Simple Summary: The Earth is under increasing pressure from the burgeoning global human population and the subsequent rise in demand for food and a myriad of other finite resources. Mitigating the environmental, societal and ecological impact of the human footprint requires understanding the long-term relationships between our species and the plants and animals we now rely upon. In addition, the modern scientific approach often conceives of, and addresses individual problems through narrow windows that can fail to take into account the connectedness of multiple problems. By broadening the scope of inquiry to include both science and humanities perspectives, and simultaneously focussing on a single species, we suggest that many of the United Nations Strategic Development Goals (SDGs) can be addressed more effectively. In this paper, we describe Animals 2020, 10, 502 2 of 18 how a comprehensive assessment of the long-term relationship between humans and dogs can yield insights, and offer ways in which modern global challenges can be tackled. Abstract:No other animal has a closer mutualistic relationship with humans than the dog (Canis familiaris). Domesticated from the Eurasian grey wolf (Canis lupus), dogs have evolved alongside humans over millennia in a relationship that has transformed dogs and the environments in which humans and dogs have co-inhabited. The story of the dog is the story of recent humanity, in all its biological and cultural complexity. By exploring human-dog-environment interactions throughout time and space, it is possible not only to understand vital elements of global history, but also to critically assess our present-day relationship with the natural world, and to begin to mitigate future global challenges. In this paper, co-authored by researchers from across the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities, we argue that a dog-centric approach provides a new model for future academic enquiry and engagement with both the public and the global environmental agenda.

Being well together, an inaugural Research Forum, will critically examine the myriad ways humans have formed partnerships with non-human species to improve health across time and place. Across the humanities and social sciences, a growing body of scholarship has begun to rethink the prominence of the ‘human’ in our accounts of the world by exploring the category less as an individualised essence and more as a temporal process of becoming. From this perspective, being human becomes a process of ‘becoming with’, performed through interactions with non-human others. This paper introduces a diverse collection of studies, originally presented at a workshop held at the University of Manchester in 2018, which explored how emergent approaches within animal studies might productively and playfully engage with the medical humanities. In each case, human health and well-being is shown to rest on the cultivation of relationships with other species. Being well is rethought and remapped as a more than human process of being well together. Collectively, this research forum invites reflection on what the medical humanities might look like from a more than human perspective.

This article investigates controversies surrounding dog walking and dog fouling in 1970s and early 1980s Britain, focusing on the microhistory of a series of events in a Lancashire mill town that became known as the 'Burnley Dog War.' A ban on dog walkers from Burnley's main public parks triggered a highly publicised seven-year struggle over access. On one level, the park ban served as a rallying cry for dog lovers across Britain, widening the dividing line between dog owners and dog haters. On another level, it constituted a struggle between antagonists over questions of belonging and exclusion in a town devastated by large-scale deindustrialisation. The dog war stimulated combatants to interrogate the nature and quality of their townscape and their sense of civic identity, the analysis of which allows scrutiny of the impact of deindustrialisation upon their sense of self and place. During the conflict, various aspects of the town's economic history, civic traditions, and landscapes, were alternately disavowed, recovered, rearticulated and contested in relation to its post-industrial present. As it will be shown, the Burnley dispute over dog walking and dog fouling serves as a lens for exploring post-industrial fractiousness along class lines.

This article scrutinises issues around disability and dependent (interdependent) agency, extending these to non-human animals and service dogs, with a sustained reference to the training of guide dogs. It does this through a detailed engagement with the training methodology and philosophy of The Seeing Eye guide dog school in the 1930s, exploring the physical, bodily and instrumental means through which the guide dog partnership, and the identity of the instructor, the guide dog and the guide dog owner, jointly came into being. The novelty of the article lies in how it reconsiders what interdependence meant and means from the perspectives drawing from historical and sociological literature on dog training. In doing so it opens up new ways of thinking about service animals that recognise their historical contingency and the complex processes at work in the creation and development of interdependent agency.

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