Everyday Violence and Healing: A Multispecies Ethnography of Street Dogs in an Animal Rescue Shelter

This paper draws on an ethnographic study conducted at the Hanumat Foundation, an animal rescue shelter in Ghaziabad, India, to examine the relationship between pain, trauma, and healing in the structuring of human-animal relationships. The study builds on Veena Das's conceptualisation of violence as embedded in the ‘everyday’, to contextualise how violence against street dogs in India is normalised as an ordinary part of their lives, altering their relationships, behaviours, and interactions with humans and other species. Street dogs that are rescued from both unintentional and intentional human cruelty, are brought to the Hanumat shelter, where their journey of treatment and recovery begins. In India, animal rescue shelters, by law, serve as temporary holding spaces where dogs undergo treatment, vaccination, and sterilisation-related procedures. Unless deemed unfit for survival on the streets, dogs are returned to their original locations post-treatment. During their temporary stay, the daily care process involves constant monitoring of the dogs’ progress, medical aid, documentation and fundraising. The specific relationship with each dog is accommodated in its treatment, highlighting the agency of the dog included in caregiving practices. For caretakers, the shelter work is motivated by ideas about compassion, care and service, culturally rooted in the concept of jeev seva or being in service of animals. The shelter’s ‘free-roaming’ model allows for an examination of the concepts of territoriality, spatial justice, and non-human agency to understand how dogs navigate social hierarchies within the shelter. Accordingly, the essay challenges anthropocentric approaches to care, justice, and ethics in a way that the ethnography highlights the agency of the dogs, their experiences, and the complex interspecies interactions that unfold in the shelter space. This interaction, it is argued, positions the shelter as an important site for examining the shared meanings that emerge in multispecies interactions in the context of the everyday.