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 technology 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 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 psychology to propose that dogs display some degree of intentionality and selfdirected 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 particularly considers the agency of militarized dogs, especially those on the Western Front
(19141918), to suggest how historians can use primary sources to uncover how individuals 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, underscored 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 journals Do Animals Need a History?
conference.
2. Adolphe Lasnier, with drawings by P. Mahler, Nos chiens sur le front (Paris: Maison de
lEdition, 1915).

dogs, history, and agency

129

(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-lAir, 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 themselves. 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 unwittingly 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 Spielbergs
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 presence of animals reflects the general marginalization of animal history by historians, 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 humananimal relations 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 chal3. Lasnier was a member of the Griffon poil dur breed club.
4. For an example of a popular history, see Jilly Cooper, Animals at War (London: William Heinemann, 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, 19141918,
ed. Damien Baldin (Peronne: Historial de la Grande Guerre, 2007); and John Singleton, Britains
Military Use of Horses, 19141918, 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 HumanAnimal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 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 Andersons exploration of the imaginative and physical interactions among livestock, colonists, Native Americans, and the environment in early colonial America;
Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarrs exposition of horses as living machines in nineteenth-century
US cities; and Jonathan Burts 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).

130

chris pearson

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-thanhuman world.6 It is therefore timely to reflect on how to better incorporate animals into historical narratives.
Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology, and science 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 intentionality. 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 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 Ren 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 automata.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: Practising 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 humananimal 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-del Nature et Culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 13.
9. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La fin de lexception 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. Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, transl. F. E. Sutcliffe (London:
Penguin, 1968), 27, 72-76.

dogs, history, and agency

131

It is unfair to position Descartes as the posteror whippingboy of the

humananimal 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 humananimal divide is geographically situated. Anthropologists have shown
that in some non-Western societies the sense of the humananimal divide does
not exist in the same way as it does in the West. They argue that some indigenous 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 Darwins
evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, scientists and others have debated
vehemently the extent of humananimal kinship. A particular source of fascination 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 positions foundations now look increasingly shaky. Since at least the late
twentieth century, scientists have made persuasive claims about animal rationality, 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 humananimal divide.
From a different perspective, sociologists and philosophers of science have
challenged the humannonhuman 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 circulating hybrid collectives of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. For Latour, nature
12. Those who identify Descartes as a leading thinker of the humananimal divide include Erica
Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 147-151; Genevive 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 lexception humaine,
68. For a defense of Descartess attitudes toward animals, see Peter Harrison, Descartes on Animals, Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 167 (1992), 219-227.
13. Nurit Bird-David, Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology, Current Anthropology 40, no. S1 (1999), S67-S91; Descola, Par-del 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.

132

chris pearson

and society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies, natures, of collectives.16 Put more simply, the world
is far messier than the humannonhuman split.17 In a similar vein, Donna Haraways 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 doghuman 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 possible 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 societies did not simply coerce wolves into becoming domesticated dogs or act as master 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, particularly 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 forcefully the fiction of a fundamental humananimal 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
humannonhuman 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: Harvard University Press, 1993), 139. On ANT, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction 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 Minnesota 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 dm Miklsi, Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 5.
23. Haraway, When Species Meet.

dogs, history, and agency

133

greater attention to nonhuman actors? By largely erasing animals from historical

accounts, do historians reinforce the narrative of the natureculture 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 agencyselfdirected 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 structures.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 consciousness, 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 material world.27 This conflation of agency with human levels of intentionality and
self-consciousness provides a formidable obstacle for the integration of nonhumans 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 arguments. 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 Bourdieuian Perspective, in How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, ed.
Yrj Haila and Chuck Dyke (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 127-149.
28. Ralf Stoecker, Why Animals Cant Act, Inquiry 52, no. 3 (2009), 266, 269.

134

chris pearson

Latour, separating humans from nonhumans disguises their interconnected agencies; 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 uncertain 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 society 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 ANTs 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 lexception humaine, 372.

dogs, history, and agency

135

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 cats decisionmaking processes to admit that it faces a variety of ways through which it can
settle (in Stewards 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 subjectivity; 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 Ingolds and
Stewards 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 Ingolds and Stewards updating of previous 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 capacity 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 different 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. Furthermore, 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.

136

chris pearson

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 dogs, or any other animals, 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, Alexandra 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, Horowitzs research suggests that they are capable of
some degree of intentional action. Others back up her findings. Using a problemsolving task that required dogs to watch another dog pull on a rod to obtain food,
Friederike Range, Zsfia 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 studies have found that dogs are capable of navigating via landmarks and of forming 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 animals point of view, see Eric Baratay, Le point de vue animal:
Une autre version de lhistoire (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, Zsfia 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.

dogs, history, and agency

137

to return to Johnsons 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 characteristics. 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 visual 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 Haraways 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. Responding to Haraways 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 Owners Face upon
Hearing the Owners Voice, Animal Cognition 10, no. 1 (2007), 18.
47. Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs, 202-209.
48. Adachi, Kuwahata, and Fujita, Dogs Recall Their Owners 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.

138

chris pearson

argues that dogs become dogs only in relationship with other beings and that they
have personhood and subjectivity.52 Smutss 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 Nonetheless, 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 psychology.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
sourcesarchival documents, memoirs, oral history, films, literary sources, photographsand rely on the interpretation of these linguistic and visual traces of the
past to formulate their narratives. Animals, even ones with some degree of purpose 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 viewpoint 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 agents
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 gnral
psychologique, 1907).
56. On Galileo, see Yrj Haila and Chuck Dyke, What to Say about Natures 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 horses history might be the story of grass, foals, blood, sex, pain, fear, and foodperhaps 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.

dogs, history, and agency

139

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, psychology, 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, ones own or others 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 understanding 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 primary 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 supplies. British numbers reached a peak in August 1917 when the British Expeditionary 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 mans 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 Malric 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, Britains Military Use of Horses, 178, 190.
60. Martin Monestier, Les animaux-soldats: Histoire militaire des animaux des origines nos
jours (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1996), 49-53.
61. Philip Howell, The Dog Fancy at War: Breeds, Breeding, and Britishness, 19141918, Society and Animals 20 (2012), 1-22. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/10.1163/1568530612341258;jsessionid=1a99ik815pe9r.x-brill-live-01 (accessed September 3, 2013).

140

chris pearson

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 wars
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 wars 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
characteristicsGovernor General of Metz General De Maudhuy hailed canine
bravery on the battlefield, arguing that like their human counterparts Frances
four-legged soldiers had fought hard for victory66human 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. Harnessing 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 institutionalization 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, Animauxsoldats, 57; Arnold Arluke and Robert Bogdan, Beauty and the Beast: HumanAnimal Relations as
Revealed in Real Photo Postcards (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 79. See also Paul
Mgnin, 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 Mgnin, Chiens de France, i-ii. See also Charles Guyon, Nos braves toutous la
guerre (Paris: Larousse, 1915).

dogs, history, and agency

141

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 dogs 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 intelligent 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 psychology 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 policedog 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 sympathetic, 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 Lon-Alphonse-Hippolter Tolet, Dressage du chien sanitaire (Paris: R Tancrde,
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 dfense du particulier et au chien du garde-chasse (Brussels: F. Vanbuggenhoudt, 1907), 9-10,
14. See also Paul Mgnin, Nos Chiens: Races, Dressage, levage, Hygine, Maladies (Paris: J.-B.
Baillire et fils, 1909), 12.
71. Lieutenant Pierre-Albert Vicard and Sergent Rode, Le Chein estafette (Paris: Henri CharlesLavauzelle, 1911), 62-63.
72. Richardson, British War Dogs, 65.

142

chris pearson

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 training school that I much regret to say that is was my experience to find occasionally 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 representations 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, however slightly, by carrying messages and seeking out the injured on battlefields.
David Edgerton has argued that militarized horses are evidence of the continuing importance of old technologies in twentieth-century history and a rebuttal to
those narratives of technology that stress innovation and novelty. Edgerton is correct 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 agency in the field. Take, for instance, Richardsons 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. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 27.
75. Richardson, British War Dogs, 56. See also the reports on 82-90.

dogs, history, and agency

143

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 understanding. 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 humancanine 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 Richardson observed, with some glee, there was . . . a convenient method of dealing
with the offenders which unfortunately is not available for human beingsan
excellent lethal chamber at Battersea!77
To return to Haraways 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 crossspecies communication and bonds shaped the combat experience of some soldiers. 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 ani76. 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.

144

chris pearson

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 operations you have to understand each other, [and] recognise the slightest change in
each other.84 Of course, we only have Heyhoes 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 zones physical hardships, and their willingness to respond to their
human trainers 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. Muse de lArme, Paris, 2001.29.2.581 Jacques-Philibert-Pierre dHarcourt, Soldats et chien
dans un poste dobservation [n.d].
82. Lieutenant Boutineau, Le chien dmineur, Bulletin technique du gnie militaire (1961), 179190; 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/publications/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: Soldiers Best Friend Treo the IED Sniffer Dog Enjoys Peaceful Retirement after Saving 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-snifferdog-enjoys-peaceful-retirement-saving-soldiers-lives.html (accessed November 6, 2012).

dogs, history, and agency

145

The discourse of animal bravery and duty that greeted Treos 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 humancanine 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 cannot gain access to canine perspectives and have to work with human-generated
sources that overflow with anthropomorphism. Nonetheless, it is possible to capture 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 humannonhuman 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 nonhumanare 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 animals 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 unproblematically manipulated by human agents.
University of Liverpool
85. On agency as a relational achievement, see Haraway, When Species Meet, 134; Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Sage, 2002).