Dog stories and why they matter (original) (raw)

2018, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde

Visiting Stellenbosch for the conference that gave rise to this volume of essays, I was sometimes asked what had brought me so far from my home in the United States. Each time I explained to the owner of a guest house or a tour guide that I was speaking at a conference on dogs in southern African literature, I found myself slightly self-conscious, wondering to what degree I needed to defend dogs as a legitimate scholarly subject. Especially in wealthy societies where dogs are sometimes treated as disposable accessories, they can seem a frivolous pastime: toys for children or fodder for funny or cute Internet postings, but not a topic for serious attention, except perhaps when dogs are abused or injure a human. This general discomfort with taking our canine companions too seriously reveals itself, for example, in the headlines of news stories on dog-related issues, which almost always involve word play, such as "A Tale of Wags to Riches, " or "Hot Dog! Vets Say Burned Feet Common for Dogs. " It's as if the writers want their readers to know they understand their topic is a little silly, a little less important than stories about humans or even more dignified animals such as wildlife. Perhaps it is the dog's ubiquity that works against its status as an important topic; according to canine ethologist Adam Miklósi, dogs are present in almost every society around the world (71). The lives of many of these dogs look quite different from those we see in Westernised, "first world" nations: in What Is a Dog?, Ray and Lorna Coppinger point out that over 75% of the world's dogs exist outside human homes, whether loosely owned by individuals, ranging freely as village dogs, or living a feral existence on the outskirts of human settlements. Nevertheless, dogs' lives are always somehow entwined with those of humans; as the Coppingers explain, humans provide dogs' ecological niche, and they cannot exist without us. And given current estimates that dogs evolved from wolves 20,000-40,000 years ago, they have surely influenced the evolution of humans as a species in turn. For this reason, Donna Haraway calls the dog a "companion species" that makes "life for humans what it is" (15). In On God and Dogs, theologian