Better than "unconditional love"
training each other in acts of communication we barely understand
The book that was most influential in our family's decision to adopt a dog was, without qualification, Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Haraway's representation of the human-canine relationship helped me convince my husband--who has pet allergies, who never had a pet as a child, and (the most significant obstacle to his being persuaded) who frequently complained that the problem with people who have dogs is that their only topic of conversation is their dogs--that owning a dog would enrich our lives. One of Haraway's explicit goals in the book is to offer "even the dog phobic--or just those with their minds on higher things-- . . . arguments and stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in" (3). Strummer was in a small way made possible by Haraway's work.
I heard Haraway speak about companion species twice in 2002. Her emphasis on the problems that arise for both dogs and for people when people treat dogs as furry children or as animated stuffed animals rather than as adult members of an other species impressed me for its common sense. The Companion Species Manifesto, covering in relatively few pages a wide range of topics relating to dogs--from their co-evolution with humans to their current situation coexisting in the world with humans who do not necessarily acknowledge that co-evolution and co-existence--serves as a handy reference to other works of interest to dog-people. Haraway does an excellent job of addressing ambivalence in general, cautioning that "companion species cannot afford evolutionary, personal or historical amnesia" (82). In particular, the later sections, covering the breeds the author lives with and loves, Great Pyrenees (livestock guardian dogs) and Australian Shepherds (herding dogs), as well as dogs needing, with a nod to Virginia Woolf (Wolf, Woof), "a category of one's own" offer a little food for thought on the controversies surrounding both purebred and rescued dogs.
An historian of science, feminist theorist and a poet of a kind, Haraway writes in a style that may be off-putting to the reader who is first-and-foremost interested in doing right by her or his dog, but Haraway's labored language highlights the kind of effort that must be invested in any attempt to understand a being that does not speak your language. "The recognition that one cannot know the other or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship is key" (50). Kinda reminds you of Rilke:
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.
Haraway also explains the problems I've been having teaching Strummer to fetch a ball: Strummer may in fact be, like Haraway's mixed-breed dog, Roland, a meta-retriever.