Making Animals Real

We are frequently told that animals are good to think with. That they can be hard to write about is mentioned less often. One reason for this may be that there is voluminous evidence to the contrary: a steadily increasing stream of academic books and articles about animals, and even an emergent field called ‘animal studies’. Like many labels, however, this one is an umbrella, convenient rather than definitive. The nature of the animals (or, more abstractly, ‘the animal’) discussed in the work it subsumes is extremely varied. At least potentially, it conflates all non-human kinds, from ants to zebras. (This generous, homogenizing embrace produces its own limitations, of course, and it is still more likely to submerge the experiences of individual animals.) Since such work is normally produced by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, rather than by zoologists or veterinarians, it describes or engages a range of human relationships with other creatures. One relationship, however, is oddly absent—or perhaps not so oddly, in view of the conventional constraints on academic prose. As Donna Haraway points out in When species meet, people in general are extremely likely to own companion animals. In 2006, about 63 percent of American households had pets, including 73.9 million dogs and 90.5 million cats, among many other kinds of animals (p. 47). It is probably safe to assume (based on anecdote and observation, rather than statistics) that scholars who choose other animals or human–animal relationships as their research area are even more likely to live with domesticated animals than are other members of their society. Perhaps—to speculate more extravagantly—they are more likely to volunteer at humane societies and zoos, or to go birding or otherwise seek out wild animals on their own turf. But this concrete experience with animals seldom surfaces in their scholarship, although it may underlie and inform it. And the personality and experience of their animal subjects tends to be similarly elusive. In both Haraway’s When species meet (along with some of her earlier work) and Sarah Franklin’s Dolly mixtures: The remaking of genealogy, on the contrary, members of their touchstone species are insistently present. The books themselves are very different, although each author is appreciatively aware of the other’s work. Haraway takes the acknowledgment of animal presence as her subject and her mission in When species meet, beginning with the question ‘Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?’ then declaring that ‘I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from the ordinary’(p. 3). Franklin’s ovine subjects emerge in her discussion more obliquely. Her opening questions are less tactile, more conventionally abstract and academic: for example, she asks ‘how we can position a shapeshifting sheep within a broader discussion about kind and type, species and breed, sex and nation, empire and colony, capital and livestock?’(p. 4). And of course, dogs and sheep are very different creatures, both intrinsically and in their relation to humans, although some of them have a long shared history. It is also significant that the individual animal who anchors Haraway’s narrative is her own beloved companion Cayenne Pepper, who would have no public profile if she did not live with a distinguished scholar, while the individual animal who anchors Franklin’s narrative was an international celebrity, who was reported to enjoy the human attention that attended her fame while she