Pre-print: ‘Dogs are conscious to a great extent vis-à-vis humans’: dog-human equivalence in negotiating culpability for dog-human violence in urban India

How do we make sense of violent interactions between humans and nonhuman animals? While a ready answer is the ‘wildness’ of nonhuman animals, this is by no means the only way that nonhuman animals are seen. These ascriptions become complex in cases where the nonhuman animal is neither fully domesticated nor ‘feral’, such as free-living dogs in urban India. In this paper, I examine our/human practices of ascribing, challenging, and negotiating culpability for dog-human violence in urban India. Using discursive psychology, I examined comments to YouTube videos about dog-human violence. The analysis examined the equivalence between humans and dogs and its role in negotiating blame. Findings show that this equivalence was constructed by treating dogs as animals, dogs as sentient, and humans as animals. While the first two practices were seen as downplaying dogs’ wildness the last was oriented to as downgrading human ‘nature’. These constructions however were flexibly used to treat dogs as the problem and make calls for their punishment. The analyses are discussed in relation to literature on nonhuman animal and human relations and moral authority of humans. Ultimately the findings show that ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ are constructions that are variously made and negotiated in our/human business of ascribing, challenging, and negotiating culpability.