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Every now and then, I look deep into my dogs' eyes and ask, "Who are you?" Usually the answer is a tail wag or a pointed glance at the cookie jar. But every now and then, they will get serious and stare back at me intently, as if to say, "Well, who are you?"
Perhaps my dogs have been conferring with Donna Haraway, who understands that "Beings do not pre-exist their relatings."1 Safi, Bahati, and Tex are who they are because of who I am, and conversely, I am who I am because of them. Our relationships are a perpetual improvisational dance,2 co-created and emergent, simultaneously reflecting who we are and bringing into being who we will become. As Donna describes in her essay "Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists" in this volume, how I think about social relationships, both within and between species, began to change during my fieldwork with wild chimpanzees, dolphins, and especially baboons.3 Living with these animals, I discovered acutely sensitive social beings who would form trusting relationships with humans when approached with humility and respect.4 Subsequently, I took a break from fieldwork, adopted a dog, Safi, and became intrigued by the relationships she developed with other dogs. Eventually, my students and I systematically examined social relationships among dogs by analyzing hundreds of hours of videotaped interactions among local dogs, including my own.5 Subsequently, I adopted two more dogs, and research on these dogs and others continues.
Although my research on dogs resembles the work I and many others have conducted on wild animals (e.g., similar theoretical underpinnings and ways of collecting and analyzing data), it differs radically from field research in one important way: I have close personal relationships with many of the dogs we observe, including, of course, with my own. This puts me (and my students, whose dogs also participate in the research) in the unusual position of experiencing our subjects in two very different ways: from the "outside, objective" perspective of a scientist, and the "inside, subjective" perspective of a human interacting daily with beloved companions.
In Western culture, the "objective" and "subjective" perspectives are viewed as different and often competing approaches to determining what is real and true.6 Ever since I began...