My Take | Why dogs shouldn’t live longer than they do now
- Dogs wouldn’t be dogs as we know them without humans. I suspect that humans would not be human as we know ourselves if we had not cohabited with them for at least 15,000 years, and perhaps as many as 40,000 years or even longer
The essay titled “The Posthuman Dog” came to my attention last week at a particularly weird time. My 11-year-old mixed Pegasus has been diagnosed with lymphoma and just started his first chemo yesterday. For the first time, my wife and I have to consider what life might be like without one of our dogs.
I love Pegasus like a devoted pet owner, but my wife loves him like a mother to a son who has never grown up. I worry about her. We always suspect dogs never grow old psychologically, and animal psychologists have confirmed that.
Pierce thinks most dogs would do fine without humans. This is because 80 per cent survive on their own anyway.
“Roughly 20 per cent of the world’s dogs live as pets, or what we call ‘intensively homed dogs’,” she wrote.
“The other 80 per cent of the world’s dogs are free-ranging, an umbrella term that includes village, street, unconfined, community, and feral dogs. In other words, most dogs on the planet are already living on their own, without direct human support within a homed environment.”