The moral and social qualities attributed to animals often draw on animal sciences; these attributions, in turn shape the interactions that humans, including scientists, have with them. Given the important role that animals play in contemporary life, and the high stakes debates that exist over their treatment in sciences and other settings, understanding how moral attributions about animals come to be made is critically important. Yet most research studies on this topic treat science, social qualities, and ethical sources of these moral attributions separately, rather than investigating how they are shaped and are shaped by the intersection of scientific, ethical and social concerns. This research study fills this gap by examining how some members of a species with considerable popular interest and long a subject of scientific investigation, the dog, come to be labeled as dangerous. One of the key advances that this research makes is the concept of "fuzzy science," or science that is fungible and used by varied actors to make moral and ethical claims that intersect with racialized and gendered attributions of animal behavior and motivation. Major research methods are participant observation, analysis of scientific and other documents, and interviews. Theoretically, the research provides new tools for understanding how the wide range of sciences and scientific practices - both formal and informal - involved in social and ethical conflicts about animals shape and are shaped by social factors, and in doing so, contributes to the fields of science and technology studies, animal studies, and critical race and gender studies.
More broadly, this research provides new knowledge to a wide range of users about the ethical, scientific, and social basis of attributions of danger and safety to particular kinds of animals. This knowledge can be used by scientists, zoos, animal shelters, and publics. Findings are disseminated in a book addressed to an interdisciplinary and popular audience, in a course disseminated to teachers, via a podcast for public radio, through popular press articles and via workshops at the UC Berkeley Science, Technology, and Society Center.
Numerous communities around the country are currently engaging in debates about dogs and danger. This project explores the roles of race, gender, and sexuality in the sciences involved in these discussions through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an animal shelter with a high volume of pit bull-type dogs and extensive research into both the debates and the policies they involve. One of the project’s key findings concerns the instability of contemporary understandings of dog breeds – while members of the general public and the media tend to categorize dogs by breed, because breed attributions in these contexts are often rooted in dogs’ appearances rather than parentage or genetics, they are frequently erroneous, which has important implications for both breed-related policies and the attribution of traits such as danger to specific breeds. Practices of not only identifying dogs but also reading their behaviors in shelter settings reveal a mix of formal and informal, or prosaic, sciences, as shelter staff and volunteers combine expert and semi-expert teachings focused in ethology and behaviorism from books, television, and classes, with knowledge rooted in shared discussions based in personal experiences. The prominence of these prosaic sciences in interactions among humans and dogs in shelter settings suggests that interventions aimed at helping shelter animals could be improved with more attention to improving communities’ shared knowledge bases concerning animal behavior. Indeed, the fact that behavior and economics were prominent factors in owner surrenders of animals at the fieldwork site indicates that more effective interventions might involve, for example, the provision of low-cost or free training and behavior clinics. The cost of pet upkeep also speaks to the ways that class and race figure in the debates about dogs, communities, and shelters, for fieldwork revealed that the norms of whiteness and middle-class status shape who is deemed an appropriate adopter or foster guardian of a shelter dog, especially a dog labeled as a pit bull-type. Finally, given the importance of moral categories – dogs labeled dangerous—and ethics in these discussions –euthanasia is prominent throughout—it is also important to consider the ideas of justice that emerge in communities working to advocate for specific dog breeds and shelter policies; research showed that while many of the project’s interlocutors’ stated political identities were firmly progressive, their advocacy for harsh penalties and felony-level sentences for cases of animal abuse was at odds with other contemporary progressive causes such as those challenging the role of race in judicial sentencing patterns. This discrepancy speaks to the need to articulate an understanding of justice not only rooted in responsibility to a multi-species world but also attentive to the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
