Article in yesterdays paper about petocracies. Well I'm cancelling going out to a function today because it's the third day of a heat wave and I'm worried about my dogs. Is that a problem? Not for me it isnt, so if my dogs rule the roost, so be it.
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematter...0131-1aapp.html
As a report warns against letting your dog into the bedroom, Lucy Cavendish asks how spoilt pets came to rule the roost.
In my household, we are used to pets. Right now, we've got dogs, cats, fish and ponies. We used to have chickens and, once upon a time, a donkey. I grew up surrounded by pets. Every time you opened a door, one animal or other would pop out. It's a domestic arrangement that me and my siblings have continued. My sister has had hundreds of cats, chickens, dogs, even a badly behaved goat called Esme who lived inside her house.
But if there is one thing that she and I know from experience - some of it bitter - it is that you let your domesticated animals run your life at your peril. You train them. You show them who is the leader. They are animals, you are human. This is your house, not theirs.
But is it? Are we guilty of letting pets rule our roosts? Increasingly, owners find themselves living in a petocracy, in which animals have an equal - and sometimes greater - say than the human in the way the household runs.
Advertisement: Story continues below
Crossing the boundaries ... One expert says we are humanising pets and as a result, they don't know how to behave. Photo: Michelle Mossop
For dog owners, the flow of the working day is dictated by the need for "walkies". Social events are routinely thwarted ("I can't come to lunch because of the dogs..."). The family with a pet can't go anywhere for the entire day unless it is taken with them. They can't go on holiday unless it is to a pet-friendly place. They no longer go abroad unless they put their beloved dogs in kennels. Nowhere is this petocracy more evident than in the bedroom.
A recent survey suggested that 62 per cent of cat owners allow their pets to sleep with them, either on or inside the bed - even though it increases the chances of more than 100 serious illnesses being passed on. Cuddle your beloved animal in bed and you could wake up with anything from worms to the bubonic plague (though the last registered case was in 1974). Chagas disease, which can cause life-threatening heart and digestive disorders, can be transmitted by dogs infected with a parasite that smuggles its DNA into the human genome, while cat-scratch disease, a bacterial infection administered by a nick from a sharp claw, can cause lethal damage to the liver, kidney or spleen. According to the study by the University of California school of veterinary medicine, those who let pets sleep alongside them also had a higher risk of general illness.
But for some people, nothing is too much for their beloved pet. I have friends who painted their walls brown because they claimed it was the colour their cats "liked". I know one woman who married and then divorced a man within a year because she said he put his labrador before her. "He let the dog sleep on the sofa and I couldn't stand it," she says. "I said it's me or the dog - and he chose the dog."
"The domination of pets in our lives is a recent development," says Jackie Chaloner of East Road veterinary clinic in West Sussex, Britain. Many of the pet owners she sees treat their animals better than their children. "The animals rule. The owners have let them take over the house. They let their cats and dogs sleep on the bed while they would never let their children come in to the bed at night. They have blurred the boundaries with their pets. They cook them gourmet food, and over-feed as an act of love - but it's the opposite of that. They're animals, not humans, but often the result of humanising them is that the animals no longer know how to behave."
Pet psychologist Jenny Sullivan, who treats dogs with behavioural problems in the UK, says the petocracy has developed because owners are scared of rejection. "In the same way that other people don't seem to discipline their children much any more, they no longer discipline their pets. There is a great need to be loved by a pet, and so instead of having a pecking order whereby the human is the leader of the pack, the animal is so often left to rule the roost. It has all become very confused. But it's not good for the animals or the owners."
Whose fault is it that we have become so dominated by our pets? Well, it's ours, of course. Man brought animals in from the cold. Domesticated dogs provided early humans with a guard animal and a beast of burden.
But whereas they would hunt and herd alongside humans, receiving little more than a reliable food source in return for their devotion, protection and companionship, now they sit next to us and loll their heads in our laps, demanding treats or their belly rubbed.
According to K Kris Hirst, an American archaeologist and expert in animal domestication, dog history is really the history of the partnership between animals and humans. "Over the past 12,000 years, humans have learnt to control their access to food and other necessities of life by changing the behaviours and natures of wild animals. All of the beasts that we use today, such as dogs, cats, cattle, sheep, camels, geese, horses, and pigs, started out as wild, but were changed over the centuries and millennia into tamer, quieter animals."
Humankind has benefited almost unimaginably from animal domestication, says Hirst. "It enabled us to keep cattle in pens for access to milk and meat, and for pulling ploughs; training dogs to be guardians and companions; teaching horses to adapt to the plough or take a rider; and changing the lean, nasty wild boar into a fat, friendly farm animal."
But having bred natural aggression, snappishness and instincts out of our domestic animals, we have gone further and endowed them with basic, loveable human characteristics. We have turned them into the equivalent of lovers who we must woo - I recently heard a woman utter to her horse, "Himself doesn't like the cold, does himself?", before kissing him tenderly on the nose - and upon whom we can spend too much time and money. The UK pet industry now generates in excess of pounds 5 billion a year.
I have friends who, regardless of the health risk, sleep with their dogs every night - and they wouldn't have it any other way. It is anathema to me; I have no truck with pets who want to sleep either on or in my beds. I've tried desperately to keep ours at the bottom of our household hierarchy. I train them. I feed them in order - humans, then cats, then the dogs, Georgie and her one-year-old puppy Peaches... - and yet our lives are still dominated by them.
For Peaches, who chews up the household when I tell her not to, is like a baby. Despite my protests, she spends half her life jumping on the beds and the sofas. She wags her tail. She opens her brown eyes wide. She looks pleadingly at us all and then, as soon as our backs are turned, she's rolling around the duvet. She looks so happy and delighted to be there. Sometimes she even puts her head on the pillow and tries to snuggle under the covers like a human being allowed a lie-in.
Should we let them on our beds and sofas? Should they dominate our lives in the way that they do? Of course not. I say this, but as I am sitting here, I can see Peaches. She has crawled on to the bed again, looking as guilty as sin, but happy just to be in my presence and living almost like a human.
