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Studying the Dog
Barbara Smuts, a world-renowned behavioral ecologist at the University of Michigan, was a keynote speaker at that seminal conference in Milwaukee a few years ago. Smuts began her research on primate societies, but in recent years, has devoted most of her attention to dog interaction and socialization. Her particular interest is in how dogs play, their signals and rules invented on the spot. With the assistance of her fellow researchers, she has developed an “ethogram,” or written description of each body movement and vocalization dogs use to initiate play with one another. In this complex version of game theory, the way the rules are drawn and how they change are based on complexities of canine dominance. Smuts has also found parallels between dogs and primates, which she explored in “Gestural Communication in Olive Baboons and Domestic Dogs,” published earlier this year in The Cognitive Animal (MIT Press).
Thus, the dialogue about dogs going on in academic circles is making its way into the mainstream in all sorts of ways, from courses attended and books written to extensive discussions, policy changes, traveling exhibitions and international conferences. We are abandoning old cultural prejudices and coming to a new understanding of dogs on their own terms, drawing on abstract literary stars in the sky and the waggy ones barking nearby. It is a welcome blend of theory and reality.
More to come! See Part Two, “Literary Dogs,” in the January/February 2008 issue.
Seeing Is Believing
Pets in America: Exploring the Connection Between People and Their Pets
November 19, 2007—January 21, 2008
Winterthur Museum and Gardens
Winterthur, Del.
June 16, 2008—August 18, 2008
Museum of Florida History
Tallahassee, Fla.
The Animals Among Us
Online photo exhibits and portable exhibition for loan to museums and exhibition spaces from University of Iowa
© 2007 D.L. Pughe
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USEFUL LINKS
“Animals and Society” section of American Sociological Association
Anthrozoös journal
“Articulating the Animal,” Obermann Center for Advanced Studies
Companion Animal Information and Research Center
H-net/H-animal, the online home for a growing number of scholars across disciplines who are engaged in the study of animals in human culture.
International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations
Society and Animals Journal
Society for the Study of Human Animal Relations
Articles and Books Referenced
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford University Press 2003)Vilmos Csányi, If Dogs Could Talk: Exploring the Canine Mind (North Point Press 2005)
Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (University of Illinois Press 2002); Animal (Reaktion 2004); Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (University of Illinois Press, 2004); Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 2006)
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press 2003); When Species Meet/Posthumanities (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming December 2007)
Teresa Mangum, “Dog Years, Human Fears,” in Representing Animals, Nigel Rothfels, ed. (Indiana University Press 2002); “Narrative Dominion, or, the Animals Write Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts,” in Volume 5: Animals in the Age of Empire (1800–1920) of A Cultural History of Animals (6 vols). Kathleen Kete, ed. (Berg Publishers 2007); “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” in Victorian Animal Dreams. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, eds. (forthcoming Ashgate Press 2007)
Dr. Gail F. Melson, Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children (Harvard University Press, 2001)
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature (forthcoming Ashgate Press 2007)
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (Harvard University Press 1987)
Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Indiana University Press 2002)
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (Harper Perennial, 1975, 2001); Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Longman Higher Education, 1976); “Heavy Petting” in Nerve (2001);In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave (Blackwell 2005)
Barbara Smuts, “Gestural Communication in Olive Baboons and Domestic Dogs,” in The Cognitive Animal (MIT Press 2007).
Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies (University of Minnesota Press 2003); Animal Rites (University of Chicago Press 2003)
This article first appeared in The Bark, Issue 45, Nov/Dec 2007
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