Contaminated Kennel

This image was taken near the town of Chernobyl where workers from the powerplant, administrative workers, and researchers have resettled in abandoned houses. This specific area is rarely visited by tourists and reflects a more everyday scene in the lives of the dogs of Chernobyl. The water bowl and presence of fresh food nearby indicate the dog is well fed and looked after by residents. The permanence of such infrastructure highlights how certain dogs take on the status of an ordinary pet within the Zone, receiving shelter and food on a daily basis, and pointing to the ordinariness of life for some people and animals in the most radioactive landscape on Earth.

By understanding these relations in Chernobyl, the very notion of a toxic landscape as barren, dystopian or apocalyptic must be reconsidered. Such ordinariness as is depicted in this image is both hopeful and haunting, drawing the viewer’s attention to the capacity for life to continue in the most unexpected places. As well as this, though, it also hints at how human-animal companionship is important for both humans and animals living in spaces like Chernobyl, where care is mutual and flows both ways. Both human and animal offer each other companionship in a space where loneliness can be an issue, whilst the dogs receive food, shelter, and protection from wolves.

The background image of wolves (taken in the Zone) asks us to consider our responsibilities to animals, specifically domestic animals, in spaces of toxicity. In Chernobyl, they face a dual exposure to radiation and wolf predation. It is likely that wolf predation poses a more immediate threat to their lives than the effects of radiation, although it is unknown how the genetic effects of the disaster will play out over long periods of time. The threats to both humans and animals in toxic spaces, therefore, do not simply reside in the toxic materiality of the landscape itself, but can arise due to the consequences that come with abandoning an area or controlling its uses. The threats to humans and animals are thus constituted both materially and culturally, and the human-animal relations that have emerged help both species to endure life in the exclusion Zone.