Whether you love or hate people speaking as their pets, using cutesy terms like “pupperinos” and “heckin’ good bois,” or sharing grammatically incorrect cat speak memes, the concept of a “pet voice” has become just as much a part of the social media landscape as images of furry and scaly companions themselves. Indeed, speaking with, and through, animals to convey our very human emotions and thoughts is one of the hallmark practices of internet culture.

But the pet voice phenomenon isn’t unique to the social media age. Media and pets have always been intertwined, and owners and animal fans alike have played with communication through them for hundreds of years.

As historian Katherine Grier details in Pets in America: A History, as early as the 19th century, people were exchanging letters to each other in the voices of their furry companions. Taking advantage of the rise in photographic technology, they also began printing out photo plates of their animals to distribute to their friends. Such interpersonal practices can be seen as the Victorian equivalent of sending cute pet pictures via messaging apps like Snapchat or WhatsApp.

But not all early pet practices were so innocuous. Fashion scholar Julia Long problematizes the way humans have used pets as props. She points to an 1886 Washington Post interview with a woman “lavishing her valuable affection” on the pet beetles she wore as a fashion statement. “When asked if the beetle ‘knew’ his owner,” the reporter notes, “this lady expressed extreme anguish and astonishment at the thought of her beloved pet not returning her affection.”

The thought of wearing a beetle like a brooch, let alone keeping one as a pet, may give many readers pause today. But as a communication tactic, the practice speaks volumes. The act of anthropomorphizing, or attributing human characteristics to non-human entities, is a distancing concept. By pretending to speak as another, particularly one that cannot actually speak for itself, the woman giving the beetles a “voice” becomes removed from their utterances. This distance, however slight, has immense implications in today’s mediated times. One of the most famous New Yorker cartoons features two dogs at a computer saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The cartoon demonstrates how speaking through pets plays into the internet’s ambivalence, or the difficulty in ascertaining definitive meanings in online communication.

It’s especially important we understand this tactic today because the anthropomorphized pet voice has taken on new life in the era of Instagram and TikTok. And as I discuss in my new book, The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives, such animal imagery is often used to mask some of the more insidious parts of internet culture, such as hate speech and harassment.

The “chill amphibian meme” of Pepe the Frog, who the Anti-Defamation League declared a hate symbol in 2016, shows how malicious human posters can warp seemingly innocent images of pets and animals. Additionally, in speaking as an animal, even a cartoon frog, the human poster puts distance between themselves and what they have said. On the opposite end of the political spectrum from Pepe is Jorts the Cat, a popular Twitter account that tweets aggressively pro-union and labor rights sentiments from behind the veil of an orange tabby. And paradoxically, it hits harder when an internet cat critiques a governor over legislation.

The distancing of anthropomorphism also has become a lucrative benefit for businesses and brands. In recent years, pet influencers have skyrocketed in popularity—and become intertwined with sponsored posts and advertising deals. As internet scholar Sophie Bishop has discussed, brands engage in a “safety dance” when recruiting influencers, a process that involves the use of automated tools to gauge the potential risk of a prospective human influencer damaging the brand. Pets bypass that safety dance entirely. Even though there is always a human poster behind a pet influencer, the distance brought by the pet voice makes them “safer,” and in turn, more marketable.

When I attended 2020 PetCon, the annual pet influencer and internet celebrity convention, founder Loni Edwards told the room as much:

You get all the benefits of the human influencer with the cuteness of pets. Everyone loves pets. They’re joyful, they’re cute, they make us happy. But they’re not going to get drunk at a party and hurt your brand like a human influencer.

While pet voice is comforting and common, it does bring with it serious implications to think about in our accelerated and ubiquitous communication in the digital age. But all LOLz are not lost. As one person with a pet account told me, “[S]ocial media used to be this fun thing, but now it can come with a lot of negativity and stress. So, I have followed certain cute animal accounts as just a way to have a burst of positivity in my feed as I’m scrolling. Being able to add to that is nice, too.” As long as we remember the human behind the pet voice, pet images and videos can be a reprieve from the more cumbersome aspects of being online.

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Emotional support is the dog job of our times. For our long-ago ancestors, dogs may have performed other functions, such as co-hunting or pulling sledges, but now they are full-time furry mental health practitioners. As dogs offer us their grounding presence and help us weather the emotional storm of a global pandemic, we should reconsider what we owe them.

Now that we are keeping our human networks at arm’s length, our need for emotional closeness with our pets has increased. This is a boon for many homed dogs, because these steadfast companions are the ultimate anti-social distancers.

This inclination may be genetic. Scientists studying canine DNA have identified a gene for hyper-sociability; dogs are programmed for social closeness with humans, they need to be attached at the hip. Six feet, which is the new human definition of “personal space,” just doesn’t work for dogs. Being with us makes them calm and happy—just as being with them makes us calm and happy.

Our current solitude represents an opportunity to explore a certain one-sidedness in our social interactions with dogs. Why is “attention seeking” behavior in dogs—which is basically defined as them wanting our attention when we don’t feel like giving it to them—pathologized, with dogs sometimes punished and often medicated for it? Why do animal behaviorists advise us to ignore our dog’s advances?

I’m asking because now the shoe is on the other paw, and humans are suffering, in large numbers, from separation anxiety. We are separated from our friends, our social networks, and in many cases our parents or children. Maybe now we will get a taste of what millions of dogs are experiencing: the profound distress of being alone when we don’t want to be.

“Separation anxiety” is itself an example of the way we pathologize dogs’ behavior, which prevents us from understanding and empathizing with their experiences. A study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science this January suggests that “separation anxiety” is not helpful clinically—because a diverse range of frustrations and distress experienced by dogs who are left alone too much are clumped under one vague label. Might we gain more sympathy for the canine set today, as we learn that our own experiences of social isolation are complex and multi-layered—and definitely uncomfortable?

We need the sympathy and safe companionship of dogs more now, as social distancing drives us into their furry paws. Those of us lucky enough to live with dogs already are reveling in more together time. The number of dogs being temporarily fostered has mushroomed over the past several weeks, as more and more people have been told to stay home. A New York Times story described how one animal shelter sent out a call for 200 foster placements and was surprised to receive 2000 applications.

This is wonderful and heartwarming. Yet I have some dark thoughts about it, too: Part of what is driving the fostering frenzy is the fact that people who work long hours away from the home and who have (rightfully, in my opinion) chosen not to have a dog are all of a sudden home all day. I fear that these dogs may get intensively loved on for a few weeks or months—until the virus does what it came to do. And then what? Many people who are fostering a dog while they are off work or working from home, who are “using” a dog for emotional comfort and social contact during this crisis, will have to return the dog to the shelter when all is said and done.

These people will have given dogs in need a beautiful gift by sharing their homes. But the sad thing is that the spark of hope and security that might be kindled in these open-hearted dogs will be dimmed when they must go back to the shelter. And although the home environment is, on average, going to be less stressful for a dog than the shelter environment, the transition from one to another can be very hard for dogs emotionally. Dogs shouldn’t be in shelters in the first place. When this is over we should do some collective soul-searching about a culture of dog ownership that leaves so many dogs adrift.

Even dogs who remain with their owners will struggle with adjustment when life returns to normal and people return to work. The rough consensus among trainers and dog advocates is that four hours alone is comfortable for most dogs, but long days home alone can compromise their welfare. Dogs’ frustration, anxiety, and loneliness can manifest in behaviors that, under non-covid19 circumstances, humans have labeled pathological. If the dogs remain in the home, separated from people and not getting enough attention, we may see an uptick in those so-called “behavior problems.”

Though this crisis is an opportunity for dogs to get more attention from humans, it is also a time of great risk for them. Reports out of China include heartbreaking details of dogs and cats who were abandoned during the lockdown and who are now starving to death. Here in the U.S., there already are reports of dogs being chained up outside, thrown out to the curb or being dropped off at shelters—all because of unfounded fears that the virus causing COVID-19 could sicken them. In truth, the giant packages of toilet paper that people are fighting over at the store are more likely vectors for the virus than a dog.

And this is just the initial wave. If past disasters and economic downturns are reasonable precedents, the numbers of dogs relinquished to the shelters or abandoned on street corners and rural highways after this crisis will swell.

Panic and upheaval can bring out the best in people as well as the worst. This is especially true in relation to our dogs. The crisis for dogs may look different and follow a different trajectory, but we need to be attentive to what it is like for them as well as for ourselves. The emotional ecosystem of dog and human is mutualistic and beneficial to both organisms. In times of crisis, they need us as much as we need them.

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A few years later, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire judge, in a modern version of excommunication, ordered a Labrador mix named Prince to vacate the city after killing a rooster.

And in 2014, a pit bull named Dream that bit a child was executed in Denver while an appeal was pending, apparently due to a courthouse paperwork mix-up.

In a large number of these cases across the United States, it is the canine itself on trial. The dog, not the owner, is charged. The dog, not the owner, is convicted. And the dog, not the owner, is punished for its crimes. When it comes to capital punishment, dogs sometimes attain a human-like standing in our courts. This practice may feel decidedly modern and particularly American, the inexorable dark side of our excessive pampering and “humanization” of our furred friends. At a glance, it isn’t even that different from pet boutiques, gourmet food, luxury lodging, and the like. But scholars trace the roots of humans putting animals on trial back millennia, long before we began showering creature comforts on our canine companions.

One remarkable case involves crops, disease, and some especially pernicious rats in 16th century France. Rodents descended on Autun, a medieval town near Dijon, destroying the barley crop and multiplying rapidly. In 1522, after numerous extermination attempts had failed and Autun was on the verge of a famine, residents turned to the only option they had left: They put the rats on trial. They took their case to the town magistrate, who relayed it to the bishop’s vicar, who ordered the animals to appear in court. The vicar also appointed one of France’s rising legal stars to defend them, a Burgundy-born jurist named Bartholomew Chassenée.

Chassenée was no fool. He knew he was fighting an uphill battle. The power of the Church was supreme, and the voracious rodents didn’t exactly make sympathetic defendants. (This was two centuries after their ancestors had brought the Black Death to Europe.) So Chassenée did his best to delay and derail the trial. He argued, for example, that the rats were too spread out to have heard the summons. In response, the vicar asked every church in every parish harboring the animals to publicize the trial.

When the rodents still didn’t show, Chassenée claimed that the journey to into town was too dangerous. Not only would the rats have to travel vast distances to reach Autun, they’d need to avoid the watchful eyes and sharp claws of their mortal enemy, the cat. Surely the vicar was aware, he said, that defendants could refuse to appear at trial if they feared for their own safety.

When that didn’t work, Chassenée appealed to the court’s sense of humanity: It wasn’t fair to punish all rats for the crimes of a few. “What can be more unjust than these general proscriptions,” he asked, “which destroy indiscriminately those whom tender years or infirmity render equally incapable of offending?” The vicar, whether moved by Chassenée’s words or simply exhausted by his objections, adjourned the proceedings indefinitely.

This was just one in a long line of cases of Europeans taking animals to court. The earliest incident dates back to 824, when an ecclesiastical judge excommunicated a group of moles in Italy’s Aosta Valley. In 1314, a French court sentenced a bull to hang for goring a man with his horn. In 1575, the Parisian parliament sent a donkey to the stake for having sexual relations with a man. And in 1864, a Slovenian pig was tried and executed for biting the ears off an infant.

In hundreds, perhaps thousands, of proceedings throughout the continent, animals were treated just like human defendants. The courts appointed them lawyers, heard testimony from witnesses, and considered the possibility of pardon or parole. Even the punishments were surprisingly human—though not particularly humane.

Some creatures were drawn and quartered. Others were stoned to death. And still others were tied to the rack, their cries a form of confession. Due process for animals was so highly valued that when a hangman in Germany took matters into his own hands before the trial of a sow had commenced, he was permanently banished from his village.

What was the point of these trials?

Scholars disagree. Some say they were merely a way to dispatch troublesome animals. But why all the pomp and circumstance? Why not just run a sword through them (or sic a cat on them) and be done with it? Others say the proceedings were an attempt to impose order on an increasingly chaotic world—a means to assert man’s god-given dominion over often unpredictable creatures during a time when we were living in closer quarters with them than at any point in our history. By putting animals on trial, we ascribed them rational thought, and thus we were able to make better sense of their actions. And still other scholars claim that our forbearers simply made less of a distinction between man and beast than we do today, at least for legal purposes. Animals were given human trials because they had human standing in a court of law.

Today, we put a different animal on trial, but the reasons appear remarkably similar. We dragged rats and pigs before judges in medieval Europe because they had violated the cosmic order. Today, we have a new cosmic order: a world where pets are family. When dogs treat us as enemies instead of as friends, they violate this order. And we punish them in kind. We put them on trial in an attempt to restore the world as it should be—or at least, as we would like it to be.

The way we punish these dogs also shares similarities to the penalties of the past. Today’s sentences may be carried out with a lethal injection behind the closed doors of a city shelter, but are they so different from the hanging of bulls in the town square? In the case of Taro the Akita, justice took a more favorable turn: In 1994, after three years and more than $100,000 had been spent on the case, the state’s new governor—acting on a campaign promise—pardoned the pooch.

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Ozzie’s my fourth black dog. Starting with a sweet Labrador mix in childhood, I have nurtured a love affair with dark-coated canines for decades. I’m not alone in this bias; Labrador retrievers are the most popular dog breed, according to the American Kennel Club, and black labs in particular are bred for their intelligence, energy, and protectiveness. My childhood companion, Lena, was a well-mannered black lab/springer spaniel mix who had all of these qualities in abundance. She was a constant companion on road trips, family outings to the park, and even at my father’s office.

Yet if you listen to many animal workers, and many pet owners, you would think my infatuation is unusual. Black animals generally are thought to repel, not attract. Humane shelters report that large black dogs have more trouble finding homes than do other dogs. The phenomenon even has a name: black dog syndrome.

There are practical explanations. Black animals can be frightening. Black animals of all sizes and breeds are harder to photograph in the shadows of a kennel. Their expressions are harder to read due to the lack of facial contrast. But as a psychologist, I’ve studied the phenomenon, and my research suggests that the explanation for this syndrome, if it actually exists, has nothing to do with the nature of the animal. Instead, it’s based in the cultural associations of the color black itself.

Across nations, folklore, literature, and popular culture have long portrayed black animals as undesirable. Black is widely perceived as the color of evil and doom. The Egyptian god of the underworld, Anubis, was depicted as a black dog (or as a man with a dog’s head) to represent the discoloration of a corpse after embalming. In the folklore of the British Isles, a black dog was a ghostly being whose appearance was regarded as a harbinger of death. Perhaps drawing on this cultural metaphor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the image of a black dog as his specter of horror in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The term “black dog” has been used since at least as far back as Samuel Johnson to describe the darkest depths of depression. Black cats also have negative connotations. In the Middle Ages, they were associated with witchcraft, often joining their owners in a fiery death at the stake. In much of the western world, they still are perceived as unlucky. (Although in parts of Asia and the United Kingdom, black cats actually are associated with good luck—except when one crosses an intended path.)

Psychological research confirms these traditional associations. In one study, for instance, the penalty records of National Football League and National Hockey League teams with black uniforms were found to rank near the top of the leagues. Furthermore, people who looked at pictures of these teams consistently dubbed them as more “aggressive” and “bad” than teams wearing lighter colors. These findings suggest that the color black may bias the judgments of referees, and even increase the aggressiveness of players themselves.

Conversely, studies also show that vibrant color, and especially color contrast, is highly appealing. Attractive color has been identified as a critical factor in product purchases in up to 90 percent of impulse buys. Web design research indicates that contrast in color (known as the isolation effect) can visually guide people to click on computer images. Color seems to be an important feature of branding in all fields of marketing, including pets.

But surprisingly, in the case of dogs, these psychological associations actually might not matter. Black dog syndrome, as a psychological phenomenon, is probably nonexistent. Since my early research on the topic, numerous studies have found that the syndrome may simply be an artifact of something called “base rate fallacy.” Due to the dominance of the dark-coat color gene, there are more black dogs and cats than any other color. This preponderance makes it appear that these animals are disproportionately represented in the shelter population. Moreover, contemporary research shows that prejudice against black dogs is not as prevalent as previously thought. In a 2013 study, participants were asked to rate pictures of dogs, colored black or white but otherwise identical, in terms of their perceived personality attributes. The white dog was rated less friendly and more dominant. Several other animal welfare researchers have confirmed that for dogs, coat color is less important to human perceptions of canine temperament than breed or other physical features such as size, ear conformation, facial features, and tail length.

Black cats, on the other hand, are a different story. They’ve been the focus of less empirical study, but research that controls for factors such as sex or age has found that black cats do in fact take longer to adopt from animal shelters than their lighter or multi-colored peers. Despite the fact that black coat color seems to be genetically linked to friendlier disposition and better health in cats, black cats are thought to be more energetic, aloof, and bold than multi-colored or lighter colored felines. And the additional time spent incarcerated contributes to a vicious cycle. The longer cats spend in shelters, the more their health and emotional well-being declines, which makes them even less desirable.

Whether it’s real or not in a technical sense, black dog syndrome still sometimes may have real effects. The simple belief that the phenomenon exists may be leading to something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: People might hesitate to adopt black dogs because of information they barely remember, or information from a less-than-credible source (a common cognitive heuristic called “source monitoring error”). As a result, fewer may be adopted, and the false beliefs may be perpetuated. And the consequences can be deadly. When shelter workers make assumptions about adoptability based on coat color, euthanasia may be disproportionately used to reduce the numbers of shelter animals that are alleged to be unadoptable.

Thankfully, there’s a growing push for us to recognize our misguided assumptions. Last year, one Utah animal shelter embraced what we know about the importance of appearance in product marketing by hiring a photographer to depict its black animals in a series of glamour shots. The aim was to allow the dogs’ personalities shine through their shadowy exteriors. And it worked; potential adoptive families lined up to meet them.

Ozzie, like all my pets, was a rescue animal. He was taken from a foreclosed house where he lived in a rabbit cage for his first three months. At first, Oz was an unsavory-looking companion, scrawny and timid, and my partner and I wavered before committing to adoption. But my love of black labs won, and now he brings our home so much joy. Like the dogs in the Utah animal shelter’s photographs, he is a reminder that first appearances can be deceptive. With pets, like anything else, color is not always an indicator of what lies beneath.

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Further questioning revealed that there actually was a single issue that prompted the visit: Zeigfield had been urinating and defecating indoors, despite being well house-trained since puppyhood. After ruling out most of the possible physical causes, I told Carol that her dog was likely developing cognitive dysfunction syndrome, the most common type of dementia in dogs.

Pets’ lives are different now than when I started my veterinary practice 40 years ago. Dogs are no longer allowed to run freely outside to be hit by cars, fight with other animals, or eat out of garbage cans. The quality of our dog foods is considerably better, and we have controlled the mostly deadly infectious diseases. Dogs’ lifestyles are safe but sedentary, leading to longer lives and more chronic conditions like obesity, arthritis, and cognitive dysfunction—which I find myself diagnosing almost daily at the Southern California veterinary hospitals where I practice.

People are often surprised that their pets can develop something similar to the Alzheimer’s Disease we see in humans, but our brains are not that different from dogs’. When your dog greets you, the same parts of the dog’s brain sends sensory input to the hippocampus, where memory connections are forged. Just beside the hippocampus sits the amygdala, which links the memories passed on from the hippocampus to emotions (like joy at your homecoming) and refers these feelings to the neural systems that initiate activity. Various parts of the cerebral cortex sort these impulses and modify them so that they are appropriate. This how the sound of the owner’s car pulling into the driveway tells your dog an affectionate greeting, a long walk, and, of course, dinner are on their way.

The cellular changes of canine cognitive dysfunction would be recognizable under the microscope to any human brain pathologist: Plaques of beta amyloid—protein fragments believed to be the result of “oxidative stress”—lead to distinctive “neurofibrillary tangles” within the damaged nerve cells, and shrinkage of the brain appears in areas where memories are made and behaviors are shaped.

Some things are different between our species, of course. Fido doesn’t forget where he put his car keys. But he may not remember which door he uses to go out to the yard. The same inability to evaluate behavioral appropriateness may prompt a person with dementia to disrobe in public, or a dog with dementia to eliminate in the house without hesitation. Many dogs with cognitive dysfunction wander restlessly all evening in a manner reminiscent of the “sundown syndrome” of Alzheimer’s patients. And most significantly, finding familiar surroundings strangely unfamiliar often triggers anxiety and agitation.

When I explain such anxiety to owners of senile dogs, I often refer to a scene in the movie On Golden Pond, in which Henry Fonda’s character leaves the house to pick strawberries and returns a few minutes later, shaking and distraught. “Nothing was familiar, not one damn tree,” he says. “I was scared half to death.”

As with many of the dogs I treat, Sterling, a 14-year-old Labrador retriever from El Cajon, was dealing with dementia along with other health problems. He had recently lost most of his hearing, and arthritic hips made it difficult for him to rise from his favorite sleeping spot. Sterling spent hours every night panting and whining. Once he got to his feet, he could move fairly well. But as soon as he left the house for a walk around the neighborhood, he pulled nervously at the leash to get back into the house, where he would pant and tremble for the next hour. Sterling’s owners felt that he was suffering, and they had started to consider euthanasia.

Once a dog’s cognition deteriorates, it loses the ability to compensate for discomfort, and the dog’s suffering becomes compounded by anxiety. This is the point at which most compassionate owners I’ve dealt with have made the difficult decision to euthanize their long-time companion. Although dementia is almost never fatal on its own, cognitive dysfunction and physical health problems are a debilitating combination.

I told Sterling’s owners we could treat the low thyroid condition that was diminishing his hearing and potentially find more effective treatments for his hip arthritis. We could lessen his distress with the same antidepressant medications given to humans. But I couldn’t offer any honest reassurance of dramatic improvement.

Treatments for canine dementia are most effective when they are started before the signs of cognitive dysfunction start to show. This is equally true in humans, which is why researchers are working on tests to predict Alzheimer’s long before symptoms appear. A number of nutritional supplements (particularly DHA, one of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil) and various antioxidants have been shown to slow the progression of mental decline. S-Adenosyl methionine (SAMe) is an over-the-counter supplement that provides mild help for old brains. There is even an FDA-approved medication to treat canine cognitive dysfunction: Selegiline is a derivative of a drug used in human Parkinson’s Disease. In my personal experience I have not seen dramatic results with this medication, but it is usually prescribed in the later stages of dementia, when it may be “too little, too late”.

We can also borrow from the extensive research that has been done in humans and laboratory animals, which find that eating a healthy diet (high in omega-3), staying mentally active, and getting lots of aerobic exercise can delay the onset of senile dementia. The exact amount of exercise that is required to delay senility in dogs has yet to be studied, but my personal experience has been that when I see one of my canine patients who is still alert and happy at 15 years old, the dog’s owner invariably tell me, “He has always gotten out on his walks every day, no matter what.”

When we are in the middle of our busy lives, old age seems far away, and taking steps to delay senile dementia (for our dogs or ourselves) isn’t a priority. There is even a certain unspoken acknowledgment that old age and a weak mind are inexorably linked. It isn’t until your graying canine companion is anxiously pacing the house at midnight or your mother forgets your name that you think you’d do anything possible to bring back the memory and comprehension that has been lost. Something to think about while you take a long walk with your dog.

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