On Pets

"If dogs could talk, it would take a lot of fun out of owning one."

Andy Rooney

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I have always been puzzled by this idea of pets! Really, I just fail to understand the whole concept. Now, before I say anything further, let me declare that I have nothing against animals. I am against cruelty to animals and also protest indiscriminate and irresponsible animal testing. A nature lover, an "environmentalist" for life with two postgrad degrees and loads of publications, academic and journalistic on the subject, I have even had a short stint volunteering with the RSPCA when I was studying abroad. I don't hate animals or anything, to be clear. Although I don't hate them, I don't really love forcibly domesticated animals---pets--either. I do love them in the wild, for sure. Nothing is as awe inspiring as an eagle in flight, or nothing is more inspiring than a sprinting big cat, especially the cheetah: oh, the sheer beauty and grace of the elegant form in motion! So, it's not the hatred of animals; it's just that I find this thoroughly modern idea of "pets" very odd, even bizarre!

When I was studying and working in the UK, I used to do my grocery at a local supermarket, a Tesco. Often, at the cash register, I would be behind an old lady who had a small dog, an ugly and sad looking pug. This woman, who was not as ugly as that little, fat creature, would shop for both herself and her pet. Her items: a loaf of sliced bread, a pack of sliced cheese and some cucumbers. Her dog's food: two shiny, big packets and an assortment of small boxes and fancy bars of dog food. After a few weeks, I figured out that she was paying at least double for the food for that dirty-looking pug than for the food she bought for herself. Or perhaps it was even more than that. I often wondered then and would ask myself, "Would I do such a thing for an animal? Would I invest so much, especially emotionally, in a four-legged creature than in a two-legged one?" And, so on. I always felt sorry for both of them, the not-so-ugly lonely looking old lady and the visibly obese, lazy-looking, ugly pug.

 
Recently, I had an argument with an old female acquaintance, a "spinster", as we would call such persons when I was learning the English language for the first time (one has to re-learn the English language every few years now!). A dedicated progressive, a head-to-toe modern, an evolutionist to the last bone and muscle in her body---you know, the culturally unmoored and deracinated type that has to borrow the very conceptual categories in order to understand her own self, history, culture, religion and civilization---one of her cats had either died in an accident or had disappeared somewhere, so I was trying to comfort her and in the middle of my comforting, I said something similar to what I am saying here, about the modern concept of pets. She didn't like it, and, in turn, started lecturing me on the benefits of owning pets and why modern pet owners are superior, more "civilized" beings because they "care", "love" and are "sensitive", and thereafter she went into a full-scale, full-blown virtue signaling mode as is the custom on social media these days. So predictable. Obviously, I responded, however humbly I could, and then I got "cancelled"!

 
In the modern west, where she lives now and she has imbibed wholesale---hook, line and sinker---the worst aspects of the secular post(modern)culture there, something that unthinking and psychologically swamped 'desi' people with many kinds of inferiority complexes often do (non-Westerners from this part of the world who have made the modern west their home because of whatever reasons), "people are so kind to animals that they actually take better care of their pets than of themselves" she informed me (oh yeah, I thought of the old lady with the horrible pug). "Pets are so terribly important that were it not for pets, people would not even say hello to one another while walking their dogs or playing with their pets outside...they would not make friends with neighbors, with other people". And loads of similar undigested fluff. I thought of sharing these "insights" with my savage psychoanalyst friend Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki and to get his take on them, his "reverse anthropological" reading of the cat lady's arguments. He never fails to oblige, so he quickly wrote back:

"The often lonely and anomie-stricken moderns with their shrunken souls like and love pets because the poor creatures---the forcibly domesticated animals---don't talk back! That is one of the most important reasons for keeping pets. This strange, even pathological, concept has not much to do with the poor animals who are basically the passive victims in the relationship; the problem is with the reductionist, pathological idea and reality of the modern self, the owners of these pets. Let me elaborate.
The sad fact that people are now either totally incapable to connect in any meaningful way with others, with their neighbors, relatives and strangers is because community has died, community has been murdered by the obscene consumerist, hedonistic individualism in the modern world. That is why pets are now needed by human beings to actually say "hello" to one another. And that is not something to be proud of, but is actually a lamentable, pitiable situation. Someone like Sartre's prognosis that "the other is hell" has become true. Everybody, especially the young---the millennials, the iGen/GenZ and God knows what follows them---seem now terribly afraid to "invest" in human relationships because of this very fear; cute, little animals and even virtual toys are their safest bet: light, burdenless, convenient, disposable--"the bearable lightness of being" alone with a toy, to give a spin to Milan Kundera's famous postmodern notion. Observe how an image of an injured or dead pet sends traumatic shock waves in them, but the mutilated body of a child in Gaza or elsewhere registers nothing of that sort. There is something terribly wrong there: misplaced empathy, lack of empathy. I am not saying that there should be empathy for one and not for the other situation, but am surprised at the tragic anomaly, the disproportion. It's sickening, really.

 
"As the traditional family structure comes under more brutal assault by the forces of secular-modernity, in particular by the "trans-" or what the comedian Dave Chappelle once called "the alphabet people", and with all the hype surrounding transhumanism and AI, traditional notions of human relationships will further degrade and pets, real toys, virtual toys and other similar paraphernalia will quickly become alternatives to fill the vacuum. To a certain degree, this has already happened."

Continues the wise Sardar: "Just like you [yours truly, that is], I also grew up in a house with a big, wide backyard where we kept all sorts of animals, from cows and buffaloes to chicks and ducklings. We had cats, goats, sheep, dogs, pheasants, parrots, doves, canaries, and even fish and much more. But we had no "pets" in the modern sense of that concept. The animals had functions to serve; they were often sources of milk, eggs, ghee, butter, cheese and even meat at times. And sometimes they did not serve any of those functions at all. We played with them, we loved them and took care of them, but they were certainly not "pets", definitely not extensions of our one-dimensional self/ego. For example, we had no need at all for these animals to become mediators or intercessors for our relationships with our neighbors, relatives or even strangers. No, there was no such concept and, in fact, that would be considered very odd, if not contemptible. There was always a strong community and human relationships, whatever they were in essence and however they were formed and nurtured, they were not animal-centered or "pet-centered". There were a million other reasons for people to interact with others, to say hello to one another, to ask after each other's health and to make friends. The "other" was not "hell" then; the other was an essential part of the healthy self and without the other---the neighbor, the relative, the stranger---the truncated and reduced self was considered to be hell, was hellish! The animals did not talk back then, too, but the owners understood them and catered to their needs better then. How could they not? The religion and religious culture required them to be mindful of their needs. The Prophet of Islam (pbuh) loved cats and his treatment of animals is the ideal model for all Muslims, his sunnah; the very first and original animal clinics and shelters were, after all, established by Muslims in the Middle Ages, all of whom were enlightened beings without this modern concept of the "pet"! The concept of "hima" in Islam makes it a farz (obligatory, duty) for a Muslim to be kind and merciful towards all of God's non-human creation too, smaller and weaker animals in particular. That many Muslims around the world don't do any such thing, and who have often forgotten all these noble principles of their faith, is another sad and tragic story, indeed. But did people then hate their animals? Not at all. People took care of them, but since they were not "pets", the animals did not sleep with them in their beds, did not sit with them on their carpets and sofas nor ate with them at their dinner tables. The point is, one does not have to subscribe to this modern notion of the "pet" in order to be kind to animals, to love them and care for them. In fact, as a reverse anthropologist, I would go as far as to say that one must shun this whole modern idea of the "pet" altogether so that one can truly love God's animal creation. That would be a healthy thing to do, because then it would mean, among other things, that the "self" has been healed back into a wholesome and integral state. Wallahu Alam."