Lab Dog is 6 months old (or 10 in human years)
And you can even read it!
I let this newsletter lapse for a variety of reasons, but I’ve decided to return to it on an occasional basis. So here we are!
Since I stopped writing, I never actually shared that my book, Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles came out in May from UChicago Press. Nor did I get to share some outtake images that couldn’t be printed for one reason or another. (More on Lab Dog here; I think you can still get a discount directly from the Press with the code “UCPNEW”. What better present for your loved ones this holiday season?)
Today, I’m featured on Psychology Today for a short interview with Marc Bekoff, who has done challenging writing about the world dogs need vs. what we want for them. (For those with institutional library access, my review of Dog Politics engages with some of it.) I also got a chance to reflect in the interview on a common refrain I’ve heard from people who haven’t actually read my book: “it seems too sad.” I call this “reflex sentimentality,” and suggest that it’s getting in the way of our ability to think seriously about the future we want for both ourselves and for dogs.
Lab Dog is, in part, a history of this reflex sentimentality: how did we go from seeing dogs mostly as useful tools to complexly sentient companions who need a daily anti-aging pill?
I talked a little with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd about this on her American Campus podcast recently as well, which is free here.
Although reviews of academic books are notoriously slow to arrive, a few people have in fact reviewed Lab Dog. In Science, Barbara J. King, who has a really fascinating book on grief in animals, published a very kind review. I particularly appreciated her closing note, which critically prods at my narrative frame:
Concluding his analysis, Bolman notes that “some dogs and humans” profited from the research described and then adds that “quite a few dogs were also sacrificed without clearly advancing knowledge in a meaningful way.” In my estimation, Bolman fails in his initial intention to remain neutral about beagle experiments, although he is never strident about his views. This refusal of total neutrality serves readers well, and I am grateful for it. With its extensive scholarship and historical analysis framed by attention to issues of multispecies justice, the book is a triumph.
Along the same lines, C. R. Calabria writes (in one of the most comprehensive summaries I’ve yet seen):
Bolman toes a line in his Lab Dog which I was first resistant to, but later appreciated. That is, he rarely moralizes about the research done on dogs.
I think you can’t read Lab Dog without recognizing that a lot of canine research in history was a waste, some of it gratuitously and quite depressingly so. But I wanted to leave room for readers to grapple with researchers and scientists of the past in their contexts; which is to say, to engage with why these projects once seemed so necessary to individuals like ourselves—even if some of it might seem self-evidently barbaric today. Many years ago, in a class by Emmanuel Akyeampong, I read a book by Joseph C. Miller, whose account of historical explanation stuck with me, despite a very different context. He writes that historians explain (rather than, say, seek truth) by focusing on
humans acting (in whatever baffled ways they can manage) out of incomplete, impressionistic, and significantly inaccurate awareness of momentary and particular circumstances from which they derive meanings, and hence motivations for whatever they do. […] To repeat: historians do not prove anything but rather explain, in the sense of rendering others’ actions plausible, even convincing, to readers or audiences also positioned in swirling flows of time.” (p. 26)
C.R.’s post is, on a separate note, a great starting point for any students forced to read part of Lab Dog for class in the future. The rest of it is available here:
More recently, Michael Worboys, who has done some of the most valuable writing on the history of dogs and dog breeds, gave Lab Dog a very warm review. (For those who haven’t read him, this article is great and Invention of the Modern Dog was an early foundation for my work.) He says:
Brad Bolman’s Lab Dog is a brilliant book…. The chapters are rich both empirically and analytically; each is like reading a mini-book.
I can’t say much more than that it’s quite a wonderful feeling to spend so many years on a project like this and find it starting to resonate with readers. So thank you very much!
(The title of this post, as an aside, comes from a 1953 article by French researcher Albert Lebeau, who rejected the conventional “dog years” conversion we all know (dog’s age x 7). Instead, Lebeau crafted a chart from longevity statistics that influenced a lot of veterinary researchers. I talk about this a bit in the book, but people are often surprised to learn that over 70 years ago people were fully rejecting the age x 7 idea.)
