MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4414179117 · doi:10.52537/humanimalia.21426

Robot Dogs and the Paw Patrol

2025· article· en· W4414179117 on OpenAlexaff
Ishaan Selby

Bibliographic record

VenueHumanimalia · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGeographies of human-animal interactions
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHumanityNormativeReproductionColonialismPoliticsAnthropocentrismEthnic groupSocial lifeWhite (mutation)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper explores the cultural politics of the police dog by tracing the role of dogs in the fabrication and reproduction of an anthropocentric social order in line with the imperatives of racial capitalism. These imperatives are based on sorting forms of life in accordance with their proximity to a normative white humanity as part of a project of meeting capitalism’s shifting valorization requirements. I argue that such sorting manifests as both labourers compelled to work by the violence of policing and as populations rendered surplus and made to die through killing, confinement, or organized abandonment. The paper reads the historical use of police dogs against Black protesters from the Civil Rights Era to the present, the children’s television show PAW Patrol, and Israel’s use of robot dogs in its ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip as examples of policing as an operation of life sorting and as a manifestation of racial (bio)capitalism that makes use of the lively capacities and properties of dogs. The paper draws on work at the intersections of animal studies, Black studies, labour studies, and critical theories of settler colonialism (especially those focused on occupied Palestine) to argue for thinking together Black liberation, police abolition, Palestinian liberation, and animal liberation toward a project of mutual freedom for all life on a shared and finite world.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.019

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.026
Scholarly communication0.0030.003
Open science0.0000.003
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.331
Teacher spread0.309 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueHumanimaliaSame topicGeographies of human-animal interactionsFrench-language works237,207