The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S7E7: Urban Health Histories with Heeral Chhabra
In this episode we delve into how urban health histories can help us to understand changing multispecies health. Heeral Chhabra tells us how the welfare of free-roaming dogs in India was caught up with the colonial history of the country and how rabies saw drastic changes in human-dog relations.
Date Recorded: 27 September 2024.
Heeral Chhabra is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Remaking One Health: Decolonial Approaches to Street Dogs and Rabies Prevention in India Project at University of Liverpool. She was awarded PhD from the University of Delhi (2022) for her thesis Animal ‘Welfare’, State Regulations and Questions of Cruelty c.1900-1940s which sought to understand animal-human relationships in colonial India through the prism of law. Heeral is also a Visiting Fellow at IASH, Edinburgh University and has previously been a Global History Fellow at International Institute of Social History. She has published widely on matters related to animals in Indian history. She is currently working on her manuscript The Barking Subjects of Empire: The History of Street Dog-Human relations in Colonial India, and also co-editing two books - Animals and South Asian History: Species, People and Environment; and Writing Global History from Global South.
Featured:
- Animals and Colonial Indian Archives by Heeral Chhabra
- Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below by Jason Hribal
- Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives edited by Michael J. Glover, Les Mitchell
- The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India by Krithika Srinivasan
- An analytical framework to understand the problematization of urban (historical) animals by Claudia Hirtenfelder
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring this podcast; Remaking One Health Indies for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work, Priyanshu Thapliyal for the Animal Highlight, and Christiaan Mentz for his audio editing. This episode was produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
- Leave a Review on Podchaser
- Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
- Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.
This is another iRaw podcast Precisely because the idea of health species this cannot be seen in isolation. The health of one is intrinsically linked to the health of the other and I think one disease in this sense is rabies, which is really dead in India. It's still there. I mean, as a child growing up, I've seen dogs die of rabies, so it's very much a reality. But how do you tackle this reality?
Heeral Chhabra:And once you think of that, I think you need to take into account all the stakeholders which are there in the system. And if you're looking at dogs or other animals, it's important to also account for their health, because they're also victim of the disease. They're not the perpetrators disease they're not the perpetrators, they're not the ones responsible for spreading it, they're also the one on the receiving end of the disease. So once you change your lens to that perspective, I think it's important because everything is interlinked, but to see those interlinkages and to see that you need to. So elimination is not a solution when it comes to health concerns and animals and zoonotics. Elimination of one thing doesn't really solve the problem. You have to look at it in its entirety and historically that needs to be done Because if we look at the way rabies was stamped out in Britain or elsewhere. It was also done vis-à-vis redefining animal-human relationships. Otherwise things wouldn't have happened.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to the Animal Turn podcast everyone. This is season seven, where we're looking at animals and multi-species health, and today is episode seven where we're talking about a subject that is very close to my heart and you'll hear that a lot in the episode today urban health histories. Now you know if you're a listener to the show, that I really am passionate about animals in the city and I'm really interested in urban animal histories. And when it comes to thinking about health, I'm almost flabbergasted how you don't look at animals or urban relations and health together, because I don't know, I feel like you look at any archival documents and these just seem too much. But alas, I give away my own proclivities. Today's episode was really fun. I so enjoyed speaking to Hiral about her work in Indian history and Indian archives and thinking about how we can understand the histories of animals as agents and as subjects. So a really fascinating discussion, and it brings health into the focus in a way that we haven't really focused on so far in the season, that kind of bringing in that temporal scale, thinking about health across time.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Let me tell you a little bit about Hiral Chhabra. She is a postdoctoral research associate with the Remaking One Health Indies Project, who you know, is sponsoring this season, and she was awarded a PhD from the University of Delhi in 2022 for a thesis titled Animal Welfare, state Regulations and Questions of Cruelty from 1890 to 1940, and her work sought to understand animal-human relationships in colonial India through the prism of law. Her career trajectory so far has led her to research positions and teaching endeavors globally. She is currently a visiting fellow at Edinburgh University and has previously been a global history fellow at the International Institute of Social History. She has published widely on matters related to animals in Indian history and she is currently working on a manuscript titled the Barking Subjects of Empire the History of Street Dog, human Relations and Colonial India. So, needless to say, she is perfect for talking about the relationship between health, dogs and history and, of course, dogs have been something of a key focus this season. So I very, very much enjoyed talking to Hiral today and history and, of course, dogs have been something of a key focus this season. So I very, very much enjoyed talking to Hiral today and I hope you enjoy listening to the show as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Just a reminder if you've got a spot of time, please, please, please, leave a review for the podcast or leave a rating wherever you listen. These go a long way in terms of supporting the show and helping others to find the show. If you haven't checked it out already, we've got a little merch store happening. The proceeds from the merch store go directly towards helping the show and paying people like Rebecca or Christian or myself for the time in generating this content, and there are some items that are explicitly there that go towards helping sanctuaries, such as Vine Sanctuary.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:There are these really great prints that are of residents at vine sanctuary and like mona, who's just absolutely glorious, and 100 of the profits from those go to vine sanctuary. So why not head over there, buy some really cool prints and support a sanctuary while you do it, or, I guess, just donate directly to mine? Whichever way you prefer, but let me stop waffling for now. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi here, welcome to the animal tone podcast. Thank you so much for having me. You were telling me in the green room that this is your first podcast experience.
Heeral Chhabra:Yes, this will be my first and, yes, I'm very much looking forward to it. A bit nervous, but yeah, happy to be here.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We're happy to have you here, and it's always fun to have folks on the show who have never engaged in this kind of conversation before, because I think the conversations tend to be quite open. So I'm sure we're going to go into some really fascinating and interesting spaces, and I'm very happy that the Animal Tone is your first, so that makes us important in your journey, which is fun.
Heeral Chhabra:I've learned a lot from your podcast, anyways, as a PhD student. So, yeah, this is like life comes a full circle, so I'm happy to be here.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Oh wow, thank you so much. It's always nice to meet people that have listened to the show. I really appreciate that so much, so I'm very excited about what we're talking about today, which is urban health histories. If you're listening to the show, you know that I'm also interested in urban histories and geography, so I think we've got a lot to talk about today, and it'll be interesting to think through a little bit about how history is connected to ideas of multi-species health, which has, of course, been our focus for this season. But before we jump in, as always, I ask guests to tell me a little bit about themselves. So how did you become interested in street dogs in particular and focused on history and archives?
Heeral Chhabra:So basically, academically, I have done all my education in India from Delhi University, starting from my bachelor's up to my PhD. My interest in animal history is actually very personal. I did my MPhil in history of education and decided that that was like a marriage which wasn't working. So I decided that it's better to divorce it right now and rather than suffer through PhD. So I decided to change my topic and I thought right now, and you know, rather than suffer through phd. So I decided to change my topic and I thought phd is something you should be passionate about because it's self-learning. So the only thing that I, you know, kind of carried me forward was the thought of animals, because I've been personally taking care of street dogs in india for a long, long time, in delhi oh, fascinating what.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:What does that? What does that entail?
Heeral Chhabra:so it entails a lot. So you, unlike the Western countries, here in Europe and elsewhere, there are a lot of unowned street dogs which are just simply there on the street. It's their place, it's their home and they just live there. So they're part of your growing up journey. So you see them, you see their life cycles, you see their behaviors, you practically engage with them. So I was someone who did that since childhood.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:When you encountered street dogs as a child, growing up, did you find that there were some street dogs you encountered again and again. You became familiar with and friendly with.
Heeral Chhabra:Oh yes, because street dogs are not addressed as beings. Dogs are territorial. So wherever you live, there will be a certain number of dogs who will be around that area and they will not let other dogs come in. So you will have constant presence of those certain dogs in and around your homes. So you will encounter them when going out, coming in, talking, barking at night, everything. So you're practically growing up with them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But there are specific dogs that you become friendly with and specific dogs that maybe you're practically growing up with them. But there's specific dogs that you become friendly with and specific dogs that maybe you're afraid of or yeah, I was very afraid of dogs.
Heeral Chhabra:So while in third grade I was coming back from school and a dog barked at me and I shouted top of my lungs and my mother was like this can't go on, because I have to travel alone on the streets, so I can't be afraid of constant presence of dogs. And then she introduced me. Then it's not that bad and you can be, you know with them and play with them and everything. So from there the journey started and then once you get involved with them emotionally and you correspond to them, you know, you see them. It's a different journey altogether. I was involved with them since my childhood up till my years in college. So when the decision was there as to what to do next in terms of peer, I was like, why not history of animals? This was something which was not done in India that much because I was keen to adopt the animal term in Indian history, which is to say that animals are just not property or things, but they're living beings and they're historical beings who respond historically to things.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean it's quite interesting that you say that, because when we think about urban studies or urban animal studies in general, I think India is a leader in many ways. The scholarship that's coming out of India in terms of ethnography and ethology and observations of street dogs, but also other urban animals, is remarkable. So you're saying that those kinds of developments haven't been as much the case when it comes to looking at their histories.
Heeral Chhabra:Yes, because it's not that history as a discipline hasn't attended to animals. They have. Historians of different periods in Indian history have attested to animals' presence. So this is not to say that they haven't been there, but the question is, in what capacity have they been attended to? Have they been attended to as property things or, as you know, things to justify larger arguments? Or has there been history written around them, which is to say that they are the central focus of attention and then you build a historical narrative around them? So there has to be I mean, there has been change right from at least 10, 15 years definitely a little longer but I think that the push to have animals as historical beings, to respond and how to cast that response and then weave your narrative around it and to see historical periods a bit differently than we have.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean, it's very important what you're saying. It reminds me I know it's quite an old text now, but it's hearable you said this idea of history from below versus history from above. You know, so often animals are spoken of as these historical objects without, as you say, kind of attending to how they might have experienced the event that we're talking about.
Heeral Chhabra:It's also to do with how the historian's understanding is also shaped about history and what constitutes as historically important, and I think that is where the change needs to come and it is coming, but it has to be more integrated into courses and other stuff.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Could you unpack more what you mean by that?
Heeral Chhabra:Yeah. So, for example, as historians, for the students of history, we have studied texts which deal with animals from ancient India up to the modern times, and we have looked at horses, we have looked at elephants in local India, we've looked at symbolism of animals. So this is nothing new for us in terms of the know-how of it. But the question then is that, with the animal turn coming in social sciences, how does that change the research questions that we begin with? And that has to do with, I think, two things. One is, of course, the content that you're studying, the research topic that you pick up and whatever your sources are, but also how the historian's mind is, you know, functioned accordingly. How is it tuned? What is taught?
Heeral Chhabra:So, for example, the idea of agency wherever I have presented, I think from 2017 onwards, there's a reluctance in the audience to imagine that animals can have agency, because that idea of animals are there for human consumption or at the disposal of human use or, you know, to be used as things. That is so, so ingrained in common parlance that even as scholars, it's difficult. So, so ingrained in common parlance that, even as scholars, it's difficult for us to imagine it in another way, let alone using it in your practice. But surely and steadily the change is coming in, because I think a lot of disciplines have now picked up animals and non-humans as a subject matter and I think everyone is breaking that epistemic ceiling, so to say that they're pushing that ceiling up and say, why not?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:you said there were. There were two aspects the animal agency is difficult to to account for, and the second one is the animal agency.
Heeral Chhabra:And what historians is trained with? The concept that which historians are trained with.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm with you. I'm with you, yes, and and I've definitely picked up on the same kind of reluctance, I think, both at conferences but also in, I think, writing that's emerged. You know maybe previous writing about animal histories, not just urban animal histories, but animal histories in general, where you'll have entire books, you know, that are focused on a specific species, but somehow the animal is still not really present in the text, which is rather remarkable. And for a long time I tried to think through what was nagging me about this, like why was I so irritated with this text? And it took a long time for me to realize exactly as you're saying because somehow they're being written about but they're not really being thought about in any sort of meaningful way in terms of the specificities of who, and by who I mean, which animals were there, doing what right?
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely, and even if we think you know a basic thing such as impact of animals that is how we generally describe the potency of agency. Do animals have agency in terms of ability to impact historical processes around them? And when we say they do, and you know, once you kind of reframe your understanding around the same text, you will have a different research question which will open up, you know, floodgates of different understanding.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, in one of your chapters which you contributed to a remarkable book that was done by Michael Glover, I think, talking about animals as experiencing entities, and he's obviously also written about these subjects in South Africa I thought it was really great how you looked at these military sales of animals and you applied, as you say, this different lens. You looked at this text so just for the listeners, in essence a hero looked at these different texts of animals being sold and what the colonial government wanted in terms of buying animals for transport. So this was mules, donkeys, camels, elephants, but they had pretty apt descriptions of what they wanted from these animals in terms of strength, in terms of their bodies, but they also seemed to include things like temperament and personality, which speaks a little bit to this agency right that you're talking about.
Heeral Chhabra:Yes, absolutely, because when you're dealing with animals they're alive beings, they are not property. They are much more than property. This is not to say that they're not property, they are treated that way. But are they only property, is my question. So when you kind of change your perspective to it, you just kind of have a different understanding of those animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:When I spoke to Pat Adams about his work on Pavlov's dogs as well, he said a similar thing. Right, scientists tend to write about these animals historically, but Pavlov's research assistants wrote about these animals as though they were objects of science. But somehow, because they're animate and because they're lively, and because they're subjects and agents, they couldn't help but also write explicitly about their personalities, whether they were shy or gregarious.
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely. And it's wonderful when you're reading the archival sources, and interesting because these archival sources are not animal-centric, obviously, they're human-centric. But you will somewhere just have one line or one quote or something coming up which will say look at the eyes of the elephant, they should be intelligent. So you're actually using that sense of animal's personality, of animal's being, of animal's living body to say whether or not the animal is important and that I think is absolutely crucial as a guest audience, to pick that up and see. But you know so you're not dealing with only properties, you're dealing with the live animals and that needs to be accounted for. And if they're alive they will respond. And can we capture that response?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and how do we represent that response? And when you entered the archives, did you find that street dogs were very pronounced in the archives?
Heeral Chhabra:Street dogs? Yes, in the sense that they are there in many departments, from legislative departments to judicial, to military, to municipal departments. So they're there everywhere. And that was my concern that even though they're there, why are they not accounted for? You know, so the presence is ubiquitous. But what do we do with that ubiquity? Are we able to kind of attend to it? Are we able to kind of utilize to it? Are we able to kind of utilize it? So it's not the lack of presence which has stopped historians from attending to them, it's something else, and I wanted to break that, something else that if they're there, they are historically relevant, they have been captured, the presence has been captured. So how do we make sense of that presence?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So how do we make sense of that presence, yeah, and I find I don't know if you'll agree with this but I find that people tend to then take these presences in two ways.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:They'll either try to pick a charismatic species who somehow has really made themselves known, right, you know, a cat who had a particular gregarious personality, who the author of a letter seemed to just really see and make, and they people who see those animals at that time historically make those animals present to us today. So we somehow find ourselves today writing about the specific stories of very specific individuals who become famous, right, whether it's a war horse, whether it's a cat on a, on a military ship, these animals end up having these specific animals and individuals end up having these specific animals and individuals end up having stories that we then try to use, I think, as being maybe a characteristic of all of that species at that time, which has some problems, I think, perhaps. But then, on the other hand, sometimes we tend to just group all of them together, as though all street dogs or all cows or all horses have the same uniform experience, because prying them apart when you just hear dog mentioned in the archive becomes really, really complicated, right?
Heeral Chhabra:Yeah, it is. That's the deal with animals historically that with focus on the so-called East, we tend to romanticize it also and see the explicitness or the exoticness of that thing it also and see the explicitness or, you know, the exoticness of that thing. And so my focus was to break that mold and say there are different animals present in close proximity. We need to look at them as well. And also my own experience of dogs and being with dogs all throughout was dogs are very distinct personalities. Some are mild, some are very, some are very pronounced, some are more docile, but they have their presence on the street. So has that presence been replicated or found in the archives, and do we have anything more to deal with it as historians?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So what was your main research question here? So you're interested in street dogs, you're looking at street dogs and you're trying to find them in the archives. What was your main goal in just making them presence as subjects, or was there a bigger question at play?
Heeral Chhabra:my research questions were a couple of them. One was that why do we behave towards street dogs the way we do in present times? Basically to trace our contemporary attitudes backwards. So begin with words such as why are they called a nuisance? Why are they problematic? Why are they? If they have been there for so many years all together, how come their presence is becoming problematic? Second was if they are problematic, how are we dealing with them? And killing? Killing them, which is actually illegal, but that was one of the ways which was resorted to very frequently and we heard reports of it in the newspapers and elsewhere Kerala.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Do you mean it's illegal today or it was illegal historically?
Heeral Chhabra:It's illegal. Today, it's illegal in India to pick up a street dog and kill the street dog or displace the street dog. This is illegal.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:By the state or by individuals?
Heeral Chhabra:individuals by the state, them by the state, by the individuals. You're not supposed to move the street dogs from their vicinity. You are not supposed to do that, so that's so. Killing is not a solution for so-called quote-unquote problem of street dogs, so that there are other ways which have been suggested. But we had reports growing up from Bangalore, from Kerala and from elsewhere that the street dogs were killed en masse and I was like how is this justified? And this is not only in India, this was elsewhere.
Heeral Chhabra:There is a tendency that whenever you have more number of animals, when the population becomes uncontrollable, one of the ways is shoot them, kill them or just eliminate them.
Heeral Chhabra:And this this, to me, was very problematic because this is blatant violence. Anybody who's lived with dogs will know that picking up a dog or killing killing anyone for that matter is an act of violence. But you know, how do we justify that violence? So that was my second concern, as to there is latent violence when it comes to dealing with street dogs. But how is it justified? And one of my concerns was also, like one of the forms that I was feeling as a kid, for putting down one of the dogs because the dog had very bad brain hemorrhage was, and you know they would have things such as destruction of dogs or something, terms like these and I was, like very disturbed by this idea of you know why do you have terms like destruction for animals, that the animal will be destroyed, it's not a thing to be destroyed, and that was very unnerving as someone who's been with animals all throughout. And so that was my second concern.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I just want to make sure that I've got everything correctly, because we're jumping a bit around here temporally. So today in India, it's illegal to kill dogs. The state and individuals are not permitted to kill dogs, although people do still kill dogs illicitly, but this is not sanctioned by the state. That said and I mean this applies to all animals that if they become problematic for whatever reason, their state as urban subjects is relatively precarious and sanctioned violence could be put against them pretty much at any moment, which is happening to dogs in Turkey at the moment. And historically you found in documents looking at street dogs killing of them was permitted historically and there would often be discourse like destruction. It was very, it wasn't, it wasn't just, it wasn't soft, it was like really ultimately categorically getting rid of these animals.
Heeral Chhabra:These are absolutely thick files in National Archives of India with the topic destruction of stray dogs as explicit, and these are thick files which give you ghastly, details of how it was done. Why it was done, and so this is a topic which is of importance to the colonial state. So you know why does this become important.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And it's important that you mention that this is part of the colonial states, and I know that that's a big part of your overall project because I came across similar concepts and words looking at, you know, cows and animals in Kingston, canada, which is, of course, also a colonial state underneath British control for a long time. So you start to see this type of language in a variety of places and cities. So do you think this is a distinctly british way of thinking about animals or a colonial way of thinking about animals?
Heeral Chhabra:I think this is definitely british way, definitely, but also colonial in the sense that it had borrowing across the colonial global network. I know non-humans have agency, so basically it's definitely the british ideas associated with it. But I also call it colonial in the sense because these are not only restricted to Britain, but these are shared across colonial metropoles, which is to say other metropoles, france, germany, elsewhere but also in their colonies. So these are ideas which have not restricted themselves to only one metropole and the respective colonies. No, they have transgressed into other areas as well, and when ideas like these float across spaces, they get reconfigured, they get reimagined, but they are also reinforced in various ways, so much so that the animal welfare discourse today also supports some of these ideas could you maybe unpack that a little bit for me?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:so how does the, how did the idea? So I guess I've got two questions from that. One is the kind of destruction and problematization of animals in these metropoles a distinctly urban phenomenon? So is that a distinctly urban phenomenon? And two, maybe you could give me an example of how this got reconfigured or subtly changed as the discourse and practice moved from Britain to India. Maybe you could give me something tangible to hold on to there.
Heeral Chhabra:This is, yes, this is distinctly urban, at least in the Indian case, historically, because whenever the colonial state is thinking of implementing whatever control measures they think are to be put for the dogs, they always say but how are we going to implement it? And if you're going to say if you're not implementing or someone is not following, you're going to punish them, you don't have that system enough to the people, to the justice, to the judicial courts and others. So this becomes highly urban in Indian context, also very much focused on the areas which are strongly controlled by the British, so Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta these are actually most of the places from where you get most of the files are relevant. There are also princely states that are following this, but that is something that I haven't looked at as yet.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, so there's like an uneven geography based on where British presence was. Okay, I'm with you.
Heeral Chhabra:Yeah, so control of street dogs is also very heavily urban in its practice. That is one also very heavily urban in its practice. That is one. Second is how does the idea get reconfigured? So let's say the term which we still use, something like humane, being humane to animals, and the term that get it gets attached to, is humane killing. And then it becomes problematic.
Heeral Chhabra:To be humane is to be more human, considerate, to be more conscious of how the other being is feeling, and to be humane is to be more human, considerate, to be more conscious of how the other being is feeling, and to be, you know, make sure that the other being is not suffering. That is being humane in a common parlance. But then I came across this term. It was humane killing, and then it was like how does killing become humane? And the idea, very simply speaking, is that you kill an animal if you can no longer help the animal and you know the animal is going to die, and the simple idea is simply kill the animal. Right, but these are, for this idea is all right or applicable to those animals who are injured or who are, you know, suffering.
Heeral Chhabra:But how does this get applied to street dogs who are healthy, happy, living in the vicinity. They've always lived in and going about their life, you know, in a comfortable zone. So this got applied and this became like a state tool to really justify mass killing of animals, and not one, two animals, these are animals in thousands. So in calcutta, in one of the years in early 20th century, you have almost 12 000 dogs being killed in one year. So these are not minor numbers, these are huge numbers, and so so my question was that how does killing become humane and what is colonial violence? Something is central to all of this thing. What kind of violence is then being, and why are healthy dogs being killed?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It makes me think of some of Krithika Srinivasan's work with biopolitics, right, yeah, Really interesting, how it's good for you that we kill you and as you say, you know, because as you were talking, we're like, how does killing become humane?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And whenever this question comes up and it comes up, you know death comes up a lot in this podcast, but you know, I often think in the human case there are people who would like to die and who we don't permit to die and there are, of course, worse and better ways to die. I think all of us would accept that there are better and worse ways to die and I think it's reasonable to assume that some animals who are in pain have better or worse ways to die. But an animal who displays absolutely a complete willingness to live, somehow reframing that it's in their best interests, that it's in their best interests to die, seems really twisted gobbled. I know you use the word gobbled often in your writing because it is. There is some gymnastics at play there to make it understandable that a healthy animal, it's in their best interests for their life to end. It's just odd.
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely. It's odd because what they're doing is they're making the very presence of the animal problematic. Once you do that, you are then in a position to say, well, your presence is not wanted anyways, so you're problematic. So once it's problematic, the solution is get rid of you. Either control you or get rid of you. And they tried both the methods control you or get rid of you. And they tried both the methods. And they because the dogs in India was specifically unowned and they did not have one so-called master or one owner, right. So this did not correspond well to the British idea of how you know dog human relations should be. And once it doesn't correspond to the ideas that you come up with, it becomes an anomaly. This seems to me like an unsuccessful example of problematization an anomaly.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This seems to me like an unsuccessful example of problematization though.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So it seems to me like the you know dogs would have been problematized in england as well, in british cities, in london they would have been problematized there too, because there were unowned dog, street dogs there historically as well, whereas today any, any dog who's not owned would very quickly be impounded, adopted. The idea of a dog not with the human is really subversive, I think, to many folks in European and North American cities. Right, but there would have been a time certainly was a time when there were street dogs, but it seems that they underwent if you permit me to use the word, like they underwent a successful form of problematization. They were problematized and this new and different and alternative way of conceiving of dogs was readily adopted by their populace. But now it seems that that was tried to be exported to metropoles in India, and while there was a lot of violence that was employed, today there are still loads and loads of street dogs. So it was in many ways an unsuccessful or much more protracted form of problematization, right.
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely, in the sense that and I talk about this in my research as well that the dog-free cities of the so-called Western countries, western Europe, america, is actually a created reality. This is not a given reality from the perspective of the dogs. The dogs have been there on the streets historically for a much, much longer time. Pet keeping, leashing, these are the new things, right so, but we are living in a time when this has become the normal, and it's a normal which is now desired to be replicated. What's happening is Turkey is not, you know, just out of the blue, the desire to replicate a sense of urban which is also very sanitized, controlled and regulated. That is the sense that is replicated, and in India it was also the case.
Heeral Chhabra:So in Britain, obviously, you've had very, very violent history through which dogs have been removed from the street, not only in Britain, but also in Parisis and new york and elsewhere.
Heeral Chhabra:Dogs were the norm, dogs on the street, and on those dogs on the street were the norm.
Heeral Chhabra:Now you have changed that reality and by changing that reality, you've also reconfigured the dog human relationship, in which the idea is that dogs need to have a home and, you know, a fixed home, that is to say that is the norm. A dog without a home is an anomaly, a dog on the street is an anomaly, right, so you've changed the normal for your own area. But when you bring that idea to the colony, the living reality is very different from the. You know the epistemic construct with which the colonial power is coming, and also fueled by the idea of rabies, because rabies care is something which has fueled the elimination of dogs in the Western world in a very, very strong way. So it is that fear which has pushed the dogs to the margins and also reconfigured their roles in society. So they're not longer. You know they're now bred according to the looks. And you know they're now bred according to the looks, and you know the breed and all of these things and not according to the usability per se.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think this is so, so important because I mean, we've spoken about dogs throughout the season and I think this really helps to kind of contextualize, because kind of the tension of street dog versus domestic or pet dog has come up time and time again, and I think to recognize that these are different kind of societal positions or standings for dogs is really significant, Because in Indian cities you do have pet dogs and street dogs and guard dogs and there are numerous types of dogs who are engaged in a variety of relationships.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right and historically, in many of the cities you spoke about, you also had laboring dogs. You had dogs that pulled wagons and carriages, that carried milk. You know, people would maybe be surprised to learn that dogs operated in many ways the same ways as donkeys do in many cities today. They were used for kinetic power and they were literally sled dogs like you think of. In colder climates they were sledding in cities. So it's really quite fascinating how this one story of dogs, this one human-dog interaction, has become hegemonic, in effect has become a really dominant narrative of the way in which dogs should be in the world.
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely, and this is something. And the thing is that this has become something which needs to be, you know, followed by the others. So, even though in the global South, in various areas you will still have persistence of street dogs and mostly they're community dogs, which are, because dogs will not survive on the street without having a very strong relationship with the area that they're living in there has to be things which sustain them so that relationship is there, so there is an ecosystem which sort of supports their presence there. So the question then I was concerned with is the dogs. I mean, despite all these measures to literally kill them and get rid of them, and with colonial power, you know, putting all their might into it, the dogs have still not only survived but thrived. So what is it, you know, what is the distinctness there? What is the distinctness of presence of street dogs in colonial India?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Really interesting. Did you just as a matter of interest in doing this work, did you rely only on archival material and resources to kind of make these observations, or did you also engage in some ethnography yourself, where you sat and you watched and you try to make sense of your historical documents, but also looking at contemporary human-dog relations today?
Heeral Chhabra:It was at the back of it. It was both because I had a very strong experience of my own supporting the dogs, dealing with the state machinery of independent India, dealing with vets, dealing with rescues, dealing with NGOs and whatnot. So that experience was already there, that if a dog has got hurt, or if the dog is captured or picked up by the MCD, what do you do? Where do you go? Which officials, which doctor, so all that. You know how to navigate the practicalities. So I had one. That experience was there with me.
Heeral Chhabra:But when, as a historian, I was looking into it and I was fascinated by the fact that a lot of vocabulary that we use today is actually derived from the colonial past. So these are actually the carryovers that we have. So my interest then as a historian was to look at why we behave with dogs the way we do. And you, you know where are these things, where are these ideas coming from? Why do you need a shelter for the dog? Or, you know, where do you? What do you do with the dog? Why do you put down a dog if the dog is not single, so humane, killing that way? Why do you euthanize? What do you do?
Heeral Chhabra:Because one of the dogs that I was taking care of actually got infected with rabies, and to go through that entire journey of you know getting a dog you know raised, yourself to see the symptoms, to maintain that protocol, to get that dog to a place where that dog can be put down. And so there was. There was both these things which kind of played their part in my research, but I, I was also very, very concerned about that. This through you know, through history as a discipline. How do we make sense of this? How do we account for this? And, because this is not merely social history of animals per se, to locate animals I'm also trying to look at did animals have agency? Did dogs have the power to navigate through these changes which are happening to them? Did they have impact?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Or, even better yet, how did they have? Because I think it's almost safe to say that they have agency right. Enough work has been done today. Use some logic and your brain and look at animals around you and just accept that they are agents. I think historical questions and findings become a lot more interesting when you start to say, well, how did animals exert their desires? How did animals resist the colonial state? How did animals adopt practices that some might have adopted more easily than others? Right, why the ready adoption of policies in Britain and not in Indian cities? These are really fascinating questions. When you start to say, well, dogs would have played a role in this in some shape or form.
Heeral Chhabra:And then the quest as a historian, can I find those things in the archives? So my work actually initially during my PhD and still is heavily relied on the colonial official archives. So these are the initially during my PhD and still is heavily relied on the colonial official archives. So these are the primary sources that I've used. It's only now that I've started looking at the other side of the story, which is to see the popular medium in which, through newspapers and magazines and articles oh, it's so fun.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Newspapers are ridiculously fun to look at Absolutely.
Heeral Chhabra:I mean, it's the kind of variations that you have and the kind of arguments that you get are just fascinating. And to see, you know both sides of the opinion, whether dogs are a nuisance, or dogs are precious to our society, or, you know, disturbing the religious sentiments, or the cruelty or the blatantness of it, or the noise someone's barking and it's not letting me sleep, or one person even raising the thing that with india after 1857 you have the queen's proclamation and they said that there has to be no safety of the subjects of the empire and therefore the you know, human concern and also animal concerns have to be taken care of. So the variety of the arguments that people have picked up to justify whatever their stand has been is not good.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, I've got to say I'm so enjoying this because I wish I'd stumbled upon your work sooner, because I've done something very similar to you although I'm not a historian in terms of looking at the history of cows in a city in which they're very invisible. So, whereas you're looking at the history of an animal who's very visible today, I was looking at the history of an animal who's decidedly invisible. So a successful, successful problematization event. And, like you, I relied on human-made and municipal documents, because I think something needs to be said for how they are made subjects in urban documents, in municipal documents. They are there and these laws impact their lives today and historically.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And yeah, you mentioned the pound just now and I almost wanted to be like well, you know, pounds were originally kind of set up not to control dogs. This is a modern conception of pounds. Pounds were originally to control roaming livestock that were not as readily and of course this is not necessarily the case everywhere but cows and pigs and goats and sheep that had ideas of their own were regularly rounded up by fellow citizens and by pound keepers. Pound keepers' first jobs were to get roaming cows and make sure that they were in pens in Canada controlling one set of species or category of animals, to then moving today to thinking about things like the Humane Society, which is primarily concerned with dogs, cats, animals that are in the home right.
Heeral Chhabra:In India you have the pinjapoles, which is that for laboring animals. Basically they started like that in the sense animal who is supposed to work but is not able to work anymore. You can't put down the animal. So where do you do have a pin drop hole where you put the animal? Now the whole thing of you know whether the animal is taken care of, who's the owner, who's not the owner. If someone wants to take the animal back, who's paying for the animal? Who's not paying for the animal? If someone is paying, where is this payment going to all of these concerns? But the thing is that what started as a place where you could just house animals which are no longer useful, you know, transformed into areas which were not very pleasant for the animals to stay in. They were often a death sentence. So that has to be kept in mind, that, even as animals, as laboring bodies, what do you do with bodies who are no longer able?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:to work. Yeah, no, yamini and ariana's book really unpacks this in Mother Kama, the India, just as a plug, is remarkable in terms of unpacking the evolution of these spaces, how they've become dairy spaces in the city that are really problematic for the animals involved. They're somehow, the animals are somehow both godlike but also not seen in terms of what their material realities are, which is quite, quite interesting. And, yeah, tracking back the history of that, I think going into the archives and looking at those documents and your focus on colonial documents would be really interesting, like how did the colonial states impact the establishments of these types of spaces and places? Or?
Heeral Chhabra:did it Absolutely, because my concern primarily was if they're so marginal, if street dogs are so marginal to colonial concern, why do you have laws governing them? Why do you have files you know literally big files telling them how to regulate them or how to control them? So definitely they're files. You know literally big files telling them how to regulate them or how to control them. So definitely they're not the marginal right. They're portrayed as marginal, but they're not, and you know. So what? So how do they become important and why are they important or why are they significant? And it is there that, once you start unpacking that, what is the meaning of an animal which is not liked by the colonial state at all, whose presence is problematic? And you know what is making the presence problematic. That has to be unpacked.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:The interesting thing of animals and cities and histories is just, I mean, it really is just layer upon layer of where cities are built, the killing of wolves and wild animals to establish even those cities, the evacuation of some animals and the keeping of other animals, the introduction of some animals, the exclusion of other animals. Some of the first bylaws in Canada were related to the control of animals. Really, it had more to do with controlling animal populations than human populations and of course, at that time in history those distinctions were quite different than what they are today. Who is considered animal, who is considered human? Of course, there are deeply racialized and traumatic dehumanization, and animalization were used in very specific ways by the British Empire.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right, yeah, remarkable and really interesting work. And we're 40 minutes in and I think I have to ask this question now how does this kind of you know these urban health? And we haven't really spoken explicitly about health. Right, we've spoken about urban animal histories here. Why would looking at these urban animal histories kind of help us think about multi-species health? Why is this important to kind of thinking through multi-species health? Why is this important to kind of thinking through multi-species health?
Heeral Chhabra:Precisely because the idea of health species this cannot be seen in isolation. The health of one is intrinsically linked to the health of the other, and I think one disease in this sense is rabies, which is really dead in India. It's still there. I mean, as a child growing up, I've seen dogs die of rabies, so it's very much a reality. But how do you tackle this reality? And once you think of that, I think you need to take into account all the stakeholders which are there in the system. And if you're looking at dogs or other animals, it's important to also account for their health, because they're also victim of the disease. They're not the perpetrators, they're not the ones responsible for spreading it, they're also the one on the receiving end of the disease. So once you change your lens to that perspective, I think it's important, because everything is interlinked, but to see those interlinkages and to see that you need to.
Heeral Chhabra:So elimination is not a solution when it comes to health concerns and animals and zoonotics. Elimination of one thing doesn't really solve the problem. You have to look at it in its entirety. And historically that needs to be done Because if we look at the way rabies was stamped out in Britain or elsewhere. It was also done vis-a-vis redefining animal-human relationships, otherwise things wouldn't have happened. But how do you implement the same things in colonies with the same disease in mind, where the lived reality is very different from that of the metropole? And once you keep in mind that, I think the lens has to also change.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Are you meaning there the kind of petification of dogs that, like the story of making dogs pets, was an incredible, like an insignificant part of removing rabies from those contexts? Is that what you mean?
Heeral Chhabra:Yes, in Britain rabies is off from the scene by 1902-1903, quite quite literally. And the reasons behind them was many. One is, of course, keeping animals as pets, but there's also a very, very pointed and very, very strong movement against getting rid of the street dogs in Britain and that was done by a couple of measures. One was taxing the dogs. Where you get down to the numbers of the owners are more responsible. The other is muzzling of the dogs and one is elimination of the dogs. But all these things have gone together, reimagining how a dog should be in these spaces, eliminating them, controlling them, with vaccinations coming in and other things. So all of these things together make that 1902-1903 reality possible. But to imagine that replication to a different setup where the lived reality or the animal-human relationship is very varied becomes a problem. And I think that is where we also have evidence that the colonial state imagined certain relationships to be like in England but they weren't. And it is where you locate animal agency in dealing with you know the historical pressures that have been put on them for their elimination. Could you tell me a little bit more what you mean? So basically, like in Britain, in India also the colonial state was keen to get rid of rabies and, interestingly, scholars have pointed out ever again that the fear of rabies was more than the actual impact of rabies.
Heeral Chhabra:So when the British colonial state was keen to get rid of rabies in India, the one thing that they wanted to do was get rid of the street dogs. And they explicitly say so, that these are the ones who spread diseases, they are the ones who are diseased, they are the ones who are infected and they need to be eliminated. And then they come up with the idea of what to do with them, and one of the ideas, which was also heavily contested in Britain but also applied, was muzzling of the dogs. To cut a long story short, they put up the idea that we want to implement this thing and various officers responded, those who had to carry this out, and they just said this cannot be done.
Heeral Chhabra:Officers in India, in India, the officers in India, and they just said, sorry, it cannot be done. And when you look at the responses of why it can't be done, it's precisely the animal-human relationships which are very peculiar to India. It's precisely the animal-human relationships which are very peculiar to India. It's also dogs, how they associate themselves with various houses or localities or the ecosystems that they're part of, those things become important. So you have a measure which was supposed to be implemented but was not implemented in India because the way the dogs live in India. So it's interesting to see that a measure which was applied to many places across the colonial global metropole, which is the muzzling of the dogs, was not implemented here.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And once you look at the reasons why it's interesting to see dogs in their environment, their specificities, Is this also because, so, like you said, I'm guessing that in Britain for example, but of course the other metropoles you mentioned you had already very distinct kind of street dogs and pet dogs. So there'd be these two very distinct categories of dogs and there was a lot of status attached to pet dogs. Right, I know that breeding became increasingly important, so it was a very much a class status driven thing as well that pet dogs were better than street dogs. So it was easy to kind of say let's muzzle pet dogs and keep them in the home but kill street dogs. But I'm listening to you now. I'm assuming that pet keeping or the pet keeping of dogs wasn't widespread. It was a much more loose connection with dogs, where dogs would move between different homes and families. So it wasn't an individual person, human, and it wasn't a specific family's responsibility to muzzle, because that wasn't how dogs and humans interacted there.
Heeral Chhabra:Yeah, absolutely, in the sense that the pet keeping that happens in Britain and elsewhere is also to do a lot with the class identity that that is shaping up. It's also to do with how urban spaces are being imagined. It's also to do with getting rid of anything which is uncontrollable, whether human or animal, on the street and elsewhere. Those relationships have to be broken in order for pet keeping to be a successful sort of a plan and the paraphernalia that gets attached to it the, the kennel clubs, the dog clubs, the food and everything. I mean.
Heeral Chhabra:A lot of scholars have written a lot about it so that kind of thing obviously doesn't take off. In india you do have kennel clubs and others, but these are very, very british and urban and elite sort of undertakings that are there. But again, coming to the, the everyday interaction of the dogs with the people, that the epistemic construct with which the colonial metropolis coming, or the colonial actors are implementing the colonial policies, when they are under attack, when they are misfit with the living realities of the, the colonized spaces, that is where you have the discrepancies coming in and that is where you have modification of laws or modification of rules or modification of orders coming in. And once you look at why these modifications are happening, or why certain things are successful and certain things are not successful, these are often animal-centric in its nature, not exclusively animal-centric, but to a great extent animal-centric as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Do you think that there would be? Because rabies is still in India and because there are increasing drives to have a smart, modern, clean city? You know the export of this idea. It's been readily taken up in a variety of metrics. It's, you know, world cities, global cities, and India is, of course, part of that right. India is driven to have a particular kind of urban presence. Do you think, even though dogs today are not permitted to be killed, as we said at the beginning, this is relatively precarious. Do you think that what we see happening in Turkey today, do you think that that would be based on what your understanding of dog's history and what's happening now in this country? Would you imagine that that's possible or plausible to achieve these goals today versus India before?
Heeral Chhabra:Could you rephrase as in can mass killing of dogs be?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Do you see the state employing these tactics today? So you said what made it successful in Britain was the kind of killing of dogs, the muzzling of dogs and to some extent, the petsification of them, and I think increasing people are keeping dogs as pets. So this tactic might work in India today. Do you think it's likely that the country would employ the kind of mass killings of dogs once again to achieve this kind of smart, modern city objective?
Heeral Chhabra:I think this is a very burning debate in India right now, where it has reached the Supreme Court as well. So these are ongoing cases as to there is a substantial population who supports street dogs as community dogs, who feeds them regularly and who take care of them. But there's also this pressure from various angles where you see dogs as unwanted in the city, especially with coming up of gated communities. We feel that pressure with also video circulating of dogs attacking children, playing or elderlies, and these are not only street dogs, these are cases of dog bites as well. So this is a very complex thing happening where dog bites, rabies, presence of street dogs these are individual things also, but these also get together to, you know, portray straight dogs in a very, very dangerous sort of an opinion, and these are cases which have reached the supreme courts and it's the there is, there is a lot of polarization, so to say, last couple of months. I mean, I think our project also looks at different public opinion and you know, in social spheres how have opinions been shaped or what kind of, you know, publicity being used from both the sides, to put it.
Heeral Chhabra:But the thing I mean historically indian state has been, or indian law has been actually very different in the sense has been or Indian law has been actually very different in the sense they actually recognize the territoriality of dogs.
Heeral Chhabra:So, with the law saying that you cannot pick up a dog from its vicinity just randomly and kill the dog, or if you're picking, the only reason that you can pick up a dog from a street is for the ABC program, which is animal birth control.
Heeral Chhabra:So you're going to pick up the dog, you are going to operate the dog, but it's the responsibility of the municipality to put the dog back in the same vicinity. You're recognizing the territoriality of the animal. What happens on the ground is another reality, but at least legally, you're supposed to put the animal back to the place that the dog belongs to. You are technically recognizing a territoriality of the animal, saying that the animal has the right to the street to which it belongs, which is, I think, a huge difference and a huge different approach from other states, and this is important. Some would see it as a problem, but other would. I mean, this is an ongoing debate as to and I don't want to enter into that, but I think, as a historian, I would want to say that mass culling of animals or street dogs has never worked. We need to look at the reason why it hasn't worked, and that reason lies in the integration of dogs in the social, cultural milieu to which they belong.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and of course this applies to numerous species right where extermination campaigns have been leveled against, whether it's rats or coyotes in North America now are being subject to a whole host of different, and it's always interesting how the same kind of discursive moves are used to vilify these animals, and I think health is a particularly powerful motivator for killing and hurting animals, or justification at least. And then also, somehow children are often mobilized as these kind of ultimate victims that if a child falls prey to a dog bite or a coyote attack or, of course, devastating, but they're used to really amplify. I think those incidents are used to amplify an underlying anxiety that's been bubbling for some time. Yeah, so really, really interesting work. Thank you so much, kiral, for helping me and think through these ideas a little bit more. Do you have a? I know you've got a quote ready for us that relates a little bit more to your work. Right, it's one of your own observations.
Heeral Chhabra:Yeah, this is a quote from basically one of the archival files that I used and I think this sort of captures the essence of the difference between the living realities of street dogs in India. And this is an observation by a government official in Punjab and he says the following what year, when are we? This is August 1900, Punjab. All right, so here the court says, speaking generally, natives of India as a rule do not individually own dogs. There are, in villages and bazaars, dogs which generally attach themselves to certain batches of houses and go around to them at mealtimes and receive the remains of the males. They are possibly recognized by the owner of the house as an adjunct and they will feed them if they appear. But it is the dog who comes and attaches himself to the houses and not the owner who takes the dogs and keeps it. In very few, if in any case, does a native keep a dog in the way a European does.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That speaks exactly to what you were saying a moment ago.
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely. You have to see that the movement of the animal is very central to the life of the animal and the relationship it builds. Animal is very central to the life of the animal and the relationship it builds. So the existing dog-human relationship in colonial India was very, very different from the imagined reality that the colonial officials have and the epistemic constructs thereof with which they want to frame the policies. But you have a clash between these and this is, I think, important to realize, and I think it's also so beautiful.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Again, it's something that I've brought up on the show before, but the idea that an animal chooses you, chooses to interact with you, relate with you, and that they're able to make decisions about when and how they interact with you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And you know, of course we've all had these kinds of moments with animals, where we've walked on the streets and a cat has approached us or a dog has approached us. Sometimes you don't have food, you don't have anything. They've just decided to be social and interactive with you for whatever reason. They have Right, and I know very few people that are not absolutely delighted that they were chosen, that they were chosen to be in that interaction for whatever reason. And that's markedly different to going to a pet store picking from a litter of eight puppies who have no choice in the matter whatsoever, what their life chances would be, where they will go, and it's a very, very. Of course there's a lot of joy in these interactions down the road, but the the choice, the autonomy of these is very, very different absolutely, and this autonomy is central to the way the animals live.
Heeral Chhabra:This is not to romanticize their lives.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:These are rough lives, these are also lives full of struggle, but at the end of the day, they do have the choice and they do exercise that choice and that freedom of being is very, very important to them I mean it's important to us right freedom, freedom of choice, is something we have fought for and I think it's important to any animal when you see them migrate, when you see them move, when you know choosing to go left or right is a choice, and I think it's. I'm not philosophical enough to know what the right words are here, but it's kind of like an affirming of being. When you get to choose to do something and see that through, you know, whether coyote or elephant or cow or dog, there's something to be said for your choices mattering right.
Heeral Chhabra:These animals don't take disrespect. You shoot them once, they will not come to you again. It's their choice. There is a response to every action that you treat them with. So these are animals who have exercised this choice historically and who, with their presence and their absence both things have actually manoeuvred quite a lot historically, and that needs to be captured.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, and of course we also have to be generous in the extent that human responses to these situations and animal responses. So when there is, I know that there's increasing politicisation about leopards in cities in India as well, right, leopards kill a lot of dogs. Street dogs are easy for them. There are higher populations of leopards in cities in India as well. Right, leopards kill a lot of dogs Street dogs are easy for them. There are higher populations of leopards in cities. Now People are afraid, understandably, of leopards and there's a lot of violence directed at a lot of wild animals like leopards and elephants, because they destroy property, et cetera, et cetera. But it's often people who are already marginalized who are bearing the brunt of these interactions. So, to try and be generous sometimes to people's responses, but also, why is it that leopards are hunting in cities? Why is it that elephants are moving through cities? They are responding to pressures in their environments, right?
Heeral Chhabra:Absolutely. And these pressures have to be uncovered, the relationship which is making them behave in a certain way which may or may not be normal. So, as a historian, as historians, I think we need to interrogate the ways that human actions or human historical processes, how have they impacted the animals around them and how have animals also responded to them? So it is one thing to say that some species have been mass-cut, but it's another thing to say does that species survive? If yes, why? If not, why? And I think that has to be interrogated as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Fascinating work. So are you still continuing to work on this now with raw indies, and what else do you have in the pipeline?
Heeral Chhabra:So we basically have a conference, hopefully next year, exclusively on dogs and history. So basically, yeah, so because we often talk about colonial India and the changes coming in with colonial state to look at the contemporary, but anytime anyone asks us what happens in pre-colonial India or you know the ancient histories or the medieval histories and other periods, and then we're like, OK, we're not that aware. So I think we have a conference coming up, hopefully mid next year We'll be soon coming up with Call for Papers which is on dogs and Indian history. And how do we understand that? And we just concluded one conference right now on streets, animals and health. One was done last year through the history package and I think a little more blog entries would come up and very much part of the roh indies project currently and I think it goes in for next year as well well, it's a great project and I'm very delighted to have had you on the show and I hope your first podcast experience was a good one.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But thank you, thank you so much for for joining me today no, thank you so much.
Heeral Chhabra:It has been such a delightful experience and thank you for making me feel so comfortable and welcome.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you so much hi priya, welcome back to the animal highlight. I'm very excited to hear what's on the cards for us today.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Hi Claudia, thank you again for having me today. So today I will be talking about a dog named Chintu. So Chintu is a street dog who lived in a city in northern India and while I never met her myself, I know her story because she shaped the development of animal welfare practices in the city that she lived in. Chintu, and her story is an example of how animals form part of urban health histories. I heard about Chintu from members of a small volunteer group that takes care of several street dogs in their city. The group undertakes everyday feeding, rescues, sterilizations and adoptions of street dogs. The volunteer group is made up of city residents from diverse backgrounds, including college students, corporate employees, shop workers, housewives and business owners. These seemingly unconnected people were brought together by Chintu when she got injured in a car accident one day.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :At the time of the accident, Chintu lived with her mother and siblings near the south gate of a local college in the city. These dogs were looked after by an old, disabled woman known to her well-wishers as Budhi Amma, that literally translates to old mother. Budhi Amma was previously homeless, but now lived inside a small guard booth that was donated to her by the college. One day, while playing on the street near the guard booth where Budhiyama lived, Chintu was hit by a speeding car. Budhiyama told about the incident to Bhavna, one of Chintu's regular feeders. Bhavna in turn called a local animal welfare NGO who advised her to take Chintu to the government veterinary hospital. Chintu was given medicines at the hospital, but neither the hospital nor the NGO had the space to give her the round-the-clock attention that she needed. So Bhavna asked Kanika, a woman who runs a local retail shop and who was active in taking care of other neighborhood dogs, that if she could take care of Chintu, Kanika agreed Soon.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Other people inspired by Chintu's will to live joined in her care. Dhiraj, Shweta and Ekta, who also looked after street dogs in the neighborhood, joined Bhavna and Kanika in looking after Chintu. This informal collection of people was enthused and motivated by the affection they received from Chintu. Ekta recounted that everyone was struck by Chintu's fiery personality. Deepak said Chintu's fighting spirit was an inspiration. Even when Chintu lost an eye and could no longer walk in a straight line, she remained active and playful. Through caring for Chintu, the group of volunteers learned to work with each other as a team and bonded over their shared experiences of looking after their neighborhood dogs. Unfortunately, after months of battling some severe medical complications and despite the consistent efforts of the group, Chintu passed away, but her memory lives on. It has been four years since Chintu passed away, but the group is still in contact with each other.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Chintu's former carers now work together to help street dogs in their neighbourhood.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :They formed a support group called Friends of Street Dogs to help others in the city who want advice on how to do the same.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :They often meet to help when they are informed of cases regarding dogs and other street animals being sick, injured or abused. They have also organized annual trap, neuter and release programs for dogs in their neighborhoods with the support from local people, municipal corporations and NGOs. When I met them in early 2024, the group had new volunteers and they were organizing an event to raise awareness about the issues that street dogs face in their city. In my conversations with the group members, Chintu was an ever-present participant. Chintu and her story is often told in raising awareness about their organization and about the issues that street dogs face in the city. Her story tells us a great deal about the human-street dog relations and the numerous health issues dogs face, such as being run over and inadequate multi-species health care available to them. It also points to the potential of more diverse readings of multi-species health that has the capacity to bring people together with a shared vision of helping animals with whom we share our everyday spaces and places.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Really nice. Yeah, I think it's so important because often I think when we think about urban animal histories or just animal history in particular, we tend to have these, um kind of special individuals in mind. Right, so we've spoken about the brown dog affair on the show before, which was a, you know, a dog who died in an experiment and prompted these two women, who were kind of posing as veterinary students, to kind of raise flags about the ethics of how vixenies were being conducted. And Virginia spoke about it on a previous Animal Highlight. And the brown dog affair is really famous as kind of like this historical example of how dogs are part of history. But you've also got these more localized histories. You've got histories where specific dogs have, by virtue of being who they are or what happened to them or how they responded to a situation, prompted people to behave differently. Like what an incredible story of a community of people forming a network and ripple effects of the relationships with Chintu to creating different kinds of responses to street dogs but also human-dog interactions.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Really, really interesting street dogs, but also human dog interactions, really, really interesting. Yeah, no, definitely.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :As you also mentioned, they're like all of these dogs we don't hear about but, they all also have so many relationships with people that they share their everyday spaces with and, yeah, they are active beings like who are lively, and they create bonds and they demand affection and attention from these people who are in their space and they occupy, like similar spaces with others. Even in cities there are so many dogs whose names we might not know, but they do have names and they do have personalities and, yeah, lots of people do have names and they do have personalities and, yeah, lots of people do have relationships with them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's a fascinating tension of history like whose stories get to be told, because so often it's the stories of the famous, but how do you tell the stories of the ordinary or the nameless or the forgotten or the unnamed right? And those are stories. They have shaped history, they have materially shaped the city and interactions that come. So it's not to say that Chintu has made as an individual, clearly made specific ripples with a specific group. But street dogs in general have an urban history, have a story that's often untold or incidental and kind of mainstream historical stories about the development of cities. But actually street dogs have been pretty pertinent to the development and the changes and the responses of cities to things like disease management, for example.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know, during some of my work on urban animal histories it's really interesting to think about waste management in cities and how dogs were similar to pigs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know they were scavengers. They're urban scavengers that are also responsible for a lot of urban waste management and a lot of the ways in which waste is managed in North American cities today was in response to stopping animals from gaining access to waste, which is interesting because this was actually part of the kind of urban ecology of the time and in this pursuit of creating a sanitized city, you change the kind of layout and the functioning of cities, and this is part of dogs and pigs stories in cities as well, right, yeah, definitely so, as you mentioned, yeah, there are important aspects or important agents who have shaped histories and especially, like, if we think about cities I was just thinking about what Hiral Chhabra also in the episode, talked about how management of dogs and their control in the cities has also shaped, how these urban policies have shaped how cities are experienced now and how dogs might be considered in place or out of place in cities through these discursive elements like public health or diseases.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :That's usually, I think, an important aspect through which their role in shaping the narratives of, or historical narratives of, our everyday, present, contemporary spaces and places could be understood. But there have been other histories, like in the case of Chintu. There have been more positive relationships that have also shaped how people have historically understood their relationship with these dogs. And often, yeah, when we talk about, like more institutional histories of, for example, dog management, then these everyday histories or localized histories of people's relationships with these dogs and their experiences with these dogs that might come into conflict with those other, more institutionalized or formal histories, those this is, this tension is very important, I think think about because both conflict and coexistence or, if you want to say, like antagonism and intimacies, shape our relationship with other non-human animals, and both of these relationships, like yeah, historically have shaped how we respond to the others.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think you're exactly right and sorry, like whenever we speak about street dogs, which is obviously quite often, I keep wanting to take us back to cities, because I hear street dogs and I think of urban dogs, but of course street dogs also in, and you're quite concerned with urban dogs. I mean urban dogs, street dogs in rural areas, and how this has not only shaped the landscapes of cities but the landscapes of rural regions, whose stories are often told right. Histories tend to be told. It's not only that specific individual's stories often get told, but specific spatial stories often only get told right the history of Paris, the history of London, what is the history of, you know, a small village in some place?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Some way I'm being purposefully abstract here, but the point being, there are many histories that are not told but that are passed down through word of mouth, through kind of forming networks, forming stories, forming networks, forming societies. These stories get passed down and, like you say, will have the potential to shape these relationships in positive ways, which is an important point. Well, thank you so much. A really great kind of, I think, connection there between humans, animals, history and potentially better futures. So, thank you, thank you so much, priya, for your work.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Thank you so much for having me again.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you so much, Tahira El-Chhabra, for being an incredible guest. I so enjoyed talking to you. Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple for sponsoring this podcast, as well as the Remaking One Health Indies project for sponsoring this season. Once again, a huge thank you to Gordon Clark for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work and to Priyashini Thakliel for the animal highlight. This episode was produced and edited by myself. This is the Animal Turn with me. Visit iRulePodcom.
Heeral Chhabra:That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
People on this episode
Podcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
The Animal Highlight
Claudia Hirtenfelder
Knowing Animals
Josh Milburn
Species Unite
Species Unite
The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell
Marika S. Bell
The Other Animals
Laurent Levy
Beyond Species
Beyond Species
The Anthrozoology Podcast
Anthrozoology Podcast
Freedom of Species
The Freedom of Species Team
Our Hen House: Vegan & Animal Rights Movement | Stories from the Frontlines of Animal Liberation
Jasmin Singer and Mariann Sullivan
Derecho y Animales
Derecho y Animales
Storytelling Animals
Dayton Martindale
Species
mackenmurphy.org
Animal Law Matters
K & R Animal Law
The Humanimal Connection
Humanimal Trust
The Animal That Changed You
Katya Lidsky
Think Like a Vegan
Emilia Leese
The Shifting Lens: Viewing the Animal Experience
Tiamat Warda Rebecca Madrid
The Salmon People
Canada's National Observer
Comme un poisson dans l'eau
Victor Duran-Le Peuch