Chris Pearson's new history of evolving human-canine relations has New York City, London, and Paris all going to the dogs. These metropolises served as testing grounds where middle-class urbanites figured out how to accommodate dogs in accordance with shifting cultural and societal norms between 1800 and 1930. Their outcomes created the Dogopolis, as Pearson terms it, that city-dwellers continue to live within today. While each city had unique human-dog relationships, Pearson unites them through collective cultural exchange that transcended national boundaries.
Pearson contends that middle-class emotional responses to canine actions, namely their revulsion to dirt, fears of vagabondage, anxiety regarding crime, and promotion of humanitarian sentiment engendered friction between dogs, their supporters, and their detractors. These intangible emotional reactions manifested as material responses that structured human-dog relations. The outcomes of conflicts decided if, which, and how dogs were welcomed into Dogopolis—it became an accommodating space that welcomed some, such as purebred pets, while simultaneously restricting others, like strays. Stressors inherent within urbanity, ranging from concerns over hygiene to homelessness, were fundamental—middle-class attempts to turn bewildering cities into livable environs altered dogs’ individual habits and collective lifestyles. Dogs that conformed to ideals of cleanliness, respectability, and domesticity were embraced; transgressors were treated harshly.
Pearson centers each chapter on points of conflict and convergence between middle-class urbanites and dogs that either promoted or restricted their inclusion into Dogopolis, namely straying, biting, suffering, thinking, and defecating. City-dwellers pondered if wandering dogs warranted toleration or were seditious influences necessitating removal. Middle-class commentators viewed stray dogs as an unhealthy influence, due either to their connection with filth and disease or their comparison with vagabonds, a characterization that triggered loathing and disgust as urbanites sought to make cities safe spaces anchored to homeliness and hygiene. Hostility toward strays led to their widespread impoundment whereas purebred dogs became implanted inside middle-class homes—each a fundamental feature of Dogopolis. Alleviating biting became fundamental to Dogopolis as it exemplified urbanity's dangers and prompted emotional responses to suffering, chaos, and death. Rabies, spread through bites, generated emotional and physical pain and death. Contemporary physicians, especially British alienist Daniel Hack Tuke, argued that rabies was an emotional condition primarily generated by fearful individuals, whereas dissenters contended that it instead arose from overexcited canine emotionality. Officials suggested containment methods, including teeth blunting proposed by Parisians, before the muzzle became the prevailing method to stymie harm. Critics in each city branded them cruel. Louis Pasteur debuted his rabies vaccine in 1884, but, due largely to the lack of capacity to implement mass vaccination, it became merely one method to combat rabies and was adopted more readily in Paris and New York.
Pearson describes how applying middle-class humanitarian values to the removal and destruction of unwanted strays became fundamental to Dogopolis. Charles Darwin's evolutionary insights alongside the crusading work of antivivisectionists, like Frances Power Cobbe, highlighted dogs’ rich emotional depth. Middle-class revulsion to cruelty necessitated devising an efficient, bloodless execution method that mitigated suffering. Reformers protested the Parisian pound's cruel method of hanging and the American counterpart that drowned dogs in the East River. London's Battersea Dog Home administered Prussic acid, which many believed was a better, albeit problematic, method. There, in the 1880s, pound managers pioneered asphyxiation, which became normalized as the humane method over the following decades.
Pearson also explains that middle-class residents welcomed police dogs into Dogopolis for their help apprehending worrisome criminals. Trainers framed their working relationship as an emotional process whereby handlers harnessed their dog's intellect to combat crime. Bloodhounds were utilized initially as police dogs in London, but the Belgian sheepdogs of Paris first proved their capabilities by helping arrest troublesome Apaches of the Paris underworld. Handlers ultimately settled on the Alsatian in Paris and New York City. Fearful dissidents continually clamored that police dogs were dangerously violent—not entirely distant from the criminals they policed. Due to these protests, police dogs were employed in a diminished role—remaining only in New York—by the late 1930s.
Lastly, piles of pet dog excrement troubled physicians, sanitarians, and owners in Dogopolis as indoor toilets became commonplace and horse traffic diminished. Waste generated emotional responses—primarily disgust—which in turn engendered concerns about bodily and municipal health. Many viewed shit as a corrupting influence on public safety and civic decency, an unpleasant sensory experience, and a disease-spreading object. Owners trained dogs not to defecate indoors, which made the street the natural space for canine defilement. Rather than abating, however, the battle over canine excrement continues to reverberate within Dogopolis.
While having adeptly unpacked human emotional character, Pearson crucially neglects including information on canine emotionality—a fundamental linkage of the human-dog bond. Junctures throughout this narrative yearn for ethological and psychological intervention. For example, insights into canine social behavior could enhance the analysis of antivivisectionist George Hoggan's heart-wrenching depictions of imminently vivisected dogs that made eyes at and licked the hands of the vivisector, or when a New York Times reporter detailed the shaking, cowering dogs he encountered in Louis Pasteur's laboratory. Contemporaries Gordon Stables and George Jesse believed muzzling to be cruel, but what do we now know about the respiratory impact or the stress that accompanies this restrictive instrument? This information could help shed new light on past debates, aid understanding of historical canine conditions, and create a nuanced, more-than-human history of urbanity.
Nonetheless, Pearson crafts a convincing narrative detailing how human-dog emotional connections helped shape modern, Western urbanity. Pearson's transnational approach to a uniquely entangled emotional and animal history functions as an innovatively layered methodology that provides a framework for future multinational animal histories. It is important to underscore that this Dogopolis has never ended. Fundamental aspects of Dogopolis, such as municipal dog shelters and police canine units, remain common today. Pearson not only helps readers understand how and why Dogopolis originated but also provides a historical context underscoring how contentious emotional points, ranging from leash laws to waste removal, continue to provoke material responses.
