Celebrate Our Pets

It seems we can’t get enough of our animal companions. But why do we keep pets at all? John Bradshaw argues that the answer can be found deep in our evolutionary past. 

- John Bradshaw

Pets can be costly, time-consuming, and often quite smelly. Why do so many of us keep them?

It’s a question we rarely ask. No other animal keeps pets, but it’s pretty much universal among humans. So what is this strange thing we do? Is it just a hangover from our agricultural past, when we needed domesticated animals for things like transport, hunting and herding, or is it something that runs deeper? I think it’s the latter: keeping pets is an intrinsic part of human nature, and something that we’re hardwired to do.

How long have humans kept pets?

The evidence suggests it goes back tens of thousands of years, before the dawn of agriculture. The archaeological record doesn’t tell us anything about the first pets, because these would have been wild animals brought into a domestic setting, with fossilised remains identical to animals that still lived in their original habitats. So the best evidence comes from hunter-gatherer societies who survived into the 19th and 20th Centuries, in places like Amazonia, Siberia and New Guinea.