Truck Dogs: Advancing a Mobile Geography of Multispecies Relations of Care

What the paper says

This paper demonstrates how multispecies relations co‐constitute mobile work in road haulage under supply chain capitalism. Bringing labour and animal geographies into dialogue, we extend the concepts of carescapes and caringscapes to theorise the truck cab, route and logistical infrastructures as multispecies sites of care beyond the ‘static’ workplace. We use multiple methods to create multispecies narrative portraits, through which we reveal how caring labour—training and socialisation, embodied attunement, walking and the management of hygiene, risk and routine—enables truck dogs to travel and reshapes drivers' sensory orientations, working rhythms and well‐being. We also show how organisational policies, regulatory regimes and infrastructural constraints render some forms of care legible as security, cleanliness, compliance and asset protection, whilst limiting or displacing others. At the same time, truck dogs offer companionship, routine and vigilance that can ease isolation and insecurity without resolving the structural harms of mobile work. We argue that supply chain capitalism is sustained through a mobile carescape in which care is continually negotiated across schedules, routes and institutional thresholds. By foregrounding these multispecies arrangements, the paper unsettles dominant accounts of where and how care is organised and advances a mobile geography of care attentive to the logistical conditions through which care is made possible, valued and constrained.