Abstract
In Victorian England poachers and dogs were subject to increasing levels of public interest and engagement. This article considers how their various interactions were represented across a range of printed and visual media and suggests that in establishing the poacher as a largely positive figure the dog had a vital role to play. If a number of other factors worked in favour of the poacher, not least the widespread dislike of the Game Laws, important in this process of legitimation was the poacher’s active link to the canine world. Though ambiguity always surrounded the poacher, and the dog was not always to be found on his side, more often than not it was. The development of this association casts an interesting light on the framing of human-animal relations in the nineteenth century, a critical moment for those concerned with the ‘animal turn’ and notions of non-human agency, and reveals how the dog was more than just the poacher’s ally in the un-official hunting field. As an urban-centred culture acquired a distinctly ruralist orientation, within the popular knowledge economy the idea of the poacher and his dog resonated across boundaries of class and geography. This in turn provides new evidence of how, at the level of culture, the more disreputable sides of life could be accommodated within a society that ostensibly prized respectability.
Reasons for Animal Presence in El pez de oro by Gamaliel Churata and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo by José María Arguedas
