I like my dog, but I don’t want to be my dog, or yours.
I really like my dog.
He isn’t really mine, but he’s in the family. Other family members claim the dog as theirs, but I end up walking him every morning anyway, which is why he’s also mine. Not that I ever wanted a dog. But he’s good, as a dog. However, once in a while I ask myself the question: what is a pet?
A pet is an animal kept in or around the domicile, the function of which is vaguely classified as ‘keeping you company’, or simply just existing in a non aggressive state. That the pet must be dependent upon the pet’s owner also appears to be a given. Cats seem less slavish than dogs, and then you’ve got insects and snakes and rodents and fish, who don’t even seem capable of that adjective.
Let’s stick to dogs as the pet par excellence. This might be because I’ve got a dog myself, but I’ve also had a cat, and I’m still unsure if it was me who had the cat, or the cat who had me. But it was definitely me who dug his grave in the end after he ran into traffic for the last time.
What the hell is a dog anyway? Seems that dogs have evolved away from wolves alongside human beings for quite some time. Some argue that you can’t even consider a human species without the canine, making it in fact part of the species, or at least in a symbiotic relationship with them (us?).
Here however, we must distinguish between the animals that are now kept as pets, and the domestic working animals of a bygone era.
It is only relatively recently that dogs have been kept in the condition in which we now find them, what we refer to as pets. Most canines of the 19th century and early 20th were working animals.
Dogs in cities and villages were put to work as draught animals for all kinds of purposes, pulling carts, turning around bellows and small scale electricity generators for workshops, guiding, rescuing, hunting, packing, guarding, etc. Old dogs might be kept around until they dropped dead, but only after a lifetime of work, a canine retirement.
Slowly, but surely and steadily, as the need for these working animals declined, as their mechanical replacements became both affordable and desirable for practical and then moral reasons, the working dog slunk out the back door of developed urban history.
The current pet landscape is unrecognizable. The animals no longer have a purpose. They are no longer valued for attributes such as their ability to pull or guide or herd or be quiet, but for their bare life, valued for simply being alive and breathing and non-aggressive.
There is no expectation that the dog will do anything other than exist, and they are supposed to be happy for it. Inter-canine socialization is effectively reduced to the dog walk, if they are lucky. Some dog owners I know restrict their pet’s contact with other dogs because this inter-dog playtime is said to reduce the animal’s desire to hang out with the human owner.
Thus, I propose that the dog is alienated from her species and worse. Today’s urban pet is an alienated and unsocialized dependent. Alienated dogs can make for mentally disturbed animals, and a flourishing pharmacology exists to manage these unsettled creatures.
Of course, none of this is the dog’s fault. My dog is perfectly nice as a dog and people say he’s happy, but then how would they really know for sure?
Thus, we have a strangely familiar situation, with the advent of mechanization and the maturation of industrial processes, dogs have become reduced from working animals to an inert form of bare life, unneeded for work or anything more than the stark fact of their existence as metabolic bodies, breathing, eating, shitting, pissing, and producing mammalian warmth.
Now consider human beings in the current condition, what some call ‘late capitalism’.
A great deal of discussion has been taking place around the question of the human being as worker, in light of new forms of mechanization, the internet accelerated amplification of computer processes. In the face of this computational onslaught it is more or less universally acceptable to recognize that many types of work will no longer be suitable for humans, because they will be better performed by machines. The question raised is, what do you do with the redundant humans who won’t be able to support themselves by work?
One set of solutions sees the residual humans shunted off as bare life to some great bong hit living room couch in the sky, the so called Universal Basic Income variation for example. It’s worth considering an unexpected (i hope!) outcome from this argument, the reduction of humans to the status of pets. I mean, if it happened to the poor dogs…
But wait, (shock and horror!) is it not the case that this is already happening, or at least well on the way to happening?
For what else is this global and pretty much universal reaction to the corona thing, but a mutation in the way that human populations are considered in the mainstream of discourse which, (see above) has been amplified and accelerated and spun around the globe at light speed, constantly, without pause or impediment.
It is now completely unremarkable to regard human populations as bare life, as cases, or excess deaths, or hospitalizations - abstractions in other words - fractionalized and submitted to processes of financialization (for what else is statistical modeling of future outcomes?) and posted onto the front pages of major media publications like share price tickers, updated in (if only that were possible) real time, a generalized and constant financialization of human bare pet life.
Furthermore, who will want these human bare life pets? Who will take them to the park and keep them for company? Nobody of course, at least none of the human masters who would certainly (I hope!) favor the canine kind.
I’m willing to bet, dollars for donuts, the very very very rich don’t care about the corona virus infection, they aren’t impacted by either the biological virus, or the hysterical popular social media amplified, meme infected, shit storm that makes up the main part of the covid iceberg, sunk like a heavy turd beneath the surface of general consciousness.
If a dog isn’t wanted as a pet, it isn’t simply allowed to go stray, at least not in London. The unwanted pet is sometimes re-homed, or sent to the animal shelter, with its limited space and resources. The surplus of unwanted animals are terminated, I assume. I don’t imagine the human pet surplus will be terminated, at least not directly, at least not quite yet, at least not if they’re vaccinated.
The problem with bare life is that it’s tough to respect. The opposite, or contrary of bare life can be found in the bundle of attributes pinned onto a universalised human being since more or less - for the sake of convenience - the revolutionary convulsions that wound up bestowing a halo of specialness on the animal life of the human being.
This specialness gave us extra attributes as a layer above the bare life and permitted the elite among humans the possibility of life as a réification of concepts, like the author, the genius, the inventor, the artist, and such. If a person wasn’t born into the correct color race family religion gender sex class country province state city, there was at least the possibility of being a latent, or potential, or wanna be, or smaller scale and less financially valorised author genius inventor artist and such.
Once that special halo is removed however, even the scent of those plug-ins, or extensions (or whatever metaphor you want) are gone for good. After that, you’ve got to ask, what’s left to live for?
The fact is that life as bare life sucks and isn’t worth living, at least not in the way I’ve been living and aspiring to live. The other thing is that bare life is equal. You can’t have more or less of it, once you’re reduced to bare life, you’re at the same time reduced to radical equality, which is the same thing. The only specialness you might hope for then is your master’s favor.
I like my dog, but I don’t want to be my dog, or yours.