Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris (Animal Lives)

Stroll through any American or European city today and you probably won’t get far before seeing a dog being taken for a walk.It’s expected that these domesticated animals can easily navigate sidewalks, streets, and other foundational elements of our built environment.But what if our cities were actually shaped in response to dogs more than we ever realized?Chris Pearson’s Dogopolis boldly and convincingly asserts that human-canine relations were a crucial factor in the formation of modern urban living.Focusing on New York, London, and Paris from the early nineteenth century into the 1930s, Pearson shows that human reactions to dogs significantly remolded them and other contemporary western cities.It’s an unalterable fact that dogs-often filthy, bellicose, and sometimes off-putting-run away, spread rabies, defecate, and breed wherever they like, so as dogs became a more and more common in nineteenth-century middle-class life, cities had to respond to people’s fear of them and revulsion