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Home PETS

I treated my dog like my baby – it was bad for both of us

by Doggone Well Staff
March 24, 2024
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I treated my dog like my baby – it was bad for both of us
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Standing at the sink doing the washing up, I see our German shorthaired pointer, Percy, lying beside the baby. He is watching her playing on a mat, his muddy nose pressed against her leg. My other daughter is leaning against him reading out jokes from the Ha Ha Bonk Book.

Welcome to my “multispecies family”: two parents, two children and a dog. Our acronym is not as snappy as the “dinkwads” – dual income, no kids and a dog – currently trending on TikTok. It’s more of a mouthful: dual income, two kids and a dog, which I guess makes us “ditkads”?

Percy charged into our lives when my eldest daughter was one. Against all advice (and in secret), we drove to South Wales and loaded an eight-week-old fur cannonball into the back. My daughter was bemused but not excessively interested, preferring her Peppa Pig noise machine instead. Having not thought we would have another child, Percy was intended as a companion – dare I say sibling – for our toddler.

I’m not sure we ever articulated it as such, but this quickly became the reality. We referred to Percy as her “brother” and I babied him in the same way as I had her. To the astonishment of onlookers, I carried him around in the sling for as long as I was able. When he got too big, I put my daughter on a buggy board and strapped Percy into the pushchair. It all felt totally normal. To me. Others thought not.

When a friend asked if we had bought Percy because I didn’t want to have another child, I felt unusually exposed. Reluctantly, I had to admit she had a point; namely, can you baby a dog in the same way as a child? Should you think of your dog as your baby?

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Gen X is not unfamiliar with this conundrum. ONS data released in 2020 shows that 50 per cent of women are childless by their 30th birthday. Typically, we blame the lack of affordable housing, the crisis in childcare, and increased labour market engagement for this fact.

Throw the pandemic into the mix and you have a perfect storm of declining fertility rates. At the same time, there are now 10.2 million dogs in the UK. This number rose as the pandemic took hold.

But do these facts tell the whole story? I suspect that another thread is at work here and, what’s more, that it’s a peculiarly feminine one. In her study Childless Parents and their Animal “Kids”, sociologist Andrea Laurent-Simpson looks at the ways in which “nonhuman” actors – dogs – have changed the face of childlessness altogether allowing a “parent identity” to emerge in childless women that would not otherwise have flourished.

This new identity, namely the woman and dog coupling, has, she argues, changed the face of our cultural understanding of motherhood altogether.

Taken to its extreme, this new face of parenting has spawned a curious flurry of “dog mummy” behaviours. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the inclusion of the dog in birthday parties and religious ceremonies (“Bark-mitzvahs”), the feeding of human-like foods to the animal (doggy birthday cake), co-sleeping, custody disputes in divorce filings and the burial of the animal in pet cemeteries.

In the UK, the introduction of “pawternity leave”, or paid time off work for those settling a new dog into the home, further strengthens the cultural shorthand between dogs and motherhood. BrewDog, the Scottish-based craft beer group, has allowed its staff to take a week of fully paid leave when adopting a new puppy or rescue dog since the start of 2017.

So where does this leave good old-fashioned motherhood? By which I mean the business of bearing and raising human children. In a tight spot, frankly. Research from Pets At Home suggests that those without children have the greatest spending power when it comes to pampering their pets and have become increasingly discerning.

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Why blow your money at JoJo Maman Bebe when you could spend it on having fresh dog food delivered to your door via Butternut Box, or plump for Lords & Labradors premium gear? Primed towards the treatment of our “fur babies” by sophisticated consumer algorithms that encourage the pampering of dogs in much the same way as one would a child, the lines have become blurred.

For me, they are not totally without distinction, but I had to have another child to see this. Five years after I “had” Percy as one might now say, I had another child. Having indulged Percy through his babyhood, although not quite to the same baroque extent that some go in for, I now found myself without the time. Quickly, Percy became a dog and no longer a baby.

His reaction was nothing short of extreme: he stood outside the nursery door and tried to paw his way in, when I came through the front door with the baby he very often tried to jump into my arms, when I breastfed the baby on the sofa, he wedged himself so close to the baby and I that frequently I had to move. In short, there were two babies but only one was being mothered.

Often, especially in the newborn months, I asked myself whether it had been fair to treat Percy as my “baby” for all those years given the visible level of distress he seemed to be in when the “real” baby arrived to demote him.

Do we, as women specifically, commandeer dogs into the ideological black holes that feminism has failed to answer? We know that canine neglect has rocketed since the pandemic ended with the RSPCA reporting a staggering rise in emergencies and abandonments: 20,999 reports of abandoned animals last year, 5,000 more than in 2020.

Of course, these facts don’t neatly map onto the “dog mummy” phenomenon, but they do speak to the ways in which we use dogs as ways of coping with realities that are hard to stomach: pandemics, policy failures, existential crises. Is it fair to use dogs as accessories to these societal ailments? I think not. But I speak from bitter experience.

Now, as another morning dawns, Percy is lying on the sofa while the children play around him. I’m still doing the washing up. My husband comes into the room and orders Percy off the sofa and into his basket, a long-forgotten symbol of healthy dog ownership boundaries. Percy obeys immediately and skulks off to lie down.

The children clamour for him to come back so that they can stroke him. I am torn. Does Percy feel abandoned in his basket away from us all? Would he rather be amongst us? His eyes seem to speak volumes to me. I say this to my husband and he laughs and goes off to do something in another room. And there you have it: dual income, two kids, one dog and, I should add, one woman trying to work out how much the dog is her baby. Truly, a furry feminine conceit.

Over supper, I ask my husband if we should get another dog to keep Percy company. He seems very keen. Another baby and we’ll be complete I think, happily stroking Percy’s head.



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