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Pet Lovers Make Lousy Human Beings
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.” — Mark Twain.
From the NYPost: Humans love dogs more than other people: study.
Two major studies showed that mankind has more empathy for pooches in dire circumstances than suffering people, according to a report in the Times of London.
A UK medical research charity staged two phony donation campaigns — one for a dog and the other featuring a man. Of course, the pooch drew more contributions.
“Would you give 5 pounds to save Harrison from a slow, painful death?” the separate ads said, featuring a canine and human “Harrison.”
Then a Northeastern University study showed that only a baby human could compete with man’s best friend.
Students were shown fake newspaper clippings about a baseball-bat attack on a puppy, an adult dog, a year-old infant and a 30-year-old adult. They were asked questions to gauge their empathy and the adult finished last in sympathy.
“Respondents were significantly less distressed when adult humans were victimized, in comparison with human babies, puppies and adult dogs,” according to Northeastern researchers. “Only relative to the infant victim did the adult dog receive lower scores of empathy.”
I’ve heard similar sentiments from talk radio listeners and alleged conservatives for years. And as everyone who listened to my rant on today’s podcast knows, I find this sentiment horrifying.
Look, I’m more misanthropic than the average person, and I get Mark Twain’s point–just as I laugh at the great line about W.C. Fields: “Anyone who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.”
But if, in fact, you really do hate dogs and babies, there’s something wrong with you. And if you really would give your last $5 to alleviate the suffering of an animal and leave one of your fellow human beings in pain…you are a lousy “fellow human being.”
There’s a name for people who can’t tell the difference between animals and humans: “Children.” (Or sociopaths. But I repeat myself.) Children think that doggies can talk and kitties like to watch TV when the people aren’t home.
Grown-ups understand that animals are just animals. The idiotic comment I’ve heard a million times about how “animals are innocent, while people are evil” is an embarrassingly juvenile argument. Animals aren’t evil or good, because animals can’t make moral judgments. They don’t make decisions. They live on instinct and training. Humans are human because we can make choices, we can choose self-sacrifice, we can show compassion to, among other things, dumb animals.
No, your pet is not your child. No, your dog is not your “fur baby.” No, your cat cannot say “Mama.” (I actually had this argument with a grown woman in Charleston, SC) No, no, no.
If this were an isolated trend, I’d shrug and move on. But it’s not. It’s part of an overall movement towards a more juvenile society. When 20-something men and women use the verb “adulting” to talk about the (formerly) everyday behavior of 20-somethings, there’s a problem. When a record number of 18-35 year olds are still living with mom and dad, that’s a problem. And when apparent adults have the same attitudes about animals as the target audience of animated Disney movies…
There is nothing wrong with loving people more than animals. There is something wrong with loving animals more than people. The fact that I have to type that sentence is frightening.
Published in Culture
It would – in my view – make sense to say, “young children are innocent, while adults have reason to feel guilty.” Like animals, they can’t make moral judgments, but unlike animals they will. They’re the exemplars of what it is to be innocent – those who have not yet done wrong.
Why do I bother to mention something so patently obvious? Because it seems to me the ‘fur baby’ idea has become popular as large numbers of adults have been choosing not to become parents.
Earlier this week somebody dumped a momma dog, two puppies and presumably the poppa next door to us.
The mother was a pit bull barely young enough to breed. Poppa was young also, I think a blue heeler. He had a nylon cord around his neck and was terrified of me. The mother wanted me to stay away and was just covered with ticks. Both were severely malnourished – it was easy to count ribs and vertebrae, and the outlines of their pelvis was evident. The two puppies had mange. We made friends over the course of two days with frequent food and water. They have now been taken to a shelter.
Dogs may be just animals, but I do not understand what sort of person would do this. And I wonder if they would have cared that they dumped these dogs at the home of an elderly lady living alone because she lost her husband earlier this year, and that is wobbly on her feet.
Amen to that.
This is the least surprising “study” ever. I’ve noticed this growing trend for years. I remember asking a lefty several years ago, “If a runaway bus was bearing down on a baby or a puppy, and you could only pull one of them out of the way, which one would you save,” . . . and the response was “It depends.”
I blew a gasket.
That was probably 20 years ago, and I see no general change in society since then.
I was going to compose a post about this same study, but you beat me to it. (Or saved me the effort. Thanks.)
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9361caea-c29e-46a7-985e-33b78d52adb9
“Fur babies” indeed. It’s easy to love your dog – or in the case of some of my FB friends – your horse. Sure they are always happy to see you – they don’t have bad days and they have no challenges in their life.
I’ve been railing against some stupid ad on the radio lately about not abandoning your pet in the case of a natural disaster. Sorry dogs but there are a lot of people who are in front of you to get a ride in my car if disaster strikes.
I have two adorable grand daughters and I really try to not talk about them all the time. I wish my friends would make the same effort about their pets. One particular couple actually pull out their phones to show me pictures.
There have been many dogs in my life and my life was made better for them. But I have more important things to talk about than your dog.
I don’t think dogs are just animals. Basically we’ve bred domestic dogs to accept humans in a role comparable to the pack mates of wolves.
If we’re collectively responsible for reshaping their natural instincts so that they will do something unnatural: view members of another species as their kin – then the humans they develop such relationships with have an ethical responsibility to them.
Certainly, our obligations to them are not of the same profound moral importance as our responsibilities to humans – but I think they’re real obligations that we don’t have to other animals.
Cats, on the other hand, they really are just animals.
How someone treats animals says something about him. We’ve known that serial killers tend to have abused animals as children (future serial killers also tend to be arsonists and unusually late bed-wetters, but that’s another post). The impulse to treat animals well and make them fur babies stems from something good: a desire to love. And because love is often a slow growing plant, we should be careful about uprooting it harshly.
But too much love for animals seems to be a trend among the childless and the empty nesters. It’s a sign that people have love to give that has nowhere to go, no person to lavish it on. That’s a more difficult problem to solve.
And since I’m in a quoting mood, and since you started with Mark Twain, I’ll close with some more of his canine related thoughts:
Also:
I had a joke in my standup that in Los Angeles, if you own a dog and your house catches fire, there’s a 50/50 chance at best you’re the one that gets rescued first
The odds are much greater the adult human deserved the beating.
This is true, however I don’t think the experiment was set up as a direct comparison or choice between the two. It wasn’t “donate to this dog or this human.” It was two different ads shown to different groups of people, then they measured the positive response. It’s possible there are still people who, confronted with an either/or donation, would choose the animal–but I think it would be fewer.
Please provide the empirical evidence that the average human is more deserving of empathy than a dog is.
(And I don’t even like dogs.)
The conservative war on pets is a great strategy for reaching young people.
I’d care more about this post if it was written by the cute young pups I just saw on Facebook.
This is exactly correct. Dogs are what they are because of us. In a way we created them.
In any case you can’t help who you love. Criticizing the fact that people love dogs like other people is pointless. The original poster obviously has never loved a dog. If I had to make split second decision to save the life of either an adult human or a dog, I’d choose the human of course. But I wouldn’t like it.
I clicked through to the article but couldn’t find links to the actual studies. I’d be interested to see what the percentages were and number of participants. I read a book once titled You Are Not So Smart, which was a really interesting discussion of how not everything we think we instinctively know is actually so. But I had a big beef with how they cited studies—social sciences studies are problematic anyway, but the authors would cite studies in such a way that validated their viewpoint even if only a plurality of participants behaved in ways that bolstered their arguments. I kept wondering, what about everyone else? How did they act? Why did such large percentages behave differently? For me it just goes to show that people do NOT all behave the same way and that studies only help you make general guesses about populations. Multiple factors—upbringing, education, social mores, religion, heredity, health—will play into a person’s initial instincts, what they say they believe, and what they’ll ultimately do in spite of or because of those two things.
Sociopathy is currently defined by the DSM as being unable to care about people or animals. Neurotypical children care but often they care about the wrong things. They are more like Democrats than sociopaths.
Every so often Dennis Prager does an informal survey about whether a person would save a stranger or their dog. (At least he used to) His findings were pretty much the same each time: 30% would save the stranger; 30% would save their dog; 30% didn’t know.
The results saddened him as there are so many who don’t seem to value human life – about 60%.
Gotta run – have something on the stove. I’ll search to see if I can get more info by him on this…
Here’s a piece Prager wrote for IBD just recently – 10/10/17 – on saving a stranger or one’s pet.
https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/who-would-you-save-your-dog-or-a-stranger-dennis-prager
From reading the survey in the original post, it doesn’t make clear that the respondents would actually let a human die over an animal, only that they have more empathy for the animal (or babies).
CS Lewis I think once pointed out that an animal’s lack of a soul is actually an argument for not being cruel to them. Because if they have no soul, their suffering is perhaps meaningless. They don’t understand their suffering and thus can’t give any meaning to it.
The same could be said of babies. So this survey really just points out the obvious, namely that people have more empathy for a baby or animal who is suffering than an adult human because the adult human can put his or her suffering in some kind of meaningful context. Maybe people also realize adults aren’t innocent like babies and animals. So the response to the survey is perfectly understandable and not a sign of the end of civilization.
This is a perfectly understandable result. What the dog and baby have in common, and the adult man lacks, is helplessness. Adults are supposed to take responsibility for themselves. That’s not to say adults don’t deserve help, but it’s reasonable to suspect they deserve less help than the helpless.
I figured conservatives would appreciate the individual responsibility angle.
@fredcole – call your office. :)
Michael, I’m not going to read all the comments but I love your podcasts, except these anti-dog tirades. You’re the one who sounds like a psychopath when you go on them. Dogs are innocent, loving, and relatively helpless. It’s entirely normal that we respond with empathy to such a creature in distress. And a couple of silly “studies” posing utterly unrealistic Sophie’s Choices between saving a puppy being tortured and saving a baby being tortured, or whatever, don’t produce meaningful information. The only thing I hear when you go on these tirades is that the suffering puppy doesn’t move you. In a word, yuck.
By the way, yes, I said “loving.” I don’t mean to suggest that canine emotions map exactly to human ones. No doubt they don’t. But anybody who claims that dogs are emotionless automatons whose actions are driven by nothing but an instinct for food and sex (your words on the podcast) has obviously never lived with one.
If I had to choose between a dog and a human, I’d of course choose the human.
But make no mistake, after we were out of the fire/flood/whatever, I’d snatch that human up and say you better make this shit worth it.
We just discussed this at work in reference to a PTA group looking to gather blankets for shelter dogs. Why dogs when there’s homeless people?
I’ll put myself in the camp help dogs and not the homeless camp. Dogs can’t help themselves and had no agency in their current situation. Human’s to some extent do.
Also dogs are way cuter than homeless people.
That was my reaction. Helplessness and lack of comprehension. You hear an adult male was attacked with a baseball bat, you know that’s the lede in the story. Why? Random? Domestic? The sentence “police will not comment on speculation that the attack was a result of the man being accused of abusing children in the neighborhood” changes the equation, as does “it was the latest in a series of assaults along a popular walking path.” You want details.
There are no details required to understand the dynamic of a human beating a puppy with a bat.
That said, yes, the “fur child” business is tiresome, and the term “adulting” makes me grind my molars down to the nerve endings. But dogs are not mechanistic automatons, and there is something wonderful in respecting the bond we made long ago with the wolves who came up to the edge of the camp, and threw their lot in with us. Yes, people matter more than dogs – but the next sentence has to be “but dogs – Dogs matter so much.”
What conservative war on pets?
I’d move them into second place behind other humans. Of all the animals, we’ve been a team the longest and it’s wonderful.
Beat me to it.
There is nothing “anti-dog” about understanding that they’re just animals and human lives are more precious. There’s nothing “anti-dog” about biology, and dogs do not “love” anymore than dogs “hate” or “covet” or “seek revenge.” Dogs are great. They’re fun. I’m sitting next to little Hans Blix (shih tzu/cav spaniel mix) right now.
But he’s a dog, and every time he licks his [redacted], he reminds me of that fact.
You can’t have nuance and the title chosen for this post.