ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an example of human–animal relations that features heavily in the canonical history of psychology, Ivan Pavlov's experiments with dogs. In contemporary retellings, Pavlov's achievements carry all before them, and the dogs appear as ‘matters of fact’ – dispensable objects, empty experimental vessels, conduits for Nobel-prize winning knowledge development, discarded matter in the progressive teleology of psychology-as-science. As S. Jarius and B. Wildemann attest, Pavlov's concept of classical conditioning is considered ‘the foundation of the modern science of learning and, in particular, of the influential theories of M. Watson and M. W. Skinner and the entire school of behaviourism’. The chapter describes in a revisionist analysis of a key figure in psychology, Pavlov, to make the case for a theory and ethics of human–nonhuman animal entanglement at the heart of an Anthropocene psychology. To accept the Anthropocene as invitation is to pay attention to the interpenetration of human and more-than-human worlds.
