British Belongings, Excess Baggage, and Trained Killers: Dogs in Wartime Hong Kong, 1941–45

War thoroughly transformed Hong Kong from a modernising city into a problematic site marked by disease, hunger, panic, and terror. Deviating from existing foci on the impacts of war on human societies, this study explores canine experiences during the occupation. It argues that when human-devised systems and practises collapsed, so did pre-existing cultural patterns of human-canine relations: furry companions were put down, prized pedigrees were abandoned in the face of evacuation, camp dogs became eyesores, Allied military dogs were recruited to work for the Japanese forces, and stray dogs – once outliers – roamed, freer than ever, in Hong Kong’s hillsides. Analysing the nuanced ways Hong Kong’s canine population experienced the atrocities, this study not only sheds light on the impacts of wartime developments on non-human animals but also demonstrates the impacts of the colonial constructs of ‘race’ and ‘class’ on the social lives of dogs both in times of war and peace.