Across countries and cultures, we love our companion animals—but what qualities, what features, distinguish a wild or illegal animal from one that shares our homes and soothes our souls? Perceptions, social standards, and legal boundaries regarding which animals are suitable to be companions vary across the globe, as well as across regions within single countries, but these mores and affects are seldom based on scientific facts. Factors ranging from historical events to perceived trainability or ferocity, to media portrayals, to cuteness impact our willingness to embrace some animals as companions as well as our propensity to exclude other animals from our homes and hearts. Through speaking with many animal lovers in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA, this chapter explores the ways in which some of the Western world sorts its pests from its pets, and brings into focus some of the arbitrary forces that conspire to change our human views of other animals, and our human behaviors toward them, in ways that are beneficial, and detrimental, to ourselves and to other species.
First, I must confess to some bias in who was chosen to be interviewed. The caretakers that this chapter portrays are meant to represent many different parts of the Western world, and to share many commonalities with each other, and with the reader. Everyone interviewed had at least some college experience, and many had higher degrees. They all had pets at the time of the interview, and most grew up with a variety of companion animals. A great many of them were active conservationists or animal researchers, with experience in shelters, zoos, sanctuaries, and parks. So, this chapter does not portray a viewpoint that might be derived from farm and ranch owners, who, for example, rely on domestic dogs as work partners, and find themselves in conflict with wolves, coyotes, or dingoes. Nor does this chapter reveal the viewpoint of active hunters or trappers whose livelihoods depend on meats and other animal products. Likewise, the views of city and county officers directly involved in animal control or animal crime have not been directly addressed. Similarly, this chapter does not portray the viewpoint of anyone who is involved in circus work or other animal-based entertainment industries, such as Sea World. Lastly, no one who shows pets or professionally breeds animals for show or retail distribution purposes is well represented here. Rather, the present focus is on the average, working, educated, animal lover who has pets and enjoys companion animals—people who are not necessarily professionally involved with animals, but who come home at night to pets and willingly shoulder a basic responsibility for their well-being, who hire an occasional pet sitter, who remember to play frisbee with the dog, who buy catnip for the cat and rock formations for the fish, who clean the bird-cage and the bunny hutch, and who bring their dinner leftovers out to the goat or the llama, all just because they enjoy the animals’ companionship—this is the population providing the foundation for this chapter.
The nationalities of the human companions and caretakers featured here are robustly Anglo-Saxon—the two Israeli representatives have both lived and worked for most of their lives in the USA or UK, or both.
Reigning Cats and Dogs?
In Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, the USA, and the UK, dogs and cats are the most popular companion animals. The USA provided a clear example: as of 2012, over 43 million US households were home to 70 million domestic dogs, and over 36 million US households housed 74 million cats (American Veterinary Medical Association [AVMA] 2012). In 2014, the UK boasted 9 million dogs and 8 million cats (Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association 2014); New Zealand hosted more than 1.4 million cats and 700,000 dogs (New Zealand Companion Animal Council 2011). In 2013, Australians provided homes to 4.2 million dogs and 3.3 million cats (data provided by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; RSPCA Australia 2013) and, while statistics were a bit more difficult to unearth, one source called HebrewPedia indicates that contemporary Israel provides homes to roughly 200,000 cats and 350,000 dogs (“Pets in Israel” n.d.).
However, this image of cats and dogs as the royalty of the house pet contingent is distorted by the variety in our definitions of what “companion animals” means. For the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), perhaps surprisingly, companion animals are named as only “dogs,” “cats,” “birds,” and “horses” (AVMA 2012). All other animals are listed by AVMA as “Specialty and Exotic,” and so, fish, despite boasting a legion of pets whose numbers approximate 95.5 million in the USA (Statista 2015) and 23 million in the UK (RSPCA Australia 2013)—swimming quietly but victoriously, especially in urban locations where space is at a premium—fail to receive recognition for occupying the number one spot for the most popular pet. Why? While the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) lists “dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, ferrets, birds, guinea pigs and select other small mammals, small reptiles and fish … [and] domestic-bred farm animals” as companion animals (ASPCA n.d.), surveys in the USA tend to follow AVMA rather than ASPCA guidelines. The reasons for this will be explored in the next section, after a variety of definitions of “companion animal” have been discussed.
Here, the first cultural difference emerges. The RSPCA does not provide a list of companion animals, but defines them simply as any creature belonging to a species such that the needs of that species (diet, environment, normal behavior patterns, interaction [or lack of interaction] with conspecifics, freedom from pain, suffering, injury, and disease) can be met by the owner (RSPCA 2014). In contrast, “wild” animals are those that are “living free” or those “that have become largely feral.” It seems that “wild” animals could become “companion animals” at any time, depending on the relative knowledge, capability, and resources of the potential owner. One major feature of the RSPCA’s animal welfare policies is the prominence of the needs of the animal as the definitive condition of pet ownership. And yet, as broad as this definition is, when examples of companion animals are mentioned in RSPCA policy, dogs are mentioned more than any other animal, showing that while the RSPCA prefers to keep the definition of “companion animal” flexible, it recognizes the popularity of dogs in the UK. Similarly, RSPCA Australia (2013) does not define companion animals, but simply addresses owners with guidelines for adoption, care, and meeting the needs of the animal.
The New Zealand Companion Animal Council (2011) also keeps its definition broad, allowing any animal to be a companion animal if it in fact “shares a living environment and relationship with humans” (p. 3). Essential features of a companion animal for NZCAC are “with whom interaction and/or companionship is enjoyed by humans” and “where a responsible guardianship is established and accepted for their welfare by humans,” thus balancing human desires and animal needs.
Israel’s official definition of, and protocols for, the keeping of companion animals did not emerge, even after extensive searching. Documents from Israel’s SPCA, and from letlive.org.il, are not currently available in English. While these organizations clearly advocate for the adoption and care of animals, they do not seem to offer a definition of “companion animal.” This in itself may have cultural foundations, discussed at the end of this chapter.
Factors That Make Animals into Companions
Why, especially given such broad definitions from so many animal welfare organizations, do we love our cats and dogs so publicly and forget our aquarium fish? Why are the same animals feared, loathed, or shunned in some countries and favored and coddled in others? Interviews with a variety of human guardians will help to shed some light on cultural foundations of animal companionship. Factors that influence our cultural preferences range from stories in the media to portrayals of animals in literature and film. Also, religious principles, traditions, and practices lead diverse peoples to embrace some animals and shun others, and nationalistic identification with certain animals serves to reinforce and reflect our notions of some animals as desirable and others as less so. Compounding factors include the demands and constraints of urban life, the need for animals to be able to adapt to human settings, and human needs for convenience. All of these elements converge in a mélange of beliefs and lore that determines which animals will be our best friends and which we will make illegal or deem unwanted.
Animal caretakers from all the mentioned countries almost universally claimed that they love dogs and cats because of their cuteness, their willingness to cuddle with and respond to us, and our ability to anthropomorphize them. We love the emotional similarities between ourselves and our medium-sized furry mammals: the intimate eye contact, the ventral-ventral hugging, and the simple, reciprocal social interactions that take place between us. Other assets of dogs and cats included their perceived cleanliness as well as their soft fur and good looks. And, fairly universally, people listed specific attributes as “undesirable,” and as features that would disqualify an animal from being a companion: being dirty, slimy, poisonous, frightening, dangerous, utterly useless, or weird, that is, unrelatable or unempathetic. Examples of “undesirable” animals ranged from reptiles and amphibians to muntjacs to plague-bearing rats and large, ferocious dogs. But the specific categorization of animal species as “clean” or “dirty,” “relatable” or “weird,” “cooperative” or “nuisance” varied widely across different people and different lands.
Those who ventured beyond cats and dogs when mentioning their favorite animals still reliably used these central features in their search for ideal companion animals. For example, hyenas were described by one rather unconventional American (a hyena researcher) as the “ideal pet,” for very conventional reasons: they are social, clean, fluffy, cute, and cuddly, and obey hierarchies; because they fit into a structured society in the wild, they would be theoretically easy to train and keep. (Compare this American’s viewpoint to the one highlighted on the popular American television show “Animal Planet,” in which a hyena puppy is listed as one of the “top ten fatal attractions”—destroying his adoptive owner’s apartment in days, keeping the owner awake at night with incessant babbling and laughter, and manifesting destructive behaviors that seemed to reveal it to be both violent and untrainable; cf. Tiley and Hawkins 2011.)
The same interviewee claimed that lions would be horrendous companion animals, as they are lazy, dirty, and attract flies. The features of desirable and undesirable animals are simply applied to unusual cases. Notice that the description of “desirable” is applied to lions in the famous case of Christian the Lion (Bourke et al. 2010). Adopted by Bourke and Rendall in 1969, the lion cub quickly became too large to keep in a London apartment. While his owners made arrangements for Christian to inhabit a larger space and exercise regularly, keeping him in captivity became very difficult and Bourke and Rendall agreed to release Christian into the wild. In 1971 and in 1973, the previous owners visited Christian in Kenya, and on both occasions, Christian remembered his human “parents” and rushed to see them, “hugging” them in lion fashion, and even introducing female wild lions in his new pride to his previous human owners. The publicized story of Christian the lion pervades American culture, with Christian as the ventral-ventral, human-hugging, beautiful, sweet, clean “child” who remembers and loves his human parents—and as a result, Americans will often foolishly claim that lions would make wonderful pets, akin to large kitty cats.
Another American noted that her compatriots have positive views of specific animals because they have been portrayed by Disney stories as friendly, helpful, empathetic, brave, and trustworthy, and others are disliked because they have been associated with villains in these same stories. Disney’s portrayals also reveal the American divide over felines—are cats sneaky and mean, or loving and friendly? Lions in The Lion King are both demonized and beloved; the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp are snide and se...