Читать книгу Dogs in the Leisure Experience - Neil Carr - Страница 15

Writing anything for public consumption always requires authors to place their ideas and beliefs on display because only by doing this can the written word be contextualized and believed or fairly rejected. As such, this public display is both unnerving and empowering (for both the reader and the author). Often, such displays are either hidden in between the written words or behind a public mask that is all too often constructed around the beliefs of others, commonly famous philosophers from history (Foucault being very popular in certain fields, for example).

This entire book and everything dog related within it is a consequence of the fact that I am a dog owner so it seems appropriate to begin explaining my standpoint by giving a brief background about how I have reached this point in my life and the implications of it. My first dog, Snuffie, entered my life as an 8-week-old Border Collie mongrel in February 2001, from the Queensland RSPCA in Brisbane. She was ostensibly to be a dog for my 2-year-old son, with the two of them able to grow up together. By this point in my life I was 29 years old and had never had anything other than a goldfish as a pet. As a child, dogs had never really entered my life and my only brief encounters with them had been rather scary. I was not, it is fair to say, a dog person, a dog lover, in any respect. This was all to change and I could and perhaps should write an entire book about the journey but this is not that book so I will skip over all but the barest bones. Simply put, in the 9 years prior to her untimely death (I sat with her after much soul searching while our family friend and vet administered a lethal injection to put her to sleep and out of the misery that was a slow-­spreading but inoperable cancer in her spinal column), Snuffie became my dog first and foremost and a family pet a distant second. Barely a day went by in all that time when we did not spend time walking together (as all Border Collie owners will doubtless attest, such dogs and owners can easily walk forever, or so it seems) or engaging in the simple play of throw and fetch. The result: I am now a confirmed dog lover and in particular a lover of mongrels. It seems I am forever destined to have black and white mutts in my household who have a passing relation to the purebred Border Collie, and Gypsy is my current canine companion.

Rudy (2011: 36), when talking of his own relationship with his dogs, stated: ‘As my dogs and I work hard to learn a common language and share a life together, we are all becoming something new, something part human, part dog, a part of one another.’ I have talked previously of the notion of the ‘dumanog’, a human–dog hybrid that fits well with Rudy’s description (Carr, 2006). Similarly, using Goffman’s concept, Sanders (1999) saw the dog and owner as a ‘with’; where they are perceived to be a group whose members are together. This togetherness is demonstrated and reinforced not just by the leash that links them in public but the looks and physical contact they each give one another in a show of ongoing reassurance.

While I remain wedded to the existence of the dumanog in the moment it is important not to oversimplify a more complex reality. While my dog and I can at specific moments be a dumanog, at others we are separate, clearly a human and a dog. This description of the relationship a human can have with a dog is reflected in the views of Wedde (2007: 284) who stated that: ‘I know that the dog and I are utterly different in ways that neither of us will understand; and yet we inflect each other’s behavior, and we inhabit a shared world that is simultaneously comprehensible and mysterious.’ The important point to remember is not the nature of the relationship with their dogs that, like me, Rudy and Wedde think they have, but that not all dog–human relations are like this or necessarily even need to be for the benefit of all participants. The idea of the relation between a dog and human being specific to the moment allows me to position myself as both owner and companion to my dogs, who can themselves be pets, companions and simply ‘dogs’. In this way, we can each of us be many things at different times and in different circumstances.