What is it that distinguishes humans from other animals? The default answer nowadays is tediously misanthropic, but a more interesting distinction is that humans keep pets. Why this should be is the subject of this book. Jacky Colliss Harvey investigates the men and women who have owned, doted on, and in some cases mistreated their pets, in literature, painting, the movies and history. This begins 26,000 years ago, when a boy and his dog went exploring in bear caves in the south of France. The evidence was discovered in petrified tracks at Chauvet in the Ardèche in 1994.
Harvey has a scholar’s aspiration and she is tremendously erudite, ranging far and wide, from Jacques Derrida (‘The animal looks at us and we are naked before it’) to John Wick (an action movie starring Keanu Reeves, who visits terrible vengeance on the villains who have killed his dog), half-answering questions about why exactly we have pets.
What is their evolutionary purpose? Do we keep them because we have egos, and like to command? Is it that they bond us to one another? Are pets an antidote to our exploitation of animals? Or, conversely, does keeping an animal reinforce our sense of being masters of nature? Is it because they make us laugh? Perhaps they are merely a kind of accessory? (Cora Pearl, the notorious Parisian courtesan, dyed her dog blue to match a blue dress.) Or, as the poet Christopher Smart had it, was his cat Jeoffrey, ‘an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon’?
And what is a pet anyway? The word is difficult to define. It comes from northern Britain, and originally meant ‘lamb’. The OED gives us ‘an animal kept for pleasure or companionship’, which is accurate but vague.
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