Selby - Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Police Dogs and Racial Biocapitalism in the Americas and Palestine Ishaan Selby Concordia University HUMANIMALIA 15.2 (Summer 2025) Abstract: This paper explores the cultural politics of the police dog by tracing the role of dogs in the fabrication and reproduction of an anthropocentric social order in line with the imperatives of racial capitalism. These imperatives are based on sorting forms of life in accordance with their proximity to a normative white humanity as part of a project of meeting capitalism’s shifting valorization requirements. I argue that such sorting manifests as both labourers compelled to work by the violence of policing and as populations rendered surplus and made to die through killing, confinement, or organized abandonment. The paper reads the historical use of police dogs against Black protesters from the Civil Rights Era to the present, the children’s television show PAW Patrol, and Israel’s use of robot dogs in its ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip as examples of policing as an operation of life sorting and as a manifestation of racial (bio)capitalism that makes use of the lively capacities and properties of dogs. The paper draws on work at the intersections of animal studies, Black studies, labour studies, and critical theories of settler colonialism (especially those focused on occupied Palestine) to argue for thinking together Black liberation, police abolition, Palestinian liberation, and animal liberation toward a project of mutual freedom for all life on a shared and finite world. Keywords: PAW Patrol, racial capitalism, abolition, Palestine, police dogs, copaganda Bio: Ishaan Selby is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University in the Department of English. He holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University. His research explores the intersections of capitalism, social difference, and animal life and has been published in English Studies in Canada, Ecocene, and an edited collection entitled Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene (Vernon Press, 2024). His first book project tentatively titled “Tooth and Claw: Animal Oppression, Racial Capitalism, and the Abolition of Policing” argues that policing is fundamental to the human– animal distinction in social formations where the dominant relationship to animal life is one of ownership and that humanization and animalization are central to the life-sorting operations of racial capitalism. He divides his time between Montréal and his home city of Toronto. Email: i_selby@live.concordia.ca ORCID: 0009-0004-6242-8456 Copyright © 2025 Ishaan Selby This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 113–145. DOI: 10.52537/humanimalia.21426 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.21426 Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 115 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Introduction: Police Dogs and the Politics of Mutual Freedom On 30 May 2020, then-US President Donald Trump threat- ened Black Lives Matter protesters with “vicious dogs” among other “ominous weapons”.1 The threat, which re- called a history of dogs being used against Black Civil Rights protesters, came on the heels of militant protest and re- volt against the killing of George Floyd five days prior, an event that caused a global reckoning with policing. What do we make of dogs as technologies of power and their historical role in reinforcing ra- cial hierarchy? What makes Trump’s invocation of “vicious dogs” as a threat against racial justice protesters so salient as a project of ra- cial backlash? These dogs were, explicitly or implicitly, police dogs; dogs used to enforce the racialized social order of Trump’s imaginary of white supremacy. We can see Trump’s threat as “symptomatic of a much longer history of white organized violence against the black community” and as a mode of racial terror within a settler colonial mode of production.2 I argue that the use of police dogs works as a biopolitical and biocapitalist mode of sorting life that is worthy of protection from life that needs to be killed or maimed.3 Under racial capitalism, such life sorting operations reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies and the differentiation of labour and political rights ac- cording to dysgenic processes of selection, valuation, and relation. This paper presents this theoretical framework and then uses it to read two seemingly disparate case studies: first, the children’s televi- sion show PAW Patrol and its reproduction of a police imaginary and second, the use of robot dogs by Israel in its current ethnic cleans- ing of the Gaza Strip and long colonial war on Palestine. My pro- ject here will suggest that drawing out the connections between these two apparently disparate phenomena on the grounds of their approaches to policing, racialization, and animality will allow us to 1 Alexander Panetta, “‘Vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons’: The politics behind Trump’s latest protest threats”, CBC News, 30 May 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ trump-politics-protests-1.5591527. 2 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization’”, 861. 3 See Puar, The Right to Maim. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-politics-protests-1.5591527 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-politics-protests-1.5591527 116 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) better understand the links between global racial capitalism, police, and the management of animal life. What unites these case studies, I argue, is the way the police as agents of capital work to classify life as either worthy of protection or as life that must be put to death or dis- ciplined, ultimately in the service of capital accumulation. What also unites them is the use of dogs (cartoon or mechanical) as agents of enforcement of a colonial and racial order. While Black and Indige- nous scholars have turned to the question of the animal, challeng- ing the erasure of race in animal studies, and while the use of dogs in war has been studied by animal studies scholars, this paper offers an analytic for thinking these strands of social and political thought together through a shared focus on policing and the accumulation of capital. The positions of Black people in the US and Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Palestine differ in important ways but they are both are shaped by racial capitalism and settler colonialism through attendant logics of humanization and animalization. I also want to keep in view the differences between using dogs to police the citizens of a country (however conditional that citizen- ship) as in the case of Black people in the US, and using dogs to po- lice the subjects of an occupation as in the case of Palestinians in Gaza, which remains under effective occupation even after the for- mal withdrawal of Israel. Such a distinction is necessary if only to grasp the historical particularities that interweave dogs and dog rep- resentations with a racialized population in bonds of violence and subjugation. For Black people in the afterlives of enslavement and the enduring structures of racial capitalism, dogs are used for the management of a population toward being productive wage labour- ers and away from challenges to the status quo of racial capitalism. In the case of Gaza, capitalism requires the land to be cleared of the Indigenous population, and so dogs are used in a project of geno- cidal elimination. My goal then is to read these two conditions to- gether in the recruitment of the dog into an anthropocentric hier- archy of policing. The use of dogs in surveilling Black life and crushing racial jus- tice projects draws on a specific history of associations between Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 117 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Blackness and animality which has typified the racial formations of societies dependent upon racialized differentiation for capital ac- cumulation and statecraft. These social formations have produced a system of white supremacy and anti-black racial hierarchy as well as racial regimes of ownership.4 The association between Blackness and animality is fraught, to say the least, since Black people are of- ten animalized as a mode of dehumanization. My approach to the Black-animal comparison follows Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog in not instrumentalizing the Black cause and the animal cause as measures for the other’s oppression.5 The recent works by Bénédicte Boisseron (2018), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020) and Joshua Bennett (2020) “engage with ‘animality’ as a relation of embodied existence and representation that con- figures ideas about both social difference and the human relation- ship to the natural world.”6 The critical thrust of these interventions has been to think against dehumanization as the paradigm for un- derstanding racism, since within this paradigm, “advocating [...] in- clusion within the human, reif[ies] the conceit of liberal humanism’s transcendence of race.”7 These works are a response to books like Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison, a touchstone for con- temporary animal activism. Spiegel stages several textual and visual comparisons between animality and enslavement. Her argument is that comparing the “suffering of animals to that of blacks [...] is offen- sive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notion of what animals are like.”8 For Boisseron and other scholars working at the intersection of Black studies and animal studies, this text repre- sents the instrumentalization of Blackness and the specific histori- cal experience of enslavement for the cause of the animal. Such an instrumentalization has led Black studies scholar Alexander G. We- heliye to complain about “the (not so) dreaded comparison between human and animal slavery” in animal studies and “how carelessly 4 See Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property. 5 Boisseron, Afro-Dog, xx. 6 Ahuja, “The Analogy of Race and Species”, 250. 7 Ahuja, “The Analogy of Race and Species”, 251. 8 Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, 30. 118 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) […] this comparative analogy was brandished about in this area of inquiry.”9 In Black studies work that is also attentive to animal op- pression, the goal is to think through the imbrication of Blackness and animal life and how Black liberation and animal liberation are set against one another in racialized public culture. Animal studies and Palestine studies have had less convergence than animal stud- ies and Black studies. However, a critical attention to greenwashing and other practices of sanitizing colonial violence against Palestin- ians has provided an opening for political and theoretical interven- tions at the intersection of animal studies and critical scholarship on Palestine. In the case of Palestine, recent work has criticized the use of veganism and animal welfare by the Israeli state and propa- ganda apparatus to marginalize the question of Palestinian self-de- termination by portraying itself as the vanguard of animal protection. I am interested in a repoliticization of the animal question through an interrogation of human-animal relationships in societies shaped by the policing of racialized populations and where the dominant relationship to animal life is one of ownership. The goal, then, is to think beyond comparison, to rethink contem- porary metaphors of intersection toward something bumpier and messier. What forms of relation come into view if messiness and rup- ture are privileged over easy intersection? My claim is that an aboli- tionist politics and way of being comes into view; one motivated by a fundamental challenge to property, capital, and the carceral state. This abolitionist politics challenges the zero-sum logic that equates Black and Palestinian oppression with animal oppression and ar- gues for concern for one over the other: instead, an abolitionist poli- tic is informed by mutual freedom. Such mutual freedom is depend- ent on the abolition of property; the abolition of property enables mutual freedom to be realized. Che Gossett emphasizes how think- ers in Black studies challenge the instrumentalization of Black suf- fering to the cause of animal liberation, where “blackness remains the absent presence of much animal studies and animal liberation discourse — which speaks to how blackness functions as ‘the raw 9 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 10. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 119 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) material’ of theory and knowledge production.”10 For Gossett, this ar- gument is not a call to abandon animal justice, instead, Gossett draw- ing from Du Bois, it is a call for “freedom for all life.” Such freedom for all life is the goal of an abolitionist analytic and political practice in so far as it challenges the naturalization of systems of confinement and the normalization of mass death. Esther Alloun similarly mobilizes a practice of intersectionality to argue for animal justice projects at- tentive to settler colonialism in Palestine against the “simplicity” of a single-issue focus on animal rights that marginalizes or erases Pales- tinians.11 Thus, my argument aims to draw out the shared foci of the political project of animal liberation with Black and Palestinian liber- ation, showcasing their shared visions for challenging the hegemony of colonial capitalism and anthropocentric hierarchy. I also emphasize the central role of property regimes and racial cap- italism to both white supremacist racial formations and animal ex- ploitation. The production of animal capital is dependent on the broad forces of racial capitalism. Both systems depend on the dif- ferential valuation of labour according to interlocking hierarchies of race, gender, and species which are dialectically produced by cap- ital’s shifting valorization requirements, that is the way capital ren- ders surplus some populations while valuing others according to dif- ferent productive relations over different historical periods. As Nicole Shukin argues, “animal life gets culturally and carnally rendered as capital at specific historical junctures”. 12 By reading those historical junctures, scholars and activists can resist idealizing treatments of animal life. My project aims to do this by reading animal representa- tions through the history of policing, racial capitalism, and settler co- lonialism in North America and Palestine, projects that harm mar- ginalized humans and animals alike. The paper also thinks about the way animals are rendered as weapons that come to police a social order of racial hierarchy. I am thus interested in the violence done by and to police dogs in the process of the conversion of life into weap- ons and the use of those weapons on racialized populations. 10 Gossett, “Blackness, Animality”. 11 Alloun, “‘That’s the Beauty of It’”, 561. 12 Shukin, Animal Capital, 7. 120 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) The figure of the police dog as seen in contemporary media rep- resentations appears disconnected from the history of policing it is based on. This disconnection is especially vivid through various kinds of propaganda that make use of dogs to conceal the harm done by police as an institution relying on certain mythologies around dogs imagined essential love and loyalty and the flatten- ing of historical struggles against racial justice. According to soci- ologist Tyler Wall, while the US had experimented with using police dogs in the early twentieth century, they first became widespread during the Civil Rights Era.13 Reflecting on the Black rebellions in the 2010s, especially the uprising in Ferguson, Boisseron writes that the “post-Ferguson era has brought back to consciousness a racial prism that many wished had died in ‘post-racial America’ after Oba- ma’s first inauguration in 2009.” Viewed through this prism, “race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence,” with such intersec- tions being visited upon the criminalized and Black body.14 Placing the empty, ahistorical representation of the police dog into histor- ically specific racial formations helps us understand the role of the police dog as part of the history of policing and the history of capi- talism writ large, especially as it concerns accumulation and the pro- duction and management of surplus populations. While the police dog is valorized, other dogs are subject to breed-based forms of dis- crimination sometimes resulting in waves of mass killing. Boisseron notes that pit bulls have been subject to these kinds of moral pan- ics since, due to their associations with Black men, the dogs them- selves come to be racialized as physical and sexual threats.15 This system of classification harms both the dog and the racialized hu- man who is denied human status through police operations and a socially stigmatizing white gaze. In an argument for the use of police dogs, police scientist Charles Sloane relies on the use of dogs in war. He writes, “there is but little difference between fighting an enemy in a declared war and fight- ing an enemy, the criminal, at home on the crime front. Both are 13 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization’”, 864. 14 Boisseron, Afro-Dog, 38. 15 Boisseron, Afro-Dog, 43–49. See also Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings, 271-275. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 121 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) comparable battles for the very existence of civilization, for without the thin wall of police protecting the people […] the world would soon revert to savagery and bestiality.”16 While Sloane’s erasure of the differences between war and policing serves to protect the ex- isting social order, it also shows how such a mode of protection is cast in racialized and species terms through his linking together of savagery and bestiality. The imbrication of race and species, particu- larly the joint portrayal of the racialized and the animal as threats to an established order, reveals the way policing enforces the racial- ized and capitalist terms of that order through the tacit or explicit threat of violence. Sloane’s rhetoric is especially striking given that his essay was published the same year he joined the US Army in the imperial war in Vietnam.17 Ultimately, Sloane’s conflation of warfare and policing practices in his discussion of the police dog suggests that “there are uncivilized elements within the United States strik- ing at the heart of domestic order, and thus the snarling police dog is a potent weapon in the war to secure ‘civilization.’”18 Sloane’s act of thinking together war and police is far from unique. Such a con- nection has also been made by Black radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party, who connected the repression they faced from US police to imperial wars. Modern work on the history of po- licing and empire has confirmed the extensive links between the re- pression of Black liberation movements and the counter-insurgency operations against various decolonization movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As sociologist Stuart Schrader argues, “pro- fessional policing did not possess two repertoires […] it possessed a single repertoire, which experts vigorously attempted to institute wherever they could.”19 I will show later how the synonymous oper- ations of war and policing come together with lethal force in Gaza and Palestine more broadly. 16 Sloane, “Dogs in War,” 388. 17 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization’”, 868. 18 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization’”, 869. 19 Schrader, Badges without Borders, 6. 122 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) War, Police, and Capital The act of rooting out domestic enemies through police violence is ultimately performed in service of capital accumulation, as dis- ciplining these rogue elements means their transformation into ei- ther docile wage labourers or surplus to be warehoused, killed and/ or profited from through mechanisms of confinement.20 The submis- sion to labour discipline and the compulsion of the market is under- written by policing and the whole carceral apparatus. A critical en- gagement with police power as both law enforcement and forms of social control places it at the centre of capitalism and “exposes the ubiquitous use of force in capitalist societies, which ranges from vis- ible interventions to preserve order to minute acts supporting capi- tal accumulation and the routine reproduction of social relations.”21 Thus, not only do the police underwrite market relations of puta- tive freedom, “this very power is central to the constitution of wage labor.”22 A critical account of police power thinks through its struc- tural imbrications with the state, capital, and racialization. Policing “is first and foremost a weapon of the state in the constitution of a capitalist order.”23 The constitution of such an order rests on a dia- lectic of direct coercion and legitimation, ultimately reinforced with violence.24 Furthermore, it relies on the ability of power to draw and fabricate distinction and difference in accordance with historically determined markers of racialization and class status. The sovereign violence of the police can most easily be seen during situations of political protest and revolt as the discretionary power allotted to policing institutions allows them to decide when to make an arrest and who to target even if the same law is being broken in different moments. Police power, then, is “inherent in sovereignty and is it- self the most comprehensive branch of sovereignty,” with the role of the police extending beyond mere law enforcement and towards the policies of civil society such as public health and welfare as forms 20 See Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism. 21 Seri, “‘The Dream of State Power’,” 36. 22 Neocleous, “‘Original, Absolute, Indefeasible’,” 14. 23 Neocleous, “‘Original, Absolute, Indefeasible’,” 13. 24 Harring, Policing a Class Society, 254–55. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 123 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of social control.25 The forms of social control used by police histor- ically involved not just the management of human populations but also non-human animals and the interaction between humans and non-humans. Mark Neocleous and Brendan McQuade point out, po- licing created and enforced modes of interaction with animals in- cluding “measures concerning the proper handling of dogs, the sale of livestock, the keeping of pigs and the removal of manure.”26 The interweaving of the management of life by police power was thus always an interspecies affair. The contribution of critical theories of police power is to place such power at the centre of capitalism even under conditions of ostensi- bly freely contracted wage labour. They thus challenge foundational assumptions in Marxist scholarship that “under capitalist social re- lations, direct political force is not necessary for the maintenance of economic exploitation.”27 Neocleous and other critical theorists of police provide a welcome intervention in challenging the idea of capitalism as operating without direct violence. However, missing from their accounts is a history of the Americas: “its history of set- tler racial genocide, racial slavery, racial segregation, racial liberal- ism, and racial revanchism” and how these historical phenomena have shaped policing and the intermingling of race and class.28 The police dog serves as a potent symbol of the intertwining of class and race as central to policing. The police dog is deployed to create and reproduce the established order of things at the intersection of the protection of property and the disciplining of racialized popu- lations. These racialized populations challenge the police power of the state within different historical racial formations and the forma- tion and reproduction of anthropocentric hierarchies. The use of dogs for policing draws its history from the use of dogs for slave catching, as Sloane himself explains, referencing the por- trayal of bloodhounds used to capture runaway slaves in Uncle Tom’s 25 Neocleous, “Original, Absolute, Indefeasible,” 20. 26 McQuade & Neocleous, “Beware: Medical Police,” 4. 27 Heinrich, An Introduction, 205. 28 Schrader, “Review of Sidney L. Harring”. 124 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Cabin.29 The scholar Sara E. Johnson maps out how dogs were used as instruments of racial terror against African and Indigenous sub- jects. As she writes, “European colonizers wielded dogs as lethal weapons, and it was abundantly clear to contemporary observers that the animals were likely to maim and/or kill their prey, not sim- ply to capture them in the course of pursuit.”30 Johnson draws out the similarities in the use of dogs by European colonizers in the nine- teenth century Americas and the use of dogs as instruments of tor- ture and terror in Abu Ghraib by the US.31 One of the key features of the Trump presidency was the mobilization of the language of the War on Terror against political rivals, namely the racial justice and anti-fascist groups that militantly organized against his brand of white nationalist authoritarian politics.32 The po- lice dog, then, represented the mobilization of the state repressive apparatus outside the bounds of formal legal procedure. In theorizing the police hunt, a hunt for a supposed “criminal”, Grégoire Chamayou elucidates a contradiction between law and police violence, “if police action finds its main justification in respect for the law, what drives it in practice is something quite different: the desire and the pleas- ure of the pursuit, in relation to which the law appears as an obsta- cle to its full development.”33 The law, then, appears to both enable and limit policing, however such a dialectic of permission and limit is illusory since it is policing as such that produces the force of the law. As Neocleous has long argued, law enforcement was a “meaning im- posed on the term ‘police’ by an increasingly hegemonic liberalism in the late-eighteenth century.”34 This recent imposition conceals a more expansive understanding of policing as constituting the state as such. Policing understood as a broad operation of management over life is geared toward the creation, reproduction, and disciplin- ing of labouring populations, both human and non-human, as well as 29 Sloane, “Dogs in War,” 388. 30 Johnson, “‘You Should Give Them Blacks to Eat’,” 73. 31 Johnson, “‘You Should Give Them Blacks to Eat’,” 67, 86–89. 32 See Ackerman, Reign of Terror, 316–26. 33 Chamayou, Manhunts, 91. 34 Neocleous, War Power, 10. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 125 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) management of surplus populations, both human and non-human. The management of movement, life, and the conditions of death as a capitalist imperative means that capitalism is concerned with life and liveliness as fundamental categories of value differentiation. Wall suggests a similar argument about state violence and policing when he argues that “the police dog amplifies the predatory animus of civi- lization — police as beast.”35 If the police act as beast in service of the established order of capitalist reproduction, then such action takes place in the domain of life itself and so involves control over and val- uation of life. In his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida argues that the beast and sovereign intertwine “at a distance from the law”, since both exist outside its formal structures, with the beast being ignorant of the law and the sovereign being above it as a law-maker.36 Derrida argues that the beast, the sovereign, and the criminal “seem to be heterogeneous among themselves” but are united in being outside the law and so “call on each other” in a com- mon relationship to law.37 While Derrida here is not discussing capi- talism per se, the enforcement of the capitalist forms of life and rela- tions of production through the bodily capacities of the police dog is an example of the intertwined relationship of the power of the sov- ereign and the beast as a particular relation to law and hierarchies of liveliness which, in racialized social formations, are shaped by en- slavement and colonization. Ultimately, I argue that the dog’s body is subject to sovereign power in the service of capital accumulation and the reproduction of racial hierarchy. Theorizing Biocapitalism The police dog is a biopolitical and biocapitalist phenomenon. The police dog, like all instruments of policing, maintains the bounda- ries between life and death by reproducing a liveable life for cer- tain subjects while, at the same time, condemning others to death through killing or organized abandonment. In my use of biocapi- talism, I draw on two different theoretical genealogies. In the first 35 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization’”, 868. 36 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 32. 37 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 17. 126 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) instance, it draws on the work of historians of enslavement, who note that a central feature of the Atlantic trade was that slaves could only ever give birth to slaves, ultimately harnessing the reproductive capacities of women toward the process of commodification. Sum- marizing this literature, Nikhil Singh writes, “[t]his biocapitalist inno- vation was in turn married to the slaveholder’s power over life and death,” mapping this power on to Foucault’s biopolitical coordinates of killing, making live, letting die, and letting live.38 In the second in- stance, it draws on the work of animal life theorists such as Donna Haraway, who argues in When Species Meet that Marxists should take into account liveliness as a form of value alongside use and ex- change value.39 These two uses of biocapital set up an interesting homology between the racialized production of lively commodities and a broader control over life itself that defines capitalism. Freder- ick Douglass was, seemingly, aware of this homology when he wrote about “slave breeding states” where slaves were “reared” like live- stock and where slave breeding was “looked upon as a legitimate trade”, sanctioned by law and upheld by public opinion.40 The fram- ing of reproduction of enslaved people as “rearing” suggests a pro- found dehumanization, to be sure, but it also implicates the market and broader relations of production in the control over life and the use of lively capacities for profit. The production of commodities was central to the Transatlantic slave trade, which saw death and terror as “incidental” to the “workings of the trade”.41 Policing, in the expansive sense I have been working with here, was and is central to the hierarchies of life and the production of commodities under the labour regime of enslavement and its afterlives. Returning to the police dog, we can see the police dog as exem- plifying the processes of biocapital across both senses, its use by the state in the enforcing of racial regimes of ownership and the 38 Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 78. 39 Haraway, When Species Meet, 46, 66–67. 40 Douglass, “Reception Speech at Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, May 12, 1846” 412, qtd in Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 216n10. Douglass also notes the blood- hound as a central technology of keeping the enslaved as enslaved. 41 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 31. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 127 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) conversion of the dog into property. The police dog is harnessed by agents of the state responsible for capitalist accumulation, ac- cumulation which articulates itself through the production of racial difference. I offer the term “racial biocapitalism” to think about the centrality of racializing assemblages in marking out certain bodies as violable based on their distance from a normative white human- ity. Racialization shapes conceptions of life and liveliness across dy- namics of labour and capital. Racial biocapitalism, then, is an his- torical expression of the afterlives of the Atlantic slave trade, and so the broader history and structure of policing. The other relevant biocapitalist modality at work is in the training of the police dogs themselves. The training is “contingent on the dog’s body being taken over by human agents and institutional forces so as to transform the canine into an obedient, disciplined ‘working dog’, a coercive metamorphosis grasped by the discursive conver- sion from canine to ‘K-9’.”42 Such a process installs an anthropo- centric hierarchy with the dog being obedient to a human master. While Wall is largely focused on the disjuncture between the sci- entific management of dogs and their use as instruments of terror, scholars of animal studies might also note the anthropocentrism baked into such forms of recruitment to this enterprise of racial ter- ror. The harm done to dogs is both central and incidental to these biocapitalist modalities: central in so far as it is the regimen of train- ing that weaponizes the dog’s capacities and incidental in so far as the police dog is one part of a broader system of the management over life under racial and species hierarchies. The dog here becomes something of an abstraction for this control over life. At the same time, actual living dogs are harmed as dogs are placed in dangerous situations where they are subject to physical dangers. In my read- ing of PAW Patrol, I will elaborate on the yoking together of policing and dogs but for now I simply note that breaking this connection is important to both projects of police abolition and animal abolition, since to abolish police (dogs) would be one form of abolishing the use of animals for anthropocentric purposes. The politics of mutual 42 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization’”, 867. 128 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) freedom I develop is thus attentive to the way marginalized humans and dogs are interwoven as subjects through their relation to being property and violence under capitalism. The shaping of modes of life and liveliness within racialized differ- ence has historically expressed itself in zoological terms. Chamayou writes that “the task of explaining the historical disaster that was tak- ing place in the contact between the European capitalist mode of production and African societies was thus entrusted, starting at the end of the eighteenth century, to zoologists and specialists in natural history.”43 It is within this discourse that human–animal relations “be- came the privileged model for conceiving the relations among peo- ples.”44 Within this zoological paradigm, race and species intersect to reproduce the biopolitics of confinement, enforced by the repres- sive state and institutionalized modes of anthropocentrism through the killing and confinement of animals as well as a broader dialec- tic of humanization and animalization. These biopolitics of classi- fication were deeply shaped by the logics of abstraction that un- derwrite private property as a social construction and institution.45 I now turn to the first case study, a critical examination of how the police dog and policing more broadly is represented in the chil- dren’s television show PAW Patrol. What political pedagogies are re- produced or made invisible through such representations? And how do animals function within a dialectic of humanization and animal- ization regarding the police? I follow Colleen Boggs’s argument that animal representations “form the nexus where biopolitical relation- ships get worked out.”46 Such a working out, I suggest, is also a ques- tion of the determination of value according to the logics of racial capitalism. I understand representations in an expansive sense, in- cluding both cultural texts and machines that summon the sign of animality, specifically “dog-ness”, as crucial to their expressive con- tent. I start with PAW Patrol as it encapsulates a certain fantasy of the 43 Chamayou, Manhunts, 48. 44 Chamayou, Manhunts, 48. 45 Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property, 3. 46 Boggs, Animalia Americana, 12. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 129 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) police as protectors of the social order, tacitly drawing on a longer history of using animals as subjects of the moral and political in- struction of children. This text symptomatically reveals the police as invested in capital accumulation, not in the least as PAW Patrol is, in the last instance, selling the police as commodity. Animal Capital and Carceral Logic, or ACAB Includes Paw Patrol PAW Patrol is a cultural juggernaut of children’s television. To those of us without children, however, it likely came to our attention through a right-wing panic which claimed that people on the left were “can- celling” PAW Patrol as part of a broader “war on police”.47 Indeed, even the Trump White House, in a response to the moral panic, lied about the status of PAW Patrol being taken off the air. What does this strange episode reveal about the links between the police dog, racializing assemblages, capitalism and popular culture? The show revolves around the exploits of a team of talking dogs led by a child who serve as a privatized security force in the fictional city of Ad- venture Bay. The most prominent character on the show is a police dog named, perhaps symptomatically, Chase: recalling the use of po- lice dogs in “manhunts”. Due to the confluence of the COVID-19 pan- demic, the resurgence of a global struggle against police in 2020, and the massive success of the PAW Patrol franchise, the show became the subject of cultural discourse around “copaganda” — media rep- resentations of the police that naturalize their role in society as ei- ther positive or necessary for the preservation of order and peace. As TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk writes, “TV has long held a po- lice’s-eye perspective” and as viewers we are “locked inside a police perspective, harnessed to their needs, desires, and daily rhythms.”48 The panic over the left’s supposed “cancelling” of PAW Patrol is then a panic over a break with the hegemony of this perspective as it is reproduced in mass culture. 47 Tara Subramaniam, “Fact Check: Despite White House claims, PAW Patrol and police LEGO have not been canceled”, CNN, 24 July 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/ politics/paw-patrol-lego-cancel-fact-check/index.html 48 Kathryn VanArendonk, “Cops Are Always the Main Characters”, Vulture 1 June 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/tv-cops-are-always-the-main-characters.html. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/politics/paw-patrol-lego-cancel-fact-check/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/politics/paw-patrol-lego-cancel-fact-check/index.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/tv-cops-are-always-the-main-characters.html 130 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Animals have long been used to instruct children in proper modes of relation and empathy. In her work, Boggs explores how John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education was a central point of refer- ence for teaching children in the Anglo-American Enlightenment. She argues that Locke’s argument relies on “the substitution of an- imals for human beings”, as the “ability to identify affectively with other human beings and to enter into social and legal relations with them depends on an ability to exercise proper compassion to an- imals.”49 The speaking animal character has often been a voice of moral instruction in popular culture. For instance, Karah M. Mitch- ell has explored how cat autobiographies present animals as sites of biopolitical control that reside in the hands of white women. Written in service of a larger “hu- mane” education movement largely directed at children, these texts worked to naturalize — through the figures of speaking animals — specific understandings of race and reproduction for young readers: they tied race to species and, through the “humane” euthanization of racialized animals, conflated non- human and human population control.50 In a video essay on PAW Patrol and/as copaganda, Youtuber Jack- son Maher, under his nom de guerre Skip Intro, notes that dogs have been used to soften the image of the police during periods of broader public scepticism. For example, following the killing of Eric Garner in New York City in 2014, the NYPD fed stories about rescu- ing kittens to the media, including the New York Times which ran a story about the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group rescuing a kitten.51 The Strategic Response Group is a unit of the NYPD that has been routinely criticized for its use of violence against protesters in the George Floyd Rebellions and, more recently, against pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.52 Such images work to “humanize” the police through its “proper” care for animals, with the animals 49 Boggs, Animalia Americana, 140. 50 Mitchell, “A More ‘Human(e)’ Society,” 414. 51 “PAW Patrol’s Dark Secret, Explained”, Skip Intro, 10 Sept. 2022, YouTube, 1 hr., 18 min., https://youtu.be/rwhUpu9MfZ0 52 Bolger and Speri, “NYPD ‘Goon Squad’ Manual”. https://youtu.be/rwhUpu9MfZ0 Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 131 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) becoming tools for the sanitization of police violence within a ma- trix of associations that work as a kind of counterinsurgency coun- tering popular anger against the police. The animal is conscripted into the apparatus of policing in so far as it is summoned to normal- ize the role of police in preserving certain kinds of life, for instance, the life of an innocent kitten. Animal representations are employed in an effort to normalize policing as both a fact of life and a desirable institution, necessary to preserve the social fabric and respond to emergencies. All the while, the real-life animals are conscripted into a hierarchical relation dependent upon a devaluation of animal life. In PAW Patrol, policing is presented as the only possible response to emergencies in the absence of a robust or even present polis.53 In- deed, as Maher points out, people only become present in the nar- rative as subjects which the Paw Patrol must swoop in and save.54 Policing creates and disciplines the subjects that populate a social order seemingly free of the contingencies of history. In her read- ing of Rancière, Kristin Ross argues that the police are an expansive political architecture of normalization. Policing, for Rancière, is ul- timately concerned with “determining what can or cannot be seen, dividing what can be heard from what cannot.”55 The phrase “move along, there’s nothing to see here” then becomes the prototype of policing as such. If this is a general function of copaganda, it is es- pecially present here, since there is literally nothing to see beyond the operations of the Paw Patrol represented by the police (dog). While there are other dogs on the show that perform other emer- gency services and duties, Chase is definitively the main charac- ter and appears more frequently than the other dogs.56 If the raison d’être of policing is the fabrication of a social order of accumulation, PAW Patrol represents the ultimate fantasy of permanent emergency 53 For an exploration of how the show participates in the logic of neoliberal privatiza- tion through showing elected officials as either incompetent or criminal see Kennedy, “‘Whenever There’s Trouble’,”: 256, 261, 264. 54 “PAW Patrol’s Dark Secret”, 10:36–11:12. 55 Ross, May ’68, 23. 56 “PAW Patrol’s Dark Secret,” 8:44–9:10. Maher is drawing on Christopher Ingraham’s work looking at how frequently each dog is deployed, with Chase by far the most frequent. See Ingraham, “Inequality Rising”. 132 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and accumulation without resistance. Unlike the superhero story which, as David Graeber argues, stages the defence of the social or- der through the defeat of villains with their own plans, purposes, and projects, PAW Patrol poses no such ethico-political dilemmas since the only villain from the neighbouring town Foggy Bottom, Mayor Humdinger, has no aspirations beyond envy and no qualities that might make one sympathize or even be compelled by him.57 Struc- turally, the show presents a problem or emergency for the dogs in the Paw Patrol to solve. Maher suggests the ubiquitous presence of Chase as the protagonist naturalizes the police as a response to any kind of emergency and in the “same class as other first responders.”58 In the episode “Pups Save Ryder’s Robot” (S1E19B), Ryder builds a ro- bot dog that goes haywire after the fire safety dog Marshall acciden- tally breaks it, the Paw Patrol works to stop the robot so Ryder can fix it. The result is a return to the status quo ante of the show with no lesson being learned and the Paw Patrol having fun with the robot dog. While the episode seems to raise some ideas leading toward a moral lesson, no such lesson is put forward instead the Paw Patrol pups play with the robo-dog. Indeed, no explicit contrast is set up between the robo-dog and the Paw Patrol pups and Ryder makes no gesture toward replacing them thereby setting the stage for the real pups to prove their superiority. The lack of narrative conflict speaks to fabrication of a particular order wherein the police are thoroughly naturalized as part of any kind of response. There is no alternative to the Paw Patrol. Ultimately, this means there is no alternative to capitalism as such. The specific interaction be- tween commerce and the police, the police as commodity, suggests an isometric connection between selling the idea of policing and police funding. The spectre of “defunding the police’”, despite never manifesting, prompted the liberals and the far-right to ally over fears of ‘“disorder” and “crime”. In most cases, such invocations often re- ferred to the simple presence of surplus populations, defined either through formal racial and national ascriptions by the far right and in “class” terms through homelessness by the liberals. Ultimately, the 57 Graeber, “Super Position”. 58 “PAW Patrol’s Dark Secret”, 41:33. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 133 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) dogs of PAW Patrol serve to naturalize the police and so to police po- litical responses to policing as such. The police force as commodity takes a particular salience under neoliberal capitalism where “while budgets evaporate for public schooling […] there is no such shortfall for police, prisons, and the military.”59 Such a mode of resource allo- cation unites the bourgeois political spectrum in defence of capital. The anti-crime and pro-police alliance between liberals and the far-right is hardly a novel phenomenon. Such an alliance ultimately arises in service of protecting capital, with the differences between these political positions amounting to disagreements in how the rul- ing class should be represented in terms of demographic diversity. The erasure of Palestine is another cause that, as Darryl Li argues, “happens to most powerfully unite liberals and the right in open ex- pressions of racist warmongering.”60 The police repression of the pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses last year has affirmed this position. I argue that the ideological consensus on the funda- mental necessity of the police and the expansionist project in West Asia known as Zionism come together in their valuation and man- agement of populations in service of capital. Robot Dogs, War, and Police in Palestine In the spring of 2024, a campaign was launched as part of the broader Palestine solidarity movement to shut down Ghost Robot- ics, a company based at the University of Pennsylvania and founded by two alumni. Like many other targets of anti-Zionist divestment campaigns, Ghost Robotics is a company producing weapons used by the IDF sustained by elite institutions tasked with reproducing a diverse but pliable ruling class, in this case an Ivy League univer- sity. The imbrication between settler colonialism in Palestine and racial capitalism in the US is vividly demonstrated by Ghost Robot- ics. In their argument for and reflections on Black–Palestinian soli- darity, organizers Chenjerai Kumanyika and Demetrius Noble note that UPenn’s centre for innovation 59 Schneider, The Apocalypse, 27. 60 Li, “Rise and Fall”. 134 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) received significant tax breaks as part of a Keystone Innovation Zone, touted as a program to foster business development in underserved areas. But the tax credits that benefit Ghost Ro- botics […] would otherwise have gone into the city’s budget and could have helped to fund […] other resource-starved pub- lic infrastructure and social programs.61 Ghost Robotics as the manufacturer of robot dogs both profits from settler colonialism and genocide by selling these “dogs” to Israel it is also materially enabled by a partitioning of space and an alloca- tion of resources structured by racial capitalism. These “dogs” can scout terrain, float in water, and generally navigate territory deemed too risky for human soldiers. The use of these dogs fits the existing rationale for the use of the police dog, which was said by police scientists in the 60s to be a weapon that could per- form tasks unsafe for human officers.62 Importantly, they work to keep Israeli soldiers safe from a guerilla resistance which has needed to favour tactics like the ambush over full-frontal, “traditional,” war- fare. As policing works as a life sorting operation, so do the robot dogs work to preserve the life of the Israeli settler-soldier and kill Pal- estinians and other subjects resisting Israeli colonialism. Thinkers in the Black radical tradition and Black Americans at large have long drawn connections between American imperialist wars abroad and its war against Black people “at home”.63 The use of terror as justification for colonialism sits in dialectical relation with the US’s (and Canada’s) own colonial history, with the “Indian Wars” serving to justify American wars abroad and exercise of its military might; the “Indian Wars” being a set of wars of colonial conquest against Indigenous nations from the early modern period to the nineteenth century.64 In an essay written during Israel’s 1982 War on Lebanon, which was conducted with the goal of destroying the 61 Kumanyika & Noble, “Lessons”. 62 Wall, “‘For the Very Existence of Civilization,’” 865. 63 Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 22. 64 See Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 24. See also Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous People’s History. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 135 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Palestine Liberation Organization, Edward Said asks the question: “Who are the Palestinians if not the functional equivalent of Israel’s blacks, or red Indians?”65 Israel’s “blacks” or “red Indians,” much like Indigenous people and Black people in the Americas, are policed by “dogs” — in this case, weaponized robot dogs manufactured and sold in the US, Israel’s imperial sponsor. We can see this as a kind of cy- ber-dystopian update of the networks of colonial racial terror in the use of dogs throughout the Americas. The use of dogs, and here I deliberately blur the lines between real and mechanical police dogs, spreads from the suppression of Indigenous and enslaved African re- volts to the present as manifested in contemporary regimes of bor- der control. Indeed, the US Department of Homeland Security has deployed these mechanical “dogs” to work as surveillance agents at the border, as part of the management of surplus populations in the climate crisis. Such a management of surplus populations is less an anachronistic callback to nineteenth or early twentieth century colonialism but rather a vision of the future of capitalism. Legal the- orist Dylan Saba notes that the ethnic cleansing of in Gaza and the turn toward border militarization are not relics of a colonial past but rather portend a nationalist future contingent on advanced technol- ogy and surveillance.66 Primitive Accumulation and Animal Capital In Marx, the concept of primitive accumulation is used to critique a political economy that “cannot account for the origins of the capi- tal relation” instead relying on the very values that came to define the capital relation, e.g. free wage labour, to explain the origins of such a relation.67 As Marx puts it, “primitive accumulation […] is noth- ing else than the historical process of divorcing producers from the means of production.”68 The world-historical upshot of this separa- tion was a break from older modes of life toward capitalist expan- sion. This account, while taken up in general terms, has also been 65 Bawab, “The Idea of Palestine”. 66 Dylan Saba, “Democrats are helping make the US border look more and more like Gaza”, The Nation, 15 Feb. 2024. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-border-gaza/. 67 Nichols, Theft Is Property!, 57. 68 Marx, Capital, 1:875. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-border-gaza/ 136 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) subject to critique for its characterization of accumulation as con- fined to a specific historical moment, and its suggestion that cap- italism operates primarily by silent compulsion. However, as Glen Coulthard notes in his synthesis of Indigenous critique and Marx- ist political economy, “the escalating onslaught of violent, state-or- chestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the persistent role that […] violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.”69 Despite noting the presence of colonial plunder and enslavement in capitalist accumulation, Marx remains inattentive to the analytical problem of “how racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies are retained as a mechanism of labour discipline and surplus appropriation” in- cluding the political process of alleging to render such distinctions “anachronistic in the long run” through narratives of universal equal- ity and freedom.70 The accumulation of animals as commodities and the clearing of land for animal use have been a feature of capital accumulation in different colonial frontiers.71 Historically, in the colonization of the Americas, livestock played a crucial role, as both the driver of material changes to the landscape and in ideological terms.72 The Israeli state has used practices of “reintroducing” wildlife as a broader practice of “making the land Jewish again.”73 The ability to reintroduce wildlife as part of a settler project is contingent on the broader dispossession of Pales- tinians that makes up the Israeli settler project’s raison d’être. Ideolog- ically, these animals work to legitimate Israeli settlers’ claims of “in- digeneity” by linking them to religious texts in which the animals are mentioned or can be read into.74 The preservation of certain forms 69 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 9. 70 Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 84. 71 See Morin, “Bovine Lives”, 261–75. Reading an account of the “Trail of Tears” the force- able transfer of the Eastern Cherokee population, Patrick Wolfe writes: “The cattle and other stock were not only being driven off Cherokee land; they were being driven into private ownership.” See Wolfe, “Elimination of the Native”, 392. 72 See Anderson, Creatures of Empire. 73 Braverman, “Wild Legalities,” 15. 74 Braverman, “Wild Legalities,” 7–27. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 137 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of animal life is done through the negation of Palestinian humanity, where Palestinians are seen as less than animals by the Israeli state and the global world system in so far as they are available to be con- fined and killed as per the imperatives of Israeli capital and statecraft. Importantly for our purposes, individual animals as well as Palestin- ians have been killed and displaced as part and parcel Israeli set- tler colonialism since the animal as an abstraction of settler power is more valuable than actual animals.75 Animals are used by colonial racial capitalism as ciphers or abstractions for other ideological pro- jects that are not concerned with preserving the life of singular, indi- vidual animals. This mode of abstraction is common across the ar- chive I assemble here, as dogs become abstractions for police power and the management over life. The use of robot dogs is part of a larger project of using animals to enforce hierarchies of life that enable the accumulation of capital through policing. The project legitimated by Zionism and the dis- course of fighting terror in order to “re-occupy” Gaza is ultimately a project to “develop” the land and make it profitable for Israeli and global capital. The post-war fantasy is one of valuable waterfront properties and other strategies of accumulation (including repair) that ultimately feed back into Israel’s economy, as Jasbir Puar has argued.76 The robot dogs also generate value in that they can be marketed as “battle tested” to other states for repression, as per the general orientation toward Gaza as a laboratory for both military infrastructure and strategies for biopolitical regulation. The use of Gaza and the West Bank as “labs” is also a mode of profit extraction, as Palestinians become animalized through being used as test sub- jects, a role that is usually filled by non-human animals in social for- mations dominantly structured by animal ownership. As Amy Kaplan explains, “Israelis have little incentive to negotiate a real peace with the Palestinians, because the lucrative security market has too much potential. What the Israelis are selling to the rest of the world is not weaponry to defeat an enemy once and for all, but systems for paci- fication and management, which match the approach that many 75 Braverman, “Wild Legalities,” 13. 76 Puar, The Right to Maim, 145. 138 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) governments have come to take toward their increasingly urbanized and heterogenous populations.”77 Israel profits from Palestinian dis- possession and the genocide in Gaza by selling weapons and mar- keting strategies for urban warfare. The political rhetoric of both a to- tal victory over Hamas and the peaceful settlement of Gaza elides the fundamental reality of profit through selling weapons of pacification. Robot dogs are, in a curious way, the realization of the fundamental raison d’être of police dogs — being precision machines that can do the dangerous work of pacification and not risk the lives of person- nel. The use of robot dogs as machines of genocide is their ultimate realization as tools of capital accumulation. The fantasy of genocide, of the clearing of the land, is the fantasy of the settler racial state par excellence, though as Patrick Wolfe has notably argued it is not al- ways required for settler consolidation.78 The claims of settler colo- nial states to inhabitation and indigeneity are established through the “reorganization” of life that retroactively affirms settler claims to rightful inhabitation. This takes on a particular cast with Zionism, which bakes in such claims based on a selective reading of history but is generally the case in all settler states. The taking of territory and the elimination of resistance to the taking of territory subtends such claims and operations of elimination. The fantasy of the nonhuman, of an idealized robot, takes on the characteristics of liveliness without life as such. The robot dog acts as a vicious beast outside the bounds of the law without having to worry about actual life. The fantasy of elimination of the native is also the fantasy of eliminating the fleshy material animals that exist outside the bounds of capital. Here, I follow Esther Alloun in think- ing about animal politics as a site through which settler colonialism is produced and articulated, with mainstream animal activist groups in Israel and the US failing to critique settler colonial investments. Such a separation of animal politics from settler colonial politics is yet another manifestation of the preservation of certain kinds of life while making die life along racialized lines of difference. 77 Kaplan, Our American Israel, 269. 78 Wolfe, “Elimination of the Native,” 387. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 139 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Since 2012, the IDF has promoted itself as welcoming of vegans “with the military advertising that it offered vegan alternatives to animal products used in equipment, such as leather-free vegan boots and later, synthetic wool-free berets, and food.”79 I see this instrumen- talization of veganism as propaganda and as the cultivation of a dis- course of progress against the “backward” Palestinian. It also op- erates within a biopolitical dialectic preserving the life of animals alongside the killing and letting die of Palestinians. The animal is thus humanized as the Palestinian is animalized vis-à-vis hierarchies of values under racial capitalism. I want to conclude here by map- ping potential solidarities between Black, Palestinian, and animal liberation movements and thinking through a non-carceral, aboli- tionist politics of animal justice. Palestinian Liberation, Police Abolition, and Animal Justice Palestinian legal theorist Noura Erakat maps instances of Black-Pal- estinian solidarity through activist intimacies, forged through strug- gle against the police in Ferguson and an increase in awareness of the Palestinian political reality by Black activists, what Erakat terms the Ferguson–Gaza moment. This renewal of Black–Palestinian sol- idarity in the 2010s featured “joint protest targeting the exchange of military and carceral technologies between the United States and Israel.”80 One of the galvanizing moments of this solidarity move- ment was Palestinians using social media to teach Black protestors how to deal with tear gas. The Ferguson–Gaza moment taught ac- tivists in the US that “white supremacy, and Zionist occupation are not isolated threats faced by distinct groups. They are inseparable components of a broader imperial structure — one that profits from violence across the world, whether it’s selling weapons to the Israeli military or to the US police departments that dominate poor and Black neighborhoods.”81 Drawing on this knowledge, the Stop Cop City movement, a multiracial coalition to stop the construction of a 79 Alloun, “Veganwashing”, 31–32. 80 Erakat, “Geographies of Intimacy”, 473. 81 Kumanyika and Noble, “Lessons”. 140 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) police training facility in Georgia, has traced links between the At- lanta Police Department and the Israeli Occupation Force.82 The genocide is also an ecocide. The destruction of olive groves, the contamination of groundwater, and the pollution of the air all com- pound the beyond unliveable condition of Palestinians in Gaza. The Stop Cop City movement is similarly fighting against an ecocide: the police training facility will require the destruction of forests and result in profound biodiversity loss. The fact that both the genocide in Gaza and Cop City are environmentally destructive is part and parcel of the environmental destruction historically integral to settler colonialism. The struggles-to-come embodied in the movement for a free Pales- tine (and Palestinian resistance) and Stop Cop City are also strug- gles against climate change. As such, animal abolitionists should take up these struggles as part of a broad coalition that challenges the hegemony of Western capitalism which also enshrines anthropo- centric domination. As Andreas Malm maps out, “the destruction of Palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different, but re- lated process of destruction: namely, that of the climate system of this planet.”83 Using the language of Palestinian political critique and existence, Malm names the possible future destruction of the Am- azon rainforest as “a different kind of Nakba” most immediately im- pacting the Indigenous and Afro-descendant people of the region. Malm offers the term “fossil empire” to think about the long history of the kind of resource extraction that typifies settler modes of ap- propriation seeking to create and reproduce energy regimes based on fossil fuels.84 Reflecting on a future “after the war” Ahmad Safi, co-founder of Pal- estinian Animal League, writes about the care shown by Palestini- ans in Gaza and the West Bank toward animals that were also injured during the indiscriminate bombing and invasion by the occupation 82 See Palestinian Youth Movement, “FREE PALESTINE. STOP COP CITY”. I use the term Israeli Occupation Force as opposed to Israeli Defence Force in line with the Palestine libera- tion movement to rhetorically denaturalize the occupation of Palestine by Israel. 83 Malm, “The Destruction of Palestine”. 84 Malm, “The Destruction of Palestine”. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 141 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) forces. Safi calls for the “people of Palestine”, including “humans and animals, trees and mountains”, to be the “fuel for the world’s revo- lutions and a torch for the civilizations that were annihilated, so that they may rise again.”85 Safi presents a conception of personhood and political action that is not reducible to the human, but rather includes Palestinian humans and nonhumans as co-strugglers to- ward revolution and a future beyond Israeli and global colonialism. It is this vision that animates my concern with a broad understand- ing of abolition that is informed by the Black freedom struggle and that moves beyond the species line. By and large, the animal justice movement has not taken carceral systems seriously, and has had little to nothing to say about Pal- estine. As the legal scholar Justin Marceau explains “abuse an ani- mal — go to jail” is representative of the broad trends within animal justice.86 More recently, scholars have challenged the reliance on these carceral systems as being able to protect animals since they can only focus on individual animals. Such a focus on individual harm and lack of attention to broader structures carves out exceptions for the many animals that are disassembled in slaughterhouses and ex- perimented on in labs since these take place under the aegis of le- gality. The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT) passed in the US is a central example of this kind of legislation which “rep- resents a Western trend of prioritizing the strength of criminal cases at the expense of saving the vast majority of animals from violent abuse.”87 As Struthers Montford and Kasprzycka note, PACT marks out exceptions for animals who threaten property and does not ap- ply to people who slaughter animals or use animals in scientific ex- perimentation, itself a central site of the production of animal cap- ital. While animal advocates may respond with a single-issue focus on preventing harm to animals, I would counter that such a focus on criminalization ultimately reproduces systemic harm to animals by not effectively engaging with the larger systems of animal commod- ification and weaponization enshrined in capitalist society. 85 Safi, “After the war”. 86 Marceau, Beyond Cages, 2. 87 Struthers Montford and Kasprzycka, “Carceral Enjoyments”, 229. 142 | Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Conclusion In thinking about the constellation of cultural and legal associa- tions that bind together Black people and dogs, Boisseron argues that what “brings the dog, the slave, and the civil rights protestor together under the same ‘ferocious’ stigma is their common claim to freedom, perceived ultimately as a feral claim.”88 I see this “com- mon claim to freedom” reflected in Said naming the Palestinian as a “threat to the stabilities — whether of states, parties, governments, or sects — that exist alongside him.”89 In thinking about the Pales- tinian as threat to stabilities of a sociopolitical world that normal- izes occupation, apartheid, and genocide, Said draws his metaphor from the long history of human–dog interaction. In his Preface to the 1992 edition of The Question of Palestine, reflecting on the ma- jor world-historical changes that had taken place since the book was first published in 1979, Said writes that the question of Pales- tine remains “undomesticated”.90 I want to argue for this ferality and “undomestication” as a counter-alliance against the police dog as a figure of repression and the harnessing of lively capital by the re- pressive state. Throughout the paper I have traced how racial capi- talism and animal capital commonly oppress Black people, Pales- tinians, and animals through the figure of the police dog (broadly conceived). In dialectical opposition to such a structure, I see the struggles of the past and future against white supremacy, colonial- ism, anthropocentrism, and the carceral state. The undomesticated nature of the question of Palestine is homolo- gous with the undomestication of Black freedom struggles against the carceral state and the animal question. To “resolve” these ques- tions would be to abolish capitalism as such. As a matter of animal justice and coalitional politics, animal justice organizations should work to ban the use of animals in policing, not just because of its cruelty to dogs and other animals but also as a project of mutual freedom for all forms of life on this shared planet. 88 Boisseron, Afro-Dog, 51. 89 Said, The Question of Palestine, 154. 90 Said, The Question of Palestine, vii, xviii. Selby , Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol | 143 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Works Cited Ackerman, Spencer. Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. New York: Viking, 2021. Adler-Bolton, Beatrice and Artie Vierkant. Health Communism. London: Verso, 2022. Alloun, Esther. “‘That’s the beauty of it, it’s very simple!’: Animal Rights and Settler Colonialism in Palestine–Israel.” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2018): 559–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/220147 3X.2017.1414138. 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