A significant portion of the population desires our dogs to be more like us; this is the new and growing concept of dog love. They are just like our children.
Americans lavished a staggering $168 billion on their pets in 2022, a mind-boggling increase of 168 billion dollars compared to just 50 years ago.
This dramatic shift in our pet-centric culture raises the question: Are we doing this for them, or is it more about us?
(Note: I’ve experienced the joy and companionship that dogs bring, but I’ve also experienced the heartache of losing two children. I can’t bear to hear that having a dog is like having my daughter Emma or the ones we lost.). This hurts. me and many others.
Dogs are not children, period.
While I don’t tell other people what to do, this shift in perspective is harmful to dogs, even fatal at times. It’s not beneficial for dogs, humans, or even children.
Last year, a close friend shared a similar sentiment.
She equated her cat to having a child, viewing him similarly. She was keeping him alive with medications and operations of $15,000 so far, while millions of Americans have no health care at all. He looked dreadful and uncomfortable. Dogs and cats can’t tell us when they are in pain.
Have we lost all perspective about our pets?
They need us to speak for them and spare them the pain we can’t spare ourselves.
Evidence suggests that many more dogs are losing their health and lives because they are being emotionalized and treated as family members rather than animals.
To many, dogs are no longer dogs but something very different and more personal.
I have another good friend who got a female dog because she never had a female child and now has a closet full of dresses for her dog to wear. She has two children, both male. This is a step way too far for me.
She also sees her dog as her best friend. I wonder what her best friend might feel about that.
We’ve moved beyond indulging dogs, a habit I’ve often fallen into before catching myself. We’ve sailed over the top.
Dogs and cats now have high-end and personalized nutrition plans, backpack carriers, exotic lotions, dog hydrotherapy, and boutique cat hotels.
The latest very profitable trend in dog toys is feline and canine “enrichment” toys, which stimulate dogs and prevent boredom and depression from the lives we make them live.
These toys have elaborate health care and are approaching the cost of human care.
There is hardly anywhere they can’t go. Do dogs need to sit with us in restaurants?
Over half a million dogs are on Prozac or other calming medications because they are “traumatized” by being left alone, or their owners are traumatized by leaving them alone, which is essentially the same thing and more likely the cause.
We need a very different understanding of animals, for their sake and our own. It’s no longer clear what it means to be a dog or how dogs can survive us in their present form.
We’ve come a million miles from Jack London’s wonderful dog Buck in Call Of The Wild.
I know a veterinary professor who is accumulating data that show that many more dogs are being killed or sickened by being emotionalized – obesity, lack of work, anthropized feelings, ethically dubious surgeries, unhealthy treats, and expensive toys – than being abused or ignored.
Animal care ethicists, veterinary scholars, and scientists—I think of James Serpell of the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school—are now openly worrying that our frantic and costly effort to humanize dogs and project our many neuroses and growing needs onto them suggests we’ve already gone w too far.
Dogs’ lives are now so constrained and dependent on us that many now have little purpose beyond “worshipping us.” Troubling health and behavioral issues are becoming evident.
Just ask one of the now scores of pet psychologists who make a lot of money offering therapy to your depressed or troubled animal and unhinged humans.
Serpell, perhaps the most respected and accomplished domestic dog scholar in America or anywhere, is alarmed. He knows more than anyone alive about domestic dogs, I believe.
“We now view pets not only as family members but as equivalent to children,” Serpell told the New York Times recently. Serpell is an emeritus ethics and animal welfare professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The problem is,” he said,” is that dogs and cats are not children, and owners have become increasingly protective and restrictive of them. So animals cannot express their doggy and catty natures as freely as they might.”
Dogs are suffering and sometimes dying from overbreeding, which mostly comes from wealthy people willing to pay thousands of dollars to custom-order dogs bred to meet their emotional needs, even when it makes the dogs sick or vulnerable to illness.
The French bulldog is one of the most popular dog breeds in the United States. This brachycephalic family of flat-faced dogs was bred to adore people and cuddle with them. Still, it also typically has trouble breeding, breathing, skin care, seeing, and eliminating, among other things.
Natural breeding is often dangerous and impossible for this breed; breeders often use artificial insemination.
These health issues do not put off dog owners, say vets and breeders; they want dogs that need loving and continuous care, just as human babies do.
Many of these and other genetically engineered dogs rack up enormous veterinary bills and often live shortened lives.
Here, we enter the complex world of dog love and human interaction.
Dogs do not love people because they are lovely; they tend to love the people who let them do the things dogs love—run freely, hunt, chase balls, go for walks, and get fed. They love the people who take them to the things dogs love to do.
Now, we are breeding them to love what we want them to love—mostly us. And people are paying thousands of millions of dollars for that.
In America, whose faith is money, we often equate the love of dogs and cats with how much we spend on them. That’s a poor measure of love. Sometimes, the most loving things we can do for them involve doing less, not more.
The simple shelter dog—the one who just loved being a dog—is vanishing. These dogs often made the most beautiful pets. They cost little or nothing and rarely saw a vet.
So do lots of established breeds. Dogs are moving beyond the reach of ordinary people, and their lives are getting too complicated and expensive.
Nothing makes Zinnia happier than walking in the woods, jumping into ponds, eating repulsive fecal matter, or retrieving a ball. Nothing makes Fate happier than chasing sheep but not herding them.
Nothing makes Bud (Boston Terriers are a flat-nosed breed) happier than chasing a mole, mouse, or chipmunk. His work is not loving me to death but digging a hole and capturing a mole.
And then killing it, like Zip, who is also free to be a cat and is good at killing things.
The more of those things we do that they are meant to do, the more we earn the dog’s love. It is not just the people they love; it is the things we do with our dogs that they love. That is what dog love is about. Making it a child is not a path to dog love for me; it’s an exploitation that gives dogs no choice or chance to love us.
Good and ethical breeding is essential to their lives as companion animals. No good breeder would breed a dog known to carry serious illness.
Capitalism is always on hand to feed and exploit our needs and fantasies. It is ravaging the animal world and corrupts everything it touches.
The so-called pet confinement device is a new billion-dollar pet market, which includes crates, electronic dollars, indoor chains, and head harnesses.
Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist in Colorado and a student of dog-human relationships, told a reporter recently that “the level of constraint that dogs face is profound. Just a few years ago, she said, the likely killer of dogs was cars that ran over them when they ran freely.
“These risks were outweighed,” she says, “by the freedom and experience of movement.” And of exploration and socializing.
Serpell says the new danger for dogs is that “Owners don’t want dogs to act like dogs.” This true. Dogs can go on vacation now, but they can do little more than keep us company and show devotion.
The irony is that dogs are increasingly allowed in public and private human spaces—restaurants, offices, stores, hotels, and parks with new (and controversial) dog runs. These thrill people as much as their dogs, who don’t need vacations.
Dogs have lived happily without dog runs for thousands of years, but now, many people build their entire experiences with dogs around them. Dog runs are an almost perfect replica of children’s playgrounds.
I’ve spent some time in dog runs, and it always seemed that the people were happier than the dogs, who often seemed anxious and confused. Dog parks are not in dogs’ genes and frequently transmit sickness.
The most severe consequence of contemporary pet ownership is that all of this primarily neurotic and pointless over-attention is killing them by the thousands.
Veterinary fees, pet sitters, and boarding costs – are forcing more people to abandon dogs in animal shelters, leading to soaring rates of euthanasia. In 2023, more than 359,000 were euthanized, a five-year record, according to the Shelter Animals Count, an animal advocacy group.
You rarely hear the words boasting that “We are a no-kill shelter” much anymore.
Shelters have to euthanize dogs themselves or farm them out to die. Few shelters can afford to keep unadoptable dogs alive for long, let alone all of their lives. Dogs are often confined in shelters with no chance of being adopted in crates for years before shelters run out of money.
There is no meaningful advocacy group to protect our dogs from our love of them.
Restrictions on dog adoption – poor, elderly, or hard-working people (or those without tall fences) are increasingly denied rescue animals. Only the unemployed wealthy with tall fences can get them quickly.
That is a death sentence for countless dogs in shelters.
We need to pay less attention to them and spend less money on them, not more. Genuine dog love is about the simplicity of relationships, not the complexity. I try to understand what my dogs need, not what I need them to need.
Dogs and many other animals are at a crossroads now. There are too many of them, a growing number of people can’t afford to care for them, and even more, people insist on treating them as children with human needs.
The truth is that we love them too intensively and obsessively.
As we disconnect from people in the digital era, dogs cannot solve our emotional problems and fill the roles of children, family, or community.
Dr. Serpell is right.
Dogs are not children and cannot duplicate the role of humans. They certainly can’t do it alone.
Vets, like human doctors, like to make money. They have huge loans from college, and technology is making their work more expensive by the day. A routine dog check-up costs $300; surgery can quickly cost thousands.
Many vets are cleaning up with canine anxiety medications and multi-thousand-dollar surgeries that were never inflicted on dogs in all of their history. This is a capitalist country. Profit is a pandemic of its own.
Our culture is centered around money worship, and we love our animals so much that we are vulnerable to the same excesses that have made growing older a nightmare for human beings. How sad to do this to dogs because we need to see them as our family offspring.
They are not that. Dogs need to be dogs; we should let them be dogs whenever possible, as tricky and challenging as this now is. They don’t need more things from us.
Dogs no longer get to make choices in their lives – this also seems to be true for many children. The challenge is enriching a dog’s life with options and chances for temporary freedom.
It may be time to ban – as many European countries are doing- the breeding of dogs particularly prone to disease, such as the Cavalier King Spaniel. That’s a horrific precedent to set and an unethical one.
The issue is a moral and emotional one, but also a timely one for me. What do we want dogs to be? What does it mean to love them?
My challenge as someone who loves dogs and appreciates their love is to view them as pets, not autonomous creatures.
They are not like us. They don’t wish to be like us. They don’t need to be like us. They are not able to be like us.
We can solve our problems in many ways. They can not. They are utterly at our mercy, and we can abuse them by overloving them just as quickly as we can by beating them.
They depend on us to act in their best interests, not ours. We are failing them.
