Man’s best friend hardly needs an introduction. People love dogs, and have for some time. Humans and canis lupus familiaris share a long, co-evolutionary history. Even if the key dates and locations are fuzzy in this millennia-long story, we know that domestication occurs quite late; the split between wolves and dogs began something like 14,000 years ago and set the stage for the emergence of the breeds we know today. Recent scholarship has even suggested that this process may not have been instigated by humans. Our domestic relationship with dogs began when particular wolves elected to cooperate with people sometime in the last 100,000 years, working together to hunt as companions.¹

Familiarity, however, did not mean that humans stopped justifying why certain dogs were valued in certain ways. In March of 1790, Joseph Colen, did just that, offering an explicit account of just how important the domestic tie between dogs and humans was in the eighteenth-century fur trade. At the time, Colen was the resident factor in charge of York Fort (later York Factory), the principal base of operations for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) during the eighteenth century. Situated on the banks of the Hayes River at Hudson Bay in what is now northern Manitoba, the fort operated as a crucial provisions entrepôt, receiving huge amounts of food from Europe alongside those trade goods that facilitated the fur trade.

Some of that food, Colen noted, went to the dogs. In a brief note scrawled on the bottom of the fort’s provisions log, Colen explained to superiors on the HBC’s London Committee that “since Christmas 6 Dogs have also been regularly served out Oatmeal &c &c.” In this marginal comment, Colen sought to banish the idea that this expenditure of an imported European grain amounted to waste. “I have found them useful & valuable animals this winter in conveying provisions to the men at Steel River &c.,” he wrote. “No Six Men in the factory could have performed the same duty – and one half the work would have been left undone that is now executed had the men been obliged to fetch their own victuals.”²

Neither Colen’s note about these dogs nor its location in the provisions book was arbitrary. As I argue in my recent article, “Accounting for Partridge: Food and Value in the Eighteenth-Century Hudson’s Bay Company,” his tenure as factor from 1786 to 1798 was defined by recurrent crises over the fort’s food supply, ones that raised fierce contests about who fed the fur trade and on what terms. While the cost of feeding servants at York Fort had long worried company officials, it was not until the HBC’s expansion inland from Hudson Bay after 1774 that it issued the very sort of provision books Colen kept. Such books played a key role in the HBC’s plan to better know – and therefore better control – provisioning decisions at York Fort, an effort that put the company on a collision course with both its servants and Maškēowak (local Swampy Cree) trade partners.

“Dogs play a revealing, if minor, role in this story, one that encourage historians to take the ‘animal turn’ in our accounts of the fur trade.”

Dogs play a revealing, if minor, role in this story, one that encourage historians to take the “animal turn” in our accounts of the fur trade.³ Admittedly, it was not a turn I took in my article. Yet I want to suggest that the eating habits of animals are important for more than just our understanding of power as it operated through food in the fur trade. Asking who fed dog what and why is to center dogs themselves, their actions and their choices.

To the surprise of company officials, the dogs that readily helped Indigenous trade partners hunt, haul, and live in Hudson Bay rejected them. Glossed simply as atim – the Cree word meaning dog – by HBC trader and factor Andrew Graham in his late eighteenth-century account of Hudson Bay, he observed that these wolf-like dogs “will not serve us although we take them into our factories when puppies, which causes us to have the Newfoundland species from England.” As Graham knew, early and affective ties secured the cooperative relationship between dog and people. But it seems the company’s efforts to foster such ties never quite succeeded. While of “great service to the natives” in hunting and transportation, the dogs of Hudson Bay refused to serve the HBC.⁴

Such a utilitarian logic shaped Colen’s own rationale for feeding these so-called Newfoundland dogs. He did so in a period where food was not simply scarce, but at the core of labour relations.⁵ Little wonder, then, that he accounted for his rationing decisions in terms of productivity – terms the London Committee was inclined to understand and support. This was particularly important as the company’s servants had spent the last three months on reduced rations, under a policy known as short allowance. Colen suspected that the oatmeal he fed to dogs might undercut his claims that “necessity compelled me to be very sparing in serving out provisions, our stock being reduced so low.”⁶ To head off both protests from his servants and scrutiny from his superiors, he thus penned an unusually frank admission of how much York Fort relied on the dogs’ labour.

That is not to say competition defined how servants interacted with dogs. In fact, instances of cooperation are far more frequent, if more subtly recorded in the journals that Colen kept for York Fort. Consider, for example, the troubles that he and the HBC’s workforce faced when the company’s stock of imported salt beef and pork turned out to be inedible. In April of 1789, he claimed, “was I to insert the continued complaints against the meat, my Journal would be filled with them.” Amidst the “general discontent and murmur,” company servants refused to either eat these provisions or work, leading Colen to worry that his management, not the meat, would be blamed for any decrease in productivity.⁷

Dogs supported this conclusion, and did so in ways humans could not. In 1791, a group of servants insisted that the salted pork they received was “so very rancid that they cannot eat it.” In support of this demand for better food, Colen observed that “even the Dogs refuse to taste it when Dress – tho’ fine looking when taken out of the Cask.”⁸ When dogs likewise refused to eat this meat, they not only supported the conclusions reached by the company’s servants, but did so on grounds that humans never could. The superior sense of smell possessed by dogs also dispelled any uncertainty about that choice.⁹ Snouts proved more reliable than eyes – human or otherwise – in determining what was fit for consumption.

“To think about what dogs ate and who dogs worked for in Hudson Bay is to reckon with the fact that people have, for centuries, acted on canine judgements.”

To think about what dogs ate and who dogs worked for in Hudson Bay is to reckon with the fact that people have, for centuries, acted on canine judgements. As a recent volume on animal mobilities and knowledge shows us, such instances of interspecies knowledge production are far from frictionless; we often learn from animals to their detriment.¹⁰ Food is the least we owe them in return.

Feature Image: Winter Travel between St. Paul and Red River. 1870. Artist: Armstrong, William, 1822-1914. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1933-257-1 Gift of Mrs. William MacDougall.

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Notes

1. For the domestication literature that stresses its mutuality, see Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg, The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017), 1-47 and Darcy F. Morey, “The Early Evolution of the Domestic Dog,” American Scientist 28 no. 4 (1994): 336-347. For leading work on animal labour more generally, see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge: Harvad University Press, 2009). ↩︎
2. March 1790, York Factory Provision Book, 1787-1791, B/239/d/92, Hudson’s Bay Company Archive (HBCA). ↩︎
3. While discussion of the ‘animal turn’ are now expansive, for helpful summaries, see Harriet Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” Daedalus, 136 (2007): 118-122; Joshua Specht, “Animal History after Its Triumph: Unexpected Animals, Evolutionary Approaches, and the Animal Lens,” History Compass, 14 np. 7 (2016): 326-336.  ↩︎
4. Andrew Graham, Andrew Graham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay, 1767-1791, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: the Hudson’s Bay Record Society), 33. On the importance of thinking about affect, see Bathsheba Demuth, “Labors of Love: People, Dogs, and Affect in North American Arctic Borderlands, 1700-1900, Journal of American History, 108 no. 2 (2022): 270-295. ↩︎
5. My article extends the periodization of this insight from that offered by Edith Burley in “Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770-1870,” PhD Thesis, University of Manitoba, 1993. ↩︎
6. March 1790, York Factory Provision Book, 1787-1791, B.239/d/92, HBCA. ↩︎
7. 5 April 1789, York Factory Post Journal, 1788-1789, B.239/a/89 HBCA. ↩︎
8. 11 February 1791, York Factory Post Journal, 1790-1791, B.239/a/91, HBCA. ↩︎
9. Nikolaas Tinbergen remarked on dogs’ superior sense of smell in The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969[1951]), 21. ↩︎
10. Tamar Novick, Lisa Onaga, Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “Knowing Animals, Moving Animals,” Osiris: Animal Mobilities, 40 (2025): 1-15, and articles within. ↩︎