Love

Tails Over Humans

I love my dogs more than everyone I’ve ever met and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

Author with Millie the day she died | Photo Courtesy of the Author

In 2012, Fiona Apple wrote a letter to her fans cancelling her South American tour because her dog was dying.

I didn’t have to read it to know why the letter was four pages long. There are those of us who get it — and by “it” I mean prioritizing animals over people, over obligations, over travel, over our own health (financial and otherwise), over anything, really — and there are the people who don’t. Fiona, squarely in the first camp of animal lovers, was trying to explain herself to the psychopaths in the second camp.

These two camps have never understood each other. This would be fine, except somehow Team Psycho has pulled a sick party trick, making the animal lovers believe they must constantly explain themselves: why we back out of obligations when our animals are sick, why we don’t spend a month out of town, why we drop thousands of dollars on emergency vet care.

I submit it should be the other way around, but it’s never the other way around because this dynamic is so firmly entrenched in contemporary life. A few days ago I was on the phone with one of the self-admitted psychos, who was tired of hearing my dog Fish bark every time we spoke on the phone. “You’re always stopping our conversation to tell your dog to stop barking,” he said, as if this harmed him in some way. I took this opportunity to share my question: Why are animal lovers always explaining themselves?

“Yeah, and you guys do a really bad job of explaining yourselves,” he said glossing over whether we should even have to. Then he added “I hate dogs,” with no embarrassment whatsoever, as if that statement wasn’t evidence of a severe mental disturbance.

In December I will be 54 years old and I am done explaining myself.

I’m tired of the psycho-party trick, powered by one of those vague cultural assumptions that we all buy into but don’t exactly know why. This particular assumption goes something like this: human connection is good (true, in theory) and therefore any time someone prioritizes an animal over a human they demonstrate that they don’t value human connection (a simplistic, nuance-free take).