The Great American Animal Farm

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In general, though, as Desmond Morris wrote in The Naked Ape, "The popularity of an animal is directly correlated with the number of anthropomorphic features it possesses." This is recognized by even the youngest children; they are generally the most levelheaded owners and associates of pets, whom they see as fraternal, adventurous and fallible allies, incapable (unlike parents) of scolding or punishing. As Freud noted in Totem and Taboo, children "feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders." Old people, particularly those living alone, often depend on pets for the companionship and warmth denied them by human society. Some behaviorists argue that the mentally disturbed can be helped by animals -"seeing-heart dogs," in one psychologist's phrase—to relate to reality.

Most often, however, humans attempt to endow their pets with human qualities, deluding themselves and demeaning animals. Many married couples who are unwilling or unable to have children adopt animals instead, embarking on a quasi-parental relationship without the responsibilities and hazards involved in child rearing. "If your romance is going to the dogs," suggests a pet-food-industry publication called Pet Pourri, "you might try a dog to save it." In fact, there are countless cases in which a couple's rivalry for a pet's affection—or occasionally even its sexual favors—ends in divorce, and often a custody battle for the animal.

Status Symbols. "It is truly amazing," wrote Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, "to what extent popular taste permits libidinous attachments to animals without clear recognition of their essentially sexual nature" (though, admittedly, it is hard to envision even a subliminal sexual relationship between humans and such pets as alligators, bats, cobras, hedgehogs, octopuses, tarantulas and vultures). Then, too, many pets, particularly the big and exotic species, are less objects of affection than status symbols, notably for the emotionally insecure or sexually maladjusted. In all too many cases, as W.C. Fields observed, "what is a dog, anyway? Simply an antidote for an inferiority complex." (Fields, of course, loathed most humans as well.)

There are countless tales, mostly mythical, of dogs risking their lives to defend their owners or else, when the owner dies, expiring of a broken heart. In fact, dogs are loving creatures and will do almost anything for a providing owner. It was, after all, Cerberus who guarded the gates of Hades. Mastiffs brought back from England by Julius Caesar became canine mercenaries, as famed in their day as the K-9 Corps of World War II. There are the tales, too, of faithful cats that travel thousands of miles to find their vanished owner, though thousands more prefer to abandon their homes. Cats are by nature haughty creatures, less dependent than dogs on caresses and canned entrees.

The late Milan Greer, who founded Manhattan's Fabulous Felines, one of the country's biggest dealers in purebred cats, demonstrated greater knowledge of feline personality than human psychology when he claimed that he sold few cats to blacks or Orthodox Jews, because they were "rejected minorities who don't want to be rejected by a cat."