“What s a dog anyway? Simply an antidote for our inferiority complex.”

-W.C. Fields

This week, I’ve started re-reading one of the classic studies of the relationship between people and animals, a book by James Serpell, my favorite dog and animal writer. It’s called “In The Company Of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships.”

This is one of the most fascinating and rarely explored subjects in our world.

Serpell, who wrote “Domestic Dogs,” one of the most thorough and useful books on dogs ever published, has a genius for stepping back and examining the complex and contradictory relationship human beings have with the animals on our planet.

Just look at dogs, the most loved animals on the earth, and the most abused, misunderstood, abandoned, exploited creatures ever to come near people.

Pet owners have only recently become a majority in Western cultures, writes Serpell, and pets are being emotionalized in historic and unprecedented ways.

Strong affection for animal companions did not become widespread in Europe until the nineteenth century. American veterinarians have noticed a dramatic increase in the level of human-animal attachments in the last twenty to thirty years.

The great mystery surrounding the pet revolution in America is that there have been very few serious attempts to explain either why pet keeping has become so important – and expensive – and what purpose, if any, it services.

According to the American Veterinary Animal Association, Americans now spend about $70 billion a year on health care for their pets. Why are we so willing to spend this kind of money on animals where tens of millions of Americans, including many children, have no health care at all?

Standards of medicare for pets are fast approaching those used on people. Veterinary procedures now include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), hip replacements, transplantation surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

In a Darwinian sense, it makes no sense, yet it tells us how important pets have become to us, I would argue in many cases, they have become more important than people. Every time I am in the company of dog lovers,  one or more will proudly tell me that they love their dogs much more than the people in their lives, as if this were a noble thing to brag about.

Sociologists generally agree that if every one of the 75 million dogs who now live in America vanished, life would continue pretty much as normal. We may love these animals, but do we really need them to survive. We are brutal to almost every species we don’t need; even more so those we do need.

We are mostly content to sit by as half of the animal species in the world disappear, mostly at the hands of human greed and arrogance. Yet dogs and cats get into beds with us, have human names, have excellent health care and nutritious and expensive food,  and are believed to give us the unconditional love people say they can’t find from people.

(I would have to argue yes, I think we have come to need dogs and other pets in many important ways, first and foremost for being surrogates for people, from whom we are becoming relentlessly disconnected. They might be necessary, but is it healthy to need surrogates for our own species? Could that be a good thing? Is it really okay?)

Serpell points out that the view of pet-keeping as some kind of gratuitous perversion of natural and normal behavior has been repeated and re-iterated through history and is even now the subject of much caricature and ridicule. A lot of people have pets, a lot of people don’t.

I’ve often fantasized about Labs hanging out in the U.S. Capitol or the White House. It would be a different world.

As the psychiatrist Aaron Katcher points out, “we are taught to despise the sentimental, to think of it as banal or as a cover for darker hidden emotions.”

Some articles have claimed pet owners are socially inadequate, that they use pets as artificial and ultimately unhealthy substitutes for reality. “A certain amount of grief or remorse when pets die is only natural,” writes Serpell.  But often, it is something much more unnatural.

When I wrote “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die,” any number of psychologists and psychiatrists told me that mourning over the death of animals can become pathological, several even called it a public health hazard that needed more attention. I believe there is some truth to that alarm.

Just look at the pet grieving on Facebook every day.

The shrinks I talked to reported what Serpell also found, that excessive grieving over a pet is sometimes the inevitable outcome of pathological over-dependency. Are animals a substitute for people? Sometimes, sure. Can we love them too much?  Are we depending on them much for emotional, even spiritual, support? Absolutely. I think we all know this is sometimes true.

But it is not the whole story.

I am always aware of keeping perspective in my love with dogs they have always brought me to people, they have not taken me away from them. My dogs taught me how to love. But they are not children to me, they are not better than people. I don’t seek unconditional love. I want love to be conditional, I have to deserve it and earn it. Unconditional love seems creepy to me, almost fascistic.

I want a dog (or a human) to love me because I  treat them well and thoughtfully, not because I exist.

Serpell has studied the case against dogs and domestic pets for years,  he finds some truth is some these stereotypes and alarms, but in  general finds them false and unsupported.

“I have argued,” he writes in his book, ” that popular beliefs about why people keep pets are often erroneous, they should be replaced with the notion that personifying animals is a normal and natural human characteristic, and one that can be emotionally fulfilling.”

These harsh beliefs about pet ownership and human-animal relations were spawned, he wrote, when moral reservations about our ruthless exploitation of animals were out-of-place and frowned upon.

To me, the danger in the pet revolution, at least in our country, is more ephemeral.

I see a culture that is losing trust and affection for humans, and loving pets more and more. Pets are filling that enormous and disturbing gap with the emotionalizing – perhaps “over-loving” of animals.

We are turning pets into demi-Gods, people into villains.

I do not believe pets like dogs can ultimately carry the weight of human relationships with other people. It puts too much pressure on them. This is one reason why nearly 400,000 dogs in America are now on Prozac. A couple of generations ago, no dogs were on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications.

We are making them crazy, just like us.

I am happy there are dogs in the world, they have enriched and nourished my life in many critical ways. They are not like us, but neither are we superior to them.

I respect James Serpell for many reasons, one is that he never loses perspective:

“For when we elevate companion animals to the status of persons,” Serpell writes, “when we empathize with them and acknowledge their resemblance to ourselves , it becomes obvious that the notion of human moral superiority is a phantom: a dangerous, egotistical myth that threatens our survival. Ironically, as the forerunner of animal domestication, pet-keeping led us into our present, destructive phase of history. Perhaps, by making us more aware of our biological affinities with animals and the natural world, it will help to lead us out again.”