Pet needs? Or human needs?

It's Friday afternoon, and I'm getting tired of writing about human health, so I thought I'd post some tidbits about dog health. In particular, I want to write about some new products on the market designed to improve the physical, emotional, and social well being of our canine companions.

The first product is doggles, which are doggie goggles designed to protect your pup's eyes from harmful UV rays (I've recently seen a beagle wearing them and he looked like a doggie aviator). I'm not kidding. But wait. It gets better. The next product is neuticles (I'm still not kidding). These synthetic doggie implants, which are the size and shape of, well, you know, are designed to help male canines regain their sense of masculine self confidence (no, I'm really not kidding) that was squashed at the hands of evil vets during the neutering process.


Now, don't get me wrong. I loves dogs as much as other folks do. In fact, I am the proud person of the best golden retriever in the whole world. I love Molly a lot, and Paul and I consider her to be a member of the family (she even gets to sleep on our bed). I try to provide her with a happy and healthy life, which includes giving her wholesome food, taking her to the vet, bringing her to the dog park daily, and buying her colorful collars and leashes that complement her blond coat.

I draw the line, however, at doggles and neuticles when it comes to pet care. It seems to me that products such as these are more about human needs and less about the actual needs of dogs (It's also a sign of capitalism running amuck, in my opinion, but that's an issue that goes beyond the scope of this post). Are we really to believe that male dogs feel a sense of shame and emasculation after they are neutered? I think not. It seems to me that as our society has increasingly come to see pets as companions with whom to forge emotional bonds ( as opposed to in the past, when dogs were treated more as lowly creatures whose place was in the backyard rather than in the family home), we have also anthropomorphized our dogs, treating them as if they are human rather than the "companion species" (in the words of Donna Haraway) of humans. Consequently, many of us have assumed that dogs share the same type of health concerns and worries as we do.

Certainly dogs have emotional and social lives, but they are not humans. And by treating them as such, we run the risk of expecting too much from them and/or not meeting the needs that they actually do have.