Dogs are perhaps our most popular pets, and certainly one of the best-loved of all animals. They are not only humanity’s best friend, they are also its oldest: burial sites dating back 12,000 years indicate that dogs moved alongside prehistoric peoples before, during and after both species settled the world. The story of the canine has been fundamentally entwined with that of humanity since the earliest times, and this ancient and fascinating story is told in Susan McHugh’s Dog.

This book unravels the debate about whether dogs are descended from wolves, and moves on to deal with canines in mythology, religion and health, dog cults in ancient and medieval civilizations as disparate as Alaska, Greece, Peru and Persia, and traces correspondences between the histories of dogs in the Far East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Dog also examines the relatively recent phenomenon of dog breeding and the invention of species, as well as the canine’s role in science fact and fiction; from Laika, the first astronaut, and Pavlov’s famous conditioned dogs, through to science fiction novels and cult films such as A Boy and his Dog.

Susan McHugh shows how dogs today contribute to human lives in a huge number of ways, not only as pets and guide dogs but also as sources of food in Asia, entertainment workers, and scientific and religious objects. Dog reveals how we have shaped these animals over the millennia, and in turn, how dogs have shaped us.

What does later life look like when it is lived in the companionship of other species? Similarly, how do other species age (or not) with humans, and what sort of (a)symmetries, if any, are brought to light around how we understand and think about aging? So far, aging has been investigated in the social sciences in purely human terms. This is the first collection of original work that considers aging as taking place in relation to other species. This volume aims to start a conversation about aging by taking its more-than-human participants seriously – that is, not only as a support for or context of human aging, but also more symmetrically, as agents and subjects in the process of aging. The contributors draw upon richly descriptive ethnographic accounts, including moments of connection between seniors and dogs in a long-term care facility, human care for aging laboratory animals, and robotic companionship in later life. The ethnographies in this volume enrich not only our understanding of more-than-human companionship during the human aging process, but also challenge and urge us to rethink what it means to live later in life in ecologically entangled social and moral worlds.