Dogs

History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 128-145 © Wesleyan University 2013 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOGS, HISTORY, AND AGENCY1

CHRIS PEARSON

ABSTRACT

Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology, and science and tech-nology studies (STS), this article argues that agency is shared unevenly between humans and nonhumans. It proposes that conceptualizing animals as agents allows them to enter history as active beings rather than static objects. Agency has become a key concept within history, especially since the rise of the “new” social history. But many historians treat agency as a uniquely human attribute, arguing that animals lack the cognitive abili-ties, self-awareness, and intentionality to be agents. This article argues that human levels of intentionality are not a precondition of agency. Furthermore, it draws on research into canine psychology to propose that dogs display some degree of intentionality and self-directed action. The aim is not to turn dogs, or any other animals, into human-style agents nor to suggest that they display the same levels of skill, intentionality, and intelligence as humans. Instead, the objective is to show how dogs are purposeful and capable agents in their own way and to explore how they interact with human agents. The article par-ticularly considers the agency of militarized dogs, especially those on the Western Front (1914–1918), to suggest how historians can use primary sources to uncover how individu-als in the past have treated dogs as capable creatures and to capture some sense of dogs’ embodied and purposeful agency.

Keywords: nonhuman agency, dogs, intentionality, canine psychology, World War I

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1915 Adolphe Lasnier published Nos chiens sur le front (“Our dogs on the front”) in which he sought to outline the various ways in which the French army deployed dogs on the Western Front.2 Whether they were patrol dogs, guard dogs, liaison dogs, or first-aid dogs, Lasnier stressed that the war dog needed to possess “intelligence, a good nose, and great gentleness.” The book, which came complete with numerous illustrations showing the war dogs in action, under-scored how the human soldier and the trained, militarized dog worked together to uncover danger, carry supplies, and locate wounded soldiers: the best method for the latter task was to train the dog to show to its master through its body language

1. This is a heavily revised version of an article that was originally submitted to History and Theory in 2010. For their helpful comments and advice on various drafts of this article, I would like to thank David Arnold, Peter Coates, Tim Cole, Tomas Frederiksen, Damien Kempf, Claudia Stein, the editors of History and Theory, and participants in the journal’s “Do Animals Need a History?” conference.

2. Adolphe Lasnier, with drawings by P. Mahler, Nos chiens sur le front (Paris: Maison de l’Edition, 1915).

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(allure) the location of the wounded party, as barking would attract enemy fire. Occasionally, reports surfaced of individual dogs acting on their own “initiative.” Such was the case with Fend-l’Air, a dog who located and dug out his master who had been buried by earth during shellfire.

As historians, what are we to make of texts like Nos chiens sur le front? On one level, we can dismiss them as war propaganda or as an attempt by dog lovers to highlight the importance of dogs to the war effort.3 Or we can treat them as anthropomorphic texts that project human qualities onto dogs, which therefore tell us more about human representations of animals than about the animals them-selves. But there is more to such texts. Nos chiens sur le front provides glimpses of dogs as living creatures who display nonhuman agency through making a difference to the conduct of the war and by possessing some level of initiative, skill, and intelligence. The dogs were not purposeless objects that were simply manipulated by human intelligence. Instead, they were agents who were unwit-tingly drawn into the conflict, but whose abilities and characteristics allowed them to perform varied and skilled work in conjunction with human agents.

The role of animals on the Western Front was relatively well known at the time and celebrated in various books, images, and memorials. More recently, a range of popular histories, museum exhibitions, and films, such as Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), have explored this aspect of the war. In contrast, academic historians have largely overlooked the presence of animals in war or have argued that they constitute a form of technology.4 This tendency to downplay the pres-ence of animals reflects the general marginalization of animal history by histori-ans, even though animal historians have begun to show how animals constitute “human” societies and to uncover the complex and close relationships between humans and other animals. They have traced the history of human–animal rela-tions to explain how animals permeate societies as pets, workers, symbols, pests, food, experimental subjects, and tourist attractions.5 “Human” society would be very different without the presence of nonhuman animals. At the same time, new understandings of artificial intelligence, genetics, and animal cognition all chal-

3. Lasnier was a member of the Griffon à poil dur breed club.4. For an example of a popular history, see Jilly Cooper, Animals at War (London: William Heine-

mann, 1983). In 2007 the Imperial War Museum, London, hosted an exhibition entitled The Animals’ War. Important exceptions to the lack of scholarly attention are La guerre des animaux, 1914–1918, ed. Damien Baldin (Peronne: Historial de la Grande Guerre, 2007); and John Singleton, “Britain’s Military Use of Horses, 1914–1918,” Past and Present 139, no. 1 (1993), 178-203. On militarized animals as technology, see David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 [2006] (London: Profile, 2008).

5. Robert Delort, Les animaux ont une histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1984); Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human–Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Rout-ledge, 2000); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (London: Penguin, 1987); and Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature–Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer R. Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998). Specific and noteworthy examples include Virginia Anderson’s exploration of the imaginative and physical inter-actions among livestock, colonists, Native Americans, and the environment in early colonial America; Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr’s exposition of horses as “living machines” in nineteenth-century US cities; and Jonathan Burt’s work on the role of animal bodies in the creation of early cinematic techniques. Virginia de John Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002).

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lenge the sense of the human subject as separate from the rest of the world. In response, scholars from a range of different disciplines call for an end to “human exceptionalism” and explore the varied ways in which we live in a “more-than-human” world.6 It is therefore timely to reflect on how to better incorporate ani-mals into historical narratives.

Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology, and sci-ence and technology studies, this article argues that agency is shared unevenly between humans and nonhumans. It proposes that conceptualizing animals as agents allows them to enter history as active beings rather than as static objects. Agency has become a key concept within history, especially since the rise of the “new” social history.7 But many historians treat agency as a uniquely human attribute, arguing that animals lack the cognitive abilities, self-awareness, and intentionality to be agents. This article argues that human levels of intentionality are not a precondition of agency. Furthermore, it draws on research into canine behavior and psychology to propose that dogs display some degree of intention-ality. The aim is not to turn dogs, or any other animals, into human-style agents nor to suggest that they display the same levels of skill, intentionality, and intel-ligence as humans. Instead, the objective is to show how certain nonhumans are purposeful and capable agents and how they interact with human agents. I pursue this through a discussion of militarized dogs in the First World War.

II. HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND REASON

The notion that there exists a fundamental divide between humans and animals has exerted much influence in modern Western history, philosophy, and science.8 One of its key foundations is the assumption that only humans possess rationality and reason.9 The sense of knowing the world through thinking is frequently held up as a hallmark of humanity and as proof of an unbridgeable rupture between humans and animals.10 Many scholars identify René Descartes as the classic philosopher of this view, pointing to his arguments in the Discourse on Method: “reason . . . is the only thing which makes us men and distinguishes us from animals.” Humans can act irrationally but this does not affect their fundamental status as rational beings. In contrast, Descartes asserted that animals are automa-ta.11 Having no self-awareness, they could experience pain but not feel it. In this sense there was little to differentiate a monkey from an oyster.

6. I borrow the phrase “more-than-human” from Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns: Practis-ing Cultural Geography in and for a More-than-human World,” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006), 600-609.

7. Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003), 113-124; Julia Adams, “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? Agency in Social Science History,” Social Science History 35, no. 1 (2011), 1-17.

8. We can situate the human–animal divide within the sense of a wider split between nature and culture, which Philippe Descola argues emerged through “historical contingency” and is unique to Western thought. Philippe Descola, Par-delà Nature et Culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 13.

9. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La fin de l’exception humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 26-27.10. Ibid.; Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and

Skill (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2000), 15.11. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, transl. F. E. Sutcliffe (London:

Penguin, 1968), 27, 72-76.


It is unfair to position Descartes as the poster—or whipping—boy of the human–animal divide, as the story is far more complex and nuanced.12 It is also necessary to recognize that his ideas are far from omnipresent. For the belief in a human–animal divide is geographically situated. Anthropologists have shown that in some non-Western societies the sense of the human–animal divide does not exist in the same way as it does in the West. They argue that some indig-enous communities share a sense of interconnectedness, communication, and kinship with animals and other nonhumans.13 Even in the West, there has long been debate, confusion, and anxiety about the boundary between humans and other animals. From animal legal trials in the late medieval period to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, scientists and others have debated vehemently the extent of human–animal kinship. A particular source of fascina-tion and disquiet has been the similarities between humans and other apes.14

Nonetheless, the idea that rationality is a defining feature of the modern human subject has stalked Western thought and seeped into philosophies of history. But such a position’s foundations now look increasingly shaky. Since at least the late twentieth century, scientists have made persuasive claims about animal rational-ity, consciousness, and language that threaten previously held convictions about human exceptionalism. Researchers at the Language Research Centre found that nonhuman primates are capable of language-acquisition. Apes could understand the syntax of human speech to the level of a two-year-old child as long as they were exposed to human language from an early age. They could also understand the meanings and use of arbitrary symbols. Language acquisition, therefore, is not necessarily an intrinsic or defining human characteristic, even if humans have a higher and wider capacity for cognitive and rational thought than do other animals.15 In drawing attention to research on animal cognition, my aim is not to erase all differences between humans and the animals. Instead, it is to question further the notion of an unbridgeable human–animal divide.

From a different perspective, sociologists and philosophers of science have challenged the human–nonhuman divide. Bruno Latour and other proponents of “actor network theory” (ANT) have argued that nature and society are not givens. According to ANT, these entities are created, and are to be explained, by circu-lating hybrid collectives of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. For Latour, “nature

12. Those who identify Descartes as a leading thinker of the human–animal divide include Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 147-151; Geneviève Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen & Co 1984), 45-47; Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London: Reaktion, 2007), 97-98; Schaeffer, Fin de l’exception humaine, 68. For a defense of Descartes’s attitudes toward animals, see Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Ani-mals,” Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 167 (1992), 219-227.

13. Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemol-ogy,” Current Anthropology 40, no. S1 (1999), S67-S91; Descola, Par-delà Nature et Culture, 26.

14. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994), 39; Harriet Ritvo, “Border Trouble: Shifting the Line between People and Other Animals,” Social Research 62, no. 3 (1995), 481-500; John Sorenson, Ape (London: Reaktion, 2009).

15. Duane Rumbaugh, “Primate Language and Cognition: Common Ground,” Social Research 62, no. 3 (1995), 711-730. See also Sandra Mitchell, “Anthropomorphism and Cross-Species Modeling,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Colombia University Press, 2005), 104.

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and society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of suc-cessive states of societies, natures, of collectives.”16 Put more simply, the world is far “messier” than the human–nonhuman split.17 In a similar vein, Donna Hara-way’s “cyborg manifesto” and later work on “companion species” stresses how communication and kinship cut across supposed species boundaries in multiple and profound ways.18 In When Species Meet, Haraway argues that species exist only in relation to one another. It is the reciprocal interminglings that create the human and nonhuman partners. Focusing on dog–human relationships, Haraway proposes that species co-shape one another in a “dance of relating” in which dogs (and other creatures) are “actors and not just recipients of action.”19

Some critics have accused Latour and others of leveling out power relations between humans and nonhumans.20 Certain passages of their work could indeed be read as attributing equal capacities to humans and nonhumans.21 But it is pos-sible to recognize the importance of human agency while according agency to nonhumans. Humans are not the only history-shaping actors, even if they remain extremely important ones. For instance, some accounts of animal domestication now recognize that dogs played a role in their domestication. Early human socie-ties did not simply coerce wolves into becoming domesticated dogs or act as “mas-ter breeders” who intentionality set out to create the dogs we know today. Instead, the domestication of dogs was a process marked by “unconscious selection” as “both people and wolves took actions for their own short-term gain” (wolves, par-ticularly calmer ones, followed human camps to scavenge food). Human agency was important during the domestication process, but so too was nonhuman agency and chance.22 Of perhaps all the domesticated animals, dogs lay bare most force-fully the fiction of a fundamental human–animal divide. For thousands of years and from hunting to herding and guarding livestock, dogs have been integral parts and shapers of human societies. Dogs have helped us to become “human.”23

If we accept that animals constitute and sustain human societies and that the human–nonhuman divide is historically contingent and geographically situated, profound questions arise for the historian. If the distinctions between animals and humans are fluid and porous, does it then follow that all historians need to pay

16. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, transl. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, 1993), 139. On ANT, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduc-tion to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

17. Noel Castree, Nature (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2005), 228, 231.18. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:

Routledge, 1991), 149-181; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 2008).

19. Haraway, When Species Meet, 134.20. Noel Castree, “False Antitheses? Marxism, Nature, and Actor-Networks,” Antipode 34, no.1

(2002), 134-135; “A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller,” ed. Colin Barron, History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 2 (2003), 77-99.

21. See, for instance, Haraway, When Species Meet, 70-71.22. Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on

Earth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58-60. For an overview of theories of dog domestication, see Ádám Miklósi, Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2007), chapter 5.

23. Haraway, When Species Meet.


greater attention to nonhuman actors? By largely erasing animals from historical accounts, do historians reinforce the narrative of the nature–culture split instead of challenging and historicizing it? There is not the space here to do justice to these questions. But if we accept that humans do not exist in isolation from the rest of life, and have never done so, then it is worth considering how nonhumans can be integrated more fully into historical research and writing. Reconsidering agency therefore becomes a necessary endeavor.

III. ANIMALS AS UNINTENTIONAL AGENTS

Despite critiques from poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, agency remains a key concern for many historians. In fact, Walter Johnson labels agency—“self-directed action,” the ability to think and act independently and follow free will—as the “master trope” of the new social history.24 The ability to reason is central to the human-centered concept of agency because it allows people to break free, to an extent, of their instincts, emotions, traditions, and political and social struc-tures.25 Under this definition of agency, actors require intentionality. William Sewell, for instance, has critiqued attempts to imbue nature with agency, arguing that nature is not an agent because agents require the ability to act with “con-sciousness, intention, and judgement.”26 For Sewell, agency and intentionality are codependent. Working within the constraints of structures, the active human subject acts intentionally to manipulate and give meaning to the passive mate-rial world.27 This conflation of agency with human levels of intentionality and self-consciousness provides a formidable obstacle for the integration of nonhu-mans into historical narratives in an active, history-shaping way. Similarly, Ralf Stoecker argues that the linguistic environment in which humans are raised from an early age means that we hold our own and others’ actions to account through “public practical deliberation” or language-based reasoning: “we make agents responsible for what they do, quite literally, we ask them for arguments that speak in favour of their deeds, and sanction bad or missing answers.” For Stoecker, animals do not perform this “social act” so cannot be classed as agents.28

Recognizing that agency does not equal intentionality undermines such argu-ments. Reason-based intentionality of the kind displayed by humans is obviously an extremely important kind of agency. But it is only one kind of agency. In this vein, Latour proposes a reconceptualization of agency that moves beyond the prerequisite of self-reflexivity and intentionality to include all nonhumans. For

24. Johnson, “On Agency,” 113. On the postmodernist challenge to agency, see David Gary Shaw, “Happy in Our Chains? Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age,” History and Theory 40, no. 4 (2001), 1-9.

25. William H. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992), 19.

26. William H. Sewell, “Nature, Agency, and Anthropocentrism,” “Steinberg: History Forums,” American Historical Review, July 2, 2002, http://www.historycooperative.org/phorum/read.php?13,271,271, 1-2 (accessed June 17, 2010).

27. For a critique of this view, see Iordanis Marcoulatos, “Rethinking Intentionality: A Bour-dieuian Perspective,” in How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, ed. Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 127-149.

28. Ralf Stoecker, “Why Animals Can’t Act,” Inquiry 52, no. 3 (2009), 266, 269.

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Latour, separating humans from nonhumans disguises their interconnected agen-cies; “any thing” that makes a difference to other actors (intentionally or not) can be considered an agent. Things, which might include microbes, machines, or animals, do not in themselves determine outcomes, nor do they act merely as a backdrop for human action.29 Nonhumans transmit ideas, forms, and possibilities, as well as change (or “translate”) what they carry. According to Latour, as soon as we allow them “to enter the collective in the form of new entities with uncer-tain boundaries, entities that hesitate, quake, and induce perplexity, it is not hard to see that we can grant them the designation of actors.”30 In this vein, animals become agents when they enable or thwart activities, thereby partly shaping soci-ety and history. The presence of mosquitos is a striking example of nonhumans shaping history.31 Stressing the physical and unintentional agency of nonhumans is one valid way of better integrating them into historical narratives in active ways. Decoupling nonhuman agency from intentionality also enables us to accord agency to environmental factors, such as floods and earthquakes. But this kind of agency, in line with ANT’s downplaying of intentionality, overlooks how some animals are purposeful and capable agents. The rest of this article, therefore, focuses on a different kind of nonhuman agency, which pays greater attention to animals as skillful agents, some of whom display degrees of intentionality.

IV. ANIMALS AS CAPABLE AND PURPOSEFUL AGENTS

Rationality is only one part, albeit an extremely important one, of being human. Anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that rationality is only one characteristic of our species and that it does not drive all of our actions. In many cases, conscious thought does not precede action.32 At the same time, animals, like humans, are capable of acting intentionally. As Ingold argues,

Is it not ironic that we should expect of an animal, as a condition of its being considered conscious and aware, that in all its activities it should proceed in accordance with plans already constructed through rational deliberation, when we ourselves do this but seldom in the course of practical, everyday life? To say that the animal is not conscious because (lacking language) it does not think before it acts, whilst admitting that we are conscious even though (despite language) we usually act before we think, is surely to apply double standards. Animals act as conscious, intentional agents, much as we do; that is, their actions are directed by practical consciousness.33

Like Ingold, philosopher Helen Steward highlights animals’ ability to act in embodied and practical ways as evidence of their agency. As creatures “that can,

29. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 71.30. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 76. See also Reassembling the Social, in which Latour argues that “action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (44).

31. John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

32. Tim Ingold, “The Animal in the Study of Humanity,” in What is an Animal?, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 95.

33. Ibid., 96. See also Schaeffer, Fin de l’exception humaine, 372.


within limits, direct [their] own activities and which [have] certain choices about the details of those activities” animals are agents.34 A hungry domestic cat, for instance, possesses a range of choices about how to secure food: jumping up onto a kitchen table to scavenge titbits, hunting mice and birds in the garden, or pestering its owners. We do not need access to the internal workings of the cat’s decision-making processes to admit that it faces a variety of ways through which it can “settle” (in Steward’s terms) its instincts. Steward proposes a model of agency that includes animals as creatures with levels of intentionality. In her view, an agent is a being that can move part or all of its body; possesses “some form of subjectiv-ity”; has “at least some rudimentary types of intentional state”; and is a “settler of matters” in that it is not purely governed by instinct.35 Although Ingold’s and Steward’s arguments that animals possess intentionality and a degree of choice may seem radical, counter-intuitive, or downright flawed to some, they have historical precedent in the early modern period. Challenging the Cartesian beast machine, many English thinkers held that some animals were capable of thought and language. Mathematician Humphrey Ditton believed that animals’ “actions plainly show thought and design.”36 Such views, according to Keith Thomas, were expressed throughout society.37 Following Ingold’s and Steward’s updating of pre-vious articulations of animal intentionality, it seems that certain animals are more intentional than we might think and that humans sometimes (or even often) act less intentionally than we might like to think. Certain animals are agents not just because they have shaped history but also because they display varying degrees of subjectivity and intentionality, and are not solely governed by instinct. At this point, the differences between animals are crucial. Apes possess far greater capac-ity to settle how their needs are met than are, say, worms. Apes and worms can both be classed as agents if they can be shown to have made a difference, thereby expanding the cast of historical actors. But the former can also be agents in the sense that they are able to learn, use tools, and form complex social bonds (and, crucially, in ways that humans can observe, understand, and appreciate38). There are therefore (at least) two possible dimensions to ape agency: shaping history and acting in ways that suggest a degree of intentionality.

It is important, therefore, to consider how different species display differ-ent kinds of agency. Dogs’ agency differs from, say, lions’ or cockroaches’. In part, this is because dogs are hybrid animals par excellence.Their temperaments, anatomies, and other attributes are a complex mixture of their DNA and human preferences for dogs to perform different tasks or to look a certain way. Fur-thermore, certain dogs, through their sense of smell, trainability, or intelligence, could also be said to possess more agency than other dogs, even those of the same breed (see the example of Treo below). Agency therefore differs within, as well as between, species.

34. Helen Steward, “Animal Agency,” Inquiry 52, no. 3 (2009), 226.35. Ibid. 36. Quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–

1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 125.37. Ibid., 126-127. See also Fudge, Brutal Reasoning.38. Sorenson, Ape, 13-33.

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We begin here to broach questions of animal intelligence and emotion, the range of which lies beyond the scope of this paper.39 But as I am interested in how dogs display some degree of intelligence, emotion, and purpose, it is worth exploring their attributes and capabilities in greater detail. This is especially important as many studies of dogs in history have largely overlooked this area, focusing instead on how dogs become objects of human representations, fears, and anxieties.40 That approach has its strengths, but it does overlook how dogs are physical, living, and capable creatures.

At this stage, it is worth reiterating that I am not trying to approach history from a dog’s, or any other animal’s, point of view.41 Nor do I want to compare dogs’ abilities and attributes to see how they match those of humans in order to turn them into quasi-humans. Instead, I turn now to studies of canine psychology to ascertain dogs’ attributes and how historians might incorporate them into their narratives.

V. A FORAY INTO CANINE PSYCHOLOGY

Dogs are capable of intentional behavior. They are not governed solely by instinct as they are able to deploy strategies to get what they want or need within relationships. For instance, they deploy visual, vocal, and other cues to attract attention from other dogs. Based on her observations of dogs at play, Alexan-dra Horowitz argues that their “attention-getting is not a fixed response to a perceptual input; their strategies indicate some acknowledgement of the desired outcome, and the employment of various means to achieve it.”42 Although dogs may lack a theory of mind, Horowitz’s research suggests that they are capable of some degree of intentional action. Others back up her findings. Using a problem-solving task that required dogs to watch another dog pull on a rod to obtain food, Friederike Range, Zsófia Viranyi, and Ludwig Huber found that dogs are able to learn from other dogs in an “inferential, selective manner” to secure food in the most efficient way.43 Like human agents, individual dogs are not static: they can change and learn in relation to other beings and their environment. Other stud-ies have found that dogs are capable of navigating via landmarks and of form-ing mental maps of their environment. They are also able to devise short cuts between different points based on their previous experience of the environment.44 Dogs therefore show evidence of intentional behavior or “self-directed action,”

39. For an introduction, see Rational Animals?, ed. Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

40. See, for instance, Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

41. On writing history from the animal’s point of view, see Eric Baratay, Le point de vue animal: Une autre version de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2012).

42. Alexandra Horowitz, “Attention to Attention in Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris) Dyadic Play,” Animal Cognition 12, no.1 (2009), 116.

43. Friederike Range, Zsófia Viranyi, and Ludwig Huber, “Selective Imitation in Domestic Dogs,” Current Biology 17, no. 10 (2007), 870.

44. Nicole Chapuis and Christian Varlet, “Short Cuts by Dogs in Natural Surroundings,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 39B, no. 1 (1987), 49-64.


to return to Johnson’s definition of agency, even if they seem poor at reasoning and long-term memory, and are apparently incapable of self-conscious thought.45

Thousands of years of domestication have shaped these capabilities and char-acteristics. Close cooperation and cohabitation with humans mean that dogs are closely attuned to our species. Ikuma Adachi, Hiroko Kuwahata, and Kazuo Fujita suggest that “during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate efficiently with humans.”46 They are able to direct their attention toward humans and pick up cues from our facial expressions, sounds, and body language.47 In turn, they are able to communicate through their body language and vocalizations, such as barking, to direct our attention toward a desired place, for instance, toward food. Furthermore, Ikuma Adachi et al.’s research indicates that dogs can create a vis-ual representation of their owner upon hearing a recording of their voice, leading the researchers to argue that “dogs have the sophisticated cognitive skills required to form categories.”48 Although we may never know fully how dogs sense, view, and smell us, it is clear that dogs have a sensitive awareness of humans.

The relationship between dogs and humans may be uneven, but it is reciprocal: dogs and humans are different beings, but they are connected ones that have shaped each other over the centuries. From enabling human hunters in the Mesolithic era to become more efficient hunters to performing police and search-and-rescue tasks today, dogs have played important roles in human societies.49 In turn, living and working with humans have shaped dogs’ capabilities. For instance, dogs are less able than wolves to solve certain problems because they often rely heavily on human cues and guidance. But rather than treat this as a sign of canine stupidity, Horowitz portrays it as perfectly understandable: dogs have learned that it is often quicker and easier to look to humans to help them perform certain tasks.50

As new research questions the comparisons made between domestic dogs and wolf packs, and as a growing number of studies show that dogs understand human gestures and motivations better when they are performed in cooperative rather than competitive contexts, the emphasis on connection and co-shaping between humans and dogs is likely to strengthen.51 Studies of canine psychology therefore dovetail with Haraway’s posthumanist vision of cross-species relating. In this vein, psychologist Barbara Smuts stresses how dogs are highly sociable beings capable of complex relationships with humans and other dogs. Respond-ing to Haraway’s suggestion that “beings do not pre-exist their relatings,” Smuts

45. John Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs [2011] (London: Penguin, 2012), 181-185.46. Ikuma Adachi, Hiroko Kuwahata, and Kazuo Fujita, “Dogs Recall Their Owner’s Face upon

Hearing the Owner’s Voice,” Animal Cognition 10, no. 1 (2007), 18.47. Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs, 202-209.48. Adachi, Kuwahata, and Fujita, “Dogs Recall Their Owner’s face,” 21.49. Juliet Clutton-Brock, “Origins of the Dog: Domestication and Early History,” in The Domestic

Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People, ed. James Serpell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10.

50. Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 181.

51. Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs, 16-29, 68-94; Helene Pettersson, Juliane Kaminski, Ester Herrmann, and Michael Tomasello, “Understanding of Human Communicative Motives in Domestic Dogs,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 133, no. 3-4 (2011), 235-245.

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argues that dogs become dogs only in relationship with other beings and that they have personhood and subjectivity.52 Smuts’s findings build on other research that suggests that dogs have emotions, even though they express them differently from humans and there is no firm evidence that they feel so-called “secondary” emotions, such as guilt, that require a degree of self-reflexivity. It is notoriously difficult for humans to accurately decipher canine emotions, given our tendency to anthropomorphize and misinterpret dogs’ behavior and appearance.53 Nonethe-less, it seems that dogs have some kind of emotional life.

There are flaws in some of the underlying assumptions and experimental design of research into canine psychologies and behavior, which some of its practitioners recognize.54 Nor does such research enable us to view the world from the viewpoint of a dog or claim that dogs are intelligent in the same way as humans. The research also overlooks historical assessments of canine psycholo-gy.55 Nonetheless, it presents a strikingly different vision from the image of dogs as machines, objects, or automata.

Following the arguments of Ingold and Steward that some animals can act with some degree of purpose and those of animal psychologists who are uncovering what certain animals are capable of, how might historians capture a sense of these aspects of nonhuman agency? Historians work mainly with human-generated sources—archival documents, memoirs, oral history, films, literary sources, pho-tographs—and rely on the interpretation of these linguistic and visual traces of the past to formulate their narratives. Animals, even ones with some degree of pur-pose and intentionality, do not communicate visually or linguistically in ways that historians can understand and interpret. They do not leave behind explanations of their motives in memoirs, diaries, and newspaper articles as human agents do. Galileo may have claimed that nature speaks through mathematics, but most, if not all, professional historians (myself included) would never claim to “speak” for a dog or gorilla, let alone a mountain or tree.56 Imagining the world from the view-point of an animal and giving that animal a voice is best left to novelists or poets.57

Historians cannot gain direct access to animal subjectivities and motivations. But they can never gain unmediated access into the inner workings of any agent’s mind, human or otherwise. As Haraway reminds us:

52. Barbara Smuts, “Between Species: Science and Subjectivity,” Configurations 14, no. 1-2 (2006), 115-126.

53. Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs, 210-223. Horowitz found that what dog owners attributed as a guilty look in their dog following a disallowed act was actually a response to the owner scolding them. Alexandra Horowitz, “Disambiguating the “Guilty Look”: Salient Prompts to a Familiar Dog Behaviour,” Behavioural Processes 81, no. 3 (2009), 447-452.

54. Horowitz, Inside of a Dog, 176.55. See, for instance, P. Hachet-Souplet, Le dressage des chiens sauveteurs (Paris: Institut général

psychologique, 1907).56. On Galileo, see Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke, “What to Say about Nature’s Speech,” in Haila

and Dyke, How Nature Speaks, 2.57. Paul Auster, Timbuktu (London: Faber and Faber, 1999); Smuts, “Between Species,” 115-126.

Sandra Swart explores the possibility of writing “horsetory” or history from the horses’ perspective: a horse’s history “might be the story of grass, foals, blood, sex, pain, fear, and food—perhaps mainly food.” But she does not claim to speak for them. Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 217.


Human beings do, or can, know more than we used to know [about animals]. . . . Of course, we are not the “other” and so do not know in that fantastic way (body snatching? ventriloquism? channeling?). In addition, through patient practices in biology, psychol-ogy, and the human sciences, we have learned that we are not the “self” or “transparently present to the self” either, and so we should expect no transcendent knowledge from that source. Disarmed of the fantasy of climbing into heads, one’s own or other’s to get the full story from the inside, we can make some multispecies semiotic progress.58

This realization, combined with the fact that scientists now have a greater under-standing of how animal minds work, means that historians can at least begin to think about how certain animals, such as dogs, are complex agents with varying degrees of cognitive abilities, intentionality, and ways of relating. Although pri-mary sources on animals are human-generated, it is possible to catch glimpses of canine agency amid the representations of them. I will now seek to demonstrate this through a case study of militarized dogs, particularly those in the trenches of the Western Front.

VI. MILITARIZED CANINES

Dogs helped sustain the militarized environment of the Western Front along with other animals, such as horses. Belligerent nations brought hundreds of thousands of horses to the Western Front, using them to pull weapons and transport sup-plies. British numbers reached a peak in August 1917 when the British Expedi-tionary Force (BEF) had 368,000 horses and 82,000 mules on the Western Front alone.59 There were fewer dogs in the trenches but they performed more varied roles than horses did due to their cognitive skills, physicality, and trainability. Armies used them as guard dogs and messenger dogs, as well as deploying them to lay telegraph wires and locate injured soldiers in “no man’s land” (a 1916 German publication estimated that 600 dogs had saved over 3,000 lives in this way).60 The Belgian army also mobilized dogs to pull weapons and supplies, a militarized counterpart to the dogcarts that plied their trade in Belgian towns. More informally, soldiers in the trenches kept dogs as pets and ratters.

As with horses, armies increasingly institutionalized the use of dogs between 1914 and 1918. While the British press attacked dogs on the home front for eating precious food,61 the War Office authorized Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Richardson to establish a military dog-training school at Shoeburyness in 1916, which was then transferred to Matley Ridge in the New Forest as the number of canine “recruits” increased. France followed suit in 1917, when Captain Mal-ric took charge of the Military Canine Service, based at Satory Camp, to train liaison, guard, and medical dogs. And once it entered the war, the United States

58. Haraway, When Species Meet, 226.59. Sidney Galtrey, The Horse and the War (London: Country Life and George Newnes, 1918),

16; Singleton, “Britain’s Military Use of Horses,” 178, 190.60. Martin Monestier, Les animaux-soldats: Histoire militaire des animaux des origines à nos

jours (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1996), 49-53.61. Philip Howell, “The Dog Fancy at War: Breeds, Breeding, and Britishness, 1914–1918,” Soci-

ety and Animals 20 (2012), 1-22. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/10.1163/15685306-12341258;jsessionid=1a99ik815pe9r.x-brill-live-01 (accessed September 3, 2013).

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army used bloodhounds to locate corpses and land mines on the battlefield. In all, armies mobilized tens of thousands of dogs. In 1917 and 1918 France alone enlisted 15,000 dogs, of which 5,321 died.62 The 1910 prediction of a French military dog handler that military dogs would become “precious auxiliaries” for soldiers was in part realized.63

Dogs were agents in the trenches as they helped sustain the trench system of combat. For instance, Colonel Winter reported the successful use of two Airedales, Wolf and Prince, as messenger dogs at Vimy Ridge: “the dogs were employed with an artillery observation post. All telephones were broken, and visual signalling was impossible. The dogs were the first to bring through news.”64 Dogs aided human combatants unintentionally in the sense that they did not choose to “fight” on the Western Front and were unaware of the war’s political and social context, as well as the overall aim to which their actions contributed: the defeat of the enemy. We might say similar things about many human soldiers in the trenches, who did not have a full understanding of the enormousness of the war’s multifaceted dimensions and were conscripted into military service. But human and canine soldiers were clearly very different: the former were able to negotiate with military authorities and voice their concerns, to greater or lesser extents, and held views on the war and their place within it.65 Although some military commentators imbued militarized animals with human characteristics—Governor General of Metz General De Maud’huy hailed canine “bravery” on the battlefield, arguing that like their human counterparts France’s “four-legged soldiers” had fought hard for victory66—human and animal soldiers were not the same.

Turning dogs into human-like soldiers obscures the fact that dogs acted with a degree of purpose and intentionality in nonhuman ways, which their human trainers and handlers mobilized in an attempt to support the war effort. Harness-ing dogs for warfare required dog trainers to take canine attributes seriously, a point recognized by prewar military dog handlers. In France, for instance, army dog trainers began to consider how to train dogs for military service at the end of the nineteenth century and to discuss the most suitable breeds. This development needs to be situated within the late-nineteenth-century history of increased insti-tutionalization of dogs as military auxiliaries, principally by the German army, as well as the fixing and codifying of breed standards spearheaded by national

62. Susan McHugh, Dog (London: Reaktion, 2004), 115; G. R. Durrant, “A Brief History of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps,” Veterinary History 11 (Summer 1978), 3-5; Monestier, Animaux-soldats, 57; Arnold Arluke and Robert Bogdan, Beauty and the Beast: Human–Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 79. See also Paul Mégnin, Les Chiens de France: Soldats de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Albin Michel, [n.d.]).

63. Jean-Daniel Lauth, Etude sur la liaison par chien de guerre (Paris: R. Chapelot et Cie, 1910), 16.

64. Quoted in E. H. Richardson, British War Dogs: Their Training and Psychology (London: Skeffington & Son, 1920), 57.

65. Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

66. Quoted in Mégnin, Chiens de France, i-ii. See also Charles Guyon, Nos braves toutous à la guerre (Paris: Larousse, 1915).


kennel clubs.67 In his 1912 manual Captain Tolet outlined the qualities required of the army dog. They must be “robust and rustic, calm, intelligent, obedient with a very subtle sense of smell.” Training dogs for search and rescue duties required the handler to exploit aspects of the dog’s character, such as the sense of smell, with “much patience.”68 Although “robust and rustic, calm, intelligent, [and] obedient” are human labels mapped onto dogs, their use does show that Tolet recognized that dogs were more than automata: they had particular qualities that differed from breed to breed and from dog to dog that human trainers had to take into account. Richardson, who spearheaded the use of dogs in the British Army, recognized this point. Based on his experience in the prewar era, he favored the Airedale “as an all-round, courageous, reliable and hardy individual,” but came round to the qualities of collies and lurchers. For Richardson, dogs were intel-ligent creatures who possessed a degree of choice over their actions. He stressed that dogs with the right training and qualities could show intelligence and their “own initiative.” A messenger dog “has to know what it has to do, and to think out how it is to do it” in the absence of its trainer.69

Other dog experts similarly promoted the view of dogs as intelligent creatures whose capabilities varied across breeds and among individual dogs. Belgian police and guard-dog trainer Gaston de Wael took what he termed “canine psy-chology” seriously. He noted that although dogs could not reason, they were able to remember things that had happened to them and to use that information to anticipate what would happen if similar things occurred again. When combined with careful training techniques, these experiences would enable dogs to make choices in particular situations, such as whether to attack someone.70 Like police-dog training manuals, military ones asserted that trainers needed to work with canine characteristics in a thorough and logical way. Lieutenant Pierre-Albert Vicard and Sergeant Rode stressed the importance of “rational” and methodical training to mold the military dog.71 Richardson similarly stressed the importance of patience and knowing how to respond skillfully to canine psychology: “I have found that many men, who are supposedly dog experts, are not sufficiently sym-pathetic, and are apt to regard the dog too much as a machine. They do not study the psychology of their charges sufficiently.”72

These training manuals do not provide irrefutable evidence that militarized (or any other kinds of) dogs were intelligent creatures. And it would be foolish

67. Aaron Herald Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 133.

68. Captaine Léon-Alphonse-Hippolter Tolet, Dressage du chien sanitaire (Paris: R Tancréde, 1912), 1, 10.

69. Yet Richardson was dismissive of some types of dogs, such as greyhounds, poodles, and dogs with “a gaily carried tail, which curled over its back or sideways . . . this method of carrying the tail seems to indicate a certain levity of character, quite at variance with the serious duties required.” British War Dogs, 52, 68, 70.

70. Gaston de Wael, Le Chien auxiliaire de la Police: Manuel de dressage applicable au chien de défense du particulier et au chien du garde-chasse (Brussels: F. Vanbuggenhoudt, 1907), 9-10, 14. See also Paul Mégnin, Nos Chiens: Races, Dressage, Élevage, Hygiène, Maladies (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1909), 12.

71. Lieutenant Pierre-Albert Vicard and Sergent Rode, Le Chein estafette (Paris: Henri Charles-Lavauzelle, 1911), 62-63.

72. Richardson, British War Dogs, 65.

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to assume that the dogs always behaved in the ways that their trainers intended. Richardson, for instance, reported of some dogs at the Shoeburyness army train-ing school that “I much regret to say that is was my experience to find occasion-ally the canine ‘conscientious objector’ among the recruits.”73 But the manuals do show how “agency has been defined historically.”74 Proponents of army dogs portrayed them as intelligent, capable creatures whom we can describe as agents.

It would be easy to dismiss the training manuals as mere cultural representa-tions of dogs that are peppered with anthropocentric statements concerning dogs’ sense of duty and responsibility. But training manuals give some sense of dogs’ physical agency. They provide glimpses, however slight and imperfect, of how dogs were capable agents whose attributes dog trainers had to work with and engage to create army dogs. Human trainers had to try to understand dogs in order to harness their capabilities and recognized that particular breeds and individual dogs were more suited for this work than others. The militarized dog, therefore, was not a product of humans imposing their intentions on the animal object. Instead, it was a mixture of human and canine abilities. It was the combination of human and canine abilities that allowed dogs to shape the conduct of war, how-ever slightly, by carrying messages and seeking out the injured on battlefields.

David Edgerton has argued that militarized horses are evidence of the continu-ing importance of old technologies in twentieth-century history and a rebuttal to those narratives of technology that stress innovation and novelty. Edgerton is cor-rect to emphasize the animals’ significance in war. But it is problematic to treat them as things or technologies. Leaving aside various ethical and philosophical questions on the status of animals, horses were living creatures with particular physical and temperamental attributes that allowed militaries to harness so many of them in relatively efficient ways. The same is true for dogs. Militarizing dogs was not the same as using a piece of technology. It necessitated a sustained engagement with dogs’ physical, cognitive, and sensory attributes, including their extremely sensitive sense of smell, their physical stamina and versatility, their attachment to humans and capacity for forming cross-species bonds, and their ability to navigate across wide geographical areas on their own.

Human-generated sources also provide some evidence of dogs’ physical agen-cy in the field. Take, for instance, Richardson’s British War Dogs. Richardson selected and reproduced British army reports that suggested that messenger dogs were able to travel independently over relatively large distances and successfully deliver messages. Numerous dogs were apparently able to carry messages over exacting and unfamiliar terrain. One report noted that two messenger dogs were released from front lines and “reached brigade headquarters, travelling a distance as the crow flies of 4,000 yards over ground they had never seen before and over an exceptionally difficult terrain.”75 The veracity of such reports can be doubted, and stories of dogs carrying vital messages to stranded units against all odds are undoubtedly exaggerated or the stuff of legend. Nonetheless, it seems clear that

73. Ibid., 61.74. Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel, “Does ‘The Animal’ Exist? Toward a Theory of

Social Life with Animals,” in Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Doro-thee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 27.

75. Richardson, British War Dogs, 56. See also the reports on 82-90.


dogs were able to use their sensitive sense of smell and ability to create mental maps of their environment to become effective messenger dogs.

There is also some indication that messenger dogs were able to learn from one another and to make decisions. Richardson describes the actions of a group of dogs who he claims were unaware of his presence: “They are going back with their messages and are keeping up a steady lop, generally led by the best dog. Suddenly, something will attract one of them, and they may even all stop for a minute. The dog that knows its work best, however, will not tolerate delay, and it soon trots off, and now sets the pace at a fast gallop, which the others are bound to follow.”76 Richardson attributed the dogs’ return to their task as the result of a sense of duty and responsibility. We cannot be sure why the dogs stopped and then returned to their task; they acted in ways that are beyond our precise under-standing. But it appears that they were capable of making some kind of decision over what to do in that situation and to take the lead from one another.

The army dog on the Western Front was the product of human desires and abilities to press dogs into military service and the dogs’ individual intelligence, temperament, and physical attributes, which were in large part conditioned by thousands of years of canine domestication and breeding. As well as being highly versatile, the militarized dog was therefore a thoroughly hybrid agent. But it is necessary to underscore that human–canine power relations were uneven. Encouraged, in part, by the recommendations of such training manuals, military officials brought dogs (and other animals) to the harsh militarized environment of the Western Front where thousands were injured or killed. Furthermore, those who did not respond to British army training methods were destroyed. As Rich-ardson observed, with some glee, “there was . . . a convenient method of dealing with the offenders which unfortunately is not available for human beings—an excellent lethal chamber at Battersea!”77

To return to Haraway’s concept of the “dance of relating” between humans and nonhumans, the case of the militarized dogs on the Western Front shows that the dancing can be uneven. Canine agency was a vital element in the emergence of the militarized dog, but it was humans who brought the dogs into the trenches, transforming the lives of previously pet or stray dogs. And although the training process may have shaped the human trainer or handler (whose views on canine intelligence or feelings toward dogs might have shifted), it arguably shaped canine lives to a greater extent, leading to them being able to perform new tasks or, in some cases, fall prey to injury or death.

But beyond the more formal training of dogs, there is evidence that cross-species communication and bonds shaped the combat experience of some sol-diers. Combatants on both sides of the lines kept pet dogs. Pet-keeping offered company, amusement, and an emotional outlet. As novelist and veteran Pierre Dumarchey recalled, even the “hardest [soldiers] softened in front” of their ani-

76. Ibid., 90.77. Ibid., 61. In a similar vein, the US army discarded its dogs after they had served their purpose

after the Vietnam War. Ryan Hediger, “Dogs of War: The Biopolitics of Loving and Leaving the U.S. Canine Forces in Vietnam,” Animal Studies Journal 2, no. 1 (2013), 55-73.

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mals.78 Second Lieutenant Hector MacQuarrie of the Royal Field Artillery, who was hugely attached to his Brussels Griffin cross, advised American soldiers to keep pets because they “humanize the front” and “keep you from being too lonely at night.” MacQuarrie felt that dogs were attracted to soldiers’ company because of the food and their “habit of appreciating manliness, and there is no more manly creature alive than a good soldier.”79 Stray or abandoned dogs were sometimes adopted by soldiers as pets or ratters, and others had the habit of following army units.80 Emotional ties therefore developed between soldiers and dogs during the war, showing how the presence of dogs shaped the experience of combat for some soldiers.81

The interconnected human and nonhuman agencies embodied in the militarized dog are apparent today. Various militaries use dogs’ extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell to identify explosive devices. Harnessing the dogs’ capabilities in this way has required scientists and military dog handlers to pay careful attention to canine behavior and to how dogs detect mines.82 Training, canine abilities, and the social bond between humans and dogs create the detection dog. Take the example of Treo, a black Labrador who made headlines in the United Kingdom in 2010 when Princess Alexandra presented him with a Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross, during a ceremony at the Imperial War Museum. As a member of the 104 Military Working Dog Support Unit, Treo had located various improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2010.83 If reports are to be believed, the pairing of Treo and his handler, Sergeant Dave Heyhoe, was a highly effective amalgamation of human and nonhuman agencies. Heyhoe claims that there was a “rapport” between himself and Treo: during oper-ations “you have to understand each other, [and] recognise the slightest change in each other.”84 Of course, we only have Heyhoe’s side of the story. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the combination of human intentionality (the military selection and training of dogs to detect explosives) and nonhuman agency (the dogs’ ability to detect the explosives through their sense of smell, their capacity to withstand the combat zone’s physical hardships, and their willingness to respond to their human trainer’s commands) performed significant work for the British military. As well as generating positive news stories, Treo and Heyhoe reportedly saved many military and civilian lives.

78. Pierre Dumarchey [Pierre Mac Orlan, pseud.], Verdun (Paris: Editions Latines 1935), 142.79. Hector Macquarrie, How to Live at the Front: Tips for American Soldiers (Philadelphia and

London: J. B. Lippincott, 1917), 215-221. On pets and mascots in the US Navy during the war, see Arluke and Bogdan, Beauty and the Beast, 38-48.

80. Dumarchey, Verdun, 140; Macquarrie, How to Live at the Front, 221.81. Musée de l’Armée, Paris, 2001.29.2.581 Jacques-Philibert-Pierre d’Harcourt, “Soldats et chien

dans un poste d’observation” [n.d].82. Lieutenant Boutineau, “Le chien démineur,” Bulletin technique du génie militaire (1961), 179-

190; Mine Detection Dogs: Training, Operations and Odour Detection, ed. Ian G. McLean (Geneva: Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Deming, 2003), www.gichd.org/fileadmin/pdf/publi-cations/MDD/MDD.pdf (accessed September 3, 2013).

83. “Sniffer dog Treo is honoured with PDSA Dickin Medal,” BBC News, February 24, 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8533382.stm (accessed November 6, 2012).

84. Quoted in ibid. and in Jill Reilly, “From Wartime Hell of Afghanistan to Rolling Green Hills of England: Soldier’s Best Friend Treo the IED Sniffer Dog Enjoys Peaceful Retirement after Sav-ing Soldiers’ Lives,” Mail Online, October 8, 2012 www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2214700/From-wartime-hell-Afghanistan-rolling-green-hills-England-Soldiers-best-friend-Treo-IED-sniffer-dog-enjoys-peaceful-retirement-saving-soldiers-lives.html (accessed November 6, 2012).


The discourse of animal bravery and duty that greeted Treo’s exploits echoes that of World War I. Such anthropomorphism remains problematic, as does the uncritical acceptance of the militarization of animals. But this should not disguise the fact that the human–canine explosive detection partnerships are relational achievements between human and nonhuman actors.85 In the case of Treo and Heyhoe, each partner responded to the other and performed different tasks according to their different abilities.

The history of militarized dogs highlights that dogs are skillful agents who have worked with human agents, with varying degrees of success. Historians can-not gain access to canine perspectives and have to work with human-generated sources that overflow with anthropomorphism. Nonetheless, it is possible to cap-ture some sense of dogs as embodied, capable, and, at times, purposeful agents who have formed uneven alliances with humans.

VII. CONCLUSION

This article has argued that the porous nature of the human–nonhuman divide allows historians to join other scholars in rethinking the relationship between humans and nonhumans. It has sought to combine the ANT and posthumanist expansion of agency with other approaches that allow more space for intentional nonhuman agency. The work of ANT and posthumanist scholars has helpfully cleared some of the theoretical ground to allow us to decouple agency from human levels of intentionality and to consider the ways in which animals, such as dogs, possess agency. From a different angle, the work of canine psychologists points to the various ways in which dogs are skillful agents and are capable, to an extent, of self-directed action.

Although historians’ methodologies do not allow us to research canine abilities in the same way as canine psychologists, we are able to use primary sources to uncover how human individuals in the past have treated dogs as capable creatures and to capture some sense of dogs’ embodied and purposeful agency. The history of dogs in the trenches of World War I suggests that forms of intentionality—human and nonhuman—are part of the story of nonhuman agency. This has been downplayed in some ANT and posthumanist scholarship, and historians can help redress the balance. Furthermore, the case study of militarized canines indicates that human intentionality and power over nonhumans needs to remain within the analytic framework. In fact, one of the most fruitful lines of inquiry might be to explore how humans have conceptualized and sought to harness nonhuman agency, and the consequences of this for humans and nonhumans. This would not be history from the animal’s point of view, but history written with animals in mind as creatures that mattered and who have played a greater role in the past than merely being objects of human representation or technologies unproblemati-cally manipulated by human agents.

University of Liverpool

85. On agency as a relational achievement, see Haraway, When Species Meet, 134; Sarah What-more, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Sage, 2002).

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Dogs