When plague swept early modern England, metropolitan councils responded by culling dogs. Records show the Chamberlain of London paying for the slaughter of 4380 dogs during the final surge of disease in 1665 (Jenner, 1997). The withdrawal of hospitality towards the canine population, suggests social historian Mark Jenner, was not because they were considered vectors of disease. Rather dogs were seen, metonymically, as uncannily unhoused human beings ‘[living] a liminal lifestyle, regularly traversing the threshold between the domestic interior of the house and shop and the more public world of the street’ (p. 55). As the city responded to existential crisis and terrors of social disorder, dogs ‘articulated a variety of fears about human relationships with each other, with the bestial aspects of humankind and with