The increasing ‘humanisation’ of our pets

Gordon Young (right) with Pip, a Jack Russell, which he bought for his brother, Thomas (left), who has schizophrenia, and their mother Eleanor

Like the rest of the Young family, Pip does not eat dog food. She may be eight months old. She may be 12in tall. She may be a wire-haired Jack Russell bitch. But she does not see the sense in it. It is not, as far as she can see, for her.

At a recent dinnertime, the Youngs were trying to change their dog’s mind. Pip’s meal of choice – boiled chicken and rice – waited on the countertop, while Eleanor Young, who is 74, pulverised some dry dog food with a few swings of a wooden meat hammer. She sprinkled this on the chicken and rice. Her sons, Thomas and Gordon, watched from a sofa. Pip sat on the floor. Gordon, who owns Pip, and whose idea it was to get the dog, then put the meal before Pip and she, with a curl of her lip, began to eat.

Silence fell. Pip ate. The Youngs watched. It is something of a nightly ritual and no one was too anxious about what would happen. Gordon, a 37-year-old architect, bought the dog in February as an object of interest for his elder brother, Thomas, who has schizophrenia, and his mother, who cares for him. The three of them live in neighbouring apartment buildings and Gordon thought that a family dog might give them a shared endeavour, and add some fun to their lives.

And earlier that evening, when Gordon arrived with Pip, that is exactly what she did. Released from her lead, she bolted into the kitchen and started chewing Thomas’s feet. He laughed and hopped while Eleanor called Pip and for an instant the dog seemed to divide and be in many places at once – sitting on its new bed, begging for food, skidding on the wooden floor, barking at a vanished ball. During the exhibition, Thomas described Pip’s exuberance as “positive and benign in some ways”, while Eleanor, who had never touched a dog before Pip, described her developing affection for the animal. “Gradually, I love her more and more. I treat her as a new baby.”

While Pip ate, nosing around the dog food, Gordon, who is gay, considered his mother’s remark. “You can see we are now a family unit with the dog. I wonder whether it would be the same if I had a child,” he said. The Youngs sat quietly while Pip sorted her dinner with a miraculous concentration. A few discarded crumbs of dog food lay on the kitchen floor. “Naughty, naughty. I don’t know why she eats rice,” Eleanor muttered. “Sometimes I give her a potato.”

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Dog-walking à la mode, London

The scene at the Youngs is part ancient, part modern. A few details aside, it might have taken place at any point in the past 14,000 years. Dogs, in the shape of wolves attaching themselves to paleolithic settlements, are thought to have been the first domesticated animal, ahead of the horse, the cow and the sheep, and the odd, leisured niche occupied by pets has been in place for millennia. Egyptian archaeological sites contain the remains of mastiffs and greyhounds, while mutant ­Chinese red and gold fish have been cherished in the home since the 4th century. Alexander the Great named a city after his dog, Peritas, and during the Middle Ages abbots and abbesses fretted about the animal obsessions of their monks and nuns. “Ye presume henceforth to bring to church no birds, hounds, rabbits or other frivolous things,” wrote William of Wykeham, the frustrated Bishop of Winchester, to three ­Hampshire nunneries in the late 14th century.

And all this time we have wondered exactly how pets fit into our lives. Fortified by our need to exploit animals for their fur and meat, Aristotelian, Christian and, later, Enlightenment thought posited a strict separation between humankind and beasts, emphasising their lack of reason and their brutal lives, empty of feeling. But pets – individuals amid the herds – have never belonged in that dichotomy.

The word itself, which derives from Scottish Gaelic, is undecided. In an early occurrence in English, in 1508, pet means both “favourite domestic animal” and “spoiled child” in the same text, pointing to the hard-to-define status of these animals. And from the 18th century onwards, when the ownership of birds, dogs and cats spilled out into wider society, our logical sense of distance from pets has been confounded by the quasi-human relationships that we have with them. Distinguished rationalists have succumbed to anthropomorphism. Prefiguring Pip by 170 years or so, Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and utilitarian, had a cat called the Reverend Doctor John Langborn that he liked to feed macaroni.

What is different about the Youngs is the pet world that surrounds them. Although some aspects of modern dog and cat ownership – the breeds, the collars, the shows – have been around for more than a century, there has never been anything like the growth, in scale or complexity, of the global pet industry in the past 20 years. In the UK, there are now 50 per cent more dogs and twice as many as cats – between six and eight million of each – as there were in the 1960s, and a total of 24 million pet animals (excluding fish) on which we spend around £4bn a year. And Britain is not unusual in this. The US, which has five times as many humans as the UK, has 12 times as many cats and dogs. In Beijing, the number of pet dogs increased from 100,000 to 1.5 million between 2001 and 2007, while India’s pet dog population has tripled, from three million to 10 million, in the past ­decade. The expansion of the global pet industry, which is valued at around $70bn by Euromonitor, the market analysts, has slowed during the economic downturn but not in a way that has anyone panicking just yet. Last year it grew by about 4 per cent.

At the leading edge of all this is what the pet industry calls “humanisation”. The eternal tendency to see ourselves in animals has been commercialised into an awesome array of human-like goods and services for pets: from counselling for cats to motion-sickness pills for dogs, vitamin-enriched food to health insurance. People in all corners of the pet care industry describe a shift in attitude from “ownership” to “parenting”, from “pets” to “companion animals”, as domesticated wildlife becomes ever more involved in our lives.

To its apologists, humanisation is a benevolent process in which pet owners are increasingly aware of the needs – from the nutritional to the psychological – of the animals in their care. It might not be intellectually accurate, but pets benefit from the attention, and we enjoy giving it. Humanisation also speaks to an era of smaller families, single-person households and ageing populations, in which pets are filling social and emotional vacancies formerly occupied by people. As I left the Youngs’ apartment, Gordon and I spoke in the hallway. “My mum finds enjoyment from Pip that she was not experiencing before,” he said. “She thinks it is destiny that Pip ended up with us at this time in our lives.”

And yet it is hard to accept humanisation as an uncomplicated good. There is so much silliness and excess. There are the cashmere dog hoodies and crystal-studded collars that you can buy at a pet-boutique-cum-café in Camden, north London. There is cat food with names such as “Elegant Medleys’ White Meat Chicken and Cheddar Cheese Soufflé with Garden Greens” that recall the sort of thing people ate at weddings in the 1970s. Even at its most efficacious, in activity toys for ­­rabbits and omega-3 supplements for neutered cats, humanisation resembles a marketing man’s dream.

Critics of humanisation point out that this flowering of goods and services is taking place at the moment in our history when fewer and fewer of us have any direct knowledge of animals other than the ones in our homes. Just 1.5 per cent of adults in Britain currently work in agriculture. To sceptics, humanisation is proof that we are losing our bearings with animals, rather than evidence that we love them more, and is part of a big, confused picture that includes distressed cats and weapon dogs alongside “fur babies” and treasured family members.

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Mangus, a Devon Rex cat belonging to Vicky Halls, a pet behaviour counsellor

At their most harmonious, humans and pets resemble other forms of symbiosis in the natural world. James ­Serpell, a veterinary professor at the University of ­Pennsylvania, and the author of In the Company of Animals (an argument for pet-keeping published in the 1980s), told me that it reminds him of the relationship between tropical cleaner fish and the dangerous creatures they swim aboard. “We’re in the role of the larger predatory fish,” he said. “These are animals that we would other­wise eat, but we prefer the social support they give us, even it does require adaptation on both sides.” The rise of pet-keeping can be seen as an evolutionary process, by which dogs, birds and cats – and more recently rabbits, reptiles and fish – have accepted human names and limits on their freedom in return for a lifetime of warmth and food.

Their lives have improved as a result. Physical proximity – 40 per cent of US dog owners say they share their bed with their dog – has made us ever more alert to the needs of our pets. Take nutrition: in the 1970s, about half of British dogs lived on scraps. That number is now 15 per cent, while the rest are sustained by a galaxy of “complete foods”, many of which contain supplements that have migrated from human diets such as omega-3 oils and dietary fibres – “The same stuff,” as one industry analyst explained, “that Danone uses in its Activia yoghurts.”

A similar circle of improving technology and attentiveness has formed in veterinary care. Diseases common among pets 40 years ago, such as rickets in dogs and retinal disorders in cats, have all but disappeared, replaced by conditions borne of the longer lives they now lead. Between 20 and 25 per cent of British pet owners have health insurance for their animals. “If you can do it to a human, you can do it to a dog, and if you can do it to a dog, you can do it to a cat,” Simon Wheeler, sales ­manager of Agria, a pet insurer, told me before describing recent rises in the incidence of diabetes and chronic skin conditions among cats. The increasing sophistication of veterinary care sees pharmaceuticals designed for the human market – from anti-inflammatories to psychiatric drugs – tested on animals, given to people and then administered to animals again. In February, Reconcile, beef-flavoured Prozac, was granted a UK licence for the treatment of dogs with conditions that include separation anxiety and canine compulsive disorder.

Pet owners are prospering too. Dogs were used to cheer up patients in US military hospitals during the second world war, and since the 1960s, evidence has mounted of the medical benefits of our interactions with animals. Being in the presence of a friendly dog or cat increases the flow of neurochemicals such as dopamine and endorphin, which reduce blood pressure. Pet owners have better survival rates and live longer after heart attacks, while aviaries and aquariums have been shown to reduce depression and improve people’s appetites in veterans’ hospitals and old people’s homes. In 2000, ­researchers at ­Warwick University compared the emotional support that volunteers derived from the various human and animal ­relationships in their lives. Cats turned out to rival humans for “reliable ­alliance” and “nurturance”, only falling down on “instrumental aid” and “intimacy”. All pets do their bit. Paul Hopkins, secretary of the Suffolk Rabbit Club, explained this to me just before he judged a show in Colchester. “You stroke them,” he said, “and you don’t have to worry about having an argument, or pleasing them. A rabbit will be there for you whenever.”

English cocker spaniel Jake sniffs a urine sample at Cancer and Bio-detection Dogs as part of research into whether dogs can detect cancer

Indeed, as human and animal lives intertwine, it can be exciting to consider the good we might do one another. On an afternoon of thickening rain, I visited the offices of Cancer and Bio-detection Dogs on an industrial estate near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Inspired by the case of Gillian Lacey, a 19-year-old whose skin cancer was brought to the attention of doctors by her parents’ Dalmatian in the 1980s, the charity is convinced that cancers have an odour that dogs can recognise. In its first trial, published in the British Medical Journal in 2004, the charity’s dogs identified bladder cancer samples with 41 per cent accuracy – a rate three times better than would be expected by chance – and it has just completed a year-long study funded by the Buckinghamshire NHS Hospitals Trust screening for prostate cancer.

I watched the dogs, which wore red vests, sniff urine samples while Claire Guest, the charity’s director, explained that the aim was to figure out how the animals assembled odour signatures before building a machine to replicate it. But she admitted that it was hard to attract the support of serious research organisations. The next day I asked the opinion of Karol Sikora, a former chief of the World Health Organisation Cancer Programme, who had visited the charity a few weeks earlier. Sikora was excited about what he had seen but stressed the importance of moving beyond the animal component as quickly as possible. “The sooner they can retire the dogs the better,” he said. “They need to shoot the dog.”

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Crufts 2010

That is not the kind of thing you hear at Crufts. Over four days every March, a cathedral to dog ownership is erected in the hangars of the NEC arena in ­Birmingham. Hyper-alert Border collies throw themselves to the floor at the subtlest hint from their owners, and competitions are followed by “heel to music”, a sort of cousin of dancing on ice, but with dogs and their owners. This year, 22,000 animals competed to be named Best in Show at Crufts, a title won by a Hungarian vizsla from Carlisle. The atmosphere was of a happy frontier town in the furthest lands of human-animal co-operation.

But over the past two years, and to its great discomfort, Crufts has also found itself involved in conversations about the proper boundaries of our relationships with pets, the limits of our infatuation. In 2008, a BBC documentary exposed cruel breeding practices by owners who went on to win prizes at Crufts. The BBC suspended its coverage of the show and ­Pedigree, Crufts’ sponsor for 40 years, dropped its support.

The BBC report was shocking because it showed breeders perpetuating genetic illnesses – such as syringomyelia, in which a spaniel’s skull is too small for its brain – to meet the abstract standards of dog shows. But the principle is surely akin to when puppies are shaped to satisfy the humanising and fashion-related demands of the pet industry at large. The past 10 years have seen pedigrees rise from about a third to two-thirds of the UK dog population, a transition accompanied by the increasing number of dogs born by caesarean ­section (89 per cent of Bristol terriers are now delivered this way); and undergoing surgery merely to breathe (pugs) or open their eyes (shar-peis). ­Anthropomorphic selection – the search for soulful eyes, a ­lasting juvenile appearance and great, cartoonish paws – applies to behaviour as well, with dependent breeds favoured for ­guaranteeing an excited welcome at the end of the day.

In one of Crufts barking halls, I met Roger Mugford, ­Britain’s best-known animal psychologist. Maladapted dogs and our rising uncertainty about what binds us to, and what divides us from, them is the very reason his profession exists. Mugford is an admirer of James Serpell but he questioned how long the symbiosis between humans and their pets can last. “I really don’t know if it is ­sustainable,” he told me.

Mugford’s concerns were partly to do with the physical environment of 21st-century cities – many dogs in Tokyo now live indoors all the time – but extended to our apparently decreasing tolerance of pets that behave like the animals they are. Our lack of contact with animals in other contexts has bred inaccurate and unrealistic expectations of the ones we keep in our homes. “People want perfection,” he said.

According to Mugford, and several other dog trainers I interviewed, whatever physical deformities or behavioural tendencies a dog might be born with, they can be compounded by the psychological trauma of living a near-human existence. “I see a lot of behavioural issues,” James Serpell told me. “I would say 90 per cent are caused by people who have no conception of normal behaviour for an animal. As far as they are concerned, if it is not behaving like a human, something is badly wrong.”

A Dutch bunny at Animal Fair pet shop in London

It is not just a minority of dogs that are suffering some of the unintended consequences of humanisation. A new – and anthropomorphising – belief that cats experience loneliness is blamed for a rapid rise in crowded multi-cat households in the UK, while the migration of rabbits into the house has led to a disturbing rise in dental problems. Evolved to be continually ground down by eating grass, the molars of house rabbits have a painful tendency to grow upwards into their nose and eye ­cavities. According to Anne McBride, who teaches animal behaviour at the University of Southampton, living indoors has also exposed rabbits to being cuddled on a daily basis, something that never happens in the wild. “Rabbits do not like being picked up, OK?” she said. “I’m sorry.” McBride has also studied rabbits put into a trance, a trick used by owners to clip their pet’s nails, and found such high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, that she believes the animals are convinced they are about to die.

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But it is dogs, humanity’s first animal companion, and the commercial engine of the pet industry, that are at the edge of this evolving relationship, and as we draw animals ever more deeply in our lives, they are the most exposed to our frailties, as well as our love. This year, Crufts happened to fall in the same week the government proposed measures to curb the use of dogs as weapons or tools of intimidation. The current tabloid scare over “status dogs” is reminiscent of previous panics, but the shape of a ­genuine problem does exist. The number of people treated in hospital for dog bites has increased by 40 per cent in the past four years, to around 5,000 a year, and Staffordshire bull terriers are now Britain’s most ­commonly abandoned dog.

Mugford, a frequent expert witness in trials under the ­Dangerous Dogs Act, advised me to go to talk about weapon dogs with a man called Carl Williams Nwazota. Last June, police raided the house where Williams lives (he goes by his mother’s surname) in Wood Green, north London, and impounded four of his dogs, three of which (two Staffordshires and an American pitbull) were returned to him several months later. Under the Dangerous Dogs Act, the pitbull was neutered and tattooed. One of the Staffordshires died the day after it was returned to Williams. A fourth dog remains in custody.

Like his dogs, Williams is a liminal figure, hard to classify. A former gang leader – “I used to run quite a large firm of the boys,” he says – he was imprisoned for firearms offences 10 years ago but now, in his mid-thirties, has reinvented himself as a kind of neighbourhood dog man. Abandoned dogs – overwhelmingly Staffordshires and pitbull crosses, some injured after fights – are left on the doorstep of his tiny garden flat once or twice a week, and he does his best to look after and rehome them. On the afternoon I visited, a huge, confused bull terrier – found the day before, wandering in traffic without a collar – was slumped on the kitchen floor.

Carl Williams at his home in London with one of the many abandoned ‘status dogs’ that he has rescued in recent years

“It has just gone stellar,” said Williams, when I asked him whether dog ownership had increased in his area since he got out of prison. “There are too many dogs out here, and there are people getting rich off it.” He says that amateur breeding has driven down the price of a Staffordshire or pit bull puppy from around £800 to £250 in recent years, fuelling the fashion of young men buying animals with no other motive than to burnish their fragile, human reputations. “The dog is like my iPhone now, like my mobile, like my car. It can be bought. It can be sold,” he said. “It’s all part of the look.”

But Williams could not quite bring himself to say that these pet owners, or their dogs, would be better off apart. At one point, he told me that all boys should be given a dog to look after to teach them responsibility, and he spoke, echoing the words of Gordon Young, of the central role that animals played in his family and upbringing. “The dog is the final part of the family unit. He says, ‘I am there. I am home.’” Later, we went outside and Williams let his two remaining dogs, Snoop and Brown Sugar, out of their kennel and threw a ball for them to chase on the dull, mud-fringed grass. Musclebound, they ambled after it. He threw it again, but for some reason they would not go and fetch it. They had sat down and would not leave his side.

Sam Knight is a regular contributor to the FT Weekend Magazine. His last piece was about the ‘Prevent’ programme to combat violent extremism. Read it at www.ft.com/prevent