Animal Entanglements: Muddied Living in Dog-Human Worlds

Nonhuman 'animals' have raised interesting questions for what it means to be human and the boundaries of the social world. Work on domesticate species has illustrated the extent to which we have entangled histories, resulting in specific social formations. This book considers peoples' everyday lives with dog companions as they cohere around experiences of work, care, walking and the use of public space, food and eating, sharing the space of home, emotional bonds and relations of kinship. In looking at these aspects of the lives of dogs and human companions, the book also frames the human-dog relationship in terms of matrices of power, understanding 'species' as socially constituted and as implicated in relations of social domination. As agential beings, dogs are able to shape outcomes and change aspects of their lived experience, but the world they inhabit is profoundly geared to human inhabitants. People living with dogs find that their lives are muddied, both literally and figuratively, as boundaries are tested and the complications of interspecies cohabitation are negotiated.