Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.
Well, each year as fireworks light up the sky on the 4th of July, social media also lights up, with angry pet owners pleading against them. On July 5th, ABC10 News in San Diego reported that the local Humane Society had already picked up over 100 stray animals, most of them dogs, frightened away from their homes by the loud explosions. One employee told reporters she anticipated that number to quadruple in the coming days.
Now, the increased concern over how pyrotechnics affects pets is understandable. But it's also partly due to Americans having way more pets than ever before. Since 2023, the number of dogs has increased by over three million. putting the nation's total of domestic canines at over sixty eight million. At the same time, pet medication has become a lucrative medical industry.
The pet supply website Chewy.com lists 10 most common medications for paranoid pups. And according to a 2016 study, 83% of vets prescribed anxiety meds for dogs as a standard part of their practice. And all that, of course, coincides with the explosion of mental health diagnoses and therapy speak among humans. as described, for instance, in Abigail Schreier's book, Bad Therapy.
So it at least must be possible. That some pet owners are projecting their own mental struggles onto their pets. For instance, it's super interesting that liberal political beliefs have been shown to strongly correlate with mental health diagnoses. Is it little surprise then, as noted in The Atlantic, that vet behaviorists are now mostly clustered in liberal areas? Many apparently assume that since their psychiatrist helps them cope with medication, the same can be done for their dogs.
The press, of course, has pounced on this idea in a 2022 New York Times piece entitled Puppies on Prozac. Owners were told how to spot the signs of anxiety and other mental disorders in their pets. The article described undesirable animal behaviors. as mental illness. instead of being a sign of insufficient training.
Now the worldview assumption at work here is that if human emotional and spiritual problems can be solved by a prescription, so can phytos. This all results from a culture that both promotes animals to human-like status and demotes humans to highly evolved animal status. Anthropomorphizing animals causes owners to interpret their behaviors as something more than just instinct or conditioning, and Darwinizing humans has long justified eliminating unwanted people just as we would animal pests. The result is a culture in which both dogs and humans are treated in remarkably similar And remarkably inappropriate ways. And that's why so many more people now refer to their pets as children.
Back in 2023 in The Atlantic, Rose Horrowitz proposed that that might be what's actually driving our animals crazy. As Americans have fewer kids, they begun to think of their pets as children and to act as helicopter fur parents. Animals tend to live longer under these conditions, but they miss out on mental stimulation and interaction with their own species. That might make them anxious or aggressive toward people and other dogs. In short, cramming an animal into a crate in an apartment for hour upon hour each day may not be what's best for them.
More fundamentally, the emotional demands made by increasingly isolated people on pets might be too much for them. Ironically, all of the increased American sentimentality toward pets changed. just may not be good for them. Horowitz's conclusion is that it might be time to reevaluate the way we approach dog ownership.
Well, she's right, but way more important than that. is what all of this says about how we think about humans in our time and culture. Excessive mental health diagnoses, over-medication, epidemic loneliness, and addictions, looking for answers in all the wrong places. All of this speaks to our own deep spiritual confusion. Animals are wonderful.
Our connections with them are real and deep. they cannot fill the human need for human friendship, human love, human solace. And certainly that God shaped hole in all of our hearts will never be filled by a pet. G.K. Chesterton wrote, I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backwards.
We should all do well to remember this, and that we shouldn't be given pets medication for what's in reality. Our own anxieties. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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