You’ll have seen them, of course: the buggies which you look at benignly as you pass because they’ve got babies in, only it turns out that no they don’t: there’s a dog looking back at you instead.
There are lots of them around these days. I sat next to one on the bus the other day, and it came as quite a shock. No infant in the buggy, but a perfectly decent little dog with a bow in its hair.
The lady with that buggy was mothering the poor creature; it did indeed look like she had no other creature to mother.
What’s disturbing about that scene is that it’s a category error. I am extremely fond of dogs and I am also fond of babies. But it’s a mistake to confuse the two. There is certainly a lot to be said for having a dog or cat.
Anything that expands our capacity for love has to be a good thing. As a cat-loving friend observes, the important thing is to have another beating heart in the home.
My daughter got a cat a while back, in the face of my insistence that the top floor of a mansion block is no place for an animal, and I can’t now quite imagine life without him.
When it seemed, a while back, that the creature might die after swallowing an inordinate amount of sewing thread, I cried my eyes out. I then paid out all the money I had to keep him with us.
But a dog or cat is not a person. It doesn’t try to be a person; it’s not meant to be a person. It’s certainly not a baby. It may indeed be part of the family, and a good deal less trouble than the others.
The late philosopher, George Steiner, was very attached to the family sheepdog on the basis that he was the only non-linguistic member of the household, and thus fulfilled a valuable function; certainly he took George in his stride.
But children are our fellow humans. They are unique, a gift; part of ourselves, whether genetically or in terms of a loving upbringing.
And yet it’s a reflection of the warped condition of the world right now that people are wilfully choosing animals over babies. That at least is the conclusion of a report from the journal, European Psychologist.
Researchers from the Department of Ethology at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest have found that 16 per cent of dog owners (cats don’t feature) consider their pet to be their child. "Dog owners with this attitude refer to themselves as 'pet parents', for whom the dog is nothing less than a cherished, furry baby."
This is grotesque for two reasons: it doesn’t do justice to the dog and it doesn’t do justice to the human baby, the junior member of our species.
First off, dogs really shouldn’t be treated like babies; it’s bad for them. What a dog wants is a walk at ground level. It wants to smell the wee on a lamp-post, and other dogs’ bottoms, and anything else that takes its fancy. It can’t do any of that if it’s stuck in a stupid buggy. It’s a form of dog abuse.
It’s cruel to turn the pet into a baby rather than giving it the treatment proper to it
As for babies, they do need a buggy until they can walk. And they need to engage with us, and play with us and have fun with us. Even a very small infant has a capacity for engagement with others that’s different from an animal, on the basis it is a different sort of animal: our sort of animal.
I quite see that if you haven’t had children or can’t have children, then you might well pour out your parental feelings on the pet. But it’s cruel to turn the pet into a baby rather than giving it the treatment proper to it. It’s also an option doomed to end in sadness. By and large, our pets have fewer years to live than we do, perhaps 12 years for a dog; a child, however, please God, will survive us.
The researchers observe that "some owners might see their dog as a child surrogate to spoil, others actively choose to have dogs and not children", and noted that owning a dog could "offer an opportunity to fulfil a nurturing drive similar to parenting, but with fewer demands than raising biological offspring". And this is just sad.
The expectation that most people will have children is the most natural thing in the world. It’s how we survive as a species. It’s the natural expectation when couples marry. Wilfully to opt for sterility, enlivened by a pet, is, I’d say, an inhuman response to the human condition.
There may be cases where it is justified – if someone can’t have children, or wants to be a priest – but by and large, continuing our own kind is a social duty as well as the most interesting function we can have. Raising another human being is a privilege but it’s also good fun.
I say, have both. It’s not either or; it’s both-and. A family with children and a dog and cat has a better chance of happiness with than without. But don’t think of dogs as babies; don’t treat them as babies. Like I say, it doesn’t do justice to the needs of the one, and the dignity of the other.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
