Susan McHugh featured on 'BBC Radio' program about dogs

In many ways the history of dogs is our history. Throughout time we have walked together hand in paw.

That was the focus of a recent show "Natural Histories" on BBC Radio featuring Susan McHugh, Ph.D., professor and chair in the Department of English.

“As a species we really don’t know who we are, you could argue, without dogs,” McHugh commented during the program.

McHugh has conducted extensive research on the world's first domesticated animal.

“One of the really surprising things I uncovered in my research journey is an almost unbroken line back to ancient times of discrimination against women with little dogs”, McHugh said.

She says that these days, some of that discrimination is still evident when dog owners are told they are using their pets as a substitute for children. That assumption is directly countered by many contemporary dog writers who focus on what is uniquely empowering about human-canine bonding.

McHugh is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (2011), a volume in the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series, as well as Dog (2004), a volume in Reaktion Books' groundbreaking Animal series. With colleagues in the UK, she co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014) and Literary Animals Look (2013), a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.