STOP TREATING YOUR DOG LIKE A FURRY HUMAN
In the car edging ahead of me, I can see the outline of a bushyhaired human in the driver’s seat and the two pricked ears of a dog in the passenger seat. Waiting for a red light, I watch the driver turn to the dog and make a remark. I smile and turn to Bella, who is splayed across the back seat: “Isn’t that sweet?”
Dogs have personal stylists and social media accounts. They are eating vegan, and paleo, and keto, wearing smartcollars synced with our smartphones, and getting acupuncture and CBD tinctures for their aches and pains. In San Francisco and Seattle, there are now more dogs than children.
We have domesticated dogs to such a profound degree that they are no longer really dogs, but quasi-humans.
But this “humanization of dogs” narrative, however compelling, misrepresents the evolution of dog-human relationships. And it shapes (and maybe misshapes) how we understand our ethical responsibilities toward companion dogs.
Emphasizing the “humanness” of dogs may reinforce our strong obligations to treat them well, yet it raises the question of whether we are obscuring the “dogness” of our canine companions.
Roughly a billion dogs inhabit planet Earth and between 75 and 85 percent of these are “freeranging,” a category that includes feral, owned-but-free-roaming, street, village and stray dogs. While nearly all free-ranging dogs live in loose association with humans, either being fed or scavenging for garbage in or near human settlements, a relatively small percentage of the world’s dogs live as pets within human homes.
But do dogs want to be pets, and do pets want to be treated like furry humans? Could it be that dogs living in loose association with humans have more interesting lives than our intensively homed pets?
This might seem counterintuitive. Don’t pets have it easy? But what dogs may gain in these areas of care and feeding, they may pay for with sacrifices in other realms, such as the increased psychological costs of
understimulation, boredom and frustration.
Many pet dogs rely on their owners for access to food, water, social companionship and the opportunity to relieve themselves. They have no control over their environment, little opportunity to make choices and few chances to engage in natural, species specific behaviors. They cannot work to procure food and find shelter, nor can they choose mates, rear young or engage in the complex social dynamics of pack-living.
As any “responsible” dog owner knows all too well, it requires patience to create a “good” dog, because homed dogs must be painstakingly taught to constrain their natural desires, to not be
dogs: They must be trained to wear a collar and walk nicely on a leash, not to chase prey, not to roll in dead stuff or poop, not to bark at intruders wearing UPS uniforms and not to roam the neighborhood in search of a nice-smelling partner.
It is precisely these skills of selfcontrol, necessary for dogs to live successfully within human environments, that make us humans have specific ethical responsibilities to our dogs.
To understand our obligations may be, we should become fluent in “dog” by observing their interactions with other dogs and people. Dog owners can try to see their dog as an ethologist might — as an animal in her “wild” habitat — looking to understand what kinds of sensory stimuli are most salient, and what kinds of behavior a given dog is highly motivated to perform.
For example, unlike humans, who are visual creatures, dogs “see” the world through their nose. Dog noses are much more prominent than human noses, and the olfactory center of the canine brain is proportionately larger. A dog’s sense of smell is approximately 1,000 times more sensitive than ours. So we can give our dogs access to things that will smell interesting to them (like others dogs’ urine). One study of off-leash dogs found that they spent about one-third of their time sniffing, so this is a nice goal: For a 30-minute walk with a dog, give at least 10 minutes of pure sniffing time, without tugging on a leash to hurry the dog along.
Similarly, we need to check our human instincts at enforcing human standards on dogs. If you spend any time in a dog park, you will see people constantly interfering with their dog’s natural behaviors, such as breaking up a rough-and-tumble play. Sometimes our constraints are excessive, and we can safely allow our dogs to just be dogs.
Perhaps we have reached an inflection point in our collective thinking about dogs. Perhaps the extreme humanization of dogs will prod us to see that dogs are not, nor do they want to be, furry versions of us. Although dogs live in relationships with humans, they are individuals in their own drama, not just ornamentation in ours. This isn’t a shift in who dogs are or how dogs interact with us; it is simply a shift in our own perspective so that we can pay more attention to dogs
Pierce is a bioethicist and the author of 10 books. Her most recent book, co-authored with Marc Bekoff, is “Unleashing Your Dog: A Field Guide to Giving Your Canine Companion the Best Life Possible.” She wrote this for Zócalo Public Square.
Bookmark Gray Matters online. It lives in loose associations with humans.