Chris Pearson, Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog (London: Profile Books, 2024), 262 pp.

Dogs have long occupied a central place in human societies as companions, protectors, and working animals. Yet their role in shaping social and urban life has often remained underexplored. In Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog, Chris Pearson addresses this gap by examining the evolving relationship between humans and dogs and its role in shaping modern society.

Offering a global narrative from prehistoric times to the present, Pearson situates human–canine relations within broader processes of modernity, including class formation, race, gender, colonialism, medicine, and urbanization. He argues that dogs have played a significant, though often overlooked, role in shaping modern urban life, influencing emotional cultures, consumer practices, and professional fields such as veterinary medicine. Organized into eight chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion, the book traces key moments in the human–dog relationship, from hunting and guardianship to pedigree breeding, street-dog campaigns, petkeeping, warfare, and what Pearson terms “poop politics.” Together, these developments explain the historical emergence of the “modern dog.”

The opening chapter, “Canines Uncollared,” considers domestication and the diverse roles dogs played as hunters, guardians, laborers, transportation animals, and indoor companions. Drawing on hunting treatises, manuals, legends, and secondary works, Pearson shows how humans gradually specialized dogs for particular purposes, producing animals with distinctive appearances, abilities, and characteristics. Yet human–canine relations were never wholly harmonious. Dogs could be targeted for attacking livestock, while the fear of rabies “cast a long shadow over human-canine relations” (27). Although the narrative primarily focuses on Western Europe, Pearson also traces canine histories and breed origins across America, Egypt, Russia, and Persia.

The second chapter examines the rise of pedigree dogs in nineteenth-century Britain and the subsequent global spread of breed ideology. This transformation privileged lineage and physical appearance over canine abilities and made bred dogs symbols of their owners’ pedigree, status, and power. Pearson places this history at the intersection of class, race, gender, colonialism, and nationalism. The working-class culture of “dog fancy” existed alongside institutions such as the Kennel Club, established in 1873 to regulate breeding and exhibitions. Women were also “heavily involved in dog breeding,” culminating in the establishment of the Ladies Kennel Association in 1894. Beyond Britain, purebred dogs acquired different political meanings: Soviet clubs promoted utilitarian and productive dogs, while colonial exhibitions in Shanghai and India allowed European elites to display their supposed mastery of nature and civilizational superiority. Pedigree breeding also became intertwined with the construction of national identities.

Chapter three turns to street dogs, once integral to urban ecologies but increasingly treated as carriers of disease and sources of disorder. Pearson links their marginalization to modern urbanism, changing medical knowledge, and the growing popularity of pedigree dogs. Animals that had consumed leftovers and sometimes served as a “powerful buffer against the spread of rabies” were relabeled as “curs” or “mongrels.” Through a class-based analysis, Pearson shows how wealthier urbanites associated street dogs with poverty, backwardness, and moral danger, while working-class and immigrant communities maintained alternative forms of companionship. His global perspective extends this discussion to Cairo and Istanbul. Dog taxes, collars, and muzzles attempted to distinguish owned animals from strays, making a dog’s right to remain in the city increasingly dependent on visible human ownership and responsibility.

Chapter four examines canine protectionism and the contradictions of supposedly humane treatment. European protectionism emerged from religious belief, humanitarian revulsion at suffering, affection for animals, and a desire to promote “civilized behavior” (85). Yet protectionist shelters that sought to rehome and care for dogs also euthanized many of them. Influenced by breed ideology and prejudice against street dogs, these movements contributed to urban “decaninization” and to “a troubling eugenics-adjacent idea of what dogs were allowed to be” (89). Pearson also follows protectionism beyond Western Europe, showing how it became a civilizational standard exported to colonial settings. At the same time, new affectionate relations with dogs required thought, responsibility, and care. Together with nineteenth-century consumerism, these relations encouraged the emergence of the pet-food industry and contributed to the development of modern veterinary medicine.

“Constant Companions,” the fifth chapter, further explores petkeeping across cities, rural areas, and plantations. Pearson argues that a once-marginal form of interaction became the dominant mode of human–canine companionship. The collar and leash directed and controlled dogs, but they also created obligations through which dogs shaped human actions and decisions. Petkeeping reflected middle-class ideals of order and hygiene, yet working-class pet cultures persisted despite taxes, licensing, and criticism of spending money on supposedly useless animals. Pearson also considers companionship among marginalized people and on American plantations, where enslaved people lived alongside dogs and valued their loyalty. Class determined which dogs were cared for and which were associated with dirt, disease, and disorder. Throughout the chapter, dogs appear not merely as passive recipients of human decisions but as intelligent agents who influenced the societies around them.

Chapter six focuses on rabies, a disease that “cast a shadow over the lives of humans and dogs” and intensified anti-street-dog campaigns (137). Sensationalist reporting, mad-dog scares, and the disease’s horrifying symptoms transformed rabies into a persistent public-health concern. Pasteur’s development of a vaccine in 1885 marked an important turning point, but it did not end older practices: authorities continued to cull street dogs, and vaccination itself became entangled with the French mission civilisatrice and imperial domination. As Pearson observes, the vaccine did not constitute a clean break with earlier understandings of rabies or methods of dealing with dogs.

Chapter seven, “Dogs of War,” traces canine militarization from the colonization of the Americas to modern warfare and policing. Colonial powers used dogs, including Cuban bloodhounds, to terrorize Indigenous communities and enslaved plantation workers. Their effectiveness depended both on human training and coercion and on their own strength and sensory capacities. By the First World War, Germany, Belgium, France, and Britain had mobilized dogs for guarding, sanitary work, message carrying, and search-and-rescue operations. Dogs also supported the morale of wounded soldiers and the public. During the Second World War, numerous breeds performed military tasks, while German shepherds were also used to terrorize and kill concentration-camp inmates and served imperial power in Japan. Pearson thus presents war dogs simultaneously as military instruments, emotional companions, and participants in state violence.

The final chapter examines dog waste and the persistence of anti-dog feeling in the twentieth century. Waste irritated middle-class urban residents but also provided income for poor “pure finders,” who collected it for the tanning industry. Concerns about parasites connected dog waste to medicine and public health, turning “poop politics” into a continuing debate between dog owners and their opponents. The chapter demonstrates both change and continuity: even as petkeeping expanded, dogs could still be represented as threats to civilized society, subjected to impoundment, euthanasia, and sterilization campaigns.

Collared is a compelling global history of the complex relationship between humans and dogs. Unlike Pearson’s earlier Dogopolis, its geographical range extends beyond the Western world and offers a broader repertoire of human–canine relationships. Drawing on social, cultural, animal, and gender history, Pearson brings together treatises, manuals, memoirs, and secondary works to reconstruct the making of the modern dog. Rather than treating dogs simply as passive beings under human control, he presents human–canine history as a co-species relationship and emphasizes dogs’ contributions to shaping human societies. Although Western Europe remains the primary focus, the inclusion of non-Western contexts makes the book valuable to both academic and non-academic readers. It is an important contribution for those interested in animal history, human–animal relations, and deanthropocentric accounts of the past.

Cihangir Gündoğdu

İstanbul Bilgi University, History Department

ORCID: 0000-0002-0086-0655