The Companion Species Manifesto

Published in 2003, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness was Haraway's correction of her own earlier framework. The cyborg, she felt, had been taken up in ways that emphasized technological fusion at the expense of the biological, embodied, relational grounding she cared about. The companion species figure — drawn from her life with her Australian Shepherd Cayenne and her training in agility work — kept what mattered in the cyborg (dissolution of boundaries, refusal of purity, identity constituted through relation) while grounding it in ordinary, ongoing practices of living with another kind of being. The figure became the foundation for her subsequent work on multispecies ethics and for the argument in Donna Haraway on AI that the human-AI relationship is becoming a companion species relationship at unprecedented speed.