Abstract

This essay offers a cultural semiotics of the relationship between agency, work, nourishment, and social life in the contemporary dog–human relationship. The pet industry has introduced a concept – enrichment – that is supposed to alleviate the despair of captive animals. However, animal behavior studies show that the antidote to boredom is not entertainment but meaningful work and the experience of agency that accompanies it. The enrichment market literally banks on the value of exhausting your dog. In the case of such profoundly social animals as humans and dogs, real enrichment takes place and is sustained only between species. Understood ontologically, as the exhaustion of being as being, boredom and fatigue emerge as social problems, not a feature of individuals. When read as late capitalism’s extraction of life itself, they emerge as essentially interspecies/ecological.