Donna Haraway. A Note of a Sportswriter Daughter.

Donna Haraway. "A Note of a Sportswriter’s Daughter: Companion Species." in: Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies. Vol. 32, No. 2, 2006. (English).

Excerpt:

MetaRetrievers

October, 1999
Dear Vicki*,

Now, I see that I lied to you about Roland's 'prey drive' and 'herding' potential -i.e., his temperament, if I understand your sense of the root 'temper'. Watching him with you lurking inside my head over the last week made me remember that such things are multidimensional and situational, and describing a dog's temperament takes more precision than I achieved.

We go to an off-leash, large, cliff-enclosed beach in Santa Cruz almost every day. There are two main classes of dogs there: retrievers and meta-retrievers. Roland is a meta-retriever. (My husband Rusten points out there is really a third class of dogs too-the "nons"-not in the game at issue here.) Roland will play ball with us once in a while (or anytime we couple the sport with a liver cookie or two), but his heart's not in it. The activity is not really self-rewarding to him, and his lack of style there shows it. But meta-retrieving is another matter entirely. The retrievers watch whoever is about to throw a ball or stick as if their lives depended on the next few seconds. The meta-retrievers watch the retrievers with an exquisite sensitivity to directional cues and microsecond of spring. These meta dogs do not watch the ball or the human; they watch the ruminant-surrogates-in-dog's-clothing.

Roland in meta-mode looks like an Aussie-Border Collie mock up for a lesson in Platonism. His forequarters are lowered, forelegs slightly apart with one in front of the other in hair-trigger balance, his hackles in mid-rise, his eyes focused, his whole body ready to spring into hard, directed action. When the retrievers sail out after the projectile, the meta-retrievers move out of their intense eye and stalk into heading, heeling, bunching, and cutting their charges with joy and skill. The good meta-retrievers can even handle more than one retriever at a time. The good retrievers can dodge the metas and still make their catch in an eye-amazing leaps--or surges into the waves, if things have gone to sea.

Since we have no ducks or other surrogate sheep or cattle on the beach, the retrievers have to do duty for the metas. Some retriever people take exception to this multitasking of their dogs (I can hardly blame them), so those of us with metas try to distract our dogs once in a while with some game they inevitably find much less satisfying. I drew a mental Larson cartoon on Thursday watching Roland, an ancient and arthritic Old English Sheepdog, a lovely red tricolor Aussie, and a Border Collie mix of some kind form an intense ring around a shepherd-lab mix, a plethora of motley Goldens, and a game pointer who hovered around a human who - liberal individualist in Amerika to the end - was trying to throw his stick to his dog only. Meanwhile, in the distance, a rescue whippet was eating up sand in roadrunner fashion, pursued by a ponderous, slope-hipped GSD.

It remains true that I can call Roland off of a deer chase most of the time; coursing a deer is not a meta-retrieving task worthy of an Aussie-Chow, from his point of view.

There are terriers on the beach too, and terrier mixes of all sorts. Why don't I see what the terrieresque crowd are doing? I am going to listen and watch.

I end with an appealing, neurotic, Airedale-black lab cross who spends his beach time day after day trying to bury an old Monterey cypress branch, about 3 feet long and 3 inches in diameter, in the sand. He digs heroic holes, ignoring the pleas of his human to do anything else; but the curly, wire-haired, labish-looking pooch keeps digging deep holes of small diameter for one end of his giant and recalcitrant stick. Nothing else matters.

Beached in DogLand,
Donna
___________________
* Vicki Hearne, a famous dog trainer and writer, who was an email correspondent on CANGEN-L, a lively Internet List on genetics in the late 1990s

Novice Play, Novice Players

September, 2000
Dear C.A. (Aussie health and genetics activist, dog world mentor, and friend),

Roland was inspiring on Sunday. Most of all, he was patently happy all day (we were at the agility trials for 9 hours total, plus 4 hours of driving). He basked in all the attention, thought his exercise pen (a new experience for him) was a fine place to rest and watch all the dogs between walks and runs, regarded the brace of barking Jack Russell Terriers next door to us with detachment, and met the performance demands on & around the course with very few signs of stress (a few yawns was all) & lots of evidence of enjoyment. His runs were solid and bode well for his getting his novice titles without too much fuss in the not-so-distant future (or so I dream).

We did not get a qualifying leg in the standard course because we missed the entry to the weave poles, entering at the 2nd pole on each try. In the Novice Class in the USDAA rules, you get to retry the weave poles as often as you need to get the *#@!* things properly negotiated, but after the 3rd try for a correct entry I just let him weave and went on with the course. We'll just get more practice on weave entries at home and in class. He wasn't fast overall, but still within allowed time, and he stayed with me mentally. I have a tendency to get physically ahead of him, partly because working with Cayenne is so different and partly because I am a Border Collie at heart myself, but I am learning to pay better attention to Roland's rhythms. He sticks too close to me, and we need to do some more distance targeting exercises over 2 or 3 jumps in succession to get him running out with more drive.

His jumpers run was very good, marred only a little by his losing momentum at the first pinwheel after the wing jump and needing some strong pushing to get over the next jump, foiling my plans for a clean backcross and fast pivot. I need to remember who he is and keep us a team. I think I confused him at the wing jump right before the 1st pinwheel jump and slowed him down at just the wrong point. The last 2/3 of the jumper course was a real high for both of us. He was much faster and sailed through the 2nd pinwheel and the hurdles, with a fun, fast finish over a double jump. We were both excited by the end and that made us more accurate and clean.

A couple of friends from local Aussie rescue stayed almost 2 hours after their runs just to watch Roland's last run (our class was the last event of the whole day), and that felt really good. Susan Caudill (Willem the Pyr's person, who now lives on our land) filmed the runs, along with several others, on her videocamera; so it was useful to look at the runs afterwards to see what we all did. Our next event is the AKC Sir Francis Drake trials on Sept 16. I think I am getting hooked on agility!

Cayenne will have her 1st birthday before long-how can a year have gone by? Watching her entice Roland into playing with her this morning was a stitch. She just kept squeaking her toy in his face and running off until he gave in and chased her and then played tug-of-war with the toy. She runs circles around him and is uncatchable unless she lets herself be caught. I have the impression that just to keep him in the game she deliberately gets herself into parts of the yard where Roland has some advantage because of his weight & strength and so can pin her momentarily against a fence or into a gully. If she just keeps beating him to toys or runs too fast and pivots too abruptly, he loses interest. If she gets him into a really playful state of mind, he'll go belly up for her and wrestle with her for a long time, handicapping himself by staying in a down position and chewing gently on her proferred parts while she assaults him with abandon from above. With her Pyr buddy Willem, she hangs onto the base of his feathery tail and gets dragged across his yard; then she lets go and circles him furiously, herding him where she wants. It's hard to be grumpy myself in the morning watching this kind of joyful doggish beginning! Of course, coffee also helps...

Learning to be a novice,
Donna

Baby Weaves

February, 2001
Dear friends,

News bulletin for the agility addicted & their long-suffering mentors: Yesterday in our back yard, Ms Cayenne Pepper graduated to 12 in-line weave poles, moving up from six 1-inch staggered/six in-line channel weave setting. She shoots through in-line accurately with speed. Her entrances need work-she can run by the entrance and then not know how to get in. We'll work on that, using some of the ideas Kirstin Cole gave me. But yesterday afternoon, she did the 12 poles perfectly about 8 times, 4 from each end. Then she was able to take a jump at a 45 degree angle after the weave pole exit and keep driving without any problem. Treats all around! I also had her jump (16-inch practice height), turn 45 degrees and enter correctly into the right side of the poles, weave 12 poles, turn 90 degrees to a box-and-inclined-plywood sheet that I used for target/touch practice, stop correctly (2 feet on, 2 feet off), and then get treated. She did it!

We have the elementary right/left commands now, & I am looking forward to seeing if they are functional on some serpentines outside our backyard. Her swing/around commands are working well, and she will do sequenced obstacles when I am up to about 10-12 feet away from her, driving her from behind. (She, of course, is hardly being driven; but the notion feeds my sense of having something to do out there! She's racing!) Sometimes she will do the weave poles as a send away (1-inch offset in channel weave set up), and she's gotten reliable at send aways into the tunnel (until she ate the child play tunnel last week) or over 1 or 2 jumps (not 3 unless I bait a touch plate at the end of the sequence). We haven't done any real obstacle discrimination work.

Her very mouthy 'herding' pestering of other dogs at the dog park is a sight to see. Folks at the park regard her as a kind of playground director. Trouble is, she's getting too committed to this project! We need to get her to obey call offs better when she gets too pesky and in-the-face of other dogs, especially retrievers trying to do their job. She provoked another young Aussie into a fight yesterday that we had to break up. We'll start putting her on leash and going to another area of the park if she disobeys settle down commands and keeps bothering other dogs. Sound right? Other ideas for controlling this nuisance behavior? There's a fine line here between play that all the dogs like and Ms Cayenne fomenting a riot.

Roland is interesting to watch in relation to Cayenne's park behavior. He monitors the goings-on from some distance, not letting the yougsters interfere with his collecting more human members for his growing park fan club who might be prevailed upon for a tasty treat or due adulation. But when the goings-on among the chasing & playing dogs get rowdy, he switches from his people-focused "aren't I the softest dog you've ever seen?" friend-and-treat scavanging mode into an all "alpha dog who was a wolf only yesterday" (coat hair partially lofted, hacked-off tail raised as high as he can get it, head up, eyes bright, muscles shining through, and a fast, prancing gait), whose only concern is other canines. Looking about 6 inches taller than he is, he runs between the rowdy dogs, not infrequently hip-bumping the dog Cayenne is playing with out of the way. He can stop rowdy behavior cold and split dogs off from each other like a champion shedding sheep. (He can also join in and become part of the bumptious scene, but not in the same way as Cayenne because he doesn't have the utterly hard-wired, in-your-face need to bark, chase, head off, turn, and nip until the other dog morphs into the tough cow Cayenne (aka daughter of Slash V) always knew s/he was underneath the dog park disguise.

Weaving in line,
Donna

Home Study

March 19, 2001
Dear friends,

Catherine de la Cruz roped me into doing a home assessment in Santa Cruz for Great Pyrenee rescue this week, if you can imagine! I think she figured that our Willem fence-building exploits qualified me - especially since she doesn't have any real pyrish person in Santa Cruz and wants a report about a woman who wants one of the dogs whom Catherine is responsible for. I consulted with my brother Rick about how he does adoption home studies for human rescues. Rick is director of Catholic Family Services in Raleigh, and he does a lot of assessments prior to rehoming children. He reinforced my sense that the job is to be the adoptee's advocate while remaining the soul of tact. Why am I quaking in my boots?! I don't even have a novice leg in fence engineering! (Good fences seem to be non-negotiable for placing a rescue Pyr!)

Speaking of novice legs, Roland and I did not get any in Madera Saturday at the USDAA trials. We did make interesting mistakes. I think that means we might be able to learn from them. Carefully timing her remarks to make an impact without damaging the novice handler's fragile self esteem, our teacher Gail Frazier tactfully said that the reason Roland and I did not do well in our Standard course was that I neglected to give Roland any information during the run! That sounds pretty basic, I must say. She was, alas, quite correct. We missed getting our Gambler's run by 0.25 seconds, but we got our points and then all the required obstacles in sequence, which have to be worked at a (tiny, i.e., novice) distance. We were overtime because I set Roland up badly for the run at the jump/tunnel opener into the Gamble, and so he came back from the tunnel entrance to discuss the rule book with me before he agreed to go into the tunnel. Our discussion took several seconds. Next time I'll discuss all the fine print with him before our run! The good part is that he did go into the tunnel and finish the gamble sequence correctly.

I talked with dad yesterday on the phone and waxed all analytical about our agility runs in Madera, thinking he, as a sports writer, would want a blow-by-blow account. He interrupted me to tell a baseball story. Donna, he said, you remember Andy Cohen, who used to manage the Denver Bears when you were a kid? Sure, I said, that's when the Bears were a Yankee farm club. Right, says dad. Well, he reminisces, Andy was watching a hitter at batting practice at spring training one time. Now this hitter, a center fielder, was supposed to be the Bears' best hope for the season, but he was swinging at pitch after pitch and hitting nothing but air. He starts analyzing what he's doing wrong, and it just gets worse. Andy gets fed up and tells the guy to get out of the batter's box. The manager steps in, sets his stance, lines up his bat, and gets ready to clobber the ball into the stratosphere. The pitch comes in; Andy swings and misses, the air hissing in the bat's wake. This sorry picture is repeated about ten times, as Andy swings and misses. Then he steps out of the batter's box, aims a spray of tobacco juice at a passing ground beetle, gives the bat back to the hapless hitter, wipes his hands on his pants, and says, "There, now do you see what you are doing? "

"Shut up and train,"
Donna

Klingon Warrior Princess

Excerpted from The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)

May 30, 2001
Dear Friends,

Ms Cayenne Pepper has shown her true species being at last. She's a female Klingon in heat. Now, you may not watch much TV or be a years' long fan of the Star Trek universe like I am, but I'll bet the news that Klingon females are formidable sexual beings, whose tastes run to the ferocious, has reached everyone. The Pyr on our land, the intact 20-month-old Willem, has been Cayenne's playmate since they were both puppies, beginning at about 4 months. Cayenne was spayed when she was 6 1/2 months old. She's always happily humped her way down Willem's soft and inviting backside, starting at his head end with her nose pointed to his tail, while he lies on the ground trying to chew her leg or lick a rapidly passing genital area. But during our Memorial weekend brief stay on the Healdsburg land things have heated up, put mildly. Willem is a randy, gentle, utterly inexperienced adolescent male soul (and Susan makes very sure he stays inexperienced & properly fenced!). Cayenne does not have an estrus hormone in her body (but let us not forget those very much present adrenal cortices pumping out aldoserone and other so-called androgens that get lots of the credit for juicing up mammalian desire in males and females). But she is one turned on little bitch with Willem, & he is INTERESTED. She does not do this with any other dog, 'intact' or not. None of their sexual play has anything to do with remotely functional heterosexual mating behavior -- no efforts of Willem to mount, no presenting of an attractive female backside, not much genital sniffing, no whining and pacing, none of all that 'reproductive' stuff. No, here we have pure polymorphous 'perversity' that is so dear to the hearts of all of us who came of age in the 60s reading Norman O. Brown. Willem lies down with a bright look in his eye. Cayenne looks positively crazed as she straddles her genital area on the top of his head, her nose pointed toward his tail end, and presses down & wags her backside vigorously. I mean hard and fast. H is trying for all he's worth to get his tongue on her genitals, which inevitably dislodges her from the top of his head. Looks a bit like the rodeo, with her riding a bronco & staying on as long as possible. They have slightly different goals in this game, but both are committed to the activity. Sure looks like eros to me. Definitely not agape. They keep this up for about 5 minutes to the exclusion of any other activity. Then they go back to it for another round. And another. Susan's and my laughing, whether raucous or discrete, does not merit their attention. Cayenne growls like a female Klingon during the activity, teeth bared. She's playing, but oh my, what a game. Willem is earnestly intent. He is not a Klingon, but what we would call a considerate lover.

Have you seen anything like this with a spayed female and an intact male? Or any other combination, for that matter? Their youth and vitality seem to have made a mockery of reproductive heterosexual hegemony, as well as of abstinence-promoting gonadectomies. Now, I, of all people, who have written all-too-infamous books about how we western humans project our social orders and desires onto animals without scrupple, should know better than to see confirmation of Norman O. Brown's Love's Body in my spayed Aussie dynamo and Susan's talented Landscape Guardian Dog with that big, sloppy, velvety tongue. Still, what do you think is going on? (Hint: This is not a game of fetch or chase.)

Should I tell the writers of the Star Trek world anything about the real Klingon on earth?

Time to get to real work!
Donna

Enforcer

April 8, 2001
Dear friends,

Nice thing at the dog beach this afternoon: Roland the HufflePuff Enforcer was looking like he might get into a fight with a couple of big-balled big males, and some sparring was already underway. Rusten and I were nearby, and I said firmly, "Leave It, Come, Sit!" Miracle of miracles, he left it, came, and sat. I was thanking my lucky stars, and remembering Pyr alpha bitch Catherine dela Cruz's and Linda Weisser's daunting stories of breaking up fights among large dogs, knowing I could not have measured up. Rusten looked grateful to some sort of deity too, even though he is braver than I am, or perhaps just more committed to not letting anyone in this world get hurt.

Then what to my wondering ears should I hear but the patter of my fellow dog beach humans, saying, "My, my, did you see that! That dog just walked out of a fight and came and sat! How do they get him to do that?" Good question. Liver cookie seems such a mundane answer. But then, I never did rise above the level of popular religion - at least not since I retired from wannabe Jesuit.

As the masthead on The Bark says, "Dog is my co-pilot."

Reverently grateful,
Donna

(...)