By Doyle Srader

I think dogs are wonderful, but their owners’ choices strain my affection, and it’s a very Eugene thing. 

I don’t want to mingle with dogs at restaurants and grocery stores. I don’t want to overhear dog owners bragging about how they ordered their dog a vest online and nobody can prove it isn’t a service dog. And I really don’t want unleashed dogs shadow-boxing me on the trails or in the parks. Yes, yes, they’re friendly, and they love being off the leash, the law and other people’s clean clothes be damned.

Eugeneans are smitten with their dogs. Infatuated. Gaga. But that’s very different from saying that Eugeneans love their dogs. A huge slice of Eugenean dog keepers do not. There is a meaning of love that is not just amplified liking. Go ahead and say you love chocolate cake, but there’s a lot more to relational love than enjoyment. You love something if it lights up your pleasure circuits, but you love someone if and only if you are willing to put their needs ahead of your whims.

Now, there are people who give their dogs a good life. They inhabit enough wide-open space that the dog can cruise around investigating things, and that’s a good start. They put the dog to work assisting them, or herding livestock or any other job that relieves the dog from the drudgery of waiting for a few minutes of human attention, which is even better. And some are dedicated rescuers who take in the hard cases, the unfriendly or badly disabled dogs, and provide a safe, comfortable home. Good for them; those choices are pretty loving.

But the majority of dogs in town endure miserable living conditions. Your Australian shepherd cannot thrive in your one-bedroom apartment. Even if you think you spend a lot of time walking and playing with them, try to imagine if you had to live with that ratio of activity to boredom. If it doesn’t remind you of a prisoner’s time in the rec yard, it should. And it’s common practice not to sell or adopt littermates together on the theory they’re less likely to bond with their human, and that nails shut the coffin on the claim that this is about love. Be honest: you like how they look, and playing with them is fun.

Your dog is not your furry child, and you are not its parent. The pet-human relationship is different in type from the parent-child relationship. It’s not uniformly worse, better, weaker, stronger, but it is unquestionably different, just like Ebola is not cancer and Dutch Bros is not coffee. 

Equating pet and human relationships is diagnostic of a knot of social problems. More of us each year find relationships elusive, daunting or both: we can’t find the friends or partners we want, and if we do, the relationship itself is a minefield. Meanwhile, dogs are for sale and don’t get a vote. Sometimes dog care can get complicated, but that’s equally true of a car or a house: They’re all three about problem-solving, not conversations between equals. 

And it’s no coincidence that the spread of “fur baby/pet parent” language has closely tracked the rise of societal loneliness. Your great grandparents grew food in their garden, and you take multivitamins. The same great grandparents would rub their eyes in disbelief at the dog toys, doggy day care and veterinary surgery bills, and at the fact that we don’t know our neighbors’ names.

A little over 20 years ago, Cookie Monster broke it to children at risk of obesity that cookies are a sometime food, but apples and bananas are anytime foods. I’m all for cookies as dessert or a quick treat, but the danger is mistaking them for nutritious food and spoiling your appetite. Same applies here: Dogs are not interchangeable with humans, and confusing pet usage with the very real and important concept of love is another blow to the already rotten connective tissue of our community.

To repeat myself, dogs are pretty wonderful, but I feel really sad when people who claim to love them won’t confront unhappy realities and do what’s necessary to care for them. On a trail or in a park, your unleashed dog is seconds away from meeting another unfamiliar unleashed dog, which is Russian roulette. Yes, they get frisky and energetic, and then you feel good because they look cute. What a great basis for your decisions. It’s the same quality of thinking that recently forced Lane County Parks and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to remind everybody that if they feed those cute doglike coyotes, then they lose their fear of humans and have to be euthanized.

Your dog is your pet, and spoiling your dog at the expense of all your neighbors is the opposite of love.

Doyle Srader lives in Eugene, Oregon.