Thinking With Animal Companions: A Keynote
This very special keynote on the range of animal companionship is the first essay in 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.
In the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first group of definitions or senses for the word “companion” are those “referring to a person, and related uses.” Within that group, the sixth subsense is “a (domestic) animal serving as company for a person; a pet.”
(All the other subsenses, both those listed before and after, refer only to humans.)
The term “animal companion” is cross-referenced; it is circularly defined as “a domestic animal serving as a person’s companion; a pet.” Of course, “animal” and “species” are not synonyms, and the valence of the modifier is inevitably affected by the term it modifies.
In the usages documented in the OED, the connotation of “companion” tends to be positive, which is consistent with popular Euro-Western attitudes toward domesticated animals—especially the pets with whom we have the strongest affective connection. But even among human connections, it is easy to imagine situations where close companionship is enforced or strained, and therefore possibly unwelcome. When the idea of companionship is expanded to include other species, its connotation becomes less predictable as the relationships become more complicated and varied.
Domesticated animals thus most closely fit the dictionary definition of companions, especially the pet species kept primarily or exclusively for our emotional comfort and amusement. At least in the Anglophone world, privileged people have enjoyed such relationships for centuries, as is evidenced by the pampered dogs (and very rarely, cats) who appear with their masters and mistresses in paintings. For less elevated individuals, such discretionary relationships were considered unacceptably luxurious and indulgent until the nineteenth century, which is also when most of the infrastructure of modern petkeeping emerged, including shows, breed societies, and commercial brands of food.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the earlier relationships with those other domesticated animals—who were understood as appropriately practical and often economic—lacked an element of mutual friendship and regard. Other-than-human participants in such relationships included draft and saddle horses, plow oxen, dogs who hunted, herded, or guarded, and even cats who managed rodent populations, as well as the less individuated members of farmers’ herds and flocks.
Humans experience a less reciprocal version of companionship with the numerous species that independently choose to live with or near us, unburdened by human ownership or control. Sometimes they come at our invitation (intentional or inadvertent), most often when we provide food. Thus, bird feeders offer gratification to observers and partakers, as well as risk—to the fed of being caught by cats or hawks, and to the feeders of contagious disease.
Luring quadrupeds comes with additional hazards. Skunks, raccoons, deer, coyotes, and foxes frequently visit suburban gardens. The state of Massachusetts recently warned residents not to feed pets on their porches to avoid attracting bears; it further advised anyone who disregarded this warning to lock their doors.
Smaller animals live with us on more intimate terms—not just the rodents whose access to interior spaces and nutritional opportunities is unimpeded by doors, but also the numerous invertebrates, mostly insects and arachnids, who also share our homes. In a physical sense, these invertebrates are at least as close to us as our pet dogs and cats, although the emotional aspect of such relationships tends to be either negative or nonexistent.
Our impact on other non-domesticated animals might be considered companionship in a still more attenuated or abstract sense. Even if they lead their lives without much (or any) contact with people, apparently wild animals cannot escape the effects of our proximity, or our increasingly long reach. Those who appeal to us as trophies or as dinner live in constant or seasonal relation to hunters.
Many live in places from which their conspecifics had previously been eliminated—or where they had never lived at all—due to human attempts to restore damaged ecosystems or to diversify those considered inadequate in some way. Such efforts have resulted in the flourishing turkey and deer populations that currently inhabit the northeastern United States, as well as the rabbits who have plagued Australia for more than a century.
In places, the introduction of domesticated animals has affected their non-domesticated relatives in more profound ways. The rescue of the American bison from near extinction is celebrated as one of the most successful conservation efforts, although almost all of the rescued bison contain genetic traces of domesticated cattle. Less benignly, people aiming to save the few remaining wild cats in Scotland are inclined to neuter or kill any that reveal evidence of hybridization with domestic moggies.
When the idea of companionship is expanded to include other species, its connotation becomes less predictable as the relationships become more complicated and varied.
And even animals who live in places that their ancestors have occupied without anthropogenic interruption cannot escape our influence—whether in the form of pollution, or introduced species, water management, or, most comprehensively, climate change.
Admittedly, influence and impact are not exactly the same as companionship. They lack the element of reciprocity, as well as that of emotional connection. But they foreground the effects of propinquity and juxtaposition. So in some sense, all other species are our companions now—or we are theirs—whether they or we desire it or not.
Featured image: Red fox staring at a human companion through a car windshield. Photo by
Erik Mclean, 2021.
Harriet Ritvo works in the fields of environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, British and British empire history, and the history of natural history. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past President of the American Society for Environmental History. She has served on numerous editorial boards, including Victorian Studies, Agricultural History Review, and Animals and Society. In 2020 she received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History. She has many works across themes and publications, but her current book project The Edges of Wild concerns wildness and domestication. Website. Contact.
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