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Relationships
Dog-Human Relationships: Training, Power, and Religion
How dogs became sites of debate about human values, unity, and knowledge.
Posted November 15, 2022 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- Two essays by Katharine Mershon offer a much-needed blend of academic thinking and practical on-the-ground implications and importance.
- There are surprising, hidden ways in which religion plays a role in how people make sense of their relationships with their dogs.
- There is a need to reckon with the unequal power dynamics bound up in our loving relationships with dogs.
I've long been interested in all aspects of dog-human relationships and two essays by eclectic scholar Dr. Katharine Mershon, both unknown to me and many others to whom I spoke, made me broaden my horizons, rethink what I thought I knew, and go much deeper into the ways in which dogs and humans intersect in numerous and surprising ways.
Here's what Katharine had to say about her two extremely thought-provoking pieces.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write "The Theology of Dog Training in Vicki Hearne's Adam's Task" and "Are Dogs Part of America's Civil Religion?"
Katharine Mershon: In the worlds of dog training and American politics, I am interested in how the bodies of dogs became sites of debate about human power, values, and knowledge. My scholarship is a response to Vicki Hearne’s insistence that we must bring together two communities who have common concerns but don’t talk to one another enough: animal trainers and academics.
I wrote the second article because I was fascinated by how offended (many) people were by Donald Trump's disdain for dogs―how this hatred became a referendum on Trump’s fitness to be president. As a scholar of American religions and culture, I started thinking about how dogs are central to the creation and maintenance of American identity.
MB: How do your essays relate to your background and general areas of interest?
KM: These pieces allow me to unite my intellectual and personal passions: religion in non-traditional spaces and dogs. By bringing the two together, I get to think about everything from creation stories to political ads.
MB: Who is your intended audience?
KM: In the spirit of Vicki Hearne’s work, I hope to reach both academics and people who work with dogs. In terms of its academic audience, I want to convince scholars of American religious history that animals play a powerful role in the construction of American religious identities.
I also aim to reach people with interests in animal ethics, gender, sexuality, race, and American literary and visual cultures. In referring to folks who work with dogs, I’m envisioning people who are involved in animal rescue and sheltering, dog training, veterinary medicine―and dog lovers in general. I hope to show that we cannot think about dogs without also understanding the religious meanings projected onto them. Some of these stories are disturbing and hard to read; others are stunningly beautiful. Both violence and love exist in our relationships with dogs.
MB: What are some of the topics you weave into your essays and what are some of your major messages?
KM: As the title of Hearne’s book Adam’s Task suggests, the creation stories in the Book of Genesis shape how we understand our relationships with and responsibilities to animals. I started asking myself questions, such as: What are the religious and ethical stakes of naming a dog? What might it mean to understand training as a religious practice? It’s here that I started to think about one of the more uncomfortable realities of human-canine dynamics: our potentially godlike authority over dogs. I think we have to reckon with the unequal power dynamics bound up in our loving relationships with dogs.
In the case of Vicki Hearne, I try to hold two truths together: that I do not endorse her training methods and that we can learn a great deal from her writings on animals. Feminist scholar of science and technology studies Donna Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble” has been incredibly helpful in these moments. One way of thinking about “staying with the trouble” is that we shouldn’t run away from things that are scary or disturbing. Instead, discomfort is a sign we need to face these matters head on. This is very much the philosophy behind my work.
As a scholar of American religions with training in literary studies, I am also interested in how dogs can be powerful symbols of American unity. My current book project is about what I call the “canine redemption narrative.” In these stories, rescuing a lost or unwanted animal sustains a desire to repair larger ills that ail American society, particularly the structural legacies of slavery. These stories about dogs and humans can expose troubling cultural assumptions about what kinds of humans may be redeemed and how their redemption should take place.
To make this more concrete, in both the cases of Trump and Raphael Warnock (whom I also discuss in the article), dogs are stand-ins for implicit assumptions about what it means to be American. For Trump, his hatred of dogs is a moral failure. For Warnock, a cute beagle in a suburban setting diffuses white racial anxieties. Because we project so many of our desires and fears onto the bodies of dogs, they are symbolically flexible.
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about dogs they will be more respectful of who dogs are and what they need?
KM: I am hopeful—I think I have to be to keep teaching and writing. Last week in class, my students and I discussed Cornel West’s idea that you can’t talk about hope without wrestling with despair. To extend that claim to this topic, we need to face the violent or painful parts of our relationships with dogs (and with other humans!) in order to figure out how to repair them.
MB: Is there anything else you'd like to tell readers?
KM: Trust your dog.1
References
In conversation with Katharine Mershon.
1. People Should Stop Saying, "Don't Worry, My Dog's Just Fine".
