Introduction: Confessions of a Dog Hoarder

I dream of more dogs. When I fantasize about a life of success, my future, much-improved self is surrounded by dogs. Like many dog lovers, I am a fancier of a particular breed: the basenji, also called the African barkless dog. Like a hoarder, I want more. But I could just as well surround myself with chihuahuas. Or I could just devote myself to dogs with special needs or old dogs who need a hospice. The shelters are overflowing with pit bulls, after all, and many people give up large dogs when they get to be too big to handle. Or for no reason except because they are sick. I could be a haven for them, for all of them.

When I imagine my own forever home, it’s never the home itself that I see, or even the landscape. Being settled down—finally, once and for all—boils down to exactly one thing: more dogs. Financial stability = more dogs. Structure and routine = dogs. Mental health = dogs. A happy family = dogs. Buoyed by these fantasies, I am no different than a dog hoarder, except that my armies of dogs are in my dreams.

Where does animal hoarding begin? Does it not begin, precisely, with desire? Reading Abigail Thomas’s extraordinary memoir A Three Dog Life I catch myself envying her that third dog and reveling in her accounts of climbing into bed with her troika, all four of them cuddling deliciously for warmth and comfort, against the rest of the world. And what a world it is: the book is mainly about the tragic accident in which her husband suffers permanent brain damage and must live out the rest of his days in a nursing home. Despite that, I find myself delighting—along with her—in her new, single-human family, and in the preposterous luxury that is that third dog. That’s the thing: no one is around to tell her how many dogs she is allowed to adopt, what size they should be, or whether or not they should sleep in the bed. Thomas herself may not be a hoarder, but I am certain that my own pleasure in reading her is mildly inappropriate, as my whole being keeps asking for permission to get just one more.

In real life, I live with two dogs: one basenji (Abba) and one chihuahua (Waffles). So I’m due for a third, right?

When I confess this to friends, they reassure me by explaining that there’s a world of difference between fantasizing about something and actually doing it. But, given that animal hoarding is now recognized as a mental illness, I am secretly convinced that its roots are precisely in fantasy, and that I’m pulsating with this inappropriate desire. And clearly, I’m not alone.

In Confessions: Animal Hoarding, a documentary-reality TV series that premiered in 2010, an elderly woman lives in filth with more than two hundred cats, her family in despair and alienated. An overweight young gay man with more than thirty chihuahuas, which bark incessantly. Dogs interbreed at will, fill yards with their feces, fight over food. Sick cats live in cages. There’s constant noise, punctuated by whispers invoking “diseases.” Most of the hoarders unemployed or on the verge of it, their spouses and fiancés threatening divorce, and adult children refusing to bring their kids over to see grandma, who remains incomprehensibly impervious to any intervention.

As grandma calmly explains that her dogs take priority over seeing her grandchildren, it’s clear that she is in pain. The source of that pain is less clear. The family members—and we, the viewers—wring hands over what could possibly have gone wrong with grandma to make her this way. I am both covering my face in horror and peeking out through the spaces between my fingers. Hoarders overwhelmingly tend to be white women, middle aged and older. While on a good day, my imagined life unfolds in a gleaming interspecies paradise, on a bad day what I see in every one of these episodes is my not-so-distant future self.

Were I watching Confessions in public, I’d be looking around to see if others felt the same way. Is it just me, or is the depiction of grandma’s übernormal family enough to send anyone into hoarding, just to keep those unbearable, judgmental people at bay? Surely, everyone gets why she breaks down sobbing at the very mention of losing any one of her dogs, even when she has eighty-seven of them. And what about that horrible husband who is “grossed out” by having to clean up cat feces? Does anyone actually like him, or do we all agree that auntie is actually much better off single? That husband, just like those children, has no interest in the actual source of the pain she’s experiencing—or conversely, in the sense of purpose that she gets—however delusionally—from “saving” animals. Instead, the alleged “loved ones” put constant, unrelenting pressure on their “loved one” to surrender the truly loved ones, the animals, to the town authorities and thus never see them again.

The show posits the hoarder as the source of the problem, not everyone around her, not her past, not her actual poverty or feelings of scarcity and precarity, not her or fear of abandonment. No one seems interested in learning about this citadel she has built—the animals in the show are often described as a “buffer”—and how it functions to keep her feeling safe and sane, buoyed by occasional experiences of love, attention, and abundance—everything she is otherwise lacking and has probably gone without for her whole life. The family “just” wants grandma or mom or auntie or daughter or grandpa or son (when the hoarders are men) “back”—back in the world that the hoarder learned long ago doesn’t actually want them at all.

Is this really a show about some antisocial freaks living on the fringes of society and abusing dogs and cats, or is it surreptitiously designed to expose how disappointing and internally destructive every attempt at closeness with humans ultimately becomes? I’ve come to this show for the former, but the take-home, at least for me, is without a doubt the latter.

It’s difficult to say exactly what kind of mental illness animal hoarding is. It was once linked to compulsive disorders but is now increasingly linked to depression, anxiety, and social isolation. In all cases of hoarding, the perpetrators feel a strong need to protect their animals from society. There is even a subcategory called “rescue hoarding,” where hoarders are convinced that they are the only people on earth who can help these animals. Furthermore, relapses happen in 100 percent of hoarders when their animals are taken away and no ongoing support is available. Unfortunately, that necessary support is usually the stuff that was in short supply to begin with: empathy, community, patience, therapy for trauma, and long-term, collaborative intervention by multiple agencies, families, and friends.

Who has that these days?

It’s easy to condemn animal hoarding because it results in actual victims, the animals. Animals recovered from hoarding situations are famously traumatized, neglected, sometimes starved. Often, they’ve lived their whole lives in dark rooms or other cramped enclosures, in their own waste, in need of medical attention, and in need of grooming and proper socialization, which they have never received. Such dogs require special skills, patience, and time from potential adopters. They might be neurotic, pathologically shy, or aggressive. They don’t know how to live with people. They don’t necessarily know how to live with dogs, even though they have lived with dogs their whole lives. They may have disorders resulting from generations of inbreeding. And when hoarders fear giving up their dogs because they might be killed by the state, they’re not exactly wrong. If the dog is feral enough, the odds are that it will show aggression and be declared beyond rehabilitation.

If we take the perpetrators to be the hoarders themselves, we are faced with a clear-cut case of animal abuse. But if, just for a moment, we imagine the hoarders as victims, too, the story—and our own place in it—changes dramatically. Confessions brings us people who are themselves living in filth, stuck in cycles of trauma and social withdrawal, poor, neglected, ashamed—indeed, shamed into hiding. From this perspective, dog hoarding emerges not as a deplorable practice of the insane but as a symptom of a sick society unable to support its members, both human and nonhuman.

During one of my recent visits to the local SPCA, just to have a look around to see who might be up for adoption, I ended up going home with a hoarded dog I named Maybelline. I told myself that I was not interested in adopting her (though I’m due for a third, let’s not forget), but once I heard her story I agreed to foster her for a week. A one-year-old mix of beagle and blue heeler, she was petite, agile, very intelligent, and—as I discovered as the Trazodone wore off—suffering from the worst anxiety I have ever seen. For the first day, she panted incessantly, paced, and destroyed the house in various efforts to escape. By day two, she had run off twice, and once she discovered herself back in the terrifying prison that was my home, she began baying to some unknown someone. She called out for more than twenty-four hours, but no one responded. On day three, the baying suddenly ceased. She had decided that the house was where she wanted to be, but her separation anxiety—from me specifically—was so intense that I couldn’t go to the bathroom without her maniacally clawing at the closed door and panting and pacing again.

Then Maybelline began resource guarding against my dogs—but the resource was the house itself, and sometimes my very body. While crated—which I was instructed to do for a couple of hours every day, so that she would be forced to manage being alone—she did everything to destroy the crate and her own face and paws. Though she was housetrained almost immediately upon arrival—she basically trained herself, just as she immediately learned “sit” and other basic obedience on the first command—she peed anxiously whenever left alone, either in her crate, in the car, or a closed room. By day five she was barking incessantly—at nothing. And by day seven she had bitten me as I carried my basenji past her to let my poor dog outside to pee.

While I fostered Maybelline, the SPCA came into possession of several more dogs from this particular household, so I learned more about her beginnings. It was a house with seventeen dogs living in it, while the human owners lived in an RV next door. The dogs were never let outside. They were fed inside in such a way that they had to compete and fight for their food. They were all intact—not “fixed”—and had interbred at will. As more of the females were confiscated, one ran away and was never seen again. Another had just had puppies, all of which had died. One was so feral she couldn’t be touched. Maybelline herself, only a year old, had gray hairs on her face—from scarring, a sign of fighting.

Halfway through the week, when Maybelline had started attacking my dogs over space, I drove down to the shelter and said she should be placed with someone who has no other animals. But I was told there were no such fosters, and that I was her best bet. I had agreed to just one week, I said, my stomach turning with guilt and sadness. As I gave back all her things, including the snacks and toys I had bought her, the shelter asked if I would be willing to swap her out for the female whose puppies had just died. I was, by all accounts, a model dog owner, a valuable foster. The opposite of the people from whom these dogs had been taken.

And yet, I clearly wasn’t. I couldn’t handle it. Her resource guarding against my dogs was too much for me; I had to keep them safe in their own home. Like a helicopter parent, I so feared anything happening to them that I couldn’t think straight about how to handle the situation. I returned home alone, beaten down by the whole experience and everything I should have done differently.

I was surprised by how fiercely I missed her. Here we were, the original owners and I—the hoarders and I—connected by this dog. I hoped the shelter was able to tell them that their dogs were safe and well cared for. I wished I could show them videos of Maybelline sitting for treats, going on long, ponderous leashed walks, and sleeping next to my head. I am absolutely sure that in their own way they wanted the very best for their dogs.

The tropes that animate Confessions: Animal Hoarders also animate shows about exemplary dog ownership. The most recent of these is The Pack, which premiered in 2020, basically a couples reality-TV, survivor-elimination show, except that the couples consist of dogs and their owners. The couples compete against each other in problem-solving challenges held in scenic locations around the world, in which their bond is showcased (and, as the script keeps reminding us, is strengthened by the show itself).

These are all fit, young professionals, most of them urban, rather than older folks living in low-income communities. The dogs are purebred and live the most charmed lives possible. The dyad—one dog, one human—is held up as the ultimate expression of dog ownership, which is remarkable in a show called The Pack. Despite its reliance on adventure content, the thrill of competition, and spectacular scenery, the show is both breathtakingly normal and normative. Everyone is perfect, a cohort of upwardly mobile young professionals that have overcome adversity with the help of man’s best friend. And it’s no small detail that they are competing for half a million dollars, in addition to hundreds of thousands to donate to a charity of their choice.

As spectacles of dog ownership, Confessions: Animal Hoarders and The Pack at first appear like they couldn’t possibly be more different. And yet, the human-interest stories behind each couple in The Pack are very similar to those that Animal Hoarders uses to explain how this single, isolated person began hoarding. Trauma and loss—from deaths of unborn children to premature deaths of parents, from military PTSD to tragic deaths of former dogs, from childhood bullying to rock-bottom depression, addiction, and “starting over”—this, we discover, is how each of the people became so bonded with their one dog, the dog of their life, their “ride or die.” Almost all the owners describe their dogs as their children, or as a buffer against the social pressure to find human partners and marry. And both shows tap into dog ownership as the true experience of living well with others, of intimacy, security, mutual support, interdependence—from friendship to family.

Is this a projection, a metaphor, a substitution? Is it a collective hallucination? Not exactly. Dogs were the first domesticated animal (the latest research dates this to 23,000 years ago1), and they accompanied humans as they dispersed throughout the world. Dogs have been an integral part of the social infrastructure in which the human species came to flourish. They were not just in the margins of that flourishing; their specific forms of companionship contributed to it so actively that it would not be an exaggeration to say that there would be no humans as we know them without dogs. It’s no surprise that dogs are considered part of the social unit, given that this is exactly what they have always been. Without any hint of substitution or projection, it may be said that human–dog relations are relations of love, and, as Donna Haraway writes in When Species Meet, “This love is a historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy.”2

But there is, at the same time, an intense and often deliberate substitution happening. Recent changes in dog-owner culture indicate that people are openly looking to dogs to help alleviate their increasing loneliness and disappointment with other people. The old adage that women who didn’t or couldn’t have children disappeared into life with animals is becoming simply, literally true, as birth rates all over the world fall and pet-adoption rates soar. The fear that dogs might simply replace children has reached as far as the Vatican, causing Pope Francis to criticize people who opt to have no children or who stop at one child but simultaneously adopt multiple cats or dogs. He claims that this turn away from children and toward animals “diminishes our humanity.”3

While “my dog is my child” is unproblematically—even if a bit metaphorically—true without any extra context, it takes on a different kind of meaning when a hoarding older person makes it clear that her actual children don’t visit her because they’re too busy with their own lives. Or when a contestant on The Pack uses her dog as a buffer against invasive family members asking why she isn’t married yet. This is a form of substitution, yes, but it’s not just some silly misplacement of feelings. It’s a deliberate turn away from humans and toward less toxic social relationships—with dogs. And though few would call most dog-hoarding cases instances of a healthy relationship, there’s no denying that, no matter how unhealthy it may be for the dogs, it is nevertheless less traumatizing for the human hoarder than the company of her “fellow” humans.

I, too, have endured a tragedy. My beloved basenji Z, the first dog of my own I ever had, was taken from me brutally by the fire that burned down my boyfriend’s house while we were working abroad, while our animals were in the care of a live-in dog sitter, our good friend. That person left the wood-burning stove on for the animals while he went to work, and something went wrong. We never found out exactly what. Along with my boyfriend’s cat, Markybear, Z perished horribly, terrified and without her people, in the very same house where I, her one and only, had told her to stay and wait for me.

I die inside every time I think about it. There is no take on what happened that makes it bearable.

Z filled my heart so fully when she was still alive that it never occurred to me to want a second dog. Once she was gone, no number of dogs could numb my need, the ache to hold her once more, even just to comfort her while she died. It’s been three years since the fire, but nothing helps, if I am honest. The love I feel for Abba and Waffles feels like it comes from another person than the person who loved Z, another life, another body. The person writing right now is not the same one who belonged to Z. And this new me is insatiable for dogs. I have entered a new world of dog ownership, one in which I must regularly curb my hunger for opening my doors ever wider to all the dogs in the world that need homes, a list that keeps growing longer.

I can no longer tell if it was Z herself that turned me inside out and opened me to other ways of knowing and loving, or if it was her loss that did this to me. She is and thus will always be the one that got away.

This is a little book about the oldest relationship that humans have cultivated with another large animal—something like the original interspecies space, as old or older than any other practice that might be identified as human. But it’s also about the role of this relationship in the attrition of life in late capitalism. As we become more and more obsessed with imagining ourselves as benevolent rescuers of dogs, it’s increasingly clear that it is dogs who are rescuing us. They are our flotation devices in a sea of precarity, not the other way around.

The Covid adoption craze is just one stage in a much longer process, which NPR now calls “the pet revolution.” Dog ownership has been steadily on the rise since the 1990s. Dog food and other products are more expensive than ever, euthanasia rates have declined dramatically, and the pet industry keeps generating more and more jobs. The most probable reason for this sudden growth in pets in the late ’90s has to do with the arrival of the internet: the attrition of traditional social relations and communities caused people to turn to dogs to fill the void.4

We are leaning on dogs more heavily than ever for the emotional labor of sustaining an unsustainable world. This form of extraction lives in unexpected places—not only in actual dog–owner relationships, or even in the recently invented abstract category of “emotional support animal,” but in TV shows, in presidential elections (Major Biden made national headlines as the first rescue dog in the White House), on TikTok, and even on our online dating profiles, where a photo with a dog increases one’s appeal so much that people have begun “dogfishing,” posing with dogs that aren’t theirs.5 Exactly what it is we are trying to “get” out of dogs is less and less clear.

Recently, an article by Margaret Renkl in the New York Times informed that, “In any household, the true master of hope is the family dog.” But the description of the household in question, a middle-class, married suburbia straight of out Norman Rockwell—the new puppy, carefully placed with them by a rescue organization, makes everyone laugh with his crazy antics, like “stealing shoes from the shoe basket and hiding them around the house, grabbing the book I’m reading and running away with it, sneaking a sip of iced tea when my back is turned”6—situates this claim in a very specific mode of late-capitalist life. This is the mode in which dog articles in the mainstream media announce hopeful states, precisely because actual hope is in ever-shorter supply. Regardless of how fervently the author declares herself an optimist, the life and environment she describes, including the normative, predictable, and slightly infantilized role that her dogs seem to play in it—ultimately fail to inspire hope in the reader.

The article lacks any unique identifying characteristics for either dogs or people. It is instead a sort of catalog of indices of every dog’s perfect America: squirrel chasing, dog biscuits tossed by UPS drivers, and “silly antics” like climbing bookcases to get food get food get food. During and after the pandemic lockdown, when people seemed to rediscover dog ownership and suddenly the media were abuzz about its advantages, articles like Renkl’s, intended as intimate, down-home messages of optimism, inadvertently serve up blandness and lack of detail as defining features of life itself. There is no bigger message to turn to here. The result is that her claim that dogs are a source of hope begs the question: hope for what?

In what follows, I attempt to think about dogs and humans—the original and most emotionally intense interspecies relationship in human history—coexisting in late-capitalist captivity. Dogs are nothing less than the beating heart of the human condition, at once ancient and only just beginning to show itself. What is the relationship between our mutual captivation and the material and affective conditions that literally hold us captive, in very different but intimately related ways?

We live in dog-rich times. Canidae, the biological subfamily consisting of dog-like (as opposed to cat-like) carnivores, are the most abundant and adaptive mammals on earth, living on every continent except Antarctica. Out there, right at the edges of our collective political-economic captivity, is the wilderness, their wilderness, where wild canids rule. While so many apex predators are going extinct due to human presence, wild canids are thriving, in large part because they seem to adapt especially well to those same places where humans live. Coyotes, whose numbers are always on the rise and whose range continues to expand across the globe, especially thrive in cities.7 Even as some wild dog species are verging on extinction—the African wild dog is one of the most endangered mammals on the planet—there are more canids alive, both wild and domesticated, than ever in history. Domesticated dogs are the world’s most populous large animals, numbering around one billion, outnumbered only by factory-farmed livestock animals and the humans that create and destroy them.

As true wilderness recedes further out of reach, domestic dogs become our “windows on the disappearing wild,” according to John McLaughlin in his book The Canine Clan.8 He writes that, once all the intelligent wild mammals are gone, including primates and cetaceans, “we will be pretty much alone here. Whose mind will we share in that lonely time, only a few decades hence? Why, that of the dog, of course. Alone among comparable intelligences, his is likely to share the world with us for some time to come.”9

But what does that sharing of the world actually look like? And is it still appropriate to describe this as a meeting of “intelligences”? Almost thirty years after McLaughlin wrote those words, dogs populate our social media, and not only in the already too-familiar manner of the Instagram influencer, but ever-more weirdly, more and more TikTok videos showing a dog’s last day or last meal before euthanasia. TikTok is also the theater for the training wars, conflicts among dog trainers about the best methods. Meanwhile, dog hoarding cases appear to be on the rise. Dog abundance is complicated in a world in which humans struggle more and more with social life, not only with doing it but with the question of what it even means anymore. And it seems that this sharing is no longer limited to the sphere of mind but involves affects, and the technologies and institutions that shape affects—indeed, every institution governing life today.

This book is not a history of the myriad fraught ways that dog–human relations act as a theater for human-on-human violence, especially against people of color and poor people of all ethnicities. Excellent books on these topics already exist.10 It’s also not an engagement with one of the liveliest media topics of the moment, namely the true story of dog domestication, one that continuously changes as paleoanthropologists and geneticists pursue the topic hoping to arrive at a stable picture. It also doesn’t explore different modes of canine–human relations that currently exist and are just as much direct products of late capitalism, except in the so-called developing world—most notably the abundance of street dogs and the eating of dogs.

It’s overwhelming, writing about dogs. I’m sure that there is no such thing as a thinking that gets at “dogs in general.” Dog being is too diverse, too ancient, too widespread, and humans are too intimately close to it to get critical distance or solid footing. On top of it all, as the best trainers will tell you, every individual dog is different. And finally, with dogs, one is never oneself: one is always in a state of being undone by them. One cannot think straight. Thinking-with-dogs must learn this as its first rule: your thinking will necessarily outrun you, your emotions will be pulled out from under you by this relationship. As Barry Lopez famously wrote, “To be rigorous about wolves—you might as well expect rigor of clouds.”11

But one does expect some things of clouds, even if not rigor. I have come to know and love the clouds where I live, and I ponder and photograph them on a regular basis. They are familiar. So I am binding myself here to the familiar, limiting myself to my particular situation, and answering a call I found in another book. In Colin Dayan’s wise and deeply moving With Dogs at the Edge of Life, she writes: “If we were challenged to write a history of dispossession, we could go to no better place that the foreclosures of an imagined humanity when bounded and sharpened by the dog kind.”12 But Dayan herself seeks to set a mood rather than writing a history of dispossession. “Mood replaces certainty,” she writes, nudging us into a different space of intelligibility.13 My goal is to follow her invitation: to zero in on some aspects of the media ecosystem and social moment in which I find myself as a dog owner and -lover, and to map out the contours of that mood, the mood of a dispossession shared by my social context, which increasingly includes dogs.

Indeed, dogs require a different space of intelligibility, but not only because theirs is a different animal intelligence. My working hypothesis is that dogs belong to another mode of existence than the one the present demands of us. There is a movement in social studies of technology to shift focus from the “quantifiable self” to something more real, earthbound, embodied, what computer scientist and science writer Linda Stone calls “the essential self.” This book could be understood as making the case that dogs are an “essential self technology.”14 The quantified self is the self that all the structures of late capitalism treat, from medicine to work to insurance (indeed, Stone sometimes calls this self “actuarial”). In contrast, the essential self is everything that exceeds what can be measured. This is precisely why thinking with dogs is a mood: we access the parts of ourselves that the endless attention to measurement cannot access, and the shift in psychophysical state is palpable. The true abundance that dogs have to offer is that of the unquantifiable—a right, if you will, to the essential self. This, I believe, is the source of the familiarity inside their strangeness, this return to the essential self that life with dogs opens onto, at least potentially.

Rather than pretend at objective evaluations, I’ve decided to embrace my obsession and speak from the perspective of the closeted hoarder, the one who wants too much, loves too hard, and probably does it wrong despite her best intentions—a limited, particular take generated by my own conditions of dispossession. Perhaps an alternative title for this introduction could have been “Confessions of a Cloud Chaser.”

The following three chapters deal with three different aspects of social life as seen through the recent turn to dogs as both agents and subjects of rescue. In “Life,” I examine the logics of rescue itself, the social imaginary that governs contemporary adoption procedures under biocapitalist logics of what it means to have a life. In “Food,” I turn to work and eating, two dimensions central to slow death, or the idea that life under the capitalist regime is actually sucking the life out of us—dogs, humans, and indeed, the assemblage that is dogs-and-humans in relation. In “Order,” I consider the place of the pack model in how humans see life with others today. My suspicion is that all models for the dog-and-human assemblage are utopian, and so I ask us to consider what exactly we want from this relationship today, what deeper desires it answers. Each chapter offers an analysis of a cultural phenomenon and ends by zeroing in on one of the deeper questions that the phenomenon presents us. My goal is not to develop a “philosophy of dogs” but to show that living with dogs demands better, more careful thinking about life than what is currently available in philosophy.

Finding the true abundance that dogs offer the world means, first of all, pushing back against the false abundances, the ones that result in the bankruptcy of our inner lives and relationships, and even of our bodies. The ones that are really just scarcity, dressed up. We know that dogs make us better people, and, in doing so, make the world better. And yet, it seems, none of the existing structures that organize life allow for their thriving, which would in turn help human thriving. The life that dogs and humans could help each each other make has yet to emerge.