Tristan: Have you ever thought about how animals became companions to us humans in the first place? Katherine Grier has. She even wrote a book on the subject, titled Pets in America: a History.
A professor in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, Grier also curated a traveling exhibition called “Pets in America: The Story of Our Lives with Animals At Home,” which recently toured the United States. Grier says companion animals have been with us for a long, long time.
Grier: It’s a complicated story because it’s a story about domestication. We know for example that dogs shared living space with people as far back as 12,000 years ago and maybe much further than that. And probably what happened was that people carried infant animals to the fireside and if they survived, and they would feed them, one of the things that they would do was keep the ones that were friendlier and drive away the ones that were less friendly. So what happened was that with dogs, it was almost a form of selective breeding, and you wound up with wolves that began to develop stronger relationships with people and who could live in a cooperative setting with people.
Tristan: Grier says cats were domesticated around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, though neither cats nor dogs were the most popular animals in colonial America.
Grier: Pet keeping was a practice established in Europe at the time when colonists were coming over here, so they brought it with them. One of the most popular practices they carried with them was keeping cage birds. Pet birds aren’t as common today, and one of the reasons they were so popular in the past was they provided the ambient music for the households until really the 20th century, when people had gramophones and then radios. So if you wanted background music in your house, you had a bird in a cage.
One of the things that colonists did was they found there were a lot of American songbirds that made good cage birds like gold finches, and even birds like mockingbirds and robins. So they captured and kept lots of different kinds of indigenous American birds as cage birds for their songs.
Tristan: Though the popularity of songbirds waned as time went on, pet ownership has become increasingly popular in America.
Grier: One of the changes that happened to the practice of pet keeping in the 19th century was that American society in general began to view pets as an integral pet of family life. They were a way to teach children how to be kind and how to teach them responsibility, and the sort of pleasure and interest that animals brought to households was much more widely accepted in the 19th century than it had been in the 18th century.
The groundwork for our modern experience was in place by the late 1800s: you had pet stores, dog food, all kinds of pet supplies, and even the rise of the small-animal veterinarian by the 1880s. So until the last 20 years, what you saw was sort of a gradual expansion of these practices: more animals receiving commercial pet food, more animals receiving medical care, and so on.
In the last 20 years, it seems like Americans have developed a new level of intensity in their relationships that they have with their pet animals. It’s socially approved, for one thing, and people aren’t embarrassed about expressing those kinds of relationships. It’s also true that the demographics of households have changed: people have more money to spend, they have fewer children, there are a lot of Americans who live alone. And there are a lot of couples that have decided not to have children. So in these households, pets can play a really large role in everyday life.
Tristan: The growing multi-billion dollar pet industry is evidence enough of pet popularity in the U.S., but Americans are not the only ones with a fascination for animal companions.
Grier: It also shows up among small-scale societies that you really wouldn’t think of as keeping pets. For example, in the Amazon there are indigenous groups that keep pets. So it’s not something that’s just a function of people having a lot of excess wealth and not knowing what else to do with it so they decide to keep animals.
(brief interlude)
Tristan: Whether you’re in the Amazon or in America, if you have internet access, you can check out our website, angieslistpodcasts.com, where you’ll find a link to the “Pets in America” virtual museum exhibit, and much, much more.
Also, if you have an interesting pet story, contact us on our website or send an email to podcast at angieslist.com. And don’t forget to submit your stories and pictures for our upcoming garden and yard episode!
Until next time, this is Tristan. Thanks for taking the time to list-en!
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