Mariam Motamedi Fraser
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On the deathlessness of ‘the dog’
Species, ‘race’ and individuals

The entanglement of species thinking (speciesism) and racism is enduring. How exactly these prejudices are entangled in each other, however, is determined in part by the different ways that the categories of species and of ‘race’ are conceived of in science. This chapter traces changing conceptions of ‘race’ and of species over several centuries, with the aim of better understanding the traffic between them. Significant here will be the bifurcation of the concepts of ‘race’ and of species post-population thinking – and especially their subsequently differing time scales. Failure to appreciate these temporal differences can lead to misplaced political optimism, as this chapter illustrates by way of a critical analysis of two contemporary readings of Darwin’s famous ‘parasol anecdote’. Further, through an analysis of the Michael Vick dog fighting controversy, this chapter teases out how the implications of the co-racialisation of pit bulls and of humans differs for dogs and for humans, given that dogs are first gathered under the sign of species. This discussion is also relevant to one of the key arguments of the book as a whole, which is that species thinking erases the significance of particularity: in practice, the particularity of the individual animal. One question that arises, therefore, is how the individual animal might be ‘recovered’ – if not in science, then in politics. The chapter proposes that there is no route ‘back’ to individuality via species. The racialisation of dogs, however, offers one potential point of entry to individuation and/or individualisation.

[A]‌nalogy may be a deceitful guide.

(Darwin 2008: 356)

I arrive finally at the concept of species, which is also necessarily to arrive at the concept of ‘race’. ‘Race’ is folded into my discussion of species for two reasons: first, because as many theorists have illustrated, and as the first half of this chapter will confirm, it is difficult if not impossible to disentangle species and species thinking from ‘race’ and racism; second, because it is the argument of this book that species thinking erases the significance of particularity: in practice, the particularity of the individual animal. One question that arises, therefore, is how the individual animal might be ‘recovered’ – if not in science, then in politics. This chapter proposes that there is no route ‘back’ to individuality via species. The racialisation of dogs, however, offers one potential point of entry to individuation and/or individualisation. I illustrate this in the second half of the chapter, by analysing mainstream North American public discourses about pit bulls, as they played out in the context of the Michael Vick dog fighting controversy.

Racialisation individuates and/or individualises dogs not because racism pertains primarily to individuals or because it is individualistic. Rather, it is because racism often operates through the constitution of racialised populations, which are usually understood to be composed of identifiable (targetable) individuals. It should go without saying that this route to individuation and/or individualisation is objectionable both for humans and for dogs. For dogs, however, it represents a significant change in the kind of category to which they are allocated (to populations, as well as to species) from which real implications flow, for their lives as well as for their deaths. To repeat the point I made in the introduction and that I will develop more fully in Chapter 7: my aim here is not to advocate ‘for’ temporary, contingent, and often politicised populations ‘as opposed’ to species which, although theoretically themselves populations (or fluctuating patterns of difference and similarity), are often reified, as I will demonstrate, as a ‘thing’. Instead, it is to use the concept of populations as a means to illuminate the implications of that species reification for animals.

The entanglement of species thinking (and especially speciesism) and racism is enduring. How exactly these prejudices are entangled in each other, however, is determined in part by the different ways that the categories of species and of ‘race’ are conceived of in science. This is a key preoccupation of this chapter, which traces changing conceptions of species and of ‘race’ over several centuries, with the aim of better understanding the traffic between them. Failure to appreciate the significance of the temporal similarities between species and ‘race’ in the nineteenth century, for example, can lead to misplaced political optimism, as I demonstrate in my analysis of two contemporary readings of Darwin’s ‘parasol anecdote’. Conversely, recognising the significance of the bifurcation of the concepts of species and of ‘race’ post-population thinking – and especially the significance of their differing time scales – brings nuance to the analysis of the contemporary intersections between speciesism and racism. This chapter teases out, for instance, how the implications of the co-racialisation of pit bulls and of humans differs for dogs and for humans, given that dogs are first gathered under the sign of species.

For the sake of clarity, this chapter is schematic. The contribution I hope to make to the debates about the relations among ‘race’, species, racism and species thinking is conceptual rather than empirical. In the first part of the chapter, I ask what are the consequences – in a somewhat abstract, even generic, way – for those individuals who are defined first and foremost by a species category. In the second part, I ask how their racialisation first as black and then as white transforms those consequences for pit bulls, as pit bulls are conceived of in US public discourses. Public discourses are usually simplistic, and often reductive. The life and death of an individual pit bull will be far more complex than such discourses allow, as Katja Guenther’s affecting ethnography of shelter animals, which includes a chapter on ‘the peculiar problem of pit bulls’ (Guenther 2020: Chapter 6), illustrates. An empirical analysis of the relations among racialising public discourses, species categories and the reality of the lives of individual pit bulls is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to note that this chapter is indebted to Dinesh Wadiwel’s analysis of ‘exception’, and of the work it does in making violence against animals, ‘on a massive scale’, possible: ‘[t]‌he gap between the human and non-human’, Wadiwel writes, ‘is constituted purely by exception – in the belief that humans are deserving of something more than that of the animal, or alternatively, that the animal may be subject to that [to] which human life should never be subjected’ (Wadiwel 2002: para. 17). The exception with which I will be concerned in this chapter – the ‘something more’ of which humans are deserving – is the conceptual possibility of a death, which I contrast with the conceptual deathlessness of animals, when they are defined as species. What the ‘simplicity’ – even the crudeness – of public, and especially public media, discourses makes transparent, is that the acquisition of the identity of an individual confers on pit bulls the ‘privilege’ of a death that always counts,1 and sometimes matters. This is important, because by lifting these dogs out of the deathlessness of species, their lives and deaths can at least potentially stand as testimony to the ways in which they are bound up in the connected violences of racism and species thinking.

What is a species?

John Wilkins argues that the ‘received view’ of species, which is mostly written by biologists (Wilkins 2017: xxix), ‘has taken biologists and philosophers by storm’ (xxi). The received view goes something like this: prior to Darwin, an understanding of species, which was derived from Plato’s essential forms and from Aristotle’s conception of individuals as sharing the essence of their species (which in turn share the essence of the genus), dominated natural philosophy and natural history.2 Although the gap between Plato and Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1770) was long (2,000 years long), Linnaeus’s ‘universal system for the naming and classification of all organisms’, which turned species and genera into fixed and stable ranks, continued and consolidated the essentialism tradition (Wilkins 2017: 81). According to this tradition, ‘all members of a type were defined by their possession of a set of necessary and sufficient properties or traits, which were fixed, and between which there was no transformation. This is variously called essentialism, typological or morphological thinking, and fixism’ (Wilkins 2017: xxi, emphasis in the original). In this manifestation of essentialism, variation within species was unimportant, and ‘represented mere imperfections in creatures’ (Futuyma 1986: 107).

In the modern view of species by contrast (so the received view continues), variation is ‘pivotal’ (Futuyma 1986: 108). The hero here is Charles Darwin, who developed a conception of taxonomic groups (taxa) in which

taxa are populations of organisms with variable traits, which are polytypic (have many different types) and which can transform over time from one to another taxon, as the species that comprise them, or the populations that comprise a species, evolve. There are no necessary and sufficient traits. This is called population thinking.(Wilkins 2017: xxi, emphasis in the original)

‘No necessary and sufficient traits’ does not necessarily point to species nominalism (to the idea that species is ‘just’ a name without an objective referent). Rather, evolutionary thinking, perhaps inevitably, ‘made it harder to be exact about species’ (Wilkins 2017: 308). If species are populations undergoing constant transmutation (see below), it is harder, for example, to identify whether/when the rank of species had been achieved. Thus it was that Darwin’s view of species changed considerably over time (Wilkins 2017: 153–182).

The ‘received view’ of species outlined above – which pits essentialist, typological thinking against, variously, ‘common descent, statistical properties of [genetic] populations, and biological relationships’ (Wilkins 2017: xxx) – is given greater complexity and depth when its relation to racism is acknowledged and interrogated. To this end, I trace now a brief history of the relations between species and ‘race’, as these relations unfolded in the eighteenth century, and then in nineteenth-century racist science.

When the evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma describes variation, prior to Darwin, as ‘mere imperfections’, he means they are ‘mere’ in a philosophical sense, not in a political sense. Consider, for example, the doctrine of monogenism, which characterised the beliefs of most British and European scientists up to about 1800 (Stepan 1982: 1). Monogenism is often associated with a relatively ‘universalistic, egalitarian and humanistic’ attitude to human differences because its roots in Christian theology, and especially the philosophy of Augustine of Hippo, decreed that no matter how ‘peculiar’ humans are, all are ‘descended from Adam’ (Stepan 1982: 1). Yet modern monogenists ascribed differences among humans to ‘degeneration from Eden’s perfection’ (Gould 1996: 71): to degeneration, that is, from an original type, the closest representative of which were ‘none other than Europeans’ (Smith 2015: 118). ‘Imperfections’, in this imperialist and colonialist context, are hardly ‘mere’.

Prior to the eighteenth century, and indeed during it, Roxann Wheeler argues, there was little consensus as to which humans differed from each other, and no single ‘register of human difference’ (Wheeler 2000: 44). Climate, Christianity, clothing and commerce were all potential contenders (Wheeler 2000). A number of developments during the course of this century, however, revivified the hierarchical notion of a ‘great chain of being’, which had its roots in Aristotle’s scala naturae. As Wilkins explains: ‘the second plank of the Great Chain is the law of continuity (Leibniz calls it the lex continui) – that all qualities must be continuous, not discrete … [Aristotle] require[d]‌ that there be no sudden “jumps”, from which the medieval claim natura non facit saltus (nature does not make leaps) came’ (Wilkins 2017: 53, emphasis in the original). The discovery in geology and palaeontology, for instance, that ‘extinction was a reality’ served to extend ‘the chain of organic beings’ back in time, while in comparative anatomy, Nancy Stepan argues, Cuvier and Lamarck (despite their differences) were both inspired to find ‘an organisational rationale for a scale of intelligence’ (Stepan 1982: 13).

Linnaeus’s work is indicative of the return of the ‘great chain’ and its contribution to the consolidation of hierarchies of fixed identities. In the first nine editions of Systema naturae (1735–1756), which introduced Linnaeus’s classification scheme, Linnaeus identified what he believed were four ‘varieties’ of humans (varieties, rather than fixed, stable subspecies), whose distinctions he explained with reference to geography and climate. These classifications went some way to derail the great chain, because the ‘alignment of races with four continents … put them all on the same level’ (Charmantier 2020: para. 26). By the tenth edition (1758), however, Linnaeus had expanded his group of four human varieties to six, and also added to the defining properties of geography and climate, personality and moral characteristics, including modes of governance. The evaluative criteria that characterised this expanded reclassification, and particularly the negative description of the variety ‘Africanus’ (which, despite Linnaeus’s reshuffling, always appeared at the bottom), was ‘viewed by contemporaries in a hierarchical manner, and carried on being used in such a way through the following decades’ (Charmantier 2020: para. 26).

Until the end of the eighteenth century, the terms ‘varieties’ and ‘races’ were used interchangeably to designate different groups of humans, animals and plants. ‘Varieties’ was the more common term (Wheeler 2000: 31). This is not to imply, however, that ‘race’ was neutral, as Amir Zelinger explains:

When race, a word that does not exist in Greek or Latin, was mentioned for the first time – in French – in the fifteenth century, it was applied to the pedigrees of dogs that accompanied aristocrats on their hunting expeditions. Already then, discourses of race represented more than an ‘objective’ classification of different types of dogs. They were part of a social ideology that connected dog ‘races’ to symbols of nobility and aristocratic supremacy and facilitated the production of class hierarchies.(Zelinger 2019: 363, emphasis in the original)

During the nineteenth century, the terms ‘race’ and ‘species’ were used mostly synonymously (Peterson 2019: 445) – ‘races’ could be applied as much to cabbages as it could to humans (444) – while ‘variety’ and ‘variation’ became the ground on which arguments about the boundaries between species were won or lost. These disputes informed (and were informed by) the racial and class hierarchies that were at this time supporting and justifying colonialism, imperialism and slavery. Indeed, it was in the ‘two hostile camps’ of monogenism and polygenism, Adrian Desmond and James Moore write, that nearly all the ‘emotive racial signifiers’ that shaped debates about ‘race’ and slavery between the British colonial emancipation of slaves in the 1830s and the American civil war in the 1860s could be found (Desmond and Moore 2009: 243).

As noted above, in 1800, most British and European scientists could be identified as monogenists. The doctrine of pluralism/polygenism, of separate creations or origins, by contrast, was considered ‘heretical and “atheistic”’, and was adopted solely by ‘the most isolated and heterodox thinkers’ (Thomas 1984: 135). Yet only fifty years later, by the mid-nineteenth century, polygenism was an ‘anthropological orthodoxy’ (Thomas 1984: 135). As well as absorbing Joseph Arthur de Gobineau in France and Robert Knox in Scotland, polygenism was instrumental in motivating ‘a collection of eclectic amateurs’ to transform themselves into a specifically North American science, the American school of anthropology (Gould 1996: 74). Key members of this school included ‘the blatant racists’ (Bernasconi 2007: 17) George Robbins Gliddon and Josiah Clark Nott,3 the craniometrist Samuel George Morton, and Professor Louis Agassiz. Wilkins describes Agassiz, who was Cuvier’s ‘devotee and intellectual successor’, as ‘the last fixist’ (Wilkins 2017: 130) – i.e. the last to believe in a conception of species as fixed.

The polygenists, Stephen J. Gould writes, ‘abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species’ (Gould 1996: 71).4 This served both ‘Southern slavery and Northern craniologists’ (Desmond and Moore 2009: 166) well, for it gave justification to slave owners to enslave and reason to craniologists to measure. It gave, in short, new ‘scientific’ solidity to long-standing racial prejudices. Desmond and Moore attribute the reification of monogenism and polygenism largely to the English-born Gliddon, an Egyptologist and one-time United States Vice-Consul at Cairo, who had a ‘zeal to falsify scripture’ (Erikson 1986: 111). Gliddon coined the epithets monogenism and polygenism in 1857 in his and Nott’s co-edited volume Indigenous Races of the Earth (Desmond and Moore 2009: 288).5 In doing so, Gliddon ‘captured the momentum of the age’ and, together with Nott, ensured that monogenism became ‘tainted’ with the stain of religious dogma. This taint was significant because, in both England and North America, the ‘harder racist attitudes [that] were spreading through the classes’ were linked to an aggressive secularism that took aim at the Church’s authority and militated against missionary support for, for example, Maori land rights and struggles against slavery (Desmond and Moore 2009: 222). Polygenism, meantime, was cast as ‘a dispassionate and fearless’ modern science that found empirical evidence of separate black and white ancestry in rocks and tombs (Desmond and Moore 2009: 289).

Darwin’s thesis was relevant to these disputes not solely because it posited a shared ancestry for all humans and animals, but because, unlike both the monogenists and polygenists, who believed that the limits of species could never be transcended – ‘[w]‌ith me’, said Knox in 1850, ‘race or hereditary descent is everything; it stamps the man’ (Knox in Stepan 1982: 4) – Darwin argued that substantial variations could exist within a species, and that, under the right conditions, these variations could convert to differences between species. With regard to the former, just as dog breeding helped Darwin to articulate the concept of natural selection (see Chapter 2 of this book), so the wide range of dogs’ sizes and shapes, coupled with the diversity of their behaviours, gave evidence of intraspecies variability. Herein lies the significance of Darwin’s stories about his dogs – about his surly dog’s unemotional greeting on return from his five-year-and-two-day voyage on the Beagle, which appeared in The Descent of Man (Darwin 1981: 45), or the ‘hot house face’ of Bob, which is the source of an anecdote in The Expression of Emotions (Darwin 2009: 113). ‘Courage and timidity’, Darwin wrote, ‘are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs’ (Darwin 1981: 39–40) (see below, on Darwin’s ‘essentialism of individuals’).

With regard to the latter, variability, Eileen Crist writes, was ‘the mainspring of [Darwin’s] devastating attack on the idea of the fixity of the species’ (Crist 2000: 41). Where the polygenists attributed the differences they identified in humans and animals to separate origins – as in Nott’s chapter on the separate origins of dogs in Types of Mankind and in a later article called ‘A Natural History of Dogs’ (Brace 1974: 521) – and where the monogenists attributed them to ‘deviations from some fixed type’, Darwin’s argument turned on the claim that variability is ‘the material basis of evolution’ (Crist 2000: 41). It was Darwin’s hope, clearly expressed in The Descent of Man, that ‘when the principles of evolution are generally accepted, as they surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death’ (Darwin 1981: 235).6

Becoming biological

In his analysis of the concept of race in early modern philosophy, Justin Smith hypothesises that, where ‘a belief in the transcendent essence of the human soul’ (Smith 2015: 8) once served as a bulwark against racial thinking (because no difference between humans could be said to mark an essential difference), the naturalisation of human beings made it possible for different groups of humans to be classified – as all animals, plants and minerals were classified – in terms of their different ‘natures’ (Smith 2015: 18). Perhaps more significant than ‘Darwin’s theory itself’ (Foucault 2003: 256), then, was the fundamental shift of emphasis, during the nineteenth century, ‘from a sense of man as primarily a social being, governed by social laws and standing apart from nature, to a sense of man as primarily a biological being, embedded in nature and governed by biological laws’ (Stepan 1982: 4). Although the insertion of humans into nature started long before Darwin began talking to dog breeders, his evolutionary theory of biological descent unquestionably represents one of its consummate moments. So ruthless was Darwin’s naturalism that, his dispute with the polygenists aside, it seemed not to matter too greatly to him whether humans were defined in terms of races or of species. In a note on Gliddon and Nott’s Types of Mankind – the ‘American manifesto for polygenesis’ (Bernasconi 2007: 15) – Darwin wrote that, either way, humans are ‘descended from common stock’ and so, in the end, it (race or species) will ‘“come back” to the same thing’ (Darwin in Desmond and Moore 2009: 265).

How could Darwin possibly think that ‘race’ and species ‘come back’ to the same thing? One answer – which I will return to complicate below – is that, for him, neither ‘race’ nor species refers to unchanging essences. Darwin’s essentialism was rather, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, an ‘essentialism of individuals’ (Grosz 2004: 42). This is the foundation of populational biology, in which ‘continuously varying individuals … undergo evolutionary changes’ (Stepan 1982: 86). Insofar as species are ‘a post hoc aggregation of individuals’, they cannot be said to be constituted ‘by essential features, abilities, or forms’ (Grosz 2004: 42). Indeed, one could go further, as Grosz does. ‘What evolves’, she argues, ‘are not individuals or even species, which are forms of relative fixity or stability, but oscillations of difference (which underlie and make possible individuals and species) that can consolidate themselves, more or less temporarily, into cohesive groupings only to disperse and disappear or else reappear in other terms at different times’ (Grosz 2004: 24).

Although Grosz is not addressing the question of ‘race’ here specifically, this is arguably exactly why population thinking – especially in combination with genetics – ultimately led to the dissolution of ‘race’ as a biological category: because the ‘relative fixity’ that is Homo sapiens includes within it very little oscillation of differences that could be identified as racial. The first draft of the Human Genome Project, which was released in 2000, ‘revealed’ that there is more genetic variation among individual humans than there is among human populations, which show roughly 99 percent similarity. ‘[A]‌s species goes’, writes Dorothy Roberts, professor in law, sociology and civil rights, ‘Homo sapiens stand out as remarkably homogeneous. There is less genetic variation in the entire human race than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees’ (Roberts 2012: 51).

At least to some degree, histories of concepts of species and histories of concepts of race appear to share a common trope. First they describe the invention of essentialist typologies in Europe over the course of several centuries, then they describe how the expunction (at least in theory) of this essentialism was prompted by a shift in scientific thinking toward populations composed of ceaselessly mutable individuals. Staffan Müller-Wille writes of ‘race’:

The concept of race is one of the most problematic legacies of the Enlightenment. Most existing historiography on this concept frames its subject by two discontinuities. At the beginning of the story, we have the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by the publication of the book Systema naturae in 1735, in which the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus proposed a classification of humankind into four distinct races. At its end stands the demise of race as a viable biological concept after World War II in favour of population-genetic conceptions of human diversity, again prominently marked by the UNESCO Statement on Race issues in 1950.(Müller-Wille 2014: 598)

As its history indicates, and especially its historical reluctance to ‘give up’ the category of race, population thinking in biology was hardly the sole contributor to the dissolution of biological ‘race’.7 The horrors of eugenic claims and of the Second World War, coupled with the civil rights movement, had important roles to play in the appreciation of the new genetic science, as did ‘the confidence of the social anthropologists and sociologists, from diverse schools, that the psychic and social life of human beings was not reducible to the biology of race’ (Stepan 1982: 172). Franz Boas, for example, and ‘his prestigious cast of students’ (which included Margaret Mead, Otto Klineberg, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu and Melville Herskovits) reconstituted anthropology as ‘a respected discipline focused on studying culture instead of race’ (Roberts 2012: 43). And their legacy has been enduring. Racism and processes of racialisation, as they are understood in the social sciences today, may well include real, material, embodied, structural, organised effects – including biological effects (Jackson 2020: Coda) – but they do not produce biological races. In place of biology, racism explains the ascription of individuals or groups of individuals to (usually negative) categories that may be wrongly perceived as biological.

The fact that any claim about ‘race’ today is rightly understood to be political rather than biological does not render incidental the relations between evolutionary biology and the power of critiques of ‘race’, racism and processes of racialisation. On the contrary, as Roberts’s concise summary (above) of the implications of the findings of the Human Genome Project indicates, the scientific erasure of ‘race’ as a biological category depends, at least to some degree, on the maintenance of the category Homo sapiens, for it is precisely the species boundary that enables proportions of human similarity (greatly similar) and difference (not very different at all) to be identified. Where science was once, as in Darwin’s century, the backdrop for the division of humans into species and/or ‘races’, now it is the backdrop for human unity. Post-Darwin, and especially post-population genetics, biology constitutes the evidence for the claim that ‘race’ can have no origin or source other than politics. This politicisation is important because it enables processes of racialisation and racism to be analysed and critiqued and, further, to be understood as subject to identifiable change and transformation. Forms of racism can harden, but also they can be modified and perhaps even dismantled. Racism itself may be abiding but, importantly, particular modes of racialisation and racism are confined to the relatively short time span of specific histories, cultures and societies. Relatively short, that is, compared to the deep time of evolution. Simply put: ‘race’ and species are now broadly understood to operate on and across different time scales.

This temporal rupture between ‘race’ and species suggests that the similarities between the trope that characterises histories of ‘race’ and histories of species (from typologies to populations) disguises a deeper fracture between them. As Grosz writes, the question converts from ‘How can individuals vary so widely? to How can species maintain their identity and cohesion over time?’ (Grosz 2004: 42). ‘Cohesion over time’ is exactly the issue. Even though, post-Darwin, species cannot be said to be ‘fixed natural kinds’ (Smith 2015: 51, emphasis in the original), the pace of zoological evolutionary change, from a human perspective, makes it feel for the most part as if they are. Species are largely perceived – by both scientists and non-scientists (Smith 2015: 51) – to endure, if not for all time, then at least for a very long time. In this regard, as Smith writes, it is almost ‘[universal] to suppose in our ordinary lives that a species is a really existing kind of thing’ (51).

To return to Darwin’s claim that ‘race’ and species ‘“come back” to the same thing’, this temporal fracture is important, for it explains how Darwin could de-essentialise ‘race’ and species with one hand, only to re-essentialise them with the other. For sure, ‘race’ may have been no more or less fixed than species in Darwin’s evolutionary theory, but in Darwin’s era they were often perceived to share the same, long – very long – durée. As with species today, ‘race’ thus appeared, in effect, to be ‘a really existing kind of thing’. In the following section, in order to illustrate this point, I will briefly reflect on two contemporary readings of Darwin’s well-known parasol anecdote, in which Darwin uses the fierce growling and barking of his dog (at a parasol) to try to explain the evolutionary relation between religious and non-religious people. I choose these readings, by Matthew Day and David Chidester (both of whom are scholars of religion) because, in my view, they fail to recognise how differences between historical and contemporary perceptions of the temporalities of ‘race’/racialisation and of species shape the political significance of the relations between them. This failure leads both authors to draw what, to my mind, are misguidedly optimistic conclusions. Today, ‘race’ and species do not, as Darwin imagined, ‘“come back” to the same thing’ at all.

The parasol anecdote

Despite Darwin’s own scientific and moral objections to both monogenism and polygenism, and even though, according to the ‘received view’ of species, his theory of evolution marks the end of typological thinking, Darwin himself was bound, in different ways, by the prejudices of race and class that defined his era. With regard to typology, Darwin did not consider racial traits to be useful for survival, and therefore did not consider them subject to natural selection. In other words, he ‘plac[ed] man’s racial traits outside evolution’ (Stepan 1982: 175). How else, then, to explain the so-called racial differences among humans? Since there existed no ‘theory of genetics with which to explain the source of variation in organisms’ (Stepan 1982: 87), Stepan argues that there was ‘some biological validity’ (86) in both Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s view that ‘racial categories’ arose in human prehistory. Nevertheless, the notion that races were ‘extremely old and fixed’ (85) looked very much like a confirmation of ‘races’ as static types.

Darwin’s legacy of scientific racism cannot be attributed solely to this typological remainder in his thinking. The issue of continuity – of evolution as a process of gradual and continuous change – kept open, more fundamentally, the possibility that all living creatures, including humans, could be situated on an evolutionary scale. As I began to discuss in Chapter 2, the linear notion of time that undergirds the idea of continuity was not, Grosz argues, Darwin’s own. On the contrary, she writes, Darwin ‘construed [life] as a confrontation with the accidental as well as the expected, a consequence of the random as well as the predictable. It is the response, the very openness, of material organization to the dynamism of time’ (Grosz 2004: 7). Unlike that of ‘virtually all of his followers’, therefore, Darwin’s ‘model of time and development … refuses any pregiven aim, goal, or destination for natural selection’ (Grosz 2004: 90):

[Darwin] refuses anything like the telos or directionality of the dialectic, or a commitment to progressivism in which we must always regard what presently exists as superior to or more developed than its predecessors. We cannot assume that the goal of natural selection is the survival of the individual or the species, nor can we assume that the goal of evolution is the proliferation of progeny.(Grosz 2004: 90)

Despite the persuasiveness of Grosz’s understanding of Darwin, it remains difficult to grasp exactly how ‘[d]‌escent, the continuity of life through time’, allows for a conception of life that generates ‘divergences rather than convergences, variations rather than resemblances’ (Grosz 2004: 7). The very concept of descent lends itself more readily to the mistaken idea of ‘the transmission of invariable or clearly defined characteristics over regular, measurable periods of time’ (7). Darwin himself did not help here, for in order to illustrate that ‘there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties’ (Darwin in Grosz 2004: 58) – ‘and by “fundamental”, [Darwin] means unbridgeable, unobtainable by small gradations, gradual increments, or elaborations’ (58) – he used the expression natura non facit saltum (nature makes no leaps) at least eight times in On the Origin of Species.

Why did he do this? Arguably, because he was grappling with the counterintuitive, perhaps almost unbelievable, relation between present discontinuity (the vast number of different ‘varieties’ of dogs, for example, today) and past continuity (could they really all share a common ancestor?).8 In place of the polygenist contention of separate origins, Darwin argued that what may look like leaps – the radical discontinuity between humans and frogs, say, that led Nott to state that ‘[y]‌ou [Darwin] may be kin to frogs but I ain’t’ (Nott in Erikson 1986: 114) – are not in fact leaps at all, if one goes far enough back in time.9 ‘This canon [nature does not make leaps]’, Darwin wrote, ‘if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true’ (Darwin 2008: 154). Despite his fidelity to branching processes (see Chapter 2 of this book), and the radical evolutionary implications to which they point, ‘the notion of evolution as a linear progression, with existing species and races providing living evidence of continuity, [was] never far away’ (Boakes 2008: 21). Or, as Stepan puts it: given ‘the type of argument he was making’, later scientists ‘would find it only too easy to interpret Darwin as meaning that the races of man now formed an evolutionary scale’ (Stepan 1982: 55). Herein lies the problem with Darwin’s famous parasol anecdote, in which Darwin draws an analogy between, as Matthew Day puts it, ‘Godless savages and superstitious dogs’ (Day 2008: 49).

The parasol anecdote appears in a section of The Descent of Man entitled ‘Belief in God – religion’ (Darwin 1981: 65). If it is difficult, today, to appreciate how significant was Darwin’s attempt to explain the evolution of religion, it is worth recalling that religion had for centuries served in Europe as a proto-racial ideology (Wheeler 2000: 15) and that, in the nineteenth century, it had an important role to play in science, particularly in Britain. The rigid distinction between religious and non-religious people was ‘theoretically unacceptable’ to Darwin, writes Day, ‘because it established an absolute gap between two points in evolutionary history that could not, in principle, be bridged by gradual descent with modification’ (Day 2008: 50). The parasol anecdote is one of Darwin’s answers to that problem. I quote it here in full:

The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and no stranger had a right to be on his territory.(Darwin 1981: 67)

Day argues that Darwin viewed religion as a ‘by-product of three separate psychological faculties acting in concert’ (Day 2008: 60): causality, reason and curiosity. The parasol anecdote was important, he writes, because, by showing that dogs have curiosity, coupled with the ability to understand (or to imagine they understand) causality, Darwin was able ‘to narrow the cultural and biological space that separates religious and non-religious humans. Both the pre-scientific savage and the non-human animal are navigating the world with the same instinctive but untutored notion of causality’ (Day 2008: 64).

Elsewhere, Darwin proposed that the roots of religious devotion – which he conceded is a ‘complex emotion’ (Darwin 1981: 67) – could be identified in a dog’s feelings toward his ‘master’: ‘we see some distant approach to this state of mind, in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings’ (Darwin 1981: 68). Day writes:

The tactical significance of the savage/dog comparison, then, is clear: the ‘savages’ of the colonized world presented a kind of intermediate form of natural religiosity, a stage betwixt and between the crude, incipient worship of a dog for his master and the cultivated, self-reflective devotion of a Victorian Christian to her God.(Day 2008: 65)

In short, by way of ‘intermediacy’, Darwin sought – Day argues – to contest not simply human exceptionalism (what today might be called speciesism), but more particularly the exceptionalism of white, God-fearing Europeans (racism).

It is interesting to reflect on what role the concept of animal–human continuity plays in both Day’s and Chidester’s similar evaluations of this anecdote. On the whole, both attribute Darwin’s imperialism to benign paternalism and cultural prejudice because they understand the concept of continuity to be evidence of Darwin’s objection to polygenism and his commitment to anti-slavery. Chidester writes:

Arguably, this identification of indigenous people with dogs can be read as a political subtext in imperial theorizing about religion – colonizers are to humans as colonized are to animals. But Darwin insisted on the continuity between animals and humans. As a result, religion was recast from a marker of difference between savage and civilized to a medium of continuity between animals and human beings.(Chidester 2009: 67)

Or, as Day puts it: ‘Darwin solved the problem of intra-species variation by appealing to inter-species continuity’ (Day 2008: 59).

Yet it takes only the gentlest of nudges to slip from an understanding of continuity as bridging a ‘gap’ to an understanding of continuity as filling a gap. Although Darwin’s analogy could potentially illustrate why ‘humans like us’ might nevertheless not be religious, it would more likely ‘confirm’, to a Victorian public steeped in the ideologies of colonialism, that non-religious people, unlike religious people, are like animals (if not, at least in some respects, synonymous with them). From this perspective, being not religious is in fact being not yet religious, not yet capable of being religious.10 Continuity (in this case, interspecies continuity) and division (in this case, the moral/political divisions between animals and humans, and between different groups of humans) are not, in other words, mutually exclusive, as both Day and Chidester seem to suppose.

My point is that the analogy is troubling not solely on account of the racist, imperialist context in which it is situated, but also because, in the nineteenth century, a particular conception of evolutionary time could apply as much to ‘race’ as it did to species. Understanding this historically and culturally specific conception of the shared temporalities of species and of ‘race’ in the nineteenth century is important because, without it, one might miss how Darwin’s ‘bridge’ between humans and animals, the unity of descent, could be interpreted as a racialised gradation of humans and animals. Understood thus, the parasol anecdote looks less like an argument for interspecies continuity, and more like an illustration of how dogs, ‘savages’ and God-fearing Europeans fit on to a continuous, linear and ‘progressive’ evolutionary scale.

By the end of Darwin’s century, ‘mankind (le genre humain)’ had shrunk into ‘the human species (l’espèce humaine)’ (Foucault 2009: 75) (as all other creatures had shrunk into species) and, no less significantly, race had mostly contracted to human phenotypical difference (Peterson 2019: 445). The ‘capacious’ definition of race, which had applied as much to cabbages as to humans, was supplanted toward the end of the nineteenth century, and certainly by the beginning of the twentieth century, by ‘a human-centred definition’ (Peterson 2019: 444). Race itself, as Christopher Peterson succinctly puts it, was racialised (Peterson 2019: 444). In 1932, the concept of racism entered the Oxford English Dictionary in the context of the rise of European fascism (Peterson 2019: 449). Today, the conjoined becoming-species of humans (and, more specifically, the becoming one species of human) and the becoming-human of ‘race’ make it inconceivable that religion – or indeed any other non-biological quality or characteristic – could define separate human species or human ‘races’. The very mode of my analysis of the parasol anecdote is indicative of this: it implicitly reflects my understanding of racism as a force that assumes many different forms, draws on many supporting actors (such as dogs), and can be interrogated in its historical and cultural specificity. Biology is relevant here, not for what it says about ‘race’ per se, but because the real, material substance of biology (life, reproduction, sexuality, nutrition, disease, death) is deployed to do biopolitical work. A key technique of that biopolitical work is racism, which Foucault describes as ‘a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain’ (Foucault 2003: 255). In other words, racism fractures what is now understood to be a ‘biological’ field. This does not mean that ‘race’ is biological. On the contrary, it illustrates that it is not. What it means, is that racist forms of politics exploit biology.

The contrast with species could not be more stark.

Who needs species?

Importantly, the ‘framing’ of the history of the concept of race as a move from typological- to population-thinking, Müller-Wille writes,

serves a similar function as the quotation marks – ‘speech act condoms’, as Jacques Derrida once called them – that habitually encase the term [race]. As a potential pollutant, race is excluded from proper and rational discourse and treated as a subject that can only be understood as a residue of long outdated forms of typological and hierarchical thinking, if it can be understood at all.(Müller-Wille 2014: 598)

There are no such ‘speech act condoms’ around the category species. Where biology itself – or rather, the privileged status accorded to biology now that human beings are ‘naturalised’ – enables the history of the concept of ‘race’ to be ‘told as the history of a false idea’ (Müller-Wille 2014: 599, emphasis in the original), the truth or falsity of the idea of species – is it an idea, or not? – remains unclear. ‘[S]‌pecies?’, John Wilkins writes: ‘[n]o biological theory requires them’ (Wilkins 2017: 342, emphasis in the original). Yet species remains a driving category in biology, even though none of the six basic species concepts identified by Wilkins – ‘biospecies (reproductively isolated sexual species), ecospecies (ecological niche occupiers), evolutionary species (evolving lineages), genetic species (common gene pool), morphospecies (species defined by their form, or phenotypes), and taxonomic species (whatever a taxonomist calls a species)’ (Wilkins 2017: 305, emphasis in the original; see also 348–350) – cover all the different ‘modes of being a species’ on the evolutionary ‘tree’ (350).

In a survey of over 150 universities in the USA and Europe, Bruno Pušić, Pavel Gregorić and Damjan Franjević asked biologists ‘what they made of the species problem’ (Pušić et al. 2017). Their results were startling. Almost none of these biologists believed that species is the unit of evolution, that there is or should be a single definition of species or that species are real, and virtually nobody believed that species are individuals, as Michael Ghiselin (1987) has controversially argued (Pušić et al. 2017: 195–197). Nevertheless, nearly all the biologists considered species to be a basic concept in biology (Pušić et al. 2017: 185). This ambivalence and ambiguity are reflected in the social sciences and humanities, which explains perhaps why a social scientist might argue that species is an actual biological infrastructure that is torqued, but neither produced nor determined, by political and economic factors (Kirksey 2015) – or that the limits, fuzziness, breaches, hierarchical subversions and reworkings of the borders and barriers around species are valuable objects of analysis, while the category itself is nevertheless accepted as ‘ontological distinction between different forms of biological life (species)’ (Livingston and Puar 2011: 7). Meanwhile, in the public domain, the concept of species is saturated, if not totally overloaded, with ethical and political value. In environmental and ecological debates, it lends power and meaning to ideas of extinction, endangerment and protection. It is the barometer of biodiversity loss and the warning signal of the collapse of ecosystems (cf. Heise 2010). It drives the Promethean discourse of Homo sapiens as a destructive geological super-agent (Crist 2013; Harari 2011). In animal activism and scholarship, the concept of species necessarily subtends the charge of speciesism (Singer 2015 [1976]).

Does it matter that, while critiques of racism are often simultaneously critiques of the category ‘race’ (as the ‘speech act condoms’ indicate), critiques of speciesism only rarely address the category species? After all, as Smith notes, ‘distinctions that are not about something real are not for that reason not real distinctions’ (Smith 2015: 52). Clearly, the formal evacuation of ‘race’ from biology (by way, in part, of population genetics) has made very little difference to the reality of racism (Duster 2015), just as the concept of unity of descent, which constitutes humans and animals as part of the same evolutionary ‘family’, makes no difference at all to speciesism. But surely it does matter, because a classification of ‘race’ is called out as racist precisely because it classifies falsely. This is why genetic science, even though it disputes biological race, continues, rightly, to be critically identified as a racist science. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Revitalisation Act, for instance, mandates that any clinical practitioner or biomedical researcher who receives federal funding ‘should report on the diversity of their research subjects according to racial and ethnic categories designated by the OMB [White House Office of Management and Budget]’ (Fujimura and Rajagopalan 2011: 17). ‘[T]‌he entire enterprise’, Roberts writes, ‘from beginning to end – identifying populations to enter into data sets, determining which and how many genetic clusters matter, and applying the findings to our everyday lives – inescapably depends on preconceived notions of race’ (Roberts 2012: 58).

Among the many possible critiques that one might raise against the NIH’s use of the OMB categories is that they turn ‘distinctions that are not about something real’ into ‘real distinctions’. Specifically, they turn ‘preconceived notions of race’, as Roberts put it, into racialised realities. Research subjects are not possessed of intrinsic characteristics that would justify their allocation to racial groups; rather, their allocation to such groups (even if by way of self-identification) is one aspect of a process of their racialisation. The OMB categories determine that the research and its research subjects will be racialised, regardless of the particularity of any individual research subject, or the particularity of patterns of health and/or genetic similarities and differences (which may or may not map on to groups of individuals). Particularity is important here as a referent beyond the category: it can serve as evidence of the fiction of the category ‘race’ (because nobody actually embodies a biological race), as well as evidence of the fact of its effects (the embodied effects of racism, which may be manifested in individuals and/or across communities).

Again, the contrast between ‘race’ and species is striking. As I have already noted, it is difficult to call out species as ‘not about something real’ because, to all intents and purposes, species appear, to quote Smith again, to be ‘a really existing kind of thing’ (Smith 2015: 51). With what implications, for particularity? Where the falsity of ‘race’ makes it important, in the struggle against racism, to be interested in forms of particularity (as I have just noted), the ostensible truth of species makes it difficult to find any reason to be interested in, or concerned about, such forms, including the form of particularity that is the singular individual animal. In the passage from induction to species classification, individual animals, who exist in relation to other individual animals with whom they may constitute a group, are transformed into members of the group. Once the species group is established, it is the species that counts, and not the individual. This is why, even though individual animals are allocated to species groups, such groups are not usually conceived to be composed of them (see Chapter 7 for more on this point). A species can be considered extinct, for example, even if some small number of individuals who are assigned to that species category are still alive (Van Dooren 2016). Or consider those individual ‘examples’ of endangered species who are constituted by law as not killable. These individuals are special not because they are individuals, but because they are members of a special species, a protected species. Mourning the extinction of ‘a species’, therefore, would appear to be mourning the extinction of the idea of individuals, which may be why species extinction is often dramatised through the fictional portrayal of the death of an endling (the final member of a species) (see for example Heise 2010: 61–63).

Individual particularity, difference or variability is certainly important with regard to population level processes of speciation, but once the stage of ‘fixity’ (through reproductive isolation, say) has been achieved, the relevance of particular individuals to their species category is nullified. Once a species rank has been identified – regardless of whatever model of species is being deployed, and whatever different mode of qualification for membership of the category species is being advanced – what that rank ‘means’ for and about an individual is already decided for that and every other individual who is a member. This is especially clear in scientific studies and experiments in which, Alexandra Horowitz writes,

[i]‌f one man fails to solve a Rubik’s cube in an hour, we do not extrapolate from that that all men will so fail. When it comes to describing our potential physical and cognitive capacities, we are individuals first, and members of the human race second. By contrast, with animals the order is reversed … [A]nimals [are] representatives of their species first, and … individuals second.(Horowitz 2012: 8)11

The fact that biologists do not wholly endorse or even believe in the concept of species; that it is very hard, and has always been hard, to identify a species in practice (Ereshefsky 2017); and that no biological theory requires them anyway; is not, therefore, what matters. What matters is that the concept of species remains central to all kinds of debates about animals – whether it is deployed scientifically or casually – while the category itself, at the very same time, obliterates the relevance of the individuals who are apparently the subjects of discussion and concern.

In her book Elephants on the Edge, the trans-species ecologist and psychologist Gay Bradshaw asks: ‘Who is an elephant?’ (Bradshaw 2009: 2). Although Bradshaw describes this question as ‘unfamiliar’ (2), to me, it is jarring. It is jarring, because it is underlined by a violence, by the abrogation of the ‘who’ by way of the category ‘elephant’. The question does not need to be asked, because the answer is given within it: an elephant is an elephant. The question one asks of species is what. What is an elephant? What is a dog? The answer will pertain to all elephants, to all dogs, regardless of ‘who’ they are. It is surely significant that Bradshaw, who is concerned with ‘whos’, prefers the terms ‘deportation’ to ‘translocation’, and ‘genocide’ to ‘culls’ and ‘harvesting’. The terms deportation and genocide, she writes, cast the consequences of the ‘appropriat[ion] of wildlife lands and the reshap[ing] of animal societies’ in a radically different light, by making visible that they are usually imposed on animals – i.e. on individual animals – ‘without animal consent’ (Bradshaw 2010: 15). But of course they are imposed without consent, for one cannot ask consent from a species. When individual animals are understood as representatives or ambassadors for a species, it means that they exemplify the species, not that they speak for it. Can speciesism explain the widespread deportation and genocide of animals? The charge of speciesism is not directed at the classification species. Rather, it is directed at the prejudicial attitudes of humans toward those whose species classification differs from their own. In this respect, the charge of speciesism reaffirms the validity of species, if not its ‘truth’.

Species appear to be real, and this ‘reality’ is everywhere instantiated and affirmed, often without notice. To be clear, I am less concerned with the ‘truth’, or not, of species, and more with how species, and especially species stories, work. What is the work of species? I have argued throughout this book, and in this chapter, that one of the key achievements of species thinking is that it erases the significance of particularity, and especially the particular individual animal as a figure of relevance in science and elsewhere.12 This is what prompts me to ask how else, by what method or mechanism, an animal can come to acquire the identity of an individual, at least in those places, be they geographical, philosophical, scientific, political … where individuality matters. Necessarily, this is a question to be investigated empirically, for the answer will always be specific to the ‘species’ of animal (i.e. to what their species story allows or not), and to their historical and cultural location. As I illustrated in Chapter 5, one way that a dog acquires individuality in science and more broadly is by being in a relationship with a human (with a human researcher, say, or with a human guardian). Another way, as I will illustrate now, is by being identified as ‘a threat to the corporate bios’ (McWhorter 2010: 77), that is, as a ‘dangerous’ dog. These two modes of individuation are in many ways quite different: what is politically and socially important about a population of dogs in relationships with humans is that the individual dogs matter in some way to those humans. While individual ‘dangerous’ dogs also matter to individual people, the political and social significance of that population lies elsewhere: in its dangerousness. Nevertheless, these two populations, very differently constituted, have something significant in common, as I will return to discuss in conclusion.

Black pit bulls

Even though it is the case that ‘race unlike species has turned out to be biologically insignificant’ (Smith 2015: 52), so saturated do these two concepts remain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that, Claire Jean Kim writes, there can be ‘no race-free space’ from which to talk about animals (Kim 2015: 185, emphasis omitted). In her book Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, Kim argues that ‘race, which borrows from species, gives back to it; race is part of the lexicon by which species is made just as species is part of the lexicon by which race is made’ (Kim 2015: 272). Importantly, scholars – and especially those who draw inspiration from the framework of intersectionality – are careful to distinguish this traffic between ‘race’ and species from analogies between ‘race’ and species. For example: the term ‘canine racism’ is derived from contemporary US debates about breed-specific legislation (BSL) and especially the banning or strict regulation of the bull breeds (Weaver 2013: 693). Opponents of BSL argue that, since young black men began dog fighting in the 1980s, and especially fighting pit bulls, pit bulls in particular have been unfairly demonised by the North American press as dangerous dogs. Drawing on the vocabulary of race-related struggles, BSL opponents not only characterise the prejudice against these dogs as ‘canine racism’, but also deploy terms such as ‘breed discrimination legislation’ and ‘canine profiling’ (Kim 2015: 273). In other words, they evoke ‘the analogy to racial discrimination to awaken sympathy for the pit bull’ (Kim 2015: 273). In response, many researchers have criticised analogous thinking both because it ‘unavoidably reproduce[s]‌ the association [of animals] with Blackness’ (Kim 2015: 273), and also because it does not comprehensively illustrate how the exploitation of black men and pit bulls are connected.

In 2007, National Football League (NFL) player Michael Vick was arrested and indicted for dog fighting, and given a twenty-three-month prison sentence. The case was especially explosive, as Kim shows, because its ‘central players’ were the ‘most animal of humans (the Black man)’ and the ‘most human of animals (the dog)’ (Kim 2015: 255). Moreover, the criss-crossing between ‘race’ and animality was especially pronounced in this controversy because Vick had ‘superstar’ (Kim 2015: 253) status as an NFL athlete, and ‘[a]‌nimal tropes’, Kim writes, ‘pervade discussions of Black male athletes to the point where they have become normalized, working synergistically with tropes about Black male violence, brutality, and dangerousness’ (Kim 2015: 268).

Kim describes the polarisation of the public debates around Vick in terms of an ‘optic of cruelty’ and an ‘optic of racism’ (Kim 2015: 254). With regard to the former, ‘animal advocates’ focused almost exclusively on Vick’s cruel treatment of his dogs, failing to recognise the racialised aspects of the case, or of their own discourse. With regard to the latter, ‘Vick’s defenders’ drew attention to racism, and especially to the racism of the North American criminal justice system, while simultaneously assuming that concern for Vick’s dogs was ‘perverse and morally out of joint’ (Kim 2015: 277). In her ‘ethics of avowal’, by contrast, Kim seeks to interrogate the intersection between ‘the institutionalized violence against Blacks and the institutionalized violence against dogs in contemporary society’ (Kim 2015: 255, my emphasis). She writes:

Like Blacks, pit bulls have been constructed as a group of beings whose behavior is biologically determined as violent, ruthless, and dangerous. Like Blacks, pit bulls are often victims of a ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ policy by police. Like Blacks, they are objects of public loathing and fear whose very presence provokes a strongly disciplinary (if not murderous) response … Pit bulls are dying for being Black’.(Kim 2015: 272–273)

Before addressing the implications of the racialisation of pit bulls for their status as individuals, I want to pause for a moment to clarify exactly what versions of the concepts of ‘race’ and of species make it possible for Kim to claim intelligibly that ‘[p]‌it bulls are dying for being Black’.

The statement ‘[p]‌it bulls are dying for being Black’ makes a particular, twenty-first century, kind of sense. It is comprehensible to the extent that one understands that pit bulls are dying because, like black men in North America, they have been ‘constructed’, as Kim puts it in the above extract, ‘as a group of beings whose behavior is biologically determined as violent, ruthless, and dangerous’. While the attribution of these characteristics (violence, ruthlessness, dangerousness) to biology has real, material implications, ‘in truth’ it is incidental; it is ‘a way’, as Foucault puts it, ‘of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms’ (Foucault 2003: 257).13 One might compare and contrast the discrimination against pit bulls in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the discrimination that English colonists directed against Indian ‘races’ of dogs in the seventeenth century (see Chapter 1). On the one hand, this racism – to use the word anachronistically – can be understood to be similarly extrinsic,14 insofar as it maps onto Indian dogs the ‘savagery’ that the English attributed to Indian people. But English racism was intrinsic too, because the colonists identified, in English dogs, the civilisation that they believed to be characteristic of the English race. Indeed, this intrinsic racism – understood as ‘the bare fact of being the same race’ (Kwame Anthony Appiah in Peterson 2019: 448) – extended to nearly all their animals: ‘[c]onvinced that their beasts could not forfeit their identity as English chattel, colonists could safely regard domestic animals as extensions of themselves. Even the scrawniest cow wandering aimlessly through the woods advanced the cause of civilizing the wilderness’ (Anderson 2004: 140). In other words, English colonists, English dogs and other English animals shared a ‘race’ that was uninterrupted by species difference. One reason why this continuity may have been intelligible is that, as I have already discussed, ‘race’ was no less real than species, and shared roughly the same time scale. Generations of English dogs and cows were imbued with the characteristics of English ‘civilisation’.

Today, the racism toward black men and pit bulls must be identified as extrinsic, because ‘race’ has no biological or other intrinsic foundation. This is what enables the commonalities between the racialisation and racist treatment of men and pit bulls to be identified and analysed, and it is also what ensures that these commonalities are understood to be contingent and temporary. The different temporalities and durations of ‘race’ and species are relevant here: the time of processes of racialisation brings men and dogs ‘together’ in a very specific (racist) way. The time of species holds them apart. Since ‘race’ does not run continuously between species (as it did in the seventeenth century), to slip over this difference would be to turn analysis into an analogy – into an analogy such as ‘canine racism’ – which would strengthen the association between men who are racialised black and dogs/animals, just as the analogy between ‘Godless savages’ and ‘superstitious dogs’ strengthened the association between non-believers and dogs in the nineteenth century.

I pay attention to how ‘race’ and species are operating as categories here, not in order to dispute the traffic between racism and species thinking that informs the racist co-racialisation of men and dogs, but rather to propose, in light of the fact that men are not dogs, that the implications that follow for men and for dogs – in this mainstream, media-saturated context – are not identical. ‘Violent, ruthless, and dangerous’, when ascribed to men who are racialised black, recalls essentialist thinking, where essentialism is indexed, as Kim notes, to biology. Perhaps it even recalls typological thinking, insofar as the duration of the narrative ‘violent, ruthless, and dangerous’ extends back at least to the early 1800s. Kim argues that the ‘parable of Black recalcitrance’, wherein ‘Vick made the right choice at first but then slipped back … echoes across the centuries with Southern plantation owners’ antebellum arguments that freed slaves would revert to (bestial) type as soon as the civilizing, disciplining influence of slavery was lifted’ (Kim 2015: 255, emphasis in the original). Racist ‘history’, here, supports the perceived eternalism of biology.

Pit bulls, however, are not transformed by racism into a type. Pit bulls are already a type: they are a type of dog (not a breed), and they are, in effect, a type of animal (a species). I would tentatively propose, therefore, that what is of specific significance to pit bulls, as dogs, of their racialisation as black, is that it marks them out as a population, a population comprising identifiable individual dogs, ‘dangerous’ dogs, who are subject to a ‘“shoot first, ask questions later” policy’ (Kim 2015: 272). Although this identification as the object and target of power (of State power, and of institutionalised State violence) – this individuation – is shared by both men who are racialised black and by pit bulls, for pit bulls it is transformative of the kind of group to which they ‘belong’. Now, in the public eye, a pit bull is somehow more than ‘just’ a dog, more than ‘just’ a representative of Canis familiaris (where one representative can as well be replaced with another). Now, a pit bull is a dog who has been singled out and made newly visible – distinguished from most other dogs.

Since my argument here risks homogenising all other dogs, i.e., all dogs who are not pit bulls, this is perhaps an opportune moment to remind the reader, as I noted in the introduction, that my analysis in this chapter is somewhat schematic (not least for the sake of brevity). In theory and probably in practice, numerous dog populations are being constituted, each of which, in its empirical specificity, challenges the relationship of the dogs who constitute them to the species category Canis familiaris. But this is precisely my point: there is almost no route back to particularity via species; nearly always, some other mode of individuation is required. The constitution of pit bulls as a population of ‘violent, ruthless, and dangerous’ individuals is in no way positive. To repeat again: ‘[l]‌ike Blacks, [pit bulls] are objects of public loathing and fear whose very presence provokes a strongly disciplinary (if not murderous) response’ (Kim 2015: 272).

I have argued that species categories are not usually understood to be composed of individuals. One consequence of this evacuation of the individual is that species categories are also somewhat disconnected from death. Insofar as examples – especially examples of a domesticated species – can be on-goingly replicated, one might even claim rhetorically that animals, when they are defined by their species, are in fact deathless (see also Chapter 7). One conspicuous aspect of the Michael Vick controversy, therefore, and of BSL more generally, is that they constitute pit bulls as a population of individuals whose deaths are of considerable public concern. The very point of BSL is that it legitimates surveillance and control of pit bulls and their handlers. Vast numbers of statistics pertaining to individual pit bull lives, and especially their deaths, are collected not only by those who support BSL, but also by those who oppose it. Pit bull deaths are a topic of concern, in other words, whether that concern stems from a belief that pit bulls should die, or from the belief that they should not. Kim herself offers plenty of statistics with regard to pit bull deaths (Kim 2015: 274), as have other scholars over the decades. In one of the earliest accounts, Vicki Hearne, writing in 1991, noted that in 1987 the Endangered Breed Association recorded that ‘35,000 people took their bull breed dogs to pounds and humane societies to be killed … because they had read in a newspaper that their dogs were dangerous’ (Hearne 2007b: 278). Clearly, not much has changed. Pit bulls in shelters, Katja Guenther writes, are routinely ‘killed in large numbers’ not because they are associated with dog fighting specifically, but because they are seen to be ‘higher risk and more dangerous than other types of dogs’ (Guenther 2020: 157).

This concern with pit bull deaths should come as no surprise – as no surprise at all – for, to state the obvious, individuation/individualisation is one of the principal apparatuses through which a life is recognised not ‘merely’ as a life, but as a life that ends with a death. Nonetheless, in the public domain, these deaths remain largely anonymous (cf. Guenther 2020: Chapter 5). A pit bull died. Or: 35,000 pit bulls died. Or: 3 million pit bulls died (in shelters, in a year, in the USA) (Kim 2015: 274). To be concerned with these deaths is not necessarily to be concerned with the loss of singularity that they represent, with the loss that, by definition, cannot be recovered. It would take the ostensibly neutral ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘salvation’ of Vick’s dogs, which Harlan Weaver argues means in fact the re-racialisation of these dogs as white, to transform pit bull deaths from something that counts, to something that matters: to transform them, that is, into the deaths of irreducible, irreplaceable individuals.

White pit bulls

That these dogs were rehabilitated at all is unusual. More commonly, as Weaver explains, ‘federal, state, and local governments [in the USA] euthanize all dogs present at a dogfighting bust, including those that work as government informants (as participants in fighting rinks staged to set up busts)’ (Weaver 2021: 111). A shift in policy made the dogs’ rescue possible, and this, Weaver argues, ‘changed the connections between the category of pit bull and race’ (111). In particular, a narrative of citizenship, closely tied to the normative kinship practices of marriage (including gay marriage) and family (Lauren Berlant in Weaver 2021: 111–112), was central to the dogs’ rehabilitation, as were certain citizenship practices: ‘one of the rescuers’ main goals for all the dogs’, Weaver reports, ‘was that they pass the American Kennel Club’s Canine Good Citizen test’ (112). ‘No longer partnered with “thugs”, he writes, Vick’s dogs ‘became pit bulls committed to the greater social good, pit bulls with stakes in home lives, pit bulls with loving families needed to advocate for them in order to distance them from their “bad rap”’ (113).15 All of which, Weaver argues, amounts not to the ‘absence of race’ but, rather, to ‘the active construction of whiteness’ (112; see also Guenther (2020): 182–185 on the part played by feminisation in the construction of pit bulls as white).

Vick’s dogs’ re-racialisation as white was synonymous with their ‘recod[ing] as “unique individuals”’ (Weaver 2021: 113). This was largely achieved through some of the most classic techniques of individualisation: naming, portraiture, photography, storying etc.; and, in addition, details of the dogs’ perceived personalities were widely disseminated (see for example Giambalvo 2019). It was also achieved, however, by way of public scrutiny of their deaths. Considerable attention was paid, for instance, to the four (out of fifty-one) dogs who died soon after being rescued: two in shelters, and two who were euthanised, one for being ‘too violent’ and one for medical reasons (Sports Illustrated 2008: para. 47). The Best Friends Animal Society, which took in twenty-two of the remaining forty-seven dogs, and which rehomed all but two of them (Lucas and Meryl), posted mini ‘obituaries’ when any of the dogs died: obituaries that included, importantly, the reasons for their deaths. Bonita, for example, whom Vick used as a bait dog, ‘passed away from anesthesia complications during a dental surgery’ in 2009 (Dickson 2009: para. 1); Georgia lost a ‘battle with kidney failure’ in 2013 (Harmon 2013: para. 1); Mya died after ‘a brief battle with cancer’ in 2019 (Castle 2019: para. 3); and Frodo, ‘the last surviving “Vicktory dog”’, died of old age in 2021 (Castle 2021).

To my mind, this preoccupation with the dogs’ deaths constitutes them as a new kind of population. No longer are they a population of ‘violent, ruthless, and dangerous’ individuals; now, they are a population of individuals who are at risk of a wrongful death. Not merely individuated, these pit bulls are, further, individualised, and as individuals they not only can die, their deaths at both individual and group level are open to moral evaluation (could this death have been avoided? Is it a just or an unjust death?). Herein lies the significance of the listing of the causes of death – it does not really matter how these dogs died, only that their deaths were distinguished from the injustices of dog fighting: ‘distinguished’, as opposed to ‘distinct’, from. It is notable, for instance, that several of the dogs’ obituaries recorded babesia as a cause of ill health and/or death. Babesia gibsoni is tick-borne blood disease that, because it can be transmitted through bites, is commonly found in fighting dogs (Niestat et al. 2022). Dying of causes related to babesia, however, surrounded – as nearly all the obituaries emphasise – by tender loving care (including veterinary care), is perceived to be morally quite different from being killed in a dog fighting pit, being tortured to death, being shot for losing a dog fight, being shot by police or being euthanised by a humane society for being ‘beyond rehabilitation’. All of these are unjust deaths. Having introduced their readers to Sweet Jasmine: to what she looks like – ‘35 pounds of twitchy curiosity with a coat the color of fried chicken, a pink nose and brown eyes’ (Sports Illustrated 2008: para. 2) – and to how traumatised her life has been, Sports Illustrated switches immediately to:

PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] wanted Jasmine dead. Not just Jasmine, and not just PETA. The Humane Society of the US, agreeing with PETA, took the position that Michael Vick’s pit bulls, like all dogs saved from fight rings, were beyond rehabilitation and that trying to save them was a misappropriation of time and money.(Sports Illustrated 2008: para. 5)

The moral outrage here is that Sweet Jasmine would have suffered an unnatural death, having endured a life of unnatural suffering that itself could have killed her. This outrage is only possible, however, if the individuated pit bull, now steeped in individuality, is perceived to be a morally relevant unit of analysis: a figure not just of particular significance, but of significance because they are particular.

Conclusion

I noted earlier Kim’s claim that dogs are the ‘most human of animals’ (Kim 2015: 255): human ‘not in terms of appearance or cognitive ability or percentage of shared DNA, but in terms of intimacy, familiarity, and identification’ (Kim 2015: 271). There is nothing especially controversial about this.16 I have already illustrated in the previous chapter, for example, how the question ‘is a pet an animal?’ (Fudge 2002: 27) torments the scientific study of dogs. In her book, Animal, Erica Fudge offers a historical analysis of how this distinction between a pet and an animal came about during the early modern period, and how it includes not only individualisation (especially by naming), but also co-habitation and taboos on pet consumption (Fudge 2002: 27–46; see also Thomas 1984: 112–115). To this list of three, I would add a fourth distinguishing feature, which is that ‘pets’ are not animals because their individual deaths (usually) matter, at least to those who know them. What ties Vick’s dogs specifically with ‘pet’ dogs more generally is that they are both illustrative of how limited are the routes by which an animal can acquire the identity of an individual and, relatedly, escape the deathlessness of species. In this case, the racialisation of Michael Vick’s dogs as black lifted them out of the undifferentiated species blur that is ‘the dog’ (constituting them as a population of identifiable ‘dangerous’ individuals), while their re-racialisation as white obviated their melting back into it.17

I am not suggesting that all humans enjoy the privilege of a death that counts. They do not (ICRC 2022; Lo and Horton 2015). Mine is not an argument aimed at securing for animals what humans have supposedly secured for themselves. My point simply is that the issue of individual particularity is intensely relevant to animals because they are usually classified by a sign (species) whose very ‘success’ depends upon its erasure. Truly, as Kim says, ‘race’ and species give and take from one another. But my own view is that they do so discriminately. Species thinking, because species are considered to be ‘real’, offers up the substance of biology to biopower. But the power to individuate, a key technique of biopolitical racism, is one that species thinking neither cares for nor covets. Species thinking does not (wish to) produce individuals, in the way that racism sometimes can. Should racism seek to convert an individual, or group of individuals, into a racialised type, however, where better to go than to species, which is a type of type like no other, for it offers no possibility of return to particularity. This matters for animals, but also for humans, for as Wadiwel writes: ‘[i]‌f the destiny of humanity lies in the animal, then the true political challenge of the contemporary era revolves around the removal of the gap in its entirety’ (Wadiwel 2002: para. 17, emphasis in the original).

Political challenge and transformation, in the context of the conjoined lexicons of ‘race’ and of species, often turn on identifying the falseness of ‘the type’ and the wrongness of an individual’s relation or allocation to it. But when animals are identified as species, the falseness of the category and the wrongness of the allocation hang suspended. This is in part what has motivated my writing of this book, and the grief that lies behind it. The idea that it is possibly-not-wrong to allocate an animal to a not-exactly-false category ensures that when species thinking kills, nobody dies.

Notes

1 Always counts, that is, in those countries – currently numbering around forty – that have passed some form of partial or full breed-specific legislation against pit bull types. (For details, see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-that-ban-pit-bulls (accessed August 2023)).
2 Both Plato and Aristotle believed in essential forms. Aristotle, however, was ‘eager to distance himself from Plato’s theory of Forms, which exist quite apart from the material world. He does so in part by insisting that his own forms are somehow enmeshed in matter’ (Ainsworth 2020).
3 I will return to Gliddon below. Nott was a physician and ‘medical anthropologist’, who spent most of his life in Mobile, Alabama. Loring Brace describes him as a ‘prototypical Southern racist’ (Brace 1974: 516). Among his many publications, Nott was responsible for the English translation of Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races (Erikson 1986: 112).
4 See Smith (2015) for a more detailed analysis of how the theory of separate origins has historically been linked to disputes over scriptural authority.
5 Indigenous Races of the Earth was the follow-up to Gliddon and Nott’s Types of Mankind, which was published in 1854 and written in memory of Samuel Morton, who died in 1851.
6 Darwin was drawn into these debates as a scientist, and also because he came from a family that for two generations had been well established as anti-slavery campaigners (Desmond and Moore 2009, esp. Chapter 1). The hope expressed in The Descent of Man stemmed in part from Darwin’s revulsion at the way monogenism often, and polygenism always, sanctified slavery by insisting that ‘savagism’ and ‘civilisation’ were given and unchanging states.
7 Biologists in the early part of the twentieth century, Richard Lewontin writes, ‘were loath to abandon the idea of race entirely’ (Lewontin 2006: para. 11). Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notion of ‘geographical race’, for instance – of race as a genetically distinct geographical population – was an effort, Lewontin argues, ‘to hold on to the concept [of race] while mak[ing] it objective and generalizable’ (Lewontin 2006: para. 11; see Gannett (2013) on the three conceptions of race held by Dobzhansky during his lifetime).
8 So varied are dogs that even Darwin was tripped up by them: ‘I fully admit’, he wrote, that domestic dogs ‘have probably descended from several wild species’ (Darwin 2008: 18).
9 This is why the comparatively speedy time span of modification by artificial selection was a helpful metaphor for Darwin (see Chapter 2), and also why so much turned on the answers to questions about geological time in the nineteenth century (Boakes 2008: 49–52; Van Grouw 2018: 62–65). The issue, simply put, was this: is the earth old enough to support theories of evolution?
10 Gradation, with the possibility of improvement, can make colonialism easier to justify than does the idea that some groups of humans are irredeemably inferior (Smith 2015: 33). This ‘liberal racism’ involves ‘making the best of the European experience the model for everyone, and the eventual perfection of mankind consisting in everyone becoming creative Europeans’ (Richard Popkin in Smith 2015: 33).
11 If they are individuals at all (see Chapter 7).
12 Which is not to deny that particular animals may be relevant, in different and often unpredictable ways, to particular scientists, or that a generic conception of ‘the individual’ is not important in science (see Chapter 7). This is especially well illustrated by the biological species concept, in which the individual is usually, but not always, considered to be the unit of inheritance.
13 The BVA, the British Small Animal Veterinary Association (BSAVA), the RSPCA and other UK bodies such as the Dogs Trust, as well as similar organisations in the United States, Australia and elsewhere, are all opposed to breed-specific legislation, citing literature that indicates that there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that pit bull types are inherently dangerous (see for example Collier 2006).
14 As Peterson, drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah, defines it: ‘[e]‌xtrinsic racism identifies morally relevant criteria (alleged intellectual weakness, dishonesty, criminality and so on) as warranting discrimination’ (Peterson 2019: 448).
15 As Weaver notes, these narratives are not only raced, but classed. They assume, for example, the existence of homes – homes on which mortgages can be raised and in which dogs are actually permitted to be accommodated – and on homes as opposed to woods or streets or shelters (Weaver 2021: 114; on dogs and class in the USA, including especially pit bulls, see also Dayan (2016)).
16 Except that Kim is probably referring to companion and working dogs, who make up only a small proportion of the total global dog population (see Chapters 2 and 5 of this book).
17 One might object that the deaths of this group of approximately fifty dogs were able to be singularised on account of their relatively small number. In Chapter 7, I will argue that while the ‘numbering up’ of animals is a key factor in their de-individualisation, it is the concept species itself that is more significant.
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Dog politics

Species stories and the animal sciences

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