Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition by Antoine Traisnel (review)

Abstract

in her sixties” (p. 43) or “cow-colored pit bull-type dog we [rescue staff and volunteers] guesstimated to be about three years old” (p. 128). While the move to describe people and dogs in a similar fashion underscores the need for equitable relations and should be applauded, such descriptions, when used repeatedly, tend to flatten the complexity, messiness, and mutability of identity, and run against the very arguments of the book. A better approach could involve taking more space to tell the stories of individuals through their own words, or, in the case of canine informants, to describe their lives using the best information available and in ways that center their perspectives. The monograph could have also situated multispecies justice within the existing body of research constituting this field and elaborated on such work within the contexts of dog rescues and cultures. Weaver correctly attributes the concept to Haraway, his graduate mentor, in a footnote buried within the introduction and then briefly revisits the term in the final pages of the book where he invents the phrase “multispecies transformative justice” (p. 184). At no point, however, is the larger body of work associated with multispecies justice—or with multispecies studies and multispecies ethnography, for that matter—mentioned or engaged, even though Bad Dog participates in these areas of thought. Despite constituting part of the title, the field of multispecies justice is conspicuously absent from the rest of the book. Engaging the work of David Naguib Pellow, David Schlosberg, Kyle Whyte, Ursula Heise, Sunaura Taylor, Thom van Dooren, and Danielle Celermajer —to name a few—would have not only placed Bad Dog in conversation with the growing field, but also explicitly placed multispecies research that remains hesitant to focus on race, sexuality, ability, class, and gender in conversation with feminist and queer theory that continues to overlook the roles of other species. Indeed, the absence of multispecies literature points to an institutional gulf separating multispecies research from the social justice–oriented scholarship that guides the book. Bad Dog insists that the pursuit of equitable, multispecies worlds requires departing from the confines of disciplinarity to instead coinhabit the mutual, multi-sited, multispecies spaces that dogs and people make together every single day. In doing so, Weaver’s book exemplifies the participatory, public-facing scholarship needed to assemble more accountable modes of thinking and relating.