"Becoming Philosophical": Moral Imagination and the Ethics of Street Dog Care in Kolkata

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with animal caregivers in Kolkata, India, to examine how religious and cosmological frameworks function as resources for meaning-making in the everyday work of caring for street dogs, and how intimate relationships with dogs are actively reconfiguring those frameworks. Moving between the institutional and the intimate—from a municipal public health official who grounds Kolkata's non-lethal dog management policies in Hindu cosmological belief to caregivers who improvise with concepts of moksha, karma, transmigration, and ahimsa in the face of daily encounters with animal suffering and death—the paper argues that South Asian religious concepts are living and capacious, being actively remade through interspecies contact. These concepts do not travel alone or stay fixed: Hindu frameworks intersect with Jainism, Islam, and with transnational animal-welfare cosmologies such as the "rainbow bridge"—a vision of a peaceful animal afterlife traceable to a poem by Scottish artist Edna Clyne-Rekhy—all of them absorbed into and reshaped by the same encounters. Engaging with scholarship on Hindu animal ethics, ordinary ethics, and immanent ethics, the paper contributes to conversations in the anthropology of religion about what gives concepts life through practice, and what the study of human-animal relations reveals about the elasticity of religious traditions.