Dog (Animal)
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 1861892039
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book unravels the debate about whether dogs are descended from wolves, and moves on to deal with canines in mythology, religion and health, dog cults in ancient and medieval civilizations as disparate as Alaska, Greece, Peru and Persia, and traces correspondences between the histories of dogs in the Far East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Dog also examines the relatively recent phenomenon of dog breeding and the invention of species, as well as the canine’s role in science fact and fiction; from Laika, the first astronaut, and Pavlov’s famous conditioned dogs, through to science fiction novels and cult films such as A Boy and his Dog.
Susan McHugh shows how dogs today contribute to human lives in a huge number of ways, not only as pets and guide dogs but also as sources of food in Asia, entertainment workers, and scientific and religious objects. Dog reveals how we have shaped these animals over the millennia, and in turn, how dogs have shaped us.
Breed proponents argue compellingly that the creation or rather ‘preservation’ of dog breeds and their regulation through breed societies and dog shows have promoted popular interest in dogs. Moreover, their work in breed societies often includes helping to educate pet owners about how to care for their dogs.3 Especially in recent years, these groups have also provided charitable services that promote the health, recovery and rescue of dogs, and even people. And they have fostered productive
history of breed, such new awareness of interdependence emerged only in the twentieth century, and the chapters that follow develop the more mixed conditions of their emergence. Like all other significant parts of human society, human–dog relationships are thus affected by massive political and economic shifts, so breed histories, which involve long associations of canine with human types, can be read as indicators of the effects of such changes within and across cultures. But, as the examples
reason to visit me, she tells her husband, I cannot tell him not to visit. But the prolonging of this failed intimacy quietly turns ugly when, on one of Hisae’s pointless visits, they encounter a pregnant brown dog in Chizuko’s neighbourhood. Whereas she takes pity on the dog, Hisae makes a strange comparison between puppies and severed heads, intimating violence against female dog and human alike. Viewed by a dog, the scene that unfolds looks all the more scary because nothing further happens;
social structure as a foundation, a context in which many more are exploited. Here the dogs are not simply substitutes (metaphors) but more complexly connections (metonyms) to this foundation. An early example of this kind of narrative is Charlie Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918), a film in which the Little Tramp pairs up with a bitch named Scraps, much to their mutual benefit. He saves her from other dogs; she leads him to a fortune; and, like Benji’s, their story ends happily off the streets in a
transformations,26 it focuses on how xenotransplantation (the exchange of body parts across species lines) fails to fulfil the eugenic promises of biological uplift through science. Seen as symbolic of the average citizen, the story of Sharik, tormented before, during and after the surgeries, exemplifies the broader failings of the Soviet experiment. So threatening was this metaphorical indictment of the political consequences of scientific authoritarianism that the novel was not published in the