Warning: If you are a dog, or cat lady, this post might challenge you. I am not responsible for people going berserk after they have read this post. Please read this post in a responsible way.
People have no patience one way or the other when it comes to defining the pet/owner relationship. There is very little agreement between the warring factions of beliefs. For some people, even defining the relationship as one of ownership would bring a huge debate preferring instead to define their calico cats as grandchildren or their chocolate Labrador as their best friend. Wake up call, it may be a very clever comment to call them your grandkids but there is no way those things sprang from your children’s loins! Also, although Chocolate Labs are oh so cute and cuddly, when is the last time that you shared a deep conversation about the meaning of life, it helped you change a tire, or even bought you the most thoughtful birthday present that you could imagine?
Yet, people are into their pets like never before. Take Cammie* for example. Her two sons were grown up. One son had already left home and another was getting ready to go to college. What was she to do? Work on her marriage, which was desperately in need of repair? Do some volunteer work at her growing church? Some more travel and leisure plans perhaps? No, none of the above. Cammie went out and bought a tea cup Maltese puppy. She set up a puppy nursery, which had a changing table, diapers, and a wardrobe with outfits for every day of the week.
When she had originally broached the topic of getting a dog with her husband Sonny*, he was against the idea. Now that the kids had left home he wanted to enjoy a little more freedom. For him, that absolutely would not include having a dog. Sonny ran a very successful limousine service in Westchester County New York. He took the small driving service that his father started and made it into a luxury limousine service for business executive expensing their ride to the airport. Between teenagers, marital disagreements and the demands of running the business Sonny was under a lot of stress. Plus, since coming to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior, he was making many changes in his life.
Petra* is a divorced mother of one who just got fired from her pharmacist position. She had grown up in a middle class Jewish household in New York. She loved the New York Yankees and had a penchant for Italian-American men. Somewhere in her story, before I met her she came to know Yeshua Jesus as Messiah, she got divorced from her Italian husband and started a serious relationship with Kato* her dog.
If there is such a thing as transference, then Petra had transferred all her hopes and dreams for relationships with her daughter, husband and friends to her little pooch. I so desperately wanted to reach her with what I thought was both our needs for a burgeoning friendship. She and I went to the same university, although we did not know each other then. We both were in the same church group so this friendship could grow, or so I thought.
Petra was in a sub-culture of people, outside of our church who anthropomorphized their animals. Some of the ladies at church liked her cute stories about Kato and did not really see how deeply she was enmeshed with her dog. Some of them may have thought it was all innocent but, with her unemployment, cutting herself off from people who could help her, was anything but!
Margaret,* born and raised in Westchester County, New York was smart and confident. She graduated from New York’s prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology and quickly made a name for herself in the competitive fashion industry. She was a loving daughter, a skilled worker and beautiful. The one thing that seem incongruent with her polished image was the baby voice that she effected whenever talking to her pets. “Ohh, wooshy, wooshy, woo, can mama give your hair a comb, ohh pretty please.” Why did this drive me absolutely insane?
All these ladies, had at varying times let me know that, “dogs are more loyal than people.” “Dogs only kill to eat, they are better than humans,” “my dog loves me no matter how I look” and “dog is God spelled backward.” What makes me incredibly sad is that they have pushed away relationships that were available under normal circumstances. Each of these ladies has reached some sort of stalemate in their relationship(s) and they don’t have the courage or skill to push past that. In other words, they have given up.
I love animals, but sometimes is seems like a lot of people that I know are looking for love in all the wrong places,i.e. with their animals. It is not ever Christian to transfer our affections for human beings with another animal species. We love the creation that God has designed and enjoy it, but right from the beginning of the Bible it describes a relationship of dominion over the creatures such as dogs, cats and fish that are around us. We observe, preserve and utilize the natural environment. And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth- Genesis1:26.
The reason for this dominion would be the specialness of what God has done in human beings. We are higher in reasoning skills, and made in the image and likeness of God. He loved us and his whole creation and pronounced that it is all good. And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good-Genesis1:31a. He cares for his creatures and made a food chain to feed them and us. The young lion roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God-Psalm 104:21. But, he has pronounced that we have dominion over the animals. That is a responsibility. If we were to run our world like God Almighty would like us to, it would be in a thoughtful way. A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast-Proverbs 12:10a.
However, after all the creation was made, and Adam was the only human, God said that it was not good for man to be alone and that he would give him a SUITABLE companion. Catch that word? Adam had all of God’s creation that he could frolic with, the birds of the air, the fish of the water, and the terrestrial creatures, and they were not called suitable by God for that deep need that we humans have to be known, understood and loved by others of our kind. Our world is in sore need of relationship repair. First, make things right with God and then allow his wisdom to help your human relationships be all they can be.
* the names have been changed but the stories are true.
