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Introduction
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1977) discusses the meticulous time schedule of a youth prison in nineteenth-century Paris. The schedule consists of a long list of paragraphs that begin with “the first drum-roll” in the morning at which prisoners are expected to get out of bed. The rest of the list structures the prisoners' day in detail until they are locked up and go to bed. This kind of educational confinement was efficient, Foucault suggests, because the repetitious acts produced a virtuous soul “around, on, within the body” of each prisoner (Foucault, 1977, p. 29). These disciplinary measures diminished the opposition between the punishing force and the punished and localized institutions in the very bodies of citizens, thus replacing an earlier paradigm of corporeal punishment. In 2008, an equally meticulous time schedule was published in O'Neil's Chihuahuas for Dummies. The list encourages Chihuahua owners to subject not only their dogs but also themselves to a number of routines to become good dog owners. The list begins by instructing owners to take their puppy out “[f]irst thing in the morning” and continues with advice concerning exercise, housebreaking, disciplining, and feeding, until the end of the day, when the pet owner goes to bed (O'Neil, 2008, p. 138).
Like youth prisons, pet keeping can be understood as an example of Western society's sophisticated disciplinary mechanisms. This connection between prison inmates and dog trainers is anything but farfetched: in a study of prison-based dog training programs, several dog trainers reported that not only their dogs but they themselves experienced increased patience, impulse control, and emotional control (Furst, 2007). The norms surrounding dog training produce the “souls” of good dogs and apt owners around, on, and within their bodies (see Włodarczyk, 2018). The actions of owners and dogs in turn resonate with wider normative frameworks concerning, for example, friendship and the responsibilities of guardians.
Based on interviews with 20 pet owners, most of them conducted in the home of the owners together with their pets, the purpose of the present study is to approach pet keeping as a set of practices and discourses that simultaneously creates inhibitions and enables certain ways of being for both humans and other animals. Drawing on Foucault, Nikolas Rose (1999, p....