Would Dogs Be Better Off Without Us?
From The Observatory
Source: Earth Food Life Project
A thought experiment tells us a lot about man’s best friend—and ourselves.
.jpg)
This adapted excerpt is from A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans, by Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff (Princeton University Press, 2021). It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) by permission of Princeton University Press. This web adaptation was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
“Would Dogs Be Better Off Without Us?” by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.
Introduction
Would dogs be better off without us? This may be a difficult question to consider if you live with a dog, love dogs, and find beauty in the enduring loyalty of the human-dog partnership. If you are reading this, with a dog curled up next to you on the couch, this question might be too painful to contemplate: Would my dog survive without me to keep them safe? Yet try to imagine for a few moments not only what your dog might lose, but also what they might gain by having the world to themselves. Consider the dogs who will come after the transition, having never known life with humans. Perhaps those dogs would have had a more prosperous future on a planet where they didn’t have to share it with people had the 20,000-or-so-year-long domestication experiment never occurred.
Dogs would be challenged by living on their own in a posthuman world, but it would be full of “dog possibilities”—the various ways in which dogs would adapt, innovate, and expand their experience. We’ve seen that there is far more to the lives of dogs than being a house pet. A dog’s world is a bustling place, where they work both independently and with others to solve the puzzle of survival and reap the rewards of life.
If humans disappeared, dogs would experience some immediate gains and losses, such as the loss of human food subsidies and the gain of freedom from physical constraint. Still, the effects of human disappearance would reverberate and shift over generations.
Physical Gains and Losses
Dogs will lose some of the key perks of being our companions: a steady supply of nutritious food, fresh, clean water, soft bedding, and shelter from the elements. They will lose access to a range of beneficial veterinary care, including vaccinations, disease and pain management, wound care, antibiotics, grooming, and parasite control.
Some significant gains would counter these losses. Humans are the leading cause of mortality in dogs, through a combination of deliberate extermination of dogs in parts of the world where rabies is a serious problem, along with car accidents and the “kind-hearted” killing of dogs in parts of the world where dogs without human homes are considered “homeless” and are not allowed to live on their own without a human “owner.”
Dogs would no longer be prey to human cruelty and exploitation. They would no longer be tortured in laboratory research facilities. Female dogs would no longer be forced into the role of breeding machines. Dogs also would be free from human sexual abuse, free from participation in sports such as fighting and racing, and free from the extreme forms of physical abuse often inflicted on dogs by humans. Dogs would no longer be raised and sold as meat. The various instances of cruelty inflicted by humans are not rare or isolated but rather a common occurrence. These are experienced by millions of dogs every day.
Social Gains and Losses
Dogs have a lot more to gain than lose in the “social” category. They would suddenly be free to interact with other dogs, something that is difficult for most homed dogs and which may also be constrained in free-ranging dogs. Dogs would be able to form friendships, establish alliances, and utilize their full repertoire of communicative and social behaviors. And after a posthuman transition period, all dogs would be reproductively intact and would be able to experience the range of sexual and parental behaviors. Because humans may select for specific behavioral phenotypes—for example, bold, friendly, outgoing—when humans aren’t around, a broad spectrum of behavioral profiles will be expressed among populations of dogs.
Perhaps the most significant social loss for dogs may be the dissolution of the bond that has evolved throughout the process of their coevolution with humans. Domestication has shaped the social behavior of dogs in multiple ways—think of the range of human-directed behaviors in dogs, such as the oxytocin-feedback loop (a positive feedback loop in which the release of oxytocin stimulates actions that release still more oxytocin, so that everybody feels the love), gaze-sharing and gaze-following, and the exquisite attunement of dogs to human emotional cues, such as facial expressions. Dogs are evolutionarily heavily invested in humans. Can dogs cash out this substantial investment into their relationships with one another?
Psychological Gains and Losses
Humans now strongly influence the psychological state of many, perhaps most, dogs around the world, both for better and for worse. We protect dogs from some of the stresses and fears they might experience if they were fending for themselves, such as fear of predators and the stress of unpredictable meals and environments. In many instances, we also provide the comfort of having a trusted companion. Yet humans also terrorize dogs: Feral and free-ranging dogs are often hunted down and killed. We impose profound psychological suffering on dogs who are held in puppy mills, research laboratories, dog-fighting operations, and other intensively captive settings. Even homed dogs are confronted with a range of psychological challenges, such as our unpredictable comings and goings, our overpressuring them to perform, our tendency to miscommunicate, our frequent and often confusing punishments, and our unhealthy emotional codependency.
Dystopia, Utopia, or Dogtopia?
Dogs might be better off without us. The list of potential gains is considerably longer than the list of losses. Most losses are replaceable. Nutritious food, water, and shelter can be found in nature. Friendship can be found in the pack. Toys would be unnecessary if dogs weren’t forced to spend all day indoors.
What is the ‘best possible life’ for a dog? It is relatively easy to come up with scenarios—both present and future—that seem awful for dogs. It is much harder to try to construct an imaginary world in which dogs have everything they need to be happy. What might a dog utopia—a “Dogtopia”—look like? For posthuman dogs, the sky is the limit.
==Editor’s Note:== For more about the book, see “Science and Speculation Say Dogs Would Do Well Without Us” (Psychology Today, October 21, 2021) by co-author Marc Bekoff and “Who Would Dogs Become without Us in Their Lives?” (Aeon Magazine) by Jessica Pierce. For a deeper dive into many of the topics addressed in the book, please visit Dr. Pierce’s blog, All Dogs Go To Heaven, and Dr. Bekoff’s blog, Animal Emotions.
