Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic (continuous publication)
Special Dossier

Political dogs in the anthropocene

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  • Carlo Salzani
Carlo Salzani
Messerli Research Institute, Vienna, Austria
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Published 2025-10-28

Keywords

  • political animals,
  • Anthropocene,
  • free-living dogs,
  • companion species,
  • right to the city

Copyright (c) 2025 Carlo Salzani

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

SALZANI, Carlo. Political dogs in the anthropocene. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 2, p. e60307, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.60307. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/60307. Acesso em: 14 dec. 2025.
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Abstract

The article proposes expanding the Aristotelian definition of “political animals” to include nonhuman animals. It focuses on dogs, specifically free-living ones, as a possible paradigm for a new interspecies community and politics. However, before examining free-living dogs, the definition of “dog” must be reclaimed from its Western reduction to “pet.” Additionally, the cohabitation of dogs and humans must transcend the ethical and political limitations of the “companion species” paradigm, which is based on a Western, minority model (the dog as a human companion) and never questions the power dynamics and hierarchies of this historically and geographically specific model, ultimately reinforcing them. The free-living dog paradigm opens up the relationship to different forms of cohabitation and politics. After briefly examining two examples of legislation that grants free-living dogs the right to inhabit the polis (in India and Turkey), the article concludes with a list of key points for reorienting politics along interspecific lines.

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