Straying with street dogs (Aron Nor & Eva Meijer)

Street dogs are not passive beings. They come up with their own norms and strategies for navigating our woven realities. They resist structural violence and everyday hostilities, acting in ways that are deeply political. This book is an attempt to stray with them. It is a dialogue between two thinkers and writers, Aron Nor and Eva Meijer, one from Romania, the other from the Netherlands, that seeks to unsettle dominant narratives about street dogs. Drawing from their own work, different theories, situated understandings, and personal experiences, the authors discuss a wide range of philosophical, anti-speciesist, and anarchist ideas, alongside different historical realities and material interventions, critical for doing justice to street dogs. Asking questions of political relevance to dogs, this text opens possibilities for thinking and living otherwise with them.

The book comes with an afterward by Maria Martelli, and a cover design created by Mina Mimosa.

“The idea of a “multispecies assembly” feels both graspable and slippery, like something you want to, you have to try out, to see how it might work! There’s a lot in the world to feel hopeless about, and the things that are crushing us feel far too big at times. Whether it’s the climate crisis, the genocides and wars, the rising fascism, the endlessly painful animal industry or else, they all seem disastrous and gigantic, and can easily produce a state of shut-down. Which we can acknowledge, and then… turn into something else! Just like Aron says, if “street dogs teach us how to be ungovernable”, they also teach us how to go on – being ungovernable, refusing to act just in response to the social conditions we’re given, and starting to follow our own (collective) paths and projects towards liberation.” – from the afterword by Maria Martelli.