Whose Dog Are You?: The Technology of Dog Breeds and The Aesthetics of Modern Human-Canine Relations
190
Whose Dog Are You?: The Technology of Dog Breeds and The Aesthetics of Modern Human-Canine Relations
190eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628953091 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Series: | The Animal Turn |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 190 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Legal and Legible
Breed Regulation in Law and Science
On the twentieth of May 1722, Alexander Pope's brother-in-law, Charles Rackett, was arrested for poaching in Windsor Forest. Rackett, his son Michael, and two servants had with them some horses and dogs. The circumstances of the arrest, its consequences for the Rackett family, and its effect on Pope's poetry all remain unclear. It has generally been understood within the context of anti-Catholicism, with its fear of insurrection against the Hanoverian reign; these political antagonisms found an immediate and effective image in the conflict over poaching, which in Rackett's case merely meant encroachment on the royal forest by a person whose rank did not qualify him to hunt, or to approach within ten miles of the forest with large dogs. As Pope's Windsor Forest makes plain, the notorious laws regulating who could enter the forest, and who could keep hounds, had long been part of the English countryside. These had been relaxed during Anne's reign, and then reinforced by George I. Such restrictions took different forms over the next century and reflected the broader drive to restrict the discord that had supported Pope's aesthetics. That desire for control led not only to various calls to regulate dogs, but also to the technological innovations that eventually took over as the Agricultural Revolution and the push for "improvement" in which the Foxhound was created as the first dog breed.
Of course many people in Britain kept dogs, and many — like Pope — even kept large dogs within the restricted ten-mile range of a royal forest, but the law prohibiting people from officially keeping and owning their dogs was in place and could be used whenever those of the proper rank might wish; and, in fact, throughout the eighteenth century the Game Laws were enforced often enough for their existence to be felt as a fact. These laws, extensions of the old Forest Laws written by Canute, existed well before natural historians began to divide the world into genera and species, and it would be specious to suggest that they gave rise to the technological manipulation of the countryside. But the process of modernizing them, to regulate the large number of dogs kept by all classes of people, reflected a significant shift from Pope's allowance for concordant discord in favor of a unified landscape in which populations of humans and dogs were not so much excluded as managed. That such management sustained a certain privilege can be seen in the fact that the parliamentary debates over strategies of regulation occurred alongside delineations of relatedness among humans and animals by taxonomists like Buffon. The taxonomies established concrete analogies between canine appearance and human appearance at the same time that they divided humans into races. And the taxonomists employed much of the same aesthetic rhetoric as the lawmakers. Thus it is that this chapter will link together the laws regulating dogs, and the natural histories that began organizing the discordant and fluid varieties of dogs into stable types. Special attention was given to dogs by the natural historians because the prominent aesthetic doctrine replacing concordia discors bonded dogs and humans as mutual reflections, evident in literary works like Gay's Fables and in numerous portraits pairing humans and dogs. Even after all the laws restricting dog companionship and ownership were repealed, the divisions they enforced endured through the efforts of natural historians who created their classifications as reflections of them.
The different laws framing and narrowing modern relations between humans and dogs sought to institutionalize the comprehensive vision of the privileged subject through the surveillance of threatening political forces that appeared as insurrectionists, or merely as interlopers accompanied by dogs. Later in the century these unpopular laws shifted to a call for regulation through taxation that claimed more benign motives in hygienic control of rabies and in the moral concern over the mistreatment of dogs by the lower classes. During this same time, the legalistic enforcement of class difference was transposed into a comprehensive knowledge of dogs and humans through taxonomies. These taxonomies organized dogs into breeds, and changed discordant variability into set and preservable character traits that linked different individuals into similar members of a breed. Once stabilized and enforceable, breed differences gave rise to narratives of breed origin and purpose, and served as naturalizing analogies to the human racial taxonomies intertwined with canine categories. The development of breed and racial taxonomies complemented the legal framing and regulation of the mimetic landscape and facilitated — even necessitated — enforcement of the framed totality of "dog" by raising the necessity to preserve both purity and heritage of the newly devised categories.
FROM THE GAME LAWS TO THE DOG TAX
Although the Game Laws may be said to have taken various forms throughout their existence, they served the consistent purpose of restricting the hunting of certain prey animals — deer, hare, and game birds — to the aristocracy. Toward this end, they technically prohibited access to the sixty-nine officially designated forests throughout England, and they regulated the possession of dogs. The laws allowed for the seizure or destruction of "guns, dogs, nets and engines kept by unqualified persons to destroy game." In his seminal work on the Game Laws, P. B. Munsche frames the period from 1671, the year the Game Act revived the exclusionary aspects of the old laws, to 1831, the year of the Game Reform Act that effectively abolished the land qualifications for hunting rights, as the era when hunting was enforced as the exclusive privilege of the gentry. This was the time when terms like "forest" and "game" were legally defined to hold restrictive meanings. A forest had clear boundaries with access limited to the aristocracy. Game indicated the specific animals that those people able to enter a forest found pleasure in hunting and that anyone not possessing the required degree of land-based wealth were restricted from hunting or interfering with. The restricted spaces, the animals classified as game, and all the elements of the hunt — particularly hounds — became metonymies of class privilege. For my purposes, what matters is that the accoutrements of hunting — guns, nets, "engines," and dogs — also sufficed to mark a person as a poacher. The metonymic relation that could exist between a gentleman and his hound was a legal, social, and grammatical solecism among the lower classes. Outside the aristocracy, dogs could not be claimed as companions, for they held the potential of signifying unqualified activity. Indeed, "by 1707, the penalty for possessing a snare or a hunting dog was the same as that for killing game," which is to say that the snare and dog outside the restricted context became equivalent signifiers of an intent that was itself equivalent with the actual performance of poaching. Citing various reasons, such as the gentry's fear that money would gain ascendancy over land-based wealth, Munsche stresses that during this era "the property qualification for sportsmen was enforced with increasing vigour." Dogs accompanying unqualified people could be seized and destroyed, and apparently without any provision for size, shape, or ability (such as nose or speed).
The actual effect of the law on the number of dogs in England seems to have been minimal, since dogs appear to have remained almost ubiquitous. But the fact of the laws, the sense that they were needed, even when not consistently enforced, is what matters most. In "The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority," Derrida draws the "unstable distinction between justice and droit" that can help us to understand the need and effect of these severe, yet haphazard, laws. "Justice" he describes as "infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous, and heterotropic"; it is, in effect, the "mystical" foundation named in the article's subtitle. And droit he describes as "the exercise of justice as law or right, legitimacy or legality, stabilizable and statutory, calculable, as system of regulated and coded prescriptions." The mystical quality of justice gives it an equivalency with nature, as the creative force that makes the world of beings appear as it is, as the mystery signified by the written landscape. This justice tends to be nebulous, and it is just such nebulosity that makes it effective in regulating the landscape. Derrida explains that "to be just or unjust and to exercise justice, I must be free and responsible for my actions." But at the same time, "this freedom or this decision of the just, if it is one, must follow a law or a prescription, a rule." A right lies in the exercise of justice; the active, free decision can be performed by those capable of acting freely, and capable of engaging with the originary, creative force of justice, of nature as the embodied expression of divine will — in other words, by the privileged. In this unstable distinction, droit would belong to those who have both the right to hunt and the right to exclude others from doing anything approximating hunting; these rights have no real meaning or function apart from enforcing the privilege of those who possess them and excluding those who do not. The instability Derrida emphasizes brings into focus the way such an unpopular institution as the old Game Laws could remain intact so long: "It turns out," he says, that "droit claims to exercise itself in the name of justice and that justice is required to establish itself in the name of a law that must be 'enforced.'" Any enforcement of the Game Laws, of the restrictions on dogs, would have been an appeal to the just order of nature that distinguishes qualified men from all others. For "privilege" itself denotes an individual's capacity for self-rule (indicated in the etymology: privus, separate, legis genitive of lex) as opposed to rule imposed from without. Privilege is thus in itself the capacity of the subject who knows the objective world sufficiently to govern it. In the words of historians Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, "The great landowner was mythologized as a wise and powerful figure. ... [whose] benevolent omniscience was a result of his landed status, for as owner of the nation he was seen to be able to understand its needs." Supposedly, those without privilege derived from property lacked the capacity for self-governance, and effectively lacked the capacity to judge the world and themselves as a subject, and by extension lacked autonomy sufficient for aesthetic judgment. The qualified expressed their privilege through the right to hunt, and to enforce the laws restricting other people's ability to hunt; these rights are at one with the capacity to judge the beauty and justness of the landscape, managed by the privileged through enforcement of laws keeping rights exclusively for them. The nebulous justice of the Game Laws would have been implicit in all the exclusionary gestures of the privileged; the incalculability of their justice excluded the possibility of anyone arguing rationally against them, since reason (as the mystical governance of nature) lay at their foundation. As long as this nebulous — or mystical — foundation to the laws remained unassailable, their repressive heavy-handedness could be challenged no more than could the natural order of the landscape, no matter how hated they were.
The Game Laws were no less unpopular than the archaic Forest Laws, because they overtly excluded the majority of people from the right to hunt or to have dogs, while enforcing the privilege of the aristocracy. In order to enforce the freedom and judgment of the privileged, they necessarily excluded the non-privileged. The tenor of the laws reflected the view that non-aristocratic people (and political outliers, like Pope's brother-in-law) were all potential poachers, and that the companionship of dogs was not something deemed a right outside the aristocracy, because, in lacking the qualification, the unqualified lacked the judgment to enforce, to enact, the law; they could not manage the landscape by enforcing its limits. The unqualified were simply not privileged; they lacked the autonomy — freedom and responsibility — necessary for judgment. We might also say that they had not interiorized the nebulous and mystical justice that gave the droit of privilege its unassailable force; the qualification to hunt, based as it was on land ownership, foregrounded the mystical value of inheritance. Being excluded not only meant being barred physically from appearing in the landscape with a dog, but being disqualified from participating in the landscape as an intentional subject capable of performing an intervention. Unqualified persons were only ever objects of judgment, and of the law. Thus, when Derrida makes the point that "we would never say, in a sense considered proper, that an animal is a wronged subject," he gets to the heart of what the bare fact of these laws meant in their distinction between the qualified and unqualified. The people and dogs lacking qualification were not "wronged subjects," because only those qualified to exercise their rights by creating laws that upheld justice could be called "subject." Only the qualified subjectivity, with its judgment, its privileged position, possessed rights; and these rights, upheld by law (droit), served as the human form of natural or divine justice, just as the landscape represented the divinely authored nature. The unqualified lacked — along with privilege, qualification — the subjectivity capable of judgment — aesthetic, moral, or legal. And thus, "What we confusedly call 'animal,' the living thing as living and nothing else, is not a subject of the law or of law (droit)." The long-term effect of these laws was to delineate subject from nonsubject; this delineation split the species delineation between humans and dogs, so that some humans were deemed nonsubject, and some dogs were deemed almost-subject, or at least a metonymy of subject, and as the active bond between human and divine agents. The real force of the laws qualifying the rights of privilege is indicated by the comment of the Norfolk squire Robert Buxton, who sneered at the idea of the "lower orders" having pets, for "no industrious man would wish to keep a dog." This standard reflected the general assumption that the "lower orders" were void of the aesthetic capacity that enabled foxhunters to find joy in their hounds, and that enabled ladies to recognize a return of their affection from a lapdog.
That dogs had become a metonymic reflection of aesthetic capacity in the modern sense, combined with the ethical justice of inherited social rank, meant that fruitful companionship between them and humans could only be possible for the privileged, those men possessing the ethical capacity for moral governance and aesthetic joy. In chapter 59 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant equates the beautiful with the morally good, since in the act of judgment "the mind becomes conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above mere sensibility to pleasure from impressions of the senses, and also appraises the worth of others on the score of a like maxim of their judgment." Such judgment, such "elevation above mere sensibility" was demonstrated by the privileged in the exercise of their qualification both to hunt with hounds and to make laws restricting other forms of human-dog relations. The equation of aesthetic judgment with moral judgment and with social law institutionalized the aspersion of non-hunting relations between humans and dogs (or, a bit more broadly, non-privileged relations, since relations between lapdogs and ladies were somewhat acceptable, though still aspersed along gender lines) as immoral and unjust, because void of feeling, sympathy, or understanding.
When E. P. Thompson, in his examination of the Black Act, argues that the strident reactions against poachers in the early decades of the eighteenth century stemmed from fears of a Jacobin uprising, he foregrounds the political forces driving such responses. The hated Forest Laws were transformed in the Black Act as an urgent need to protect the kingdom against a persistent threat akin to today's War on Terror. Then, as now, the threat remained indeterminate and ever-present, and provided the locus where the right to exercise justice through the force of law was enacted. The act passed in 1723, Thompson says, "was so loosely drafted that it became a spawning-ground for ever-extending legal judgements," and it "signalled the onset of the flood-tide of retributive justice." Poaching had been common enough prior to the Black Act that London restaurants had relied on it for their meat and poultry. But with the Hanoverian accession, deer were given renewed protection to preserve the supply for the royal hunt. This privilege, along with the political need to stifle any Jacobin threat, encouraged gamekeepers to enforce the right to kill dogs, which only heightened tensions among the residents of the countryside. As Thompson states, "No power provoked fiercer resentment than" that of gamekeepers "to seize and kill hunting dogs. ... Again and again the killing of dogs sparked off some act of protest or revenge." Confrontations between gamekeepers and dog owners continued throughout a good part of the century, even after any Jacobin insurrection had vaporized, with legal judgment tending in favor of the keepers. The unpopularity of these laws, and of any law associated with the Game Laws, shifted attention from overt restrictiveness to management through taxation.
(Continues…)
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