Animals as socializing capital

Therapy animals, usually dogs, are one of the great newly discovered resources of the affective economy. I see good and bad in this. The good news is that animals are being more frequently encountered within human social space, normalized as the kind of entity that "belongs" there and can make claims about that space. The bad, or the problematic, is how this happens. I am not even really thinking here of the imposition of class categories and hierarchies onto dogs--the "good" golden retrievers and labs, the "bad" rotts and pits--or between dogs and other species. I am thinking, right now, about how scientific studies promulgate a certain image of therapy animals that accomplishes their introduction into social space but in a way that prevents them from making claims against it.

For example, a piece by CBS on how children below level in reading catch up better by reading to dogs. On one hand we have descriptions like this:

Ross, an Irish setter owned by Barbara Murgo, sits quietly and patiently as kids read to him.

And Ross seems to look forward to it.

I do not think it is incorrect to ascribe patience, self-control, and anticipation to Ross, and I know my dogs loving hanging out with kids. But what if he didn't like it, or didn't feel like it one day? Is that an interpretive option?

The thinking is that the kids are no threatened by the dog and so will read to their ability without fear of judgment. The problem for these kids seems to be not so much a reading deficit as a power relation. They don't want to be objects of evaluation; when they feel like that, they underperform to escape attention; the adults monitoring them induce this feeling.

What the kids seem to get out of the experience is an escape from the limitations of power relations.

One youngster told Turner, "He sits and, when I show him the book, he looks at it."

That's not just adorable, that's transaction. It might be a fiction of the kid's making that they are both interested in the book, but it is at least a fiction of a shared world--and I would say, a fiction closer to the truth of the dog than that proposed by the adults.

The way the adults see this seems to hearken back to the structural issues that discouraged kids from reading in the first place. The dogs/kids are reinserted under surveillance, telos, accountability. The space in which they can interact is limited and, after each session, dis-integrated. The dog is only allowed to enter human space in its most passive mode. The positive contribution, the multiplication of narratives--and there are tons of stories to be had with dogs--are "screened" out. "They just have to be willing to lie so still for so long," concludes the writer with a sympathetic wink. I do not doubt that these dogs are largely willing to do something boring for the benefit of others, but it seems cruel--to them and the kids--and stupid to limit their social representation to that.