Abstract
Many homeless pet owners face criticisms like these: “You can’t possibly take good care of that animal! You’re being irresponsible and unfair. You can’t even take care of yourself, or you wouldn’t be homeless.” But what do we actually know about the kind of care that homeless people provide for their animal companions? How do homeless pet owners themselves respond to these slurs and accusations?
Based on interviews with 75 homeless pet owners (mainly dog owners) in five U.S. cities, Leslie Irvine’s book provides crucial insights for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of homelessness, human-animal relationships, deviance and stigma management, and the construction of self through narrative. Organized into chapters focusing on separate themes that emerged in her analysis, My Dog Always Eats First relates richly detailed stories and weaves in literature from history, ethnography, and sociological theory and research.
Homeless pet owners are a somewhat hidden population, not accessible through shelters and soup kitchens, where pets are generally banned, and difficult to approach successfully on the street, where they may view researchers with suspicion. Irvine gained access through introductions from veterinarians who provide free care to the pets of homeless people, plus their assistants and students, who had already established trusting relationships with homeless pet owners.
Irvine’s use of narrative analysis is instructive for anyone wishing to understand or use this analytic approach. She focuses on how stories produce selves; that is, how people create and recreate themselves through the stories they tell about their lives, in this case about their homelessness and their connections to animal companions. Irvine emphasizes how social structures shape these stories: for example, how being stigmatized as homeless and criticized publicly for having pets prompts narratives that defend pet ownership among the homeless. She stays true to the stories as told, honoring the voices of a marginalized group while also contextualizing the stories within socio-economic hierarchies, popular stereotypes, social services, and public policies.
Relating basic living conditions among the people and pets she studied, Irvine describes housing arrangements such as living in vent boxes under freeways and in vans with seats removed to accommodate the sleeping and food needs of humans and animals alike, and she identifies family-like patterns of mutual assistance, including help with housing, food, pet care, and kibble. She explains how issues typical for homeless people, such as finding housing or getting a free meal, are often more complicated for homeless pet owners, who are more often denied shelter and who face additional criticisms from strangers.
Irvine’s primary focus is to unpack the role that human-animal relationships have in the construction of a positive moral self, not simply as shown in the narratives but also as created in their telling. Irvine’s respondents described their pets as friends and family members, often highlighting the pet owners’ caregiving responsibilities, and as sources of companionship, constancy, stability, and self-worth. The pets provide an intense connection that bestows a sense of purpose and of mattering in a world that often treats homeless people as irrelevant. The narratives illuminate animals as central to redemption, particularly in the narratives of previously homeless people whose animals made life better by providing a sense of responsibility and direction and helped, by nature of their need and the humans’ commitment to their care, to motivate their humans to seek housing, get off drugs, and forestall suicide.
The narratives also highlight the ways that dogs protect and provide material help to their companions, alerting them to potential dangers of robbery and rape, scaring off potential attackers, and attracting needed resources such as money and a ride. Yet Irvine repeatedly stresses the limitations of narratives that attach all good outcomes to the animal. Instead, as she reminds us, pets do not solve the material conditions of life. The notion of dog as protector may prompt young homeless travelers to adopt dogs they are unable to care for, and redemption stories may downplay the tellers’ own roles in the positive changes in their lives.
Irvine devotes a fascinating chapter to stigma and stigma management. Noting that the poor are perhaps the only group stigmatized for pet ownership in contemporary Western societies where pet ownership is nearly a birthright, Irvine describes a long history of prohibitions against pet ownership among the poor, taking readers back to the Middle Ages when English and French laws reserved ownership of hunting dogs for the nobility; the poor could keep large dogs only for protection, and only if the middle toes of each front paw were amputated to prevent the dogs from chasing deer.
Within the narratives, Irvine examines the self-affirming ways that homeless pet owners respond to slurs and accusations from the domiciled. Although much dog-inspired interaction with strangers is positive, critics openly accuse homeless pet owners of being unable to provide adequate care for their animals, being financially irresponsible in having a pet, and forcing homelessness on their animals. Grounding her discussion in well-known and lesser-cited theories and prior research, Irvine shows that homeless pet owners often respond to stigma by ignoring it (believing that domiciled people simply fail to understand that the animals are in fact well cared for), by attempting to reduce their critics’ social status by cursing at them, and by replying in ways that affirm homeless pet owners’ positive sense of self: they work hard to assure that their dogs eat well, and the dogs have abundant freedom, exercise, and companionship—something missing in the lives of many domiciled pets who are confined to a dwelling and left alone during long work days.
Irvine recommends additional research to increase our understanding of animal-facilitated human interaction and its outcomes for social networks, resources, and well-being. She emphasizes that the denial of rental housing based on pet ownership disproportionately affects the poor and recommends research to uncover the customs and beliefs that support no-pet policies and to identify how to change them. Irvine’s policy recommendations focus on ways of improving life for homeless pet owners. Given the responsibility-promoting aspects of pet ownership highlighted in Irvine’s research, perhaps homeless pet owners would make better tenants than those who do not have pets. Irvine recommends developing rental housing policies that enable responsible pet owners to keep their pets and using research-based methods to assess any consequent problems and develop policies to counter them, such as screening pets for training and vaccinations.
Taking the reader from slur and stereotype to in-depth understanding and implications for housing policy, Irvine’s book is lively, well-referenced, well-organized, jargon-free, and a worthy read for students, researchers, and policymakers concerned with homelessness. While I have not yet used Irvine’s book in the classroom, I am motivated to do so by its richly detailed stories, its themes of class and stigma, its stereotype-busting content, and its sociological perspective on the lives of homeless people with animal companions.