“The image of man betrays that which distinguishes him from all other beings: his ability to observe himself. It is men’s fate that he not only rejoices in what he sees, but is displeased by his faults, physical and mental. Men’s urge to civilize compels him to strive for the improvement not only of his material conditions, but of himself as well. To prune and to cultivate. The image of man bears witness to this ambition.” These opening lines of Homo Sapiens 1900, a 1998 documentary by Peter Cohen, highlight how the film deals with various eugenic methods throughout the 20th century, focusing primarily on four national contexts (USA, Sweden, Russia and Germany) to illustrate the development of “race research” and the disastrous results of human intervention into natural proceedings. These lines also apply to Kirsten Bakis’ novel, albeit on “dog scale”: In Lives of the Monster Dogs, the canine voices in the narrative are displeased; it’s dogs who are pruned and cultivated to their creator’s measures of perfection. The novel is a fictional account of a Frankensteinian experiment that begins in rural Switzerland, is refined by the patronage of a king of Prussia (ironically enough, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin was the home to “hereditary research”), eventually is taken into the Canadian wilderness, and comes to a furious conclusion in a magnificent building called ‘Neuhundstein’ in New York in 2009. Kirsten Bakis’ text deals with many issues that this symposium touches upon: the control of natural selection/eugenics, politics of the body as politics of dispossession and enslavement, the role and responsibilities of archivists and archives, the scientist as equally talented and terrifying etc. In my paper I will show just how much this novel is infused with ideas of racial hygiene, the manufacturing of perfection and the many selective processes – one of them migration – that are used in order to achieve this goal. Rich material provided by literary scholarship on animals as protagonists and narrators (as well as metaphors) provides the theoretical framework; I draw also on Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People (2010). The novel is as much an observation on the “breeding” of celebrities as it is an illustration of ambition and scientific, scholarly, and individual excess.