We saw in Chapter 3 some attempts, most notably by Jacques Derrida and by Deleuze and Guattari, to frame our concepts of animality in terms other than traditional taxonomy would allow, in particular against the grain of hierarchical classifications of animal life in which ‘human’ inevitably signifies ‘superior’. In Deleuze and Guattari's works (specifically A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?) this alternative animality addresses certain lacunae in our thinking towards non-human species without necessarily making recourse to the moral assumption that we treat other animals cruelly or unjustly and that we must improve our treatment of them. Donna Haraway, not forgetting Deleuze and Guattari's belittlement of people who like cats and dogs (so-called Oedipal animals), pulls no punches in condemning their descriptions of ‘becoming-other’ (-woman, -child, -animal) as leaning towards ‘misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project’. Rethinking her deployment of the figure of the cyborg as an image useful for critical contemplation of the relations between living organisms and technology, and beyond the Deleuzian idea of becoming-animal, Haraway moves, as Braidotti comments, ‘a step beyond the Oedipal configuration of the culture of familiar pets by proposing a new kinship system that includes “companion species” alongside other siblings and relatives’. For Haraway, from her own experiences as a ‘dog person’ (never to be referred to as a ‘dog owner’), productive reflections on the formation of relations between companion species can be gained from observing the range of human dealings with the domestic dog (a relationship that is also at the centre of Grandin's book, Animals in Translation, for its long history and potential to yield insights into the co-evolution of dogs and human beings). With the Deleuzian derogation of domestic canines in mind, perhaps, Haraway defends her choice of subject against the Western stereotypes of them as ‘furry children’.