I was talking with some close and good friends today, and one of them turned suddenly to me and said they were agonizing over a question involving a dog, and they thought I might be the right person to help them.

They have a dog they love dearly, and they are planning a vacation thousands of miles away near the ocean, and they can’t decide whether or not to bring him.  They thought it was something they should do, but it seemed they didn’t want to do it.

I said I don’t give unsolicited advice to people, but since they asked, my opinion was to leave the dog behind, especially if they were uncertain about it.

Until recently, it was almost unheard of for a dog to go on vacation; the tourist industry got wise and now accepts pets almost everywhere.

I said I wouldn’t bring my dogs on vacation and never have.

They are on vacation every day, and traveling to distant and unknown places makes them anxious and confused.  It doesn’t give me rest or renewal, either.

Dogs are unaware of time and don’t know an hour or a day from a week. To them, a human going away on vacation is no different than having their human go to the drug store to pick up a prescription.

Until recently, nobody dreamed of bringing a dog on most vacations; very few hotels and motels permitted it.

Holidays were for relaxing. Dogs don’t need them or even know what they are.

I don’t want to be getting up early and walking my dog on vacation.

I don’t want to worry about how they will react to people or strange dogs. I want to relax, sleep late with my wife, read a book, and take a walk myself. I take them to various places when I’m home, and I enjoy it.

Maria blessedly agrees with me. We have a great dog sitter, and the dogs hardly notice we are gone. Our time together is sacred.

I’ve had dogs all my life and never had a dog with separation anxiety. This is because I don’t feel or believe it and can’t transmit it to them.

My friends blinked as if the lights were turned on.

They seemed relieved.

Oh, thanks, they said.

We didn’t want to take it, and now I feel good about it.

I felt good about it, too; a small step toward canine sanity and perspective.

On some vacations – out camping or hiking, it makes sense. Dragging a dog 1,000 miles to a motel room makes no sense.

I know people feel differently about it; that is their choice and right; I don’t tell other people what to do unless they want my advice and will listen.

They don’t have to agree with me.

Most people don’t.

In the early 1970s, psychologist and academic Boris Levinson, a great dog lover, wrote a ground-breaking book called  “Pets and Human Development.”

He foresaw that the decline of organized religion, the rise of disconnecting technologies and TV  (even before the Internet), the breaking up of families and communities moving all over the country, and our separation from nature and animals were dehumanizing people.

Over time, he said, people would begin turning to pets for emotional support and comfort from the tense and disconnected lives they were starting to live. He didn’t imagine social media and the wrenching polarization of politics. People could be “woke” or “asleep” in his time. It was no one’s business.

“Certainly alienation and isolation result from complex stresses created by a technological society whose values and institutions are in many ways dehumanizing,” he wrote. For sure.

“It will take more than providing children and adults with pets for them to function as productive, happy members of the human family,” he wrote.

They would need to learn about the importance of nature and animals in our lives and history.

Levinson was shockingly prescient.

We have turned to dogs and pets for comfort, and we love them more and more. But the truth is that we also need them more and more, hoping they can replace the humanity and connection that our society has taken from us.

I don’t believe that is working – look at the news. I know many people who wouldn’t dream of taking any vacation without their dogs.

Dogs wrote, Levinson, cannot make society less angry, mechanized, routinized, and cut off from the vital rhythm of the natural world. In the Western world, he wrote, far-reaching improvements will be long coming (there was no talk of climate change then).

He believed that animals would provide some relief, give much pleasure and remind us of our origins.

According to Levinson, science, technology, and religion no longer serve modern man’s needs as they once did.

People feel that the world is impersonal and even cruel and that they are no longer in control of their lives or destiny.

“As a result of our technological orientations,” he wrote, “we see nature as a gigantic, inexhaustible mine of riches, or more destructively, as a whore to be exploited at our leisure and then cast out.”

Society, wrote Levinson,  failed even in 1972 to realize that people have survived until now precisely because they have cooperated to some extent, not only with their fellow human beings but also with animals.

When a man or woman is forced to live and work, deprived of contact with nature, he loses emotional strength.

The book was a prophecy come true.

People are disconnected from nature and the animal world

We turn our heads while the natural world is being destroyed. An “animal rights” movement drives the animals we have worked with for centuries away from us and off the earth.

My life turned around when I decided to live in nature with animals as well as dogs.

Only then did I understand myself and where we humans come from. And only then did I learn what love was.

He could not have imagined a country where political leaders would refuse to cooperate or negotiate with one another and threaten and persecute people who disagree with them.

But if we continue to be so disconnected from one another and spend much of our lives staring at screens (this was long before social media and AI also), we will turn more and more to pets – not animals – to fill the holes in our lives and calm our tensions and fears about the world we are living in.

This is why we love our dogs and cats more than ever, and we need them more and more. My belief – speaking only for me – is that vacations are for me to rest and connect lovingly, physically, and emotionally with my wife and partner, free from the distractions and chaos of our world.

The time is for us to recharge and love one another. My dogs are not in the middle of that.

I completely understand why people want to take their dogs and cats on vacation. That’s up to them, not me.

But Levinson warned of a black hole that no dog or cat can fill. His worries seem more and more truthful by the day.

Until people grasp the importance of nature, return to it, and reconnect with the animals that partnered with their evolution, they are looking to the wrong place and barking up the wrong tree.

My dogs already love me and understand me.

They don’t need or deserve to come on vacation with me.

I don’t want the donkeys to come, either.