The Love-Hate Relationship goes to the dogs … and cats

Saturday, 13 April 2024

Pets are good for your health, offer unconditional love and are part of the family. They are also crushingly expensive, make climate change worse and leave hair everywhere. Dog person CARLY GOOCH and person person MICHAEL WRIGHT fight over the chew toy…

Puppy love: Carly Gooch

There are two types of people in this world: People who go, “Ooooh big stretch” when a pooch does a downward dog; and sociopaths.

Those are not my words, it’s just one of the plethora of memes I can relate to being an animal lover, dog enthusiast and all round pet passionista (I made that last term up but I think you get the gist).

My phone is full of photos of my mini schnauzer, Oscar (as in ‘the Grouch’), I find (empty) poo bags in my jacket pockets and, despite having no rug rats in the house, the floor is still littered with soft toys.

Do I love having a pet? Absolutely.

Pets make your house a home, much more than plants or a comfy couch.

Owning an animal - do goldfish count? - has multiple benefits, according to research, including lowering blood pressure, giving us companionship, improving mental health, and encouraging us to get outside - and even spark up conversations with strangers.

When we think of pets, our minds go instantly to cats and dogs, but I know plenty of people are asking their feathered friend, “Who’s a pretty boy then?”, feeding carrots to their bunnies and taking a lazy lizard for an outing on their shoulder, that (or is it “who”?) seems to satisfy the need for unconditional love outside human affection.

I’m still unsure where fish swim in the scheme of things, seeing as they’re relegated to a tank of water, but I’m sure they’re a source of entertainment.

And that’s the thing - every day Oscar makes me smile at his antics. I look forward to seeing his face when I return from work, and he never lets me down. He’s leaping off the floor to greet me as I open the door as if it’s been weeks since he last saw me, then seconds later he brings me one of his toys in an invitation to play.

For hundreds of years our domesticated pets were treated literally like animals. But, having grown up with dogs, and now having my own, they really are sentient beings, capable of feeling. They have managed to assimilate into our lives, able to understand more than 100 words and signals. How many of us can speak “bark”?

I consider Oscar a friend - we hang out together, my husband and I have family outings with him including walks and trips away, and sometimes I even forget he’s not human, like when I’m on the bus after work and for a nanosecond I consider messaging him to say “I’m on my way home” - but he has no opposing thumbs and he’s too young for Facebook.

If only I could teach him to play Uno or Monopoly with me, but again the lack of fingers is probably the only thing holding him back.

As the late American author Agnes Slight Turnbull once said, “Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really”.

Dog’s breakfast: Michael Wright

Let’s be clear: hating pets is not the same as hating animals. Except for the obviously terrible ones like rats, cats and hoggets that destroy electric fences, I like them. They are, by most measures, better, happier, less complicated creatures than us. So it’s ironic we insist on keeping them captive in order to be better, happier and less complicated ourselves.

I think that imbalance is my problem: the animals didn’t sign up for this. Pets have no idea they are pets. They just are. When you see dogs sniffing each other’s crotches at the park, they’re doing exactly what they’d be doing if humans weren’t there. In fact, save for a bit of food provision, we could just leave them to it.

But we don’t. Boy, do we not leave them to it. We have built billion-dollar markets, vast swathes of the culture and in many cases our entire personalities around the recreational keeping of animals. In the process, we lost all sense of reason about whether any of it is a good idea.

I grew up on a farm, which I know is animal hostage-taking on an industrial scale, but at least no-one’s kidding themselves about what’s what. I always wanted a pet dog, but Dad said no because a house dog would be targeted by the working dogs.

Now that I think about it, the pet would have been the envious one. Farm dogs get to do exactly what they want pretty much all the time. Also, they have space. Any time I see a collie in town, on a leash, kilometres from the nearest sheep, a little part of me dies.

Cat incarceration is even less defensible. Businessman Gareth Morgan’s foray into politics on a controversial ‘death to all of them’ platform might have been ill-advised, but he had a point. Cats are predators, as evidenced by our terrifyingly large feral population, but forget about that. It’s Morgan who should be taken out and shot because WE LIKE CATS. Case closed.

Then there are the photos. And the stories. Dear God, the stories. The only thing more boring than other people’s kids is other people’s pets. This can be overcome - E.B. White wrote marvellously about the demise of his beloved scottish terrier - but unless you too are one of the great prose stylists of the last century, I don’t care what your dog did.

In all of these things - killer cats, perma-tethered dogs, interminable anecdotes - imbalance. We like the upside, so disregard the opposite. I get it. The most effective remedy for a bad day is seeing a dog with its head out the window of a moving vehicle.

But making you happy is not the same as making them happy. Remember that the next time you feel the urge to list your cat’s personality traits or your dog’s 10 favourite desserts. We might think they are part of our world, but they think that way too.