(PDF) Ferality Tales

Ferality Tales Ferality Tales   Greg Garrard The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism Edited by Greg Garrard Print Publication Date: Aug 2014 Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742929.013.018 Abstract and Keywords This article examines some tales of feral dogs in the context of ecocriticism and critical animal studies. It discusses the concept of ferality in ethology and evolutionary biology, and considers environmentalist conceptions of ferality as a kind of biological pollution alongside the celebration of ferality in animal studies as a subversive biological tendency.. Fictional texts discussed include Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy, Alistair Macleod’s collec­ tion As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Keywords: feral animals, co-evolution, critical animal studies, ecocriticism, biological pollution, Dog Boy, Eva Hor­ nung, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, Alistair Macleod, The Call of the Wild, Jack London ONE of the most exciting things that occurred in my thirteenth year was that I acquired a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer. To a young geek, its powers were awesome: eight colors, a keyboard with rubbery little keys, and, in the deluxe version, 48 kilobytes of memory. Programs had to be loaded from cassette tapes, which could take up to half an hour. The computer I’m using right now has 43,690 times as much memory, stores much of its infor­ mation on an Internet server somewhere else for instant access and can display more colours than humans can discriminate. Similar, if less dramatic, stories could be told of medicine, astronomical observation, materials engineering, and a plethora of other fields of enquiry. The advancement of technological and scientific learning is real and cumula­ tive, and is—apocalypse aside—impossible to reverse. Ecological modernization is an in­ creasingly important objective of scientific progress, as well as arguably the only viable way forward for environmentalism. Moral and political progress is also real. Gender, racial, and sexual equality; disability rights; and increased attention to animal welfare are all important forms of liberal moral improvement, but unless they are entrenched in political constitutions, they are not cu­ mulative and seem far more easily undone by ideological changes. The reason is that the human animals supposedly running the show are as fallible and contradictory as they Page 1 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales have always been, which imposes important limits on our moral responses, as psycholo­ gist Daniel Gilbert has argued in an article memorably titled “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming”: Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the prac­ tice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets. (Gilbert) Whereas scientific knowledge begets more knowledge so long as the global research (p. 242) base exists and continues to communicate, moral wisdom has to be learned, painfully and unreli­ ably, by every generation afresh.1 Does art belong with science, or with morality? Politicised forms of literary criticism— Marxism, feminism, ecocriticism—have seen themselves as progressive, but they seem not to have been accompanied by sustained and cumulative literary movements. Art changes, perhaps even develops, but does not progress. If Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a better novel than Crime and Punishment or Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not because it is more recent. Partly this is because the occurrence of novels and poems is singular, in the sense articulated by Derek Attridge. Literary works are noncommensurable, their authori­ ty and inventiveness attributed, unlike a valid scientific experiment, to a specific individ­ ual or group. Indeed, the word “experimental” has precisely opposed meanings in the arts and the sciences: as Attridge points out, “The very term ‘experiment’ paradoxically com­ bines the notions of a controlled, repeatable physical process and the unrepeatable try­ ing-out of new procedures” (Attridge loc. 547). Partly it is because literature responds far more avidly to the relative stability of humans’ natures (the term I prefer to “human na­ ture”) than to technological and even broader historical changes. Even so, I want to ar­ gue that literature and literary criticism can contribute to scientific progress, provided we conceive of it more generously than we have heretofore. The potential for such inter­ disciplinary progress is most obvious in the two fields of the humanities most closely al­ lied to the natural sciences: ecocriticism and animal studies. According to biologist E. O. Wilson, “The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities” (6), a project he calls “consilience.” It is an immense and progressive ambition for research across the academic disciplines, yet his version of it insists on locating physics at the head of a rigid hierarchy of coordinated scientific explanation. Only if they submit to the authority of the natural sciences will the humanities be permitted to contribute to human and biospheric welfare and the advancement of knowledge. “Ferality Tales” is inspired by Wilson’s hopes, but seeks to show that the various epistemic frameworks of the disciplines can and should collaborate successfully on more or less equal terms. As Stephen Rose says, “Our Page 2 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales world may be—is, I would claim—an ontological unity, but to understand it we need the epistemological diversity that … different levels of explanation offer” (95). Ferality, the condition of existing in between domestication and wildness, is an ideal test case for three reasons: it is a key point of dispute between environmental ethics and ani­ mal rights; it is a subject on which scientific perspectives have changed dramatically in recent years; and it has inspired some superb fictions over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will therefore be locating ferality by triangulating from animal studies and ecocriticism, ethology and evolutionary ecology, and literary fic­ tion, using the insights (and perhaps lacunae) of each to produce a multifaceted, interdis­ ciplinary projection of this concept.2 Ferality: Between Animal Studies and Eco­ (p. 243) criticism Linnaeus’s epochal taxonomy Systema Naturae (1735 first edition) boldly classified hu­ mans among the human-like apes, causing both theological and scientific dismay. Writing to a colleague, Linnaeus responded: “It is unacceptable because man has been cate­ gorised among the Anthropomorpha, but man knows himself” (148). It seems, indeed, that self-knowledge is what defines this species—if anything does. Pursuing this strange basis for categorization, Giorgio Agamben comments that Linnaeus does not record—as he does with the other species—any specific identifying char­ acteristic next to the generic name Homo, only the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum [know yourself]. Even in the tenth edition, when the complete denomina­ tion becomes Homo sapiens, all evidence suggests that the new epithet does not represent a description, but that it is only a simplification of that adage, which, moreover, maintains its position next to the term Homo. It is worth reflecting on this taxonomic anomaly, which assigns not a given, but rather an imperative as a specific difference. (loc. 255) But if Sapiens alludes not descriptively to the wisdom of our kind (how could it, indeed), but to the faculty required to recognise ourselves at all, “Homo sapiens,” argues Agamben, “is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (loc. 268–69). To shape ourselves to ourselves we need animals, be­ cause man is “a constitutively ‘anthropomorphous’ animal (that is, ‘resembling man,’ according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must rec­ ognize himself in a non-man in order to be human” (loc. 272). Located at—or even as—the species boundary is, Agamben says, the feral man, which Lin­ naeus categorizes as a biological variant of our species, Homo ferus. To Agamben, “the enfants sauvages, who appear more and more often on the edges of the villages of Eu­ rope, are the messengers of man’s inhumanity, the witnesses to his fragile identity and his lack of a face of his own” (loc. 295). Although the feral man is recognized as human, he or it “seems to belie the characteristics of the most noble of the primates point for point: it is tetrapus (walks on all fours), mutus (without language), and hirsutus (covered with Page 3 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales hair)” (loc. 292). Just on the other side of that imaginary boundary is the animal, through whose difference and inferiority Homo sapiens habitually defines himself, as if gazing into a kind of weird anti-mirror. And if the domestic animal is the one who affirms our power and sovereignty most unambiguously, perhaps the feral animal is the one who, like the feral man, refuses to face us, and in doing so, frustrates our preening self-identification. Such seems to be the view of animal studies critic Philip Armstrong, for whom “ferity” (as he calls it) is a subversive energy of quite stunning breadth and force. The (p. 244) au­ tonomous agency of animals it embodies “provided a means to disrupt the instrumentalist paradigm that united Cartesian philosophy, new scientific practice, capitalist economics, and colonial domination over populations and terrains” (38). The enduring Freudian com­ mitments of cultural studies, from which animal studies largely derives, are evident in his assertion that, “As the history of modernity shows … the attempt to eradicate, regulate, commodify or otherwise manipulate wildness tends to result in ferity—the return of wild­ ness, or an escape back to it, or its redirection into unexpected modes” (189). In truth, though, if the return of the repressed is bad psychology, the return of the wild is even worse ecology; much of the time when industrial modernity seeks to eradicate wildness, it simply succeeds. The key point, though, is that an animal studies perspective that has in­ herited a preoccupation with transgression will no doubt be inclined to celebrate the feral animal along with Armstrong. Domestication will be read as perhaps the earliest form of oppressive “bio-power,” which seeks to minimize or eliminate animal agency altogether. Armstrong is not the only advocate of ferality as a subversive force. Another writer from the Southern hemisphere, Adrian Franklin, indicts environmentalist concern about feral animals as a form of nationalism, insisting that …the species-cleansing of outsider categories of animal based on the logic and de­ mands of ecology reinforces the solidarity of human nationalism. Nationalism has always thrived on the rhetorical advantages of ecology. Ecology not only deals with communities that are tied to specific territories but gives them an unswerv­ ing sense of order ordained by nature itself. (17) In truth, many forms of nationalism (most notably American Republicanism since the 1980s) are hostile to environmentalism, and the few opportunistic alliances that have existed, as between the German Nazis and conservationists, have proven both superficial and transient.3 Franklin’s characterization of “ecology” as a rigidly territorializing discourse also seems unencumbered by any detailed knowledge of it as a science: he supports his argument with highly selective, ten­ dentiously interpreted examples of popular environmentalism rather than references to scientif­ ic papers. While Franklin is right to suggest that, practically and perhaps morally, feral animals cannot be exterminated from Australia, he provides inadequate evidence for the claim that “Fer­ al animal control does not follow from the science of land and nature but from moral, cultural, ethical and political discourses” (177). In Franklin’s account, the acceptance of feral animals by Aboriginals legitimizes their presence as part of a jolly “hybrid” mix, and biodiversity (which he claims is enhanced, not destroyed, by feral animals) is celebrated by means of a lazy and unex­ amined analogy with cultural diversity. Page 4 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales The question is particularly pointed in Australia, which is plagued by feral and invasive exotic species, but which was also the birthplace of modern animal rights. As Peter Singer observes of the ethics and language of “pest control”: The farmer will seek to kill off the “pests” by the cheapest method available. This is likely to be poison. The animals will eat poisoned baits, and die a slow, painful death. (p. 245) No consideration at all is given to the interests of the “pests”—the very word “pest” seems to exclude any concern for the animals themselves. But the classification “pest” is our own, and a rabbit that is a pest is as capable of suf­ fering, and as deserving of consideration, as a white rabbit who is a beloved com­ panion animal. (233) In practice, animal advocates have campaigned vociferously, and sometimes successfully, against extirpation campaigns directed against feral and invasive animals. For instance, when Italian wildlife authorities sought to assess the impact of introduced grey squirrels in 1997 as a prelude to the introduction of control measures, animal rights advocates took them to court. By the time the legal process found in favour of the conservationists three years later, the squirrel popula­ tion was too big to eliminate. Thus Dan and Gad Perry’s assessment laments that “The responses of [wildlife] managers and animal rights proponents to environmental issues remain mostly dia­ metrically opposite, leading to ongoing friction” (Perry and Perry 31). Having said that, Perry and Perry also give an example of successful compromise over lethal control of feral pigs in Texas, and major organizations such as PETA in the United States and the RSPCA in the United Kingdom and Australia support humane population control.4 On the other side of the argument, passions also run high. In the early work of “land eth­ ic” proponent J. Baird Callicott, domestication seems to have an almost mystical power to denature animals: Domestic animals are creations of man. They are living artefacts, but artefacts nevertheless…. There is thus something profoundly incoherent … in the complaint of some animal liberationists that the “natural behaviour” of chickens and male calves is cruelly frustrated on factory farms. It would make almost as much sense to speak of the natural behaviour of tables and chairs. (50) Because domestic animals have been “bred to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency,” he claims, “It is literally meaningless to suggest that they be liberated” (51). It is significant that he does not include dogs in his list of denatured animals, as his demeaning list of traits would not comfortably encompass Rottweilers (docile?), Jack Russell terriers (tractable?) and Border Collies (stupid?). Released feral animals, claims Callicott, reveal the truth of the situation: they either die, confirming their enfeebled vulnerability, or—like feral mustangs—they survive, “begin to recover some of their remote wild ancestral genetic traits and become smaller, leaner, hearti­ er, and smarter versions of their former selves” (51). It is not hard to see why Callicott’s uncompromising land ethic, which subordinates all in­ dividual rights—human and animal—to the supraorganismic interests he vests in the ecosystem, was chastized by Tom Regan as “environmental fascism” (Regan 362). On the other hand, Callicott’s ire is understandable given the immense destructive capability of feral animals, which is well known to environmentalists and conservation biologists. Per­ haps the worst example is the rabbit, introduced to Australia as a game animal by a Page 5 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales farmer in 1859. So rapid was their spread across the country that, as Clive Ponting re­ ports, “in the mid-1880s 1.8 million rabbits were killed in Victoria and nearly 7 million (p. 246) in New South Wales without perceptibly slowing up their relentless spread” (171). Before the introduction of myxomatosis the rabbit population was as high as ten billion, leading to profound ecological changes in the Australian Outback. Feral cats have been held responsible for the extinction of several insular species of bird (including the famous Stephens Island wren, supposedly killed off by the lighthouse keeper’s cat) and are con­ sidered another imported scourge of Australia’s native wildlife, along with feral camels and horses (or “brumbies”). Dogs have not had such bad press, although Robert Whittak­ er notes that “Domestic dogs can also be devastating, and feral populations have been re­ sponsible for the local extinction of land iguanas in the Galápagos” (231). In this, as in so many matters ecological, generalizations are risky: the impact of ferality depends on the particular species and the habitat into which it escapes. The singularity of literary landscapes is such that I cannot “control” for (fictional) habitat—although it is worth noting all three of my texts are situated in cold northern climes—and so I propose to limit the variables by focusing on a single species: Canis familiaris, or the domesticated dog. Ferality: Between Ethology and Evolutionary Ecology Just as “human” depends, as we have seen, on “animal” for its meaning, “feral” depends on “domestic” and “wild.” Until the 1980s, a view prevailed, in both popular and scientific accounts of domestication, that S. K. Robisch has dubbed “the campfire myth,” in which the ancestors of modern dogs were irresistibly attracted to the warmth and smell of roasting meat of cavemen’s campfires and were tamed first by familiarity and later by de­ liberate selection. How flattering a story it is to us is evident from Jack London’s White Fang, which tells the story of a wolf cub that accepts domestication, effectively recapitu­ lating speculative phylogeny as fictional ontogeny.5 White Fang’s mother, Kiche, is half dog and half wolf, an ancestry that presumably accounts for her reaction to the proximity of an Indian encampment: A new wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger. She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men. (loc. 1671) To the wolf-dog—even so powerful a one as White Fang—acceptance of the domination of man is akin to spiritual revelation, but more firmly grounded in the facts of life: No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a god; no effort of will can possi­ bly induce disbelief in such a god. There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on its two hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful and (p. 247) loving, god and mystery and power wrapped up and around Page 6 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales by flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any flesh. (loc. 2261) London promotes us to a peculiar sort of divine condition: weak, edible creatures made by evolu­ tion to transcend, and ultimately to direct, evolution. He certainly intended the privileged rank of the dog as man’s lieutenant to remain undemeaned, but given the tool-centred construction of prehistory that dominated twentieth-century culture—with its ages of Stone and Bronze and Iron —it was only a couple of short hops from good soldier to fine instrument, and thence to Callicott’s stupid artefact. Donna Haraway passes scathing judgment on such narratives: Dogs are said to be the first domestic animals, displacing pigs for primal honours. Humanist technophiliacs depict domestication as the paradigmatic act of mascu­ line, single-parent, self-birthing, whereby man makes himself repetitively as he in­ vents (creates) his tools. The domestic animal is the epoch-making tool, realizing human intention in the flesh, in a dogsbody version of onanism. Man took the (free) wolf and made the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible. Mongre­ lized Hegel and Freud in the kennel? Let the dog stand for all domestic plant and animal species, subjected to human intent in stories of escalating progress or de­ struction, according to taste. (28) The campfire myth is anthropocentric twice over: once because it assumes that domestication is something (good or bad) we did to wolves, and again because it neglects the examples of domes­ tication that do not involve humans at all. Ants of several different species, for example, have domesticated fungi that provide the nest with food by digesting plant material. Their careful maintenance of the right temper­ ature and humidity for the fungi leads evolutionary biologist Darcy Morey to describe the ants’ work as “complex agriculture” (61). Regarding human’s domestication of plants, Michael Pollan counter-intuitively sets out in The Botany of Desire to understand the qual­ ities in plants that attracted—even seduced—humans, more or less unconsciously, to do­ mesticate them. “We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species,” he says, “but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests” (xvi). Given that there are roughly 100–200000 wolves in the world, and as many as half a billion dogs, the evolutionary gamble of domestication seems to have paid off for the ancestors of dogs. The new scientific consensus is, according to Ádám Miklósi, that “the natural environ­ ment of the dog is that ecological niche which has been created by humans” (10), and that it was the palaeolithic midden, not the fireside, that was most likely to have been the primal scene of domestication. More remarkably, the scientific evidence suggests that “not only have convergent processes made dogs fit for the anthropogenic environment, but also that dog and human behaviour actually share some important features” (237). Even though the underlying causal pathways are probably different due to our lack of close evolutionary ancestry, dogs have, for example, converged with human children to some degree in terms of their attachment behaviors. Like children, but unlike (p. 248) chimpanzees and socialised wolves, dogs pay careful attention to the gaze and gestures of Page 7 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales adult humans, and respond to their referential aspects. Perhaps most endearingly, Miklósi found that, whereas socialised wolves carried on worrying indefinitely at a frustrating puzzle task, “after a few attempts most dogs stopped trying and looked at their owner who was standing behind them” (179).6 David Paxton purports to show that, so intimate has dog–human co-evolution been, that our brains have changed so as to enhance our complementary capacities. In short, we do some of their thinking for them, while they do most of our smelling for us, while together “we and dogs make up a composite animal that has the ability to speak” (loc. 179). Although sceptical of Paxton’s claims, Donna Har­ away prefers such “remodeled versions [of evolution] that give dogs (and other species) the first moves in domestication and then choreograph an unending dance of distributed and heterogenous agencies.” (28) In evolutionary terms, domestication is not subjugation, but rather a specialized form of symbiosis. Like all intimate relationships (and in contrast to the fuzzy, feel-good notion of symbiosis prevalent in popular ecological discourse), do­ mestication includes the potential for anguish, cruelty, and incomprehension on both sides, as well as joy, love, and mutual benefits. We have eaten dogs, at times, and they have eaten us. But, as the Australian Aboriginal saying has it, it is dogs that make us hu­ man. The situation of feral dogs is therefore, in reality, mainly sad, rather than excitingly liber­ ated or subversive as Armstrong’s analysis would lead us to expect. Luigi Boitani, a lead­ ing expert on “free-living” dogs of all kinds, estimated in 1995 that there were around 800,000 feral dogs in Italy, a number that could only be sustained by a regular influx of abandoned animals given the extremely high mortality rate of their litters. The low chances of survival of feral puppies seem to be made worse by the minimal or non-exis­ tent paternal care dogs exhibit, as contrasted with wolves,7 and their seeming lack of the pack organization typical of other canids. Although it may be unwise to generalize since all observers note the genetic diversity of feral dogs and the wide variety of ecological factors they encounter (Boitani et al.), it would seem that feral dogs literally cannot live without us. Crucially, for our purposes, Miklósi insists that “Adult socialized offspring from feral dogs should be indistinguishable from other dogs living in human families. Note that in this sense feralization is the opposite process to socialization and not to domestication, which was often implied in earlier writings” (86). Given this shift in the understanding of dogs’ natures, we might expect to encounter two typical manifestations of ferality in fiction: as an existential condition midway between more-or-less reified notions of domesticity and wildness, reflecting the old anthropocentric consensus; and the representation of ferality as a developmental vicissitude befalling our most intimate symbiont. Anthropomorphism is less of a problem than lupomorphism in these ferality tales: the dog seems inherently (and surprisingly) resistant to disnification, but is at considerable risk of departing do­ mesticity only to arrive at ferality as, effectively, a wolf. As we have seen, anthropomor­ phic representations are better supported on scientific grounds than lupomorphic ones. Page 8 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales (p. 249) The Call of the Wild Our first ferality tale is also by far the most famous. The author of The Call of the Wild (1903), Jack London, was flattered by dozens of imitators, although as S. K. Robisch points out, he “may have been easy to copy, but he was hard to match” because “no mat­ ter how many writers revived [his] characters, they would always belong to London, who before he invented them met their real counterparts in the world” (294). London was sen­ sitive both to contemporary scientific thinking about wolves and dogs, and astutely obser­ vant of the human–canid moral and material economy of the Klondike Gold Rush. For ex­ ample, say Raymond Coppinger and Richard Schneider, “London was right in making ‘Buck’ a cross between a Saint Bernard and Scottish sheepdog, stolen in one of the lower 48 states. Buck and his fellow captives were dog derivatives, not wolf derivatives” (Cop­ pinger and Schneider 26). Contemporary photographs show a mishmash of mongrels in the traces, by contrast with the uniformity of present day Alaskan huskies.8 At the same time, though, The Call of the Wild is also shaped by London’s seriously complex ideologi­ cal commitments, which led him, as Robisch observes, to attempt “to synthesize no less than Darwinism, atavism, early Marxist socialism, the Nietzschean concept of the over- man, and the tricky relationship between deterministic naturalism and survivalist self-re­ liance” (290). As a result, he over-emphasizes the importance of dominance hierarchies among sledding dogs, thrilling bloodthirsty readers with Buck’s campaign to oust the lead dog Spitz. As the old leader disappears beneath a mass of murderous dogs, Buck looks on, “the successful champion, the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good” (loc. 474). The victory is the logical conclusion of Buck’s brutal re-educa­ tion from the effete “morality” of his comfortable California upbringing to the “primitive law” that prevails in the howling North, via a man in a red sweater in Seattle who sets him on the path from “dog” back to “wolf” by bludgeoning him with a hatchet. According to London’s half-mournful, half-thrilled Spencerian Darwinism, “wild” and “civ­ ilized”—and their canid symbols, “wolf” and “dog” too—are existential conditions at least as much as they are biological ones. So when Buck experiences “species memory” erupt­ ing from his unconscious being, we are to perceive ancient necessities awoken by strange, modern contingencies like the Gold Rush: “The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.” (loc. 275). Dim memories of the Californian “Sunland” are brushed aside by inher­ ited recollections of lying by campfires beside his prognathous and brachiating caveman master. Even then, the atavistic inner wolf struggles to dominate the loyal dog Buck who takes pride in his strength and skill in the traces, much like the faithful “Dave” who de­ mands to die in them. The inner conflict reaches its climax when John Thornton rescues Buck from the cruel, “callow” greenhorns Hal and Charles. Their deserved demise begets a contest of civilis­ ing “love” and “wild,” wolfish wiles in the dog, a contest sharpened by the “blood (p. 250) longing” aroused in him by hearing a chorus of wolves: “in spite of this great love he bore John Thornton, which seemed to bespeak the soft civilizing influence, the strain of the Page 9 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales primitive, which the Northland had aroused in him, remained alive and active” (loc. 832). Ultimately, though, long days convalescing at his master’s feet are outweighed by the thrill of a four day lone pursuit of a bull moose—perhaps the most extreme “tall tale of the Klondike” in the novel. Ferality makes Buck the perfect predator, supposedly combining the ancient instincts of the wolf with the enhanced intelligence bred by man. Having tak­ en bloody revenge on the Yeehat Indians for their murder of Thornton, he haunts the re­ mote woods of the Northland, prompting Robisch’s comment that “If Buck is an Evil Spir­ it, then turning feral means going bad…. In the climax of The Call of the Wild Buck’s con­ version to ‘evil’ reaches beyond the bestial state even while the bestial state is valorized as pure” (317). London’s ambivalence may extend still further, however, as Buck is “evil” specifically towards humans who are represented as savage themselves. Evil cancels out evil, but does not make him good; rather, Buck’s feral power makes him an Uberhund, be­ yond good and evil, a potent denizen of London’s intensely moralized domain of “wild” amorality. As the novel ends, the transformation from anthropomorphized focalizer to lupomorphic enigma remains uncompleted: the unnamed “Ghost Dog” who rips the throats of the Yeehats also returns annually to mourn John Thornton, and his forsaken do­ mesticity. “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” Our second case is the eponymous story from Canadian writer Alistair Macleod’s collec­ tion As Birds Bring Forth the Sunand Other Stories (1986). As with so many of Macleod’s flinty stories, it is set in the rugged and unforgiving environment of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where men struggle daily to make a living. The legendary quality of “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” is enhanced by the careful balance of scepticism and respect main­ tained by the narrator, the contemporary great-great-great-grandson of a man who res­ cues an injured puppy from under the wheels of a cart and nurses it by hand back to health. The immense dog she grows into is devoted to her savior. Even so, “She was never given a name but was referred to in Gaelic as cù mòr glas, the big grey dog” (loc. 1809). When she is in heat, the man finds a dog nearly big enough to mount her, then takes them both to the seashore where there is a hollow she can stand in to mate. The sturdy rough­ ness of the man only emphasizes the intimacy of the scene: “He was a man used to work­ ing with the breeding of animals, with the guiding of rams and bulls and stallions and of­ ten with the funky smell of animal semen on his large and gentle hands” (loc. 1817). Tak­ ing herself off to whelp, the cù mòr glas disappears from the man’s home. The dramatic climax of the story is a mirror image of another tale of misrecognition and tragic irony, best known in the British Isles as the story of a wolfhound named Gelert, but apparently folkloric around the world: returning from a hunt, King Llewellyn finds his faithful dog in his child’s bedchamber covered in blood, and the child gone. But after he has killed the dog in anger, he discovers the child unhurt—and a dead wolf that Gelert has fended off to boot. In Macleod’s story, it is the dog that goes away, and when (p. 251) the man succeeds in finding her a year later, she bounds up to him on the shoreline joyful­ ly, knocking him over in the surf. Her six pups, now full grown, “misunderstood, like so Page 10 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales many armies, the intention of their leader” (loc. 1834). They rip away his jaw and throat in front of his horrified sons, mortally injuring him. The terrible story is recounted around the region: “All of his caring for her was recounted over and over again and nobody missed any of the ironies” (loc. 1869). The dog, now known as the cù mòr glas a’ bhàis or big grey dog of death, goes on to haunt the family, a curse transcending the generations: This is how the cù mòr glas a’ bhàis came into our lives, and it is obvious that all of this happened a long, long time ago. Yet with succeeding generations it seemed the spectre had somehow come to stay and that it had become ours—not in the manner of an unwanted skeleton in the closet from a family’s ancient past but more in the manner of something close to a genetic possibility. In the deaths of each generation, the grey dog was seen by some—by women who were to die in childbirth; by soldiers who went forth to the many wars but did not return; by those who went forth to feuds or dangerous love affairs; by those who answered mysterious midnight messages; by those who swerved on the highway to avoid the real or imagined grey dog and ended in masses of crumpled steel. (loc. 1889) In fact, as soon as the pregnant bitch lopes off across the ice, she tilts from tangible reality into an allegory of what lies beyond the embattled refuge of the man’s hearth and threshold: a beck­ oning wildness, meaning death. A curse modernized and naturalized as a “genetic possibility” is a curse nonetheless. The cù mòr glas a’ bhàis is woven into family legend, itself a synecdoche of traditional Cape Breton Gaelic culture, but her immortality costs her animality. The dog’s ferality comes to embody a lethal, fascinating chthonic energy that asserts itself even as it is dis­ missed as superstition. Thus, at the close of the story, the narrator and his five grey- haired brothers gather round the deathbed of their own father, fearing that, against their will, they will seem to have fulfilled the curse: Sitting here, taking turns holding the hands of the man who gave us life, we are afraid for him and for ourselves. We are afraid of what he may see and we are afraid to hear the phrase born of the vision. We are aware that it may become con­ fused with what the doctors call “the will to live” and we are aware that some be­ liefs are what others would dismiss as “garbage.” We are aware that there are men who believe the earth is flat and that the birds bring forth the sun. (loc. 1916) The phrase “we are aware” seems an agnostic disavowal of visions and delusions, but because the beauty and mystery of the story’s title broods over it throughout while the grey-haired sons gather around the deathbed at its conclusion, the undertow of mythicized ferality prevails over the narrator’s superficial urbane scepticism. The dog’s presence is richly realized at the beginning the story—especially when she is an injured puppy with ‘bulging eyes and…scrabbling front paws and … desperately licking tongue’—only for her to become, as the Afterword points out, “a sort of ca­ (p. 252) nine banshee,” recalling too “Finn McCool’s great dog Bran loping across the Giant’s Causeway from Ireland to Scotland and Charon’s dog Cerebus guarding the gates to the Page 11 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales underworld and keeping watch over the River Styx” (loc. 2645). Is being legendary an el­ evation or a demotion? Either way, it might seem either perverse or puritanical to object to such allegorization: it is the fate of most fictional animals, and figurality is in any case impossible to police. Allegorical animals sometimes bite or whimper, while even the real­ istically drawn canines of our next tale find symbolic resonances clustering round them whether Hornung wills it or not. Still, one would like to see more curiosity about dogs themselves. They always reward it. Dog Boy Eva Hornung’s brilliant novel Dog Boy (2010) betrays immense curiosity about dogs on the part of the author, as well as her determination to resist both allegorising and crudely anthropomorphizing them.9 To the child protagonist Romochka, abandoned or orphaned in anarchic post-Soviet Moscow, a family of feral dogs represents not an existential threat or lure but a haven from hunger and cold.10 By following them home, he has unwittingly “crossed a border that is, usually, impassable—not even imaginable” (15); unlike the earli­ er ferality tales, though, this border runs erratically through the modern cityscape, not simply between it and a putative “wilderness.” On its far side, Romochka’s nature as a feral child is shaped in complex intra-action with his canine companions, as he moves through phases of vulnerability, affection, fear, and power. First to be tried and abandoned is the conventional relationship of boy to puppies: he names them, then forgets their names, then names and forgets again. Soon the desperate child admits his need and suckles from the dominant female, Mamochka, catching faint hints of the scent-world the dogs inhabit: His suckle siblings were all milk-spiced, but the three older dogs had strong saliva and rank muzzles, each different, unequal in experience. They carried their own body odour on their tongues, their own signature in faint urine, paw, skin and anus —and their authority in their teeth, clean and sharp. They carried their health and their abilities in their kiss. He tumbled over the puppies too, kissing each dog on their return to the lair, then smelling their necks and shoulders to see what they might have done, might have found today. He, like the puppies, found the smell on their mouths and bodies tantalising, but he couldn’t read the stories. (19–20) As he grows together with the dogs, he becomes still more “animalistic,” but rather than connot­ ing only chaos or lethal violence,11 ferality represents a viable alternate social order: filthy, stink­ ing, impoverished, but also alive with affection and pervaded by a kind of morality. “Everything [is] ritual” in the lair (27), much like the finely calibrated world of canine play revealed by Marc Bekoff’s studies (Kalof and Fitzgerald). Hornung vividly conveys how Romochka’s perceptions become attuned to the ca­ (p. 253) nine “environment,” in the sense of the word articulated by Richard Lewontin in The Triple Helix: Page 12 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales …it is the biology, indeed the genes, of an organism that determines its effective environment, by establishing the way in which external physical signals become incorporated into its reactions. The common external phenomena of the physical and biotic world pass through a transforming filter created by the peculiar biology of each species, and it is the output of this transformation that reaches the organ­ ism and is relevant to it. (64) Romochka is able to access this phenomenological environment—known to biosemiotics as the organism’s Umwelt—both because of the convergent evolution of humans and dogs, and because of his developmental intimacy with them. It may not be possible to know what it is like to be a bat, but a dog might not pose nearly as many problems (see Uexküll loc. 159–80, 957, 1009, and passim).12 Romochka’s life with the dogs allows his co-evolutionary potential to be realized, but the ancient compact still requires he do his part as human. His physical limitations—useless nose, small teeth—frustrate him so long as he hopes to become more canine, but when he works with Black Sister to flush out a rat she shows him what interdependence requires of him: Black Sister crouched down, tail wagging, eyes shining in the gloom, snuffing away at the gap under the wood pile. She turned to him with a look of such hope and expectation that he was stirred. She trusted him to help her get that rat, she really did! An urgent pride flooded him. He would help, no matter what. (50) The scene recalls Miklósi’s experiments with dogs and socialized wolves described above: the contingent developmental ferality of Black Sister has not altered her evolutionary propensity to look to a human companion to solve problems. Her mute appeal comes in the context of a power­ fully anti-anthropocentric narrative in which the dogs enable Romochka to survive and, as Agam­ ben suggests, recognize himself ultimately as Homo sapiens. By contrast, the animal studies per­ spective, in which domestication is represented as a form of repressive bio-power, is inconsistent with the way it is the dog’s gaze that elicits Romochka’s human subjectivity, not the other way round. Until Part IV, when attention shifts to the attempts of scientists at the Children’s Centre to comprehend Romochka and the younger adoptee Puppy, the novel develops a powerful and sustained critical analogy between the feral dogs and the bomzhi, or homeless peo­ ple. To the regular citizens of Moscow, both are alike repulsive and degraded: when Ro­ mochka and his canine siblings assault and rob a woman of her shopping bags, she screams ‘“Filth! Bomzh! Animal!”’ (89). Like the militzia officer who comments that “Feral kids are worse than rabid dogs” (135), the woman’s crudely zoomorphic rhetoric abjects dogs and “feral” people as subhuman, taking for granted an anthropocentric vertical hier­ archy of value. But Romochka, while he is upset by her insult, inhabits a far more com­ plex moral and perceptual landscape, in which “enmity (p. 254) between feral dogs and bomzhi is seasonal, and winter is its peak” (82). His fear of feral people stems from the contrast between the chaos of their lives and the love and discipline among the dogs: Sometimes [the bomzhi] seemed to him just like sick dogs or lone strays. You couldn’t predict when they would be dangerous. Some of them didn’t know how to Page 13 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales behave, either with him or with each other. They fought and yowled, ripped and tore each other over food and scraps of metal. They stole from each other, beat each other senseless, even killed. They mated even when one of them didn’t want to. At other times they touched each other with a tenderness that filled him with confusion and longing. (85) Romochka’s zoomorphism is critical and sophisticated, based not on a fantastical “beast within” but on a precise, observant analogy between the most desperately disordered hu­ mans and the clanless dogs. The civilized Muscovites Romochka encounters when he ventures into the subway are likewise represented zoomorphically, but not denigratingly: Crowds of people stood near the edge of the platform, each person almost touch­ ing the next, yet just distant enough to be alone. They were clearly not a pack. It was as if all these strangers had somehow agreed that their personal territory could be shrunk for the purpose of waiting for trains. People stared blankly up the tracks or straight ahead, none meeting another’s eyes. (117) Much as London used focalization through Buck to expose the cruelty he saw as latent in human nature, Romochka’s alienated feral viewpoint reveals our complex unconscious negotiation of so­ cial estrangement and physical intimacy. The last two parts of the book shift attention to the questions of developmental psycholo­ gy that make historic cases of “feral children” so painfully fascinating: what aspects of normal human behaviour can develop in a child raised by dogs? How might one distin­ guish between that presumably deprived upbringing and the mental “retardation” that might lead such a child to be abandoned in the first place? But Dr. Dimitry Pastushenko’s epiphany about Romochka comes when he acknowledges for the first time that, far from being rendered subnormal by nature or nurture, the boy is, so to speak, bilingual across species. Ferality has made the boy a “master of passing” between worlds: He’d done so for three months now in the centre—among experts, no less. Among dogs … well, Dimitry could only begin to guess […] Romochka could cross … over. (229) Such bicultural fluency is similar to what dogs learn when properly socialized in both ca­ nine and human codes of behavior. Immediately after this realization, Dimitry is forced to acknowledge the independent agency of animals when he sees a feral dog take the subway two stops on its own: “Why had dogs always seemed thing-like, symbolic,” he asks himself, “when (p. 255) they were in fact person-like and about as symbolic as he was” (234). The truth about Romochka’s nature turns out to be radically incomplete without taking into account his feral family, just as human nature is incomprehensible in isolation from our evolutionary companions, pre-eminently the “domestic” dog. As Donna Haraway puts it, dogs are “Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote” (5). Page 14 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy therefore unites in a single novel the two opposed meanings of “experimental” discussed above. It incorporates evidence, derived from repeatable scien­ tific studies such as Miklósi’s comparative ethology of wolves and dogs, of human–canine co-evolution, and portrays ferality as a developmental phenomenon rather than the out­ come of an existential struggle. At the same time, the biological specificity of the dogs— the fact that they do not stand for all animality everywhere and always—endows them with the transformative otherness that, according to Attridge, “enters, and changes, a cultural sphere” (loc. 524) when singularity manifests in a particular act of reading. First, Attridge implicitly denies that animals are extrinsic to the “cultural” sphere: “I take the relation between the human and the non-human in all its forms to be a significant part of what I am calling ‘culture’” (loc. 569). Later this relation is acknowledged as a crucial ex­ ample of alterity as defined in The Singularity of Literature: We can specify the relation between the same and the other a little more fully by thinking of it in terms of that which the existing cultural order has to occlude in order to maintain its capacities and configurations, its value-systems and hierar­ chies of importance; that which it cannot afford to acknowledge if it is to continue without change. (loc. 746) The tremendous ethical import of a novel like Dog Boy lies, according to Attridge’s persuasive argument, in the unprecedented and unpredictable cultural dynamic it sets in motion: “[Singu­ larity] is produced, not given in advance; and its emergence is also the beginning of its erosion, as it brings about the cultural changes necessary to accommodate it” (loc. 1338). A culture al­ tered by the alterity of Hornung’s dogs—call it biocentric, call it posthumanist, call it the advent of Timothy Morton’s “Ecological Thought”—would interdifferentiate within and between species, rather than constructing a simplistic binary of human and animal that must thereafter be either defended or undermined. As Morton puts it, “Humans may be ‘animals,’ but ‘animals’ aren’t ‘ani­ mals’” (Morton 62). Dogs, in particular, are not animals. Conclusion Canis familiaris is a designation almost as odd as Homo sapiens. According to the biologi­ cal species concept, which is based on the ability to interbreed, Canis familiaris is a sub­ species of Canis lupus, somewhat as some scientists claim that we are really the (p. 256) “third chimpanzee” (genus Pongo) (Diamond). Presiding alone over the genus Homo is, on this view, justifiable only on theological, not taxonomic, grounds. As part of our family, our evolutionary familiar and first domesticate,13 the dog has been promoted by Pongo sapiens from Canis lupus ssp. familiaris, perhaps in recognition of their role in our self- recognition. As James Serpell points out, though, our good lieutenant remains liminal: To be loved by a paragon is one thing, to be adored by a creature that eats shit, sniffs genitals and bites people is quite another…. In symbolic terms, the domestic dog exists precariously in the no-man’s-land between the human and non-human worlds. It is an interstitial creature, neither person nor beast, forever oscillating uncomfortably between the roles of high-status animal and low-status person…. it Page 15 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales has become a creature of metaphor, simultaneously embodying or representing a strange mixture of admirable and despicable traits. (Serpell 254) If the dog lies on the boundary between human and animal, at once imaginary and effective as it is, feral dogs inhabit the border’s border. They possess the agential energy idealized by Arm­ strong as a generalized “ferity,” but are as likely to direct it back towards enhanced intimacy as subversion. Conversely, while some feral species are undoubtedly destructive, environmentalist generalizations about ferality as a kind of biological pollution (worse even than chemicals or ra­ diation because self-sustaining) are belied by studies of dog populations that show they would vanish without human waste to feed on and abandoned dogs to replenish their numbers. Despite the contempt of some environmentalists, the dog’s domesticity is not denaturing, and its seeming wildness provisional, not existential: feral dogs are only ever one social­ ized generation away from return to the human fold. If there is progress in fictional ferali­ ty tales as much as in the science of ferality, we might expect it to manifest as a resis­ tance to allegorization, so that fictional dogs can be dogs, rather than (or as well as), hav­ ing to mean something. At the same time, though, in the most sophisticated of these tales, the hardship and scandal of ferality for both its human and canine victims recasts the symbiosis of people and dogs not as biopolitical oppression, but as the most ancient and demanding of moral responsibilities for both parties. Acknowledgments I am grateful to the contributors to the ASLE discussion list for their suggestions of texts for this essay. It is a consistently valuable and encouraging resource. The idea of “resis­ tance to allegorization” as an indication of progress in the representation of animals emerged in the context of my supervision of Jude Allen’s dissertation on metamorphic narratives in twentieth-century literature. As so often in the agonistic intimacy of the symbiosis of student and supervisor, it is hard to say exactly whose idea it was. Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press; London: Eurospan. Kindle. Stanford University Press, 2004. Print. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Kindle. Boitani, Luigi, Francesco Francisci, Paolo Ciucci, and Giorgio Andreoli. “Population Ecolo­ gy and Biology of Feral Dogs in Central Italy.” The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behav­ iour, and Interactions with People. Ed. Serpell, James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Callicott, J. Baird. “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair.” Environmental Ethics. Ed. El­ liot, Robert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 29–59. Print. Page 16 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales Coppinger, Raymond, and Richard Schneider. “Evolution of Working Dogs.” The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People. Ed. Serpell, James. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 268p. Print. Diamond, Jared M. The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. London: Vintage, 1992, 1991. Print. Franklin, Adrian. Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006. Print. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New Critical Idiom. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011. Print. Gilbert, Daniel. “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming.” Los Angeles Times July 2, 2006. Print. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, Ill.: Prickly Paradigm, 2003. Print. Hornung, Eva. Dog Boy. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Print. Kalof, Linda, and Amy J. Fitzgerald. The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Con­ temporary Writings. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Print. Kaminski, J., J. Call, and J. Fischer. “Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for ‘Fast Mapping.’” Science 304:5677 (2004): 1682–83. Print. Lewontin, Richard C. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. London, Jack. “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang.” Ed. M. Mataev. 2010. Kindle. Miklósi, Adam. Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. (p. 259) Morey, Darcy. Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2010. Print. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review LXXXIII:4 (1974): 435–50. Print. Paxton, David. Why It’s Ok to Talk to Your Dog: Co-Evolution of Humans and Dogs. 2011. Kindle. Perry, Dan, and Gad Perry. “Improving Interactions between Animal Rights Groups and Conservation Biologists.” Conservation Biology 22:1: 27–35. Print. Page 17 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. 1st ed. ed. New York: Random House, 2001. Print. Ponting, Clive. A Green History of the World. London: Penguin, 1992, 1991. Print. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Print. Robisch, S. K. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature. Reno, Nev.: University of Nevada Press, 2009. Print. Rose, Steven P. R. Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene. Fully rev. ed ed. London: Vintage, 2005. Print. Serpell, James. “From Paragon to Pariah: Some Reflections on Human Attitudes to Dogs.” The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People. Ed. James Ser­ pell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. 2nd ed., with a new preface by the author. ed. London: Pimlico, 1995. Print. Uexküll, Jakob von. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Trans. Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kindle. Whittaker, Robert J. Island Biogeography: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1998. Print. Notes: (1) . This distinction, which is probably obvious to everyone else, was first pointed out to me in a lecture by philosopher John Gray. (2) . The terms “triangulation” and “projection” are borrowed from cartography. The for­ mer uses trigonometry to establish the position of an unknown point by making it a vertex of a triangle formed with two known points. A projection converts the coordinating lines of latitude and longitude on a mapped globe into a flat plane. In metaphorical terms, tri­ angulation attempts to situate a term—“ferality,” in this case—by estimating its position from several disciplinary perspectives. Like a cartographic projection, a conceptual pro­ jection aims at once to be precise and to fulfill, by means of necessary distortion (a cer­ tain flattening, let us say), a particular purpose. (3) . At one time I would have agreed with Franklin: “An Absence of Azaleas: Imperialism, Nativity and Exoticism in Romantic Biogeographical Ideology,” Wordsworth Circle, 28:3 (Fall 1997):148–55. But the evidence has made me change my mind: “Heidegger Nazism Page 18 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 17:2 (Spring 2010): 251–71. (4) . See, for example, Adam Gabbatt, ‘Australian camel cull plan angers animal welfare groups.’ The Guardian, November 26, 2009. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/nov/26/australia-thirsty-camels-animal-welfare. Also this impeccably balanced arti­ cle from the Daily Mail: Richard Shears, ‘Massacre at murder spring: The shocking cull of wild horses in the Aussie outback.’ Mail Online, November 17, 2007. Available at http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-494610/Massacre-murder-spring-The-shocking-cull- wild-horses-Aussie-outback.html. (5) . Ernst Von Haeckel, coiner of the term oecology and translator of Darwin into Ger­ man, came up with the fascinating—though incorrect—notion that the embryonic develop­ ment of individual organisms (ontogeny) “recapitulated” the evolutionary development of the species (phylogeny). Gestation, on this view, compresses into a few weeks and months the aeons of deep time. (6) . Another amazing example of convergence is the collie, Rico, who could recognize the labels for 200 different objects, and when prompted with a name he did not know, prefer­ entially chose the unknown object from amongst three known ones (J. Kaminski, J. Call, and J. Fischer, “Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for ‘Fast Mapping,’” Science, 304:5677 (2004): 1682–1683. Fast mapping has only previously been observed in human children. There is, moreover, some evidence of social learning in dogs, involving both ca­ nine and human teachers. (7) . We might well conclude, on Boitani’s evidence, that depictions of free-living or feral dogs as “pack animals” are in fact lupomorphic. (8) . The Alaskan husky is, despite its wolfish appearance, a recent phenomenon, bred out of the Gold Rush mongrels and Siberian huskies, and refined since then. As Coppinger and Schneider point out, Native Arctic dogs and Alaskan malamutes are too big for sled­ ding. (9) . For an extended discussion of the distinction between crude and critical anthropo­ morphism and zoomorphism, see my Ecocriticism (Routledge 2011), pp. 152–170. (10) . A Financial Times article shows how much a part of Moscow life the feral dogs are, and explains that the extermination sweeps are now a thing of the past: ‘Moscow’s Stray Dogs’, Susanne Sternthal, 16 January 2010, http://tinyurl.com/c9rd9ce, [accessed 20 Au­ gust 2013] (11) . “Animalistic” and “bestial” are key examples of crudely zoomorphic language, which typically demeans humans by representing them as (completely imaginary) animals. See note 5. Page 19 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021 Ferality Tales (12) . Thomas Nagel’s famous essay admits as much, asking “What is it like to be a bat?” specifically because its Umwelt is so obviously inaccessible. The main point of his essay, though, is to challenge “psycho-physical reductionism,” or the attempt to reduce the mind/body problem to a merely scientific issue. Knowing in precise detail how bats per­ ceive the world does not, he argues, give us any access whatever to its subjective experi­ ence. If the same is true of humans, neuroscience cannot shed any light on what it is like to be human. (13) . The OED includes among the meanings of “familiar”: “1.a. Of … one’s family or household …; 2.a. extremely friendly, … intimate; 3. Of animals: … domestic, tame.” Greg Garrard Greg Garrard is Sustainability Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Ecocriticism (2004, 2011 2nd edn) as well as numerous essays on ani­ mal studies and environmental criticism. He has recently edited Teaching Ecocriti­ cism and Green Cultural Studies (2011) and become co-editor of Green Letters: Stud­ ies in Ecocriticism, the journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UKI). Page 20 of 20 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 January 2021