Beloved companion or health risk? Or dinner? Start a debate about how we should relate to other species, and sparks soon fly – the ethics of hunting, bull fighting, laboratory tests on rabbits, eating some animals and not others, and pet ownership are all guaranteed to ignite ethical outrage.
Add ‘health risks’ to the moral maze, and somehow the issues get even murkier. Walking the dog is good for you, stroking the dog is good for you, but dog poo probably isn’t. So should we ban pets from city streets? A recent article by Jane Derges and colleagues claims that number of people actually infected from dog poo in the UK is very small – yet it was the top topic of complaint when they talked to people about their neighbourhoods. It is, they say, a ‘marker of incivility’, reminding residents of their marginalisation from the city authorities.
And as for eating dogs … well, mostly we don’t, because they are ‘pets’, and we divide up the animal world into ‘pets’ (not edible), ‘livestock’ (edible) and ‘wildlife’ (edible if you’re a bit of a foodie).
Asking ‘Who’s afraid of turkeys?’, Colin Jerolmack urges us to look more carefully at these arbitrary categories – because, he says, they contribute to unhelpful divisions between those organisations and professionals who deal with different ‘kinds’ of animal. This is a call to support the ‘One Health’ initiative for closer collaboration between human and animal medicine – for, it says, the benefit of ‘all species’. One driver of this initiative is the rise in ‘zoonotic’ disease: those that can jump species boundaries. Intensifying agriculture and global travel have increased risks from diseases such as avian flu, swine flu, and West Nile fever, and closer collaboration, it is argued, with help with monitoring the risks. Of course, in practice, the human species is the one that apparently matters most (no one is saving the tsetse fly), and it seems, some humans matter more than others.
As Kennedy Mwacalimba suggests in his report on experiences on preparing for Avian Influenza in Zambia, international responses protect humans in rich countries at the cost of humans and animals in resource-poor countries. The risk of Avian Influenza for the population of Zambia was actually quite low (compared with the massive public health burdens of HIV and TB, and the rather more pressing cattle diseases that Zambian farmers struggle with) – but the international community, worried about global threats from supposedly ‘dangerous’ African farming practices, poured huge resources into ‘pandemic preparedness’.
So health risks are a shaky guide to practice: it all depends what risks we worry about (infection from dog poo, or civil disrespect?), and whose risks count most (the Zambian chicken farmer, or the highly mobile European traveller?). But, maybe thinking a bit more about how relations with animals reflect our relations with people, and how both could be more respectful, might just help us think about what ‘healthier’ might look like.
3 Responses
Chazza on Sep 21, 2012
I heard an interesting bit of zoonotic disease news on BBC iPlayer. It was about Hantavirus which has been contracted by tourists in the USA who, Claudia Hammond on the BBC said, had “accidentally inhaled mouse droppings”. The inclusion of the word “accidentally” seemed unnecessary – unless someone, somewhere, inhales this sort of material on purpose, of course. Never say never, I suppose.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00xzbrj/Health_Check_Outbreaks_of_Ebola_and_Hantavirus/
Lens on Sep 24, 2012
It also seems that zoonotic disease is often managed by attempting to use a ‘closure’ or ‘biosecurity’ model where ‘borders’ and narrow ‘boundaries’ are closely managed in an attempt to prevent breaches and spread. But this is a very perilous way to manage infection as the close ‘policing’ of borders can lead to either regulatory mechanisms being overwhelmed or dire unintended consequences.
Ewen Speed on Oct 17, 2012
I was reminded of your post when I came across an interesting series of pieces in the New Statesman that link dog poo in Buenos Aires to zoonotic disease (apparently 70% incidence of parasites in canine faecal samples), through to self-sustaining social norms and their relation to legal rules, through to shifting norms in relation to heroin and marijuana use, through to panoptic biometric inter-species regulation and governance. Hern, drawing from Yglesias (writing in The Slate) argues that the law about animal waste does not need to be enforced in major American cities because it has become the social norm. He then extends this to drug policy, arguing that whilst heroin and marijuana are both illegal, heroin is no longer socially acceptable – the social norms around its use have changed markedly, whilst marijuana, he argues, is still very much socially acceptable. The crux of Hern’s argument is that making behaviours socially unacceptable is a far more affective means of effecting social change than legislating for that change. In the context of dog poo, Hern argues the faecally afflicted Buenos Aires must make not clearing up after your dog socially unacceptable, i.e. a ‘marker of incivility’ as Derges et al put it in your post.
All of this gets perilously close to Thaler’s Nudge agenda, with Hern at one point advocating we skip the legislative process and “directly change the norms which, on a day-to-day basis, guide our behaviour far more effectively than the intricacies of the law.” Certainly, as you say, nobody wants to marked out as ‘incivil’. However, Hern takes it even further, citing a surveillance system in a gated community in Minnesota. This involves taking DNA samples from residents pets and matching them to any faecal matter found in the complex. It’s known as the poo-prints programme and is an example of the principles of panopticism worthy of inclusion in any second year UG lecture. I am interested in what this speaks to in terms of the perversity of succumbing to biometric regulation (of self and others) in order to eradicate ‘markers of incivility’. One could argue that panoptic biometric inter-species regulation was a much more insipid ‘marker of incivility’ than a piece of poo on the path. The article didn’t state whether the human residents were also required to provide DNA samples…