Foxhounds, Curs, and the Dawn of Breeding: The Discourse of Modern Human–Canine Relations

Revelations that the sports star Michael Vick supported a dog-fighting ring have brought out the shocking details of breeding operations that regularly electrocute, hang, and drown those dogs not living up to the standards of the fighting pit, dogs designated “curs” for their worthlessness (Gladwell, 52). In the news stories on Vick’s pit bulls, the general tenor has been outrage over the humans’ behavior and sympathy for the pit bulls, which are, among all breeds of dogs, attested “to possess the single greatest ability to bond with people” (Gorant, 2). There is a basic contradiction here that is worth exploring, for it seems to say quite a bit about the relations with dogs people in the West allow themselves. The pit bull’s ability to bond with people is an intentional result of the same breeding strategies that make it violently aggressive toward other dogs: dogs in the pit are known to fight with greater vigor when they can see their owner approving (Gladwell, 59). Affection expressed for the breed by people who have no interest in the dog-pit must displace not only the violence that accompanies the ability to bond, but also the violence used to create a breed particularly notable for the combined qualities of affection and violence.

Every breed of dog is the result of the second sort of violence, since a breed exists only through the elimination of curs. This differentiation between the breed that manifests predictable traits and the cur, the breedless dog, “just a dog,” whose character is unpredictable, runs through much of the modern discourse on dogs that names pit bulls, and terriers, and foxhounds as though their breed made them into something more than “just a dog.” And yet, virtually all the recognizable breeds that grant this elevated value are modern creations. The importance of breed as an identifying qualification arose quite suddenly in Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century alongside two other cultural events that were by no means unrelated. First of all, within the Agricultural Revolution the drive for “improved” crops and animals led men like Robert Bakewell to develop breeding strategies that produced new strains of cows and sheep with particularly desirable qualities, such as rapid growth; as other people followed Bakewell’s program of intense inbreeding, they began to value the pedigree records that showed whether or not an individual animal possessed the important characteristic of a breed. And secondly, natural historians were mapping out the similarities and differences among plants, animals, and humans, creating taxonomies based on supposedly essential, or unchanging, details, to frame the categories of animal breed and human as mutually reifying reflections of one another. Both of these activities are manifestations of the discourse on animals that Jacques Derrida has characterized “the one that occurs most abundantly” in the modern era (2008, 13). During “the last two centuries,” Derrida asserts, human–animal relations have been dominated by “forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of intervention into their object, from the transformation of the actual object . . . namely, the living animal.” This fundamentally modern equation of the knowledge about animals with the ability to transform and manipulate them through breeding has the effect of reducing “the animal not only to production and overactive reproduction,” Derrida continues, but also to “all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the putative human well-being of man” (25; and see Lawlor, 11, 13).

One of these “end products” is the foxhound, created precisely through an extended manipulation of reproduction in order to serve a particular desire of eighteenth-century sporting men. The success these men attained spurred the subsequent manipulation of dogs into the vast array of breeds that have since appeared, each of which is accompanied by a history recounting the dog’s supposed original place and function in a romanticized regional landscape. The effect of the histories is to make the artificial breeds appear natural, an appearance buttressed by the “increasing willingness” Nicholas Hudson has traced through the eighteenth...