READ: Companion species

Like most people with a Substack, I tend to write my posts a little in advance, so that there’s a buffer for when the world goes awry and I don’t get anything written for a week or two. This is definitely one of those weeks. But I’m still writing because it’s important and it’ll be going out in a little while, when hopefully life is a little easier. But if you’re also grieving right now, maybe give this one a miss?

Solstice sunrise at Uffington white horse

Many of you will be well aware that for the past few years, my shadow and companion has been our rescue greyhound, Storm. We’re a tiny family – just Phil and Storm and I – and he’s a big presence in it. He also has more friends than I can count, some he knows well and some who only know him through a screen.

Just over a month ago, in early June, he received a devastating diagnosis. There are few things that greyhounds are prone to – they’re healthy dogs as a rule – but one of them is an aggressive form of bone cancer. There are invasive treatments, but they don’t give you much more time, and they are very uncomfortable for an animal who can’t understand what’s happening to them. Greyhound-knowledgeable vets, including ours, advise you to put them on a cocktail of painkillers and enjoy making memories for as long as you get. In most cases, that’s between a few weeks and a couple of months.

Chilling on the sofa

For us, the good times lasted until Sunday. Until then he was blissfully unaware, getting all the treats and cuddles and gentle adventures, walking with his best friends every day, and taking his meds wrapped in tasty ham.

But Sunday the pain broke through, and by Monday lunchtime, as thunder broke over the house, I knew that he knew something was badly wrong. I also realised that as the person he orbited around, and the person who had promised to keep him safe over and over, from the first day and for four adventure-filled years, it was my responsibility to tell the vet, and walk him along this one, last road.

Phil and I made him as comfortable as we could, and he went gently and peacefully in my arms on Monday evening.

The best of snoots

That was three days ago. I still don’t know how to live without him – how to eat without leaving some for him, how to walk without him showing me the way, or how to sleep without hearing him breathe. By the time you read this, I might have just about started to figure that out. In time, we might be ready to do this again. But we will always miss him, and he’ll always leave a groove in my days and an ache in my soul.

And the thing I want you all to know is that this is as it should be. I have read countless attempts by numerous talented philosophers and writers over the years, trying to put into words what it means to bond to another species. None of them come close apart from one, maybe, and that is Donna Haraway. So here’s some extracts from her Companion Species Manifesto. I highly recommend you find a copy in full if these quotes speak to you. It’s a lot more than a love story. It is, as the title suggests, a proud manifesto for a way of being-in-the-world that humans and other animals have been evolving together for missions of years.

And I’d ask you to take a moment to remember the best of companions, Tailteann Storm Wildcroft.

Wearing his most fabulous hat

He was born to nothing but joy and mischief on 19th June 2015, but raced with all his heart for his trainers in Ireland and Swindon until age 5, and was finally homed in love 30th September 2020 via Forever Hounds, who are just one charity among many who do so much to care for the thousands of hounds who age out of the racing industry each and every year. He was honestly loved by everyone he met and many he didn't, and was up for every adventure to the very end, when he passed into the Summerlands on 12th August, 2024, at just 9 years old, leaving a huge hole in our life, our home, and our hearts.

Here's Donna Haraway, talking about her Australian Shepherd dog, and so, so much more:

“One of us has a microchip injected under her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID California driver’s license. One of us has a written record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of us does not know her great grandparents' names. One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called ''purebred." One of us, equally product of a vast mixture, is called "white. " Each of these names designates a racial discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh.” (Haraway 2016: 91)

“We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is an historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy" (Haraway 2016: 94)

“"Companion species" is a bigger and more heterogeneous category than companion animal and not just because one must include such organic beings as lice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what it is-and vice versa.” (Haraway 2016: 106)

“The big, wide world is full of bumptious life. […] Earth's beings are prehensile, opportunistic, ready to yoke unlikely partners into something new, something symbiogenetic. Co-constitutive companion species and co-evolution are the rule, not the exception.” (Haraway 2016: 123-24)

“The task is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh” (Haraway 2016: 154)

“My multispecies family is not about surrogacy and substitutes; we are trying to live other tropes, other metaplasms. We need other nouns and pronouns for the kin genres of companion species, just as we did (and still do) for the spectrum of genders. Except in a party invitation or a philosophical discussion, significant other won’t do for human sexual partners; and the term performs little better to house the daily meanings of cobbled-together kin relations in dogland”  (Haraway 2016: 187)

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Manifestly Haraway (Univ Of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis).