Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The domestic and the feral: human-animal relationships in
the
home and in the wild
Human responses to animals can be captured in a dialectic of desire and disgust,
domination and affection. Perin (1988:117) remarks on '[a] remarkable
ambivalence…built into the dog—human bond'. On one hand, dogs serve to
complete a person or a family, and are treated with affection similar to that given to
people. On the other hand, as Perin (1988:118) points out, in common English and
American usage,' “a dog's life” is an unhappy, slavish existence; and a “dog's death”
is a miserable, shameful end.' Tuan (1984) argues similarly that the treatment of pet
animals by people manifests a mix of affection and cruelty, and that affection itself
cannot be separated from a desire to dominate. A pet may be expected to fit into the
home, to become, as Tuan (1984:107) puts it, 'as unobtrusive as a piece of
furniture'. This may be achieved by de-naturing them, by spaying females and
castrating males so that they become 'less smelly and dirty'. The spayed or castrated
and regularly shampooed animal is thus rendered suitable for home life. Also, de-
clawing, although illegal in the UK, is still practiced, as it is in other Western
European countries. Cats' and dogs' defiling traits are removed, and the animal
becomes a suitable object for affection. This suggests a common aversion to
untamed
nature if it appears as such in a domestic setting. Baker (1993:104) suggests that
animals—and cultural constructions of 'the animal'—will invariably figure as
the negative term when used in binary oppositions. This is perhaps why, in the
post-Cartesian West with its continuing appetite for the dualistic and
oppositional, animals seem to figure so overwhelmingly negatively in our
imaginative and our visual rhetoric.
In some cultures, it is the 'naturalness' of familiar animals which renders them
unambiguously defiled. Thus, for Gypsies, cats are defiled because they lick their
genitals and thus fail to maintain a distinction between the 'pure' outer body and
the 'impure' inner body. For this reason, they are totally excluded from Gypsy space.
Similarly, Gypsy dogs, which have the same defiling traits as cats, are only kept
because they work—as hunters or as guard dogs—and they are never allowed in the
living space (except, occasionally, if small breeds like Yorkshire terriers—so much
for pollution taboos). Agee and Evans in
Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men
(1965)
made a similar observation about dogs in poor rural communities in the American
South in the 1940s. They might have been useful, like farm cats kept as ratters, but
they were not objects of affection. According to modern Western standards of
animal welfare, they were neglected.
There are a number of themes here: domination, domestication and, through the
elision of the animal and the human, racism and a more general dehumanisation.
These relationships between people and animals in the recent past, and in societies
other than the dominant ones in the West, serve to highlight their cultural
specificity. Historical changes in the treatment and perception of animals underline
