Pets unravel carefully constructed personas and threaten deeply-formed maturities. In some sort of inside-out abandon, we welcome these fuzzy ears, tails, and feathers, even fit into our lives and hearts, and unabashedly share that part of ourselves, that vulnerability even, with the world.

Because it is a vulnerability to love something so deeply.

Why do we do it? Never mind the expense, the inconvenience, and, for those of us who own cats or roosters, the early morning petitions to “get out of bed right now!”

Fortunately, a relatively new science called anthrozoology studies the relationships between pets and their humans.

“Despite sometimes suffering due to our misunderstanding of their requirements,” writes John Bradshaw, biologist, pet owner, and pioneer anthrozoologist, “cats and dogs were benefiting from their relationships with people – there are far more of them in the world today than there are of the wild ancestors from which they emerged thousands of years ago.”

Drawing from biology, neurology, anthropology, and psychology, Bradshaw dispenses with cosmetic arguments, “dogs are cute” and the like, and argues for deep cultural and neurological ties.

For example, those who have pets as children are more likely to carry on “petting” as adults. This playmate bond, once formed, continues for life. The youthful life force of writer Gerald Durrell was developed in the affectionate company of many (many) pets. In My Family & Other Animals, Durrell notices all the little details of his beloved turtle, “Achilles”:

The fruit that Achilles liked best was wild strawberries. He would become positively hysterical at the mere sight of them, lumbering to and fro, craning his head to see if you would give him any, gazing at you pleadingly with his tiny boot-button eyes.

When Achilles has an unfortunate meeting with a poorly covered well, Durrell adopts a pigeon who promptly refuses to sleep outside and is often perched on the faces of his family members, “cooing loudly and lovingly.”

The frenzy of young love. I remember the moment I became a cat owner. I was six, we picked siblings from a litter of Siamese cats. We carried them home in pillowcases, and I sat for what felt like hours in front of a heater with the male one curled in my short legs, gathering the courage to poke his foot pads. I wanted to be his favorite.

The first domesticated animal is thought to be evidenced by a dog buried with a human in modern Israel, dating back 12,000 years. Whether one died after the other is unclear, but their lives were intertwined in the afterlife.   Biologist Frans de Waal has worked with primates his entire career as a means to understand social biology. In delightful argument for our instinctive empathy he writes a touching story on loyalty I’d like to include here:  
In Edinburgh, Scotland, there’s a little sculpture of “Greyfriars Bobby,” a Skye terrier who refused to leave the grave of his master, buried in 1858. For fourteen whole years, Bobby guarded the grave while being fed by his fans, until he died and was buried not far away. His headstone reads ‘Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.’

Many of us love and appreciate pets to the point of invasion. “What would the world be like without music, rivers, or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?” asks Mary Oliver in her melodies of love to canine companions.

My favorite great aunt is in her late 80s and still ventures out in Michigan winters because her Siamese must go out. “He keeps me young,” she often says. I imagine her bounding across the yard after him; I know she does. He gets him unstuck when he attempts to clear the chain-link fence and fails. The precious things we keep nearby are often alive.

Pets bring something into our lives that we miss, long for, and often don’t even recognize until it flies in our faces, in our laps, and on our arms.

While grieving her father's death, writer Helen McDonald bought – and promptly fell in love with – a goshawk.

The hawk’s wings barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porcupine—two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel.

As McDonald repeatedly withdraws her presence to lure the hawk, she reflects that “nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life: wildness, power, virility, independence, and strength.”

We project onto our animals aspects of ourselves that we most admire, whether those aspects exist or not. The animals become our extensions; perhaps we give them the adoration and forgiveness we cannot self-give.

When people speak of their pets, I cannot help thinking these individuals speak of themselves.

Like John Steinbeck, who traveled with his dog, Charley, around America the year he won the Nobel Prize. When Charley desires to “salute a tree,” Steinbeck writes lovingly:

It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others, he is abysmally ignorant. He cannot read, cannot drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow imperial selling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course, his horizons are limited, but how wide am I?

Travels with Charley was written post-illness when Steinbeck felt homesick to “know” his country. Steinbeck’s mood indulged a bit of self-pity. Pity, he extended to his dog.

Animals enact on us a unique relationship – pet, and master – and yet, we treat the relationship like the relationships we already know and have well-worn: parent, child, friend, colleague.

That is because, Bradshaw argues, a love of pets imitates our most primal relationships.

Stroking the warm fur of a dog may tap into our primate instinct to build friendships through grooming,” elevating both endorphin and oxytocin, and that “testosterone, with an established role in child care, might reasonably contribute to the more tough-and-tumble interactions that many men have with their dogs.

Luna. Photograph by Scott Danzig.

A less-theoretical case: the many cats in British writer Doris Lessing’s cat-themed essays appear like people in her life, meaningful, forcing from her a sort of engagement. Did Lessing, who famously said, “I felt I wasn’t the best person to bring them up” when she abandoned her children, find an untapped maternal love for her cats?

I think so, especially when her “young grey,” who had no interest in being a mother, was reluctant to stay and nurture her kittens. It is a humorous account of man vs. beast while Lessing uses psychological know-how to trick her cat into acting like a mom. The mother Lessing herself never was.

There is a pity in our relationship with pets, a form of empathy. Empathy for someone who needs something needs us. It is often solidified in that first meeting. E.B. White’s acquisition of a dachshund, for example:

I bought a puppy last week on the outskirts of Boston and drove him to Maine in a rented Ford. There had been talk in our family of getting a “sensible” dog this time, and my wife and I had gone over the list of sensible dogs, and had even ventured once or twice into the company of sensible dogs…. But after a period of uncertainty and waste motion, my wife suddenly exclaimed one evening, “Oh, let’s just get a dachshund!

Turns out they had a particular one in mind. So many well-laid plans are ruined by a pair of searching, liquid eyes.

Although domestication was more recent, our affection for animals in our communities dates back at least 50,000 years. For 50,000 years we have had some sort of relationship with these beasts, more than needing them for food and fur, and to us, they have brought some level of pleasure.

Of a particular cat, Doris Lessing mused;

I sit down to be with him, it means slowing myself down, getting rid of the fret and the urgency. When I do this – and he must be in the right mood too, not in pain or restless – then he subtly lets me know he understands I am trying to reach him, reach cat, essence of cat, finding the best of him. Human and cat, we try to transcend what separates us.

It is exactly what McDonald sought of Mabel, her goshawk, and to get there, McDonald knew she had to disappear: “You must learn to become invisible.” She explains goshawks are motivated by food alone and the only way they eat is if they trust the hand that feeds them.

I have owned cats, mostly Siamese, ever since the first one whose feet I couldn’t bear to touch lest I frighten him. One now circles my ankles on the off-chance I have a sudden craving to brush him or open some yogurt. I invariably give in. I have a helpless devotion to cats.

The weaker our wills the more cats demand. And love.

My thoughts on pets – every single pet owner ever has their thoughts on pets – are that they give us something we lack, whatever it might be. Peace, comfort, calm, sure – but also, love. Perhaps love most of all.

Film critic Roger Ebert said it better (he said everything better).

On Ebert’s list of the ten greatest films ever made is a little-known documentary called “The Gates of Heaven.” This 1978 film was about a pet cemetery, the cemetery’s owners, and its patrons. I’ve seen it many times. I was, like Ebert, quite blown away by the compassion, reality, and devotion captured. It’s like a Hemingway short story. Markers on the various graves state simply: “I knew love; I knew this dog”, and “For saving my life.”

“These animal lovers,” writes Ebert, “are expressing the deepest of human needs, for love and companionship.”

In the emptiness of the post-religious modern era where we have become distanced from nature, extended family, and saddled with aching self-awareness, is it any wonder we need pets so deeply?