The Company We Keep

Traditionally, a review should not begin with what is wrong with a book. But in the case of Jay Ingram’s The Science of Pets, it seems necessary to address two big flaws up front: the cover and the title.

I suppose the choices were made with marketing in mind. The cynic in me suspects that if you slap an image of a pooch on anything, dog lovers will buy it. And I believe that if you couple “science” and “pets” in a title, a whole cohort of people will flock to a book, podcast, or documentary seeking further confirmation about the great things their fur babies do for them. A biological miracle drug, a pet can lower blood pressure, assuage loneliness, and even save a life — right? It turns out that the real lowdown on pets is much more complex, and it’s a subject that shines in the capable hands of Ingram, a science communicator with over four decades of experience in a variety of formats.

Ingram is remembered and beloved as the former host of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks, from 1979 to 1992, and of Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet, from 1995 to 2011. (During his time on Daily Planet, Ingram was influential in the decision of a much younger colleague of mine to pursue science journalism.) This doyen of popular science has also authored twenty or so books, written countless newspaper columns and magazine articles, and delivered plenty of public presentations. At the risk of sounding ageist, I’d say that for someone as well-established and prolific as Ingram, it’s an occupational hazard to occasionally “phone it in.” Thankfully, despite his book’s cover and title, Ingram is far from phoning it in with The Science of Pets.

In eight sections and thirty-three brief chapters, Ingram explores the connection we have with animals, both domesticated and not, although dogs and cats receive the lion’s share of attention. It makes sense: we spend an inordinate amount of time, money, and mental energy on these two mammals. But first Ingram looks to the archeological record and takes readers on a romp through the past to introduce the potential origins of keeping pets.

Cave paintings in France and Spain dating back 20,000 to 35,000 years attest to our fascination with animals that have shared the landscape with us. When I was an archeology student, I always approached cave paintings as capital‑A Art: evidence of abstract thinking and materially innovative, considering how spare yet lifelike the images are. Ingram got me wondering if our connection to animals has always been so potent that it was crucial for early people to record for eternity not just these creatures’ presence but their own alongside them. Cave paintings are more than evidence of cognition; they’re a testament to our deep affinity with other species.

In his opening pages, Ingram establishes that this desire to keep animals is fundamentally human. Drawing on history as well as modern research, he argues that pet ownership is a strong expression of biophilia, the innate human need to link to other living things. Even trophy hunters, he contends, are expressing biophilia, in a somewhat warped way.

Ingram is persuasive. As I was reading The Science of Pets, I was also listening to the memoir of an Indigenous woman from Ecuador. As she recounted her childhood, I was struck by how many “pets” she and her siblings kept. They regularly brought creatures from the rainforest to their village home: turtles, birds, lizards. A howler monkey was particularly beloved. I do wonder if, in her case, “pet” was a term settled on in translation. The word itself is slippery: there are multiple definitions and all are unsatisfactory, maybe because we don’t quite know why we keep animals, domesticated or not. Why did nineteenth-century Tahitians want eels as pets? They spent time creating bonds: eel keepers could call out to the slender fish, which would then eat from their hands. There is no definitive answer, though Ingram raises some intriguing possibilities. Maybe we’re suckers and some animals have exploited us for their own benefit. Maybe Rover is just an adorable parasite.

Much of the ground Ingram covers will likely be familiar to dog and cat fans; how and when they probably evolved and became domesticated, for instance, is ground well trodden. But who routinely watches the neighbourhood dogs and cats and contemplates the minority they represent? Most of the world’s dogs and cats live among humans — but not with them. Around 80 percent of dogs roam free, and most cats are feral. “Dogs are the most common carnivore in the world; house cats are vastly more numerous than all forty or so species of wildcat, from cheetahs to lynx,” Ingram writes. These are just two of the fascinating statistics sprinkled throughout the book.

Even with the standard science around the benefits of keeping pets, Ingram goes deeper and upends some traditional beliefs. Do they actually alleviate depression? Reduce blood pressure? Are they really non-judgmental? Okay, he does not ask that last question, nor is there a good answer for it. But it does get at the plethora of studies about the effect pets have on human health, physical and mental. Ingram seems to have read them all.

Of course, the narrative around cats and dogs says a lot about people. Pet owners can be comically predictable. Take pet names. To avoid spoiling the reveal, I’ll just say this: cat and dog owners are as unimaginative as new parents. (My mother-in-law, though, called her standard poodle Mossy Rock. Now that is imaginative.) I can see readers racing ahead to the chapter on pet names once they get their hands on the book, eager to compare their own inventions with those of others.

While Ingram does get into the keeping of horses and parrots as pets, he also ventures into the unusual territory of ants, which could satiate a desire for a pet without the drawback of dying before your charge does or contributing to the ecological disaster that is pet food. Hydras are another option, even if, technically, they’re “immortal.” But the idea of insects and hydrozoans as the future of pets seems implausible. Also, if you’re looking for an ethical option, many researchers would suggest a rat, which doesn’t rate much of a mention in this book.

I appreciate how Ingram takes on the ethics of keeping pets, particularly the impact some of them have on nature. Cats, for example, are notorious bird killers, although that research isn’t especially clear on how many they actually dispatch annually. Even the sweetest dogs can be terrors: they’ve famously slaughtered vulnerable kiwis and penguins in New Zealand. The keeping of exotic pets undermines efforts to protect ecosystems and feeds the spread of invasive species in places like Florida. Ingram cites one particularly damning study: of the 140 non-native reptiles and amphibians now living in the Sunshine State, 85 percent arrived via the pet trade.

But one subject doesn’t come up: the one I call “big rescue,” particularly of dogs. I don’t think I’m alone in witnessing the shift in what has become acceptable dog behaviour in public spaces. They bite, they jump on you, they clip your legs from behind as they run after a squirrel.

I grew up with dogs — all mixed-breed adoptees. I love dogs. I was never afraid of them. Today I am trepidatious around man’s best friend. I can’t tell if one is friendly or if another wants to bite my face off. We seem to be awash in rescue dogs that are anxious, fearful, and easily triggered. Maybe covering this topic is too much to ask of The Science of Pets. So I went looking for a book about rescue animals and came across Carol Mithers’s Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets, which came out in 2024.

Overall, The Science of Pets is enjoyable and illuminating and a book that pet owners should read, if only to do some soul-searching about their need to keep an animal. What I appreciate the most is that Ingram understands how people absorb information. I’m offered a fair number of science books to review, but I only occasionally say yes because I more often than not find them too long and too dense. If I struggle to read a book, how can I review it? Ingram seems to intuit this problem and knows the most successful science books are those that an average person can tackle in small chunks without losing the thread of a larger story. Although his chapters are short, Ingram occasionally offers a recap to remind us what came before, so we don’t have to go searching for facts or context we’ve misplaced in our hippocampus.

By the time I finished reading, I had also come up with a better title. I would have gone with Pet Theory: The Surprising Science Behind an Obsession. As for a cover — well, I envision an illustration of a human head with a menagerie of animals swimming inside.