Tag Archives: pets

October 5, 2017 · 4:52 PM

Autumn Chill

The October night is mine to fill. My parents have long since gone to bed with our cat, who knows something is wrong. I’m left alone with my paperback copy of Never Let Me Go, purchased yesterday during our weekly trip to Costco. Never have I been so invested in a fictional friendship. I let the drama absorb me; it’s an effective distraction from the death that looms outside.

Autumn lies on the top step of the stoop. Once a swift jumble of insatiable canine exuberance, tonight she is quiet and still. The cool concrete seems to give her 13-year-old body some relief. A year ago Autumn was overweight for a shepherd-lab mutt her size. The growth in her lung that announced its presence in March has siphoned away much of her muscle, leaving a scrawny, dull-eyed creature whose every breath seems to cost effort she doesn’t have to spare.

It’s brisk outside. I put down my book and rise from the couch, opening the heavy wooden screen door to check on her. This is the third or fourth time I’ve done so tonight. It is a ritual I will reenact on several evenings before we let her leave us.

“Do you want to come inside, baby girl?”

Autumn does not raise her head at the sound of my voice. I crouch and lay a hand on her greying brow. We have to be gentle; sometimes she flinches when we pet her. I watch her ribs rise and fall under the mottled brown coat that inspired her name.

The humans in the family have realized that we should take her to the vet for the last time. We’re still not sure when. No one wants to decide. Soon is too close to now, even as now extends her decline. We’re watching her, waiting for a definitive sign, but Autumn doesn’t give us one. She simply fades, often imperceptibly. Eating less, sleeping more, weighing less, hurting more. There is no marker, no metaphorical cliff over which she can fall to let us know that the time, her time, has arrived.

We cannot discuss this with her. We do not ask, Have you suffered enough? Do you want to die? When should we kill you? but we have taken it upon ourselves to answer for her.

Inside, Ishiguro’s codependent characters await reactivation. They will endure intimate betrayals and paradigm-shifting revelations under my watchful gaze until one character enables the others to slowly disconnect from life. Even fictional mercy requires consent.

I stroke Autumn’s torso, my palm barely grazing her. We look into each other’s eyes and she seems to sigh. I tug her collar and again suggest that she come indoors, lay on her soft bed, let the cat cuddle close.

She won’t move.

Unwilling to wait, to be with her stillness, I stand and return to the house, to the couch, to the book whose ending is probably as dismal as our family’s current reality. How long do we let her endure this lessened life? Even after we make the call, we won’t know.

Autumn never tells us.

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The essay above is a dispatch from 2010, written for a 2016 creative nonfiction class.

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August 8, 2017 · 11:10 AM

Pets as Conduits to Health?

As I made my way to one of my regular dog-walking clients yesterday, I caught a story on the radio about a new study out of the Rand Corporation. Contrary to what the authors call “a widely held belief that children’s general and psychological health benefits from owning and/or interacting with pets,” there was no statistically significant difference between the health of children who lived with pet animals and those who lived solely with other humans.

Let’s side-step an interrogation of the study’s assumption that children’s health is a major reason adults adopt cats and dogs. We all have assumptions about the motivations of other people in our culture. For example, my assumption has long been that some parents and guardians see pets as a way to teach their children responsibility, aside from perhaps enjoying the company of companion animals themselves or wishing to reproduce the conditions of their own childhoods for their offspring. I cannot access the full study to see whether the authors cite any sources that back up their particular assumption. A quick glance at the references section indicates both an explosion of scholarship on pet-human relationships and that the authors likely have research to back up the assumption stated above.

Back when I spent a lot of time researching U.S. pet-keeping practices, I don’t recall reading or asking my informants about the reasons they chose to bring pet animals into their homes. This not only seems like a significant oversight on my part, but an intriguing line of research to pursue in the future. At the very least, I’m considering subscribing to Anthrozoös.

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February 23, 2017 · 2:11 PM

Why Can’t I Eat My Pet Fish?

This originally appeared in Why Can’t I Eat My Dog?, a monthly Q&A series about U.S. culture featured in my newsletter.

QUANDARY

So, I get why we can’t (won’t) eat our dogs. But what about pet fish?
~from Lesley

ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Oh, goody! Lesley’s question gives us the opportunity to complicate our understanding of the basic cultural categories that inform our interspecies relationships, and explore what happens When Those Categories Collide…

We can think about animal-human relationships in terms of relative proximity. In the very first issue of this “advice” column, I addressed the idea that non-human animals exist on a continuum of proximity-to-humans. This continuum can be traced using the concept of edibility. Animals that humans consider to be edible (“fair game,” if you’ll indulge me) fall into a particular span on the proximity continuum: they are close enough to humans to be mundane, but not so close that they are emotionally important. In the U.S., the edibility span is where we will find cattle, pigs, and chickens. Different cultures categorize animals differently along the continuum, and for Lesley’s question about pet fish, we’ll stick with mainstream U.S. culture.

Now you might want to have a Dramamine for this next part, because we’re about to take a mobius-trip.

The meanings of animals change with practice—the cultural category a given animal is in depends on how humans interact with them. Conversely, our interactions with animals are bounded, imperfectly, by these categories. Proximity dictates practice, which dictates proximity. It’s a reciprocal loop of mutual influence. It’s also helpful to remember that emotional proximity maps onto physical/categorical proximity, thereby correlating with edibility. (Sea-sick, yet?)

Anyway, the upshot of this is: Pets are animals with whom humans maintain close physical relationships and develop emotional ties. Humans also avoid eating pet animals for supper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about fish? An excellent question. In the U.S., fish can occupy different categories depending on how humans interact with them: exotic, edible, and pet. It’s the interaction that can transform a fish into friend, foe, food, or instagram subject.

Pet fish occupy a particular position within the pet category because they create an intersection of the exotic and pet categories, neither of which make them edible. Whereas “normal” fish (think tuna, salmon) are categorically edible, pet fish are decidedly not food…unless you’re Otto in A Fish Called Wanda. But the movie understands him to be a psychopath, reinforcing the normative categorical structure of animal-human relationships.

We keep pet fish close to us, so they become like-us to the extent that they become inedible. Exotic pet fish are doubly inedible. But we do not keep pet fish as close to us as we keep, say, a pet dog. Pet fish live out their lives in tanks, whereas pet dogs live out their lives without this extra physical separation. The relationships are different, the interactions are different, and their relative edibility index is correspondingly different, as well.

At the same time, many pet fish are also “exotic” in the sense that they are not typically the types our culture eats. Do you know anyone who keeps a sturgeon in their office? (Don’t answer that.)

In conclusion, because of the ways we interact with them, pet fish simultaneously occupy two inedible categories on the proximity continuum. Take your pick—just don’t fry up that betta for your next dinner party.

 
MISCELLANY

For more background on the history of pet keeping in the U.S., check out Pets in America by Katherine C. Grier.

In 2010, mid-way through writing my MA thesis about the category of cow that’s created in a petting-zoo, I had the fortune to hear Donna Haraway give the keynote address at the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s “Nature Culture” conference. Conference attendees were split into camps: those who believed nature and culture were separate and that categories were useful, and those who believed categories were no longer useful in understanding the interactions among beings. Haraway had recently written a book called When Species Meet, which explores human-animal “encounters” and posits that humans can become “companion species” with other species of animal, “becoming with” one another. After her keynote, John Law was charged with responding. He asked Haraway about fish, positing that dogs are easier to connect with—thereby becoming a companion species—than fish. I believe he said something like, “just look at it!” (Sometimes it’s difficult to break free of one’s cultural categories.) Haraway suggested that one could ratchet-up mediated ways of responding when it comes to human-fish relations. Somehow, there would be a way to create intimacy across the median of diversity. (Underwater, no less!) Law seemed stuck on the problem of “significant otherness.”

Come for the backlash against vegetarians; stay for the Oster eggs puns.

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Do you have a question about the culture we live in?
Ask an (armchair) anthropologist!
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Reminder
While some thought and research does go into answering these questions, this is largely armchair anthropology, brought to you by someone who left academia in 2010. There’s a very good reason I’m no longer a “real” anthropologist, and it’s called Fieldwork Talking to Strangers.
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You can submit your own question about social norms and cultural practices to “Why Can’t I Eat My Dog?” whenever the mood strikes you. The ‘advice’ column welcomes all inquiries, animal-related or not, but cannot guarantee an answer to each submission.

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May 5, 2016 · 11:57 AM

Why Can’t I Eat My Dog?

What follows is the first in an ongoing Q&A series about the strange inner workings of U.S. culture. 

Quandary

Why can’t I eat my dog?

Anthropological Explanation

Many forces conspire against the enterprising individual who fixes a side-long glance upon their household pet and thinks, “In a pinch…” The majority of these dissuasive forces are cultural, and therein lies their strength. There is a logic underpinning our taboo against eating pet animals, and it has to do with our close relationships with them, and the different categories these practices create.

You’ve no doubt noticed that certain animals are more “edible” than others. In the United States, most people think nothing of eating a hamburger, but grow queasy at the thought of horse meat having slipped into their ground beef, and positively livid at the idea that cat meat might grace someone’s plate. The reason is simple: we have a social aversion to mixing up different categories of animals. A taboo, if you will.

For anthropologists, taboos are a “repression of interstitial states produced by the application of discrete conceptual classes on the continuum of experience” (Valeri, p.63).

Animal-human relationships are arranged into these categories on an axis of “closeness.” The closer an animal is to humans in their cultural relationship, the less edible it becomes. Eating is a practice that creates lines of distinction between humans and animals that are not-human enough to become food. Because we have placed dogs firmly in the “pet” category, they cannot also be in the “food” category. This is why pets are taboo as a source of food: humans have formed such close bonds with them that they have become inedible. The inverse is true to a lesser extent: animals that are far from humans (exotic animals and pests) are less edible, but not quite as taboo as those closest to humans on the relationship spectrum.

Different cultures consider different animals close (and therefore inedible). Conversely, some cultures consider the animals Americans tend to think of as pets as a category of creature that is perfectly edible. It all depends on each culture’s relationships and practices with regards to each animal. Last September, a brief story appeared on KPCC about dogs from South Korean meat farms being “rescued” and brought to the United States for adoption. In this case, Americans were imposing their culturally-specific logic of animal-human relationship taxonomy onto a different culture.

Cultural norms constrain our every thought and action, and the taboo against eating the (potential/technical) food source in closest proximity to us is merely one of them. Most Americans–even enthusiastic carnivores!–likely take this comestible constraint as a given. They are “naturally” repulsed by the idea of boiling Fluffy for supper, if they’ve ever allowed themselves to consider it in the first place. (They should be repulsed; everyone knows Fluffy would be much tastier fried.) This blatant assault on American’s gastronomic freedom ensures that our taxonomy of animal-human relationships remains intact.

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Originally published in my newsletter. This question sent me down a nostalgic rabbit hole of thesis notes, so count yourselves lucky there’s only one citation: “The Forest of Taboos” by Valerio Valeri.

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You can submit your own question about social norms and cultural practices to “Why Can’t I Eat My Dog?” whenever the mood strikes. The ‘advice’ column welcomes all inquiries, animal-related or not, but cannot guarantee an answer to each submission.
Submit your question by May 15 for a chance to win a free book!

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November 5, 2015 · 2:01 PM

Voicing the Voiceless

Earlier today as I stood in line at checkout, I overheard one of the cashiers at another line ooh over a customer’s baby. “Look at her, she’s like, ‘I just wanna go back to sleep,'” the cashier said.

I thought about how quickly we map our expectations onto other beings, how easily we imbue them with personalities of our own designs. And how we tend to do this for those who can’t “speak” for themselves: babies and animals.

My pets have distinct personalities, but I’m not fooling myself. I know these personalities spring not from them, but from my idea of them. My interpretations of their behaviors. I speak for them in silly voices, attributing reactions and thoughts that they very well may not have.

I’ve caught myself doing the same thing to babies. My friend and I were hanging out with her toddler, and I found myself saying things like, “he’s like, ‘mm, mysterious berries!” or “he says, ‘I dunno about this strange lady.'” How presumptuous of me!

When we speak for animals and for babies, we privilege our interpretation of them over the ways in which they are already communicating with us. They have personalities, but can we recognize them? How much of a being’s personality originates with them, and how much is in the mind of the beholder? This is back to the classic conundrum of intent vs. interpretation, which I tried to suss out a few weeks ago.

And how can we even begin to untangle this when considering cases of pet personality development, much less human personality development? Luckily, I think humans are pretty good at asserting themselves when push comes to shove, outsider interpretations be damned. But until they can do so verbally, they’re at a disadvantage. Those of us who can speak tend to do so for them unless we really check ourselves. Hopefully their development isn’t too much at our mercy.

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