Why Do We Have Pets?

Source: Rami Gabriel, used with permission

I recently addressed the Department of Agriculture at a public university in Ghana. My talk was about the emotional foundations of human culture and cognition.

After fielding a particularly difficult question, “What is the relationship between psychology and soil science?” (to which I responded, “I don’t know.”), we settled into a discussion of whether the domestication of animals as pets constituted proof that animals have culture. We more or less agreed that animals do have culture, as demonstrated by the range of living arrangements to which they adapt.

This conversation interested me because the Western culture of pets is so unlike the culture of feral and farm animals, which my interlocutors were used to. I felt the need to explain the status of pets in the West, and what I came up with is that domesticated dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, etc., are often treated as some amalgamation of toy and baby in the context of a consumer society which caters to desire, expression, and identity.

The faculty and students of the department of agriculture were nonplussed. They contested the legitimacy of a pet industry that directs scarce resources to domesticate creatures for companionship rather than other cultural uses.

There are 900 million dogs and 700 million cats (both owned and feral) worldwide. According to a 2018 study, half of U.S. households own an animal, while the number of pets in China has grown to 251 million. The global pet market is worth 260 billion dollars, more than the solar and wind energy sectors combined.

While many animals are provided with the necessities of life (and more), some animals lead lives of desperate loneliness. It is impossible to quantify these groups exactly, but maybe it is worth asking why we have pets, or more specifically, whether the way humans extract comfort from animals is a legitimate use of the animal’s life.

The culture of keeping pets serves many important social and emotional functions; they are companions that sustain individual well-being. Many of us can think fondly of animals that we grew up with and love dearly. These animals, in most Western social frameworks, are basically members of the family treated with great warmth and indulgence.

Indeed, canines have been domesticated and co-habiting with humans for at least 15,000 years, the interspecies relationship evolving from care/usefulness to care/comfort. This is a symbiotic relationship: humans need companionship to deal with an increasing sense of loneliness and isolation as broader kinship structures have diminished with urbanization and animals need food and shelter.

But, as with other aspects of human’s relation to our ecological niche, animal domestication can be interpreted as an arrogant, self-serving, and problematic practice. Pets can be treated like emotional captives to their owners, who control their access to food, exercise, social encounters, and even the outdoors. The culture of domestication as pets, while often pleasant, is at some level an imposition of a culture on the animal.

As I learned in Ghana, the modes of domestication in the West are not universal. Humans have used animals to satisfy a range of needs; to name just a couple, animals help us shepherd flocks when we farm and serve as our guardians when we are exposed to the elements. Enlisting animals to serve as pets, on the other hand, fulfills our need for companionship and, in particular, non-human companionship. The emotional needs that stem from the feeling of isolation are varied since the causes of isolation include everything from shyness to shame to the desire to avoid the duplicities of human society.

From forest preserves to farming communities and animal training facilities, there is also a wide range of cultures that our animal cousins inhabit. Doris Lessing’s famous book On Cats posits two very different situations, one in South Africa when strays needed to be euthanized for the good of the region and one in the West in which the domestic cat provided a unique insight into the human condition.

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A recent book by American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals, returns to ideas put forward by Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer about animal liberation. It analyzes our responsibility to tend to the emotional lives of animals.

We have been challenged by how to interpret the consequences of humankind's cognitive and organizational superiority over other animals. In the Book of Genesis, there is a passage that seems to legitimate our relation to the earth humans are to:

Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth (Gen. 1:26).

In taking over the planet, humans have instilled an order of extraction—from ivory keys on the piano to factory farms and the thousand tools we have conjured to ease the dark, cold nights—legitimized by the fruits of culture that were the putative result.

Presently, acknowledgment of how our practices have damaged the earth’s climate constitutes a significant political force. But does this critique of extraction apply to how humans treat living, feeling creatures? In Ghana, I saw forts built for the storage of gold, metal ores, diamonds, ivory, pepper, timber, grain, and cocoa, which were repurposed for the storage and trade of human beings.

For hundreds of years, colonial Europeans used the myth of a hierarchy of humanity to legitimize the enslavement and extraction of African people. As CLR James recounts in The Black Jacobins, this subjugation of living, feeling creatures was contested in dozens of revolts across the Black Atlantic. The tragedy is that humans often display a callous lack of recognition for living, feeling creatures; this extends from our relation to animals to the shameful way groups of humans treat each other.

How often have our notions of justice been misled by the comforts of the fruits of extraction? Is the domestication of living, feeling creatures such as cats, dogs, rabbits, and others another misapplication of extraction in which the comfort of the benefits cloud our notions of justice? Maybe it is worth considering why there is such a prevalent need in Western culture to keep pets who are often treated like toys and babies.

Is this culture in which humans create domestic bonds with animals a kind of pragmatic substitute for socially interacting with other humans? I might argue that a culture of keeping pets is continuous with a colonial culture of extraction in which humans extract benefits from living creatures without regard to the feelings of the subjugated creatures.

My interlocutors in Ghana were dismissive of the pet industry in the West, which they saw as prioritizing the emotional needs of humans over the natural livelihood or alternate cultural lifeways of the animals. They felt that this culture of domestication of animals as pets seems to redirect the function of an animal’s life from its own needs and predilections to those of its keeper. It thereby restricts the animal to a somewhat artificial culture.

Additionally, viewed through the lens of altruism, the pet industry invests capital in one set of living, feeling creatures rather than another kind, the human being. In this case, maybe the proliferation and consumption of products for pets reflect an unacknowledged sense of guilt.

To better encapsulate the different needs animals serve, we might consider more thoughtfully why in the West, we so often limit animal culture to domestication as pets. What does this say about our needs and the cultural means we have developed to satisfy them? Are animal lives really ours to manage and control? For all its comforts and joys, domesticating animals as pets subjugates their needs to ours, and that is a culture we need to consider more deeply.