They were incarcerated, starved, tortured, driven mad, vivisected and killed but they were also named, cared for, attributed complex personalities and immortalised in countless lectures, doctoral theses and lab reports now long forgotten. Over a career spanning six decades, Pavlov housed, cared for and experimented on thousands of dogs in his St Petersburg labs. I soon discovered that in paying closer attention to the actual experiences of Pavlov’s dogs and their relations with humans, the received image of order and calculability slips considerably, to reveal something much more complex, messy and interesting. I set out to find out all I could about their lives, their interactions with human co-workers, and the part they played in the laboratory setting and the wider life and times of Pavlov, assisted in particular by the remarkably detailed work of Pavlov’s biographer Daniel Todes. I decided to re-examine Pavlov’s experiments through a focus on the everyday experiences of the dogs involved, taking them as legitimate historical subjects – a novel kind of ‘history from below’ (Montgomery & Kalof, 2010). Cherkaev and Tipikina’s description is representative of the general tone: ‘hard-set laws derive from Ivan Pavlov’s studies of animals’ higher nervous activity, which allows animal behaviour to be broken down into predictable and modifiable reflexes… Pavlov’s famous experiment of the drooling dog shows that there are two types of reflexes: innate reflexes that are evoked by the irritant itself and acquired reflexes that are evoked by subsequent associations’ (Cherkaev & Tipikina, 2018, p.29).Īs a psychologist influenced by the ethical and theoretical pull of posthumanism, and its challenge to anthropocentricism, this absence seemed significant – an example of a persistent blind-spot in psychology’s understanding of itself. The role of dogs as living animals in these experiments rarely features in textbooks or academic accounts, which emphasise a tale of scientific progress and experimentation. In contemporary accounts of Pavlov’s achievements, his dogs mostly appear as anonymous and interchangeable experimental objects – exemplified in those familiar textbook diagrams explaining the conditioning process, complete with generic canine images. This shift is sometimes referred to as the ‘animal turn’, and you can see its impact too in the emergence of interdisciplinary fields such as Human-Animal Studies and posthumanism, and in the important work of environmental philosophers like Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret.Īs I began to learn more about the field, I noticed that little attention had been paid to the lives of animals, or human-animal interactions, in experimental psychology, past or present. As a critical psychologist with an interdisciplinary bent, I came to the subject via theoretical developments in the humanities and social sciences, where animal life is increasingly in the spotlight, and growing attention paid to the lives of other species as they are entangled in our own (human) personal, social and cultural lives. Then a couple of years ago I began to research, write and subsequently teach on the topic of human-animal relations. I had never thought to question the familiar, iconic image of Pavlov. Yet until recently I knew very little about Pavlov, less still about his dogs. The term a ‘Pavlovian response’ has even entered our everyday language, to refer to the prevalence of this type of learning in everyday life. Every student of psychology learns about what is now referred to as ‘classical conditioning’, and Ivan Pavlov remains one of the most cited psychologists of all time to this day.
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