The kingdom of dogs: Understanding Pavlov’s experiments as human–animal relationships

Abstract

The growth of Human–Animal Studies, multi-species, and posthuman scholarship reflects an “animal turn” offering important theoretical, ethical, and methodological challenges to humanities, science, and social science disciplines, though psychology, in particular, has been slow to engage with these developments. This article is the first to apply the conceptual lens of the “animal turn” to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. It is unique in applying in particular the work of feminist cultural theorist Donna Haraway, to radically reframe the human–animal relationship at the core of these landmark experiments. This original portrait is contrasted with contemporary retellings of those experiments which ignore or are indifferent to the complexities of that relationship. Paying attention to nonhuman others that constitute animal experimentation in psychology, historically, today, and in retellings, is argued to be a vitally important step for psychology today. The analysis provided constitutes a distinctive, radical shift in the way psychology might approach the lives of nonhuman animals, in its own past and present, with far-reaching implications for the future development of psychology.

Considering the “Dog” in Dog–Human Interaction

“…This deficit is analogous to the report of animals kept—and the conditions in which they are kept—in most scientific work, historically. As Adams ( 25 ) notes about Ivan Pavlov's research, for instance, though it is widely cited, and clearly represented as involving dogs, no details of the dogs, such as the length of their lives, the conditions (social, living) of their lives, the procedures done to them, or even how their lives ended, are included either by Pavlov or by the textbook authors or journal papers that cite the research.…”

“…To give an animal a name highlights the differences between subjects (individuals) being considered only as members of a group (species). In a postscript to his paper, Adams ( 25 ) lists the names of some of Pavlov's dogs, as a way to begin to remedy their oversight. By not naming dogs, researchers demonstrate that they are not considering dogs as individuals at all; they are simply thought of as representative “dogs.” It is perhaps no wonder, then, that their well-being is not being examined: only individuals can have well- or ill-being at all.…”

“…Indeed, it is because of their personalities that dogs are valued for much HAI work: so can we describe them? Use without identity promotes the ongoing inequity, the “moral discontinuity” that not only is one kind of life more valuable but also that only one kind of life deserves to be seen ( 25 , 31 ).…”

Centring individual animals to improve research and citation practices

“…Pavlov and his colleagues spent many years in a purpose‐built laboratory in St. Petersburg using hundreds of dogs (exact number unknown; Pavlov, 1960) in various procedures to investigate how classical conditioning works, and, later, which areas of the brain are responsible for certain impulses. Today, virtually all psychology textbooks, if they do mention that Pavlov used dogs as experimental subjects (and not all do; Adams, 2020) refer to Pavlov as the father of classical conditioning, and briefly explain, using simple diagrams, how dogs were conditioned to salivate on hearing a tone (e.g. Klein, 2009).…”

“…Similarly, George Bernard Shaw accused Pavlov of ill‐treating his experimental subjects, and called his methods ‘criminal and detestable’ (Shaw, 1947, p. 212, cited in Dewsbury, 1990). More recently, Adams (2020) called for a revision of how psychology describes and reports Pavlov's work. He suggests that literature should include the dogs in the narrative – their stories, their contributions to science and the messy human–animal relationships that had formed between the dogs and the experimenters who worked with them.…”