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Why I Hate Dogs

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-11-05

By far, my favorite stat about Americans and Halloween is the amount of money that pet owners spend on costumes —over $500 million dollars in 2018, a nearly 50% increase from just a decade ago. Half a billion dollars for pet costumes in the United States, which says something about what Americans value in this era. Other revealing stats from the National Retail Federation Halloween report show that millennials are the demographic most likely to dress their pets up, and that the three most popular pet costumes in 2018 were, in order, a pumpkin, a hot dog, and a bumblebee.

The crazy Halloween stats reflect a growing trend toward pet spending in the United States in general, which shows a pronounced increase in the past 20 years in dollars spent on pets, pet food, veterinary bills, and grooming and kenneling (and pet costumes.) In my neighborhood alone, there are two pet “boarding houses” and one “doggie treat” boutique shop, all within walking distance, all built within the last three years.

I’ve had a relatively benign relationship with pets most of my life—while I’ve been in families that have owned pets,
I’ve never been in charge of taking care of one myself, and so I’ve never really bonded with one. And I’ve always casually thought that pets were sort of, you know, interchangeable. Lose one here, get another one there. Whenever I heard friends refer to their pets as “family members,” I never knew how to respond. I didn’t question their devotion, and I knew the animals are hugely important to them. But I didn’t get it. And when they talked about the lengths they go to keep their pets alive, well, then I really didn’t get it.

Pets die. We know this, right? It’s usually the first really horrible lesson we learn in childhood. Pets die. They have a finite lifespan and then they die. If they manage to get to an old age without having first gotten pegged by a car or suffered some animal cancer, well, we know what’s next. They go off into that gentle night. It’s sad, when they’re gone, but you know, nature, destiny, circle of life, etc. And pet owners will probably reload with another younger version anyway, after a proper mourning period. It may sound heartless, but that’s usually the way things go.

Or rather, the way things used to go. With advances in veterinary sciences and technology, and with pet owners who now see their pets as family members, it’s not unusual to learn of pet owners who will willingly plunk down $5000-10,000 for the hope of extending their beloved pet’s life by another year or so. Pet chemotherapy is not just a thing, it’s a relatively common thing—Americans spend over $500 million a year (that number again) on pet chemo, which usually averages between $3000-$5000 for a course of treatment. For the singular hope of getting your aged pet to last a little longer.

They say you can’t put a price tag on the love of a good dog or cat, but I don’t know, if I was faced with those numbers, I could probably come up with some parameters. Like: under a thousand dollars? Okay, let’s do it, let’s save good old Duke! Over a thousand dollars? Well, I’m afraid it’s His Time. Can’t fight Nature. We’ll make sure he doesn’t
suffer.

It’s actually becoming a bit of an ethical question now for pet owners and veterinarians alike: to what lengths should you go to keep your animal around? What’s humane? Is it crass to put a price on what you can afford to pay to keep your animal healthy? Is it bad for the animal, to keep extending his natural life, just so you won’t be sad? And is it worth going into financial jeopardy just to have the beloved family pet kept alive? A lot of Americans believe it is.

Part of me empathizes with these tough questions that pet owners have to deal with, but another part of me thinks: it’s just a dog. A beloved dog, to be sure, and a good dog. But a dog. I’ve heard a lot of dog owners rhapsodize about
how they’d rather spend time with their dogs than with people, and while I understand the impulse to say this — people are notoriously disloyal, and disobedient — it always brings out an unrepentant, specist rage in me. For I prefer humans to any other species.

And I know it’s just a coincidence, but people have gotten lonelier in the past two decades, in the midst of this pet-ownership boom. In 2010, nearly 1/3 of Americans 45 and over reported feeling chronically lonely most of the time. It’s a real social problem, loneliness is, with long-lasting consequences. And while I know that people get pets (partly) to help overcome their loneliness, I still feel that sometimes people save all their social interaction for their pets, and I can’t help thinking that that’s not a great thing. It’s not necessarily a step up to go from being a shut-in to being a shut-in with a dog.

In my neighborhood, we have a lot of dogs, and we see a lot of after-dinner dog-walkers, but most owners aren’t too interested in letting others pet their dogs; in fact, they seem desperate not to get slowed down on their walks by having to interact with other people. They do that thing, that common, 21st century thing where they just pretend that they simply don’t see you. I don’t really hate dogs, but I hate feeling that the pet owners in my neighborhood use their pets to avoid everybody else.