Examining the cute and the monster in regards to animal representation, I focused on the dog and his/her role as companion and soldier in relatively contemporary times of war.
In researching instances of the dog as “monster” I was guided by a 1908 copy of National Geographic’s Book of Dogs as well as the French critical theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who wrote about “monstrous alliances” in their essay “Becoming Animal” (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987). They argue that part of what leads this alliance is “unnatural participations” (Kaloff, the Animals Reader, 41). What better place to look at unnatural participation than between animal and war machine?
