A resurgence of animal mobilization in Israel

I’ve written previously about the history of animal mobilization in Israel— in particular, giving an overview of academic work that observes the ways in which veganism and animal rights have been mobilized as evidence of Israeli “civilization” in contrast to Palestinian “savagery,” and the ways in which the mainstreaming of animal rights has occurred alongside the mainstreaming of Palestinian suffering.

Perhaps it therefore comes as no surprise that the current conflict has seen an extraordinary resurgence of animal mobilization. Here, for example, in the Times of Israel, we read about how the “onslaught of terror” has “upended large numbers of citizens around the country – and their furry friends,” and how Israeli animal welfare organizations (“another group of emergency workers”) have acted to save animals. Particularly striking in this article is a quote from an animal welfare worker who is caring for the two pets of a neighbor, and who laments the trauma caused to them by airstrikes: “During the airstrikes this morning Malka the dog was shaking and freaking out, and Paspas the cat has been showing all of the signs of stress, like over-grooming herself. And last night she was having tremors and jerking.” The article does not acknowledge that Israel is carrying out far more extensive and severe airstrikes against Gaza, whose residents cannot (as Malka and Paspas’s owner did) flee, or that pets and indeed humans in Gaza might suffer the same kind of trauma from these airstrikes.

This implications of these absences is that the suffering of animals is more visible, more legible, and more significant than the suffering of Palestinians. Yet, at the same time, Israeli rhetoric in recent weeks has overwhelmingly trended towards equating Palestinians with animals: Israel’s defence minister, Yoan Gallant, described Palestinians as “human animals,” and Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, characterized them as “bloodthirsty animals… people who basically act as animals.”

Palestinians are animals, and yet they are not animals like other animals, because, as the poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan observed on Twitter, “the western public consciousness would mobilize if this was 2.2 million golden retrievers being bombed to extinction in an inescapable cage.” And, indeed, a 28 October article in the Jerusalem Post treats Israeli animals as “four-legged victims” of the current war, whose suffering is moving in ways that the suffering of Palestinians fails to be. Another Jerusalem Post article on the same day announced that a Palestinian rocket had claimed one casualty in a town: a dog. Violence against Israeli animals by Palestinians (“Hamas barbarians butcher family dog in bloody rampage”) is offered as evidence of the extreme and singular barbarity of Palestinians, in spite of notorious recent and historical incidents that have involved Israeli slaughter of Palestinian dogs.

I have previously discussed the idea that one of the functions of animal mobilization and animal citizenship is to relieve moral discomfort in situations whose moral tension has become unbearable. I remain convinced that one of the ways in which this occurs is through a reorganization of the category of “persons.” In my forthcoming Intertexts article about the Nowzad dog rescue, I discuss the ways in which the substitution of the person for the human creates the possibility of the nonhuman person and the human nonperson. Personhood is no longer something that is assumed to be innate to the human, but rather something that must be earned and performed in a specific and legible way. This facilitates the removal of Palestinians from the category of “persons” (because they fail to perform personhood in a way that is acceptable to Israelis and, indeed, to many other Westerners) and in fact facilitates the eviction of Palestinians from the category of persons insofar as Palestinians are denied access to the very things (stable infrastructure, economic prosperity) that would allow them to perform a version of personhood that is legible to Western eyes. More broadly, the reconceptualization of personhood means that resistance to the hegemony of elite states is always figured as an abdication of personhood, since it becomes yet another way of “acting as an animal.”

The other, important side of this is the elevation of certain animals to the status of personhood. What renders this so important is the fact that, without it, the de-personalization of humans would be seen as structurally undermining the category of the person. If all humans are supposed to be people, then the systematic treatment of some humans as not-people creates dissonance. Now, however, being a person is not about being a human, but rather about performing a certain personhood. This means that we can feel confident in our moral coherence: it is not that we are failing to treat humans properly, but rather that these humans are not people.

Meanwhile, pets are people. Just as we deny Palestinians (and other non-persons, such as asylum seekers) the things that we view as the prerequisites for personhood, we supply these things to pets as part of extending personhood to them. We create their narratives of personality through the provision of pet consumer culture, which assigns them cosmopolitan tastes and interior liveliness. Thus we are always producing this new category of personhood even as we pretend that it is natural and pre-existing.

This is one reason why I feel that posthumanism has revolutionary promise at the same time that I’m suspicious of the ways in which it can be co-opted. After all, what we see here is one version of posthumanism, insofar as personhood is extended to nonhumans. At the same time, in reality it is simply substituting the “person” for the hegemonic human. This means that it is more important than ever to refuse the policing of subjectivity, to insist that you do not have to be legible human or person in order for your life or your being to have value. But I don’t know how we get there from here.

The cosmopolitan pet

A lighter topic for today’s blog entry: luxury international animal transportation.

In 2022, I found myself interacting with a few different (but interrelated) strands of pet cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, I was writing a paper about the Nowzad Dogs evacuation. At the same time, my husband and I were researching ways to move our elderly, high-strung pug mix from Belgium to Finland, while also evaluating if there was any realistic chance of eventually moving him to the US. It was thus that we discovered the large and lively online community devoted to luxury international animal transportation.

The majority of mainstream airlines offer two forms of animal transportation: pets that, with their carrier, weigh 8kg or less and fit under a seat can generally travel in the aircraft cabin so long as they remain in their carrier for the duration of the flight. All other pets must be placed in cargo, though flat-nosed breeds like pugs and French bulldogs are often not allowed to be placed in cargo. The United Kingdom, somewhat exceptionally, does not allow dogs to be flown into the country in aircraft cabins.

Many owners of mid-size and larger pets are not willing to place their animals in cargo, either because of the safety risks involved, because of the physical discomfort involved, or because of the anxiety that pets may feel when separated from their owners in a stressful environment. Many owners of small pets do not want to stress their animals by forcing them to remain confined for the long duration of an international flight. And, of course, owners of flat-nosed breeds have few options for transporting their pets over non-drivable distances at all.

Facebook groups have therefore emerged that are devoted to, variously, (1) sharing information on airline pet policies, including boutique airlines that allow larger pets or that allow owners to buy seats for pets; (2) organizing charter flights in which pet owners pay approximately $5,000-$10,000 each to charter a private jet on which their pets can travel in comfort; (3) discussing all other issues related to travel with pets: pet-friendly hotels, ferries and cruise liners that allow pet travel, and so on.

I described this community as devoted to “luxury international animal transportation,” but I think that many people who have participated in the community would object to the term “luxury.” For some, like my own family, this form of pet transportation may be used only once or twice as part of a large, expensive, and unavoidable international move. And while it’s true that some in the community want options to transport their pets more frequently, for instance if they divide their year between two countries or frequently vacation in a remote area, I suspect that these participants would also argue that transporting their pets is not a “luxury”: it is ethically demanded, owing to the way that they understand their relationship with their pets.

Heidi Nast has provided the most substantial examination of shifts in human-pet relationships in what she characterizes as the “post-industrial” world, and what I would term “elite countries”. Nast sees a particular genre of pet love, one that positions pets as “highly commodified and valued objects of affection and love” (“Loving…Whatever”), emerging in the 1980s and 1990s and intensifying into the twenty-first century. Nast is particularly interested in reading pet love as a response to post-industrial conditions: specifically, the hyper-mobility, hyper-individualism, precarity, and social isolation that emerge under these conditions. Pets provide a form of love object that is functionally ideal for people who lead unstable, fragmented, highly mobile, consumption-oriented lives that make traditional attachments to neighborhood and family (and particularly to children) impractical. In this sense, pet love actually serves an important purpose for post-industrial capitalism, “smoothing” the experience of participation and, as Nast writes, “helping to sustain an increasingly inequitable global economy” (“Critical Pet Studies?”).

The rise of luxury international animal transportation fits very well into Nast’s schema, because it draws together consumption, affect, and mobility. The need for such a service arises in an increasingly mobile elite world in which global travel functions as a sign of both professional and personal success, but in which the intensification of border imperialism also means that this mobility is also often accompanied by separation from loved ones, transience, and challenges related to child-rearing. The amenability of pets to border regimes— they may require health certificates and medical documentation, but are not (unlike human family members) scrutinized for entry on the basis of their national origin, poverty, religion, or employment record— renders them ideal companions for globally mobile humans. Luxury international animal transportation both legitimizes that companionship through consumption and is a necessary consequence of it: if your relationship with your pet is one of the closest and most important in your life, then of course it is of paramount importance that your pet be safe and comfortable.

We also begin to see echoes here of the way that animals, as in Israeli case studies, function as a site of moral simplicity and purity. Spending $5000-10000 on a luxury plane flight would normally raise many uncomfortable political and environmental questions: couldn’t that money be better spent elsewhere? Ought chartering private jets, even in groups, be allowed in a rapidly warming world? Yet because this expense is necessary for the comfort of an animal, it is removed from the sphere of politics and becomes morally requisite. I speak with some degree of experience here: while my husband and I opted to use a small airline for our relocation, and therefore spent less than twice what it would have cost us for a normal set of airline tickets, it is very possible that we would have bought a seat on a charter flight if that had been the only option. For us, the idea of any discomfort or stress for our dog is unbearable, and the need to ensure his comfort and happiness overrides all other considerations.

I say this: and yet the “other considerations” at play in my own life provide a stark illustration of the tensions that the “moralization” of this animal affection creates. As I write, I am trying to find financial assistance for several Afghan friends, among them a family with two young daughters who are hoping to buy their way out of Kabul in a few months. $10,000, for them, is the price of an entirely new future. Similarly, I have several former students from whom $10,000 is the difference between being able to obtain a U.S. student visa and not, in a world where such a visa is not only the path to the elite education for which they’ve worked and sacrificed all their lives, but also their chance to support their families in Afghanistan.

It is not the choice to spend money on pets that I find problematic— how can I, when I experience the same devotion? Rather, it is the sense that is highlighted in the Israeli articles I have previously discussed: that animal welfare has become decoupled from human welfare, and that this has happened in a way that renders animal welfare a moral absolute in a way that human welfare is not. It seems to me that this decoupling and this “moralization” are intensifying as dehumanization becomes a more common and more visible part of our world, perhaps as a form of deflection and perhaps a survival strategy: if we did not displace our emotional reaction onto animals, then we simply could not tolerate the brutality of the world that we live in.

Comparing narratives of animal care: Afghanistan vs. Ukraine

At the time that Russia’s war in Ukraine began, I was researching the comparative treatment of humans and nonhumans during the evacuation of Kabul. I was therefore particularly interested in the way that animals figured in media coverage of Ukraine. And animals did figure— in fact, they were featured in multiple photosets and posts that not only characterized animals as refugees, but also centered the love and dedication of human refugees who transported their pets to safety. Take, for example, several March 2022 photo stories: one from The Atlantic, entitled “Pets Can Be Refugees, Too,” one from the Guardian, entitled, “Pets of war: Ukrainians take comfort from their animals as they flee the conflict,” and one from AP News, entitled “Ukrainians fleeing war ‘can’t leave’ pets behind.” These stories, and others like them, foreground the devotion of human Ukrainian refugees to their pets, often in the form of photos showing refugees who have carried their dogs and cats over long distances in order to find shelter. One feel-good story that was widely circulated concerned in English newspapers concerned a Ukrainian woman who carried her elderly German shepherd on her shoulders for ten miles.

Immense international efforts were made to support Ukrainian pets, from the waiving of legal entrance requirements for refugee pets to outpourings of donations through charitable organizations. The scholar Kristin Sandvik has provided a substantial accounting of these efforts in her work on Ukraine and “pet exceptionalism,” in a series of blog posts and in an article for International Migration. As of June 2023, international animal rescue groups continue to work in Ukraine in order to protect and evacuate animals left behind.

Sandvik notes that the “pet exceptionalism” on display in Ukraine must be understood in the context of the larger exceptionalism that has characterized Western attitudes towards Ukraine, particularly in the early days of the war. Human Ukrainian refugees were welcomed and endowed with unprecedented privileges in Western Europe, even as Syrian, Afghan, and other non-white refugees remained unwelcome and subject to immense legal barriers. In one sense, the narrative of Ukrainian pet devotion might be seen as a form of justification for the privileged treatment of Ukrainians: Ukrainians deserve privileged treatment because they demonstrate “appropriate” care for animals, which aligns them with Eurocentric ideologies of the human. I am interested in exploring this idea further, because such a justification rests upon the non-obvious assumption that pet love has, in fact, come to comprise an important part of the construction of humanness. At the same time, it’s also clear to me that Ukrainian pet devotion does not pre-exist the privileged treatment of Ukrainians in any clear way; rather, the (visible, legible) characteristic of Ukrainian pet devotion emerges as part of the process that privileges Ukrainian refugees. In order to unpack this further, I want to discuss two pet incidents that I witnessed through my involvement in and following the August 2021 evacuation of Kabul.

The first of these incidents involves a very dear friend of mine who, during the chaotic weeks leading up to the US withdrawal, was forced to flee his home with his family without the pet cat that he had raised from a kitten, as his family felt that their only chance of safety was to board an American evacuation flight. My friend’s experience of the following days was brutal and immensely traumatic. However, the sole moment at which he displayed the full emotional weight of this experience, and the only time that I have ever known him to swear in any language, was when mourning the loss of his cat and lashing out at the Taliban soldiers who were responsible for their separation.

The second incident involves a former student of mine who was forced into hiding after the U.S. withdrawal due to the former prominence of her father as an anti-Taliban political analyst. I had attempted to arrange her family’s evacuation through an organization that was supporting Afghan journalists. However, it was well-known at that point that no evacuation flights were allowing animals. My student— a young woman with a lot of experience of stress and fear— became nearly hysterical when I told her that her pet cat would not be allowed on the flight. She insisted that she would refuse to board the flight if she could not bring her cat with her, and that she would remain in Afghanistan while the rest of her family left.

I offer these anecdotes in order to highlight several important elements: first, in contrast to the narrative that portrays Afghans as incapable of “appropriate” care for animals, many Afghan refugees feel the same affective attachment to their pets as Ukrainians. Second, Afghan pets without Western intercessors (such as the high-profile animal rescuer Pen Farthing) are not extended the same exceptional privileges as Ukrainian animals, nor is Afghan care for pets understood as having the same weight and importance as Ukrainian care for pets. One justification offered for pet exceptionalism during the Ukraine crisis, as Sandvik notes, was that companion animals would “lessen trauma and enhance well-being” for “distressed refugees.” However, Afghan refugees are not figured as distressed in the same way as Ukrainian refugees— I suspect because trauma is understood as the normal context of Afghan being, though the reaction that Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr (2017 x) record to depictions of Afghan daily life (“I never thought of them [Afghans] as human before!”) perhaps also applies. Third, the enormously greater logistical challenges, legal struggles, and uncertainty that Afghan refugees face in reaching safety often make animal accompaniment impossible or, in fact, unethical. Afghan refugees often face waits of several years in refugee processing centers (including in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, but also when claiming asylum in the United Kingdom) or in third countries (like Pakistan and Iran) where their standard of living is extremely low; they may therefore be willing to risk their own comfort and safety on the uncertain chance of obtaining resettlement, but be unwilling or unable to ask an animal to endure the same. (Would my friend’s family be able to board an American evacuation flight (where animals would not be allowed)? Would they be housed in a refugee processing center for several years, even if they did? Would they ever, in fact, be resettled in the US? Would they survive the evacuation?)

If we compare Afghan and Ukrainian refugee experiences, it becomes clear that the narrative of exceptional Ukrainian pet devotion (“Ukrainians ‘can’t leave’ pets behind”) is one that is produced by both the systemic smoothing of Ukrainian migration and the formal validation of Ukrainian affective capacity.

The significance of this issue for my larger project lies primarily in the role that we see pet love playing in the determination of humanness. This is a more complex point that it seems and is connected to the “elevation” of animal rights that I discussed in my post about veganism in Israel. In that post, I noted how scholars have highlighted the way that animal rights (decoupled from human rights) have become figured as a “pure” ethical issue, simpler and more universal than human rights. What we see here is that the treatment of animals has become characterized as a basic moral intuition that is inherent to humanness: the failure to perform “appropriate” treatment of animals, therefore, demonstrates a lack of moral intuition and, consequently, a defect of humanness. At the same time, questions regarding the “appropriate” treatment of humans have increasingly become viewed as political rather than moral: a question of economics and utility rather than moral intuition and humanness. To endorse animal cruelty, for example animal testing in the cosmetics industry, is immoral and inhuman; to endorse slavery and precarity, for example labor practices in the coffee and chocolate industries, is a political position. I am interested in further investigating how this decoupling has taken place.

Human vs. Nonhuman Rights in an Israeli/Palestinian Context

One of the few areas in which the relationship between human and nonhuman rights has been explored is that of Israel/Palestine, where several recent papers have looked at the tension between, on the one hand, the prominence and popularity of veganism in Israel, and, on the other hand, the Israeli state’s apartheid regime. A great deal attention has been particularly paid to the endorsement of veganism by the IDF, which advertises vegan options for soldiers (including faux-leather boots).

One of the earliest explorations of this issue, Erica Weiss’s “ ‘There are no chickens in suicide vests’: the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in Israel” (2016), foregrounds its principal claims in its title. First, animal rights activism has become massively and explicitly decoupled from human rights activism in Israel; second, “[w]hile activists of the earlier [animal rights] movement articulated their claims through the ethical regime of humanism and the commonality of suffering, the latter movement has adopted an approach focused on the commonality of agency that foregrounds questions of guilt and innocence” (2). The same shift that has elevated animal rights activism (and particularly veganism) to mainstream and official acceptance in Israel (Weiss 6-7) is a shift that has seen animal rights become apolitical, a question of universal rights and wrongs, where human rights activism is understood as political.

The adoption of animals as apolitical figures of absolute innocence is reminiscent of the use of children that media scholar Susan Moeller has described in war reporting. Moeller, in “Hierarchies of Innocence,” argues that children have come to serve as “moral referents” in a post-Cold War world that increasingly requires us to make complex and uncomfortable moral judgements. Children relieve us of this uncomfortable responsibility insofar as they are figured as apolitical (outside of political struggles), absolutely innocent (outside of struggles around culpability), and avatars of the future (meaning, I would argue, that they allow us to displace our care onto an abstract future rather than a messy and demanding present).

However, especially in Israel/Palestine, children are no longer perceived in this way— Weiss quotes an Israeli animal rights activist who argues that “[e]ven a child is not really a child over there [in Palestine]. Even the children are sometimes terrorists” (7). A need exists, therefore, for a “more pure” moral referent, one that will allow the effective partitioning of “political” issues from “ethical” issues in a way that relieves Israelis of the discomfort that they might experience from understanding the two as intertwined. In particular, Weiss looks at how the current animal rights focus on agency and innocence allows Israelis to figure Palestinians as “responsible for their own denial of basic rights by virtue of their own agency” (14). If the debate around animal suffering is framed in terms of who deserves to suffer, in other words, then the debate around human suffering can also be framed in these terms, permitting not only the creation of moral hierarchies (animals deserve to suffer less than humans do) but also the justification of Palestinian suffering.

Similarly, Esther Alloun’s work on Israeli veganism and animal rights activism suggests that Israeli mainstreaming of animal rights functions to ease moral discomfort with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in several ways. Like Weiss, Alloun (2017) notices that veganism is framed as a “simple,” higher, apolitical issue of compassion and ethics rather than a political issue, implying that human rights (particularly in the context of Palestine) is merely a political issue. At the same time, Alloun (2019) observes that the figuring of Palestinians as incapable of properly caring for animals, in contrast to Israeli care for animals, is used to justify Palestinian subjugation. (In particular, Alloun notes that “animal welfare has been leveraged in popular media to depict benevolent Israelis coming to the OPT to rescue zoo animals from Palestinians who lack care and knowledge, obscuring the role of Israeli occupation and warfare in creating poor living conditions for humans and animals alike” [2019 7].)

This particular strategy of “veganwashing” (as Alloun terms it) has very clear connections to the mobilization of animals to justify Western humanitarian intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Purnima Bose (2020) has made this argument in her analysis of the “canine-rescue narrative,” which sees a soldier or military family rescue a stray dog from Iraq or Afghanistan and “bring it home” to the West. Bose deals with this narrative in a specifically American context, but I (2023) have discussed British examples, notably Pen Farthing’s memoirs of saving Afghan dogs and Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between.

The canine-rescue narrative, Bose argues, “valorizes Americans as more compassionate pet owners than people in Central and South Asia” (95), a kind of “American pet exceptionalism” (105) in which “it is better to be an American dog than an Afghan or Kyrgyz one because Americans love dogs and Afghans and Kyrgyzes do not” (ibid). Canine-rescue narratives often specifically emphasize the cruelty and indifference of Afghans and Iraqis towards dogs, in contrast to the Western capacity to recognize dogs as subjects. (For more on all of this, see my forthcoming article in Intertexts). Such portrayals justify Western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan through the figure of the dog: the Iraqi and Afghan incapacity to properly care for animals becomes a visceral illustration of “their” primitivism and barbarity, which Western education/enlightenment arrives to correct.

What particularly interests me in the similarity between the Israeli mobilization of veganism and American & British mobilization of canine rescue is that animal rights discourses seem to arise in each case in response to otherwise-unmanageable experiences of moral tension and discomfort. The animal becomes a vessel for displaced affect— not necessarily a substitute for the human, but a kind of new person that allows the partitioning of this kind of person (deserving of compassion) from that one (not deserving of compassion). There are some echoes here of the Valladolid debate that took place at the dawn of European colonization and slavery, a debate that sought to regulate which types of non-Europeans could be licitly treated as non-persons and therefore enslaved. Sylvia Wynter (in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”) has discussed the role of this debate in forming the current “statement” of what it is to be human. I am interested in the possibility that we are seeing another shift in how we state what it is to be human, one that is necessitated by the inability of the “old” statement to sufficiently justify and relieve the tensions of our current situation of border imperialism.

The purpose of this blog:

Over the past few years, as I have worked full-time in academic research, I have become more and more disillusioned with the state of academic publishing. I went into this work with a fair picture of some commonly lamented flaws, such as the following:

• The outrageous pricing structure of academic publishing is akin to health insurance in that is essentially designed to bilk large sums of money out of wealthy institutions; this not only disadvantages professional academics who are not affiliated with wealthy institutions, but also seriously disadvantages students and, more broadly, learners in the Global South who are thus denied access to high-quality research.

• A great deal of the labor involved in academic publishing is not compensated; rather, professional academics are expected to contribute labor on a volunteer basis. This includes not only reviewing and editing, but also writing articles and books (for which authors are not paid).

• Academic publishing simply no longer produces reliably accurate material. In my own work, I have highlighted not only serious factual errors but also anti-science claims that have made it to print in books published by highly regarded authors by university presses. In my experience, few academic texts (articles or books) receive rigorous editing— likely, again, because the labor of doing so is uncompensated.

• Academic publishing is also rife with inequity. There is systemic discrimination against scholars and publications from the Global South, reproducing a situation of colonial hegemony.

• Academic publishing operates at such a slow pace that most academic books and articles are out-of-date by the time that they appear.

Very few people in academia would dispute these facts, and they are widely discussed.

I therefore want to use this blog as an alternative to publishing— a place where I can explore academic work and ideas without engaging with the exploitative and unreliable academic publishing system.

Specifically, I want to make use of it as the site of a project that I have been formally and informally engaged with for more than a year: namely, a juxtaposition of the increasing mobility of nonhuman animals (particularly, though not exclusively, dogs) and the decreasing mobility of human animals (particularly, though not exclusively, humans from the Global South).

I first addressed this issue in a paper (forthcoming in Intertexts) that explores the treatment of humans and nonhumans during the August 2021 evacuation of Kabul. At the time, the British evacuation of dogs and cats from Pen Farthing’s Nowzad charity drew a great deal of attention— especially given the fact that Britain had failed to evacuate many British citizens and residents from Afghanistan. My personal experience of interacting with the British government on behalf of a family of British citizens and residents who were not evacuated, and who eventually were helped to return to the UK through the efforts of private volunteers, sparked my interest in the disparity between the treatment of dogs and the treatment of humans. I was fascinated to discover that Purnima Bose had addressed this topic through her analysis of what she terms the “canine-rescue narrative,” which sees nonhuman subjects mobilized to justify humanitarian interventions. However, I think that there is more going on here than simply the mobilization that Bose describes.

I have spent the past year enmeshed in two different spheres that are relevant to this topic. First, due to my own experience of moving internationally with a dog, I have become immersed in the world of international pet mobility: the communities and companies that facilitate international pet mobility, the world of international pet rescue (in which, largely, people from the Global North adopt dogs rescued from the Global South), and the discourses of pet subjectivity that are involved in both. Second, due to the many friends of mine who are refugees enmeshed in the nightmarish realm of what Harsha Walia terms “border imperialism,” I have become immersed in the legal and logistical realities of human migration.

Let me be clear: I write these words at a time when the death toll from the latest refugee disaster in the Mediterranean is still unknown, but is likely to number in the hundreds. Reports suggest that many of those who drowned may have been Afghans, as indeed many people who drown in the Mediterranean are Afghans. Earlier this year, a gifted and prominent Afghan journalist who was known by friends of mine, Torpekai Amarkhel, drowned in the Mediterranean while carrying the ID card that identified her as having worked for the UN. Young people whom I taught in Afghanistan have told me that they are contemplating taking the smuggler route to Europe, overland or by sea. Every time I see a news report about a Mediterranean disaster, I wonder if anyone I knew was on that ship.

Why do Afghans— and Syrians, and Pakistanis, and Palestinians— take this risk? Because there is no other viable escape for them, even when they are in situations of the most extreme danger. The US— a country to which legal immigration is “nearly impossible” (and, yes, I know the link is from the Cato Institute, but you should still read it)— promised many Afghans who had worked directly for U.S. or U.S.-funded entities that they would be protected, but in fact the massive dysfunction of USCIS, combined with the failure of the U.S. government to provide meaningful infrastructure for programs aimed at Afghan allies, have left the vast majority of those who worked for or with the U.S. stranded. Applications for “Special Immigrant Visas” are meant to take nine months to process, but in practice take an average of three years (often longer) and are logistically overwhelming. Applications for P1 refugee resettlement are erratically processed and cannot be processed at all in the countries most accessible to Afghans (Pakistan and Iran). As for European efforts, this recent headline says it all: “New research reveals the EU’s ‘staggering neglect’ of Afghan refugees.”

Personally, I know one young man who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military and who is considering paying a smuggler to take him and his young family to Europe because he sees no hope of ever receiving a U.S. Special Immigrant Visa. I know another young Afghan family who, like many others, chose to walk from Brazil to Texas in order to apply for asylum at the U.S. border. I know men who worked for the International Red Cross and are now starving, young doctors who taught family planning to rural women and are now left to a government that had threatened them with death. I know journalists, activists, teachers, artists, all of whom are desperate to continue their work— yet who face overwhelming odds against ever being granted a visa to travel to any country for any purpose. Their bodies have been immobilized by the law.

At the same time, in August I will board a luxury airplane operated by a boutique airline that allows small- to medium-sized pets to travel internationally in comfort. For a larger price, I could have participated in a grassroots community that group-charters private jets in order to internationally transport pets of all sizes. If you are paying $8,000 to fly your pet transatlantically, you might also consider the growing industry of luxury hotels that cater to pets, some of which provide doggie room service and doggie spa days. If you happen to be traveling in Turkey or Morocco and fall in love with a stray dog there, you’re not out of luck: a friend of my husband’s who had this experience in North Africa was able to arrange for a local dog rescue to help her transport her new canine friend home to London.

I am fascinated by this figure of the “cosmopolitan dog,” who flies first class and nonchalantly crosses borders. To me, there are echoes here of what Sara Ahmed writes about whiteness and mobility. Ahmed, on the one hand, associates whiteness with an experience of accessibility: “[r]ace becomes, in this model, a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive, and to do ‘things’ with” (“The Phenomenology of Whiteness” 154). At the same time, she asks whether certain forms of nomadism are made possible for certain subjects “because the world is already constituted as [their] home” (Strange Encounters 83). Finally, she considers whiteness as a kind of agency that allows the “border-crossing” of transformation, in a discussion of the film Dances with Wolves that sees her theorize the character of Dunbar as able to not only “make but… unmake the border between self and other, between natives and strangers” (Strange Encounters 124). The whiteness that Ahmed is discussing is one that is fundamentally characterized by its behavior around borders. Whiteness can cross borders because all places are accessible to whiteness, because all places are home to whiteness, because whiteness has the capacity to make and unmake borders at will.

What does it mean that an African dog can be endowed with this kind of cosmopolitan whiteness, but an African human cannot? Why have we seen industries spring up around facilitating mobility for pets at the same time as mobility for humans has become increasingly and brutally restricted? This seems to me to raise important questions about subjectivity, responsibility, relationship, and the border between “persons” and “commodities.”

These are the questions that I hope this blog will explore.