Paper short abstract

Drawing on multispecies ethnography with street dogs in India’s central Himalayas, this paper explores the relations, lifeways, and possible futures that are foreclosed for dogs and humans when pethood and ownership become normative frameworks shaping multispecies health interventions.

Paper long abstract

Street dog rescue and adoption in contemporary India is widely promoted as a means to improve human-animal health: dogs are “saved” from suffering in the streets, while humans gain companionship and enhanced wellbeing. In this paper, I interrogate the mutualist promise of this health paradigm by centring the harms inflicted on dog bodies and emotions through the practices of ‘homing’ them in human-centric households. Drawing on ethnographic research in the central Himalayas of India, I examine the lives of twelve street dogs whose individual stories and trajectories complicate celebratory narratives of dog rescue and adoption. I explore the relations, lifeways, and possible futures that are devalued and foreclosed when pethood and ownership become the normative frameworks shaping multispecies health interventions.

I show how knowledge and practices framed as animal care and welfare reconfigure canine social worlds to align with particular human-norms of domesticity and kinship. ‘Homing’ street dogs inside human-households can paradoxically render them ‘homeless’ by severing dog-dog kinship bonds, curtailing their reproductive projects, and normalising confinement as care. These findings unsettle increasingly hegemonic cultural assumptions in urbanising India that equate a dog’s proper home and health with a place in human-households. Attending to the fluidity and plurality of street dog-human cohabitations in India reveal alternative, less harmful modes for dogs and humans to live and “become with” each other as individuals and species. Making such alternative versions of human-animal ‘homes’ more visible and viable might be necessary for pursuing more just, healthy, and genuinely mutual multispecies futures.