Introduction: Police Dogs and the Politics of Mutual Freedom

On 30 May 2020, then-US President Donald Trump threatened Black Lives Matter protesters with “vicious dogs” among other “ominous weapons”.¹ The threat, which recalled a history of dogs being used against Black Civil Rights protesters, came on the heels of militant protest and revolt against the killing of George Floyd five days prior, an event that caused a global reckoning with policing. What do we make of dogs as technologies of power and their historical role in reinforcing racial hierarchy? What makes Trump’s invocation of “vicious dogs” as a threat against racial justice protesters so salient as a project of racial backlash? These dogs were, explicitly or implicitly, police dogs; dogs used to enforce the racialized social order of Trump’s imaginary of white supremacy. We can see Trump’s threat as “symptomatic of a much longer history of white organized violence against the black community” and as a mode of racial terror within a settler colonial mode of production.² I argue that the use of police dogs works as a biopolitical and biocapitalist mode of sorting life that is worthy of protection from life that needs to be killed or maimed.³ Under racial capitalism, such life sorting operations reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies and the differentiation of labour and political rights according to dysgenic processes of selection, valuation, and relation.

This paper presents this theoretical framework and then uses it to read two seemingly disparate case studies: first, the children’s television show PAW Patrol and its reproduction of a police imaginary and second, the use of robot dogs by Israel in its current ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and long colonial war on Palestine. My project here will suggest that drawing out the connections between these two apparently disparate phenomena on the grounds of their approaches to policing, racialization, and animality will allow us to better understand the links between global racial capitalism, police, and the management of animal life. What unites these case studies, I argue, is the way the police as agents of capital work to classify life as either worthy of protection or as life that must be put to death or disciplined, ultimately in the service of capital accumulation. What also unites them is the use of dogs (cartoon or mechanical) as agents of enforcement of a colonial and racial order. While Black and Indigenous scholars have turned to the question of the animal, challenging the erasure of race in animal studies, and while the use of dogs in war has been studied by animal studies scholars, this paper offers an analytic for thinking these strands of social and political thought together through a shared focus on policing and the accumulation of capital. The positions of Black people in the US and Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Palestine differ in important ways but they are both are shaped by racial capitalism and settler colonialism through attendant logics of humanization and animalization.

I also want to keep in view the differences between using dogs to police the citizens of a country (however conditional that citizenship) as in the case of Black people in the US, and using dogs to police the subjects of an occupation as in the case of Palestinians in Gaza, which remains under effective occupation even after the formal withdrawal of Israel. Such a distinction is necessary if only to grasp the historical particularities that interweave dogs and dog representations with a racialized population in bonds of violence and subjugation. For Black people in the afterlives of enslavement and the enduring structures of racial capitalism, dogs are used for the management of a population toward being productive wage labourers and away from challenges to the status quo of racial capitalism. In the case of Gaza, capitalism requires the land to be cleared of the Indigenous population, and so dogs are used in a project of genocidal elimination. My goal then is to read these two conditions together in the recruitment of the dog into an anthropocentric hierarchy of policing.

The use of dogs in surveilling Black life and crushing racial justice projects draws on a specific history of associations between Blackness and animality which has typified the racial formations of societies dependent upon racialized differentiation for capital accumulation and statecraft. These social formations have produced a system of white supremacy and anti-black racial hierarchy as well as racial regimes of ownership.⁴ The association between Blackness and animality is fraught, to say the least, since Black people are often animalized as a mode of dehumanization. My approach to the Black-animal comparison follows Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog in not instrumentalizing the Black cause and the animal cause as measures for the other’s oppression.⁵

The recent works by Bénédicte Boisseron (2018), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020) and Joshua Bennett (2020) “engage with ‘animality’ as a relation of embodied existence and representation that configures ideas about both social difference and the human relationship to the natural world.”⁶ The critical thrust of these interventions has been to think against dehumanization as the paradigm for understanding racism, since within this paradigm, “advocating [...] inclusion within the human, reif[ies] the conceit of liberal humanism’s transcendence of race.”⁷ These works are a response to books like Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison, a touchstone for contemporary animal activism. Spiegel stages several textual and visual comparisons between animality and enslavement. Her argument is that comparing the “suffering of animals to that of blacks [...] is offensive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notion of what animals are like.”⁸ For Boisseron and other scholars working at the intersection of Black studies and animal studies, this text represents the instrumentalization of Blackness and the specific historical experience of enslavement for the cause of the animal. Such an instrumentalization has led Black studies scholar Alexander G. Weheliye to complain about “the (not so) dreaded comparison between human and animal slavery” in animal studies and “how carelessly […] this comparative analogy was brandished about in this area of inquiry.”⁹ In Black studies work that is also attentive to animal oppression, the goal is to think through the imbrication of Blackness and animal life and how Black liberation and animal liberation are set against one another in racialized public culture. Animal studies and Palestine studies have had less convergence than animal studies and Black studies. However, a critical attention to greenwashing and other practices of sanitizing colonial violence against Palestinians has provided an opening for political and theoretical interventions at the intersection of animal studies and critical scholarship on Palestine. In the case of Palestine, recent work has criticized the use of veganism and animal welfare by the Israeli state and propaganda apparatus to marginalize the question of Palestinian self-determination by portraying itself as the vanguard of animal protection. I am interested in a repoliticization of the animal question through an interrogation of human-animal relationships in societies shaped by the policing of racialized populations and where the dominant relationship to animal life is one of ownership.

The goal, then, is to think beyond comparison, to rethink contemporary metaphors of intersection toward something bumpier and messier. What forms of relation come into view if messiness and rupture are privileged over easy intersection? My claim is that an abolitionist politics and way of being comes into view; one motivated by a fundamental challenge to property, capital, and the carceral state. This abolitionist politics challenges the zero-sum logic that equates Black and Palestinian oppression with animal oppression and argues for concern for one over the other: instead, an abolitionist politic is informed by mutual freedom. Such mutual freedom is dependent on the abolition of property; the abolition of property enables mutual freedom to be realized. Che Gossett emphasizes how thinkers in Black studies challenge the instrumentalization of Black suffering to the cause of animal liberation, where “blackness remains the absent presence of much animal studies and animal liberation discourse — which speaks to how blackness functions as ‘the raw material’ of theory and knowledge production.”¹⁰ For Gossett, this argument is not a call to abandon animal justice, instead, Gossett drawing from Du Bois, it is a call for “freedom for all life.” Such freedom for all life is the goal of an abolitionist analytic and political practice in so far as it challenges the naturalization of systems of confinement and the normalization of mass death. Esther Alloun similarly mobilizes a practice of intersectionality to argue for animal justice projects attentive to settler colonialism in Palestine against the “simplicity” of a single-issue focus on animal rights that marginalizes or erases Palestinians.¹¹ Thus, my argument aims to draw out the shared foci of the political project of animal liberation with Black and Palestinian liberation, showcasing their shared visions for challenging the hegemony of colonial capitalism and anthropocentric hierarchy.

I also emphasize the central role of property regimes and racial capitalism to both white supremacist racial formations and animal exploitation. The production of animal capital is dependent on the broad forces of racial capitalism. Both systems depend on the differential valuation of labour according to interlocking hierarchies of race, gender, and species which are dialectically produced by capital’s shifting valorization requirements, that is the way capital renders surplus some populations while valuing others according to different productive relations over different historical periods. As Nicole Shukin argues, “animal life gets culturally and carnally rendered as capital at specific historical junctures”.¹² By reading those historical junctures, scholars and activists can resist idealizing treatments of animal life. My project aims to do this by reading animal representations through the history of policing, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism in North America and Palestine, projects that harm marginalized humans and animals alike. The paper also thinks about the way animals are rendered as weapons that come to police a social order of racial hierarchy. I am thus interested in the violence done by and to police dogs in the process of the conversion of life into weapons and the use of those weapons on racialized populations.

The figure of the police dog as seen in contemporary media representations appears disconnected from the history of policing it is based on. This disconnection is especially vivid through various kinds of propaganda that make use of dogs to conceal the harm done by police as an institution relying on certain mythologies around dogs imagined essential love and loyalty and the flattening of historical struggles against racial justice. According to sociologist Tyler Wall, while the US had experimented with using police dogs in the early twentieth century, they first became widespread during the Civil Rights Era.¹³ Reflecting on the Black rebellions in the 2010s, especially the uprising in Ferguson, Boisseron writes that the “post-Ferguson era has brought back to consciousness a racial prism that many wished had died in ‘post-racial America’ after Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.” Viewed through this prism, “race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence,” with such intersections being visited upon the criminalized and Black body.¹⁴ Placing the empty, ahistorical representation of the police dog into historically specific racial formations helps us understand the role of the police dog as part of the history of policing and the history of capitalism writ large, especially as it concerns accumulation and the production and management of surplus populations. While the police dog is valorized, other dogs are subject to breed-based forms of discrimination sometimes resulting in waves of mass killing. Boisseron notes that pit bulls have been subject to these kinds of moral panics since, due to their associations with Black men, the dogs themselves come to be racialized as physical and sexual threats.¹⁵ This system of classification harms both the dog and the racialized human who is denied human status through police operations and a socially stigmatizing white gaze.

In an argument for the use of police dogs, police scientist Charles Sloane relies on the use of dogs in war. He writes, “there is but little difference between fighting an enemy in a declared war and fighting an enemy, the criminal, at home on the crime front. Both are comparable battles for the very existence of civilization, for without the thin wall of police protecting the people […] the world would soon revert to savagery and bestiality.”¹⁶ While Sloane’s erasure of the differences between war and policing serves to protect the existing social order, it also shows how such a mode of protection is cast in racialized and species terms through his linking together of savagery and bestiality. The imbrication of race and species, particularly the joint portrayal of the racialized and the animal as threats to an established order, reveals the way policing enforces the racialized and capitalist terms of that order through the tacit or explicit threat of violence. Sloane’s rhetoric is especially striking given that his essay was published the same year he joined the US Army in the imperial war in Vietnam.¹⁷ Ultimately, Sloane’s conflation of warfare and policing practices in his discussion of the police dog suggests that “there are uncivilized elements within the United States striking at the heart of domestic order, and thus the snarling police dog is a potent weapon in the war to secure ‘civilization.’”¹⁸ Sloane’s act of thinking together war and police is far from unique. Such a connection has also been made by Black radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party, who connected the repression they faced from US police to imperial wars. Modern work on the history of policing and empire has confirmed the extensive links between the repression of Black liberation movements and the counter-insurgency operations against various decolonization movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As sociologist Stuart Schrader argues, “professional policing did not possess two repertoires […] it possessed a single repertoire, which experts vigorously attempted to institute wherever they could.”¹⁹ I will show later how the synonymous operations of war and policing come together with lethal force in Gaza and Palestine more broadly.

War, Police, and Capital

The act of rooting out domestic enemies through police violence is ultimately performed in service of capital accumulation, as disciplining these rogue elements means their transformation into either docile wage labourers or surplus to be warehoused, killed and/or profited from through mechanisms of confinement.²⁰ The submission to labour discipline and the compulsion of the market is underwritten by policing and the whole carceral apparatus. A critical engagement with police power as both law enforcement and forms of social control places it at the centre of capitalism and “exposes the ubiquitous use of force in capitalist societies, which ranges from visible interventions to preserve order to minute acts supporting capital accumulation and the routine reproduction of social relations.”²¹ Thus, not only do the police underwrite market relations of putative freedom, “this very power is central to the constitution of wage labor.”²² A critical account of police power thinks through its structural imbrications with the state, capital, and racialization. Policing “is first and foremost a weapon of the state in the constitution of a capitalist order.”²³ The constitution of such an order rests on a dialectic of direct coercion and legitimation, ultimately reinforced with violence.²⁴ Furthermore, it relies on the ability of power to draw and fabricate distinction and difference in accordance with historically determined markers of racialization and class status. The sovereign violence of the police can most easily be seen during situations of political protest and revolt as the discretionary power allotted to policing institutions allows them to decide when to make an arrest and who to target even if the same law is being broken in different moments. Police power, then, is “inherent in sovereignty and is itself the most comprehensive branch of sovereignty,” with the role of the police extending beyond mere law enforcement and towards the policies of civil society such as public health and welfare as forms of social control.²⁵ The forms of social control used by police historically involved not just the management of human populations but also non-human animals and the interaction between humans and non-humans. Mark Neocleous and Brendan McQuade point out, policing created and enforced modes of interaction with animals including “measures concerning the proper handling of dogs, the sale of livestock, the keeping of pigs and the removal of manure.”²⁶ The interweaving of the management of life by police power was thus always an interspecies affair.

The contribution of critical theories of police power is to place such power at the centre of capitalism even under conditions of ostensibly freely contracted wage labour. They thus challenge foundational assumptions in Marxist scholarship that “under capitalist social relations, direct political force is not necessary for the maintenance of economic exploitation.”²⁷ Neocleous and other critical theorists of police provide a welcome intervention in challenging the idea of capitalism as operating without direct violence. However, missing from their accounts is a history of the Americas: “its history of settler racial genocide, racial slavery, racial segregation, racial liberalism, and racial revanchism” and how these historical phenomena have shaped policing and the intermingling of race and class.²⁸ The police dog serves as a potent symbol of the intertwining of class and race as central to policing. The police dog is deployed to create and reproduce the established order of things at the intersection of the protection of property and the disciplining of racialized populations. These racialized populations challenge the police power of the state within different historical racial formations and the formation and reproduction of anthropocentric hierarchies.

The use of dogs for policing draws its history from the use of dogs for slave catching, as Sloane himself explains, referencing the portrayal of bloodhounds used to capture runaway slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.²⁹ The scholar Sara E. Johnson maps out how dogs were used as instruments of racial terror against African and Indigenous subjects. As she writes, “European colonizers wielded dogs as lethal weapons, and it was abundantly clear to contemporary observers that the animals were likely to maim and/or kill their prey, not simply to capture them in the course of pursuit.”³⁰ Johnson draws out the similarities in the use of dogs by European colonizers in the nineteenth century Americas and the use of dogs as instruments of torture and terror in Abu Ghraib by the US.³¹

One of the key features of the Trump presidency was the mobilization of the language of the War on Terror against political rivals, namely the racial justice and anti-fascist groups that militantly organized against his brand of white nationalist authoritarian politics.³² The police dog, then, represented the mobilization of the state repressive apparatus outside the bounds of formal legal procedure. In theorizing the police hunt, a hunt for a supposed “criminal”, Grégoire Chamayou elucidates a contradiction between law and police violence, “if police action finds its main justification in respect for the law, what drives it in practice is something quite different: the desire and the pleasure of the pursuit, in relation to which the law appears as an obstacle to its full development.”³³ The law, then, appears to both enable and limit policing, however such a dialectic of permission and limit is illusory since it is policing as such that produces the force of the law. As Neocleous has long argued, law enforcement was a “meaning imposed on the term ‘police’ by an increasingly hegemonic liberalism in the late-eighteenth century.”³⁴ This recent imposition conceals a more expansive understanding of policing as constituting the state as such. Policing understood as a broad operation of management over life is geared toward the creation, reproduction, and disciplining of labouring populations, both human and non-human, as well as management of surplus populations, both human and non-human. The management of movement, life, and the conditions of death as a capitalist imperative means that capitalism is concerned with life and liveliness as fundamental categories of value differentiation. Wall suggests a similar argument about state violence and policing when he argues that “the police dog amplifies the predatory animus of civilization — police as beast.”³⁵ If the police act as beast in service of the established order of capitalist reproduction, then such action takes place in the domain of life itself and so involves control over and valuation of life. In his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida argues that the beast and sovereign intertwine “at a distance from the law”, since both exist outside its formal structures, with the beast being ignorant of the law and the sovereign being above it as a law-maker.³⁶ Derrida argues that the beast, the sovereign, and the criminal “seem to be heterogeneous among themselves” but are united in being outside the law and so “call on each other” in a common relationship to law.³⁷ While Derrida here is not discussing capitalism per se, the enforcement of the capitalist forms of life and relations of production through the bodily capacities of the police dog is an example of the intertwined relationship of the power of the sovereign and the beast as a particular relation to law and hierarchies of liveliness which, in racialized social formations, are shaped by enslavement and colonization. Ultimately, I argue that the dog’s body is subject to sovereign power in the service of capital accumulation and the reproduction of racial hierarchy.

Theorizing Biocapitalism

The police dog is a biopolitical and biocapitalist phenomenon. The police dog, like all instruments of policing, maintains the boundaries between life and death by reproducing a liveable life for certain subjects while, at the same time, condemning others to death through killing or organized abandonment. In my use of biocapitalism, I draw on two different theoretical genealogies. In the first instance, it draws on the work of historians of enslavement, who note that a central feature of the Atlantic trade was that slaves could only ever give birth to slaves, ultimately harnessing the reproductive capacities of women toward the process of commodification. Summarizing this literature, Nikhil Singh writes, “[t]his biocapitalist innovation was in turn married to the slaveholder’s power over life and death,” mapping this power on to Foucault’s biopolitical coordinates of killing, making live, letting die, and letting live.³⁸ In the second instance, it draws on the work of animal life theorists such as Donna Haraway, who argues in When Species Meet that Marxists should take into account liveliness as a form of value alongside use and exchange value.³⁹ These two uses of biocapital set up an interesting homology between the racialized production of lively commodities and a broader control over life itself that defines capitalism. Frederick Douglass was, seemingly, aware of this homology when he wrote about “slave breeding states” where slaves were “reared” like livestock and where slave breeding was “looked upon as a legitimate trade”, sanctioned by law and upheld by public opinion.⁴⁰ The framing of reproduction of enslaved people as “rearing” suggests a profound dehumanization, to be sure, but it also implicates the market and broader relations of production in the control over life and the use of lively capacities for profit. The production of commodities was central to the Transatlantic slave trade, which saw death and terror as “incidental” to the “workings of the trade”.⁴¹ Policing, in the expansive sense I have been working with here, was and is central to the hierarchies of life and the production of commodities under the labour regime of enslavement and its afterlives.

Returning to the police dog, we can see the police dog as exemplifying the processes of biocapital across both senses, its use by the state in the enforcing of racial regimes of ownership and the conversion of the dog into property. The police dog is harnessed by agents of the state responsible for capitalist accumulation, accumulation which articulates itself through the production of racial difference. I offer the term “racial biocapitalism” to think about the centrality of racializing assemblages in marking out certain bodies as violable based on their distance from a normative white humanity. Racialization shapes conceptions of life and liveliness across dynamics of labour and capital. Racial biocapitalism, then, is an historical expression of the afterlives of the Atlantic slave trade, and so the broader history and structure of policing.

The other relevant biocapitalist modality at work is in the training of the police dogs themselves. The training is “contingent on the dog’s body being taken over by human agents and institutional forces so as to transform the canine into an obedient, disciplined ‘working dog’, a coercive metamorphosis grasped by the discursive conversion from canine to ‘K-9’.”⁴² Such a process installs an anthropocentric hierarchy with the dog being obedient to a human master. While Wall is largely focused on the disjuncture between the scientific management of dogs and their use as instruments of terror, scholars of animal studies might also note the anthropocentrism baked into such forms of recruitment to this enterprise of racial terror. The harm done to dogs is both central and incidental to these biocapitalist modalities: central in so far as it is the regimen of training that weaponizes the dog’s capacities and incidental in so far as the police dog is one part of a broader system of the management over life under racial and species hierarchies. The dog here becomes something of an abstraction for this control over life. At the same time, actual living dogs are harmed as dogs are placed in dangerous situations where they are subject to physical dangers. In my reading of PAW Patrol, I will elaborate on the yoking together of policing and dogs but for now I simply note that breaking this connection is important to both projects of police abolition and animal abolition, since to abolish police (dogs) would be one form of abolishing the use of animals for anthropocentric purposes. The politics of mutual freedom I develop is thus attentive to the way marginalized humans and dogs are interwoven as subjects through their relation to being property and violence under capitalism.

The shaping of modes of life and liveliness within racialized difference has historically expressed itself in zoological terms. Chamayou writes that “the task of explaining the historical disaster that was taking place in the contact between the European capitalist mode of production and African societies was thus entrusted, starting at the end of the eighteenth century, to zoologists and specialists in natural history.”⁴³ It is within this discourse that human–animal relations “became the privileged model for conceiving the relations among peoples.”⁴⁴ Within this zoological paradigm, race and species intersect to reproduce the biopolitics of confinement, enforced by the repressive state and institutionalized modes of anthropocentrism through the killing and confinement of animals as well as a broader dialectic of humanization and animalization. These biopolitics of classification were deeply shaped by the logics of abstraction that underwrite private property as a social construction and institution.⁴⁵

I now turn to the first case study, a critical examination of how the police dog and policing more broadly is represented in the children’s television show PAW Patrol. What political pedagogies are reproduced or made invisible through such representations? And how do animals function within a dialectic of humanization and animalization regarding the police? I follow Colleen Boggs’s argument that animal representations “form the nexus where biopolitical relationships get worked out.”⁴⁶ Such a working out, I suggest, is also a question of the determination of value according to the logics of racial capitalism. I understand representations in an expansive sense, including both cultural texts and machines that summon the sign of animality, specifically “dog-ness”, as crucial to their expressive content. I start with PAW Patrol as it encapsulates a certain fantasy of the police as protectors of the social order, tacitly drawing on a longer history of using animals as subjects of the moral and political instruction of children. This text symptomatically reveals the police as invested in capital accumulation, not in the least as PAW Patrol is, in the last instance, selling the police as commodity.

Animal Capital and Carceral Logic, or ACAB Includes Paw Patrol

PAW Patrol is a cultural juggernaut of children’s television. To those of us without children, however, it likely came to our attention through a right-wing panic which claimed that people on the left were “cancelling” PAW Patrol as part of a broader “war on police”.⁴⁷ Indeed, even the Trump White House, in a response to the moral panic, lied about the status of PAW Patrol being taken off the air. What does this strange episode reveal about the links between the police dog, racializing assemblages, capitalism and popular culture? The show revolves around the exploits of a team of talking dogs led by a child who serve as a privatized security force in the fictional city of Adventure Bay. The most prominent character on the show is a police dog named, perhaps symptomatically, Chase: recalling the use of police dogs in “manhunts”. Due to the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resurgence of a global struggle against police in 2020, and the massive success of the PAW Patrol franchise, the show became the subject of cultural discourse around “copaganda” — media representations of the police that naturalize their role in society as either positive or necessary for the preservation of order and peace. As TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk writes, “TV has long held a police’s-eye perspective” and as viewers we are “locked inside a police perspective, harnessed to their needs, desires, and daily rhythms.”⁴⁸ The panic over the left’s supposed “cancelling” of PAW Patrol is then a panic over a break with the hegemony of this perspective as it is reproduced in mass culture.

Animals have long been used to instruct children in proper modes of relation and empathy. In her work, Boggs explores how John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education was a central point of reference for teaching children in the Anglo-American Enlightenment. She argues that Locke’s argument relies on “the substitution of animals for human beings”, as the “ability to identify affectively with other human beings and to enter into social and legal relations with them depends on an ability to exercise proper compassion to animals.”⁴⁹ The speaking animal character has often been a voice of moral instruction in popular culture. For instance, Karah M. Mitchell has explored how cat autobiographies

present animals as sites of biopolitical control that reside in the hands of white women. Written in service of a larger “humane” education movement largely directed at children, these texts worked to naturalize — through the figures of speaking animals — specific understandings of race and reproduction for young readers: they tied race to species and, through the “humane” euthanization of racialized animals, conflated nonhuman and human population control.⁵⁰

In a video essay on PAW Patrol and/as copaganda, Youtuber Jackson Maher, under his nom de guerre Skip Intro, notes that dogs have been used to soften the image of the police during periods of broader public scepticism. For example, following the killing of Eric Garner in New York City in 2014, the NYPD fed stories about rescuing kittens to the media, including the New York Times which ran a story about the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group rescuing a kitten.⁵¹ The Strategic Response Group is a unit of the NYPD that has been routinely criticized for its use of violence against protesters in the George Floyd Rebellions and, more recently, against pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.⁵² Such images work to “humanize” the police through its “proper” care for animals, with the animals becoming tools for the sanitization of police violence within a matrix of associations that work as a kind of counterinsurgency countering popular anger against the police. The animal is conscripted into the apparatus of policing in so far as it is summoned to normalize the role of police in preserving certain kinds of life, for instance, the life of an innocent kitten. Animal representations are employed in an effort to normalize policing as both a fact of life and a desirable institution, necessary to preserve the social fabric and respond to emergencies. All the while, the real-life animals are conscripted into a hierarchical relation dependent upon a devaluation of animal life.

In PAW Patrol, policing is presented as the only possible response to emergencies in the absence of a robust or even present polis.⁵³ Indeed, as Maher points out, people only become present in the narrative as subjects which the Paw Patrol must swoop in and save.⁵⁴ Policing creates and disciplines the subjects that populate a social order seemingly free of the contingencies of history. In her reading of Rancière, Kristin Ross argues that the police are an expansive political architecture of normalization. Policing, for Rancière, is ultimately concerned with “determining what can or cannot be seen, dividing what can be heard from what cannot.”⁵⁵ The phrase “move along, there’s nothing to see here” then becomes the prototype of policing as such. If this is a general function of copaganda, it is especially present here, since there is literally nothing to see beyond the operations of the Paw Patrol represented by the police (dog). While there are other dogs on the show that perform other emergency services and duties, Chase is definitively the main character and appears more frequently than the other dogs.⁵⁶ If the raison d’être of policing is the fabrication of a social order of accumulation, PAW Patrol represents the ultimate fantasy of permanent emergency and accumulation without resistance. Unlike the superhero story which, as David Graeber argues, stages the defence of the social order through the defeat of villains with their own plans, purposes, and projects, PAW Patrol poses no such ethico-political dilemmas since the only villain from the neighbouring town Foggy Bottom, Mayor Humdinger, has no aspirations beyond envy and no qualities that might make one sympathize or even be compelled by him.⁵⁷ Structurally, the show presents a problem or emergency for the dogs in the Paw Patrol to solve. Maher suggests the ubiquitous presence of Chase as the protagonist naturalizes the police as a response to any kind of emergency and in the “same class as other first responders.”⁵⁸ In the episode “Pups Save Ryder’s Robot” (S1E19B), Ryder builds a robot dog that goes haywire after the fire safety dog Marshall accidentally breaks it, the Paw Patrol works to stop the robot so Ryder can fix it. The result is a return to the status quo ante of the show with no lesson being learned and the Paw Patrol having fun with the robot dog. While the episode seems to raise some ideas leading toward a moral lesson, no such lesson is put forward instead the Paw Patrol pups play with the robo-dog. Indeed, no explicit contrast is set up between the robo-dog and the Paw Patrol pups and Ryder makes no gesture toward replacing them thereby setting the stage for the real pups to prove their superiority. The lack of narrative conflict speaks to fabrication of a particular order wherein the police are thoroughly naturalized as part of any kind of response.

There is no alternative to the Paw Patrol. Ultimately, this means there is no alternative to capitalism as such. The specific interaction between commerce and the police, the police as commodity, suggests an isometric connection between selling the idea of policing and police funding. The spectre of “defunding the police’”, despite never manifesting, prompted the liberals and the far-right to ally over fears of ‘“disorder” and “crime”. In most cases, such invocations often referred to the simple presence of surplus populations, defined either through formal racial and national ascriptions by the far right and in “class” terms through homelessness by the liberals. Ultimately, the dogs of PAW Patrol serve to naturalize the police and so to police political responses to policing as such. The police force as commodity takes a particular salience under neoliberal capitalism where “while budgets evaporate for public schooling […] there is no such shortfall for police, prisons, and the military.”⁵⁹ Such a mode of resource allocation unites the bourgeois political spectrum in defence of capital.

The anti-crime and pro-police alliance between liberals and the far-right is hardly a novel phenomenon. Such an alliance ultimately arises in service of protecting capital, with the differences between these political positions amounting to disagreements in how the ruling class should be represented in terms of demographic diversity. The erasure of Palestine is another cause that, as Darryl Li argues, “happens to most powerfully unite liberals and the right in open expressions of racist warmongering.”⁶⁰ The police repression of the pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses last year has affirmed this position. I argue that the ideological consensus on the fundamental necessity of the police and the expansionist project in West Asia known as Zionism come together in their valuation and management of populations in service of capital.

Robot Dogs, War, and Police in Palestine

In the spring of 2024, a campaign was launched as part of the broader Palestine solidarity movement to shut down Ghost Robotics, a company based at the University of Pennsylvania and founded by two alumni. Like many other targets of anti-Zionist divestment campaigns, Ghost Robotics is a company producing weapons used by the IDF sustained by elite institutions tasked with reproducing a diverse but pliable ruling class, in this case an Ivy League university. The imbrication between settler colonialism in Palestine and racial capitalism in the US is vividly demonstrated by Ghost Robotics. In their argument for and reflections on Black–Palestinian solidarity, organizers Chenjerai Kumanyika and Demetrius Noble note that UPenn’s centre for innovation

received significant tax breaks as part of a Keystone Innovation Zone, touted as a program to foster business development in underserved areas. But the tax credits that benefit Ghost Robotics […] would otherwise have gone into the city’s budget and could have helped to fund […] other resource-starved public infrastructure and social programs.⁶¹

Ghost Robotics as the manufacturer of robot dogs both profits from settler colonialism and genocide by selling these “dogs” to Israel it is also materially enabled by a partitioning of space and an allocation of resources structured by racial capitalism.

These “dogs” can scout terrain, float in water, and generally navigate territory deemed too risky for human soldiers. The use of these dogs fits the existing rationale for the use of the police dog, which was said by police scientists in the 60s to be a weapon that could perform tasks unsafe for human officers.⁶² Importantly, they work to keep Israeli soldiers safe from a guerilla resistance which has needed to favour tactics like the ambush over full-frontal, “traditional,” warfare. As policing works as a life sorting operation, so do the robot dogs work to preserve the life of the Israeli settler-soldier and kill Palestinians and other subjects resisting Israeli colonialism.

Thinkers in the Black radical tradition and Black Americans at large have long drawn connections between American imperialist wars abroad and its war against Black people “at home”.⁶³ The use of terror as justification for colonialism sits in dialectical relation with the US’s (and Canada’s) own colonial history, with the “Indian Wars” serving to justify American wars abroad and exercise of its military might; the “Indian Wars” being a set of wars of colonial conquest against Indigenous nations from the early modern period to the nineteenth century.⁶⁴ In an essay written during Israel’s 1982 War on Lebanon, which was conducted with the goal of destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization, Edward Said asks the question: “Who are the Palestinians if not the functional equivalent of Israel’s blacks, or red Indians?”⁶⁵ Israel’s “blacks” or “red Indians,” much like Indigenous people and Black people in the Americas, are policed by “dogs” — in this case, weaponized robot dogs manufactured and sold in the US, Israel’s imperial sponsor. We can see this as a kind of cyber-dystopian update of the networks of colonial racial terror in the use of dogs throughout the Americas. The use of dogs, and here I deliberately blur the lines between real and mechanical police dogs, spreads from the suppression of Indigenous and enslaved African revolts to the present as manifested in contemporary regimes of border control. Indeed, the US Department of Homeland Security has deployed these mechanical “dogs” to work as surveillance agents at the border, as part of the management of surplus populations in the climate crisis. Such a management of surplus populations is less an anachronistic callback to nineteenth or early twentieth century colonialism but rather a vision of the future of capitalism. Legal theorist Dylan Saba notes that the ethnic cleansing of in Gaza and the turn toward border militarization are not relics of a colonial past but rather portend a nationalist future contingent on advanced technology and surveillance.⁶⁶

Primitive Accumulation and Animal Capital

In Marx, the concept of primitive accumulation is used to critique a political economy that “cannot account for the origins of the capital relation” instead relying on the very values that came to define the capital relation, e.g. free wage labour, to explain the origins of such a relation.⁶⁷ As Marx puts it, “primitive accumulation […] is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing producers from the means of production.”⁶⁸ The world-historical upshot of this separation was a break from older modes of life toward capitalist expansion. This account, while taken up in general terms, has also been subject to critique for its characterization of accumulation as confined to a specific historical moment, and its suggestion that capitalism operates primarily by silent compulsion. However, as Glen Coulthard notes in his synthesis of Indigenous critique and Marxist political economy, “the escalating onslaught of violent, state-orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the persistent role that […] violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.”⁶⁹ Despite noting the presence of colonial plunder and enslavement in capitalist accumulation, Marx remains inattentive to the analytical problem of “how racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies are retained as a mechanism of labour discipline and surplus appropriation” including the political process of alleging to render such distinctions “anachronistic in the long run” through narratives of universal equality and freedom.⁷⁰

The accumulation of animals as commodities and the clearing of land for animal use have been a feature of capital accumulation in different colonial frontiers.⁷¹ Historically, in the colonization of the Americas, livestock played a crucial role, as both the driver of material changes to the landscape and in ideological terms.⁷² The Israeli state has used practices of “reintroducing” wildlife as a broader practice of “making the land Jewish again.”⁷³ The ability to reintroduce wildlife as part of a settler project is contingent on the broader dispossession of Palestinians that makes up the Israeli settler project’s raison d’être. Ideologically, these animals work to legitimate Israeli settlers’ claims of “indigeneity” by linking them to religious texts in which the animals are mentioned or can be read into.⁷⁴ The preservation of certain forms of animal life is done through the negation of Palestinian humanity, where Palestinians are seen as less than animals by the Israeli state and the global world system in so far as they are available to be confined and killed as per the imperatives of Israeli capital and statecraft. Importantly for our purposes, individual animals as well as Palestinians have been killed and displaced as part and parcel Israeli settler colonialism since the animal as an abstraction of settler power is more valuable than actual animals.⁷⁵ Animals are used by colonial racial capitalism as ciphers or abstractions for other ideological projects that are not concerned with preserving the life of singular, individual animals. This mode of abstraction is common across the archive I assemble here, as dogs become abstractions for police power and the management over life.

The use of robot dogs is part of a larger project of using animals to enforce hierarchies of life that enable the accumulation of capital through policing. The project legitimated by Zionism and the discourse of fighting terror in order to “re-occupy” Gaza is ultimately a project to “develop” the land and make it profitable for Israeli and global capital. The post-war fantasy is one of valuable waterfront properties and other strategies of accumulation (including repair) that ultimately feed back into Israel’s economy, as Jasbir Puar has argued.⁷⁶ The robot dogs also generate value in that they can be marketed as “battle tested” to other states for repression, as per the general orientation toward Gaza as a laboratory for both military infrastructure and strategies for biopolitical regulation. The use of Gaza and the West Bank as “labs” is also a mode of profit extraction, as Palestinians become animalized through being used as test subjects, a role that is usually filled by non-human animals in social formations dominantly structured by animal ownership. As Amy Kaplan explains, “Israelis have little incentive to negotiate a real peace with the Palestinians, because the lucrative security market has too much potential. What the Israelis are selling to the rest of the world is not weaponry to defeat an enemy once and for all, but systems for pacification and management, which match the approach that many governments have come to take toward their increasingly urbanized and heterogenous populations.”⁷⁷ Israel profits from Palestinian dispossession and the genocide in Gaza by selling weapons and marketing strategies for urban warfare. The political rhetoric of both a total victory over Hamas and the peaceful settlement of Gaza elides the fundamental reality of profit through selling weapons of pacification.

Robot dogs are, in a curious way, the realization of the fundamental raison d’être of police dogs — being precision machines that can do the dangerous work of pacification and not risk the lives of personnel. The use of robot dogs as machines of genocide is their ultimate realization as tools of capital accumulation. The fantasy of genocide, of the clearing of the land, is the fantasy of the settler racial state par excellence, though as Patrick Wolfe has notably argued it is not always required for settler consolidation.⁷⁸ The claims of settler colonial states to inhabitation and indigeneity are established through the “reorganization” of life that retroactively affirms settler claims to rightful inhabitation. This takes on a particular cast with Zionism, which bakes in such claims based on a selective reading of history but is generally the case in all settler states. The taking of territory and the elimination of resistance to the taking of territory subtends such claims and operations of elimination.

The fantasy of the nonhuman, of an idealized robot, takes on the characteristics of liveliness without life as such. The robot dog acts as a vicious beast outside the bounds of the law without having to worry about actual life. The fantasy of elimination of the native is also the fantasy of eliminating the fleshy material animals that exist outside the bounds of capital. Here, I follow Esther Alloun in thinking about animal politics as a site through which settler colonialism is produced and articulated, with mainstream animal activist groups in Israel and the US failing to critique settler colonial investments. Such a separation of animal politics from settler colonial politics is yet another manifestation of the preservation of certain kinds of life while making die life along racialized lines of difference.

Since 2012, the IDF has promoted itself as welcoming of vegans “with the military advertising that it offered vegan alternatives to animal products used in equipment, such as leather-free vegan boots and later, synthetic wool-free berets, and food.”⁷⁹ I see this instrumentalization of veganism as propaganda and as the cultivation of a discourse of progress against the “backward” Palestinian. It also operates within a biopolitical dialectic preserving the life of animals alongside the killing and letting die of Palestinians. The animal is thus humanized as the Palestinian is animalized vis-à-vis hierarchies of values under racial capitalism. I want to conclude here by mapping potential solidarities between Black, Palestinian, and animal liberation movements and thinking through a non-carceral, abolitionist politics of animal justice.

Palestinian Liberation, Police Abolition, and Animal Justice

Palestinian legal theorist Noura Erakat maps instances of Black-Palestinian solidarity through activist intimacies, forged through struggle against the police in Ferguson and an increase in awareness of the Palestinian political reality by Black activists, what Erakat terms the Ferguson–Gaza moment. This renewal of Black–Palestinian solidarity in the 2010s featured “joint protest targeting the exchange of military and carceral technologies between the United States and Israel.”⁸⁰ One of the galvanizing moments of this solidarity movement was Palestinians using social media to teach Black protestors how to deal with tear gas. The Ferguson–Gaza moment taught activists in the US that “white supremacy, and Zionist occupation are not isolated threats faced by distinct groups. They are inseparable components of a broader imperial structure — one that profits from violence across the world, whether it’s selling weapons to the Israeli military or to the US police departments that dominate poor and Black neighborhoods.”⁸¹ Drawing on this knowledge, the Stop Cop City movement, a multiracial coalition to stop the construction of a police training facility in Georgia, has traced links between the Atlanta Police Department and the Israeli Occupation Force.⁸²

The genocide is also an ecocide. The destruction of olive groves, the contamination of groundwater, and the pollution of the air all compound the beyond unliveable condition of Palestinians in Gaza. The Stop Cop City movement is similarly fighting against an ecocide: the police training facility will require the destruction of forests and result in profound biodiversity loss. The fact that both the genocide in Gaza and Cop City are environmentally destructive is part and parcel of the environmental destruction historically integral to settler colonialism.

The struggles-to-come embodied in the movement for a free Palestine (and Palestinian resistance) and Stop Cop City are also struggles against climate change. As such, animal abolitionists should take up these struggles as part of a broad coalition that challenges the hegemony of Western capitalism which also enshrines anthropocentric domination. As Andreas Malm maps out, “the destruction of Palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different, but related process of destruction: namely, that of the climate system of this planet.”⁸³ Using the language of Palestinian political critique and existence, Malm names the possible future destruction of the Amazon rainforest as “a different kind of Nakba” most immediately impacting the Indigenous and Afro-descendant people of the region. Malm offers the term “fossil empire” to think about the long history of the kind of resource extraction that typifies settler modes of appropriation seeking to create and reproduce energy regimes based on fossil fuels.⁸⁴

Reflecting on a future “after the war” Ahmad Safi, co-founder of Palestinian Animal League, writes about the care shown by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank toward animals that were also injured during the indiscriminate bombing and invasion by the occupation forces. Safi calls for the “people of Palestine”, including “humans and animals, trees and mountains”, to be the “fuel for the world’s revolutions and a torch for the civilizations that were annihilated, so that they may rise again.”⁸⁵ Safi presents a conception of personhood and political action that is not reducible to the human, but rather includes Palestinian humans and nonhumans as co-strugglers toward revolution and a future beyond Israeli and global colonialism. It is this vision that animates my concern with a broad understanding of abolition that is informed by the Black freedom struggle and that moves beyond the species line.

By and large, the animal justice movement has not taken carceral systems seriously, and has had little to nothing to say about Palestine. As the legal scholar Justin Marceau explains “abuse an animal — go to jail” is representative of the broad trends within animal justice.⁸⁶ More recently, scholars have challenged the reliance on these carceral systems as being able to protect animals since they can only focus on individual animals. Such a focus on individual harm and lack of attention to broader structures carves out exceptions for the many animals that are disassembled in slaughterhouses and experimented on in labs since these take place under the aegis of legality. The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT) passed in the US is a central example of this kind of legislation which “represents a Western trend of prioritizing the strength of criminal cases at the expense of saving the vast majority of animals from violent abuse.”⁸⁷ As Struthers Montford and Kasprzycka note, PACT marks out exceptions for animals who threaten property and does not apply to people who slaughter animals or use animals in scientific experimentation, itself a central site of the production of animal capital. While animal advocates may respond with a single-issue focus on preventing harm to animals, I would counter that such a focus on criminalization ultimately reproduces systemic harm to animals by not effectively engaging with the larger systems of animal commodification and weaponization enshrined in capitalist society.

Conclusion

In thinking about the constellation of cultural and legal associations that bind together Black people and dogs, Boisseron argues that what “brings the dog, the slave, and the civil rights protestor together under the same ‘ferocious’ stigma is their common claim to freedom, perceived ultimately as a feral claim.”⁸⁸ I see this “common claim to freedom” reflected in Said naming the Palestinian as a “threat to the stabilities — whether of states, parties, governments, or sects — that exist alongside him.”⁸⁹ In thinking about the Palestinian as threat to stabilities of a sociopolitical world that normalizes occupation, apartheid, and genocide, Said draws his metaphor from the long history of human–dog interaction. In his Preface to the 1992 edition of The Question of Palestine, reflecting on the major world-historical changes that had taken place since the book was first published in 1979, Said writes that the question of Palestine remains “undomesticated”.⁹⁰ I want to argue for this ferality and “undomestication” as a counter-alliance against the police dog as a figure of repression and the harnessing of lively capital by the repressive state. Throughout the paper I have traced how racial capitalism and animal capital commonly oppress Black people, Palestinians, and animals through the figure of the police dog (broadly conceived). In dialectical opposition to such a structure, I see the struggles of the past and future against white supremacy, colonialism, anthropocentrism, and the carceral state.

The undomesticated nature of the question of Palestine is homologous with the undomestication of Black freedom struggles against the carceral state and the animal question. To “resolve” these questions would be to abolish capitalism as such. As a matter of animal justice and coalitional politics, animal justice organizations should work to ban the use of animals in policing, not just because of its cruelty to dogs and other animals but also as a project of mutual freedom for all forms of life on this shared planet.