What is it about animals that makes us want to invite them into our homes, onto our couches and even into our beds? In RN’s new series Animal People, Sarah L’Estrange investigates our relationship with the animal kingdom, starting with a look at the pets we keep.

After just three months of owning my first dog, she had a fright and ran away. At the time, she was a small, timid dog only recently introduced to suburbia, streets and traffic. She jumped at a piece of paper blowing in the breeze. I knew she would be terrified being out in the big wide world and I was devastated.

For two weeks I hunted for her, searching the streets, putting up posters on street lamps and posting messages on Facebook and Twitter. No word. Then, two weeks to the day after she ran away, an older man rang and said the precious words: ‘I think I have your dog.’ He found my phone number on her tag; she was skulking in his front yard. After tears of joy, she was returned to her rightful place in my home.

There’s enormous cultural variation in pet keeping. Some cultures not only don’t have pets, they don’t have the concept of what a pet is. Hal Herzog, professor of psychology, Western Carolina University

The whole experience of having, losing and then regaining a dog got me wondering about our relationship with animals. Why had I reacted so strongly to losing her? How had she welded herself onto my heart?

I’m not the first to wonder about this relationship. Aristotle wrote a history of animals, anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss is responsible for the saying ‘animals are good to think’, and art historian John Berger penned the influential essay Why Look at Animals.

Over half of us have animals in our homes. They’re on our televisions, cute cats fill our computer screens, we’ve sent them into space and they are part of the stories we tell ourselves. We also eat them and use them for scientific research.

Animal People unravels some of the connections between us and four-, six- and eight-legged creatures. Even if you’re not an animal lover, we are all animal people.

What is behind the compulsion to invite another species into your home, feed and shelter them and in many cases love them like a member of the family? After all, other species do not have pets.

‘There are instances of animals that fall in love and have relationships with members of other species,’ says Hal Herzog, professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.

Related: Should Australia have an attorney for animals?

Herzog admits examples like Koko the gorilla’s pet kitten exist, but says that such examples are isolated. However, while pet ownership distinguishes us from other animals, it is not universal in human cultures.

‘I, at one time, was convinced that pet keeping was an evolutionary imperative, but I’ve totally changed my mind about that,’ says Herzog. ‘There’s enormous cultural variation in pet keeping. Some cultures not only don’t have pets, they don’t have the concept of what a pet is.’

‘So the style of pet keeping we see in the United States and Europe today is really a cultural anomaly, not a cultural universal.’

Aside from the evolutionary and cultural explanations for why we keep pets, there are also more immediate reasons, such as the unconditional love we believe that pets show us.

‘[This] applies to dogs, for example,’ says Herzog. ‘But I have a pet cat and she doesn’t give me unconditional love. I love her, but I’m not sure her love for me is unconditional.’

Another theory posits that pets are good for our health. However, Herzog questions this.

‘The problem is that there’s about an equal number of studies that have shown that pets have no effect, or in some cases that pet owners are worse off than non-pet owners,’ says Herzog. ‘[Some studies have shown that pet owners] are more likely to have migraine headaches, they’re more likely to be depressed, they’re more likely to be overweight or obese.’

Related: The pet bereavement support group

Then there are the evolutionary theories. Often pet owners describe their pets as their substitute children, and one theory holds that you’re simply being duped by the pet’s real parents. Something like what a cuckoo does in the bird world.

‘I argue that the reason why humans and only humans keep pets is that pet keeping requires culture, that pet keeping is essentially a meme, as Richard Dawkins put it in his book The Selfish Gene,’ says Herzog. ‘It’s basically an idea that it’s okay to love an animal, that it’s good to have an animal living with you. That spread across cultures like a mental virus.’

Pet Power: why own pets? Sunday 3 August 2014 Listen to the first episode of the series Animal People. More This [series episode segment] has image,

One of the reasons Herzog believes culture is the most probable explanation for pet ownership is that often our pet choices are influenced by fashion rather than rational choices; beetles were very popular in Japan during the ‘60s and in the ‘70s pet rocks were the fad.

‘A hundred years ago in the United States dogs were not the most popular pet, it was caged birds.’

Our relationship with pets has changed a lot since the days that dogs, for example, lived in a kennel in the back yard begging for scraps after the family meal. Now they’re allowed into our houses, onto our couches and even into our beds. There are dog weddings, pet clothing stores and even pet restaurants.

Herzog, for his part, struggles with this ‘humanisation’.

‘I think it completely skews our idea [of what animals are].’

‘Increasingly this idea that pets are people is really taking hold in our culture, for better or for worse.’

Animal People delves into the complex relationship between humans and animals.



