Behind the desire to treat animals as if they were people lies a wish to treat people as if they were animals.
Juan Manuel de Prada
Is anybody else as freaked by “furry babies” and “pet parents” as I am? Besides Juan Manuel de Prada, that is.
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Clarissa's Blog 
“Is anybody else as freaked by “furry babies” and “pet parents” as I am?”
Oh heck yeah. That is incredibly creepy and it makes me profoundly sad to hear people talk about their “grand-dogs”– it’s trying to put a shine on the fact that your kids will never reproduce, and you will never have grandkids. And hey, maybe your kids are the sort who really, really shouldn’t be parents, and so this is a good thing. But… still profoundly sad. Why are we celebrating this like it’s normal?
I keep expecting the next development to be bumper stickers normalizing “fur-girlfriends” and “fur-boyfriends”.
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…and I say this as someone who grew up with a dog that our whole family was ridiculously, stupidly fond of. She was THE BEST dog. But, you know, she was THE DOG. That was her role in the family. No confusion there.
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“a dog that our whole family was ridiculously, stupidly fond of”
My family also had dogs that we treated as quasi family members but we never thought of them as…. human. That wouldn’t be good for us or them.
The whole ‘fur baby’ phenomenon is just icky (and I say this as someone who would kind of like having a dog but living in a city apartment and travelling sometimes… not the greatest combination.
The whole point of dogs is that they’re not people…. they can be great company if you can meet them on their terms (some study years ago claimed people with pets lived longer) but…. they’re not your kids.
I don’t get cats as much but again, they can be fun to be around (I used to occasionally cat sit for a friend when they went on trips) but they’re not kids.
One of the odd things about the modern world is how disruptive simple statements of reality seem to be….
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The one that gets me the most is that I cannot go shopping anymore without encountering dogs in strollers– or worse, a dog in a shopping cart (people put food in there!), inside stores clearly marked “no dogs except for service dogs”. I had never seen that more than… 3 years ago?
The image that projects is not at all helped by the part where the local vagrants also find that baby strollers are the ideal way to cart their dogs around with them (portable shade, hot sidewalks). Caution: sanity questionable. I feel like this is one of those all-the-adults-have-left-the-building situations.
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(I’m a lot less keen on letting my preschooler ride in the cart, after seeing dogs rubbing their arses there– do I really want to worry about pinworms?)
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They bring these beasts to the beach where clear “no dogs” signs are displayed. They think it’s ok because their dog is “friendly”. Fact is, it still urinates on sand where people go barefoot and children play.
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“no dogs except for service dogs”
an under-recognized part of the ADA was making it a crime to question the status of service dogs (I can sort of see the point).
But eventually this led a subset of crazy anti-social people to buy ‘service animal’ signs so they could bring their pet dogs onto planes or into other places.
I imagine that eventually the process led to most places abandoning any kind of enforcement.
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That’s really unfortunate, and I would love to see that amended.
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Yes. They tell you they “love animals” and you don’t. I tell them I love animals in nature and admire them from afar. Dogs are man-made mutants and other animals are intensively farmed and killed for their food, so you don’t love “animals” because you love to own a dog. I blame Disney for this goofy anthropomorphism. I am also outraged by the amount of money, time, love, parental energy that families spend on these abominations and not on piano lessons, extra tuition, visits to museums, opera, hiking, cooking from scratch, etc. There are 4.5 million dog attacks a year in US only, nearly one million requiring medical intervention and a few resulting in death (and many mutilations). If a product caused only a fraction of this damage, it would be an uproar, but dogs are sacrosanct. Both the state and big business have a vested interest. Dog lovers are not going to start a revolution, or go to the doctor too often or go into residential care (can’t leave the dog). They don’t read very much or meet with other people outside their doggy circle. Apart from the straight costs, the opportunity costs of owning such a beast are huge.
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The world has too many busybody revolutionaries, anyway — and as a retired doctor who wasn’t paid by individual patient visits, unnecessary redundant patient appointments were annoying.
I like big friendly dogs as long as they belong to other people, but they’re too high-maintenance for me. My preferred pets are snakes or cats.
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….obviously, as a doctor you are not bothered by 4.5 million dog attacks per year in US only (out of which nearly one million require medical intervention, some of them being serious injuries and mutilations). More grist to the mill, I suppose…..
https://www.sneedmitchell.com/post/dog-bite-facts-statistics
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So out of 90 million loving companion dogs in the USA, some 4.5 million poorly trained or unduly provoked canines — a mere 0.5 % of the total — end up biting someone. That’s a VERY small percentage of bad dogs, for which the OWNERS should be held accountable, rather than the dog with an I.Q. of about 12 whose unacceptable behavior is clearly the fault of improper training by its human owners.
When I was a practicing physician, I never treated a single bite injury from a dog, although scores of my patients had pet dogs that they considered family. In the 26 years since I’ve been retired, many of my neighbors here in Arizona have big friendly dogs that like to come up to me and sniff me while they wag their tails, and none of them have ever been the least bit threating.
When the poorly trained 0.5 % (like apparently President Biden’s two dogs at the White House) become a danger, they should be dealt with immediately: removed from the environment where they are a threat, retained if possible, and only as a last resort euthanized.
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” a VERY small percentage of bad dogs”
Breed of dog matters…. a lot. A very high percentage of serious attacks are from a few breeds, like pit bulls which have become far too popular…. it’s a niche breed that should only be kept under very strictly defined conditions by licensed people who know what they’re doing.
“a mere 0.5 % of the total — end up biting someone”
If only people bit each other at such low rates….
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The usual (and very predictable) comparison between dogs and people from a dog lover. We are the people, we would not exist without people and neither would dogs. We need people, we don’t need dogs (other than as objects of gratification, which is not a real need, plus the odd sniffer dog). It’s not just the attacks, it’s not being able to enjoy a picnic or a ball game in the park or nature because dog lovers use public recreational spaces as their dog’s toilet or exercise yard. It’s the barking and the stinking, the disgusting slobering mutt that some karen brings into restaurants because she can’t bear to be without it for a couple of hours. It’s the water polution (unlike human waste which goes into treatment plants, dog waste goes into waters or – if picked up, in land fills), it’s the bees that are disappearing https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/17/pet-flea-treatments-poisoning-rivers-across-england-scientists-find
waters being polluted: https://mcwec.org/2022/08/the-problem-with-dog-waste/
https://phys.org/news/2009-11-dogs-larger-carbon-footprint-suv.html
90 million dogs are an awful lot of dogs and 4.5 million dog attack is actually 5% and not 0.5% which does not matter to me because I believe a child’s little finger is worth more than all the mutts in the world.
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It’s not that the breed is popular, it’s that it’s available. Because the arseholes who breed them for fighting have no qualms whatsoever about dropping the “fails” off on the roadside, where mushy-hearted dog-rescue people go “Oh! The Poor Puppies!” (I know, my sister is one of them), and take them home, feed them, and then try to find good homes for them. That is one case where we would seriously be better off re-discovering the art of putting them in a bag and throwing them in the river. At one point my sister had eight dogs so antisocial they could not be re-homed, she couldn’t bear the thought of euthanizing them, and we were all terrified that some Jehovah’s Witness was gonna try knocking on her door (inside the gate) and get eaten (though they did take a chunk out of some meth-head who had the wrong address one night– we don’t feel bad about that). Down to just two now. One of them still capable of mauling somebody on a whim. Dumb and aggressive.
Alongside this, those same dog breeders will use any fluffy Fido they can find to train their pups to attack other dogs. Which is why “free puppies” ads are mostly gone from classified ads now. The combination means that these days, when your regular working-class family goes looking for a puppy for their kids, for a pet… what’s available that doesn’t cost $$ is… fighting dog rejects. When I was a kid and Dad decided we needed a dog, we called the first “free puppies” ad in the paper, went over and picked one out of the litter, and never looked back. That dog’s mother was an AKC-registered standard poodle. Sire was “about the size of the hole in the fence”, and the dog looked like a scrappy terrier of some sort. Kind of Toto-ish. Owners were not thrilled, but we got a dog that was an absolutely fantastic family pet. That is just not a thing that happens anymore. Scrappy genial neighborhood mutt things have been entirely displaced by scrappy pittbull mutt things.
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“arseholes who breed them for fighting ”
yeah I’d like to put every single person involved in dog fights put in jail with the key locked well away…
The thing with pitbulls, I understand, is that many of them are sweet and loving… until something sets off the ‘fight! get ‘im!’ impulse. It’s look idiots that try to make pets out of wild animals… it works fine…. until it doesn’t…. usually catastrophically.
I’m completely okay with strict licensing laws for some breeds combined with stiff legal punishments for those that violate them.
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…and those dogs have a legit purpose as working dogs. Friend of the family had a pair of them who guarded a junkyard, and had racked up more arrests in their career than most policemen: He also never let those dogs around kids or other animals, and kept them in a very secure kennel during their non-working hours. They weren’t pets, they weren’t safe, and everybody knew it.
People these days engage in a lot of magical thinking when it comes to dogs, and it is dangerous. Some weird savior-complex BS mixed in with a total denial of reality.
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“Dogs for security and protection” another goofy myth. If anybody wants to rob you or harm you in any way, they will just shoot/stab/poison your mutt. Not difficult. An electronic alarm system could be far more useful and poses no risk for the innocent, does not bark for no reason and creates no mess.
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“another goofy myth”
Depends on where you live and what your budget is. Barking dogs are one of the most effective deterrents to people even attempting to enter your home illicitly.
My sister, as mentioned, has dangerous dogs. They have been essential, given the neighborhoods she’s lived in. The guy they took a chunk out of: he was high on meth, mistook her house for the address of someone he felt owed him money, and tried to force his way in through the front door. The dogs objected. He left in a very big hurry, and the only evidence he’d been there was the bloody scrap of jeans retrieved from the dog. Think the dog may have gotten a contact high from the experience, because she was very interested in all the passing addicts (yeah, that kind of neighborhood) after that. Like, would sniff and whine through the fence when they came in range. Would have liked another taste. On a completely different occasion, a neighbor held her at gunpoint over the fence because he was drunk. Ended without incident, because she was able to point out to the fellow, calmly, that if he shot her he wouldn’t be leaving alive because there were already two neighbors taking aim at him, waiting for his move. For over a year, she had to abide a retarded man living in the place behind hers, who’d sit just his side of the fence and masturbate loudly whenever she was in her backyard.
Does this sort of thing happen to you in your neighborhood? If they did, would you feel that your electronic security system was adequate protection?
It feels great to be judgmental and superior about things like security dogs and personal firearms if you’re wealthy enough to live in an OK neighborhood and have a good electronic security system installed. You feel safe. That general sense of having enough security is not applicable to everyone. Even a good electronic system will not stop the meth-head from trying to come in your front door. It only deters rational intruders. Dogs are quite good at handling the irrational ones, and overall far less lethal than shooting.
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4.5 million is 5% of 90 million, not 0.5%. I hope you did not make similar errors when prescribing medication to your patients. “Loving companions”? Love, like friendship, is a free choice between those who are capable of making that choice. A man-made beast, which you have to imprison to prevent it from running away and castrate it so that it cannot seek to mate with its own species, a poor animal that you have to drag about on a leash to urinate and defecate in places that do not belong to you, is not everyone’s idea of a “loving companion”. I know it licks your face (dog “kisses”) but it will also lick anything on the pavement with just as much “love”.
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I think the biggest calculation error here is assuming that all the dogs that attack people are A) Attacking innocent victims, and B) actually belong to someone.
One of the sad facts of modern “furbaby” mentality is that we have abandoned the “shoot to kill” default, when confronted with a strange dog that doesn’t seem friendly. Now we gotta worry that it’s somebody’s beloved pet. In my state, at least, if it’s on your property, and it’s threatening you, your kids, or your pets and livestock, you are legally authorized to kill it. If more people followed through on this, more people would take leash/fence laws seriously, and we’d have fewer attacks.
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Hear, hear! We have neighbors who often let their very large dog escape and run across everybody else’s backyards. This is an aggressive animal that I once saw attacking a small, peaceful puppy of other neighbors.
She runs around wild for a while, after which the whole family of the owners starts trampling en masse through everybody’s backyard, looking for her and making a huge ruckus. They’ve been doing it for years. It’s annoying, especially because after a dozen times of doing it, you’ve got to start figuring out a way to stop it. But these owners don’t learn.
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When I was a kid, those dogs got poisoned, everybody knew which crabby neighbor did it, and nobody complained.
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We’ve never owned a dog, but we used to have multiple neighbors who allowed their dogs to roam freely (which is totally illegal) and for some reason many of their dogs chose our back yard as their public restroom. Every spring when the snow melted I’d find our back yard covered with piles of dog crap.
Thank heaven, those people are gone now. All of our current dog-owning neighbors are responsible and law abiding.
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When I was a kid, it was still just generally accepted that there were “neighborhood dogs” that roamed more or less freely, and everybody tolerated them as long as they didn’t cause property damage, or bite children or animals. When, occasionally, they did… they’d disappear suddenly and without explanation (probably the owners drove 50 miles and dumped them– I am not advocating this, just that’s probably what happened), or we’d hear rumors that the scary witch down in the corner house had fed it rat poison, or animal control would get involved and the chastised owners would fix their fence and things would be quiet for a while (this was the least popular option, as it meant all the other dogs had to be kept in for a while also). I particularly remember one cocker spaniel who repeatedly showed up in our front yard, dragging a leash. Sweet dog. We finally figured out where it lived and thereafter would pick up the leash, walk it home, knock on the door, and return it to its embarrassed elderly owner.
Which was far from perfect, but there were some upsides to the arrangement: all the kids knew how to conduct themselves safely around dogs, the dogs knew how to conduct themselves around kids, and vicious and unpredictable dogs were eliminated quickly.
These days, most people scrupulously obey leash and fence laws– which is good, I think– but combined with the part where they’re being used as child-substitutes, and actual kids don’t play outside anymore anyway, the net result is a huge population of domestic pets who haven’t been properly socialized to be safe around kids– or were never the right temperament to become socialized but they’re part of the family and we wouldn’t dream of having them put down just because of a widdle naughty behavior… these animals, when they do get loose, they are far more likely to be dangerous, and the neighborhood kids are far more likely to react (like, run screaming) in a way that gets them hurt.
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