The Future Is Canine - Margret Grebowicz

Margret Grebowicz is finishing a short book called "Rescue Me: On Dog Abundance and Social Scarcity", which I am planning to turn into a longer and ""slower"" research project on dogs and late capitalism. The Covid adoption craze is just one stage in a much longer process which NPR calls “the pet revolution.” Dog ownership has been steadily on the rise since the 1990s. Dog food and other products are more expensive than ever, euthanasia rates have declined dramatically, and the pet industry keeps generating more and more jobs. We are leaning on dogs more heavily than ever in history for the emotional labor of sustaining an unsustainable world. This form of extraction lives in unexpected places—not only in actual dog-owner relationships, or even in the recently invented abstract category of “emotional support animal,” but in TV series, in presidential elections (Major Biden made national headlines as the first rescue dog in the White House ), on TikTok, even on our online dating profiles, where a photo with a dog increases one’s appeal so much that people have begun “dogfishing,” posing with dogs that aren’t theirs. Exactly what it is we are trying to get out of dogs is less and less clear. #canine #MargretGrebowicz #scifoo