WHY JEWS HATE DOGS
WHEN I heard that the Queen treats her dogs as if they were themselves royalty, it made me ponder on this strange — to me — love the British have for their pets. It has often puzzled me since I grew up in a pet-free household and no one in our wider family had a pet. So I wrote a short blog about it for the Guardian recently saying I just don’t get this pet love.
I knew it might cause bit of a stir as some people are so devoted to their pets they regard them as equal members of their family. What shocked me was the massive reaction it got.
The piece had a quarter of a million hits, was shared nearly 15,000 times and garnered over 3,000 comments — many so extremely hostile I had to stop reading them. I was pitied, pilloried and accused of producing “clickbait” — ie writing just for a reaction. This wasn’t the case.
I genuinely don’t get pet love and wondered why that might be. I said nothing in the piece about how other people’s pets can be a real nuisance — dogs barking at all hours, cats treating your garden as their toilet. Dogs chasing you in the park or snapping viciously at you.
Yet, despite what I thought was a fairly well-tempered article, it hit a raw nerve. And not just here — an Australian TV company went to very great lengths to interview me live on air. Turns out Australians — who I’ve always thought were far less sentimental about animals than Brits — are also devoted pet lovers.
Then the penny dropped. Jews don’t tend to keep pets. I know Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg at the New North London Synagogue has a dog and pets are increasingly popular among some Jews, especially in America where the “bark mitzvah” and “cat mitzvahs” indicate Jews, too, can spoil their pets.
But, when I was growing up, no Jews at our shul or beyond kept pets.
So I wonder if that’s the reason it feels so strange to me. Is it a Jewish thing to feel antipathy towards the idea of keeping animals as companions? Perhaps it’s something hard-wired into us going back through our long history of persecution and fleeing. If you’ve had to be ready to run all your life you won’t have time to find a basket for Tiddles, a portable cage for Polly Parrot or a kennel for Rover.
I did some research and it turns out, as ever with Jews, it’s complicated. US online magazine Moment says the idea that Jews have a fraught relationship with animals, especially dogs, has circulated throughout our culture.
And literature is filled with references showing our ambivalence towards dogs.
In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock hates being thought as lowly as a dog. And one of the most offensive Yiddish sayings is: a hunt mit di
oyern — “You are a dog with ears.” Canine fear may be embedded into our collective Jewish consciousness as dogs have been used to intimidate us in pogroms. Then came the Nazi obsession with dogs and their use in torture. Hitler was, of course, famously a dog lover.
The contrary view of Jews and dogs comes in the Torah where they are praised for keeping silent while the Exodus took place, thus helping to facilitate our escape from slavery in Egypt.
There’s been a tendency for us to have more children than the wider population so there’s less time, energy and money to devote to a pet. I’m one of four and I’m so grateful my parents gave me two brothers and a sister rather than fewer siblings and a pet.
My father felt we had no right to own animals. A belief I share. My sibs have never had pets either. Someone reacting to my Guardian article said it was such a shame I didn’t have pets growing up.
I find this attitude troubling. It speaks of a view that wanting to keep a pet is the norm and anyone who questions this is bizarre, odd, freakish. For a while, it felt as if I was living in a one-party state. You can say you’ve no desire to have children — but don’t dare diss pets!
And yet, for all our supposed love of animals in this country, Andrew Tyler of Animal Aid recently said on Radio Two that a staggering 250,000 pets are abandoned every year, many along busy roads possibly in the hope they’ll be run over. Perhaps those pets didn’t perform the way their owners wanted them to.
Isn’t that the danger of thinking a pet is like a human? You project feelings on to them that they cannot possibly reciprocate because they’re a different species. Some say their pet is their best friend, which I find profoundly sad and nothing to celebrate. A pet can’t make you a cup of tea, talk you down from a middle-of-the-night panic attack or come and fetch you when your car, or you, breaks down.
Not getting the whole pet love thing has made me feel like an alien in my own country. At odds with what seems to be a majority view and a part of mainstream culture. At odds with permissible feelings.
However, it’s not unusual for a Jew to feel the loneliness of difference. But we keep quiet about it most of the time.
For once, I didn’t.