John Berger, “Why We Look at Animals”
3. Pets
Bud,* the melancholic-seeming tabby we rescued from a near-certain death at the animal shelter, lay next to my table as I wrote this. To be more accurate, I should say that he sprawled, spread eagle, trying to catch whatever cooling breeze he could from the overhead fan. Or so I imagine. In truth, I can have no idea what’s going on in Bud’s head.
It was a steamy day in August so I’ll stand by my explanation. But fundamental to our relationship is the fact that neither of us can ever really know what the other is thinking. Of course, I know when he’s hungry and when he wants to be petted. I know when he wants out and when he’s got a mouse in his sights.
But no matter how important a presence he is in our household and no matter how much I love him, Bud will always be a stranger to me. Believing that as I do, I am ever at a loss for words when people refer to him as one of my “children.” I do understand that this assignment of kinship isn’t meant literally, but I also suspect that this particular choice of words reveals the fundamental weirdness of our relationship to our pets.
Photographs of people’s pets generally devolve into photographs of people with their pets—more or less what Berger has in mind. Later in the passage quoted above, he writes, “The pet completes him [the pet owner], offering response to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed.”
Surely, this description encompasses much of the photography one sees of people and their pets. In Suki Dhanda’s Year of the Dog series, a cross section of Londoners and their dogs sat for mostly formal environmental portraits. Many of the shots suggest precisely the kind of transference Berger describes: the dog serves as an identifier of its owner, almost—and I don’t mean to be harsh here—as a kind of accessory. Certainly their pit bulls go a long way toward pumping up the three young men in “Mark, Bulent, Daniel, Lady and Casper,” while the Afghan in “Anita, Raphael, Isabella, Alfie and Amadeus” functions as a mark of elegance, or perhaps as a reminder of lost tranquility, for the young mother at the mercy of her two toddlers.Ratcheting it up a notch, Jennifer Karady staged “narrative portraits” that set out to dramatize the relations between her human subjects and their animals. In Karady’s world, people turn to pets for “human” companionship: one particularly creepy set-up, “Wedding Night, Val and Rex, Germantown, NY,” depicts the naked Val gazing dreamily out the bedroom window while the presumably post-coital Rex dozes off on the bed nearby. “In Memoriam: Angela and Her First Love Angel” depicts Angela (mercifully clothed) holding what I have to assume is the taxidermied remains of the late Golden Retriever Angel. Around her in the room are a rabbit, a cat and another dog, presumably an inadequate replacement for the dearly departed.
Robin Schwartz, who seems virtually incapable of taking a photograph without an animal in there somewhere, started out with pictures of primates and dogs, most of them living as pets. You get an occasional glimpse of a person but, for the most part, the human presence is implicit only in the environments: a Hamadryas Baboon riding a Big Wheels tricycle or a Greyhound lounging in the back seat of a convertible roadster. Of late, Schwartz has been staging photographs that feature her daughter, Amelia, and a veritable menagerie of animals. For Schwartz, these pictures depict “real-world journeys” generated by fantasy, and for her viewer, the line between what’s real and what’s staged can be difficult to discern. So many of the pictures feature “normal” animals—dogs, cats, goats, horses—that you get lulled into accepting these as straight documents. Then the elephants trundle into view and the deer circle around, and you realize that you’re in some hybrid territory. Or as Schwartz puts it, “the line of who is a person and who is an animal overlaps, is blurred.”While the photographs may all be sweet and harmless, albeit sometimes weird, there is, as Berger suggests, a tragedy here too. Or at least a palpable loss. Back in the day, people didn’t keep animals just for the companionship. Animals, like people, had to earn their keep: so dogs worked as herders and hunters, and horses signed on for transportation and agricultural duty. The latest theory about the domestication of cats argues that they entered the human sphere with the rise of agriculture. In an early example of entente cordiale, the cats found benefit in hanging around the grain stores, where rats and mice abounded, and the farmers tolerated these least tractable of animals as an efficient form of pest control.
In this view, pets are an invention and specifically an invention that came with the rise of industrial and capitalist culture. As Berger informs us, until sometime in the 18th century, the word itself, pet, denoted a lamb raised by hand.
Modernization put the beasts out of business, one by one: with the mass migration to cities, people no longer needed dogs to herd livestock or cats to safeguard the harvest, while the train, the automobile, and the tractor took over from the horse.
* That's not Bud dressed up in old boys' clothes and sitting in the rocking chair. It's Tramp, Jennie and Edgar Krueger's cat, and the picture was taken by Alex Krueger in Watertown, Wisconsin, around 1905. Bud would never allow such an indignity to be visited on him--even if I were so inclined.
