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I. WE HAVE NEVER
BEEN HUMAN

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1. WHEN SPECIES MEET

Introductions

Two questions guide this book: (1) Whom and what do I touch
when I touch my dog? and (2) How is becoming with a practice
of becoming worldly? I tie these questions together in expressions I
learned in Barcelona from a Spanish lover of French bulldogs, alterglobalisation and autre-mondialisation.1 These terms were invented by
European activists to stress that their approaches to militarized neoliberal models of world building are not about antiglobalization but about
nurturing a more just and peaceful other-globalization. There is a promising autre-mondialisation to be learned in retying some of the knots of
ordinary multispecies living on earth.
I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary. I am a creature of the mud, not the sky. I am
a biologist who has always found edication in the amazing abilities
of slime to hold things in touch and to lubricate passages for living
beings and their parts. I love the fact that human genomes can be
found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are
lled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such,

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some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and

some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm.
I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become
an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one
is always to become with many. Some of these personal microscopic biota
are dangerous to the me who is writing this sentence; they are held in
check for now by the measures of the coordinated symphony of all the
others, human cells and not, that make the conscious me possible. I love
that when I die, all these benign and dangerous symbionts will take
over and use whatever is left of my body, if only for a while, since we
are necessary to one another in real time. As a little girl, I loved to inhabit
miniature worlds brimming with even more tiny real and imagined entities. I loved the play of scales in time and space that childrens toys and
stories made patent for me. I did not know then that this love prepared
me for meeting my companion species, who are my maker.
Figures help me grapple inside the esh of mortal world-making
entanglements that I call contact zones.2 The Oxford English Dictionary records the meaning of chimerical vision for guration in an
eighteenth-century source, and that meaning is still implicit in my sense
of gure.3 Figures collect the people through their invitation to inhabit the
corporeal story told in their lineaments. Figures are not representations
or didactic illustrations, but rather materialsemiotic nodes or knots
in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another. For me, gures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come
together with all of the force of lived reality. My body itself is just such
a gure, literally.
For many years I have written from the belly of powerful gures
such as cyborgs, monkeys and apes, oncomice, and, more recently, dogs.
In every case, the gures are at the same time creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of erce and ordinary reality; the dimensions tangle
and require response. When Species Meet is about that kind of doubleness, but it is even more about the cats cradle games in which those who
are to be in the world are constituted in intra- and interaction. The partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kinds, living and not,
are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters.
Neither the partners nor the meetings in this book are merely literary

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Jims Dog. Courtesy of James Clifford.

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conceits; rather, they are ordinary beings-in-encounter in the house, lab,

eld, zoo, park, oce, prison, ocean, stadium, barn, or factory. As ordinary knotted beings, they are also always meaning-making gures that
gather up those who respond to them into unpredictable kinds of we.
Among the myriad of entangled, coshaping species of the earth, contemporary human beings meetings with other critters and, especially, but not
only, with those called domestic are the focus of this book.
And so in the chapters to follow, readers will meet cloned dogs,
databased tigers, a baseball writer on crutches, a health and genetics
activist in Fresno, wolves and dogs in Syria and the French Alps, Chicken
Little and Bush legs in Moldavia, tsetse ies and guinea pigs in a Zimbabwean lab in a young adult novel, feral cats, whales wearing cameras,
felons and pooches in training in prison, and a talented dog and middleaged woman playing a sport together in California. All of these are gures, and all are mundanely here, on this earth, now, asking who we will
become when species meet.

JIMS DOG AND LEONARDOS DOG

Meet Jims dog. My colleague and friend Jim Cliord took this photograph during a December walk in one of the damp canyons of the Santa
Cruz greenbelt near his home. This attentive, sitting dog endured for
only one season. The next winter the shapes and light in the canyon did
not vouchsafe a canine soul to animate the burned-out redwood stump
covered with redwood needles, mosses, ferns, lichensand even a little
California bay laurel seedling for a docked tailthat a friends eye had
found for me the year before. So many species, so many kinds, meet in
Jims dog, who suggests an answer to my question, Whom and what do
we touch when we touch this dog? How does this touch make us more
worldly, in alliance with all the beings who work and play for an alterglobalization that can endure more than one season?
We touch Jims dog with ngery eyes made possible by a ne digital camera, computers, servers, and e-mail programs through which the
high-density jpg was sent to me.4 Infolded into the metal, plastic, and
electronic esh of the digital apparatus is the primate visual system that
Jim and I have inherited, with its vivid color sense and sharp focal power.

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Our kind of capacity for perception and sensual pleasure ties us to the
lives of our primate kin. Touching this heritage, our worldliness must
answer to and for those other primate beings, both in their ordinary
habitats and in labs, television and lm studios, and zoos. Also, the biological colonizing opportunism of organisms, from the glowing but invisible viruses and bacteria to the crown of ferns on top of this poochs
head, is palpable in the touch. Biological species diversity and all that asks
in our time come with this found dog.
In this camera-begot canids hapticoptic touch, we are inside the
histories of IT engineering, electronic product assembly-line labor, mining and IT waste disposal, plastics research and manufacturing, transnational markets, communications systems, and technocultural consumer
habits. The people and the things are in mutually constituting, intraactive touch.5 Visually and tactically, I am in the presence of the intersectional race-, sex-, age-, class-, and region-dierentiated systems of labor
that made Jims dog live. Response seems the least that is required in this
kind of worldliness.
This dog could not have come to me without the leisure-time promenading practices of the early twenty-rst century in a university town on
the central California coast. Those urban walking pleasures touch the
labor practices of late nineteenth-century loggers who, without chainsaws, cut the tree whose burned stump took on a postarboreal life. Where
did the lumber from that tree go? The historically deliberate ring by the
loggers or the lightning-caused res in dry-season California carved Jims
dog from the trees blackened remains. Indebted to the histories of both
environmentalism and class, the greenbelt policies of California cities
resisting the fate of Silicon Valley ensured that Jims dog was not bulldozed for housing at the western edge of real-estate hungry Santa Cruz.
The water-eroded and earthquake-sculpted ruggedness of the canyons
helped too. The same civic policies and earth histories also allow cougars
to stroll down from the campus woodlands through the brushy canyons
dening this part of town. Walking with my furry dogs o leash in these
canyons makes me think about these possible feline presences. I reclip the
leashes. Visually ngering Jims dog involves touching all the important
ecological and political histories and struggles of ordinary small cities that
have asked, Who should eat whom, and who should cohabit? The rich

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naturalcultural contact zones multiply with each tactile look. Jims dog is
a provocation of curiosity, which I regard as one of the rst obligations
and deepest pleasures of worldly companion species.6
Jims seeing the mutt in the rst place was an act of friendship from
a man who had not sought dogs in his life and for whom they had not
been particularly present before his colleague seemed to think about and
respond to little else. Furry dogs were not the ones who then came to
him, but another sort of canid quite as wonderful dogged his path. As
my informants in U.S. dog culture would say, Jims is a real dog, a one-o,
like a ne mixed-ancestry dog who could never be replicated but must be
encountered. Surely, there is no question about the mixed and myriad
ancestors, as well as contemporaries, in this encrusted charcoal dog. I
think this is what Alfred North Whitehead might have meant by a concrescence of prehensions.7 It is denitely at the heart of what I learn when
I ask whom I touch when I touch a dog. I learn something about how to
inherit in the esh. Woof . . .
Leonardos dog hardly needs an introduction. Painted between 1485
and 1490, da Vincis Vitruvian Man, the Man of Perfect Proportions, has
paved his way in the imaginations of technoculture and canine pet culture
alike. Sydney Harriss 1996 cartoon of Mans celebrated canine companion mimes a gure that has come to mean Renaissance humanism; to
mean modernity; to mean the generative tie of art, science, technology,
genius, progress, and money. I cannot count the number of times da
Vincis Vitruvian Man appeared in the conference brochures for genomics
meetings or advertisements for molecular biological instruments and lab
reagents in the 1990s. The only close competitors for illustrations and
ads were Vesaliuss anatomical drawings of dissected human gures and
Michelangelos Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.8
High Art, High Science: genius, progress, beauty, power, money. The
Man of Perfect Proportions brings both the number magic and the reallife organic ubiquity of the Fibonacci sequence to the fore. Transmuted
into the form of his master, the Dog of Perfect Proportions helps me
think about why this preeminently humanist gure cannot work for the
kind of autre-mondialisation I seek with earthly companions in the way
that Jims dog does. Harriss cartoon is funny, but laughter is not enough.
Leonardos dog is the companion species for technohumanism and its

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dreams of purication and transcendence. I want to walk instead with the

motley crowd called Jims dog, where the clean lines between traditional
and modern, organic and technological, human and nonhuman give way
to the infoldings of the esh that powerful gures such as the cyborgs
and dogs I know both signify and enact.9 Maybe that is why Jims dog is
now the screen saver on my computer.

Leonardo da Vincis Dog. Copyright Sidney Harris, ScienceCartoonsPlus.com.

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PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS

Copyright Dan Piraro, King Features Syndicate.

That brings us to the more usual encounters of dogs and cyborgs, in

which their supposed enmity is onstage. Dan Piraros Bizarro Sunday
cartoon from 1999 caught the rules of engagement perfectly. Welcoming
the attendees, the small dog keynote speaker at the American Association
of Lapdogs points to the illuminated slide of an open laptop computer,
solemnly intoning, Ladies and Gentlemen. . . behold the enemy! The
pun that simultaneously joins and separates lapdogs and laptops is wonderful, and it opens a world of inquiry. A real dog person might rst
ask how capacious human laps can actually be for holding even sizable
pooches and a computer at the same time. That sort of question tends
to arise in the late afternoon in a home oce if a human being is still at
the computer and neglecting important obligations to go for a walk with
the eectively importuning beast-no-longer-on-the-oor. However, more
philosophically weighty, if not more practically urgent, questions also lurk
in this Bizarro cartoon.
Modernist versions of humanism and posthumanism alike have
taproots in a series of what Bruno Latour calls the Great Divides between
what counts as nature and as society, as nonhuman and as human.10
Whelped in the Great Divides, the principal Others to Man, including
his posts, are well documented in ontological breed registries in both

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past and present Western cultures: gods, machines, animals, monsters,

creepy crawlies, women, servants and slaves, and noncitizens in general.
Outside the security checkpoint of bright reason, outside the apparatuses
of reproduction of the sacred image of the same, these others have a
remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centers of power and selfcertainty. Terrors are regularly expressed in hyperphilias and hyperphobias, and examples of this are no richer than in the panics roused by the
Great Divide between animals (lapdogs) and machines (laptops) in the
early twenty-rst century c.e.
Technophilias and technophobias vie with organophilias and
organophobias, and taking sides is not left to chance. If one loves organic
nature, to express a love of technology makes one suspect. If one nds
cyborgs to be promising sorts of monsters, then one is an unreliable ally
in the ght against the destruction of all things organic.11 I was quite
personally made to understand this point at a professional meeting, a
wonderful conference called Taking Nature Seriously in 2001, at which
I was a keynote speaker. I was subjected to a fantasy of my own public
rape by name in a pamphlet distributed by a small group of self-identied
deep ecology, anarchist activists, because, it seemed, my commitment to
the mixed organictechnological hybrids gured in cyborgs made me
worse than a researcher at Monsanto, who at least claims no alliance with
ecofeminism. I am made to recall those researchers even at Monsanto
who may well take antiracist environmental feminism seriously and to
imagine how alliances might be built with them. I was also in the presence
of the many deep ecologists and anarchists who have no truck with the
action or analysis of my hecklers self-righteous and incurious stance. In
addition to reminding me that I am a woman (see the Great Divides
above)something class and color privilege bonded to professional status can mute for long periods of timethe rape scenario reminded me
forcibly why I seek my siblings in the nonarboreal, laterally communicating, fungal shapes of the queer kin group that nds lapdogs and laptops
in the same commodious laps.
At one of the conference panels, I heard a sad man in the audience
say that rape seems a legitimate instrument against those who rape the
earth; he seemed to regard this as an ecofeminist position, to the horror
of the men and women of that political persuasion in the room. Everyone

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I heard at the session thought the guy was slightly dangerous and denitely politically embarrassing, but mainly crazy in the colloquial sense
if not the clinical. Nonetheless, the quasi-psychotic panic quality of the
mans threatening remarks is worth some attention because of the way the
extreme shows the underside of the normal. In particular, this would-be
rapist-in-defense-of-mother-earth seems shaped by the culturally normal
fantasy of human exceptionalism. This is the premise that humanity
alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies.
Thus, to be human is to be on the opposite side of the Great Divide from
all the others and so to be afraid ofand in bloody love withwhat
goes bump in the night. The threatening man at the conference was well
marinated in the institutionalized, long dominant Western fantasy that
all that is fully human is fallen from Eden, separated from the mother,
in the domain of the articial, deracinated, alienated, and therefore free.
For this man, the way out of his cultures deep commitments to human
exceptionalism requires a one-way rapture to the other side of the divide.
To return to the mother is to return to nature and stand against Manthe-Destroyer, by advocating the rape of women scientists at Monsanto,
if available, or of a traitorous keynote environmentalist feminist, if one is
on the spot.
Freud is our great theorist of panics of the Western psyche, and
because of Derridas commitment to track down the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the
animal order, of the law over the living, he is my guide to Freuds approach on this question.12 Freud described three great historical wounds
to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to
hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism. First is the
Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, mans home world, from
the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to
burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces.
Science made that decentering cut. The second wound is the Darwinian,
which put Homo sapiens rmly in the world of other critters, all trying
to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man.13 Science
inicted that cruel cut too. The third wound is the Freudian, which
posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes,

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including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with
dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that
blade too. I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian,
which infolds organic and technological esh and so melds that Great
Divide as well.
Is it any wonder that in every other election cycle the Kansas Board
of Education wants this stu out of the science text books, even if almost
all of modern science has to go to accomplish this suturing of rending
wounds to the coherence of a fantastic, but well-endowed, being? Notoriously, in the last decade voters in Kansas elected opponents of teaching
Darwinian evolution to the state board in one election and then replaced
them in the next cycle with what the press calls moderates.14 Kansas is
not exceptional; it gured more than half the public in the United States
in 2006.15 Freud knew Darwinism is not moderate, and a good thing
too. Doing without both teleology and human exceptionalism is, in my
opinion, essential to getting laptops and lapdogs into one lap. More to
the point, these wounds to self-certainty are necessary, if not yet sucient, to no longer easily uttering the sentence in any domain,Ladies and
gentlemen, behold the enemy! Instead, I want my people, those collected
by gures of mortal relatedness, to go back to that old political button
from the late 1980s, Cyborgs for earthly survival, joined to my newer
bumper sticker from Bark magazine, Dog is my co-pilot. Both critters
ride the earth on the back of the Darwin sh.16
That cyborg and dog come together in the next professional meeting in these introductions. A few years ago, Faye Ginsburg, an eminent
anthropologist and lmmaker and the daughter of Benson Ginsburg, a
pioneering student of canine behavior, sent me a cartoon by Warren
Miller from the March 29, 1993, New Yorker. Fayes childhood had been
spent with the wolves her father studied in his lab at the University
of Chicago and the animals at the Jackson Memorial Laboratories in Bar
Harbor, Maine, where J. P. Scott and J. L. Fuller also carried out their
famous inquiries into dog genetics and social behavior from the late
1940s.17 In the cartoon a member of a wild wolf pack introduces a conspecic visitor wearing an electronic communications pack, complete with
an antenna for sending and receiving data, with the words, We found
her wandering at the edge of the forest. She was raised by scientists. A

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student of Indigenous media in a digital age, Faye Ginsburg was easily

drawn to the join of ethnography and communications technology in
Millers cartoon. Since childhood a veteran of integrating into wolf social
life through the rituals of polite introductions, she was triply hailed. She
is in my kin group in feminist theory as well, and so it is no surprise that
I nd myself also in that female telecommunications-packing wolf. This
gure collects its people through friendship networks, animalhuman
histories, science and technology studies, politics, anthropology and animal behavior studies, and the New Yorkers sense of humor.
This wolf found at the edge of the forest and raised by scientists
gures who I nd myself to be in the worldthat is, an organism shaped
by a postWorld War II biology that is saturated with information sciences and technologies, a biologist schooled in those discourses, and a
practitioner of the humanities and ethnographic social sciences. All three

Warren Miller, from CartoonBank.com. Copyright The New Yorker collection, 1993. All
rights reserved.

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of those subject formations are crucial to this books questions about

worldliness and touch across dierence. The found wolf is meeting other
wolves, but she cannot take her welcome for granted. She must be introduced, and her odd communications pack must be explained. She brings
science and technology into the open in this forest. The wolf pack is
politely approached, not invaded, and these wolves will decide her fate.
This pack is not one of orid wild-wolf nature fantasies, but a savvy,

Faye Ginsburg and the wolf

Remus greeting and playing in
Benson Ginsburgs laboratory at
the University of Chicago.
Published in Look magazine, A
Wolf Can Be a Girls Best Friend,
by Jack Star, 1963. Photograph by
Archie Lieberman. Look Magazine
Collection, Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division,
LC-L9-60-8812, frame 8.

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cosmopolitan, curious lot of free-ranging canids. The wolf mentor and

sponsor of the visitor is generous, willing to forgive some degree of ignorance, but it is up to the visitor to learn about her new acquaintances. If
all goes well, they will become messmates, companion species, and signicant others to one another, as well as conspecics. The scientistwolf
will send back data as well as bring data to the wolves in the forest. These
encounters will shape naturecultures for them all.
A great deal is at stake in such meetings, and outcomes are not
guaranteed. There is no teleological warrant here, no assured happy
or unhappy ending, socially, ecologically, or scientically. There is only
the chance for getting on together with some grace. The Great Divides
of animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic atten into mundane dierencesthe kinds that have consequences
and demand respect and responserather than rising to sublime and
nal ends.

COMPANION SPECIES

Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cellsa sure case of

what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you were
to check our DNA, youd nd some potent transfections between us. Her
saliva must have the viral vectors. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have
been irresistible. Even though we share placement in the phylum of vertebrates, we inhabit not just dierent genera and divergent families but
altogether dierent orders.
How would we sort things out? Canid, hominid; pet, professor;
bitch, woman; animal, human; athlete, handler. One of us has a microchip
injected under her neck skin for identication; the other has a photo ID
California drivers license. One of us has a written record of her ancestors
for twenty generations; one of us does not know her great grandparents
names. One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called purebred.
One of us, equally a product of a vast mixture, is called white. Each of
these names designates a dierent racial discourse, and we both inherit
their consequences in our esh.
One of us is at the cusp of aming, youthful, physical achievement;
the other is lusty but over the hill. And we play a team sport called agility

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on the same expropriated Native land where Cayennes ancestors herded

sheep. These sheep were imported from the already colonial pastoral
economy of Australia to feed the California gold rush forty-niners. In
layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complexity is
the name of our game. We are both the freedom-hungry ospring of conquest, products of white settler colonies, leaping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels on the playing eld.
Im sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. Some
molecular record of our touch in the codes of living will surely leave traces
in the world, no matter that we are each reproductively silenced females,
one by age and choice, one by surgery without consultation. Her red merle
Australian shepherds quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of
my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors. Who knows
where my chemical receptors carried her messages or what she took from
my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside
to inside?
We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse;
we are bound in telling story on story with nothing but the facts. We
are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand.
We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the
esh. Signicantly other to each other, in specic dierence, we signify in
the esh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is a historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy.18
In my experience, when people hear the term companion species, they tend
to start talking about companion animals, such as dogs, cats, horses,
miniature donkeys, tropical sh, fancy bunnies, dying baby turtles, ant
farms, parrots, tarantulas in harness, and Vietnamese potbellied pigs.
Many of those critters, but far from all and none without very noninnocent histories, do t readily into the early twenty-rst-century globalized
and exible category of companion animals. Historically situated animals
in companionate relations with equally situated humans are, of course,
major players in When Species Meet. But the category companion species is less shapely and more rambunctious than that. Indeed, I nd that
notion, which is less a category than a pointer to an ongoing becoming
with, to be a much richer web to inhabit than any of the posthumanisms

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on display after (or in reference to) the ever-deferred demise of man.19 I

never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted
to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains to be done in
reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman
and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical dierences.20 Fundamentally,
however, it is the patterns of relationality and, in Karen Bards terms,
intra-actions at many scales of spacetime that need rethinking, not getting beyond one troubled category for a worse one even more likely to go
postal.21 The partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit
of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion species. Even the
Oxford English Dictionary says as much. Gorging on etymologies, let me
taste my key words for their avors.
Companion comes from the Latin cum panis, with bread. Messmates at table are companions. Comrades are political companions. A
companion in literary contexts is a vade mecum or handbook, like the
Oxford Companion to wine or English verse; such companions help
readers to consume well. Business and commercial associates form a company, a term that is also used for the lowest rank in an order of knights,
a guest, a medieval trade guild, a eet of merchant ships, a local unit of the
Girl Guides, a military unit, and colloquially for the Central Intelligence
Agency. As a verb, to companion isto consort, to keep company, with sexual and generative connotations always ready to erupt.
Species, like all the old and important words, is equally promiscuous,
but in the visual register rather than the gustatory. The Latin specere is
at the root of things here, with its tones of to look and to behold. In
logic, species refers to a mental impression or idea, strengthening the
notion that thinking and seeing are clones. Referring both to the relentlessly specic or particular and to a class of individuals with the same
characteristics, species contains its own opposite in the most promising
or specialway. Debates about whether species are earthly organic entities or taxonomic conveniences are coextensive with the discourse we call
biology. Species is about the dance linking kin and kind. The ability to
interbreed reproductively is the rough and ready requirement for members of the same biological species; all those lateral gene exchangers such
as bacteria have never made very good species. Also, biotechnologically

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mediated gene transfers redo kin and kind at rates and in patterns unprecedented on earth, generating messmates at table who do not know
how to eat well and, in my judgment, often should not be guests together
at all. Which companion species will, and should, live and die, and how,
is at stake.
The word species also structures conservation and environmental
discourses, with their endangered species that function simultaneously
to locate value and to evoke death and extinction in ways familiar in colonial representations of the always vanishing indigene. The discursive tie
between the colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the animalall
reduced to type, all Others to rational man, and all essential to his bright
constitutionis at the heart of racism and ourishes, lethally, in the entrails of humanism. Woven into that tie in all the categories is womans
putative self-dening responsibility to the species, as this singular and
typological female is reduced to her reproductive function. Fecund, she
lies outside the bright territory of man even as she is his conduit. The
labeling of African American men in the United States as an endangered
species makes palpable the ongoing animalization that fuels liberal and
conservative racialization alike. Species reeks of race and sex; and where
and when species meet, that heritage must be untied and better knots of
companion species attempted within and across dierences. Loosening the
grip of analogies that issue in the collapse of all of mans others into one
another, companion species must instead learn to live intersectionally.22
Raised a Roman Catholic, I grew up knowing that the Real Presence was present under both species, the visible form of the bread and
the wine. Sign and esh, sight and food, never came apart for me again
after seeing and eating that hearty meal. Secular semiotics never nourished as well or caused as much indigestion. That fact made me ready to
learn that species is related to spice. A kind of atom or molecule, species is also a composition used in embalming. The species often means
the human race, unless one is attuned to science ction, where species
abound.23 It would be a mistake to assume much about species in advance of encounter. Finally, we come to metal coinage, specie, stamped
in the proper shape and kind. Like company, species also signies and
embodies wealth. I remember Marx on the topic of gold, alert to all its
lth and glitter.

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Looking back in this way takes us to seeing again, to respecere, to the

act of respect. To hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to
notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that
is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species
meet. To knot companion and species together in encounter, in regard
and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with, where who and what
are is precisely what is at stake. In Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species, Anna Tsing writes, Human nature is an interspecies
relationship.24 That realization, in Beatriz Preciados idiom, promises
an autre-mondialisation. Species interdependence is the name of the
worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and
respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention.
Not much is excluded from the needed play, not technologies, commerce,
organisms, landscapes, peoples, practices. I am not a posthumanist; I am
who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out
of categories in the making of kin and kind. Queer messmates in mortal
play, indeed.

AND SAY THE PHILOSOPHER RESPONDED?

WHEN ANIMALS LOOK BACK

And Say the Animal Responded? is the title Derrida gave his 1997 lecture in which he tracked the old philosophical scandal of judging the
animal to be capable only of reaction as an animalmachine. Thats a
wonderful title and a crucial question. I think Derrida accomplished
important work in that lecture and the published essay that followed, but
something that was oddly missing became clearer in another lecture in
the same series, translated into English as The Animal That Therefore I
Am (More to Follow).25 He understood that actual animals look back at
actual human beings; he wrote at length about a cat, his small female cat,
in a particular bathroom on a real morning actually looking at him.The
cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isnt
the gure of a cat. It doesnt silently enter the room as an allegory for all
the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables (374). Further, Derrida knew he was in the presence of
someone, not of a machine reacting. I see it as this irreplaceable living

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being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, see me naked (37879). He identied the key question as being not whether the cat could speak but whether it is possible
to know what respond means and how to distinguish a response from a
reaction, for human beings as well as for anyone else. He did not fall
into the trap of making the subaltern speak: It would not be a matter of
giving speech back to animals but perhaps acceding to a thinking . . . that
thinks the absence of the name as something other than a privation
(416). Yet he did not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement
either, one that risked knowing something more about cats and how to
look back, perhaps even scientically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately.
He came right to the edge of respect, of the move to respecere, but
he was sidetracked by his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature and by his own linked worries about being naked in front of his cat.
He knew there is no nudity among animals, that the worry was his, even
as he understood the fantastic lure of imagining he could write naked
words. Somehow in all this worrying and longing, the cat was never heard
from again in the long essay dedicated to the crime against animals perpetrated by the great Singularities separating the Animal and the Human
in the canon Derrida so passionately read and reread so that it could
never be read the same way again.26 For those readings I and my people
are permanently in his debt.
But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion
species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be
doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking
back at him that morning. Derrida is among the most curious of men,
among the most committed and able of philosophers to spot what arrests
curiosity, instead nurturing an entanglement and a generative interruption called response. Derrida is relentlessly attentive to and humble before
what he does not know. Besides all that, his own deep interest in animals
is coextensive with his practice as a philosopher. The textual evidence is
ubiquitous. What happened that morning was, to me, shocking because
of what I know this philosopher can do. Incurious, he missed a possible
invitation, a possible introduction to other-worlding. Or, if he was curious when he rst really noticed his cat looking at him that morning, he

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arrested that lure to deconstructive communication with the sort of critical gesture that he would never have allowed to stop him in his canonical philosophical reading and writing practices.
Rejecting the facile and basically imperialist, if generally wellintentioned, move of claiming to see from the point of view of the other,
Derrida correctly criticized two kinds of representations, one set from
those who observe real animals and write about them but never meet
their gaze, and the other set from those who engage animals only as literary and mythological gures (38283). He did not explicitly consider
ethologists and other animal behavioral scientists, but inasmuch as they
engage animals as objects of their vision, not as beings who look back and
whose look their own intersects, with consequences for all that follows,
the same criticism would apply. Why, though, should that criticism be the
end of the matter for Derrida?
What if not all such Western human workers with animals have
refused the risk of an intersecting gaze, even if it usually has to be teased
out from the repressive literary conventions of scientic publishing and
descriptions of method? This is not an impossible question; the literature
is large, complemented by a much larger oral culture among biologists as
well as others who earn their livings in interaction with animals. Some
astute thinkers who work and play with animals scientically and professionally have discussed at some length this sort of issue. I am leaving aside
entirely the philosophical thinking that goes on in popular idioms and
publishing, not to mention the entire world of people thinking and engaging with animals who are not shaped by the institutionalized so-called
Western philosophical and literary canon.
Positive knowledge of and with animals might just be possible,
knowledge that is positive in quite a radical sense if it is not built on the
Great Divides. Why did Derrida not ask, even in principle, if a Gregory
Bateson or Jane Goodall or Marc Beko or Barbara Smuts or many others
have met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and
redone themselves and their sciences? Their kind of positive knowledge
might even be what Derrida would recognize as a mortal and nite knowing that understands the absence of the name as something other than a
privation. Why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he did know how to talk about?

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Leaving this query unasked, he had nowhere to go with his keen

recognition of the gaze of his cat than to Jeremy Benthams question:
The rst and decisive question will rather be to know whether animals
can suer. . . . Once its protocol is established, the form of this question
changes everything (396). I would not for a minute deny the importance
of the question of animals suering and the criminal disregard of it
throughout human orders, but I do not think that is the decisive question, the one that turns the order of things around, the one that promises
an autre-mondialisation. The question of suering led Derrida to the
virtue of pity, and that is not a small thing. But how much more promise
is in the questions, Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to
play with this cat? Can I, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is oered? What if work and play, and not just pity,
open up when the possibility of mutual response, without names, is taken
seriously as an everyday practice available to philosophy and to science?
What if a usable word for this is joy? And what if the question of how animals engage one anothers gaze responsively takes center stage for people?
What if that is the query, once its protocol is properly established, whose
form changes everything?27 My guess is that Derrida the man in the bathroom grasped all this, but Derrida the philosopher had no idea how to
practice this sort of curiosity that morning with his highly visual cat.
Therefore, as a philosopher he knew nothing more from, about, and
with the cat at the end of the morning than he knew at the beginning, no
matter how much better he understood the root scandal as well as the
enduring achievements of his textual legacy. Actually to respond to the
cats response to his presence would have required his joining that awed
but rich philosophical canon to the risky project of asking what this cat
on this morning cared about, what these bodily postures and visual entanglements might mean and might invite, as well as reading what people
who study cats have to say and delving into the developing knowledges
of both catcat and cathuman behavioral semiotics when species meet.
Instead, he concentrated on his shame in being naked before this cat.
Shame trumped curiosity, and that does not bode well for an autremondialisation. Knowing that in the gaze of the cat was an existence
that refuses to be conceptualized, Derrida did not go on as if he had
never been looked at, never addressed, which was the fundamental ga

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he teased out of his canonical tradition (379, 383). Unlike Emmanuel

Lvinas, Derrida, to his credit, recognized in his small cat the absolute
alterity of the neighbor (380).28 Further, instead of a primal scene of Man
confronting Animal, Derrida gave us the provocation of a historically
located look. Still, shame is not an adequate response to our inheritance
of multispecies histories, even at their most brutal. Even if the cat did
not become a symbol of all cats, the naked mans shame quickly became a
gure for the shame of philosophy before all of the animals. That gure
generated an important essay. The animal looks at us, and we are naked
before it. Thinking perhaps begins there (397).
But whatever else the cat might have been doing, Derridas full
human male frontal nudity before an Other, which was of such interest
in his philosophical tradition, was of no consequence to her, except as
the distraction that kept her human from giving or receiving an ordinary
polite greeting. I am prepared to believe that he did know how to greet
this cat and began each morning in that mutually responsive and polite
dance, but if so, that embodied mindful encounter did not motivate his
philosophy in public. That is a pity.
For help, I turn to someone who did learn to look back, as well as
to recognize that she was looked at, as a core work-practice for doing her
science. To respond was to respect; the practice of becoming with
rewove the bers of the scientists being. Barbara Smuts is now a bioanthropologist at the University of Michigan, but as a Stanford University
graduate student in 1975, she went to Tanzanias Gombe Stream preserve
to study chimpanzees. After being kidnapped and ransomed in the turbulent nationalist and anticolonial human politics of that area of the
world in the mid-1970s, she ended up studying baboons in Kenya for her
PhD.29 About 135 baboons called the Eburru Clis troop lived around
a rocky outcropping of the Great Rift Valley near Lake Naivasha. In a
wonderful understatement, Smuts writes, At the beginning of my study,
the baboons and I denitely did not see eye to eye.30
She wanted to get as close as possible to the baboons to collect data
to address her research questions; the monkeys wanted to get as far away
from her threatening self as possible. Trained in the conventions of objective science, Smuts had been advised to be as neutral as possible, to
be like a rock, to be unavailable, so that eventually the baboons would go

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on about their business in nature as if data-collecting humankind were

not present. Good scientists were those who, learning to be invisible
themselves, could see the scene of nature close up, as if through a peephole. The scientists could query but not be queried. People could ask
if baboons are or are not social subjects, or ask anything else for that
matter, without any ontological risk either to themselves, except maybe
being bitten by an angry baboon or contracting a dire parasitic infection, or to their cultures dominant epistemologies about what are named
nature and culture.
Along with more than a few other primatologists who talk, if not
write in professional journals, about how the animals come to accept the
presence of working scientists, Smuts recognized that the baboons were
unimpressed by her rock act. They frequently looked at her, and the more
she ignored their looks, the less satised they seemed. Progress in what
scientists call habituation of the animals to the human beings would-be
nonpresence was painfully slow. It seemed like the only critter to whom
the supposedly neutral scientist was invisible was herself. Ignoring social
cues is far from neutral social behavior. I imagine the baboons as seeing
somebody o-category, not something, and asking if that being were or
were not educable to the standard of a polite guest. The monkeys, in
short, inquired if the woman was as good a social subject as an ordinary baboon, with whom one could gure out how to carry on relationships, whether hostile, neutral, or friendly. The question was not, Are the
baboons social subjects? but, Is the human being? Not, Do the baboons
have face? but, Do people?
Smuts began adjusting what she didand who she wasaccording
to the baboons social semiotics directed both to her and to one another.
I . . . in the process of gaining their trust, changed almost everything
about me, including the way I walked and sat, the way I held my body,
and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was learning a whole new way of
being in the worldthe way of the baboon. . . . I was responding to the cues
the baboons used to indicate their emotions, motivations and intentions
to one another, and I was gradually learning to send such signals back to
them. As a result, instead of avoiding me when I got too close, they started
giving me very deliberate dirty looks, which made me move away. This may
sound like a small shift, but in fact it signaled a profound change from

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being treated like an object that elicited a unilateral response (avoidable), to

being recognized as a subject with whom they could communicate (295).
In the philosophers idiom, the human being acquired a face. The result
was that the baboons treated her more and more as a reliable social being
who would move away when told to do so and around whom it might be
safe to carry on monkey life without a lot of fuss over her presence.
Having earned status as a baboon-literate casual acquaintance and
sometimes even a familiar friend, Smuts was able to collect data and earn
a PhD. She did not shift her questions to study baboonhuman interactions, but only through mutual acknowledgment could the human being
and baboons go on about their business. If she really wanted to study
something other than how human beings are in the way, if she was really
interested in these baboons, Smuts had to enter into, not shun, a responsive relationship. By acknowledging a baboons presence, I expressed respect, and by responding in ways I picked up from them, I let the baboons
know that my intentions were benign and that I assumed they likewise
meant me no harm. Once this was clearly established in both directions,
we could relax in each others company (297).
Writing about these introductions to baboon social niceties, Smuts
said, The baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in
the world they always lived in (295). In other words, her idiom leaves the
baboons in nature, where change involves only the time of evolution, and
perhaps ecological crisis, and the human being in history, where all other
sorts of time come into play. Here is where I think Derrida and Smuts
need each other. Or maybe it is just my monomania to place baboons and
humans together in situated histories, situated naturecultures, in which
all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from
scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined,
sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter.
All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact. The temporalities of companion species comprehend all the possibilities activated in
becoming with, including the heterogeneous scales of evolutionary time
for everybody but also the many other rhythms of conjoined process. If
we know how to look, I think we would see that the baboons of Eburru
Clis were redone too, in baboon ways, by having entangled their gaze
with that of this young clipboard-toting human female. The relationships

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are the smallest possible patterns for analysis;31 the partners and actors
are their still-ongoing products. It is all extremely prosaic, relentlessly
mundane, and exactly how worlds come into being.32
Smuts herself holds a theory very like this one in Embodied Communication in Nonhuman Animals, a 2006 reprise of her study of the
Eburru Clis baboons and elaboration of daily, ongoing negotiated responses between herself and her dog Bahati.33 In this study, Smuts is
struck by the frequent enactments of brief greeting rituals between beings
who know each other well, such as between baboons in the same troop
and between herself and Bahati. Among baboons, both friends and nonfriends greet one another all the time, and who they are is in constant
becoming in these rituals. Greeting rituals are exible and dynamic, rearranging pace and elements within the repertoire that the partners already
share or can cobble together. Smuts denes a greeting ritual as a kind of
embodied communication, which takes place in entwined, semiotic, overlapping, somatic patterning over time, not as discrete, denotative signals
emitted by individuals. An embodied communication is more like a dance
than a word. The ow of entangled meaningful bodies in timewhether
jerky and nervous or aming and owing, whether both partners move in
harmony or painfully out of synch or something else altogetheris communication about relationship, the relationship itself, and the means of
reshaping relationship and so its enacters.34 Gregory Bateson would say
that this is what human and nonhuman mammalian nonlinguistic communication fundamentally is, that is, communication about relationship
and the materialsemiotic means of relating.35 As Smuts puts it,Changes
in greetings are a change in the relationship (6). She goes further: With
language, it is possible to lie and say we like someone when we dont.
However, if the above speculations are correct, closely interacting bodies
tend to tell the truth (7).
This is a very interesting denition of truth, one rooted in material
semiotic dancing in which all the partners have face, but no one relies on
names. That kind of truth does not t easily into any of the inherited
categories of human or nonhuman, nature or culture. I like to think that
this is one treasure for Derridas hunt to think the absence of the name
as something other than a privation. I suspect this is one of the things
my fellow competitors and I in the doghuman sport called agility mean

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when we say our dogs arehonest. I am certain we are not referring to the
tired philosophical and linguistic arguments about whether dogs can lie,
and if so, lie about lying. The truth or honesty of nonlinguistic embodied
communication depends on looking back and greeting signicant others,
again and again. This sort of truth or honesty is not some trope-free,
fantastic kind of natural authenticity that only animals can have while
humans are dened by the happy fault of lying denotatively and knowing
it. Rather, this truth telling is about co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing,
holding in esteem, and regard open to those who look back reciprocally.
Always tripping, this kind of truth has a multispecies future. Respecere.

BECOMING-ANIMAL OR SETTING OUT THE

TWENTY-THIRD BOWL?

The making each other available to events that is the dance of becoming with has no truck with the fantasy wolf-pack version of becominganimal gured in Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris famous section
of A Thousand Plateaus, 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,
Becoming-Imperceptible.36 Mundane, prosaic, living wolves have no truck
with that kind of wolf pack, as we will see at the end of these introductions, when dogs, wolves, and people become available to one another
in risky worldings. But rst, I want to explain why writing in which I
had hoped to nd an ally for the tasks of companion species instead made
me come as close as I get to announcing,Ladies and Gentlemen, behold
the enemy!
I want to stay a while with Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,
Becoming-Imperceptible, because it works so hard to get beyond the
Great Divide between humans and other critters to nd the rich multiplicities and topologies of a heterogeneously and nonteleologically connected world. I want to understand why Deleuze and Guattari here leave
me so angry when what we want seems so similar. Despite much that I
love in other work of Deleuze, here I nd little but the two writers scorn
for all that is mundane and ordinary and the profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals, even as innumerable references to diverse animals are invoked to gure the authors anti-Oedipal
and anticapitalist project. Derridas actual little cat is decidedly not invited

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into this encounter. No earthly animal would look twice at these authors,
at least not in their textual garb in this chapter.
A Thousand Plateaus is a part of the writers sustained work against
the monomaniacal, cyclopean, individuated Oedipal subject, who is riveted on daddy and lethal in culture, politics, and philosophy. Patrilineal
thinking, which sees all the world as a tree of liations ruled by genealogy
and identity, wars with rhizomatic thinking, which is open to nonhierarchical becomings and contagions. So far, so good. Deleuze and Guattari
sketch a quick history of European ideas from eighteenth-century natural
history (relations recognized through proportionality and resemblance,
series and structure), through evolutionism (relations ordered through
descent and liation), to becomings (relations patterned throughsorcery
or alliance). Becoming is always of a dierent order than liation. It
concerns alliance (238). The normal and abnormal rule in evolutionism;
the anomaly, which is outside rules, is freed in the lines of ight of becomings.Molar unities must give way to molecular multiplicities.The
anomalous is neither individual nor species; it has only aects, infections,
horror . . . a phenomenon of bordering (24445). And then,We oppose
epidemic to liation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate
by contagion, epidemics, battleelds, and catastrophes. . . . All we are saying is that animals are packs, and packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion. . . . Wherever there is multiplicity, you will nd also
an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that an alliance
must be made in order to become-animal (24142). This is a philosophy
of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud; becoming-animal is not an
autre-mondialisation.
Earlier in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari conducted a
smart, mean critique of Freuds analysis of the famous case of the WolfMan, in which their opposition of dog and wolf gave me the key to how
D&Gs associational web of anomalous becoming-animal feeds o a
series of primary dichotomies gured by the opposition between the wild
and the domestic.That day the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the
truth and passing it by, and then lling the void with associations. He
knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter.

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The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dogs tail (26).
This gibe is the rst of a crowd of oppositions of dog and wolf in A Thousand Plateaus, which taken together are a symptomatic morass for how not
to take earthly animalswild or domesticseriously. In honor of Freuds
famously irascible chows, no doubt sleeping on the oor during the WolfMans sessions, I brace myself to go on by studying the artist David
Goiness Chinese Year of the Dog poster for 2006: one of the most gorgeous chow chows I have ever seen. Indierent to the charms of a bluepurple tongue, D&G knew how to kick the psychoanalyst where it would
hurt, but they had no eye for the elegant curve of a good chows tail, much
less the courage to look such a dog in the eye.
But the wolf/dog opposition is not funny. D&G express horror
at the individuated animals, family pets, sentimental Oedipal animals
each with its own petty history who invite only regression (240).37 All
worthy animals are a pack; all the rest are either pets of the bourgeoisie
or state animals symbolizing some kind of divine myth.38 The pack, or
pure-aect animals, are intensive, not extensive, molecular and exceptional, not petty and molarsublime wolf packs, in short. I dont think it
needs comment that we will learn nothing about actual wolves in all this.
I know that D&G set out to write not a biological treatise but rather a
philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary one requiring dierent reading
habits for the always nonmimetic play of life and narrative. But no reading strategies can mute the scorn for the homely and the ordinary in this
book. Leaving behind the traps of singularity and identity is possible
without the lubrication of sublime ecstasy bordering on the intensive
aect of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. D&G continue, Anyone who likes
cats or dogs is a fool (240, italics in original). I dont think Deleuze here
is thinking of Dostoevskys idiot, who slows things down and whom
Deleuze loves. D&G go on: Freud knows only the dog in the kennel, the
analysts bow wow. Never have I felt more loyal to Freud. D&G go even
further in their disdain for the daily, the ordinary, the aectional rather
than the sublime. The Unique, the one in a pact with a demon, the sorcerers anomaly, is both pack and Ahabs leviathan in Moby Dick, the
exceptional, not in the sense of a competent and skillful animal webbed
in the open with others, but in the sense of what is without characteristics and without tenderness (244). From the point of view of the animal

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worlds I inhabit, this is not about a good run but about a bad trip. Along
with the Beatles, I need a little more help than that from my friends.
Little house dogs and the people who love them are the ultimate
gure of abjection for D&G, especially if those people are elderly women,
the very type of the sentimental. Ahabs Moby Dick is not like the little
cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it.
Lawrences becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or
domestic relation. . . . But the objection is raised against Lawrence:
Your tortoises are not real! And he answers: Possibly, but my becoming is, . . . even and especially if you have no way of judging it, because
youre just little house dogs (244). My becoming seems awfully important in a theory opposed to the strictures of individuation and subject. The old, female, small, dog- and cat-loving: these are who and what
must be vomited out by those who will become-animal. Despite the
keen competition, I am not sure I can nd in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror
at the ordinariness of esh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal
and anticapitalist project. It took some nerve for D&G to write about
becoming-woman just a few pages later! (291309).39 It is almost enough
to make me go out and get a toy poodle for my next agility dog; I know a
remarkable one playing with her human for the World Cup these days.
That is exceptional.
It is a relief to return from my own ights of fancy of becomingintense in the agility World Cup competitions to the mud and the slime
of my proper home world, where my biological soul travels with that
wolf found near the edge of the forest who was raised by scientists.
At least as many nonarboreal shapes of relatedness can be found in
these not-always-salubrious viscous uids as among Deleuze and Guattaris rhizomatic anomalies. Playing in the mud, I can even appreciate
a great deal of A Thousand Plateaus. Companion species are familiar
with oddly shaped gures of kin and kind, in which arboreal descent is
both a latecomer to the play of bodies and never uniquely in charge of
the materialsemiotic action. In their controversial theory of Acquiring
Genomes, Lynn Margulis and her son and collaborator, Dorion Sagan,
give me the esh and gures that companion species need to understand
their messmates.40

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Reading Margulis over the years, I get the idea that she believes
everything interesting on earth happened among the bacteria, and all the
rest is just elaboration, most certainly including wolf packs. Bacteria pass
genes back and forth all the time and do not resolve into well-bounded
species, giving the taxonomist either an ecstatic moment or a headache.
The creative force of symbiosis produced eukaryotic cells from bacteria.
Hence all larger organismsprotests, fungi, animals, and plantsoriginated symbiogenetically. But creation of novelty by symbiosis did not end
with the evolution of the earliest nucleated cells. Symbiosis still is everywhere (5556). Margulis and Sagan give examples from Pacic coral
reefs, squid and their luminescent symbionts, New England lichens, milk
cows, and New Guinea ant plants, among others. The basic story is simple: ever more complex life forms are the continual result of ever more
intricate and multidirectional acts of association of and with other life
forms. Trying to make a living, critters eat critters but can only partly
digest one another. Quite a lot of indigestion, not to mention excretion,
is the natural result, some of which is the vehicle for new sorts of complex patternings of ones and manys in entangled association. And some
of that indigestion and voiding are just acidic reminders of mortality
made vivid in the experience of pain and systemic breakdown, from the
lowliest among us to the most eminent. Organisms are ecosystems of
genomes, consortia, communities, partly digested dinners, mortal boundary formations. Even toy dogs and fat old ladies on city streets are such
boundary formations; studying them ecologically would show it.
Eating one another and developing indigestion are only one kind of
transformative merger practice; living critters form consortia in a baroque
medley of inter- and intra-actions. Margulis and Sagan put it more eloquently when they write that to be an organism is to be the fruit of
the co-opting of strangers, the involvement and infolding of others into
ever more complex and miscegenous genomes. . . . The acquisition of the
reproducing other, of the microbe and the genome, is no mere sideshow.
Attraction, merger, fusion, incorporation, co-habitation, recombination
both permanent and cyclicaland other forms of forbidden couplings,
are the main sources of Darwins missing variation (205). Yoking together all the way down is what sym-bio-genesis means. The shape
and temporality of life on earth are more like a liquidcrystal consortium

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folding on itself again and again than a well-branched tree. Ordinary

identities emerge and are rightly cherished, but they remain always a relational web opening to non-Euclidean pasts, presents, and futures. The
ordinary is a multipartner mud dance issuing from and in entangled
species. It is turtles all the way down; the partners do not preexist their
constitutive intra-action at every folded layer of time and space.41 These
are the contagions and infections that wound the primary narcissism of
those who still dream of human exceptionalism. These are also the cobblings together that give meaning to the becoming with of companion
species in naturecultures. Cum panis, messmates, to look and to look
back, to have truck with: those are the names of my game.
One aspect of Margulis and Sagans exposition seems unnecessarily
hard for companion species to digest, however, and a more easily assimilated theory is cooking. In opposition to various mechanistic theories of
the organism, Margulis has long been committed to the notion of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is self-making, in which self-maintaining entities (the
smallest biological unit of which is a living cell) develop and sustain their
own form, drawing on the enveloping ows of matter and energy.42 In this
case, I think Margulis would do better with Deleuze and Guattari, whose
world did not build on complex self-referential units of dierentiation or
on Gaian systems, cybernetic or otherwise, but built on a dierent kind
of turtles all the way down, guring relentless otherness knotted into
never fully bounded or fully self-referential entities. I am instructed by
developmental biologist Scott Gilberts critique of autopoiesis for its
emphasis on self-building and self-maintaining systems, closed except for
nourishing ows of matter and energy. Gilbert stresses that nothing makes
itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and
between always-in-process critters ramies through space and time on
both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In
embryology, Gilbert calls this interspecies epigenesis.43 Gilbert writes:
I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar;
its just that she was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept
(as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe
that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more
implications because it means that we were never individuals. Like
Margulis and Sagan, Gilbert stresses that the cell (not the genome) is the

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smallest unit of structure and function in the biological world, and he

argues that the morphogenetic eld can be seen as a major unit of ontogenetic and evolutionary change.44
As I read him, Gilberts approach is not a holistic systems theory
in the sense that Margulis and Sagan lean toward, and his fractal turtles
all the way down arguments do not posit a self-referential unit of dierentiation. Such a unit cheats on the turtles pile, whether up or down.
Software engineer Rusten Hogness suggests the term turtling all the way
down might better express Gilberts kind of recursivity.45 I think that for
Gilbert the noun dierentiation is permanently a verb, within which mortal knots of partly structured dierence are in play. In my view, Margulis
and Sagans symbiogenesis is not really compatible with their theory of
autopoiesis, and the alternative is not an additive mechanistic theory
but a going even more deeply into dierentiation.46 A nice touch is that
Gilbert and his students literally work on turtle embryogeny, studying the
inductions and cell migrations that result in the turtles plastron on its
belly surface. Layers of turtling, indeed.
All of that takes us to the ethologist Thelma Rowells practice of
setting out a twenty-third bowl in her farmyard in Lancashire when she
has only twenty-two sheep to feed. Her Soay sheep crunch grass on the
hillsides most of the day, forming their own social groups without a lot
of interference. Such restraint is a revolutionary act among most sheep
farmers, who rob sheep of virtually every decision until whole breeds may
well have lost the capacity to nd their way in life without overweening
human supervision. Rowells empowered sheep, belonging to a so-called
primitive breed recalcitrant to meatindustrial standardization and behavioral ruination, have addressed many of her questions, not least telling
her that even domesticated sheep have social lives and abilities as complex
as those of the baboons and other monkeys she studied for decades.
Probably descended from a population of feral sheep thought to have
been deposited on the island of Soay in the St. Kilda archipelago sometime in the Bronze Age, Soay sheep are today the subject of attention by
rare breed societies in the United Kingdom and the United States.47
Focused on weighty matters such as feed conversion rates, scandalized sheep scientists with an agribusiness emphasis rejected Rowells rst
papers on feral ram groups when she submitted them (the manuscripts,

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not the sheep) for publication. But good scientists have a way of nibbling
away at prejudice with mutated questions and lovely data, which works
at least sometimes.48 Scottish blackface hill sheep, Rowells numerically
dominant ovine neighbors in Lancashire, and the lowland Dorset whitefaced breed, mostly on the English Downs, seem to have forgotten how
to testify to a great deal of sheep competence. They and their equivalents
around the world are the sorts of ovids most familiar to the sheep experts reviewing papers for the journalsat least for the journals in which
sheep usually show up, that is, not the behavioral ecology, integrative
biology, and evolution journals in which nondomestic species seem the
natural subjects of attention. But in the context of the ranching and
farming practices that led to todays global agribusiness, maybe those
domestic ovine eating machines are rarely asked an interesting question.
Not brought into the open with their people, and so with no experience
of jointly becoming available, these sheep do not become with a curious scientist.
There is a disarmingly literal quality to having truck with Rowell
and her critters. Rowell brings her competent sheep into the yard most
days so that she can ask them some more questions while they snack.
There, the twenty-two sheep nd twenty-three bowls spaced around the
yard. That homely twenty-third bowl is the open,49 the space of what is
not yet and may or may not ever be; it is a making available to events; it
is asking the sheep and the scientists to be smart in their exchanges by
making it possible for something unexpected to happen. Rowell practices
the virtue of worldly politenessnot a particularly gentle artwith her
colleagues and her sheep, just as she used to do with her primate subjects.
Interesting research is research on the conditions that make something
interesting.50 Always having a bowl that is not occupied provides an extra
place to go for any sheep displaced by his or her socially assertive fellow
ovid. Rowells approach is deceptively simple. Competition is so easy to
see; eating is so readily observed and of such consuming interest to farmers. What else might be happening? Might what is not so easy to learn to
see be what is of the utmost importance to the sheep in their daily doings
and their evolutionary history? Might it be that thinking again about the
history of predation and the smart predilections of prey will tell us something surprising and important about ovine worlds even on Lancashire

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hillsides, or on islands o the coast of Scotland, where a wolf has not been
seen for centuries?
Always a maverick alert to complexity in its details rather than in
grand pronouncements, Rowell regularly discomted her human colleagues when she studied monkeys, beginning with her 1960s accounts of
forest baboons in Uganda who did not act according to their supposed
species script.51 Rowell is among the most satisfyingly opinionated, empirically grounded, theoretically savvy, unself-impressed, and unsparingly
anti-ideological people I have ever met. Forgetting her head-over-heels
interest in her sheep, seeing her patent love for her obstreperous male
adolescent turkeys on her Lancashire farm in 2003, whom she unconvincingly threatened with untimely slaughter for their misdeeds,52 told
me a great deal about how she treats both unwary human colleagues
and the opinionated animals whom she has studied over a lifetime. As
Vinciane Despret emphasizes in her study, Rowell poses the question of
the collective in relation to both sheep and people: Do we prefer living
with predictable sheep or with sheep that surprise us and that add to our
denitions of what being social means?53 This is a fundamental worldly
question, or what Desprets colleague Isabelle Stengers might call a cosmopolitical query, in which the cosmos refers to the unknown constituted
by these multiple divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they
could eventually be capable, as opposed to the temptation of a peace
intended to be nal.54 Eating lunch with the circa sixty-ve-year-old
Rowell and her elderly, cherished, nonherding, pet dog in her farmhouse
kitchen strewn with scientic papers and heterogeneous books, my wouldbe ethnographic self had the distinct sense that Oedipal regression was
not on the menu among these companion species. Woolf!

LIVING HISTORIES IN THE CONTACT ZONE:

WOLF TRACKS

Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? How is becoming with a practice of becoming worldly? When species meet, the question of how to inherit histories is pressing, and how to get on together is
at stake. Because I become with dogs, I am drawn into the multispecies
knots that they are tied into and that they retie by their reciprocal action.

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My premise is that touch ramies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being aected, and entering into responsibility are not
ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other.55 Touch does not make one small; it peppers its
partners with attachment sites for world making. Touch, regard, looking
back, becoming withall these make us responsible in unpredictable
ways for which worlds take shape. In touch and regard, partners willy
nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that
brought that contact into being. Touch and regard have consequences.
Thus, my introductions in this chapter end in three knots of entangled
companion specieswolves, dogs, human beings, and morein three
places where an autre-mondialisation is at stake: South Africa, the Golan
Heights in Syria, and the countryside of the French Alps.
At the o-leash dog park in Santa Cruz, California, which I frequent, people sometimes boast that their largish, prick-eared, shepherdlike mutts are half wolf. Sometimes the humans claim that they know
this for sure but more often rest content with an account that makes their
dogs seem special, close to their storied wild selves. I nd the genealogical speculations highly unlikely in most cases, partly because it is not
easy to have at hand a breeding wolf with whom a willing dog might mate,
and partly because of the same agnosticism with which I and most of my
dogland informants greet identication of any largish black dog of uncertain provenance as a half Labrador retriever. Still, I know wolfdog
hybrids do exist rather widely, and my dogs playing with a few motley
claimants tied me into a web of caring. Caring means becoming subject to
the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the
end of the day than at the beginning. Learning something of the behavioral biology of wolfdog hybrids seemed the least that was required.
One of the places that led me, via an article by Robyn Dixon in the Los
Angeles Times on October 17, 2004,Orphaned Wolves Face Grim Future,
was to the Tsitsikamma Wolf Sanctuary on the southern coast of South
Africa near the town of Storm River.56
During the apartheid era, in quasi-secret experiments, scientists
in the service of the white state imported northern gray wolves from
North America with the intent of breeding an attack dog with a wolf s
smarts, stamina, and sense of smell to track downinsurgents in the harsh

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border areas. But the security-apparatus scientists at Roodeplaat Breeding

Enterprises found to their dismay that wolfdog hybrids make particularly
bad trained attack dogs, not because of aggressivity or unpredictability
(both issues with many of the hybrids discussed in the general literature), but because, besides being hard to train, the wolfdogs generally
defer to their human pack leaders and fail to take the lead when ordered
to do so on counterinsurgency or police patrols. Members of an endangered species in much of its former range in North America became
failed mixed-blood immigrants in the apartheid state intent on enforcing
racial purity.
After the end of apartheid, both the wolves and the hybrids became
signiers of security once again, as people terried for their personal safety
in the ripe, still racialized discourses of criminality rampant in South
Africa engaged in a brisk newspaper- and Internet-mediated trade in the
animals. The predictable result has been thousands of animals unable to
be repatriated to their continent of origin. Both epidemiologically and
genetically categorically impure, these canids enter the cultural category
of the disposable homeless, or in ecological terms nicheless. The new
state could not care less what happens to these animate tools of a former
racist regime. Running on private money from rich donors and middleclass, mostly white people, a rescue and sanctuary apparatus of a sort that
is familiar globally to dog people does what it can. This is not an honored
truth and reconciliation process trying to meet a socially recognized obligation to those nonhumans forced into becoming with a scientic racial
state apparatus. The sanctuary practices are private charity directed to
nonhumans whom many people would see as better killed (euthanized?
Is there anygood death here?) in a nation where unaddressed human economic misery remains immense. Further, the nancially strapped sanctuaries accept only pure wolves, though only about two hundred canids
could probably have passed that test in 2004 in South Africa, and have no
resources for the possibly tens of thousands of hybrids who face, as the
newspaper article headlined, a grim future.
So, what have I and others who touch and are touched by this story
inherited? Which histories must we live? A short list includes the racial
discourses endemic to the history of both biology and the nation; the collision of endangered species worlds, with their conservation apparatuses,

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and security discourse worlds, with their criminality and terrorist apparatuses; the actual lives and deaths of dierentially situated human beings
and animals shaped by these knots; contending popular and professional
narratives about wolves and dogs and their consequences for who lives
and dies and how; the coshaped histories of human social welfare and
animal welfare organizations; the class-saturated funding apparatuses of
private and public animalhuman worlds; the development of the categories to contain those, human and nonhuman, who are disposable and
killable; the inextricable tie between North America and South Africa in
all these matters; and the stories and actual practices that continue to produce wolfdog hybrids in unlivable knots, even on a romping-dog beach
in Santa Cruz, California. Curiosity gets one into thick mud, but I believe
that is the kind of looking back and becoming-with-companions that
might matter in making autres-mondialisations more possible.
Heading to the Golan Heights after running with the wolves in
South Africa is hardly restful. Among the last companion-species knots
in which I imagined living was one that in 2004 featured Israeli cowboys
in occupied Syrian territory riding kibbutz horses to manage their European-style cattle among the ruins of Syrian villages and military bases.
All I have is a snapshot, one newspaper article in the midst of an ongoing
complex, bloody, and tragic history.57 That snapshot was enough to reshape
my sense of touch while playing with my dogs. The rst cattle-ranching
kibbutz was founded shortly after 1967; by 2004 about seventeen thousand Israelis in thirty-three various sorts of settlements held the territory,
pending removal by an ever-receding peace treaty with Syria. Learning
their new skills on the job, the neophyte ranchers share the land with the
Israeli military and their tanks. Mine elds still pose dangers for cattle,
horses, and people, and ring-range practice vies with grazing for space.
The cattle are guarded from the resourceful Syrian wolves, not to mention Syrian people periodically repatriating stock, by large white livestock
guardian dogs (LGDs), namely, Turkish Akbash dogs. Turkey does play
an odd role in the Middle East! With the dogs on duty, the ranchers
do not shoot the wolves. Nothing was said in this Times article about
whether they shoot the Syrian rustlers. The cattle that the Israelis took
over after the expulsion of the Syrian villagers were small, wiry, capable
in the same kinds of ways as Rowells nonsheepish sheep, and resistant to

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the local tick-borne diseases. The European cattle who were imported to
replace the supposedly unmodern Syrian beasts are none of those things.
The Israeli ranchers brought the guardian dogs into their operation in
the 1990s in response to the large number of gray wolves, whose number
on the Golan Heights grew signicantly after the defeat of Syria in 1967
reduced the Arab villagers hunting pressure on them.
The Akbash dogs were the prosaic touch that made the story in the
newspaper of more than passing interest in the huge canvas of fraught
naturecultures and war in the Middle East. I was a kind of godhuman to
Willem, a Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog who worked on land in
California that my family owns with a friend. Willem, his human, Susan,
and his breeder and her health and genetics activist peers in dogland have
been major informants for this book. Willems livestock guardian dog
people are astute participants in the hotly contested dogwolfrancher
herbivoreenvironmentalisthunter naturecultures of the contemporary
U.S. northern Rocky Mountain region. Willem and my dog Cayenne
played as puppies and added to the stock of the worlds joy.58 This is all
quite small and unexceptionalnot much of a line of ight to delight
Deleuze and Guattari here. But it was enough to hail me and maybe us
into curiosity about the naturalcultural politics of wolves, dogs, cattle,
ticks, pathogens, tanks, mine elds, soldiers, displaced villagers, cattle
thieves, and settlers become cowboy-style ranchers on still another bit
of earth made into a frontier by war, expulsion, occupation, the history of
genocides, and ramifying insecurity all around. There is no happy ending
to oer, no conclusion to this ongoing entanglement, only a sharp reminder that anywhere one really looks actual living wolves and dogs are
waiting to guide humans into contested worldings. We found her at the
edge of the city; she was raised by wolves. Like her forest-immigrant
cousin, this wolf wore a communications pack that was no stranger to the
development of military technology for command, control, communication, and intelligence.
Of course, by the rst decade of the new millennium, that kind of
telecommunications pack could be ordinary equipment for day walkers in
the mountains, and that is where these introductions will end, but with
the printed word rather than a personal GPS system situating the hiker.
In 2005 primatologist Allison Jolly, knowing my livestock-guardian-dog

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passions, sent me a brochure she had picked up on her walking tour

through the French Alps that summer with her family. The brochure was
in Italian, French, and English, already setting it o from unaccommodating monolingual U.S. aids to mountain outings. The transnational paths
through the Alps and the urbane, leisured, international hikers expected
on the paths were vividly present. On the cover was an alert, calm Great
Pyrenees guardian dog, surrounded by text:Important notice to walkers
and hikers [or on the ip side, Promeneurs, Randonneurs, etc.]: In the
course of your walk, you may encounter the local guarding-dogs. These
are large white dogs whose task is to guard the ocks.
We are in the midst of reinvented pastoraltourist economies linking
foot-traveling humans, meat and ber niche markets that are complexly
both local and global, restoration ecology and heritage culture projects of
the European Union, shepherds, ocks, dogs, wolves, bears, and lynxes.
The return of previously extirpated predators to parts of their old ranges
is a major story of transnational environmental politics and biology. Some
of the animals have been deliberately reintroduced after intense captive
breeding programs or with transplants from less-developed countries in
the previous Soviet sphere, where progress-indicating extinctions sometimes have not gone as far as in western Europe. Some predators reestablished populations on their own when people began trapping and shooting
returnees less often. The wolves newly welcome in the French Alps seem
to be ospring of opportunistic canids sidling over from unreliably progressive Italy, which never completely wiped out its wolves. The wolves
gave the LGDs a job deterring lupine (and tourist) depredations on the
shepherds ocks. After the near destruction of the Great Pyrenees during the two world wars and the pastoral economic collapse in the Basque
regions, the breed came to the Alps from the mountains for which they
are named, by way of their rescue by the purebred dog fancy, especially
through the collecting practices of wealthy women in England and the
eastern United States. French dog fanciers learned some of what they
needed to know about reintroducing their dogs to guarding work from
U.S. LGD people, who had placed dogs on ranches in western states in
recent decades and communicated with their European peers.
The knots of technocultural, reinvented pastoraltourist economies
and ecologies are all over North America too, raising the most basic

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questions of who belongs where and what ourishing means for whom.
Following the dogs and their herbivores and people in order to respond
to those questions attaches me again and again to ranching, farming, and
eating. In principle if not always in personal and collective action, it is easy
to know that factory farming and its sciences and politics must be undone.
But what then? How can food security for everybody (not just for the rich,
who can forget how important cheap and abundant food is) and multispecies coourishing be linked in practice? How can remembering the conquest of the western states by Anglo settlers and their plants and animals
become part of the solution and not another occasion for the pleasurable
and individualizing frisson of guilt? Much collaborative and inventive
work is underway on these matters, if only we take touch seriously. Both
vegan and nonvegan community food projects with a local and translocal
analysis have made clear the links among safe and fair working conditions
for people, physically and behaviorally healthy agricultural animals, genetic
and other research directed to health and diversity, urban and rural food
security, and enhanced wildlife habitat.59 No easy unity is to be found
on these matters, and no answers will make one feel good for long. But
those are not the goals of companion species. Rather, there are vastly more
attachment sites for participating in the search for more livable other
worlds (autres-mondialisations) inside earthly complexity than one could
ever have imagined when rst reaching out to pet ones dog.
The kinds of relatings that these introductions perform entangle
a motley crowd of dierentially situated species, including landscapes,
animals, plants, microorganisms, people, and technologies. Sometimes a
polite introduction brings together two quasi-individuated beings, maybe
even with personal names printed in major newspapers, whose histories can recall comfortable narratives of subjects in encounter, two by
two. More often, the congurations of critters have other patterns more
reminiscent of a cats cradle game of the sort taken for granted by good
ecologists, military strategists, political economists, and ethnographers.
Whether grasped two-by-two or tangle-by-tangle, attachment sites needed
for meeting species redo everything they touch. The point is not to celebrate complexity but to become worldly and to respond. Considering
still live metaphors for this work, John Law and Annemarie Mol help
me think: Multiplicity, oscillation, mediation, material heterogeneity,

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performativity, interference . . . there is no resting place in a multiple and

partially connected world.60
My point is simple: Once again we are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down.
Response and respect are possible only in those knots, with actual animals and people looking back at each other, sticky with all their muddled
histories. Appreciation of the complexity is, of course, invited. But more
is required too. Figuring what that more might be is the work of situated
companion species. It is a question of cosmopolitics, of learning to be
polite in responsible relation to always asymmetrical living and dying,
and nurturing and killing. And so I end with the alpine tourist brochures
severe injunction to the hiker to be on your best countryside behavior,
or sorveguate il vostro comportamento, followed by specic instructions
about what polite behavior toward the working dogs and ocks entails.
A prosaic detail: The exercise of good manners makes the competent working animals those whom the people need to learn to recognize.61 The ones
with face were not all human.
And say the philosopher responded?

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