Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans by Margret Grebowicz

Published as part of Forerunners: Ideas First, a series by The University of Minnesota Press

I didn’t realise until I went to the website to find the above link, but the University of Minnesota Press published what I would have to describe as the best piece of academic (or academic adjacent, as this one is?) writing I’ve ever encountered, As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

If that one and this are a fair representative sample of the consistent quality of their books, then… well… I may have stumbled upon essayistic literature’s secret walled garden….

Are the great books the University of Minnesota Press publishes meant for scum like me to read in between bouts of crying and/or panic attacks in an empty, vapid, life?

Or are they meant to be reserved for the lucky few, the ivory towered intellectuals who love life and get to read and think and read and read and think and think while I’m doing nothing but shamefullly and disgracefully exchanging my endless-feeling (though I know they’re not) days of life for nothing but cash, down here in the horror the horror the horror of the grim modern world?

Well, some of those special books got to me, University of Minnesota Press… Some of your precious precious academic words got out and they found their way to a sad sad loser who knows how to read.

How do you like that, ey?

How do you like that???

–///–

Sorry it was late yesterday when I typed that and – as with the end of every week – the end of every day tends to be a time of great melancholy for me at the moment.

Why is that?

Because – like many of us – I’m trapped into a cycle and a stasis of a psychologically unsustainable present that I’ve maintained for far longer than I would have liked to have done in order to facilitate a blunt economic goal, which remains tantalisingly within reach but not yet in my cold, tiny, hands.

I am – like many of the people who don’t have better things to do than read literary lifestyle blogs on the internet – trapped into a functionally inert repetitious non-life.

Will there be an escape from it before the end of my working age life? Yes, definitely – it is a particular stasis I am within for a particular reason and it won’t last forever (this particular stasis won’t, but alas alas alas maybe a later, hopefully better, one will?), but it doesn’t have a fixed termination point yet so it all feels very… forever… at the moment.

Ah.

I have a plan. I do have a plan!

And this stasis – which I abhor, by the way – I find it destructive and restrictive and so so so so so uninspiring and uninspired and I am unable to find space or a sense of self outside of it.

I don’t write (blogging doesn’t count), I don’t think, I don’t create, I haven’t even recorded more than one novelty song since Christmas, and that one novelty song I didn’t even bother to finish writing and just uploaded a chorus and a five minute spoken word improvised monologue about an imaginary city filled with dogs followed by a five minute one finger synthesiser solo, which even my biggest fans (my lover and I) haven’t maintained on regular rotation.

“Dog City” is the name of my fictional city of dogs (“dog City / it’s a city for dogs / dog City / it’s a city just for dogs” is the chorus), and it makes sense why I – a miserable, childless, propertyless millennial without a vocational career – would choooooose to fantasise about such a place: because, for losers like me, dogs are the only thing we’re really able to have…

And even that is something the people with power and influence (e.g. dog charities and the pope) want to have taken away…

Rescue Me is a fascinating (for me) philosophical essay about the current Western world’s psychological reliance on dogs.

It looks at how and why people – especially people in my demographic as mentioned above – seek the company of dogs, and also explores other particularly 21st century attitudes and issues related to dog-human relationships.

Grebowicz explores the fallacy and loneliness inherent in dominance-based training (i.e. don’t try to be an alpha, try to be a peer (an attitude I have loooong practiced, considering my dog no more and no less of a valid person than myself)), she writes about the various cruelty of “work to eat” toys, which she compares to the dog equivalent of the kinds of vacuous email jobs that enmiserate millions of humans), and she also looks at the ways in which dog ownership is used as a class and sociocultural signifier, briefly touching on a study that seems to imply there is a direct correlation between dating app-based “success” and profile pictures featuring dogs.

A lot of pages, though, are dedicated to something with a little less resonance for me, but this is a – again, super interesting (!) – focus on contemporary American infrastructures related to dog ownership and dog adoption (¿adogtion?), as it seems to be that the United States now has a profit-driven (of course) dog-rehoming system that basically only permits people with loads of money to get approved to adopt rescue dogs – even the less than perfect dogs that are nobody’s first choice – and aggressively shames anyone who buys dogs from dog breeders, even like the good, responsible, ones.

My dog is eight years old, so it’s been a while since I acquired a dog and maybe things have changed here in England in that time, too, but I have never encountered an attitude here that buying a healthy pedigree pup from a Kennel Club-approved middle class breeder is anything to be ashamed of, in fact all of the similarly aged peers of mine who have dogs pretty much went this route – a rescue dog here has always been something I’d considered a thing you do after you’ve already had a dog (or two or three) and proven to yourself (and the wider world!) that you’re a responsible enough dog owner to handle a dog with potential problems.

Maybe this is a class thing here, though, and maybe with the increasing cost of pet purchase and ownership this is even less achievable than it was a decade ago. Maybe cute breeder puppies and Kennel Club certification are only the acceptable end of an industry line that at the other end arrives at cruel, filthy, dirty, puppy farms…

Maybe there is sense in trying to shame people from perpetuating the forced breeding and dehumanised meanness at the sad end of that scale.

But Grebowicz makes it clear that the “secondary” dog market in the United States perpetuates similar abuses towards humanity – valuing money and property ownership as the sole arbiters of suitability to dog acquisition (property ownership with a garden, which basically means either super rich (or near to super rich) in a city or living somewhere no one with personhood is content to live (I’m talking about suburbs so deep that they’re hard to imagine).

What dogs can give – and what we can give to dogs, too – are not to do with economics, as Grebowicz makes clear…

Dogs and humans are a codependent interspecies block that has been living and rotating in harmony for millennia and millennia…

When we warm our feet and our hearts with the warmth of a canine companion we are doing something that is as innately human as drawing animals on the walls, as carving fantasy women out of stone, as making drums and clothes out of the mammals we murder, as telling stories, as fire, as cooking, as language…

Humans and dogs are more human than humans and agriculture, than construction, than writing, almost as human as tool making, as community, as exploration, as looking to the future…

To deny dogs to anyone is to deny something deeply human, deeply within us… And without us: to deny the dogs we have made (in the images we wanted) humans to love and humans to be loved by, is also to deny something to them, too…

As coyotes and foxes and wolves encroach on our cities in the night and dogs fill our daydreams and our hearts during the day, then there is little to detract from the guarantee of a human-canid future..

Margret Grebowicz’s short book is an engaging and interesting and important text on what is lost by making access to dogs harder and what could be and what is gained by making it easier…

More dogs, please. We all need more dogs.

And less capitalistic extraction and less shit lives and less regimented work weeks and less pointless empty labour.

My life is like the life of a dog with an owner who has bought them a food delivery system they have to work at to get fed… Pointless, empty, of no consequence and a facile mockery of meaningful and satisfying toil. Am I tired? Yes. Am I fed? Yes. Is my life worthwhile in any way? No.

We should spend more time with dogs. They are so crucial to how we became the animals that we are, that anything else is disingenuous.

I highly recommend Grebowicz’s excellent essay if anything mentioned here chimes with you!

Order direct from the publisher here please