From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion

by Andrei S. Markovits, Katherine Crosby

Overview

In the wake of the considerable cultural changes and social shifts that the United States and all advanced industrial democracies have experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s, social discourse around the disempowered has changed in demonstrable ways. In From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion, Andrei Markovits and Katherine Crosby describe a “discourse of compassion” that actually alters the way we treat persons and ideas once scorned by the social mainstream. This “culture turn” has also affected our treatment of animals inaugurating an accompanying “animal turn”. In the case of dogs, this shift has increasingly transformed the discursive category of the animal from human companion to human family member. One of the new institutions created by this attitudinal and behavioral change towards dogs has been the breed specific canine rescue organization, examples of which have arisen all over the United States beginning in the early 1980s and massively proliferating in the 1990s and subsequent years.  While the growing scholarship on the changed dimension of the human-animal relationship attests to its social, political, moral and intellectual salience to our contemporary world, the work presented in Markovits and Crosby’s book constitutes the first academic research on the particularly important institution of breed specific dog rescue.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472072460
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	09/15/2014
Pages:	362
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies as well as an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Katherine N. Crosby, a 2011 graduate of the University of Michigan, is completing her doctorate in the Department of History, University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 What Is Breed Rescue? 35

2 The Overwhelming Predominance of Women in the World of Dog Rescue: The State of Michigan as a Representative Case Study Enhanced by Relevant Interview Data from Rescuers Elsewhere 64

3 The Topography of Breed Specific Dog Registrations from 1960 to 2009: An Important Contextual Framework for Rescue 80

4 The History of Golden Retriever Rescue as a Case Study of Breed Specific Rescue 107

5 Regionalism in the Breed Rescue World 155

6 Rescue Groups and External Relationships 175

7 Communication, Networking, and Sustenance 203

8 The Golden/Labrador Retriever Comparison 239

9 The Unique Case of Greyhound Rescue 259

10 Changing Discourse of Compassion within Breed Specific Rescue in the United States: "Good" Breeds versus "Bad" Breeds The Case of Pit Bulls 276

Conclusion 297

Appendix A Data from Our Survey of Michigan Rescues 307

Appendix B Breed Specific Canine Rescue Survey 311

Appendix C Interview Questionnaire 329

Appendix D Interview Subjects 333

Index 337