So the canine poor are to be pitied, and the work of the dogs’ home approved: but never indiscriminately. If it is right to help these dogs, the principles of economy, the truths of political economy – should always be observed. Since the dogs could not be housed forever, and not all dogs could be rehomed, some – many – were necessarily rendered disposable. And here the consequences for dogs who are judged unsuited or unlucky diverge drastically from their human peers – for these animals are subject to a third and fatal form of liminality. These animals hover between life and death, a ‘zone of occult instability’ or fluctuation, as Frantz Fanon puts it.41 Or, as Colin Dayan writes,
‘Dogs stand in for a bridge – the bridge that joins persons to things, life to death, both in our nightmares and in our daily lives.’42
In the case of the inmates at the Dogs Home, after a short grace period (fourteen days to begin with, coming down as low as three days by the end of the century), surplus animals were required to be euthanized. As the Illustrated London News argued, in its arch way:
There are some dogs whose life is of no value to themselves or to anybody else.
When a fellow of this good-for-nothing description has enjoyed the bounty of so liberal an institution more than a fortnight without paying for it, being in fact a pauper, and having no master to reclaim or employ him, then he is gently invited to retire from existence; for human science has invented several easy and painless devices to relieve an unlucky dog of the burden of his mortality, cheaper than permitting him ‘to eat his own head off’. It would, indeed, be unjustifiable, as a matter of social and political economy – worse than the toleration of monkery or beggary in the Middle Ages – to undertake to support all the idle dogs in London as long as they chose to live at the public expense. Their consumption of food, which, though not of the same kind as human food, has yet a value no less certain and appreciable, must compete ultimately with the wants of the two-legged population.43
Political economy here takes on a dimension that certainly haunts the human but which is hardly comparable in all but the most exceptional circumstances and in the most excessive rhetoric. By 1871, by which time it had removed south of the river to Battersea, the Dogs Home was participating in the systematic policing of strays from the streets of London, having established a working relationship with the Metropolitan Police, and the franchise of putting to sleep thousands of unwanted dogs every year.
The Dogs’ Home represents an exemplary kindness to animals, then, but also a kindness that kills, that has to kill, that has to participate in the making killable: in short, the Battersea Dogs’ Home was not just the world’s first rescue home but also its first ‘kill-shelter’. In this regard it further anticipates the world the Victorians have furnished for us.
‘Stray’, then, takes on a deadly connotation in this biopolitical or zoopolitical regime.
‘Stray’ is an ambiguous, liminal category (are animals temporarily lost or defiantly errant, homeless by accident or by choice?), but when translated into the practices
of law and policing the fixing of the identity of the stray is a political judgement that condemns an animal not to the deprivation of its liberty but its existence. The geographer Krithika Srinivasan rightly observes that dogs in modern Britain, to be assured even of life (the very limited business of non-interference, put forward by Donaldson and Kymlicka as one of the rights of denizenship), have to show that they belong to someone, that they are property.44 The comparison she makes with the Indian ‘street dog’ shows that the modern, Western ‘stray’ is a very particular legal and spatial construction, with a special and instructive history and geography. ‘Dogs in India can be in the absence of a human owner’, she argues, but ‘strays’ in Britain are by definition out of place.45 If the stray animals cannot be ‘rehomed’ they can be rendered out of existence as well as out of public space. We recognize that ‘civility … is a principle that has the power to actively expel those who challenge the socio-spatial boundaries of the moral order’, but this expulsion, ultimately, is from the world of the living.46 The killing of animals in the Dogs’ Home, which is in the following pictures a simple before-and-after contrast (Figures 9.1 and 9.2), might in fact be figured as a representation of the hovering of the animal between life and death, like Schrödinger’s famous cat, here a ‘poise or suspension between opposites’, exhibiting ‘the seepage between entities assumed to be distinct, whether dead or living, animal or inanimate, commonplace or extraordinary’.47
Figure 9.1 Going into the lethal chamber: from Basil Tozer, ‘The Dogs Home, Battersea’, English Illustrated Magazine, volume 13 (1895): 445-9, 447. Courtesy Cambridge University Library.
Between Wild and Domestic, Animal and Human, Life and Death 155
Conclusions
In Donaldson and Kymlicka’s vision of Zoopolis, the liminal animal can be granted a place in our society, a form of citizenship. For them, the point or purpose of citizenship
‘is to recognize and uphold membership in a shared society. Citizenship is a way of acknowledging who belongs here, who is a member of the people in whose name the state governs, and whose subjective good must be considered in determining the public good and in shaping the social norms that structure our cooperative relations.’48 Inspiring as this vision is, however, we must acknowledge the realities of animals’ liminal lives, and the work of such liminal concepts as the ‘stray’ in drawing connections between humans and animals, sometimes to the advantage of non-humans, but sometimes to their utter detriment. In the purgatorial condition of the
‘stray’, the boundaries of the human and the animal seem to be inherently ambiguous, indicative of their ‘extreme separation and vertiginous proximity’: at once dissolving the boundary between the human and animal poor, and asserting that non-human animals possess most insistently those ‘lives not worthy of being lived’.49 The stray in this regard becomes a kind of anti-citizen, and in the most extreme separation between the human and the animal, dogs and other animals exist in a palpably precarious form of liminality, trembling perilously ‘at the edge of life’.50
Figure 9.2 Coming out of the lethal chamber: from Basil Tozer, ‘The Dogs Home, Battersea’, English Illustrated Magazine, volume 13 (1895): 445-9, 448. Courtesy Cambridge University Library.
Notes
1 Terry O’Connor, Animals as Neighbors: The Past and Present of Commensal Species (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
2 Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, What is a Dog? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). See also the earlier evolutionary biology discussion in Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein, How Dogs Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
3 See, for instance, Susan M. Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
4 Kimberley K. Smith, Governing Animals: Animal Welfare and the Liberal State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67.
5 Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218.
6 Alasdair Cochrane, ‘Cosmozoopolis: the Case Against Group-Differentiated Animal Rights’, Law, Ethics and Philosophy 1 (2013): 127–41.
7 Erin Luther, ‘Tales of Cruelty and Belonging: In Search of an Ethic for Urban Human-Wildlife Relations’, Animal Studies Journal 2 (2013): 35–54.
8 Clare Palmer, ‘Companion Cats as Co-Citizens? Comments on Sue Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis’, Dialogue 52 (2013): 759–67, 765.
9 Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2012); Irus Braverman, Wild Life: The Institution of Nature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). For domesticity, see Philip Howell, At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). The quotation is from Bob Torres, Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 59.
10 Kiboko na Kipepeo weblog (co-authored with George E. Brooks), ‘On the Origins of Liminal Species’, weblog, ‘Kiboko na Kipepeo/The Hippo and the Butterfly’, 19 May 2013. Available online: kibokonakipepeo.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/on-the-origin-of-liminal-species (accessed 10 August 2016).
11 Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 218.
12 I take this contrast from Squier, Liminal Lives, 263.
13 Celia Deane-Drummond, The Wisdom of the Liminal: Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 4.
14 Tim Cresswell, ‘The Prosthetic Citizen: New Geographies of Citizenship’, Political Power and Social Theory 20 (2009): 259–73.
15 For a different approach, see Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, The War Against Animals (Lei-den: Brill, 2016).
16 Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997), 63–4.
17 See, for instance, Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). For Jekyll and Hyde, see Colin Dayan, With Dogs at the Edge of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 122.
18 Luther, ‘Tales of Cruelty and Belonging’, 40.
19 Howell, At Home and Astray. In arguing that the ‘stray’ is the antonym of the ‘pet’, I do not mean to say that this is its only meaning: the question of how the ‘stray’ as a category moves from the management of rural livestock to that of the street dogs of the city is an important question to which this chapter does not speak directly.
Between Wild and Domestic, Animal and Human, Life and Death 157 20 See Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in
Eighteenth-Cen-tury Britain (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015).
21 Apart from an ambiguous reference to Valentine and Orson (1649), the OED offers only these later nineteenth-century examples: 1864 F.W. Robinson Mattie II. 78 ‘A stray whom no one would claim as child, sister, friend’; 1889 Harper’s Mag. Mar. 545/2
‘There is also a school for strays and truants … which re-enforces the public schools’;
1892 Daily News 2 April 6/6 ‘Greater facilities are now offered than formerly in con-veying the strays to the Home [for Lost Dogs]’.
22 Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (Abing-don: Routledge, 2016).
23 Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 133.
24 See, for instance, Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000); Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse.
25 Cynthia Curran, ‘Pets’, in Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, ed. James E. Adams, Tom Prendergast and Sara Prendergast (Danbury: Scholastic Library Publishing, 2004), 189–93, 192.
26 Grace Moore, ‘Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist’, Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Lit-erature and Culture, ed. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (Alder-shot: Ashgate, 2007), 201–14.
27 James Greenwood, The True History of a Little Ragamuffin (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1866), 74.
28 In the United States, ‘Good Shepherd Homes’ from 1893 make the link quite explic-itly: see Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), ch. 8.
29 John Hollingshead, ‘Two Dog-Shows’, All the Year Round 2 August 1862: 493–7.
30 See, for instance, Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain:
Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
31 See Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
32 Hollingshead, ‘Two Dog-Shows’, 493.
33 John Hollingshead, ‘Happy Dogs’, in Miscellanies (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874), 34 203.Illustrated London News, 22 August 1868, 182.
35 George Augustus Sala, ‘The Key to the Street’, Household Words 6 September 1851:
565–72, 568.
36 Howell, At Home and Astray, 84.
37 Koven, Slumming, 61.
38 James Greenwood, ‘Going to the Dogs’, The Star (London: C. Beckett, 1866).
39 For the attraction and allure of wandering, see Jeremy Tambling, Gone Astray: Dickens and London (Harlow: Pearson, 2009).
40 Greenwood, ‘Going to the Dogs’, 5–6.
41 See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York:
Grove, 1968), 227; the more recent translation by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004, 163) prefers ‘hidden fluctuation’. For this reference, see Dayan, With Dogs at the Edge of Life, xiv.
42 Dayan, With Dogs at the Edge of Life, xiii.
43 Illustrated London News, 22 August 1868, 182.
44 Krithika Srinivasan, ‘The Biopolitics of Animal Being and Welfare: Dog Control and Care in the UK and India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 1 (2013): 106–19.
45 Srinivasan, ‘Biopolitics of Animal Being’, 110.
46 Luther, ‘Tales of Bruelty and Belonging’, 41.
47 Dayan, With Dogs at the Edge of Life, xiv. The pictures are from Basil Tozer, ‘The Dogs’
Home, Battersea’, The English Illustrated Magazine 13 (1895): 445–9. For an extended discussion, one that I read after writing this chapter, see Susan Hamilton, ‘Dogs’
Home and Lethal Chambers, Or, What Was it Like to be a Battersea Dog’, in Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism, ed. Lawrence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 83–105. Hamilton persuasively argues that these carefully staged photographs work to elicit sympathy and impress the reader with the humane disposal of surplus animals, domesticating the potentially disruptive charge of its imagery.
48 Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, ‘Animals and the Frontiers of Citizenship’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 34, no. 2 (2014): 201–19, 217.
49 Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 90.
I reference here something of the ‘purgatorial anxiety’ involved in the distinction between bios and zöe put forward by Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), as discussed by Squier, Liminal Lives, 8.
50 Dayan, With Dogs at the Edge of Life.
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