Let's be nicer to people who aren't "dog-people"

Domesticated animals are a privilege, not a right.

I’m going to throw my brother-in-law under the bus here. I have to draw attention to it because I love him. (Plus, tbh, he has edited so many of these Echoes, and I hope this one isn’t an exception.)

Last summer, our family got into a heated discussion about dogs. My brother-in-law’s concluding statement: “If you don’t like dogs, you’re evil.”

As much as I disagree with my brother-in-law’s argument, I believe I understand how he arrived at this logic. (I also believe he probably wanted the conversation to end as much as I did.)

Dogs have long been included in the portrait of a hearty home. Think of all the starring roles that dogs have scored in recent Hollywood history: Airbud, Lassie, Homeward Bound, Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, Turner & Hooch, Marley & Me, Balto, (I could probably name 100 more without using Google). It’s plain as day how much dogs are preferred over other pets in pop culture and our neighborhoods. Conversely, no one says you’re evil for not liking cats, the second most-popular domesticated animal. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the cat is still portrayed as the indifferent BFF to spinsters, “crazy cat ladies,” and our favorite “evil” group of the 17th century, witches (aka women who were into herbal remedies and expressing emotions.) 

Most of our traditional views on the “nuclear” family are evolving, but Lassie isn’t budging. When it comes to the US and Canada’s (and I’m coming to understand only our) obsession with being dog-moms and dog-dads, we need to take a closer look at why we’ve become a society that blindly pours all our leftover love into canine companions. Personally, the stigma I feel that comes with not being a “dog-person” is at an all-time high.

Sure, “man’s best friend” has been around for a while. Perhaps my frustration is that I’m in my mid-30s and realizing that you have to work really damn hard to skip certain ladder rungs of society. I’ve already gotten married, had a kid, and moved to Maine. Now everyone’s waiting for the dog.

Don’t worry brother, you’re not the only one “under the bus.” I think I’ll be examining 97% of my friends and loved ones in writing about this. Truthfully, I can only name a handful of friends that do not have, or do not ever want a dog. I can recall a couple of friends that have said aloud that they don’t care for dogs at all, not now, not ever.

Our love for dogs is as pervasive as it is instinctual. The latter requires some background context, but let’s kick this off with some basic stats:

• 69% of Americans own a dog (Insurance Information Institute, 2020).

• In 2020 alone, $103.6 billion was spent in the pet industry.

I think we can agree, we have a lot of fucking dogs.

But Coco, why are you such a Deb Downer? Dogs are beautiful, loving animals, and they need us as much as we need them. They help people see, feel, heal. They save kids from drowning, for crying out loud!

I have a story to tell.

About a decade ago, a close friend told me a story about her hometown in rural Eastern Europe. Her family had taken in a street pup. The family kept this dog outside their home where they fed her and took care of her. The dog never came inside, but I was assured this was a luxe life compared to how most dogs were treated at the time. (It’s more common to see dogs in the streets than on leashes.) I met this sweetheart of a dog, and she was pretty wild-looking. Definitely not the kind of pooch you see around San Diego boardwalks and Portland biergardens. This was a Romanian street dog that otherwise would be left to starve.

At its peak (which is on the decline), the street dog problem in Romania “stem[med] from the country’s communist period when some people had to move into apartment blocks that did not allow pets, and so had to abandon their dogs.” (BBC News, 2019)

“Doggy,” as my friend’s family called their pup, was impregnated one night by another stray. She gave birth to a litter of puppies. Without trying to flourish the following series of events, I’ll just get to the point: my friend’s grandmother took the puppies to the river and drowned them.

In re-telling this story, as I sometimes do with the apropos trigger warnings, not a single friend, colleague, or acquaintance asks why the grandmother did what she did. Almost every person gasps, screams, or howls in anger at the injustice done to these poor, innocent pups. I watch the person, make their mind up on the spot, without further inquiry, that this grandmother was in their words, evil.

To be honest, when I first heard this, I was shocked too. Luckily, my friend was patient with me. She’s the kind of close friend who is comfortable challenging the status quo, yet generous in interrogations that often follow. While I tried to unstick my eyebrows from the ceiling, she calmly, yet firmly told me about where her family came from and what kind of odds they faced, especially her grandmother, while growing up in communist Romania in the 80s.

The idea that my friend’s family might not have been able to feed themselves — let alone a half-dozen, barely alive puppies — never crossed my mind. Like I said, Doggy wasn’t in the best shape herself, and they had no idea what kind of canine “took advantage” of her in the middle of night. Romania didn’t have the resources they do now. Even with more shelters popping up in the country, the number doesn’t come close to what we have here in the US and Canada.

This is an extreme story that tests the threshold of where people lie on the spectrum of dog-enthusiast. But I see all levels of pup proclivity. You want to bring your dog to our birthday BBQ? You’re 9/10 of my friends. You want to invite your cat to a cabin rental? You’re nuts. Sure, cat allergies are twice as common as dog allergies, but both types still affect three of 10 Americans. No dog owners have ever asked me if I was allergic to dogs. The assumption that dogs should be allowed everywhere is not a mantra you need to dig too deep to discover. In so many places I have lived, it’s a given that dogs come first.

My husband Ian and his brother always had dogs growing up. Big, beautiful dogs. German shorthaired pointers, huskies, Australian Shepherds, mutts. They also had cats. So many hilarious, weird, quirky and cool cats. My mother-in-law loves animals. It never mattered how small or large of a home she lived in, most of the rooms were inhabited by beautiful, sprawling animals waiting for belly rubs and treats.

I hope you can tell that I also love animals. I love the way an animal can brighten a home, adding magic and warmth instantly. I love the companionship stories between dogs and veterans, puppies and children. For the most part, I love my friends’ dogs. 

“‘Dog Person’ means something different to me now than it did 10 years ago,” Ian recently told me. “Saying, ‘I love dogs,’ doesn’t feel like it’s enough anymore.”

Ian and I try our best to reject labels such as “dog people” and “cat people,” but there’s no escaping them. When we rescued our cat Tum Tum, the amount of mugs, rugs, jewelry, memes, mugs, t-shirts, towels, mugs, and cards that came our way with things like “cat dad” and “cat mom” plastered on them was overwhelming. I started to think, I mean, I love Tum Tum, but this much? I barely have photos of Ian in my office, and we’re married.

The chasm widened as years passed, us still dog-less. We traveled a ton, lived in small city apartments, and had a kid; the prospect of getting a dog became increasingly difficult. Then something weird started to happen. The longer we lived without a dog, others painted us with a partisan brush. As if we had unknowingly become “cat people only,” by way of delaying dog ownership.

“What do you love more, cats or dogs?” we are commonly asked.

“Well,” Ian has said, “They complement one another, they’re not replacements for one another. If you can have both in your home, that’s great.”

A few years ago, on vacation with friends, one of the neighbors asked the above. We replied with the usual and added, “We have a cat we love though.” Said person started talking about how they hate cats. They kept on the topic for far too long (though we should note we had been drinking, which did not help anyone). He asked Ian to come over and watch a video on his phone. It was a video of a cat being killed in a blender.

Something changed in me then. For as long as I pined for a dog of my own, I started to concentrate less on the type of hound I wanted in my home, and more about the type of human I’d be encountering in dog parks.

Perhaps from these less-than-friendly park encounters, I started noticing alarming data in books, such as “Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari, that I might have glazed over before. At the start of the chapter “The Anthopocene,” Harari recounts humankind’s obsession with wolves and our kinship to the “man’s best friend.” And yet, as we know, the wolf population has been decimated. Harari writes the following:

“How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf? Less than a hundred. (And even these are mostly Polish wolves that stole over the border in recent years.) In contrast, Germany is home to 5 million domesticated dogs. Altogether about 200,000 wolves roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs … At present, more than 90 percent of the large animals of the world (those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals.”

A chart follows the passage with this breakdown:

Wild large animals — 100 million tons

Biomass of humans — 300 millions tons

Domesticated animals — 700 million tons

There is so much more data (especially planet and climate focused) that I might save for a more robust piece that is less rant, more essay. But I hope that this is a sobering reminder that there should be no pet hierarchy. Owning a pet of any kind is a privilege and should be treated as such. If having a dog defines your morals, don’t assume the same for the rest of us. So many people have been attacked and bitten by dogs, and many truly fear dogs. It’s this assumption — that everyone should like or love your dog — that needs to change.

I’ll end this with one last statistic from a recent ASPCA study: Each year, approximately 1.5 million animals (670,00 dogs and 860,000 cats) are euthanized . If dogs help us be more empathetic people, if they improve our mental health, if they remind us to connect to the earth and the great outdoors, if they’re the gateway to not being evil — consider why it frustrates you that someone else doesn’t love your dog. Rather than a sinister fault in personality, the other person might have a hundred reasonable explanations for not being a “dog-person.”

And if you ever hear a story about a culture not treating an animal the way you would, take a breath. Do what so many of us fail to do when faced with opinions that don’t match our own: ask questions. It’s become a popular anecdote that we like to spend time with our animals more than people, that we bend down to pet dogs before making eye contact with our neighbors. If you’re in the same reality I’m living in right now, we’re divided more than ever. It seems an easy first step towards lightening our prejudice load, by not defining ourselves and others, by the animals we keep in our homes.