Stray Philosophy II: Dog/Human Reflections on Education, Boundaries, Care, and Forming Interspecies Communities

In Stray Philosophy II I reflect on the process of learning to live with our Romanian dog companion Doris, and her learning to live with my other dog companion Olli and me, in the city of Amsterdam. I use our experiences to criticize anthropocentrism, and to investigate how we can establish better relations with other animals, foregrounding their view on the matter. This is not just a matter of acknowledging dog agency, but also an attempt to theorize in a more-than-human way. The paper is a follow up to “Stray Philosophy: Dog-Human Observations on Language, Freedom and Politics” (Meijer, 2014), which focused on Olli’s first months in Amsterdam. Our reflections are divided in four sections: education, boundaries, care and forming new interspecies communities, and draws on insights from animal political philosophy, ecofeminism, interspecies autoethnography, and narrative ethology. Similar to how this worked in the first Stray Philosophy paper, I am the one writing it down, but Doris and Olli co-formed every word written.