First, some dog agility training:

This one is long but even just a few minutes will do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG6TeAn4N6I&list=FLXtYxn6KLvi7vUCO6kh95Iw&index=2&t=313s

Sweet Ollie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4N7G29GWQI

In this post, I want to share what has been helpful for me in thinking about Donna Haraway’s work. This is, perhaps, elementary but I found so much of my thinking around her work particularly dealing with non-human animals and post-humanism solidified when I watched dog agility competitions online such as the UK’s Cruft’s Dog Show (clips from which are above). Speaking directly to ideas discussed in When Species Meet and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Haraway explores the boundary between human and the non-human animal through an exploration of the ways in which dogs, other critters, and humans have evolved together. Centered on the domestic, her work rallies against human exceptionalism. In The Companion Species Manifesto, she focuses on her own dog, Ms. Cayenne Pepper, and uses dog agility training as an example of two species who are in communication with one another in a way that is not merely an “owner” asking its “pet” to perform tricks. Rather, clearly illustrated in agility training, the dog’s agency is clearly visible—they can choose not to follow a command, to bark and yip, or go off course. It is not an instance of a non-human animal “performing” for their “owner.” There is an entire relationship between handler and dog wherein each creature has agency.

In her latest work from which we read an excerpt, it seems that Haraway is expanding her focus from the domestic and dogs to thinking of ourselves and other critters as a compost—a continual, joyous “becoming with” one another in all our creaturely forms: animal, human, and plant life, micro, and macro. Haraway envisions this compost as a literal, but not pejorative, hot mess wherein “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” She also expresses this idea through the idea of the tentacular wherein “The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres.” And it is an attention to the present—to this hot messy compost—that we must begin wherein we must be “truly present . . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1). Haraway urges readers to be open to “unexpected” collaborations (4). So, back to dog agility training—could we begin to conceptualize of this compost as numerous conscious and unconscious collaborations like the relationship or collaboration of that between dog and human? If we think of the compost of all organisms and beings on earth, then could we situate dogs and humans as one of these collaborations?

Again, that’s probably simple stuff when it comes to Haraway. But I suppose in reading this it wasn’t until I started thinking back to agility competitions that it clicked for me. I am curious as to what implications Haraway’s recent work has for gender?