Teaching the Dog and Learning from the Dog: Interactivity in Herding Dog Training and Use

Abstract

Recent trends in social sciences advocate the recognition of interactive properties in human–animal relationships. Based on an ethnographic study, this paper explores the interactive properties of the relationships between herding dogs and their trainer-users, and how the dogs' behaviors participate in the construction of trainer-users' knowledge. Trainer-users' discourses and practices revealed a common theoretical axis, portraying the herding dog as a social predator descended from the wolf and driving the game towards his pack-leader. The dog's hunting skills are used to turn him/her into a working tool, through minimally constrained education and training. Once trained, the dog should become an autonomous but controllable worker, who helps livestock breeders lead their flock quietly. Two training modes were identified and used simultaneously by the trainers: contextual training (teaching the human–dog–livestock relationship to the dog) and conditioned training (teaching the commands to the dog). Trainer-users all recognized the individual personalities of the dogs and were sensitive to the quality of their relationships with them. They expected the dogs to be more competent than humans in understanding livestock behaviors, thus suggesting that the dog is more a work assistant than a work tool. Indeed, the dog helps the livestock breeder to establish an optimal interrelational distance between the species by managing space, time, and affectivity in the human–dog–livestock relationship. This triangular relationship, defined by the trainers as a leader–predator–prey relation, resembles a misunderstanding maintained by the livestock breeders in order to reach the leader position. Finally, the livestock-handling context appears particularly fruitful for revealing the complexity of interspecific relationships, the evolution of work in the livestock breeding context, and for understanding the human's connection to their social environment, including non-human living beings.