Feeding the Dogs

Images by Saiman Chow. Source, without words.

by KARL STEEL

In comments in the post below, Ryan Judkins reminds me that:

during the curee, the dogs were usually fed on the innards of the deer, including the stomach, lungs (if they be hot) and the intestines, after they'd been washed, usually chopped up and all mixed together with blood and bread.

How to Make a Human talks about this too:

Humans’ mastery over their hunting animals is even more apparent in techniques that prevented dogs from killing or freely eating the prey. Dogs were allowed to slow, harry, and corner prey, while humans were meant to deliver the killing blow. Hunting rules required that the field butchery reserve a portion of the prey for the dogs, but they also required that the dogs eat only at their master’s command. In practical terms, the restrictions preserved the bulk of the carcass for the human hunters while ensuring that the dogs received the positive reinforcement of a reward. At the same time, to restrict dogs’ actions in hunting, restrain them from the kill, and permit them to eat only with human permission ensured that neither the dogs’ violence nor their necessity to human hunting might call human mastery into question. The ritual protection of human mastery encompassed even carrion birds, which were left the scraps from the carcass; as the Middle English Tristrem puts it, “þe rauen he 3aue his Ʒiftes, / Sat on þe fourched tre” (to the raven he gave his gifts, and set them on the forked branch; 502–3). The ravens now became beneficiaries of the hunters’ largesse, their appetite appropriated by a ritual that indicates that the control not only of violence but also of meat-eating concerned humans (64-65).

Judkins' forthcoming JEGP article on the royal hunt stresses the community around the breaking of the deer carcass, in which servants and colleagues, whether human or animal, receive their due. More and more, I'm slipping away from my strong paranoid reading of human mastery (see above!) and sliding towards readings like Judkins', which consider affects other than anxiety and cruelty. Love, familiarity, conscientious attention to particular appetites, shared joy: these matter too. 

This isn't something as simple as a switch from negative to positive affect. Things are more complicated. Think of this brief encounter in Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation:

Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. (Pigs have big flaky dandruff all over their backs.) The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar's penis in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he hold me, who wanted to have his butt hole played with. "I have to stick my finger in his butt, he just really loves that," he told me. Then he got all red in the face (103).

Grandin aptly calls this section "How to Make a Pig Fall in Love." Like all love, things can go awry. Our face might go red, maybe because the pig doesn't love us anymore, or maybe because we're a bit embarrassed. When intimacies that can hardly be named find their way into the public eye, things can be a bit disgusting or embarrassing for the guardians of human exclusivity. For more on love's weirdness, see my post below, and also see Dominic Pettman's Human Error, 77-101, which discusses the films Zoo and Tierische Liebe (Animal Love) as well as Haraway's dog love in When Species Meet and J. A. Baker's The Peregine to track love's strangeness, how it can entail, don't forget, "monomania, projective narcissism, and so on," a "familiar libidinal economy, involving the kind of struggles around difference and recognition that can lead to passive-aggressive sulking because of perceived miscommunication" (95).

I have this in mind because I've just read Kathy Rudy's Loving Animals: Towards a New Animal Advocacy. Rudy, a dog lover, says that "the task of coming out as gay was a piece of cake compared to coming out as--what?" She observes "there is not an adequate name for the kind of life I lead, the way my desires organize themselves around animals, especially dogs" (35), that "it's not so much that I am no longer a lesbian...it's that the binary of gay and straight no longer has anything to do with me. My preference these days is canine" (41). For more on this kind of love, we might look to "Michael Field" and their love for and through Whym Chow: perhaps start here and here.

Rudy cooks for her dogs. One loves any kind of meat, another needs a lot more food than you'd think to look at her, and another, Duncan, a yellow lab mix, goes nuts for oatmeal and scrambled eggs (when I told my wife, Alison, about this, she cried "he's a breakfast dog!"). Rudy's learned a lot more about her dogs by feeding them; it's another way to "talk" to the dogs, to build affection and knowledge, another way to render "their subjectivity more visible" (184). She's made a better love between them, which is to say, this queer animal lover is making love to them in a new, better way.

Feeding animals, eating with them--as Cuthbert did with his horse, you remember--makes us companions, a word Haraway often uses in When Species Meet. And companionship can be very intimate indeed. The scholar of How to Make a Human would claim that this is just bad faith: after all, look at Chaucer's Prioress, so deeply sad about her dogs and mice, but still happy to feed her dogs roast meat. Charity begins and ends at home, says the old me. The scholar I am now isn't so sure, and Rudy's partially to thank for that. Because becoming companions (or concarnians, as I say in AVMEO) with animals might mean something's not quite clicked with your human relations. It isn't just hypocritical humanism. To be sure, animal companionship isn't necessarily a better love; it's just, perhaps, a love that disorients you from the community of humans. It's a weird love, like any love, but weirder than most because it lacks the veneer of (human) normalcy.

After all, isn't the Prioress a bit camp, what with her silly romance name, her (arguably) bad French accent, her fancy wimple, by which I mean, aren't the Prioress and her dogs a bit queer?

I have in mind dog-feedings, like the one Judkins describes above. Or Yvain and his lion sharing meals when the lion may be the only one who knows who Yvain really is. Or even the willingness among the philosophers (of all people, generally the most obstinately human)--Albert the Great, Thomas of Cantimpré, Vincent of Beauvais--to repeat Pliny's observation that certain cuts of deer meat disgust dogs, unless (as Vincent says), they're especially hungry. Or Richard Wyche's fifteenth-century account of his religious persecution, where amid his tortures, he "asked the bishop to have my horse taken to his stable, and I gave what I had in my purse to the man leading it there" (trans. Christopher G. Bradley, PMLA 127.3 (2012): 630 [626-42]). Yes, Richard asks this because the horse, a special kind of transportation machine, needs sustenance, but I have to think he asks also because he likes his horse, and he, a religious man (of all people &c.), remembers it, even with execution looming, with nothing mattering for eternity, we would think, but his imperiled soul.

So the shared affect of a meals draws my attention. The love the hunters and the dogs share matters, even as we must not forget the dismembered carcass of the deer around which this affect clusters.

One more thought on the queer love of dogs: if this particular project continues (and it could, if someone's looking for a Kalamazoo paper to fill a slot?), think of the stories of knights who love hunting and disdain the love of women...until they're forced to grow up. Guigemar, for example, but we could come up with dozens more. Think of how queer that love is, particularly when read with the compulsory erotics whose force draws the knight out of his pleasures with his horses, hounds, and hawks, and into his human, only human maturity.

(for more stuff on zoophilia, see James Goebel's excellent musings over at "A Geology of Borders")