TOO MANY PEOPLE OWN DOGS
If you love dogs, maybe don’t get one.
By Rose Horowitch OCTOBER 22, 2023, 7:30 AM ET
Marcia Munt was 47 when she adopted her first dog. It was 2020, the height of the pandemic, and her house felt empty. Maisie was a nine-week-old bundle of cream-colored fur and lopsided ears. But Munt, a consultant in Sacramento, soon became convinced that the dog was not normal. Maisie howled at any stimulus. She paced all night and pounced on anyone who came to the house. Munt, who had only ever owned cats, couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to have a dog. “I had been the best dog mother I could be,” she told me. But she spent much of that first year in tears.
Maisie’s vet prescribed fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, but it ruined the dog’s appetite. Munt then turned to Melissa Bain, a veterinary behaviorist with a wider pharmaceutical arsenal. Maisie now takes venlafaxine, an antidepressant, and gabapentin, an anticonvulsant, with an option for the sedative clonidine in particularly fraught situations. “It’s a bit of a cocktail that is always being adjusted,” Munt said. She spends hundreds of dollars each month on Maisie’s care and considers it well worth it. Perhaps the most valuable treatment Bain offered, however, was for the human, not the dog. “Honestly, it just felt cathartic in many ways,” Munt told me. “She said, ‘It’s Maisie. It’s not you. You have done everything you need to do.’”
The rise in anxiety among American humans has been exhaustively documented. With much less fanfare, we also seem to have entered the age of the anxious canine. Last fall, a New York Times wellness column offered earnest advice on “How to Handle Your Pet’s Anxiety”; the author, reporting that veterinarians were observing an uptick in stressed-out animals, noted that two of her editors had cats on Prozac. In a 2016 study, 83 percent of veterinary general practitioners reported prescribing dogs anti-anxiety medication. (In the 1990s, some began prescribing Prozac off-label; the FDA approved a version for treating dog separation anxiety in 2007.) Although there are no comprehensive statistics on the share of dogs on prescription anxiety meds, more than half of American dog owners said that they buy “calming” products including pheromone spray and Lycra jumpsuits, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2023–24 pet-owners survey. Google searches for dog anxiety have roughly tripled over the past decade. Many of America’s 85 veterinary behaviorists are booked months in advance. The seven I spoke with said that the number of people seeking pet mental-health care has exploded in the past few years. But there is no consensus as to why.
One theory is that dogs today really are more anxious. Rather than buying from a breeder, more Americans are choosing to adopt. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, shelters are euthanizing nearly two-thirds fewer animals than they were a decade ago. Adoption saves lives, but it sometimes leaves traumatized pets with inexperienced owners. Meanwhile, we’ve also altered the way pets live. Pet dogs (and cats) used to spend more time outside; now, experts told me, they’re much more likely to stay indoors. When they do go outside, they’re kept on leashes or under supervision. As Americans have fewer kids, they’ve begun to think of their pets as children and to act as “helicopter” fur-parents, the bioethicist Jessica Pierce told me. Animals tend to live longer under these conditions, but they miss out on mental stimulation and interaction with their own species. That might make them anxious or aggressive toward people and other dogs. The pandemic dog-buying spike heightened all of these dynamics, as millions of dogs spent their first years socially distancing.
Still, the proliferation of medicated dogs might say more about their owners. Vet behaviorists are mostly clustered in liberal areas; so are human anxiety diagnoses. Amy Pike started her career practicing in rural Kentucky, where her client list was short. Now she serves pet owners in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and business is booming. In Pike’s view, that’s because her new neighbors have a healthy respect for the science around pet mental health and medication. She and other vet behaviorists believe that dogs have always been anxious, and that the welcome destigmatization of human mental-health issues has allowed us to finally recognize their suffering. But it could be that anxious adults are projecting their own issues onto their furry companions. Some dog owners have clearly begun to pathologize normal dog habits. A 2019 survey concluded that 85 percent of dogs had behavioral problems; almost half of the owners reported that their pet had anxiety. The numbers seem incredible, until you look at the list of bad behaviors. Repetitive behaviors like digging in the yard or displaying a “tennis ball fetish” qualified, as did excessive barking. What people classify as a behavioral issue, said Pierce, the bioethicist, reflects human expectations as much as a dog’s nature.
So is the dog-anxiety crisis real, or is it a product of owners’ anxiety-riddled psyches? Dogs can’t tell us how they’re feeling, so we’ll probably never know. But both explanations are depressing. Either humans are stressing dogs out so much that they truly need prescription meds, or owners are putting their dogs on unnecessary psychoactive drugs to address annoying but normal dog habits. It might be time, in other words, to reevaluate the way we approach dog ownership. Many Americans don’t have the time, energy, or green space their pets need to thrive. If the choice is to medicate our dogs or to make them, and ourselves, miserable, pet ownership starts to seem ethically murky. “Ideally, a lot fewer people would own dogs and cats,” Pierce told me.
That’s a hard message for pet lovers to hear. When I was growing up, my family had a labradoodle named Trixie. For much of her life, she was a dog-park dog, happiest when chasing tennis balls and sniffing puppy butts. But about halfway through her 15 years, she was bitten by another dog. After the incident, Trixie snarled and snapped at other dogs she met. We spent less time at the park.
My conversations with pet behaviorists made me wonder if I had failed her. It hadn’t occurred to me to slather Xanax in peanut butter and slip it into her kibble. Had I missed the signs that my dog needed treatment? I asked Bain, the veterinary behaviorist, about this. I could sense that she thought the answer was yes. But she was gentle about it. “Were you a bad owner when your dog barked at other dogs?” she asked. I began fumbling out a response, but she interrupted me. “No. No. No. You weren’t,” she said. “You didn’t know any better.”
It was kind of her to reassure me. But I was still left to wonder whether medicating dogs is in their best interest—or ours.
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I DON’T LIKE DOGS
I joined a Subreddit that shares my extremely unpopular opinion. I’m not sure it was a good idea.
By Olga Khazan
Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t like dogs. I don’t like the way they smell. I don’t like the way they jump on your dry-clean-only pants. I especially don’t like the way they “get to know you.” (I generally don’t like to be poked down there unless it’s so someone can tell me whether I have HPV.) I don’t believe animals are equal to people; I can’t believe $15,000 pet surgeries exist in a country where not every person can get health care.
I’ve long kept this feeling to myself, because in America, saying you don’t like dogs is like saying you think the Taliban has some good ideas. Recently, however, I learned about a community of people just like me: The Dogfree Subreddit. I don’t use Reddit much, but immediately, I was taken by r/Dogfree’s tagline: “We don’t like dogs.” I had never before seen this, my most taboo opinion, written out so plainly.
That first day on the site, I couldn’t stop reading posts, which are mostly news reports of dog bites, complaints about seeing dogs in public, and gripes about sidewalk poop, barking, and other dog-related externalities. One post is titled, “The fact they breathe with their mouths open and tongues hanging is enough for me to want nothing to do with them.” As I read my same unpopular views, reflected back by other people, I was overcome by the thrill of being truly known, by the unmistakable gasp of catharsis.
The Subreddit’s FAQ includes a response to a frequent assumption that, surely, our problem is with unruly dogs and their oblivious owners. “Though it might be a tough pill to swallow,” the moderators respond, “we in this sub simply don’t like dogs.”
A few bad experiences crystallized my lifelong disdain. On top of not liking dogs, I’m allergic to them. When I was 9, I had to be picked up from a friend’s slumber party after her dachshund crawled across my pillow and my eyes swelled shut. I still remember the indignity of having to call my parents, the thick stupor brought on by extra-strength Benadryl, the painful wheezing as I ran my face under the tap at 2 a.m. It was my introduction to the fact that it’s a dog’s world and I’m just living in it.
Other times, I’ve had scary run-ins with dogs that were trying to “protect” their owners. In grad school, my boyfriend’s roommate had a pit bull that would terrorize me whenever I went over while the roommate stood back and laughed. “He’s friendly!” he’d say dismissively. (The Dogfree people hate when dog owners say this.) When we first moved into our house, our neighbor’s enormous dog, apparently confusing us for intruders, bounded into our yard and ran straight at me, barking wildly. I screamed an expletive. The neighbor did nothing. This is probably why I never bothered to meet those neighbors.
None of these encounters, of course, were particularly dangerous. But they cemented an impression that dogs are at best gross, and at worst threatening. More recently, I was with a group of people that included a pediatric reconstructive plastic surgeon. She told us about her job mending the faces of kids who have been in horrible accidents, and someone asked her, “Seeing what you see in your profession, what’s one thing you would never do?” “Get a pit bull,” she said quietly.
But this kind of thing just doesn’t trouble most people. The majority of Americans own a pet, and dogs are the most popular pet choice. Americans are more attached to their dogs than they are to their cats or other animals: Most dog owners say the dog is as much a part of their family as a human family member. If forced to choose, 39 percent of Americans would rather save their closest pet from death than one human person. I may not understand this bond, but I know I can’t argue with it. All of this leads to a lot of pent-up anti-dog sentiment, which I was happy to off-gas on r/Dogfree.
At last, a place to discuss the revulsion of seeing a “dog blanketd” on someone’s couch, which you’re expected to sit on even though it’s covered in hair and god knows what else. Or your outrage over an incident in which a dog attacked a 6-year-old girl. Or the extreme strangeness of the fact that owning a dog requires you, the human, to scoop the poop of them, the animal, into little bags, which many humans then leave scattered around everywhere. When I read Dogfree, I think, I’m right to hate dogs.
According to a 2019 unscientific survey of 2,000 people who claimed to be members, Dogfree’s 56,000 Redditors are 57 percent female and mostly live in North America. They were drawn to the Subreddit because they feel socially pressured to like dogs, or don’t appreciate when people prioritize dogs over people, among other reasons. A lot of them, though, just simply have never liked dogs. Most aren’t allergic, but most are afraid of at least certain kinds of dogs. And it’s not an anti-animal Subreddit: Less than a quarter are totally pet-free and plan to remain that way; lots of members express a desire to care for a cat.
GemstoneWriter, a 19-year-old thinks dogs are loud and dirty, but she tries to think of dog owners as “lost, rather than enemies”. She doesn’t like how some people elevate dogs to nearly the status of human children. Still, she doesn’t admit to many people that she dislikes dogs, and Dogfree makes her feel less alone. When someone’s attacked by a dog, she likes how people in the Subreddit empathize with the victim instead of defending the dog or owner.
Emma Allum, a 41-year-old member in Southeast England, gets unnerved when big dogs veer toward her or stare at her. “I don’t like it when they lick me,” she told me, “and when you’re just walking along, minding your own business, and some big dog shouts in your ear from behind the garden fence.” During our Zoom call, it felt uncanny to hear this thought coming from someone else. When a dog licks me, all I can think about is how soon I can take a shower.
Allum’s fear of dogs sharpened over a series of jarring incidents, such as when one dog tried to sniff her baby son while he sat in his stroller and when another charged at her in a field. But dogs are popular in her area, so if you’re afraid of dogs, “you are made to feel like a bit of a plonker,” she said. Not so on the Subreddit. There are no plonkers there.
The Subreddit is an example of a “negativity friendship”—a community of people united by something they don’t like. (In politics, negative partisanship is a similar phenomenon.) Several studies—which remarkably did not involve me as a participant—have found that hating the same person brings people closer together than liking the same person does. We seem to appreciate the risk the other person took in revealing something so unsavory; if we share the unsavory view, all the better. In a world where pretty much everyone likes travel and hiking and coffee, your tribe comprises those who hate what you hate. “Because of the potential social repercussions and relative rarity of revealing negative attitudes, perceivers view negative attitudes as especially informative,” one such study finds.
In fact, the more I perused r/Dogfree, the more I found I disliked dogs—and the less I could see any other point of view. The forum kept reminding me of new ways dogs are disgusting. I’m not normally paranoid about dog bites, but Dogfree makes maulings seem widespread. Dog owners aren’t allowed to post in the Subreddit, so we never get a sense of, say, how owners would prefer to be told that we don’t want to pet their dog. Though I’m sure no dog lovers will be friends with me after this story anyway, it seems like simultaneously staying active in the Subreddit and remaining close with a doting dog parent would be difficult. At one point, I was apparently reading so much anti-dog propaganda that my phone’s hidden algorithms took note and TikTok served me a video about a woman whose top lip was ripped off by a pit bull. We know what you like, it seemed to say. You like to hate on dogs.
After a while, I started to question whether this was actually healthy. Some of the posts on the Subreddit seemed like they were stoking fear and rage rather than offering support. Is it really that bad to see a dog with its head sticking out of a car? Do dogs really not belong in nature? Is it truly that annoying when a dog looks at you?
The Subreddit is also an example of an echo chamber, but whether echo chambers are harmful, per se, is unclear. From studies of partisan political news, researchers have concluded that not only are very few people actually members of echo chambers; seeing mostly one-sided news doesn’t appear to radicalize people as much as we may fear. In studies of people who spent months consuming partisan news, “people’s views did not become more extreme and people did not become more hostile toward the other side,” Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor at UC Davis who has studied online polarization, told me.
The moderators of the Subreddit didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, but in a post in which they urged members not to talk with reporters, they essentially agreed with this analysis: “We’re accused on an almost-daily basis of being an ‘echo chamber,’ but we don’t find that to be an inaccurate or even unfavorable perception of us; perhaps it’s an echo chamber, but it’s the only one we have.”
Nevertheless, I started to feel like this whole thing might be a giant yucking of a yum, a slam book we were compiling on the rest of the school. The Subreddit doesn’t allow posts about animal abuse, but I was a little taken aback by the attitude of one user, who chatted me: “I fuckin hate dogs, wish they’d die out as a species, and my dream job would be head euthanizer at the pound.” Yeesh.
I wouldn’t want to own a dog myself, but I generally believe that people have a right to do what makes them happy, as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else. The dog owners who can manage that should be left in peace! I occasionally felt bad participating in the disparagement of animals that didn’t get a say in whether they became pets, are only obeying their natural instincts, and, after all, can’t even read.
Allum told me that although, on the whole, she finds the Subreddit validating, she’s careful not to get too sucked in. She skips some of the articles about dog bites, figuring they won’t do anything to help with her fear. Lots of people on the Subreddit hate dogs, but Allum doesn’t. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay, this person has said this, but I don’t actually hate dogs,’” she told me.
This is the problem we all face online: the tricky balance of joining in without losing ourselves. It’s being religious without becoming a zealot, sharing without one-upping, not letting your stated beliefs outrun your actual opinions. Life inside the echo chamber is cozy, but also cacophonous.
I still think I will visit Dogfree occasionally, and I still think it’s a good place for people to talk about their fear of dogs—a stigmatized and poorly understood phobia. I still wish I didn’t have to interact with dogs as often as I do.
But I will probably find a wider group of Subreddits to follow. After all, the site offers plenty of options. For example, I don’t like cats, either.
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WHY SO MANY MILLENNIALS ARE OBSESSED WITH DOGS.
The only thing getting me through my 30s is a cranky, agoraphobic Chihuahua named Midge.
By Amanda Mull
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have asked one question more than any other. It’s come up time and again, day and night, as frequently in my post-vaccination spring and summer as it did in the dark moments of the pandemic’s first wave: Are you my booboo?
The question is never answered by Midge, my agoraphobic Chihuahua, but the answer is obvious. She’s been my booboo since 2018, when I brought her home from a cat shelter, where she had been stashed by a Long Island dog rescue after her foster family gave her back—she didn’t like them, or anyone, and cats aren’t looking for new friends. At 12 pounds, she is twice as big as the most desirable Chihuahuas, and she has a moderately bad personality, which is maybe why the puppy mill where she spent the first year of her life decided it didn’t want any more of her robust and extremely rude babies. Now almost five years old, she has grown to tolerate me. I ask her questions she doesn’t answer—if she’s my booboo (yes), if she’s a big girl (relatively speaking), if she has a kibble tummy (a little bit).
Since last March, Midge and I have been testing the bounds of what it means to live in my very small apartment together. In many ways, she’s been a perfect pandemic pal: She hates interacting with others; she loves to sit on the couch; she long ago assessed sneezes as an existential threat. Whether she was sitting on a blanket in the kitchen while I cooked, frowning at me from a safe distance while I did yoga, or watching me do chores from beneath the leaves of her favorite enormous tropical houseplant, she bore witness to a year I spent otherwise alone. Every day, she climbed up the back of the couch to snooze atop its rear cushions, her face pointed toward mine at eye level while I worked at the kitchen table.
In a year when time felt slippery, Midge kept track of it—waking me up for breakfast, waging a nightly campaign for dinner, huffing and snorting and pacing until I got up from work to play fetch with her stuffed crocodile for a few minutes. Many days, she was the only living thing I spoke to, and the only one I touched. She tolerated most of my hugs, and once, when I was in the depths of late-winter depression, she let me pick her up and hold her tiny, warm chest to my forehead for a few seconds. Her big brown eyes look dismayed and embarrassed after these displays of affection, which is usually enough to make me laugh. I tell her she’s a good girl and try not to think about how much worse the past year would have been without her.
Or, for that matter, the past three years. The 2020 pet-adoption surge was sharp: Shelters emptied and rescue groups ran out of dogs as the work-from-home set welcomed new companions for themselves and their kids. Among adults under 40, who accounted for the majority of pet adoptions, the pandemic-era spike in demand was anomalous in its intensity, not its trajectory. Millennials recently overtook Boomers as the largest pet-owning cohort of Americans; by some estimates, more than half of them have a dog. The pet-ownership rate is even higher among those with a college education and a stable income—the same people who are most likely to delay marriage, parenthood, and homeownership beyond the timelines set by previous generations. Dogs, long practical partners in rural life or playmates for affluent children, have become a life stage unto themselves.
That dogs’ roles are changing isn’t itself so surprising. Humans and canines have been molding themselves to each other’s needs for tens of thousands of years, helping ensure the mutual survival of both species. The question is why the relationship is changing so quickly right now. For America’s newest adopters, a dog can be many things: a dry run for parenthood, a way of putting down roots when traditional milestones feel out of reach, an enthusiastic housemate for people likely to spend stretches of their 20s and 30s living alone. An even more primary task, though, is helping soothe the psychic wounds of modern life.
Midge’s adoption was both planned and impulsive. In 2017, I went apartment hunting for my first place of my own in New York, looking only at buildings that allowed dogs, even though I didn’t have one. Then, I waited. How do you know if you’re ready to keep another mammal alive? I had no idea, but I found myself at a party in early 2018, in a professional rut and at the end of a relationship. A friend notorious for her flakiness showed up late, and when she arrived, she had in tow both her own happy mutt and another that she was watching for the weekend. A little bomb exploded in my head—if she could avoid killing two dogs simultaneously, surely I could manage one. I spent the next few days perusing Petfinder.com. Midge was on my lap on the B48 bus the next weekend.
I would have denied it at the time, but I got a dog because I was frustrated with everything else. The benchmarks that I was raised to believe would make me a real, respectable adult seemed foreign, even though I was 32, the same age when my mother, already a married homeowner working for the employer she’d have for the rest of her career, became pregnant with me. This particular Millennial sob story is familiar by now: Thanks to wealth inequality and wage stagnation and rising housing and child-care costs and student loans and all the rest, we’re the first generation to do worse than our parents. People like me, who grew up middle-class, don’t tend to suffer the most severe economic fallout. But the existential crisis provoked by these changes can still feel acute. All your life, you were told that if you worked to follow a particular path, you would be rewarded. Then the path was bulldozed to make room for luxury condos.
Millennials recently overtook Boomers as the largest pet-owning cohort of Americans; by some estimates, more than half of them have a dog.
When I adopted Midge, I had no clear view of a future beyond my one-bedroom apartment, let alone a future involving a family of my own, and I still don’t. As I looked around for an opening through which to push my life forward, the gap that was available to me was roughly the size of a hefty Chihuahua. Dogs are, for some of us, a perfect balm for purgatorial anxieties. If you have time and care to give, they love freely, they put you on a schedule, they direct your attention and affection and idle thoughts toward something outside yourself. The desire to turn outward and spend energy nurturing others is a mark of emotional maturity, but that nurturing needs a vessel.
People without kids adopt pets not only as a dry run for eventual children but for lots of other reasons, too, including as an outlet for caring impulses that have nothing to do with parenthood. They also lavish their dogs with privileges that, in America, have historically been reserved for other people: Dogs now sleep in the same bed as their humans at night; they have birthday parties; they go see their friends at daycare.
But for the particular rung of the American socioeconomic ladder that has pursued dog ownership most fervently in recent years—young, urban professionals, especially white ones—dogs serve yet another purpose: They’re a class marker and a way of coping with deep status anxiety. Dogs broadcast stability—Midge is not nearly as expensive as a child or a single-family home, but she is an indicator that I have mastered enough elements of my own life to introduce some joyful chaos into it.
Yet while dogs can be an effective therapy for the stresses of modern life, especially as it grows lonelier and more precarious, their friendship isn’t always available to those who could use it most. For people clawing to maintain basic stability (instead of signaling that they’ve attained a middle-class version of it), the barriers to dog ownership are larger than simply having the disposable income to feed another mouth. A lot of subsidized and low-income housing refuses pets or limits the type and number that residents can have, and homeless shelters generally require people to abandon their pets to get a place to sleep. Companionship, whether with a pet or other people, is elemental to human dignity; in America, it’s easier to come by if you have money.
According to Pat Shipman, a paleoanthropologist and the author of the forthcoming book Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs, humans and dogs have been living together for about 40,000 years, though for almost all that time, the relationship was primarily practical; we gave dogs food and heat from fire, and dogs helped us spot approaching danger and track prey.
As humans shared their hunting spoils, dogs had less need for their lupine ancestors’ brutality, and more need, evolutionarily speaking, to appeal to people. As a result, long before we started breeding them, dogs shrank, their ears flopped, their tails curled—they became cute. They also acquired eyebrow muscles that gave them a much larger range of expressions than wolves, allowing them to better communicate with humans.
In A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans, Laura Hobgood shows how, along the way, dogs became vital players in humans’ emotional lives. As smaller dogs suitable for in-home pest control (and companionship) emerge in prehistoric fossil records, their burial sites reflect a high level of care: Dogs weren’t just useful to humans; they were beloved. Still, the concept of a pet—a companion animal that plays no functional role in a household—is far more recent, dating back only about 3,000 years. The first pets tended to be tiny, manicured lapdogs, and were an extravagance of the wealthy; the ancient Pekingese breed, for example, was once legally reserved for members of the Chinese imperial court. For everybody else, the human-canine bond continued to be not only emotional but practical. (Many of the breeds now slotted into the working, sporting, hound, herding, and terrier groups at dog shows were in fact developed to perform specific tasks for agrarian families.)
Industrialization was the beginning of the end of that era for most dogs. Over time, as people left rural areas for cities, more of them began departing the home every day for work or school—and much of daily life suddenly took place where dogs weren’t allowed to go. But if dogs were with humans less, that didn’t mean that humans no longer needed their companionship—in some ways, we may have needed it more. “Having pets helps people physically and psychologically,” Shipman told me, rattling off research findings. Mental illness, incarceration, isolation, grief, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism—virtually all modern trials can be eased, in measurable ways, by the companionship of a dog.
Seen this way, it makes perfect sense that so many isolated, stressed-out people brought dogs into their life during the pandemic. Dogs pull us out into the world, make us get some sun on our face, give us an opening to chat with our neighbors. After a year when serendipitous social interaction was hard to come by, it returned to my life in the form of Cowboy, a then-14-week-old puppy who moved into an apartment on my floor in February. While waiting for his vaccinations to be complete (same, buddy), Cowboy’s owners ran him up and down the empty hall a couple of times a day to work out some of his puppy energy. That’s how I met him, and after a few encounters, he would scratch at my door every day to say hi.
At some point soon, Cowboy’s dads will go back to in-person work, and so will I. Visions have danced in my head of loading Midge into a BabyBjörn and carrying her everywhere I go, like a real asshole. Some minority of pet owners may be able to do just that, as anxious employers try to cajole people back into the office and prevent them from jumping ship with promises of pet-friendly workspaces. But many people—even many dog lovers—will likely balk at these reverse-engineered solutions. Contemporary offices are barely hospitable to humans, let alone a new population of four-legged co-workers.
What if, instead of forcing dogs to fit our modern lives, we set about making modern life more hospitable to pets? Doing so would require us to acknowledge that our connection to other living things—and to the natural world at large—isn’t a luxury, but an essential element of what makes us human. Fittingly, virtually all of the changes that would make having a pet easier would make life more humane for people too: flexible working conditions, for example, and affordable housing, and more public green space. (That the list of dog-friendly circumstances is basically identical to the things that would make it easier for more Americans to have kids isn’t a coincidence. Dogs aren’t children, of course, but their popularity among those of childbearing age is indicative of the deep emotional commitments that people rush toward when given the chance.)
I often look down at Midge—as she weaves between my feet while I cook, or when she’s sprawled in a sunny spot, tongue hanging out—and marvel at the little animal that lives in my apartment. She knows what bedtime means, and she has somehow learned to tell whether I’m opening the fridge to get a drink or to get food, even before I touch anything. She doesn’t know how she got here, or who I am, beyond the fact that I care for her, and she takes care of me.