Andy Moyle
All-Breed Dog Obedience Instructor
AMPSK9.com
Sunday was Mother’s Day, and I noticed an uptick in posts on dog-oriented social media feeds of a certain theme. This theme has been around longer than I’ve been involved in the space, but this year, culminating in the flurry of posts this Sunday, it seems more prominent than ever. Perhaps my increased rate of noticing is a peculiarity own social media feeds, the content recommendation algorithms having observed that I tend to linger longer on this sort of stuff. Or maybe it’s just cognitive bias on my part. But I don’t think so. The theme I’m referring to is what I’ll refer to as the “Pet Pawrent” phenomenon, which I’ll define loosely as, “representing relationships with dogs paternally.”
Terms such as “dog-mom” and “furbaby” have existed in the common lexicon for quite some time, and encounters with Pet Pawrents displaying an indulgent and unhealthy attachment to their pets have been the chagrin of not only working dog trainers but members of the general public as well. Who among us, simply wanting to enjoy a picnic in the park or an evening at a brewery patio have not had to deal with an uncontrolled animal encroaching on our personal space with behavior enabled, perhaps even encouraged, by a responsibility-dodging Pet Pawrent? As a dog obedience instructor, I deal with the consequences of Pet Pawrenting pretty regularly, but I was taken aback this Sunday to see how many of my fellow instructors were actively promoting (or perhaps taking advantage of) this phenomenon with posts on social media wishing a happy Mother’s Day to “Dog Moms” and whatnot. Until now, my impression of the field was that most trainers-for-hire regarded Pet Pawrenting as harmful to the behavioral and mental wellbeing of our companion animals, but perhaps 2025 marks a turning point when the attitude has shifted from one of contempt toward one of acceptance of it as the New Normal, where treating the dog as a human child is tolerated, encouraged even, by trainers looking for a competitive edge in a craft where marketing prowess increasingly trumps working ability.
The outburst of “Dog-Mom” posting this Mother’s Day by some of my colleagues coincided with an uptick among others deriding it. 1 2 It seems to be on a lot of people’s minds. The topic of how Pet Pawrenting can be harmful for our relationships with dogs has been dealt with ad nauseum, and I don’t have much to add regarding it. Entire online communities such as Reddit’s r/dogfree dedicate themselves to criticizing and ridiculing what they see as the excesses of Pet Pawrent culture.3 4 What I am interested in examining in this article is why it is occurring. If we accept that the tendency to represent relationships with dogs paternally is a growing phenomenon, what is it about our society that makes Pet Pawrenting attractive? In providing a properly philosophical root-cause analysis, I intend to avoid the useless and self-indulgent moralism of a polemic and treat the phenomenon as-such, hoping to provide fresh insight useful to the reader regardless of their moral stance on the topic.
Pet Pawrenting: How Did It Start?
Anthropomorphism as a way of comprehending the natural is an enduring conceptual schema. Studies have shown that attitudes toward dogs closely map those held towards children:5
It’s a phenomenon that seems to be quite pervasive cross-culturally in industrialized societies. To quote Lilly Mae from the 1991 documentary A Little Vicious:6
“A dog is just like people. If you abuse the kids, they become to hate you. If you abuse a dog, they become to hate you. Any kind of animal. They’re just like kids. Dogs is just like kids. They got feelings just like people.”
The specifically anthropomorphic attitude that motivates modern Pet Pawrenting was foreshadowed by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Great Britain in the late 19th century.
Victoria was raised under the oppressive ‘Kensington System,’ a rigid set of rules and educational practices instituted by her mother which severely limited her social interactions with children in her cohort. For companionship, Victoria was afforded “Dash,” a King Charles Spaniel with whom she grew intensely attached. Victoria’s attachment to her pet dogs remained a constant throughout her adolescence and into her adult life as Queen. She gained a reputation for being cold and distant with her family and close associates, writing in her private correspondence about children that,7
“An ugly baby is a very nasty object—and the prettiest is frightful when undressed,”
and at other points railing against the ‘baby worship’ she believed had a handicapping effect on people of power and ambition.
In Victoria’s private writing about her dogs however, she is unrestrainedly affectionate, far more so than she is toward her own children, cooing over her dogs and singing the praises of their virtues. When her beloved “Dash” died at the ripe old age of 10, she had the following engraved on his headstone:
His attachment was without selfishness
His playfulness without malice
His fidelity without deceit
READER
If you would be beloved and die regretted
Profit by the example of
DASH
It seems to be the case that the young Victoria’s sociality, frustrated by the oppressive Kensington System, found a displacement object in her dear little Dash, establishing a pattern that she would repeat many times in her adulthood. Perhaps we can empathize with the poor girl who was unfortunately forced to embody the ‘Princess Locked Away in a Tower’ archetype, and who, just like in the Disney movies, seems to have turned to her animal companions to be able to make it through. It’s long been my working assumption that we will find the genesis of most aspects of the Dog Fancy in the culture of Victorian England, and it seems that the Pet Pawrent phenomenon is no exception, emanating from none other than Queen Victoria herself. But what is it about modern society nearly two centuries later that enables its spread?
The Rise of the Pet Pawrent
There are two main theories about what is causing the spread of Pet Pawrenting.
The Boomer Theory
The Boomer Theory of Pet Pawrents asserts that the reason why Pet Pawrenting is becoming more common is because of a “sissification” of society. Its adherents mostly seem to be members of the Baby Boomer generation, and when analyzing their theory, it can be troublesome at times to separate factual analysis from self-indulgence. These Boomers claim that younger generations have not been exposed to hardship and therefore emerge into adulthood with childlike-minds, playing Pet Pawrent with their dogs instead of creating families of their own. Proponents of the Boomer Theory therefore identify dogs in a Pet Pawrent arrangement as displacement objects, similar to Queen Victoria’s Dash, and ascribe the tendency to displace social expression onto pets to a moral failing on the Pet Pawrent’s part.8
Allegedly, the root of this “sissification” is a lack of hardship during developmental years. Therefore, the theory goes, modern generations have no tolerance for hardship and no longer engage in difficult social relationships such as marriage and child-rearing as adults, preferring “easier” Pet Pawrent relationships instead. If you listen closely to Boomer ideologues, some may even go so far as to claim that the cause of “sissification” is that not enough people nowadays were physically disciplined as children!
On first glance, this seems to match Queen Victoria’s experience. As a Princess, Victoria most certainly did not want for any material comforts, and there is no evidence that Victoria was ever physically abused as a child. However, those who are familiar with Victoria’s personal writings, and most likely Queen Victoria herself, would probably not describe her childhood under the oppressive and controlling Kensington System as “without hardship.” In fact, some of Victoria’s first actions as Queen were to cut contact with her mother and banish her childhood governor Sir John Conroy from her royal quarters, demonstrating that she held a significant amount of resentment toward them for the way she was treated. In Victoria’s case, social isolation and a lack of freedom were a specific sort of hardship that caused her to seek a displacement object for her social expression in her dearest Dash.
Furthermore, the notion that modern generations lack hardship is something that I find to be more in the realm of self-indulgence than fact. In a recent discussion elucidating some aspects of the Boomer Theory of Pet Pawrenting, dog trainer Linda Kaim recounts seeing violent and graphic images from the Kent State shooting and the Vietnam War on black and white television, and asserts that modern generations are not exposed to the same sort of real-life violent media like the Boomers were.9 From my own personal experience as a late Millenial, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I was a mere 8 years old when the entire country was subjected, over and over again, to full-color images of a pair of buildings with thousands of people inside being destroyed during the events of September 11, 2001. As we grew older and the internet matured alongside us, many members of my generation were also exposed to hundreds if not thousands of graphically violent images of gore, Mexican cartel torture, and other unspeakably awful stuff as children and adolescents on the Internet. Most Boomers did not really interact with the web very much until 2012 or later and therefore are ignorant of just how bad the old school internet could be before it was all coalesced and sanitized on the websites they use now. Even today, a simple scroll through Twitter with the right settings will expose you to images from conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, even our own backyards such as such as police bodycam captures or footage from the violent race riots of 2020 that make the stuff from the Vietnam era look like a walk in the park.
The Boomer Theory of Pet Pawrents simply does not stand up to the facts, historically or in the present. While I agree that the Pet Pawrents are seeking an object for the displacement of their “paternal frustrations” as Kaim calls it, I think the Boomer Theory serves more as vehicle for comforting moralism than an objective description of the phenomenon.
The Progressive Theory
The theory that Technological Progress is the cause of Pet Pawrenting is closer to the truth, but in my opinion, it lacks sophistication. This theory claims that advancement in the production of technological artifacts has conditioned society to expect instant gratification of every desire, and so when folks feel a paternal urge, they seek its immediate discharge by obtaining a pet rather than creating a family. I think there’s some truth to that, however, the theory lacks historical perspective. If technological progress fosters a proclivity toward instant gratification (what economists call “high time preference”10), then we should expect to see lowering time preferences the further we look back into humanity’s past, with some sort of idyllic period in archaic pre-history when technological advancement was near zero with a world populated by Noble Savages who had maximal control over their desires and urges, perfectly operating with their eye toward the future with no concern over the satisfaction of present urges.
That’s obviously an absurd picture, especially when you consider contemporary humans who still live the archaic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in 2025 like certain uncontacted tribes across the globe from the Amazon to the Australian outback. My understanding of these groups is that they live almost entirely hand-to-mouth, lacking the technology to store food or any other form of value for extended durations of time, and that their societies tend to be internally violent, indicating a high time preference tendency to immediately gratify violent urges.
There are also periods we can point to in the not-so-distant past when instant gratification culture emerged in the absence of relative technological progress, and we saw humans doing a lot more degenerate things with their animals than “pawrenting” them: the late Roman Empire for example. Queen Victoria should serve as another example of an early Pet Pawrent who existed in a time of relatively low technology. The Progressive Theory, like the Boomer Theory, is therefore correct to identify the source of the Pet Pawrent urge in a desire to find a convenient displacement object for the gratification of paternal frustrations, but fails to identify the material conditions which lead to the preference for displaced gratification.
Setting Things Straight
The Progressive Theory is correct to point out a relationship between technology and time preference, but I think the real connection is between certain kinds of technology. Consumer technologies which shorten the duration between payment and receipt of the product are sometimes blamed for rising time preferences, but I think that’s confusing the effect for the cause. I don’t think that the fact that you used to have to wait 2 weeks to get something from the Sears Catalog is the reason why people’s time preferences were lower 70 years ago than they are in the age of Amazon Prime, because back then waiting 2 weeks WAS the fastest way to gratify your desire for that new lamp or whatever. People ordering from the Sears Catalog were still seeking short term consumption, they were just limited by the technology they had at the time.
The real question is why consumption (as opposed to saving or investment) is taking up so much of peoples’ budgets nowadays? In other words, why are more people choosing to spend their resources on goods in the present rather than later on in the future? The question itself assumes that there is a way to choose to delay gratification, that is, that there is a technology which exists to store value to be consumed later on. That technology is called “money,” and I think the reason we’re backsliding and more frequently choosing instant rather than delayed gratification is because our monetary technology is degenerating and making it harder for us to preserve value into the future.
One of the nice things about money is that we can employ math to figure out exactly how much value it holds right now vs. at a future date: economists call it the rate of interest.11 Taking out a loan, the interest rate represents how much the borrower is willing to sacrifice his future consumption for consumption in the present, and conversely, how much future consumption the lender has to be compensated with in order to sacrifice her consumption in the present. From a market perspective then, the general rate of interest therefore represents the time-price of money, an objective measurement of a society’s valuation of future vs. present consumption – its overall time preference.
Historical studies of interest rates have shown that they were highest in pre-modern and medieval societies when violence and warfare were common and property rights lacked robust enforcement, reflecting a high value on consuming goods in the present vs. the uncertain future.12 From the 17th-19th centuries, interest rates consistently fell in developed countries as capital accumulated and economies got wealthier, reflecting a tendency of capital-holders to save and invest their current purchasing power into long-term projects that produced delayed gratification. This coincided with the widespread adoption among world economies of gold as money, which due to its innate physical characteristics and distribution in the earth’s crust, makes it a reliably scarce commodity capable of lasting long periods of time in storage without physically degrading: a superb monetary technology. The latter part of this “Golden Age” corresponded with the rise in developed countries of a middle class which had enough wealth and resources to be able to afford pet dogs who, like children, provided no economic utility, and with Queen Victoria the Pet Pawrent at its helm, the Dog Fancy exploded into modern consciousness.
That all changed in the early 20th century as government central banks shifted away from physical, hard money into a fiat money standard. Fiat monetary policy has enabled central banks to keep interest rates artificially low by constantly inflating the money supply. This distorts market signals and makes it difficult for capital-holders to know when and where to save and invest vs. consume, raising their time preference in a world of uncertain booms and busts. At the level of the individual, inflation of the money supply means that one dollar today will buy more for us today vs. a year from now, so the incentive is for us to spend our money as quickly as possible.
Since our monetary technology doesn’t allow us to save effectively, we get conditioned to seek gratification of all of our desires in the moment, knowing that if we try to delay gratification we will only get less of the desired good. That’s why consumer technologies like Amazon Prime are so popular nowadays. I think that building a family is another form of saving and investing current resources into future goods, but if we learn that saving and investing doesn’t pay off in the future, it seems less attractive. Furthermore, since the modern Dog Fancy from Queen Victoria on already contained within it a tendency to seek displacement of paternal frustrations, the dog-as-furbaby provides a convenient object for high time preference individuals feeling the urge.
History shows us that low time preference is a learned behavior, not something that comes to us naturally. We have to be confident that delaying gratification of a desire will actually produce more gratification in the future. If our savings technology isn’t able to adequately store value into the future, then we will not learn to delay gratification – it’s as simple as that. And if we can’t learn that habitually forgoing present consumption enables more consumption of future goods, then we’ll end up in a high time preference, instant gratification, Pet Pawrenting society.
I think a lot of the time, psycho-analyses of the Pet Pawrents lead to of self-indulgent moralizing like what you see on r/dogfree. I understand the attraction, but I’m not sure that it’s helpful. We know what the problem is and why it’s bad – what we need are solutions. If trainers can learn to apply a more straightforward root-cause analysis of the incentives that cause the phenomenon, they will have more compassion for the Pet Pawrents, and a more clearheaded approach toward dealing with it. We won’t be able to tackle this ourselves, but I have hope that if more of us become aware of the problem and what we can do to remedy it (hint: Bitcoin fixes this), then a more reasonable future awaits for man and dog alike.
- Bill Church and Babette Haggerty, 4/30/2025, Bow Wow Bill and Babette Haggerty Talk Dog, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjW8YwWfjWI ↩︎
- Linda Kaim, 4/28/2025, Relationships with Dogs, https://lionheartk9.com/relationships-with-dogs/ ↩︎
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Dogfree/ ↩︎
- For an alternative take on a possible cause of the uptick in anti-dog sentiment, see Jeffrey Tucker, 4/18/2025, There Is A Growing Plot Against Dogs, (The Epoch Times), https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/there-is-a-growing-plot-against-dogs-5844000 ↩︎
- Turcsán, B., Ujfalussy, D. J., Kerepesi, A., Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E. (2025) Similarities and differences between dog-human and human-human relationships. Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-95515-8 ↩︎
- Immy Humes, 1991, A Little Vicious, https://vimeo.com/ondemand/alittlevicious ↩︎
- Queen Victoria to Victoria, The Princess Royal, 2/26/1859, in Dearest Child: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal, 1858–1861, ed. Roger Fulford (London: Evans Brothers, 1964), 191. ↩︎
- Bill Church and Linda Kaim, 4/7/2025, Linda Kaim’s Top Dog Training Secrets Revealed Live!, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2moUi33UQ54, 12:55 – 19:26 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ludwig von Mises Institute, Time Preference, https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Time_preference ↩︎
- Burton G. Malkiel, Interest Rates, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/InterestRates.html ↩︎
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 2001, Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers) ↩︎