Dog dimensions

Some observations from being a stand-in dog owner for three weeks:

1) The dog as the victor in a very lucrative dyad
The pet dog, as my good friend Mike (the dog's real owner) pointed out, is absolutely superior to man in evolutionary survival terms. Through human history, it has evolved into a perfect symbiosis with its owners; thriving by their side as a perfect companion (if you want to be nice) or parasite (if you want to be cruel). It forms a nice dyad with its human master, a dyad where the dog in fact comes out as the winning part in most scenarios:
In times of peace and prosperity, it lives freely off the sustenance provided in full by its loving owners. In times of unrest or crisis — or in that truly nightmarish scenario outlined by Alan Weisman that gives the most radical meaning of the word post-human — that is, in a future world where humanity simply has extinguished itself, many breeds of dog would surely survive. In this scenario they are winners to, eating from rubbish bins and hunting in flocks. An ingenious animal, isn’t it?

2) The specific human-doglead-dog entity
Another Mike, British sociologist Mike Michael who specializes the complexities of agency and how everyday life is mediated by technology, devotes one of his chapters to this fascinating dyad of the dog and its owner.
The dog, like other pets, is an odd hybrid of subject and object, he says. And when performing together, the animal–human come to comprise an agential unit. The dog's action becomes determined by its owner, and vice versa. The ‘right-acting’ dog only becomes so thanks to how well it is raised and how it becomes judged in the eyes of its surrounding humans; the actions of the owner can easily be judged depending on what the dog suddenly starts doing during that quiet walk in the park.
The dog-lead is especially significant here, Michael argues, since it provokes questions like: Who is the user — human or dog? Who is configured, and where is the morality embodied — in the animal, the technological artefact or the human?
The dog-lead becomes a channel or conduit of tactile, kinaesthetic, aural and visual communication, allowing for a mutuality between dog and human — a form of joint action. Through the lead, the dog can read the human intentions and vice versa. Just like there cannot be a scientist without the laboratory, or a truck driver without the truck, the Hudogledog (human-doglead-dog) is constituted by the unity of its constituent parts, Michael argues. Other such hybrids he draws our attention to is the Dababug; the Da(ddy) + ba(by) + bu(ggy), and the Acacomp; the Aca(demic) + Comp(uter).
Trivial? Perhaps, but it teaches us new ways to think about agency.

3) The dog-owner Ummah
There is a global, slumbering consciousness unifying all dog owners, as if they all shared one big, collective psyche. They share the same set of judgments, and they can spot a mile away if the Hudogledog that you and your pet comprise is a well-functioning one. If the dog is in any way psychotic (like many of them are), these people will be the first to notice, and they will put up with it (since there is an understanding that many dogs are, at large, psychotic) but will simultaneously hold you responsible for the management of this psychosis.
I don’t really want to be part of this hive-like mind; I feel alienated not by the dogs but by the owners themselves. I don’t have the skills nor the preferences required. I don’t fit in because I don’t have that rosy-cheeked understanding that coprophagia can be a phenomenon one might have to deal with in a responsible relationship. Half-chewed tennis balls, over-priced nutritional pellets and the never-ending demand of returning to the same park over and over again are all things that do not appeal that much to me. And when your dog is of the kind that attacks other dogs, the whole charade of them pretending to be cool about it (“because that’s the way some dogs are”) when their own dog has in fact been near-decapitated, is enough to make me feel, well, a bit uneasy.

Not to sound discontented though: it was a generally nice experience.
Just one that I might not devote my entire life to.

Update 10/3 2008: Donna Haraway’s latest book is on the companionship between dogs and humans as an ethical and ontological category.