On Pets choosing humans

It is the right of every living dog to have a person that thinks they're the greatest animal on Earth. —Sue Sternberg

What is it with human beings and their need to keep pets? Have you ever just sat and thought on that for the odd question it is? I truly wish I could know your knee-jerk reaction to that question. If your mind is like mine, though, it went first to the evolutionary advantage of having pets. Dogs, for example, might protect a tribe from predators while cats may protect them from disease and spoilage caused by vermin like mice or rats. So, smart ancient humans deduced with their evolved brains, "Feed animal, protect human." It only follows, then, to conclude (albeit in error) that people tamed wolves and eventually bred them into dogs.

In fact, there's a growing theory that wolves domesticated themselves:

[...] the current theory on wolf domestication is that wolves domesticated themselves. Wolves that were naturally less fearful of humans would wander into human camps to eat scraps and refuse. Initially, this likely happened at night. Most believe that cooperation between humans and adult wild wolves is highly unlikely, instead it may be that as wolves spent more time around human camps or settlements, interaction between humans and wolves would eventually lead to humans taking wolf pups into their own care and taming them (taming is different from domestication, taming is a process of training an individual animal whereas animal domestication involves using selective breeding to alter the animal population entirely). These tamed wolves would be raised and bred by the humans, and eventually resulted in a domesticated animal. —u/nikstick22

The above helps answer the question I opened with, but obviously this doesn't get us very far. At some point in human history we stopped keeping pets for protection and started keeping them just to... keep them. However you choose to explain it, no one's sleeping better at night because Goldie the goldfish is standing guard over their casa, I'll tell ya that much.

Some of the answer is frustratingly vague, at least to me. There's unfortunately a swath of online chowderheads saying inane things like, "We just like pets, and we don't really know why." But you, dear reader, you can rest assured that after devoting entire minutes of personal time to generic online research I can confidently say that I too am one such online chowderhead. I mean, come on! Does this subject really need more conversation? Shall we gather 'round the ol' horse and give it another good beating for old times' sake? Nay! I mean, Neigh!

Instead we'll use this segment of our un-get-back-able time to bask in the wonderfulness of our pets. Whether your temporary life-traveling companion is a dog, a cat, or a mouse, your pet does more than keep you company. They mirror parts of us that we have a hard time seeing on our own. If we're observant and a bit introspective we, the keepers of the pets, can find health, healing, and maybe even a home of our own through them. As cheesy as that sounds we must accept the fact that while it's true we choose the pets we keep, our pets also play a role in choosing us.

We don't need full understanding to have a full appreciation of a felt experience. And that's what this blog is about: the experience of pets and occasionally their humans. I'm Ben Doyle Gray. I photograph and write about the pets we, as a society, choose to keep.