Fetishising Fido might make us feel good – but is our growing tendency to anthropomorphise our animals and pamper our pooches actually good for them? GoodWeekendMag
“When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”who lived with him, Carlo was an adorable, handsome fellow, a prince among dogs, and possibly a genius. He was, Jane Rogers says, “so important to us”, her voice catching as she recalls what he meant to her and her late husband, and her adult children. “At times he was like our child,” she says, “sometimes he was like our brother.
Carlo’s ashes, which arrived from the pet crematorium in a tasteful cardboard box with pressed flowers and his name inscribed on top, now sit on the mantelpiece in the house they all once shared. Forty per cent of Australian households now have a dog, and, arguably, never have so many canines commanded such a depth of devotion. If the dog of old was the trusty family pet, fondly left to its own devices and blithely wolfing down Pal in the backyard, the 21st-century dog is more likely to be a pampered “fur baby” who sleeps under the doona, dines on organic pasture-raised lamb with ancient grains, enjoys, or endures, spa baths, and is possibly on Prozac.
Tennis great Roger Federer with Willow in an Instagram post in May: “We gave in … But we couldn’t be happier.”Millennials are embracing the canine trend. As one 25-year-old explains, “People my age can’t afford a house and don’t have children, so we’re living in apartments and getting dogs instead.” Even the Pope recently implored Catholics not to get a dog or a cat instead of having a child.
“Suddenly she’s awake in the middle of the night or barking all the time, or you’ve given her the wrong thing to eat and she gets diarrhoea.” In our wish to honour them, however, we seem to have changed their status from mere dog to furry human, as if that represents an elevation, and not a devaluing of dog-ness. They give us so much: company, fun, loyalty, labour, a sympathetic ear, solace in our darkest moments. But are we giving them what they, as dogs, really want or need? Or to put it another way, does a cavoodle really care if its coat looks too fluffy?You could call it the love paradox.
“These dogs aren’t going to a trainer to learn how to walk on a leash,” she says. “They’re going because they’re self-harming or standing in a corner staring at the wall, air-snapping, all sorts of odd behaviours. The statistics suggest 50-60 per cent of owners say their dog has separation anxiety. That’s not normal behaviour. It’s a pathology. And that’s a crazy number. Veterinary surveys suggest 80 per cent of people think their dogs have problem behaviours.
Pierce says there are also many natural behaviours we never see because of the way we breed dogs – for example, the nurturing role male dogs play in raising litters. All in all, it brought home to her just how circumscribed our dogs’ lives have become, and how little we understand the canine mind. Without meaning to do wrong, we’ve become both their protectors and their kindly jailers. “Dogs don’t have any other life outside what they’re given,” says Pierce. “It’s a sort of ‘intensive captivity’ where often their only friend is their human. We’ve got a whole social network. We go out of the house when we want. Dogs are often denied that.”
Some breeds now have heads so large their mothers are forced to give birth by caesarean. Alsatians, with their sloping backs, can be left unable to stand. Dachshunds can suffer disc problems because of their elongated bodies on short legs. The list of cultivated deformities in “purebreds” goes on. She’s been reading some of the deep thinkers on the subject, such as feminist professor Donna Haraway, who believes human and dog evolution are linked: dogs “become with us”. Or American author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who has devoted decades to observing the hidden lives of dogs, hoping to get a window into the canine mind. She moved to the country, so her dogs could roam the woods and live doggier lives.
It reminds me of another friend’s confession that her small dog sleeps on the pillow with her every night, wedged between her and her husband. Leahy also sleeps with Bear, although he’s on the outside of the blankets.
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