Simon Garfield: We Are Denying Dogs Their Dogness

The humanization of dogs: from strollers to popcorn at the cinema

When did the dog stop being a dog? This question isn't posed by an indignant neighbor at the bakery, but by Simon Garfield (London, 1960), bestselling author on typography and correspondence history, in "Dog Love," the book Taurus published in Spain in June 2023 and dedicated "to all the dogs we love." His thesis is uncomfortable: affection for pets has gone so far that we are denying their animal condition. The humanization of dogs, he argues, is no longer a few people's eccentricity; it is the norm.

Garfield is not suspected of hating animals. He wrote the book nearly four years before it reached Spanish bookstores, when his dog Ludo was still alive and it was normal to type with the animal sniffing his shoes. He accepted the commission, he confesses, because refusing would have been as absurd as "stopping writing about love." What motivated him was something else: finding out how far we have stretched this coexistence and what we have broken along the way.

What is the humanization of dogs?

Dressing them in coats and hats or taking them to the cinema. The problem, according to the author, is not loving them: it is imposing exclusively human habits; the debate also includes examples like seating them at the table or putting them in baby strollers. "If everything humans do can be done by dogs, we are denying their dogness," he summarizes. The formula is simple and allows little rebuttal: there are already enough humans acting like humans.

He finds a dog wearing clothes, in his words, "something crazy." What truly worries him is that the scene no longer raises eyebrows. "What has peine is that we have normalized it," he points out. And a normalized habit stops being questioned, which is precisely when it deserves a second look.

Cafés with canine menus and cinemas with dog popcorn

Two specific phenomena left him speechless while documenting the book. The first, the opening of a dog-specific café: not a place that admits them, but one designed for them and their owners, with a canine menu he found "somewhat strange." The second, seeing that there are cinemas where dogs enter with their own portion of popcorn, called pupcorns. "I thought that was also extreme."

These are not isolated anecdotes from an eccentric city, but two cases that, according to the author, show how much the humanization of pets has become normalized.

Instagram and the dog turned into merchandise

Social media bears much of the blame for this drift. The more images seen of dogs dressed up or doing silly things, the more natural it seems to do so with one's own pet. The author does not declare himself an enemy of platforms, but he points out the effect: the weird becomes custom, and custom becomes norm.

There is a greater risk. "With social media, we are treating dogs like manufactured food," he denounces. The animal becomes a product, another piece to extract value from. There are content creators with their adorable pets and trinc counts. A living being turned into a showcase is not affection: it is inventory.

Poodles dancing the can-can in Las Vegas

In 1992, Garfield traveled to Las Vegas as a journalist to cover what experts called the world's best dog show. During the ten minutes the performance lasted, the audience was stunned: the poodles did unusual things. The number ended with the dogs dancing the can-can.

The anecdote speaks not of those animals' capabilities, but of us. "We want them to resemble us more, reinforcing our mutual bond in increasingly absurd and pleasing ways. We won't let a dog just be a dog if it can also be an artist dog, right?" There, probably, lies the whole problem in a single sentence.

Do dogs replace children who aren't had?

This is one argument appearing in the debate. The author's thesis is that owners choose dogs that look like them or directly complete them: if there are no children, they adopt a puppy to fill the void. On this idea, a forum user offers a harsher explanation: that the part of the brain prepared to raise babies settles for an animal that behaves like a baby for almost its entire life.

Against this, some defend the opposite, that the bond is real and not a cheap imitation. "The joy and sadness the dog feels is because it truly loves you and misses you. It is exactly the same feeling humans have," argues one of the repeated positions in the thread, for whom the only difference between species is intelligence level. Others reply that a human family consists exclusively of related humans, and calling the dog family equates to humanizing the animal or dehumanizing the person.

In the middle remains the most common position among dog owners who haven't lost their heads: it is part of the house, but not a person, and it doesn't need disguising to prove it. The discrepancy, ultimately, is not about animals: it is about the word we use to describe what we feel.

Beaches, stores, and strollers: where coexistence clashes

Daily friction occurs in public spaces. It is maintained that across practically the entire Spanish coast, dogs are banned in summer, and every year the same request returns to enable meters of sand, with proposals to open urban beaches adjacent to other already banned ones. The counterweight is not ideological, but practical: the waste found where access is allowed.

Some also complain about seeing them inside hardware stores advertised as pet friendly, dogs in baby strollers, or pets with visors and matching outfits. For one owner, being called "dog dad" is enough to lose patience. And at the health extreme circulates the story of a minor who allegedly contracted a parasitic infection after kissing the animal; it is worth remembering that any doubt about parasite transmission between animals and people should be resolved with a veterinarian or doctor, not heated messages.

Meanwhile, the dog will continue doing what it knows how to do: peeing where allowed and sticking its nose where it shouldn't. With or without a visor.