How consumerism and colonialism helped make dogs the pets we know and love today

I live in a city that is drenched in history. I’m constantly reminded of its layers of history, from Roman remains to a 1930s cinema converted into a theatre-cum-library-cum-cinema. When I take my dog Cassie for her daily walks, we stroll along an 18th-century canal with the English Civil War-era city walls forming a picturesque backdrop.

The past haunts us, and Cassie herself is profoundly historical. A Bedlington-Whippet cross who joined my family in June 2021, aged eight weeks, she has grey fur, soulful eyes, and a scruffy beard and eyebrows. She exudes affection, curiosity, and joie de vivre. Everyone – canine or human – is a potential friend to her (squirrels and cats, however, are definitely not in the friend zone). She is a joy to have around during this period of political, social and environmental turmoil.

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As people often say, dogs live in the present and so help keep you in the moment too. And while my mind often still whirrs when I’m with her – thinking through work and family life, and worrying about war, Trump, and climate breakdown – sometimes, sitting in the garden with her on my lap, listening to the hum of insects and traffic, I feel a deep sense of calm.

Such moments seem outside time. But as a historian, I know that the past is ever present, and that neither dogs nor humans exist outside of their historical contexts. She’ll never realise it, but Cassie’s life is very different to a dog living in, say, early 19th-century Britain, let alone a street dog in Delhi at any point in history. If she’d been born in Britain on 2 May 1821 instead of 200 years later, Cassie would not have been inoculated against infectious diseases such as distemper, the vaccine for which was only developed a century later.

She would likely have eaten a diet of scraps from the table and kitchen leftovers instead of the sophisticated mix of ground-up, dried meat and vegetables that is Kibble dog food which I feed her. Indeed, even dog biscuits only became available in the mid-19th century when James Spratt first launched his range of ‘dog cakes’.

It would certainly never have occurred to dog owners 200 years ago to pick up their pet’s excrement on walks, a practice which was only encouraged from the 1970s onwards. Neither would early Victorian Cassie have been bought any of the specialised puppy toys and equipment which we see in pet shops today.

She would probably have been allowed to roam the streets unsupervised much of the time as it was not until the 1860s and 1870s that legislation was passed cracking down on straying dogs in Britain. Her life would in some ways have been freer and more independent than it is now, but she would also have been potentially more susceptible to illness and violence.

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After more than a decade of researching and writing scholarly work on the history of human-canine relations, Cassie prompted me to write Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog.

Beginning with Stone Age-era canine cave carvings and ending with dogs on TikTok and Instagram (and yes, Cassie has her own IG account), I investigate how humans bred and valued dogs primarily as workers – hunters, herders and guards – in the ancient, medieval and early modern world. In Victorian Britain change was afoot as the working-class ‘Dog Fancy’ (men who bred dogs for fighting and showing) and upper- and middle-class dog breeders, under the auspices of the Kennel Club, started fashioning and standardising dogs based on their lineage and appearance.

How dogs looked now mattered more than what they did. This fed the appetite of the growing ranks of middle-class consumers who sought out canine companionship to complete their domestic idyll and who had money to spend on accessories for their pet dogs.

The model of the middle-class pet dog overshadowed other forms of human-canine camaraderie. Elite commentators lambasted the dogs of the poor, who they branded dangerous and diseased, as well as street dogs who lived fully or semi-independent lives on the streets.

In Britian, the police rounded up street dogs who were then rehomed or killed in dogs homes, the most famous being based in Battersea. Campaigns against streets dogs were emulated across Europe and North America and exported to British colonies. Yet street dogs have survived, and still form the bulk of dogs in the Global South.

Historical forces, from consumerism to colonialism, have melded with dogs’ genetic malleability to create the dogs we know and love today. What stands out for me as I walk Cassie is that although the bonds between canines and humans have transformed tremendously, the two species are bound together by more than leash and collar. Collaboration and companionship remain the warp and woof of this interspecies history.

Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog by Chris Pearson is out now (Profile, £18.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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