Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, animals in developed countries become increasingly absent from people's everyday routines. Societies in North America and the United Kingdom are predominantly urban and agriculture in the form of agribusiness involves only a very small percentage of the population. Animals enter human societies as commodities, primarily as meat but also less visibly as research objects. Only one kind of animal grows more common in urban societies in the second half of the twentieth century - the domestic pet. As pets, dogs occupy an interesting position within Western culture. They are both extremely visible and at the same time curiously opaque. They appear as somehow self-evident, signs only of themselves. The dog, a sometimes comic, frustrating or pathetic but almost always lovable figure in Western culture seems to deflect critical attention. In this paper I argue that dogs, far from being uncomplicated figures, hold an extremely contradictory position in Western culture. Tracking a path through a series of cultural texts, fictional, philosophical, practical and visual, I approach 'modern dog culture' (to borrow a phrase from a California-based dog magazine), not as an isolated subculture but as an element within a wider society caught up in a tremendous unease about its relationship with nature. 

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