Conclusion: Familiaris

Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog, is a subspecies of Canis lupus, the gray wolf. In other words, wolves and dogs are not distinct species.

What are we to make of this? What have we made of this? What will we make?

“Easy certainty undermines what matters most in the mutuality of adaptation between humans and dogs,” Dayan writes.1 She is speaking about mutual regard and openness, what she and Haraway both call “respect.” For these two thinkers, dog–human relationships provide a delicious, murky uncertainty, the one that accompanies taking someone seriously as a subject with an inner life of their own: an other person. Without this, we have nothing. In her critique of Derrida in When Species Meet, Haraway faults Derrida for not being interested in the cat’s inner life, not really. “He came right to the edge of respect,” she writes, but “failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him.”2

Simple obligation of companion species, what matters most in the mutuality of adaptation—these are the guiding frameworks for thinking about dogs in recent years, ones that focus on intimacy, relation, reciprocity, and ethics. But today we are witnessing the emergence of a different paradigm for understanding the role of dogs in our lives, one grounded in the extreme vulnerability of our social selves. Dogs are no longer simply our best friends in the private, domestic sphere—or rather, what was once the private, domestic sphere is quickly becoming the stuff of public life, discourse, and politics, right down to an obsession with uncovering the truth about the history of domestication—for dogs and humans alike, as we confront our shared captivity and exclusion from the “state of nature.” At stake is something other than ethics, or relations between individuals—it’s the social itself in a better state, a healed state.

“What matters most” between dogs and humans is thus not a constant, or a fact that can be excavated in the course of evolutionary-biological or paleoanthropological discoveries and put on display in a museum of natural history. “What matters most” undergoes change as the nature of social life undergoes change. These changes are reflected in the changes in dog-owner culture.

We have known for a while that the desire for certainty in a relationship with another being is a sort of category mistake. And (at least) the past two decades of theory have taught us that it comes at a price: the foreclosure of possibility. But when we come to see that desire as part of a much broader extractive process, the error becomes more than epistemological—looking for certainty where none is possible—and even more than ethical—turning away from otherness, openness, or the generative power of “the open.” It becomes an aesthetic or libidinal issue, verging on cathexis, a fixation that’s not quite appropriate to the situation. And when it is reflected in and indeed shapes and even creates practices—in this case, the practices that make up dog ownership—it becomes real, creating the very material reality that is subject to the mutual adaptive process, down to the very chemistry of feelings. On all sides.

“Ah, but one is never useless to his dog,” John Mclaughlin writes.3 No wonder there are such experiences of intensity and meaning between people and dogs, as both species coevolve in direct response to the pressure of increasing meaninglessness, feelings of uselessness, and relational bankruptcy.

As owners, we are pushing each other and ourselves to “do better” in this form of relation, which for many of us is the relation par excellence, the ethical encounter stripped down to its essence. All of that may be true—and it is certainly true that we should do better—but it’s important to realize and not forget that this demand unfolds not in a vacuum but under the pressure of social scarcity.

The goal, then, is not just to do better in these conditions but to do differently, to allow new paradigms to emerge from life with dogs. To let our dogs help us to change.

“Now let’s go further,” Dayan writes. She invites us to think again about dogs, but in ways that don’t project from the human onto the dog. The arrow of projection should actually be reversed, she argues correctly. The neuroscience imposing human measurement frameworks and analytical tools onto dog minds has it exactly backwards: it’s dogs that actually provide “the ground for human sensibility and cognition”—or rather, it’s this extraordinary, primeval, intimately co-adaptive relationship, without which neither dogs nor humans would be what they are. Borrowing once more from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, I would name this phenomenon an assemblage, a unit whose “elements are contaminated and thus unstable; they refuse to scale up smoothly.”4 She also calls assemblages “scenes for considering livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth,” which is precisely how I am trying to frame the dyad.5

I sometimes wonder if such reimagining could answer the hunger humans seem to have for the wolf pack. Deleuze and Guattari’s fascination with the wolf pack is itself contagious, and dreamy. But it relies on a willful forgetting of the individual, when in fact, the extraordinary social capacities of wolves are what allows for the development of strongly differentiated, individual personalities. It is the very stability of social organization and the effectiveness of communication that allows individual temperaments to mature in pack societies.6 A wolf pack “works” because of the sometimes dramatic differences among its individual members, not according to the logic of some undifferentiated, undulating, interconnected mass, or Deleuze and Guattari’s other favorite, the swarm. It might be time to revisit the wolf pack as an imaginary—but to get it more right this time. “In such a terrain, even the word ‘love’ can be redeemed. And, perhaps, even the notion of ‘human.’”7 Love and human—both words that, to Dayan, are at present merely a shiny veneer on what is actually erasure, violence, and killing.

If we are indeed to do better and go further, what is at stake from here on out is this terrain, the dog-human posthuman. We can no longer afford to forget that this terrain is coextensive with the late capitalist social imaginary. No, even that phrase doesn’t get at the heart of it: more than an imaginary, it’s the most powerful and all-pervasive affective milieu in which we live, that of the very vitality that is living with others and living in an environment. And a large part of its power today comes from the fact that this vitality suffers from seemingly continuous and bottomless attrition, like a descending Shepard tone.

Dog abundance and proximity doesn’t always have nice effects. The assemblage isn’t soft and fuzzy. A study has just been announced that shows that hookworms have evolved a resistance to all of the drugs we currently have to kill them. This has happened because in greyhound racing kennels, the dogs were so susceptible to catching hookworms from each other that they were treated for them more often than would normally be called for. The resistant worms survived the treatments, and researchers predict that they will now spread to dogs outside of racing kennels. As retired racing greyhounds are adopted into homes, the worms will be passed on to other dogs, and as dogs meet other dogs in dog parks, the infection will spread. And hookworms can be passed from dogs to humans—which was not the end of the world, as long as we had drugs to fight them.8

Can dogs rescue humans from the coming end of the social—whether real or imagined? I believe they can—that perhaps only they can. But it won’t be recognizable as a rescue operation. It will require some changes in perspective on the part of humans first. Calling for respect for and openness to the other is no longer enough. Creating and adopting more and more dogs is not enough, if this does nothing to destabilize the machines of dispossession that govern our world. Even calling for more and better technologies of the essential self is not enough, if we don’t also recognize that the essence of the self is embeddedness and relationships.

Dogs have always been humans’ partners in survival, and I believe they can help us survive even the unlivable present. But this requires basic changes in infrastructure to reflect that we are ready, for the first time in human history, to own up to and prioritize our relationship with and dependency on a nonhuman animal. As long as humans are not ready to receive the help, we cannot be helped.

Can we make better relationships under the relentless pressure of social scarcity, in order to find our way out of it? Can we see the dog-human posthuman for what it really is, even as we, imagining ourselves as the intelligent observers capable of taking stock of the situation, grapple at every moment with a crisis of affect, the affective crisis that is slow death? Can we create dog-human practices that actually allow for new forms of sociality to emerge, ones we have not yet seen? With these questions—and with the concrete practical changes they imply—we are in the strange position of beholding this ancient, original posthuman assemblage as if we were seeing it for the first time.

And yet, none of this is new. The ancient Egyptian god Anubis, who guards the entrance to the underworld, is half wolf, half man—in most depictions. In some, however, he is simply an African wolf, sleek, muscular, shiny black, with narrow, almond eyes and tall, sharp ears.9 It’s commonplace to describe him as the god of the dead, as if he simply watched over dead people. In fact, Anubis is the ultimate judge of the living. He not only guards the gates of the afterlife, he attends the scales on which the human heart is weighed prior to allowing the soul to enter. Don’t be fooled by the stylized, ornate imagery. In the end, it’s a wild dog that judges the human heart.

Out there, right at the edges of our collective late-capitalist captivity, is the wilderness, their wilderness. My own dogs know that wilderness doesn’t belong to them. When I walk them at dusk, they become anxious and impatient to return home. For domestic dogs, dusk means imminent danger. For wild canids, it means the party has just begun.

One early cool, fall evening recently, I was picking mushrooms in the forest and suddenly was awash in an exquisite vocal cacophony. Coyotes. They weren’t nearby, and I’m sure they weren’t interested in me, but they were unmistakably communicating to each other across the forest through which I happened to be traipsing. I wasn’t exactly scared for myself, but I was secretly relieved that, this one time, Abba wasn’t with me, that I didn’t have to fear for her, since coyotes sometimes kill dogs. (I am always very aware of this fact when Waffles wakes me up to go out at night, his little chihuahua body the perfect size of a coyote supper.)

It’s funny that my first instinct is to fear for my dogs, when historically it was dogs that have killed wolves in wolf hunts as well as on farms, where dogs were traditionally protection against coyotes and foxes. Irish wolfhounds, the largest dogs in the world, came into existence for this very reason, to kill wolves. But my dogs seem like a whole other species from those true working dogs of old, and they stand no chance against a pack of coyotes. And coyotes are here, everywhere. Wolves are far away, in cold, brutal, spectacular national parks and protected wilderness areas, but coyotes are everywhere that humans are. Right around the bend. I never see them, but their songs—what songs!—are an unmistakable reminder that humans and canids, both wild and domestic, continue to coevolve, even now, when it feels like “everything that is to be done is as if it were already done.”10

This year there are more coyotes than usual, or maybe it’s just that they are coming closer than usual. It’s been an exceptionally wet summer, and that probably has all sort of effects on their ecosystem that I don’t even begin to understand. All I know is that it’s fall, and every day at dusk, when that exquisite chill creeps across the field and the sky is still pink, they howl over the hill up the road from my house. Sometimes they howl down the hill. Often they wake me up when it’s still dark with their howling, out there, moving freely, a pack of wild things, while my dogs snuggle even more tightly under the covers, unmistakably afraid. I am their family, not the coyotes outside. Sometimes we go to listen in the doorway. Close together, safely inside and framed by a sliding glass door, we behold the inky darkness from which they call out. They know we are here, and they certainly know we can hear them. I fantasize that they can even see our silhouettes framed by the tall rectangle of light.

What do my dogs feel when they hear coyotes? Are they encountering creatures like themselves or something else, someone alien? Helen Mort writes about her dogs chasing a badger, whom they can never catch not only because he happens to outrun them but for a more mysterious reason: “The badger belongs to a world they can’t reach, as private and inaccessible as their world is to me.”11 But we know that the distance between wild and domestic dogs is not nearly as great. On the evolutionary scale, it’s almost nothing. Who are domestic dogs in the ongoing dance between wild canids and humans, in which humans must protect their dogs from wolves, coyotes, and even foxes, the very same animals who simultaneously thrive in more or less hidden proximity to humans? As domestic dogs become our family members, are wild dogs our not-yet-domesticated companions, as sort of dog of the future, coming ever closer, more and more dependent on patterns of human life, patterns that depend on so strongly on the life force that is Canis?

One thing is for sure: they’re watching.