Living with a small dog, you aren't usually slapped about the face with the reality of human-animal power relations. Maybe you have to wince a bit when you are potty training or teaching manners or administrating some such disciplinary activity, but generally, when the dog misbehaves or fails to listen you can just scoop it up and transport it to another environment or situation, and you don't have to worry about the dog losing its shit.
With larger dogs, this can be a very different reality, all the more so the stronger the dog is. Our roommate saw it fit to adopt a very large and strong young Pit Bull - though he probably didn't have much of a choice seeing as how it was being chased down the street by yelling, scared people, and the poor thing scooted right up the front stairs - so I've had a chance to feel the bare reality of human-animal power relations in a raw way.
What I mean is that you have to exert your dominance in a prominent way or else the dog can easily overtake you. It seems as though power relations become much more clear the higher the stakes. In less threatening conditions, you tend to see more of the world through your own projections, while the other makes its presence felt in struggle.
I'm sort of exaggerating here, because the dog is just the sweetest thing and has shown no aggression whatsoever towards human beings or even other dogs, so I've never really felt threatened. But there was a night I was playing with the dog, and he got his jaws around my sweater sleeve. Thinking he was playing tug of war, he wouldn't let go, and was pulling pretty hard, so I ended up having to take off the sweater and let him have it, then try to fish it away from him afterwards.
See, this dog is incredibly strong and it is still going to get stronger and larger. It is true about Pits' jaws: they lock up pretty well. So if something goes wrong and you don't have mastery over the dog, you're going to have a problem. It is like maintaining a respectful protocol around heavy machinery. If you lack the power to reverse or escape a bad process, you're going through that process whether you like it or not, to come out on the other side in whatever form of disrepair the situation warrants.
It is a case study which lays bare the human-animal relationship. A domestic animal, brought into the human world - a world that in the end has power over it, even if it is a powerful animal that can take on individual human beings - must necessarily take on the traits required of it to coexist in the domestic realm.
It ends up being a symbiotic relationship that we initiated. We incorporate various species for various exploitative uses, and they come to adopt a lifestyle that makes them dependent on humans for sustenance.
And that is sort of the predicament isn't it? For someone with strict egalitarian sensibilities, it would have been easier if everyone was simply doing their own thing from the beginning, animals included. But we have this domestic animal population, which has found itself deposited into a certain niche after centuries of co-evolution. Let's free all of these creatures and see how that works out!
It isn't easy moving in the world, especially when one's head is full of charged ideas.
I'd venture that this is a microcosm for our current snafu as well. Capital has produced a certain human being after its 200 or so years of operation - scale this number back if you want to bring in greater historical causal chains - and this human being is tied to capital due to his and her nature: to passively consume. To decouple from capital means to radically change one's nature. Not easy. Usually it takes a little jolt, hate to say.
