Truck dogs: advancing a mobile geography of multispecies relations of care

Journal article

This paper demonstrates how multi-species relations co-constitute mobile work in road haulage under supply chain capitalism. Bringing labour and animal geographies into dialogue, we extend the concepts of carescapes and caringscapes to theorise the truck cab, route, and logistical infrastructures as multispecies sites of care beyond the ‘static’ workplace. We use multiple methods to create multispecies narrative portraits, through which we reveal how caring labour - training and socialisation, embodied attunement, walking, and the management of hygiene, risk, and routine - enables truck dogs to travel and reshapes drivers’ sensory orientations, working rhythms, and well-being. We also show how organisational policies, regulatory regimes, and infrastructural constraints render some forms of care legible as security, cleanliness, compliance, and asset protection, while limiting or displacing others. At the same time, truck dogs offer companionship, routine, and vigilance that can ease isolation and insecurity without resolving the structural harms of mobile work. We argue that supply chain capitalism is sustained through a mobile carescape in which care is continually negotiated across schedules, routes, and institutional thresholds. By foregrounding these multispecies arrangements, the paper unsettles dominant accounts of where and how care is organised and advances a mobile geography of care attentive to the logistical conditions through which care is made possible, valued, and constrained.

Authors: Arora, N; Hopkins, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 1
• Article number: e70064
• Publication date: 2026-03-25
• Acceptance date: 2026-03-10
• DOI: 10.1111/tran.70064
• EISSN: 1475-5661
• ISSN: 0020-2754
• Language: English
• Keywords: multispecies; carescapes; caringscapes; supply chain capitalism; logistics; mobilities