Love, Violence, & Respect in Animal-Human Companionship

This essay on the nuances of animal autonomy and more-than-human respect is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

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I Love You Like I Love the Land

Nobody tells you to stop loving the land 
When it bites you with wind or ice
Hurricanes or tornadoes 

I love you like I love the land 
My elements are your elements 
and by your teeth
my skin is your skin

I hid the other one under my cuff
Because I don’t trust men’s protection
Like I can’t trust my two male dogs together 
With me

But I love you like I love the land
We are the land and the land is us 
Is it wrong for me to love the land and you? 
To make space for you in my bed

Am I imbalanced?
Would a medicine man warn me? 
Or is a coyote simply pointing out what I already know:
That I love you like I love the land

And love is like wind
Sometimes inviting and other time biting.

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This poem is my raw reflection on breaking up a fight between two of my male dogs. This event was both horrifying and deeply unsettling to me. I’m someone who has publicly written about good relationships with animals; someone who has invested much of my life to believing that good relationships require me to make space for animal autonomy, emotions, and agency, but also consistently question what that even means. 

This event was scary because I rarely have moments where animal autonomy becomes unsafe for me or for other dogs in my family. But this made me feel lucky rather than smart. 

I am also too aware that when a dog bites a human, they might find themselves criminalized and marked permanently as dangerous. I can’t unsee this event as connected to the way humans also permanently criminalize BIPOC bodies and their animals. I write poetry to play with that permanence, while also being quite aware that violence in any form is so deeply troubling, and that it isn’t always legible across species lines—no matter how much we blur those boundaries in our homes. We are always distinct, yet so deeply connected.

It made me think that as Indigenous peoples who “love land,” we don’t stop when the land hurts us in drought, fire, or storm. In fact, we mourn climate injustice, enduring together the sadness and violence with the land. I am also aware, as a feminist scholar, that normalizing pain in any relationship (to land, humans, or animals) is a slippery slope. I am not apologetic to violence, though so deeply aware that many of us Native women and people live with it always looming like the fear that my dogs might break into another fight with each other. 

I mucked through that unsettling feeling for many weeks, exacerbated by the tensions of our time. I am urged by Diné relatives (although at times I feel so disconnected from our traditional ways) to understand that a conflict for other-than-humans is never just about them, but that these beings usually have a message we need to pay attention to. 

My elders warn of dogs in the home and argue they should have a separate space from humans. With that advice and this experience, I thought about how drawing too closely between human and other-than-human lives can end in conflict. This is a careless mistake we sometimes make in scholarship and in our lived realities; one that my elders had good reason to warn us about. 

Perhaps it wasn’t always about not bringing the dogs inside the home or sharing our beds with them—perhaps they were urging us to pay respect to our animal relatives and their agency. They deserve a space of their own, and to make their own choices. Respect, in this way, might look different than the cultural norms around contemporary human-dog relationships and instead requires we trust these beings more than we manage them—while remaining accountable to the times our human-constructs fail us, and our relationships with them.

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Featured image: Dog looking out over mountains. Photo by Sisko1701, 2017.

Kelsey Dayle John (Diné) is a member of the Navajo Nation and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at CU Boulder. She studies interspecies learning in tribal communities, with a focus on equine-human interactions and Native American horse cultures/histories. Kelsey is the founder and organizer of Horses Connecting Communities, a learning community that supports horse education on the Navajo Nation. Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “Fences Tell a Story of Land Changes on the Navajo Nation” (July 2020).
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