Genealogy of Obedience: Reading North American Dog Training Literature, 1850s-2000s

270 Pages·2018·31.277 MB·English

by  Justyna Wlodarczyk

Genealogy of Obedience
Human- Animal Studies
Series Editor
Kenneth Shapiro
Animals & Society Institute, usa
Editorial Board
Ralph Acampora
Hofstra University, usa
Clifton Flynn
University of South Carolina, usa
Hilda Kean
Ruskin College, Oxford, UK
Randy Malamud
Georgia State University, usa
Gail Melson
Purdue University, usa
VOLUME 20
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ has
Genealogy of Obedience
Reading North American Dog Training
Literature, 1850s– 2000s
By
Justyna Włodarczyk
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Two sections of Chapter 7 (titled in the book: “Garrett, Foucault and Radical Behaviorism” and “Beyond
Behaviorism”) have been published as: “Be More Dog: The Human-Canine Relationship in Contemporary
Dog Training Methodologies,” Performance Research 22.2 (2017): 40–47. DOI:10.1080/13528165.2017.1315962
One section of chapter 6 (titled in the book: “Disciplining Affects: The Dog Whisperer”) has been
published as “Disciplining Affects: The Dog Whisperer,” Fictions. Studi sulla narratività, xvii, (2018): 49–62.
DOI:10.19272/201806901004
Cover illustration: Front image, “Sitting Pretty” courtesy of the author. Background image: Ten Lords a’
Leaping (1930). Photographer: George Jackman for Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd. Retrieved by State
Library of Queensland, Australia [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Włodarczyk, Justyna, author.
Title: Genealogy of obedience : reading North American dog training
literature, 1850s–2000s / by Justyna Wlodarczyk.
Description: Boston : Brill, [2018] | Series: Human-animal studies, ISSN
1573-4226 ; volume 20 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031879| ISBN 9789004380288 (hardback) | ISBN
9789004380295 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dogs—Training—United States—History—19th century. |
Dogs—Training—United States—History—20th century. |
Dogs—Training—United States—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC SF431 .W655 2018 | DDC 636.7/0835—dc23
LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2018031879
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
ISSN 1573-4 226
ISBN 978-90-04-38028-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-38029-5 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Introduction: Canine- Human Intensifications, Periodizing
Dog Training in the US Since the 1850s 1
1 Periodizing Dog Training with Foucault 9
2 1850– 1910: Shaping the Dog’s Soul 10
3 1910– 1970s: The Emergence and Strengthening of the Disciplinary
Regime 14
4 1980s– 2000s: From Governmentality to Self- Governmentality:
Biopower, Behaviorism and Care of Self 18
5 2000– 2015: Beyond Behaviorism: Affirmative Biopolitics 23
1 The Gentle Way in Punishment: Transcending Animality/ Performing
Animality in Early US Pet Dog Training Manuals, 1850– 1900 26
1 Dog Training in the Nineteenth Century 29
2 Canine Sagacity 35
3 The Gentle Way in Punishment 38
4 Canine Minstrelsy 46
5 Conclusion 51
2 Hunting Dog Manuals: The Pointer as a Work of Art in the Age
of Biopolitical Reproduction, 1845– 1909 53
1 Sports Hunting 57
2 The Notion of Breed and Hunting Dogs 59
3 Polishing Instinct: The Pointer as a Work of Art 64
4 S.T. Hammond’s Training or Breaking? 69
5 Hunting in Black and White 73
3 Culture of Instinct: Emergence of the Disciplinary
Regime, 1910– 1946 80
1 Was Most Modern? 83
2 Police Dogs 86
3 Most’s Masculine Methods 90
4 Nietzsche Goes to the Dogs 95
5 Should American Dogs Bite? 100
6 Conclusion 105
vi Contents
4 The Rise and Fall of Obedience: From Helen Whitehouse Walker
to the Dawn of Positive Training, 1933– 1984 107
1 Leading Others: Tools of Discipline 111
2 Governmentality 116
3 Training You to Train Your Dog: Layers of Human- Canine
Discipline 121
4 The Soul of a Trainer: Crossover Trainers, 1980s– 2000s 124
5 Off the Leash 127
6 Feeling Power and Positive Dog Training 129
5 Power without Coercion: From Governmentality
to Self- Governmentality, from Discipline to
Self- Control, 1984– 2000s 134
1 Had Foucault Read Skinner? 138
2 Training as a Practice of Freedom 144
3 Doggie Zen: Dog Training and Technologies of the Self 147
4 From Discipline to Control 152
5 Accounting for Affect/A ccounting for Gender 159
6 Countermodernity: Resistance to the Positive Training
Revolution, 1980s– 2000s 166
1 Disciplining Affects: The Dog Whisperer 168
2 Vicki Hearne: On the Nature of Freedom 183
3 David McCaig: Pastoral Dissent 191
7 Be More Dog: Towards an Affirmative Biopolitics 200
1 Do More with Your Dog 204
2 Are We Having Fun Yet? 207
3 Affirmative Biopolitics 210
4 Garrett, Foucault and Radical Behaviorism 214
5 Beyond Behaviorism 217
6 Beyond Agility 221
7 Back to Ethology, Back to the Body 223
8 Conclusion 227
Conclusion: The Death of Obedience 229
References 237
Index 255
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without various forms of support that
I have received over the years of work on the project. Most significantly, I have
been the beneficiary of two fellowships that have allowed me to develop my
ideas in supportive environments: the Animals and Society/ Wesleyan Animal
Studies Fellowship in Human- Animal Studies (2015), which resulted in the
first drafts of c hapters 1 and 2 of this book, and the Fulbright Senior Research
Award (2016/2 017), which took me to the Forum for International US Studies
at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where I spent a wonderful-
ly productive year devoted solely to this project. The supportive environment
created by ifuss creators Jane Desmond and Virginia Rodriguez is second to
none; I cannot say enough good things about the atmosphere, the office space,
university facilities, easy access to archives, continuous and lively intellectual
debates and personal support. I have benefitted from the feedback of other
ifuss fellows during regular workshops and from almost daily conversations
over coffee with David Schraig, program coordinator for ifuss. I would also
like to thank my home university, The University of Warsaw, for readily grant-
ing me academic leave (multiple times) to pursue this project. My Polish col-
leagues – especially Marek Paryż, Zuzanna Ładyga, Anna Pochmara, Joanna
Ziarkowska, Ewa Łuczak – have always been there for me when I needed them.
Zuzanna, who has never lived with a dog, probably knows more about dog
training than many dog trainers do.
I have received an outpouring of support from animal studies colleagues
whom I contacted by e- mail and at conferences, asking for clarification of their
own research and for feedback on my ideas. I have benefitted immensely from
a mostly online relationship with the late prof. Raymond Coppinger, whose in-
put into chapters 2 and 3 was significant and whose work has been very inspi-
rational for me. Drafts of most of the chapters were presented at various con-
ferences; the one that I remember the most vividly as a truly welcoming space
for intellectual discussion being the Living with Animals conference at Eastern
Kentucky University (2017), organized by Bob Mitchell and Radhika Makecha.
Michał Pręgowski’s unwavering belief in my competence to write about train-
ing as well as his own enthusiasm and energy have helped me maintain my
own motivation.
I have been immersed in the dog community for many years and would also
like to thank my non- academic friends for the many discussions we have had
about training, which have often been amazingly fruitful. It would be hard
to list all my “dog friends” whose influence on this book is considerable but
viii Acknowledgments
Magda Gmitrzak, Basia Kaczmarczyk, Magda Widlak, Karolina Nowak, Maria
Pajzderska are certainly among them. I hope you enjoy this book as well.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their ongoing support of the en-
deavor and willingness to relocate to Illinois with me, even if somewhat grudg-
ingly. Irmina and Janusz, I am glad you survived the cornfields and the wind.
To my mom, for serving as housesitter, babysitter, petsitter, and number one
fan. I cannot say that my dogs ever expressed any kind of enthusiastic support,
but they have gracefully survived the turmoil of this period of intense writing
and editing, which they probably associate with less attention (and training!)
for them. The memory of the relationship I had with my dearest Uma, whom
we lost in 2015, keeps me grounded in the belief that humans and canines can
truly be companion species and that training together can be a vehicle for in-
creasing interspecies understanding. The presence of the dogs I currently live
with – Malcolm, Ida, Migo and Flora – keeps me relatively sane and humble.
Preface
The idea for this book began with something of a conceptual experiment: the
application of Foucault to dog training, in an attempt to explain the differ-
ence between Foucault’s disciplinary society and the post-F oucauldian term
“society of control,” as employed by Deleuze (1992), Rose (1999a) and Hardt
and Negri (2001). To me – someone with a history of involvement with dogs –
dog training seemed a perfect example to illustrate the waning of the classic
disciplinary regime: we go from leashes and obedience schools to cookies
and individually- tailored behavior modification programs; from hands- on to
hands- off methods; from six- week- long group classes to perpetual training at
home. I was discussing Discipline and Punish with a group of undergraduates
who were not “dog people.” Still, they seemed to find the example useful and
contributed stories of their own: it seemed everyone had at least heard of a
friend or family member’s adventures in the world of dog training. Because
the students’ response was overwhelmingly positive, I checked if anyone had
written about this shift in dog training practices using a Foucauldian vocabu-
lary. No one had. As I was re- reading Foucault’s Technologies of the Self (1988)
with a group of graduate students, the analogy between the self- control prac-
ticed in Greek askesis and self- control as one of the foundational exercises in
reinforcement- based dog training again taunted me with possibilities for fur-
ther exploration. Then there was Diogenes the Cynic, who literally led a dog’s
life; an iconic figure for animal studies and for Foucauldian biopolitics. When
I discovered that Foucault had read Skinner, the giant of American behavior-
ism and potentially the greatest influence on dog training today, I was hooked.
I knew I had the making of a full- fledged project that was both practical and
intellectually productive: it was an interpretive strategy that could explain
what might otherwise remain baffling. Reading dog training literature through
a Foucauldian framework made sense; it flowed; it explained certain conun-
drums that would otherwise be left unanswered. Why is an obscure German
army colonel, who never set foot in the US, considered the father of modern
dog training in North America? Why do contemporary positive dog trainers
swear by B.F. Skinner, who trained pigeons to carry out suicide missions? Why
were mid- twentieth- century American trainers so opposed to teaching dogs
tricks? Why did William Koehler, who is now condemned for excessively cruel
methods, receive awards from the American Humane Association and the Dog
Writers’ Association of America?
Of course, my interest in tracing the genealogy of dog training has a per-
sonal dimension, even if the personal voice is absent from my argument in
x Preface
this book. This analysis is fueled by my own involvement in the dog world:
I am – and have been ever since I remember – a “dog person.” In an attempt to
explain how some “pet owners” become “dog people,” performance artist Holly
Hughes writes: “Our lives revolve around our dogs. We don’t just rig our teach-
ing schedules around the need to let them out every few hours. We train them,
and the majority of our weekends are built around travelling to soccer arenas
and stables to compete in dog shows” (Hughes 2015, 212). This has been the sto-
ry of my life. My greatest joys and my deepest heartbreaks have been related to
dogs. My involvement with dogs has, to a large extent, defined how and where
I live my life, how my day is organized, whom I call kin, where and how I trav-
el (I have moved with my dogs across continents, multiple times). It has also
shaped my academic path. The existence of the animal turn in the academy
has, of course, served as an enabler. An early mentor, in my pre-a nimal studies
days, once asked me: “What would you be researching if you weren’t doing
this?” I did not hesitate. My answer was immediate: “Dogs.” At the time, it did
not seem possible, at least to me, to carry out serious research within American
Studies in Europe on a topic that had such a trivial ring to – as I felt – everyone
but myself. Now, having a community of scholars to fall back on, the animal
studies community, makes it much more feasible.
Yet, it seems that dog training is a tricky topic among animal studies schol-
ars. This suspicion towards training is understandable, particularly in the US
context. Firstly, outside of a religious framework, obedience seems antithetical
to the American experience. Beginning with Emerson and Thoreau, America
explicitly values individualism and non- conformity. In fact, the subsequent
emancipation of oppressed groups has taken place through acts of civil disobe-
dience. If we conceptualize the emergence of animal studies – even if it does
not always directly connect to the discourse of animal rights – as a discourse
that probes and questions the status of animals in contemporary society, it is
not surprising that it is not going to be interested in an exploration of methods
for enforcing obedience. On the contrary, resistance looms as a more potent
topic for analysis. Yet obedience, as it relates to the human- canine relationship,
has a history: this book is the story of the rise and fall of obedience as a con-
ceptual category in human- canine relations. Today, obedience – understood as
unconditional submission to the will of the other: a definition Foucault uses
to explain the difference between Cynic askesis and Christian ascetisism (Fou-
cault 2008, 320) – is long dead even among those who participate in obedience
competitions. One of the goals of this book is to show that the very impulses
behind the animal turn have also shaped the changes in contemporary dog
training. As a corollary, I also want to show how dog training responds to bigger
shifts in conceptualizing the world: how it is not static. And again, Foucault is