Are Pets Our Emotional Slaves?

As I am walking through the park for my morning walk I pass by a fenced pet playground. Today it was particularly early in the morning and the place was quiet but I felt like something was following me along the fence. A small dog hauling silently.

I looked around but nobody was there. I was hesitant to take action since I am not an animal person. An old man shortly arrived with his dog. I asked about the deserted dog and he told me that this was a rather usual phenomenon lately. People abandon their pets and someone ends up taking them to the shelter.

For the most part humans are not hunter-gatherers anymore. Having a dog is not essential for survival as it used to be. Most of us don’t live in the countryside where house cats can keep mice off the cellar. We crave the company of animals like never before, yet we also abandon them. We are treating pets like we treat our wardrobe.
 

Hijacking the brain

Both dogs and cats end up being anthropomorphized because of their features. Large wide eyes combined with a tiny head resemble the features of a defenseless baby. Almost all mammals fall for this trick. There are even circumstances where a lionesse took care of baby antelope, or monkeys communally raising puppies.

Nature has also created a double-safe system for ensuring newborn mammals are being taken care of. We fall for cats, dogs and bunnies and not to so much for chickens, spiders and cockroaches due to the fact they are closer to us genetically.

 

The making of a pet

Dogs and cats are probably the two most popular pets in our western culture. Dogs were bred for thousands of years from certain breeds of wolves. In order for us to control them we made sure to breed them to the point where they became mentally challenge. We called that a “dog”. Same thing happened to cats as they descended from Mesopotamian wild breeds. We made them soft enough to tolerate in the house.

Both species have been bred selectively, through a process of eugenics, selecting certain useful traits while leaving others die out. This is after all how we ended up with species like miniature chihuahuas and cats that look like grandpa’s ball sack. Many dogs today have breathing and heart problems because of their ridiculous features that have not been designed by nature. They would die without our care.

Although dogs seem to understand us and even empathise with humans, they are nothing more than mirrors going through a process of emotional contagion. Dogs have been selectively bred to be loyal and reflect human emotion, react to human like circumstances and even reflect empathy. They have been bred to be the perfect happy slaves. Cats still hold some dignity about free will, but they have become high-class prostitutes in regards to everything else. Feed them and they will be all over you. Neglect them and they take off to the next client.

A thought experiment

Hitler describes a much similar pet-creation process in his autobiography Mein Kampf. Being a dog lover himself he describes how Jews could be bred to the point of being slaves to what he understood as a “superior race”. He believed that much like dogs, lesser humans will also enjoy being slaves, since after a few generations they will be bred to the extent that their entire nature will change.

Now imagine yourself living in the year 2150 with Hitler having won WW2. You wake up early in the morning and a happy human-slave (let’s call it servman) comes to greed you in your bed, roll over in your airy silk sheets, make you breakfast and then patiently wait for you to come back from work so you can take him for a walk. You turn the tv on and you watch advertisements about the supplements you could buy to keep your servman happy. You also occasionally march to the streets to defend your servman’s rights. You are also angry with other humans because they abandon their servmen left and right, creating social and health problems. You are better than everyone else though. You treat your servman with...humanity.

No choice?

A house cat or house dog is defenseless in the outside world. These creatures are enslaved both mentally and physically. Their existence is tragic for someone who knows how they came to be, but for them it is rather an inevitability. They don’t know any better. I wonder, would we treat mentally challenged individuals in such a way even if they were happy not knowing any better?

It seems that having a dog or a cat is no different than having an emotional slave that enjoys being a slave because he has been manufactured to be that way. Thing is, most of us have no idea about what we are propagating and instead we focus on our emotional state because our partner abandoned us or because “nobody understands” us. A dog or a cat seem to understand us because they don’t talk back. They are there watching us like “wise philosophers”. We reflect on them and their silence speaks back to us. We echo our thoughts through their cute eyes . We are mesmerised by their programmed reactions neglecting our standardised stimuli. Pets, at best, are nothing more than mental masturbation.

We have become emotionally desperate with our surroundings. Partially this might be because of the vast amount of people and information flooding our lives. This is after all why people in cities have more pets than people in the countryside— yet they are more lonely than ever. We connect with an animal that cannot possibly communicate with us beyond the stimuli we provide to it. Pets learn much like small babies to imitate and seek attention from their caregiver. They are copy machines, much like Wilson in Cast Away.
 

If we indeed crave pets so much, if we get attached to them so passionately only to discard them later on, if we seek a meaningful relationship through them, then we are filling up voids. Voids we rather not confront.

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