Dogs are a meme

I am fascinated by how important dogs have become to us. Just like most of us, I love petting them and enjoy their shenanigans. But I also like thinking about their journey as a species.

Shedding tears

A stand up comedian goes up to the stage and says “My dad died last year”. No one reacts. “And then my old dog came next to me, cuddled next to me, and died on the same day”. People go aww and are visibly sad. He pauses. “You just felt sorry for the dog that I made up but you never shed a tear for my dad.” This was brilliant. People wince. Point made.

This is how much we love dogs. And can you blame us? For years, we bred them to be cute, cuddly, furry, loyal and loving. They wag their tails, and give you all the attention you ever needed from a creature. They are helpless, and make you feel responsible and empowered in a weird way.

Not exactly wolves

It wasn’t always like this. We all know they were wolves once, and we bred them, right? Not exactly. In the book “In Defence of Dogs”, John Bradshaw explains this well.

They came from the same ancestor as wolves but split off way before farming began. They are very different than wolves. They don’t need to be dominated over or shown who the master or alpha is. Unlike wolves, they don’t organise themselves into packs with rigid hierarchies. They are more in tune with human emotions than wolves are. And they are in a permanent adolescent state unlike wolves who grow to become self-sufficient adult predators.

For most of the time since, they were animals living close to us. The less fearful ones ate better and survived. We didn’t domesticate them so much as they domesticated themselves. In the later phases of domestication (thousands of years ago), we started deliberately shaping them into the thing that wags its tail and stares at you with googly eyes and makes you feel like the most important person in the room.

And it worked

Today, roughly 1 in 3 households in the UK has a dog, 1 in 2 in the US do. Over 80% consider a pet a member of their family.

The pet food and pet toy industry is one of the most lucrative in the world. The industry size is over $150Bn. It grew faster than almost every other consumer category for fifteen years running till 2024.

Pet parents (or pawrents), love to splurge on their dog. They want to “give their dog the best life”. They project their own emotions - believing that a dog is capable of feeling a complex emotion like guilt when it has just learned to respond to the angry tone irrespective of its behaviour.

Some animals are more equal than others

When someone says “I am an animal lover”, they don’t mean that they love chickens or pigs or cows. They mean cats and dogs. Because we humans have decided that dog and cat lives matter more than other animals’. We have created a class system.

I know some vegetarian families who, for the first time, have allowed meat in their households. Not for the humans. For the dogs. They happily pay for the lives of 100s of chickens, 10s of pigs and cattle that go to feed their dog while themselves abstaining from meat.

In the book, The animals amongst us, John Bradshaw explains how it was common for humans to hunt down and eat dogs (as is common for many societies even today). While we may never truly resolve our ethical dilemmas about animals and food, it is remarkable how far dogs have come.

Dogs over humans

In India, thousands (people, not dogs) took to the streets to protect street dogs from getting euthanised. Very few bat an eyelid for the sanitation workers who have to deal with dog waste on streets, but thousands protested. Vir Sanghvi articulated this brilliantly here: https://theprint.in/opinion/sharp-edge/dogs-matter-more-to-indian-middle-class-than-people/2720695/

“Why does the middle class not feel as deeply about the homeless people who live on the same streets as the dogs? Why do we find it easier to fight for dogs than the humans who exist at the margins of our society?”

Won’t be wrong to say that some of us value pet dogs, even stray dogs, over their fellow humans.

Dogs are a meme

When viewed through the lens of Instagram or TikTok, a dog starts feeling like any other product of modern capitalism. Other people have it. It promises joy. Its possession has variable rewards built in. You can make reels about it. It gives you status, makes you part of a club. There is a regulated way of going about it. You can buy it. And people are buying loads of them - there are more than 85 million dogs int the US, the biggest consumer market in the world.

Once you buy it, you can share its shenanigans on social media, project your own complex emotions on it, and make other people buy a dog. It’s a meme.

It’s a meme that has evolved with us, and virally propagates itself.