The Titanic Challenge: What Can We Do About Dogs?

"You can take my dog when you pry him from my frozen dead body in the icy North Atlantic."

There were 12 dogs aboard the Titanic. Three of them, two Pomeranians and a Pekingese, survived. Fifty-year-old Ann Isham refused to get into a lifeboat without her large dog (possibly a Great Dane). Passengers on the German liner Bremen later saw a woman in a lifejacket with her frozen arms wrapped around a large dog bobbing in the waves but neither were recovered. Elizabeth Barrett Rothschild was able to save her Pomeranian but lost her husband, a Rothschild heir and garment industry founder in New York City. It is said that the Pomeranian jumped from Elizabeth’s arms after disembarking Carpathia in New York and was run over by a carriage, which conjures images of A Fish Called Wanda.

Our relationship with our pets, and particularly dogs, is a difficult one to unwind.

I’d call it a form of the solastalgia described in my 1990 book, Climate in Crisis. Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by rapid and uncontrollable environmental change. We quietly grieve for the loss of the natural world. We’ve feel a connection deep in our genetic makeup — a broken strand of an inner web. Restoring a connection to animals — a different kind of intelligence than our own — mends our link to the wild.

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Many of us are in a love-hate relationship with nature. Those who enjoy hiking, camping, and wilderness outings relate to the natural world in one way or perhaps along a spectrum of emotions, from deep respect and reverence to challenging adrenalin-pumping risk-taking. Others regard the wild world as antiquated at best, or a nostalgic fiction at worst.

Nature may inspire in some of us a measure of fear. In others, a healthy respect for the dangers of the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.

When we take an animal into our family, we tame a little portion of that inchoate fear. We recover a bit of the lost reverence we once took for granted. We may not cognize these emotions, but we sense that it feels good. It feels right.

So it is that when an annoying someone like me comes along to point out that there are 900 million dogs in the world, 740 million of them feral, where not long ago there may have been fewer than a million, we are the bearer of bad news. Even worse, the full message is that fossil fuels fueled the rise of dog. We need to get rid of both the fuel and the dog, and even that won’t be enough.

But it is a start.

The ecological crisis is a human crisis. Happily spending over 100 billion dollars for their pets … Americans, some rich, some dirt poor, expose more than their soft spot for animals. Here, and on other continents (at a different scale), the cost of this expression of love exceeds donations to charities and even the financial assistance provided by the US government. Products and services ranging from the best (read: most expensive) to the outrageous (yes, it starts with caviar) present an image of a human condition so much in love with itself and so little concern about those in need. Contact lenses (“I want my Persian to have blue eyes” or “I want my Rex to see better”), knee and hip replacements, chiropractic therapy, and even psychiatric sessions are on record. Online dating is no longer only for people, but also for dogs and even cats.

— Mihai Naden, O’dogs an’ Climate Change (2019)

The AI Opinion

I asked the various chatbots to give me a children’s story about Greta Thunberg discovering that the climate impact of owning her two large dogs was more than taking several transoceanic flights to climate conferences. I prompted the bots to have her give up her dogs. Bing and Chat-GPT repeatedly declined, instead offering lame alternatives like having the dogs go vegan, or Greta campaigning on behalf of adopting shelter dogs rather than breeding more. It seems even bots have a trained soft-spot for man’s best friend. Only DALL-E had the courage to follow my instructions. Knowing that she is in Sweden, it apparently had her throw her dogs into the Gullmarn fjord.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, dogs were a luxury of royalty and aristocracy. They were for hunting on private game preserves, or they were bred as weapons of war. 150 years ago, there were 27 types of dogs in England. By 1900, there were 80. Today, there are more than 400 registered breeds.

It was fossil fuels that fueled the rise of dog

In the 19th century, breeding became all the rage. Wealthy families wanted (and could support) large dogs, while commoners preferred terriers, dachshunds and bulldogs. Scottish and Russian deerhounds were crossed with a Great Dane, a Tibetan mastiff, and a boxer to create the Irish wolfhound proudly engraved on stone cornices in Dublin today as the native Irish dog. The golden retriever was produced by mixing a yellow-colored retriever with a tweed water spaniel and inbreeding their litter. The so-called “top dogs” became commodities, bought, sold and hired out for stud duties, often for very high prices. What the Dutch did for tulips, the English did for sheepdogs.

“At the end of the century there was a fashion for Russian dogs bought solely to sit on the lap of a lady called lap dogs,” says Professor Michael Worboys of the University of Manchester and author of The Invention of the Modern Dog.

The main thing they wanted was a loving dog that would put up with being carried around in a handbag and eating funny foods and all the rest of it. The last dog you want, as an aristocrat, is the same dog as everyone else.

 

Chinese Dogs

The present growth rate of dogs in the world is still closely correlated to fossil fuel wealth, which is why the US leads in dog ownership and breeding. The dog population of the US is growing 1.4% per year, three times the rate of human population growth, including immigration. (Fossil fuel consumption in the United States grew 2.5% in 2022). According to a recent market report, a similar phenomenon is underway in China where total pet dog and cat numbers exceeded 100 million in 2020, increasing 1.7% year on year. The poodle has been knocked out of the first place as the preferred breed. The Chinese rural dog, a mixed-breed local, is now top dog.

China’s pet economy began to develop in the 90s. In line with the booming economy and its ever-growing GDP, the pet industry developed rapidly after 2010. In 2020, 52 million dogs and 49 million cats were kept by 63 million pet owners in China’s urban areas.

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Several online news reports referring to the market research firm Frost & Sullivan indicate that the younger generations, i.e., those younger than 30 years or the so-called post-90s generation, are the driving force behind the Chinese pet industry. They are mostly single and female, looking for a pet partner to fulfill their emotional needs and feel less alone in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen (Tier 1 cities). It is expected that pet ownership in the coming decennium will especially grow in the only slightly smaller provincial capital cities (Tier 2 cities).

— Enting, I., Business propositions in the unique Chinese pet industry (2022).

 

China dog ownership by birth decade

In China, the ratio of dogs and cats to people is about one to ten. In the US, it is one to two. In both cases, the gap is rapidly closing. Moreover, the Chinese data show that generationally, pet ownership is trending more favorably with those born post-’90s than those from earlier generations. Partly, that is a reflection of the disposable income of better-educated youth. As income increases, so does pet ownership. Singles are more likely to be pet owners than married with children. One-third of all pets are urban. The market report says, “The future stereotype pet owner holds a cat instead of a dog. She is female, less than 30 years old, single, with middle income (RMB 4,000–9,999) living in the new Tier 1 cities.”

Pet Expenses from Huang, Y., et al., The Market for Pet Food, Supplies, and Services in China, EU SME Centre (2021)

 

Treating Pet Addiction

There is both good news and bad news in this. The bad news is the rule of holes and we just keep digging deeper by the year. We are drawing ever closer to tipping points that, once crossed, cannot be gotten back across for thousands of years, with catastrophic results for civilization as we know it and our species. We are addicted to our pets and the genetic, epigenetic, cultural and other agents of that addiction are highly resistant to interventions by outside agents like government dictates, scientific papers and shaming.

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She is female, less than 30 years old, single, with middle income, living in the city.

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In this way, dogs are emblematic of our other addictions. They are a symptom as much as a cause. We are addicted to the consumer culture we have been gradually improving upon since mercantilism emerged from feudalism and liberty was wrested from autocracy. We would sooner give in to Hell on Earth — for surely that is what we are auguring in — than surrender those millennial gains in comfort and freedom. You can take my dog when you pry him from my frozen dead body in the icy North Atlantic.

 

Pet ownership’s more insidious injury is the hardening of our hearts for the sake of a selfish, possessive happiness. Rather than seeing other animals as autonomous beings with their own lives, desires and cultures, they are reduced to mere dolls. Living creatures become commodities that can be perfectly calibrated to one’s tastes — see the many “dog breed selectors” online. People crave the unconditional love pets offer, but such supplication requires mastery at the level of individual animals broken by “training”, control of a species’ genetic inheritance through inbreeding and the dominance of whole ecosystems to feed hundreds of millions of animals.

— Troy Vettese, environmental historian at the European University Institute
and co-author of Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2020)

Our dogs are our Teddy Bears. We cling to them when the world seems so incomprehensibly nasty and frightening.

There is a glimmer of good news, though. It is about fashion. And, if there is one thing for certain we can say about fashion, it is this: it changes.

We may even outgrow our Teddy Bears.

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