When civilians encounter depictions of soldiers displaying bonds of affection towards animals, the encounter sets in motion a process that triggers an affective response, engaging the audience at a fundamental, pre-conscious level and helping to create positive feelings towards the soldiers. The definition of affect that Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg provide fits very well with the phenomenon identified and discussed in this chapter: ‘the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension’. At the same time, however, these almost instinctive forces do not act in a vacuum but interact with socially and culturally conditioned expectations to shape responses, whether those responses come in the form of attitudes, opinions or actions. This means, for example, that the affective response stimulated by depictions of soldiers with animals is also influenced by the audience's awareness of the military as a masculinised institution, as well as by its expectations that soldiers will engage in and (partly) be defined by gendered and racialised performances and discourses. There will, therefore, be subtle differences between the view that the audience forms of a male soldier holding a cute puppy and that of a female soldier holding the same animal, although both responses may be positive. Audiences’ views will also be influenced by which racialised categories they perceive the soldiers in the images to belong to, and how those gendered and racialised judgements intersect. For example, members of a community that perceives their state's military as hostile and a potential source of violence to themselves – especially those who have been historically and structurally targeted in the state's ‘martial politics’ – are likely to have a very different response to an image of a soldier with a dog than citizens who regard the military as a protector of their values and their lives.

In general terms, though, there is something very appealing and emotionally satisfying in seeing or reading about humans sharing their lives with animals and enjoying their company; it tends to make the viewer or reader well-disposed towards the humans concerned, even in the absence of any other information about them, as the passage quoted below suggests: