How Pets Edged Out Our Friends
no seriously, think about it for a minute...
One of the more successful premium pet foods in America - Freshpet - has finally unleashed major national advertising that surfaces what we ALL know to be true…
Never. Make. Fun. Of. Your. Friend’s. Pet. Never.
And the following chapter in my new book explains why this is so creepily funny to us in the States… it’s all about the power of touch…which Americans no longer get much from humans (i.e. from those they aren’t in the early months of dating).
Chapter Twenty-Six
HOW PETS EDGED OUT OUR FRIENDS
Something else happened during the same historical period that older Americans learned to transform their friends primarily into sources of “catch-up” entertainment more than everyday solace and comfort.
We became obsessed with our pets.
We turned them into pseudo-children. Sometimes, our pets became the children that nature and circumstance would not let us have.
In 2022, Americans spent $12.6 billion on retail dog food for roughly 65 million dogs.1 That’s a crude average of $193 annually per dog (across all dog sizes). That is maybe six to seven large bags of mainstream branded food per doggie. However, if you’re more affluent, you most likely have two or more dogs, and you may even buy natural, grain-free dog food for them. If so, you will spend more like $600–700 per year for your dog food. The premiumization of American pet food matches the premiumization of human food closely because we treat them increasingly like family members.
In America, we didn’t always fetishize our pets as fictive children. My paternal grandmother (who made excellent fudge) was “attacked” by the family boxer in the 1960s while standing in her front yard. After some lousy surgery, her right knee never bent fully again. Her husband quickly exterminated the family dog with the family gun on the family property. This was rural New Hampshire in another era. You did not necessarily take your problem animal to a vet’s office for proper disposal. By the 1970s in America, millions of stray dogs and cats were roaming the streets due to the mash-up of unmitigated animal breeding, a lack of animal control departments, and a lack of regulations around neutering or spaying. People used to open their front doors and let unwanted pets run off (!).
In the 1960s, we did not invest much in our pets other than food and some shots at the vet. Pets did not get health insurance. They did not receive costumes or hiking booties. They did not get dental care or cancer treatment. They did not receive anxiety chews or oral hygiene “bones.” They did not go to doggie hotels or spas. And they did not come to our coworking offices.
As pets slowly became more childlike in our eyes, we started to spoil them like little kids, including buying them human-grade food, even if we can barely afford it. But not all Americans.
Pet ownership in America correlates loosely to household income.2 Poor families generally do not have pets; there is no way to spare the extra cash to support their food intake. Recent research has shown that the population of pets has grown steadily in the United States since the 1980s, but the percent of homes with pets has not really changed much.3 The pet population has grown twice as fast as the human population despite better animal control and neuter-spay incentives from county governments.
In other words, our love affair with pets has led to a de facto increase in the mammal population of pet-owning homes. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as a demand increase. And this happened during the same period as wealth inequality grew a lot and our intimate social networks contracted (at least among older, primarily white Americans).
The decline in family-based socialization, the reduction in time spent socializing in general with anyone, plus the small household size of the average American created an emotional hunger by the turn of the twenty-first century that pets excel at filling.
One group of emotionally needy pet owners, those who tend to live alone as singles, are the ones who truly pamper their pets the most. Their pet becomes a mix of child and partner. They even engage in permissive parenting, which drives all their guests mad. Half of these pet owners will even leave the TV on for their pets when they leave home.4 Again, if the TV is a companion surrogate for adults, then it makes sense for us to project this behavior onto our pets if we truly see them as household members.
Pet Affection and Bonding—We Bred This Possibility into Them
The vast majority of American pet breeds in homes today appeared only in the nineteenth century after aggressive, highly intentional breeding efforts aimed only at aesthetic variation.
Due to intense mixing and interbreeding, dog breeds have long since ceased to predict behavior. Even purebred dogs fail to show predictable behavior differences according to the most extensive genetic and behavioral database ever assembled.5
As an entire subspecies, human-bred dogs share interactional traits that matter for our understanding of their seduction of American humans. They are almost all trainable by humans, and most dogs want to interact with humans, not just for food. This prosocial docility appeared centuries ago when aristocrats first bred dogs for estate-level functions (hunting, herding, etc.). We also bred horses similarly so we could control them intensely for our purposes.
But no other livestock species behaves this way. We bred cows, goats, sheep, and pigs to provide us with food and to be minimally containable in herds. Pigs are the most docile of our livestock species, but they lack one trait we consider essential among pets: they can’t stand to be picked up and cuddled like a human infant.6
And that, I suspect, may be the critical thing dogs and cats have on us: they will let us treat them like human babies.
And, as such, they become perpetual objects of parent-child soothing, touching, and relaxation. Especially for the childless or lonely empty nester. And pets don’t wake up one morning and ask for a car! Or a down payment!
Pets are a major source of emotional comfort and solace in American middle-class life because, like a baby, they require no complicated filtering of your emotions at all. We can be unguarded. They won’t talk back. Ever. They don’t expect much from us and are super easy to please.
And pets are much more independent than human babies. You can ignore them for hours if you want. Well, until they start chewing all your throw pillows or scratching up your drywall.
Dogs Are Master Relationship Builders
I can’t prove this, but it does seem that dogs, especially, are vastly superior at nurturing and working at relationships with humans. Better than a lot of American humans. They simply need our relationship more than we ultimately need them. I’m pretty sure that dogs understand that we can get rid of them at any moment. Deep down.
What else explains this:
Dogs provide us with unconditional love and companionship. They’re at our sides when we’re sick, and they always seem to know when we need a little extra affection. They love us without judgment, even when we are ignoring them or not feeding them a second dinner.7
Dogs are also totally reliable and sensorily fixated on us. Your dog is always there. When it’s awake, it’s always tracking who is in the room and where people are in the house. Neither your children, spouse, nor friends can claim that kind of availability. They have much greater privacy needs. I don’t think your dog or cat needs any privacy at all.
Greater physical availability and a lack of need for privacy combine to allow pets to shine in an individualistic society. Our individual schedules and notions of personal space make humans a relatively less reliable source of physical touching and soothing. Your dog will put up with a lot of personal space invasion to meet your daily need for touch.
Here’s a description of what happens with my beagle almost every night in my home. This should be very familiar to many of you.
At bedtime, I drag Mickey over to cuddle on my bed. He does not like this. Not when he’s curled up elsewhere already and ready to snore. Usually, he reminds me of this by uttering a soft groan (of irritation) as I drag him over. He endures the rough belly rub and ear-tickling that only a human hand can deliver and waits for my hand to go limp, so he can stand up, shake it off, and walk back to his “spot,” where he lies down exactly where he had been before being so rudely interrupted.
During this “annoying” interruption, he doesn’t bark, growl, bite, or try to force himself out of my grip. Why?
Because he tolerates his owner’s need for cuddle love and he also knows I’m dominant in the relationship. And he indeed sees the bigger picture.
The good food. The excellent furniture. The nice people. And the “magic fingers.”
The what? The magic fingers. Human hands, people. Come on. Very few animals on Earth have ten super flexible fingers on two, count ’em, two huge paws. These magic fingers do things no dog could ever do for another dog. Not even your canine buddy’s most fabulous ear lick can compare to the magic fingers.
We bred domestic dog breeds to bond intensely with us. Experts call it docility. The magic fingers were a silent but critical part of the process—docility in exchange for access to those fingers. Anyone who gets massages weekly knows what I’m talking about. It’s tough to give up weekly massage. Very.
Yes, theoretically, our spouses signed up to provide physical touch to us, but this is where cultural habits can get in the way. It is no secret that most Caucasian Americans come from ethnic worlds where physical touch is just not super common outside of sexual activity and the baby/toddler years. This is even more true if your partner is on the autism spectrum or . . . if both partners are on the spectrum.
Older Americans, especially, come from these low-touch cultural worlds and see it as totally normal. But that is not true for younger Americans, who tend now to come from cultures that celebrate same sex friendly touch much more (e.g., Puerto Rico, Brazil, Mexico, India, etc.).8
By getting our tactile needs satisfied more from our pets rather than from our sexual partners and close friends, we distract ourselves even further from human bonding and community. We become more self-sufficient individualists, pursuing our “personal schedules” independently. Interesting. Getting our touch fix from nonhuman animals who have no privacy guardrails (other than the rear door).
Pets + Video = Who Needs Friends?
Have you ever noticed that your pet seems to enjoy TV time? As in . . . really seems to enjoy it? You turn on the TV, sit down or lie down, and within two to three minutes your pet is next to you. Just chillin’. We know pets are not watching the video the way we are. Their brains cannot convert 2D imagery into 3D brain images like ours can. They can follow the audio well, though. They can hear doorbells or dogs barking in our movies and TV shows. But that’s not why they’re sitting near us during TV time.
As with on-demand video everywhere all at once, pets allow us to escape daily stress, relax, and remove basic emotional comfort requirements from our human social network. It’s hard to believe this doesn’t minimize our need for friends to play a similar role. I know it minimizes the daily need for spouses to give us physical comfort. Pets are helping keep the peace, folks. But pets are also enabling our continued physical alienation from each other at the same time.
The tragic COVID-19 pandemic created an eerie laboratory in which to understand how strongly we see pets as sources of emotional solace, tactile comfort, and unconditional love. Lockdowns and pre-vaccine isolation from family created enormous waves of loneliness in America for up to a year or more.
There was also a 2020 run on pets once it became clear that lockdowns would last for months. We couldn’t see our friends or extended family for up to a year or more in some cases. Physical touch vanished from the lives of people living alone. So, many of us now needed cute, furry mammals to process our roller coaster of daily emotions. Over twenty-three million homes adopted a pet.9
Pets fit in perfectly as agents of calm and soothing, weakening our need for face time with friends, spouses, and children. In fact, your pet is far more reliable than the average close friend. The latter has “a life” and “a schedule” and “things to do.” So annoying.
Your pet is like a high school boyfriend. It has nothing it needs to be doing other than hanging out with adorable you. Certainly not homework. It is simple-minded. It is really easy to hang out with. And it also smells and does gross things.
If there’s one thing you’re picking up on in this book it’s that an individualistic society actually goads us to do whatever is most easy, until we cross a social line. Until society pushes back.
But ours rarely ever does.
If you have not heard of my book…here’s the final marketing trailer!!
Order HERE while the feeling is hot! And please send the Amazon link to those nonfiction buffs who love social history…
PS- Let me know your favorite line from this chapter in the comments!
IRI/Circana, past 52-week retail sales US Multi-Outlet, week ending August 7, 2020, cited in American Pet Products Association, “Pet Industry Market Size, Trends & Ownership Statistics,” accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp
American Veterinary Medical Association, 2018 and 2022 Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook, p.11.
According to the American Pet Products Association, “the number of dogs and cats in the United States increased by about 32 percent between 2000 and 2017. At the same time, the human population grew only 15 percent.” Source: American Pet Products Association, Pet Industry Market Size.
American Veterinary Medical Association, 2018 and 2022 Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook, p. 14.
Kathleen Morrill et al., “Ancestry-Inclusive Dog Genomics Challenges Popular Breed Stereotypes,” Science 376, no. 6592 (April 29, 2022), accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126 /science .abk0639?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D8464249173908823109404934799 1384876828%7CMCORGID%3D242B6472541199F70A4C98A6%25 40AdobeOrg%7CTS%3D1651162390&_ga=2.218466969.1066386900 .1651162373-689641651.1609118629.
Yes, certain pig breeds can be trained to tolerate doglike pet affection, but it’s a process. And not all owners of pet pigs bother to get them to tolerate more than a quick pet. Source: American Mini Pig Association, “Socializing Mini Pigs,” no date, accessed August 30, 2023, https://americanminipigassociation.com/owners/helpful-owner-articles /socializing-mini-pigs/#:~:text=Pigs%20do%20not%20like%20to%20 be%20grabbed%20at%20or%20held,natural%20instinct%20is%20to%20 run.
Becca Risa Luna, “9 Reasons Dogs Make the Very Best Friends, the End,” The Dog People powered by rover.com, no date, accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.rover.com/blog/reasons-dogs 392 Our Worst Strength-make-best-friends/#:~:text=Dogs%20provide%20us%20with%20 unconditional,feeding%20them%20a%20second%20dinner
S. M. Jourard, “An Exploratory Study of Body-Accessibility,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 5, no. 3 (1966): 221–31, accessed August 30, 2023, doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1966.tb00978.x. PMID: 5975653.
Jacob Bogage, “Americans Adopted Millions of Dogs During the Pandemic. Now What Do We Do with Them?” Washington Post, January 7, 2022, accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com /business/2022/01/07/covid-dogs-return-to-work/.
I currently have six dog, just lost my heart dog. My life revolves around them. I cook for them, developed individual herbal remedies for them. I can go weeks or months without seeing my human friends. I leave the house to go to thr market and miss them. They are my pack.
James, I observed this a while back! It's true about PETS - and that people don't touch each other much anymore. Touching each other in a friendly way here is actually considered weird. It's definitely a PROBLEM!!!!