When Dogs Interact
Channel: LIVING SOCIOLOGY
Date: 2019-12-04

First Person, Plural on CFUV-fm, Victoria, BC 
Originally aired July 11, 2002

Dallas Road is a scenic stretch on the South Side of Victoria along the waterfront.  It is a dog-haven, a place where dogs run without leashes and owners get to enjoy playfulness and freedom with their companions.  We went out to Dallas Road to talk to the dogs. A description of Dallas Road can be found in the transcript below.

Symbolic Interactionism is a term coined by sociologist, Herbert Blumer in 1937 and represents one of the major approaches to social phenomena taken by sociologists. According to SI, people attach meanings to things they encounter. Those meanings are created through social interaction. Words and gestures are the means by which people share meanings with each other. People anticipate what others will do based upon those meanings. So for a symbolic interactionist, words, gestures and meanings in mundane exchanges merit close study and understanding.  Dr. Clint Sanders is a symbolic interactionist. He has been a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut since 1976. We talked to him by phone recently and discussed his interest in dogs and his assertion that if we want to understand human society fully, we need to acknowledge that we live in an interspecies society.

We asked ourselves what we learned from our dogs.  We share our top-ten lists and some insights about our own interactions with the animals in our lives, including bugs.  We discover a lot can happen when dogs interact!

copyright: Carl Wilkerson and Pattie Thomas

http://sociologylegacy.pbworks.com/w/page/93414074/Episode%2010%20When%20Dogs%20Interact