The proliferation of new canine services – from nurseries to water parks, hairdressers and dietitians – is not a random or anecdotal phenomenon. Sociologists and psychologists say that it responds to a radical transformation of social relations following the digital and hyper-individualized society in which we live.
Eduardo Bericat, Professor of Sociology at the University of Seville and researcher of social values, explains that many people who take their dog to daycare do not do so just out of necessity, to have no one to leave it with, but thinking of the dog's emotional well-being and in its education, as is done with children, "which gives the idea of a bond between the person and the dog of an almost paternal nature".
And he emphasizes that the dogs are not only considered as another member of the family, "but that they appear in the photos occupying the central position and being recipients of all the looks and affections of the other family members".
He believes that this has to do with the fact that the relationships between people and dogs are very satisfying, less problematic and tumultuous than those with other people and are better adapted to the idiosyncrasies of today's society. "The dog demands service and sacrifice from us, because it involves an expenditure of time and money, but its relationship is simple, predictable and it compensates, it offers us loyalty and faithfulness, it projects a bond every time it receives us with joy", reflects Bericat .
Psychologist Rafael San Román points out that this involvement, this fact of putting dogs at the center of everything, is still an act of a certain selfishness, because a dog does not involve as much renunciation nor is it as stressful as, for example, children "Taking care of a dog is like taking care of a baby for years, it is rewarding, and the care it needs and the relationship that is established are stable, they do not become more complex or the coexistence more conflicting as they grow, as yes it happens with children", he says.
Luis Ayuso, an expert in the sociology of families, believes that the transition from an agricultural and service society to a digital society has meant that the family has ceased to be a productive unit in which children had value and has become a emotional unity, and "when we move in the emotional sphere we can project this emotionality on the children, but also on the animals, who are always happy to see you and very well supply this emotional need that the human being has".
This is why there is a decrease in the human birth rate and an increase in the canine birth rate and, in Spain, the number of registered dogs already exceeds by almost three million the number of children under 14 years of age. "It is not a passing fad, but rather a structural trend that points to a radical transformation of human sociability, that is to say, the way in which we inhabit the world by relating to other people and other species", comments Bericat .
In this context, it is increasingly common to anthropomorphize the dog, to attribute human qualities to it. The ethologist and anthrozoologist Paula Calvo assures that "anthropomorphizing allows us to understand that they can feel, suffer, be happy..., it facilitates empathy with animals and has allowed their domestication".
Bericat, from the field of sociology, explains that by anthropomorphizing the dog "we raise its moral value until it matches the emotional value" that is given to it today. "We could say that we rationalize our behaviors, since if the dog did not have the moral value that we assign to it, many of the human attentions that some people devote to their dogs would be judged as totally irrational, something that flies in the minds of many when they see a dog dressed in fashion, carried in a baby carriage or sitting on a sofa in the nursery", he explains.
And this fact of turning the relationship with the dog into a substitute or complement to the social relationships with relatives, friends and colleagues, says Bericat, is transforming human sociability and giving rise to the emergence of new concepts such as dog-children or multi-species families. "We are in a transitional phase in a society with a plurality of family forms in which none of these forms is hegemonic, and the multispecies family is now another that is added to this existing diversity, and makes more complex and autonomous the ways we decide to relate", concludes the sociologist.
