My latest book, “A matter of politics” has just been published and is available on Amazon.com.
They didn’t die out. They were erased.
Throughout history, mankind has shaped the natural world to suit its needs — and few creatures have felt that force more acutely than the dog. For thousands of years, dogs were bred, trained, and deployed in service of human ambition. They pulled sleds across polar ice, hunted wolves across Russian steppes, guarded nomadic flocks in the Himalayas, and turned spits in the kitchens of Tudor England. They were useful. They were valued. They were celebrated.
And then, one by one, they were destroyed. Not by accident. Not by neglect. By politics.
A Matter of Politics tells the stories of ten dog breeds whose fates were decided not by nature, but by the decisions of emperors, revolutionaries, colonisers, and bureaucrats. From the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the plantations of colonial Cuba, from the court of the Russian tsars to the streets of wartime London, these are the hidden histories of animals caught in currents far larger than themselves — and of the humans who created them, exploited them, and ultimately condemned them.
A Matter of Politics is a work of popular history that moves across continents and centuries, from the courts of medieval France to the committee rooms of modern international law. It is a book about power — who has it, how it is exercised, and what it destroys along the way. It asks, through the specific and often overlooked lens of the animals we have bred and discarded, what it means to create something and then decide it is no longer convenient. The answer, repeated ten times across as many chapters, is uncomfortable.
But it is also, in places, quietly extraordinary — because alongside every story of destruction, there is at least one human being who refused to let it happen without a fight.
A Matter of Politics is essential reading for anyone interested in the hidden forces that shape the natural world — and in the surprising, sometimes devastating ways that history reaches into places we never expect it to go. And also for those that like dogs, and want to know everything about them.
Available at https://amzn.eu/d/0etZLMza (or your local Amazon website)