, aka context as well, that we need to think about where these relationships are happening. That if you want to really understand multi-species health, you need to look at where they are happening and who is involved.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:As Rashmi mentioned, the stakeholders. And then I think what we've just started touching on now is the significance and the importance of discourse. How health is spoken about and how the animals involved are spoken about has both imaginative and material impacts. What other key themes do you think there were? Has there been something I've missed there?
Rashmi Singh Rana:Oh yeah, so this was from actually Priya's highlight on where he was speaking about being either in our research with other animals, with non-humans, our roles as passive observers, as we are trained to, to be passive observers in our data collection methods, versus being a responsive researcher.
Rashmi Singh Rana:I think that was. I think that really spoke to me, because even I was having these you know ethical concerns and dilemmas around how do I work with dogs who I see injured. For instance, when I saw a dog that was, I knew was mauled by a wolf, I couldn't also there wasn't any dispensary or for me to get medicines from nearby but there was nothing that I could do about it and I was also concerned if I should do anything about it, because it's, you know, sort of natural that in in this multi-species space there's been an interaction between the dogs and the wolves and this time the dog has suffered and it and suffered quite gravely. And when do I intervene and should I intervene as a researcher? So those ethical questions as researchers also sort of I mean it put me thinking about how.
Rashmi Singh Rana:I need to conduct in such spaces and I think, as researchers studying animals, we need to be very cognizant and reflective of that from time to time throughout journeys in our research.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I actually think that might have been a bit of an underdeveloped theme throughout the season where, you know I could have maybe probed guests a little bit more on their methods and how they interact when they encounter, you know, do they engage in activist practices, do they intervene when they observe? You know, I definitely spoke with you and Priya a lot more about this because we were talking about your field notes. But this, I think, is perhaps I mean, the one person who was on the show who obviously spoke about methods not his own methods but the methods of someone else was Matthew Adams talking about Pavlov and Pavlov's dogs, and what I really appreciated in that highlight of Priya's was the juxtaposition of different research spaces, right. So we often tend to think about the ethics and there are ethical protocols that have been designed for how to research animals. Again, I think they're deficient and they're just designed to like help an industry that tests on animals, but they exist.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:At least the number of kind of guidelines that exist for doing multi-species ethnography out there are emerging, they're coming up more and more, but they're definitely not as mainstream or as legitimized. And I think you raise a very important point here that there are ethical considerations and they don't always have easy answers right, especially if you're trying to understand some of these murky dog relationships like death. One of the key things that came up with Jessica was I asked her do we know anything about the cultural responses of dogs or the social responses of dogs to death? And she was like no, nothing. We have very little in the way of observations or understandings of how dogs die when they want to die by themselves.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I have very contextual insight Again. Yeah, I won't say I can generalize these, but I can talk about just this one dog, kammo, who died because of Parvo in the marketplace and I could not do anything for her. Basically there were no real veterinary services that were there and I even asked people if they would do anything and most people would just try to make her more comfortable in her process of dying, but they wouldn't go out of their way to take her to the veterinary hospital, which was like an hour away. So we had to hire a car go.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :For the villagers it was not really something that mattered to them that much, but for me the process of watching her die was quite painful but quite interesting also to see what she wanted and how she wanted to die, because there were good days and there were bad days to die. Because, yeah, there were good days and there were bad days. There were good days when there, when she would be more active and she would walk around and drink and eat more, and then there were bad days when she would not be able to move around much and she would be heaving and, uh, like breathing very heavily. So it was on those days it was more difficult to just sit by her side.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And when she died, did you see her die? Did she like go off into a specific place, or did you just find her dead one day? How did that happen?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :So when I found out that she died, she used to sleep at night on this balcony of this uh like building, like where uh there was this uh lady and her daughter who used to like care for her sometimes, like she used to uh just like go there because it was publicly accessible stairway so she could easily go up to their balcony and sleep there on cold winter nights. And yeah, they had put down some jute sacks for her to sleep. And they told me that she had died and I asked them where she was, because she wasn't there in her usual place, that balcony space. So they told me that she actually went to the terrace and she died there.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :So she, I can just imagine like it must have taken her a lot of strength to make her way to the terrace, to be by herself, and then she passed away. So I found her at the back in the terrace. So, um, yeah, and the stairway also like she had to go up. I don't know why she went up, because there was no food or anything. I sometimes saw her there with other dogs, like just playing around, but I did not know if she had any particular attachment to that place.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But yeah, she went to the terrace today.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Rashmi go ahead. Yeah, so I mean that's a very good question and, um, I mean I've been with dogs around me, free living dogs around the areas where I've lived, and somehow I don't think I've ever seen a dead dog, unless the dog has been hit by a vehicle, if there's been an accident, I haven't seen a dog die naturally so, and although I've heard stories of dogs not of dogs going away from their usual places to die because they know they're going to die they don't die in the same place. I don't know how true that is, but I've definitely not seen a dog die Even old dogs die of natural death or seeing their bodies in the vicinity. I've just seen dogs disappear or not return, but I never know the reasons why.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Death is a fascinating I mean again with talking about Jessica the idea that we often focus health. When we have conversations about health, we tend to focus on life and the like prolonging of life and a key takeaway for me with talking to Jessica was also kind of how to die well and how to respect the ways in which others want to die, whether that's human, others or other animals. But also I just I find it really interesting that we know so much, for example, about how elephants die, but very little bit about how dogs die or how elephants have crafted very specific social responses. Now, this might have to do with the fact that elephants have very different social setups to that of dogs. They have a much more kind of structured society than what dogs do. Dogs tend towards more loose connections, so this might be one of the reasons why it's been such a difficult thing to observe.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But also, as you mentioned, there's some sort of urban dynamics going on here, right, like it might also be that waste removal kicks in. You know there's some sort of urban dynamics going on here, right? It might also be that waste removal kicks in. Where there's a dead dog, waste removal comes and the dog whether that's waste removal by predation leopards coming into cities seeing sick dogs or slow dogs and predating on them or actual municipal waste removal where once there's a dead animal depending on the city you're in people are pretty quick to remove them again for fear of disease. Somehow a dead animal body is a diseased body. So, yeah, I think that kind of tension between life and death is perhaps another key theme.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And related to this, something that hasn't come up in a grad review before, which I think is a cool theme to maybe unpack with the two of you, is how evolution played a role in this conversation about multispecies health. It came up several times in interviews about the tension between, I guess, evolution and scientific discourse, as well as evolution and domestication. So evolution and health, which it wouldn't be something I would have jumped to to thinking about how evolution shapes health. But did you guys pick up on that as well? That evolution was a theme that emerged over the course of the season Priya.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yeah, if you think about, in evolutionary terms, the entangled histories of humans and dogs and how we have co-evolved with each other, I guess that definitely shapes both of our lives and how we understand each other and each other's health.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Also, if you think about what Mariam talked about species stories also, like the domestication of dogs and them being evolved as like man's best friend, I think like, yeah, that's like a naturalized process, but yeah, that's something that takes work and that's like a socialized, ongoing everyday process that you do with every dog.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Uh, so, but then there's also these um, like larger like understandings of uh, like function, like in evolution. I think like, if you think of it in terms of behavioral ecologists, uh, there's a lot of uh understanding of behavior in terms of function and not intention, uh, because you always supplant intention with function, because if you talk about intention, then yeah, that's a murky waters. You can't really know what the dog's thinking uh, other than, yeah, what behaviorally, what might be the function of a particular uh like behavior? Uh, so I think it's a, it's an epistemic frame through which you can try to understand health and our health needs could have developed that way. But I think, yeah, it can be supplemented with other measures also. I think I think I lost my train of thought there no, no, I think.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean I think you're talking maybe at again two different levels here how evolution as a discourse is mobilized to naturalize dogs as being man's best friend, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, how this could have potentially grave negative health consequences for dogs. Right, if dogs are naturalized as being designed or the natural end product of their long-term relationship with humans is somehow that they'll become pets, this has really negative potential health consequences for them, including losing if they're being kept as pets their desires to freely roam, for example, or their desire to hunt. And, yeah, just how some of these desires are social. I don't think I want to speak in like predetermined ways.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:There are things that different dogs and different people want to do because of the societies and cultures we grew up in, but there are also kind of biological and physical needs. As a canine, dogs have particular things that they need to do to be psychologically healthy, right. This again, the conversation with Mariam and with Jessica really just drove home to me that a lot of dogs, particularly pet dogs, are struggling for a lot of psychological reasons, where you might think of street dogs as struggling for a variety of, let's say, material or physical reasons access to food, access to cars I mean being hit by cars. So yeah, I'm not an evolutionary biologist myself, but there was something there. It came up a good couple of times.
Rashmi Singh Rana:For me.
Rashmi Singh Rana:What I took from it was that and I'm mainly reiterating here that what becomes problematic is the naturalization and promotion and pushing of one kind of dog-human relationship which is where dogs and humans are together.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Dogs are with humans in their homes, so pet dogs, so just that one association, one kind of association of dogs and humans being propagated, which is not natural in the way that it has to be formed and has to be worked on throughout the lives of a pet dog and a human.
Rashmi Singh Rana:So I think that becomes sort of for me that is problematic, just pushing forward of that one narrative, whereas they are, at least as from historical evolution point of view, there are different kinds of relations, and I think you do talk about this in the episode with Hiral, where you say their associations like they were sled dogs or they were their guard dogs, or they are hunting dogs, and then what these different associations mean for dogs' health, not just from the point of view of disease but also from the point of view of their emotional and social needs. You know, comparing between pet dogs and dogs that are free living or free roaming, or guardian dogs who get to roam around, or other hunter dogs who get to roam around and the implications these relations will have on their social, emotional, mental health as well. So I think, yeah, it becomes problematic when one kind of relationship is propagated forward.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I hear you like there's one way to be dog, and it's become normative almost, that the way to be dog is to be in a home. Dogs should be in people's homes, uh, and it can be quite subversive one when you point out that most of the world's dogs are not in people's homes, um, but also that, uh, it might not be in their best interests. For some of them it might be, uh, but for many others it might not be yeah, just to add to what both of you were saying.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I just had an anecdote to share. Uh, so I think there was a harvard study that came out about what do dogs dream about, and it said that they dream about their owners. And I I saw that study after, like coming back from field work and during field work, one of the shopkeepers who used to take care of some of the dogs in the marketplace one day he said he told me that do you know? These dogs dream also, and I asked him what do these dogs dream of? And he said just of what would they dream of? They dream of chicken legs and play fighting with other dogs. That's what they dream of.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:They dream about what they do in their lives.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yeah, so it was quite interesting that these three dogs like in that their dreams were not revolving around humans, but they were revolving around, like their playmates and their food. And then there was also interesting, like what you were talking about, the psychological health of pet dogs. There was this dog, moti, who used to run away every day from his home to the market and come and play with the dogs there. And I asked the owner, like why do you think the moti runs every day? So he said what to do? Like he gets bored every day at home, there's no one to play with him and he has friends here in the market, so he comes every day but he comes back. Also he knows where to sleep. But, yeah, what to do? Like we'll also do the same, like if we're in the same place. So the dogs, yeah, they might have like more needs than we might think, just being inside a home and just being fed, like you know, us giving them all the attention.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And there might be more complicated ways for dogs to exist in our societies than simply being in our homes or in the streets, right, so there might be. Again, depending on the personality of the dog and their own experiences. There might be some dogs that just want to create dog packs and live their lives and create their own, but there might be other dogs who want to create loose relationships with families. There's more than enough evidence that that's the case. They'll come back to a particular home or store again and they'll maintain those relationships, maybe sometimes coming inside, but having the autonomy and freedom to leave when they want to leave is very different to a pet relationship where I think they're asked to stay inside and live according to our rules pee when we say they should pee, poo when we say they should poo. And let's not say that there are not positives in this relationship as well. Right that there aren't some people that maybe take their pet dogs to explore and expand and live, you know, go on multi-day hikes with them and expose their dogs to a variety of different experiences. So I think there is, as Rashmi was saying, there are, many ways to be dog, but we do have to kind of look at some of these relationships structurally as well, right, but we do have to kind of look at some of these relationships structurally as well, right, like how are our policies, our practices, our infrastructure catering to or hampering ways in which dogs can be well or live a good life? Right, and I think there are different pressures for street dogs to that of pet dogs, but in some ways they're also they have, similar demands on us that I think are just not being reflected in our conversations about health.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Before we switch to your quotes, we've got a little bit of time now to maybe just touch on gaps or conflicts that you think emerged across the different episodes. So do you think there were any areas where you know maybe these ideas were conflicting or contradictory, or do you think there were any gaps? You know things that should have been in the season? So, for example, rashmi, you mentioned the methods earlier and I think that I certainly you guys with your animal highlights brought a lot of methodological questions forward, but I think I could have maybe probed a little bit more with the interviewees how they understand dogs and their methods, although, that said, andita did give me a lot of really great insights into how she does a multi-species ethnography and behavioral ecology. So yeah, I put it to you. Any big tensions or gaps you think the season missed no.
Rashmi Singh Rana:It would be maybe interesting to see more contradictory views as well, I mean especially from the Indian discourses there's a lot of, even on topics around animal conservation. Somehow dogs are not part of the animal conservation. Yeah, so I mean dogs are in fact pitted against the objectives of animal conservation, saying that dogs are harming animals by animals they mean, you know, wild animals or animals that are not tolerant of humans. So I think having so again. Then there are different discourses of dogs not being inclusive and they're also very. These discourses are coming from Indian people, maybe influenced by Western ideas, but Indian academics or Indian conservation practitioners, et cetera. So having them on board I don't know if it would have it would have given a very different, contradicting, head-butting ideas and opinions.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Having different ideas is always interesting, even if you don't agree with them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think it's good to have those conversations, but even it makes me think about what Daniel was saying with regards to kangaroos. Right, I think kangaroos are an interesting parallel with thinking about dogs in India, because while kangaroos might traditionally be thought of as wild, I think in the Australian context they've also received this kind of pest status, and I was quite surprised to hear Dan say that they're often excluded from conservation practices despite being a protected species. So that just goes to show how these local dynamics or understandings can really. Coming back to what we spoke about at the beginning of this episode, that, like protection, sacrifice dimension, how political and how social, it is right that kangaroos are not included in conservation practices, or they are, but very begrudgingly and it sounds to me very similar to dogs here. One because I think dogs aren't considered or thought of as being wild, which is quite remarkable. And two, because they perhaps sometimes straddle that pest status which conservationists generally don't want to conserve or deal with right generally don't want to conserve or deal with, right?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :yeah, I think, uh, the the breadth of topics that were discussed in the season like covered a lot of really crucial aspects around multi-species health and, uh, I think, yeah, the the dynamics between conflict as well as coexistence that is inherent in multi-species cohabitation and collectives.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :That's something that's a key takeaway that comes up, like in all of the episodes that, yeah, you can't romanticize the idea of co-living with other beings, like even living with other humans. Free living and free will to other humans is difficult, let alone like other species, like other beings whose internal dynamics we don't always know, or decolonial thought about health and what it means to live with other beings, because I think that's a key thing to think about if we're thinking about health in these terms, when we're trying to build these collective ideas of health, not just like human exceptionalist ideas or just limiting or just contesting the boundaries or where our moral circle, to what extent we can extend it to whoever, wherever, like sentience, where do you place borders? That's an interesting question in itself, but I think the perspective of some indigenous or more traditional ecological knowledges and ideas.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :That would, I think, enrich discussion a lot.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean both of you are saying, I think, really fascinating thing. I mean, more voices always adds to the complexity of the conversation, whether those are voices that are dissenting or just different right so that provide a different viewpoint on health. I know that Krithika did. I asked in that first episode kind of to define decolonial and that decolonial can be a lot more expansive and broad, you know, and that maybe possibly requires its own kind of episode or season to really just unpack what do we mean when we say this, because sometimes words like that get bantied about without really, I think, grappling what's the difference between colonial or decolonial or post-colonial. These are also extremely political terms. But I do think Oswaldo also provided some insights into indigenous thoughts and practices here, right, the work that he does with the network in Brazil with regards to thinking with indigenous, with the network in Brazil with regards to thinking with indigenous voices and ideas, resisting, you know, capitalist tendencies of objectifying animals as commodities and as products. So I think that did, there was glimmers of it in the season. But I hear you, there's definitely space to maybe think and this has been a critique that's come up, I think, several times in the grad reviews is that there is more space for varied views, perhaps outside of mainstream animal studies. So I hear you on that. And, just as an aside, it's interesting how many Cs have come up. So again, I just listened, re-listened to Jessica's episode this morning, which is why I think it's really pronounced in my mind, but right at the end of the episode she said I just listened, re-listened to Jessica's episode this morning, which is why I think it's really pronounced in my mind, but right at the end of the episode she said you know, she thinks that for living a better life with dogs, that she thinks about care, curiosity and collaboration.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right, we should foster care, we should foster curiosity and collaboration. But then, of course, I thought well, dan speaks about compassion. There's a C. We've spoken about collectives from Oswaldo and throughout the course of our conversation as well, we've spoken about conflict and coexistence, and I think that I was just like whoa, there are all of these Cs. Yeah, exactly so it's been a really fascinating season, obviously incomplete, even coupled with the biosecurity season. There's a lot more to be said about health and how we understand health, particularly from animals vantage points. Right, that seems really difficult to do. Okay, let's switch to the quotes.
Rashmi Singh Rana:My quote is from this American missionary named Robert Ikwal, who was American from origin but he was born in China and he was a missionary. He was a military officer and also an anthropologist who traversed across Tibet in 1921. So that was over 100 years ago and he documented and published a lot on the Tibetan nomadic life from the time before, you know, chinese ingression into Tibet, which was in 1949 or so. So I find his work interesting is that he has this one essay, which he is dedicated to give the account of the dogs that he had encountered during his travel in Tibet, and particularly the dogs that were with the Tibetan nomads and the role of the dogs in the Tibetan nomadic society. So it goes like the dogs play yet another role in relation to the children of the nomads To a greater degree than any other animals lambs, calves and colts. The dogs become the playmates of the children, babies just learning to crawl out of their fur and felt wrappings, tumble among puppies and their attendant mothers and find their earliest playmates among the dogs. I have seen children up to 6 and 7 years old who romped with the dogs around the tents on their hands and feet with as much ease as they walked or ran, erect and seemed indeed to communicate with their canine playmates. From that association, the child goes on caring for and mastering beasts larger and stronger than himself.
Rashmi Singh Rana:This quote ends here and then he quotes in a few paragraphs earlier. He says that the dogs help shape the behavior patterns of the children of the tents and thus influence character formation. End quote. So I really like that this ethnographer, this anthropologist from 100 years ago was able to, you know, center dogs and throughout this essay on dogs he centered the dogs and showed how, in different ways, the different roles that dogs perform and how and because of those roles, how they've in turn shaped the society of these nomads, the society of these nomads, their social privacy, building social privacy around tents, because dogs are around them and these dogs tend to be very aggressive and basically influencing their social life, influencing the social life of humans. So he centered dogs in those narratives. So that's something that was really impressive for me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And do you find that, as someone who has observed nomads moving with dogs, do you find that several of his observations still hold true today?
Rashmi Singh Rana:Somewhat. So I've worked a little with the nomadic societies that he's speaking with. So he was looking at Tibetan nomadic societies and they're similar nomads in India, in Ladakh area especially, who with families they move around the whole pasture lands and they basically they carry the entire homes from one area to another camp in one places. So I've not spent too much time with them so I don't know a lot about them. I've looked at the people I work with are shepherds who individually go and take their livestock but their families might still be, you know, in. But yeah, there's a lot of, um, still a lot of attention in the dogs that, uh, they have. Like every tent will have a couple of dogs with them, you know, guarding the tent and just being around the tent and there'll be relations between the human and the dog. So quite a bit of it is still retained from my limited observations of these nomadic societies.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I cycled through portions of Mongolia and one of my, mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and one of my key memories was, of course, interactions with dogs. You know, like dogs would seemingly come from nowhere and be interested in us and then hang around for a day or two and then they would leave. Um, and yeah, it was also just kind of interesting to see how they did have. There would be a nomadic camp in the middle of, you know, the middle of what seems like nowhere, right, like you can't see any buildings for miles, but then there's a, there's a yurt and there's some dogs hanging out. Uh, obviously also with these pastoralist communities moving with them. So it's an interesting kind of set of relationships that are going on there. It's not an easy life but, as you've discussed in your highlights, there is surely something satisfying for these dogs and being able to move and engage in vast roaming expanses and play with both humans and other animals and hunting.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for that quote very, very interesting quote that Rashmi picked out and in that quote there was also talk about like relationship of children and these dogs. Yeah, and I think yeah, that's also a very important point, not just in those nomadic pastoralist societies but in general. What I also thought that this process of co-living or living together, is like a socialization or habituation process that goes both ways, both for humans and dogs. So from my understanding and what I was told during my fieldwork was that both dogs get habituated and socialized to live with humans, but humans also have to get social, like these young toddlers, to behave around dogs to respect them, to not be too rough with them or just to let the dogs like also, uh, decide what kind of touch they agree with or not and how to like understand their.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :So I think to start it young is a key thing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You see it again, folks from different cultures, different countries, different societies have different exposures to dogs and sometimes in some groups, dogs are villains and dirty and you shouldn't interact with them or they are dangerous.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But sometimes and I think people do have some folks do have legitimate fears. Right, they see a dog and they're afraid. And the tricky thing is is when you act in an afraid way like that, dogs tend to respond not always, but oftentimes and this is a kind of socialization practice of learning to be with dogs and dogs learning to be with varied responses to their presence as well. But yeah, I think we often expect dogs to adapt and change so often to what human society expects of them, without us necessarily making those same provisions and expectations, despite constantly breeding them and constantly bringing them into our societies in a variety of forms, whether that's an urban environment or a pastoralist camp. There is something to be said for figuring out what dogs need from that interaction, which is different and it's not always as unequal as I frame it here, but I do think most of the time it is. Priya, do you have your quote ready?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yep, I do have a quote. I didn't go too far off in my literature. I sticked to some of the core, like you know, conceptual literatures that I find very interesting to think with and it's funnily it's a paper that came out last year, written by my supervisor, kritika shenivas.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Perfect, we've come full circle.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :It's called Conservation Beyond Biopolitics Vulnerability and Abundance in Chennai's Nature Cultures, and I can't recommend it enough. I would say it has some very interesting ideas to think with, you can debate with it and you can contest them or you can agree with them, but yeah, really cool paper, if I say so myself. Uh, hopefully kritika is not listening to this of course she's.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:why would, why would this be a bad thing for her to listen to? You're like praising her, like hopefully she's not listening, I think it's delightful.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :She still doesn't know that I'm a fanboy, but yeah, so she states in the paper. I suggest that equitable, more-than-human futures require a reorientation towards the present as different from the conservationist emphasis on the past and future, and the recognition of variations in non-human flourishing and vulnerability as matters of care, attention and opportunity, rather than control. This means reaching beyond dominant biopolitical logics of protection, sacrifice and valuations of unworthy or worthy life. It entails respecting the agencies and resilience of already existing abundant natures, while refraining from the displacement of and reallowing space often material for the autonomy of diminishing natures.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, her writing is beautiful and I think it really is so important. It was something that didn't come up with Dan was how conservation I mean he spoke about protectionism and baselines, but a lot of that is a historical. It's kind of holding in tension what species we used to have and what numbers with what we hope in the future. But I think what your quote drives home here is just actually taking stock and being cognizant of who exists now and how practices today impact them in different ways. I too am a fan boy of Krithika's, so I'm very, very happy that you picked that quote.
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah, no, I think that it really really beautifully encapsulates how nature plays out, at least in urban spaces. And oftentimes, growing up and even till very recently, we, our ideas of nature, are very, very, um, um, not attached uh with. Uh, yeah, detached, yeah, yeah, detached from human spaces. And you look at nature, that's something away from humans and in pristine forests or pastures or something.
Rashmi Singh Rana:But I think she's brought upon crucial ideas around looking at nature in our everyday being, especially in urban spaces, and really forced to look at things that are part of the human commune or in human spaces as also nature. And I think that's where we sort of label dogs as not wild. It is because of their inherent or their associations with humans, because of whatever co-evolutionary history there is them being around human spaces and because of their proclivity or their association and affinity for humans. They are not treated as, you know, animals or as not treated as wild animals would, and they are not afforded the same kinds of rights and spaces to be and the and ways to control them and manage them and reduce them, when we don't apply these same rules for other animals that are, you know, away from humans in forests or non-human spaces.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, really beautifully said, I think, and of course it reminds me I had her on the show not too long ago to talk about re-animalization and how there's this idea not only to expect animals to become more human or adapt more to be human spaces, but actually to re-animalize what it means to be human and what it means to have space. And this requires and I've mentioned risk a couple of times. This requires accepting more risk that perhaps to have healthy multi-species collectives as well as multi-species health entails a better redistribution of both protection, sure, but also of risk. It can't always just be there, needs to be more risk distributed, and this includes risk to different human groups.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yeah, just to add to that, yeah, as you mentioned, like as Rashmi mentioned, that there's this distancing of, like protected natures from quote unquote, like human spaces, and you also mentioned there is, there is this like idea of risk inherent in living with other non-humans. Uh, it's, it's key to also emphasize here that, yeah, when we talk about human also, humans are a differentiated community. Community like, they're like social difference. So when we talk about, for example, protecting these more risky beings like leopards or elephants or wolves, who, right, rightfully, should have, like you know, their, like you know their habitats protected, but we expect more like rural people or, like you know, people like who live in the forest, fringe villages, to be okay with living with these animals, while we can't live with, like mice or, like you know, pigeons or girls here in um edinburgh, foxes, dogs uh, we are not fine with living with these like less risky, I would say still risky, still can, uh, like you know, impart disease, but we find it so problematic to live with them.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :But we expect to displace this conservation to, like other, more already marginalized human groups. So, redistribution of risk, it's not to say that, oh, we need to marginalize already marginalized human groups, but, yeah, there needs to be like a differentiation of both, like you know, in human communities not, it's not a monolith and like inclusion of equity and social justice within human communities as well as non-human community. So it's a very expansive idea and I think it's really important to bring that home 100%.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And also, as Waldo mentioned, in that idea of marginalized multi-species collectives, is how marginalizations work with one another. Right, so you've got a marginalization, let's say, of elephant populations in India, who are also just trying to survive. Right, but they are destroying crops and moving through spaces as different spaces become increasingly urbanized and built up. But the folks living at these fringes are also often marginalized and their marginalizations influence and impact one another. But who is making the policy decisions to build up in places? Who is benefiting from the farming most versus the tourism that's taken from the elephants? So there is an unequal distribution of burdens and benefits, right, just a classic political economy conception here. And I think you make a valuable point of just considering the risks in your own environment and not saying that you have to take on and agree and embrace all risk. I don't know if we would do that, but perhaps just being okay with having a little bit more risk and maybe finding ways for that to be, I don't know, this kind of pursuit of a completely sanitized life.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I don't think it's helping anyone. Really. I think, yeah, there definitely has to be management of risk. It's not to say that, oh, like you know, we need to just embrace all risk without, like you know, being able to have the opportunity to self-preserve oneself or to like protect ourselves or manage risk, but rather than like very easily going towards like more destructive ways of going towards total elimination or, you know, killing should not be the first option on the table, it's just to say that, but there might be more, better ways of managing risk, and that's why it's important to also look at, like, how people have, like you know, human communities have always managed, like outside of these urban environments.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :These urban environments are quite a recent phenomenon in history and humans have been living beside, like you know, non-human communities for such a long time and they have been managing risk. It's not like they don't manage risk in their surroundings and that they don't have the traditional ways of co-living and understandings of risk and who bears the burden of what kind of risk, but like, we need to learn of risk, but like we need to learn. And, again, the onus of responsibility in these cases should be first on the elites in the urban areas, because they are the ones like who. For them, it's very easily easy to, for us to, and I would say, like I'm also one of the urban people like that, we can insulate ourselves very easily. Talk about insulating ourselves from risk while displacing risk to other, more marginalized people.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean 100%, and I think it's no secret that I think cities are a key area where we need to focus on, because I think a lot of these relations have been obfuscated depending on the city you're in. There are some up front, but just the the consumption in cities alone is connected to massive farming practices that happen outside of cities that impact a variety of ecologies, both including the people and animals in those ecologies. Cities emanate more light pollution and air pollution than than other spaces. Right, so they have a. There is a stake to be said here with regards to how much risk urbanites should be willing to take on for the benefits they get for being in the city, but, like you say, those benefits are not equally distributed.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, but we're going to need to start wrapping up. This is, of course, always a really interesting conversation. Thank you both of you for joining me on the show While we say goodbye here. Perhaps. I know you're both still working on your PhDs, so let us know if there's anything else you're currently working on and if people want to get in touch with you about your work, how might be the best way to do that?
Rashmi Singh Rana:Yeah, I'm just working on a few, a couple of papers from the work that I've been doing so far and emanating from that, I think I'll be.
Rashmi Singh Rana:I'm co-organizing a symposium at the ICCB, which is International Congress for Conservation Biology yeah, conservation Biology which is in Brisbane this year in June. So I'm organizing a symposium on basically titled Reimagining Domestic Dogs in Socio-Ecological Systems Wow, so we're bringing in the symposium only allows four talks so I will give one of the talks but the other talks would be on different roles that domestic dogs have in socio-ecological systems. So there are a couple of talks from the Indian-Himalayanological system. So there are a couple of talks from the Indian Himalayan region and then there are a couple of talks from Australia itself on dingoes, on camp dogs and the nativeness of dingoes and the debate around that. So hopefully the symposium will allow these conversations about the basically discussions around the different socio-ecological effects of the domestic dogs, be it antagonistic effects or positive, uh, facilitative or mutualistic effects that they have, and try to have some discussions about how we could make, basically try to foster, an environment of safe cohabitation and coexistence. So hopefully then there will be a report or a white paper based on those discussions.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Is it open for attendance or is it a closed symposium?
Rashmi Singh Rana:It's an open one. You have to register for it. You can register for the symposium and then you can attend. It's going to happen in Brisbane this year.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Is it only in person, or is there a virtual option as well?
Rashmi Singh Rana:I am not sure if there's any virtual one but if there is any I'll let you know, okay, sounds good, priya, any last words?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :just that I'll be busy in the coming months trying to finish up my PhD writing. So, yeah, I'm just yeah in the thick of writing and finishing up my chapters, trying to think through a lot of concepts. If people would like to get in touch with me and, yeah, would like to discuss any ideas about multi-species cohabitation or human animalanimal relations or dogs in general would be are interested in my work and would want to collaborate, yeah, I would be happy to discuss it further and yeah, my contacts would be in found at the ROAND's website. That's the best way to get get in touch with me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wonderful. Thank you, both of you, for all of the work you've done this season with the animal highlights I've learned a great deal from you and for helping me kind of think through and unpack this season here in the Grad Review. Thank you, thank you so much for your work. It's been a pleasure working with you. All right, folks. So we've reached the end of season seven, where we've been talking all about animals and multi-species health. Just a reminder to please head over to where you listen to podcasts, whether it's Podchaser or Spotify or iTunes it is iTunes, yeah, itunes and leave a review for the show. That would really be fantastic and wonderful and I thank you, and I thank you and I give you kisses and smooches and thank you so much. Thank you also to Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple, for being a longtime sponsor of the show. Make sure you go and check out their website to see the amazing work they are doing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you to the Remaking One Health Indies Project, led by the wonderful Krithikas Rinavasan, for sponsoring this season. It's really been remarkable delving into and thinking about multi-species health. Thank you also to the Phoenix Zones Initiative, which further contributed to two other episodes in this season. Thank you. Thank you so much, sponsors, for helping to make this work possible, and thank you also, listeners and supporters who have headed over to our merch store and supported us that way. It really does help us keep afloat. Thank you to Priyashnu Thapliel and Rashmi Singh Rana for being wonderful guests on the show today. Thank you also for your amazing work with the Animal Highlights. It's been wonderful working with you over the course of the season. Thank you to Jeremy John for the logo, gordon Clark for the bed music and Rebecca Shen for her design work. This episode was produced, edited and hosted by myself. This is the Animal Tone with me, claudia Hertenfelder.
Rashmi Singh Rana:For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
