Postdoctoral Fellowship: "Dangerous" Dogs and the Fuzzy Sciences of Animal Profiling

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The moral and social qualities attributed to animals often draw on animal sciences; these attributions, in turn shape the interactions that humans, including scientists, have with them. Given the important role that animals play in contemporary life, and the high stakes debates that exist over their treatment in sciences and other settings, understanding how moral attributions about animals come to be made is critically important. Yet most research studies on this topic treat science, social qualities, and ethical sources of these moral attributions separately, rather than investigating how they are shaped and are shaped by the intersection of scientific, ethical and social concerns. This research study fills this gap by examining how some members of a species with considerable popular interest and long a subject of scientific investigation, the dog, come to be labeled as dangerous. One of the key advances that this research makes is the concept of "fuzzy science," or science that is fungible and used by varied actors to make moral and ethical claims that intersect with racialized and gendered attributions of animal behavior and motivation. Major research methods are participant observation, analysis of scientific and other documents, and interviews. Theoretically, the research provides new tools for understanding how the wide range of sciences and scientific practices - both formal and informal - involved in social and ethical conflicts about animals shape and are shaped by social factors, and in doing so, contributes to the fields of science and technology studies, animal studies, and critical race and gender studies. More broadly, this research provides new knowledge to a wide range of users about the ethical, scientific, and social basis of attributions of danger and safety to particular kinds of animals. This knowledge can be used by scientists, zoos, animal shelters, and publics. Findings are disseminated in a book addressed to an interdisciplinary and popular audience, in a course disseminated to teachers, via a podcast for public radio, through popular press articles and via workshops at the UC Berkeley Science, Technology, and Society Center.