The cost of loving your pet

Americans now spend roughly $6,000 a year on a single dog, including $130 bags of prescription food and Prozac for canine anxiety. When Vox host JQ asked pet owners to explain their devotion, one listener described holding her 65-pound dog like a giant baby while he tolerates it. Another called her cat “part of my soul.” A third said her dog taught her “patience and understanding and second chances.” This is the phenomenon at the heart of this episode of Explain It to Me: how did we become so attached to these creatures, and what makes that love worth the cost?

A very recent invention

Rod Phillips, a historian at Carleton University and author of Cats: A History, points out that the modern idea of a pet is startlingly new. For most of history, cats were kept for utility—controlling vermin in granaries, bakeries, and ships—and were often treated with hostility. The church cast them as heretics and accomplices of witches. Dogs lived among people; cats lived on the fringes.

The shift began about 150 years ago, when a portion of the population started arguing that cats were “as nice as dogs.” Cat shows emerged, and by the early 1900s commercial cat food appeared. But the real transformation happened after World War II. “People have a lot more disposable income,” Phillips explains, and they could turn some of that toward keeping cats as companions rather than tools.