There is a lot of suffering in the world, but not much of it goes on at the annual Belgravia Dog Cocktail Party – unless you are a Labrador being forced into a tutu by a toddler ahead of the fancy-dress contest. The Cavalier King Charles spaniel in a capotain – as though he has just stepped off the Mayflower – is a favourite to win, anyway.
The black Labrador, participant in the “Dog with the Waggiest Tail” competition, might be the most privileged animal in Britain. An obliging, aging golden retriever, meanwhile, stares at his owner with devotion. A creature without the capacity for cynicism is wearing a beaded Union Jack collar. There is a voluble cockapoo in a green bow tie. The “Dog with the Prettiest Eyes” contest is under way and, yes, just as I suspected, “Luna” has it.
Dogs can’t organise dog shows themselves, of course. But the people present are having just as nice a time, these walking Boden catalogues with their silk scarves, cream trousers, serious watches. They are nothing like the crowd at Crufts – an event I attended in March that plays host to the genuinely swivel-eyed canine enthusiasts, held at Birmingham’s NEC. No, if these people are lunatics they are doing a fantastic job of hiding it. We are eating catered salmon off porcelain plates and drinking semi-dry rosé out of medium-quality glassware. The suffering really is happening elsewhere. Birmingham, perhaps.
Surely there has never been a better time in history to be a dog – all that Stone Age hunting and foraging traded for doting family and unlimited food. In the intervening 12,000 years they had jobs, went to war, were put on show by the Victorians and eventually became pets. Until very recently, they were expected to sleep outside. Some even had to guard the house.
Now 90 per cent of dog owners consider them not even as pets but as “members of the family”. In fact, “some say ‘pet’ is a derogatory word”, Dan O’Neill, professor of companion animal epidemiology at the Royal Veterinary College, tells me. That dogs could possess a sense of derogation is not the most avant-garde proposition that will be made in the course of this article.
Around these animals – not pets, but family members, children, babies? – an entirely new economy has arrived: luxury pet products (Hermès Natural Dog Shampoo, £68); food subscription services (a month of the “human quality meat” from Butternut Box, £125); grooming centres (membership to “Sniffles Dog Grooming Spa” in Hampstead, £67.50 a month); luxury day cares (the “ultimate membership” at WagWorks in Putney, £925 a month – annual human membership to the National Liberal Club costs just £75 more). Globally, the “pet industry” (pawconomy?!) is projected to reach $500bn (£375bn) by 2030 – the same size as the entire global cosmetics industry.
I am at Matcha* the golden retriever’s first birthday celebration. He is wearing a party hat – intended for humans – and, surrounded by loved ones, eating a pork chop. Matcha’s friends then sing “Happy Birthday” in typical atonal fashion and clink their wine glasses. His “mum” (adult human female, 31) is a member of a WhatsApp group for golden retrievers based in the Barnes, Fulham and Putney area. No other breed’s owners are permitted access. When Matcha goes to “school” it costs £70 per visit and he is driven there and back in a “school” bus. (*Some names have been changed to protect the anonymity and privacy of canine sources.)
Walter, a local Clumber spaniel, has 2,703 followers on social media and “posts” in his own vernacular: “I, Walter, go to visit furriend Beetle and we have best time in Great Missenden… We do walkies and have brunch and chase ball!” In April, Walter “receive postcards from family holidays! This create much excite!” On a recent holiday to Champagne, he was recognised by a local vintner. In The Howell Book of Dogs: The Definitive Reference to 300 Breeds and Varieties (2007), Clumber spaniels are described as gentle, affectionate, loyal, aloof and dignified – which are famously human traits but do speak to the Walter I know.
At WagWorks, a dog daycare centre, I stare at a papillon – the breed is named for its butterfly-shaped ears – called Tim, who stares plaintively back. By my calculations, it could cost more to be Tim today than me, adult human female (30) with rent, a TV licence and obligations to HMRC.
A lexicon for irony-immune millennials has emerged to explain their new relationship to the hound – pet parents, doggos, pupper, smol, hooman, furbaby. The CEO of WagWorks tells me, as we stand in front of a schnauzer called “Rupert”, that these dogs are “viewed as like children”. I glance at Rupert. In the course of our conversation, Ollie Hudd-Williams – more slick fin-tech bro than mud-under-the-nail farmer – has to clarify several times when he is referring to humans. In dogland, that is never the default assumption.
But I wanted to know what all of this said about us – the decadent and infantilised West, the defanged (oops!) society in which man hardly hunt, so dogs certainly aren’t going to. The SSRI-ed, Amazon-dependent, anxious human world, projecting all of our pathologies on to the canine one. The super-ego tells us dogs are not people and should not be treated as such, but the id responds in a series of woofs, growls, whimpers and puppy-eyes. In 2026 have we reached the total Homo sapiens-ification of Snoopy, Clifford, Pluto and Lassie?
All dogs – yes, even the modern cockapoo – share a common ancestor in the Pleistocene grey wolf. He would not recognise himself in my ex-boyfriend’s beagle “Bertie”, or my parents’ labradoodle “Dougal”, of course (the latter has a proclivity for pecorino). But traces of him remain nonetheless.
Some 20,000 years ago (debated figure) the more docile of these late-Stone Age wolves scavenged for scraps at human settlements. Eventually the friendliest ones stuck around, and through hundreds of centuries of selective breeding – traits like biddability, intelligence, serenity are optimal – they eventually arrived at Matcha’s birthday party. Domesticated, loved, pampered, coddled, groomed, indulged, cosseted, trained, Instagrammed.
Of course, dogs have always performed some kind of companionship for man; devotion is easily exchanged for food, even with a canine IQ. But for the majority of the domesticated dog’s existence, the primary function was work. Border collies manoeuvred sheep, Great Pyrenees guarded them. Basset hounds tracked game. The curly lagotto Romagnolo dug for truffles, while the yappy Jack Russell flushed rats out of dens. In the First World War, the Red Cross trained Airedale terriers to courier first aid to the front lines.
Now you are more likely to know a Labrador that sleeps in his “parents’” bed than one that retrieves fishing nets in Newfoundland. Just as the human realm increasingly moved away from manual labour, as the mines closed and the PowerPoint factories opened up, the function of the dog changed too. Developments in front-line technology may have spared the lives of many an Airedale terrier, but now he is expected to be an emotional-support pup… a family member, a baby. And the pet (derogatory) was expected to adapt to the sedentary lifestyle of the 21st century.
This attitude has caused all sorts of difficulties for man’s best friend. O’Neill, the aforementioned professor of companion animal epidemiology, is presenting an unpublished paper to me over Zoom: “Are UK dogs living in a ‘Prozac Nation’? Fluoxetine epidemiology and clinical management in VetCompass dogs in 2023”. Or, in the form of the question I put to him: did we take all our dogs out of work, put them in tutus and daycare and create a new wet-nosed, anxious generation?
Well, first of all, I am told to be cautious with my language. Because “technically we don’t know that dogs suffer anxiety…” (for all our attempts to breed the dog into a human role we have not yet overcome the language barrier). But what we do know is that many dogs display “clinical signs that may be related to anxiety” and that if you are a lurcher or a Border collie you are more likely to be proscribed Prozac – human drug – than say, a golden retriever or a Chihuahua is. I do think if you threw a birthday party for a Pleistocene grey wolf, he might be a little confused too.
There is the inevitable case to make that the insistence that we treat our pets (derogatory) like humans is a natural displacement activity: as birth rates in the West decline, all those hardwired parental instincts must be directed somewhere. Where we used to protect our infants from marauding tigers, we now – in the safe, comfortable padded cell of modernity – worry if Rex and Fido have anxiety (that’s “clinical signs that may be related to anxiety” to you!). And the cash once spent on expensive nurseries for the coddled children of the elites now goes to Rupert and his (very pleasant) day out at WagWorks.
On an unrelated project last year, I was rooting around the web to learn more about the early-Renaissance painter Giotto, and instead discovered Giotto the skateboarding bulldog. This is our fault, really. If Giotto can do something so human as ride a skateboard, we make the logical leap that he can do something so human as to feel love, sadness, ambition. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Moonpig – the online personalised greeting-card service – tells your correspondent that almost a quarter of a million cards are sent “from” our animals every single year, with “loving dogs ‘sending’ ten times more cards to their owners than aloof feline companions”.
Back to the Belgravia Dog Cocktail Party, where not even the dogs on Prozac can be having a bad time. I was disappointed when Finn, the sandy-coated Cocker Spaniel did not win “Dog with the Prettiest Eyes”. My tacit approval of Finn the cocker – and not, say Truffle the dachshund – comes from obviously irrational places: a false sense of kinship, an artificial warmth, a poor understanding of evolution, clinical signs that may be related to egotism. I have nothing but “Finn” in common with Finn. But what in our relationship with the canine realm is rational?
[Further reading: The battle for Mallorca]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentVery witty and well-written. The importance of this dog-obsession is everywhere visible in my part of the world. There are more dogs than children (unless the children are all at home in their bedrooms on their devices).
The footpaths are still fouled, despite local council dog bins (and 85% of owners do pick up). But it only takes the 15% (who are usually in full-time work and take their dog out at night, where their anti-social failure to pick up is not noticed at the time) to ruin the verges for toddlers who want to run free.
Sigh, it’s a fad that really got going under Co-vid restrictions (although the trend for two, or even three dog “families” was evident from before Co-vid).
Just the sort of article I would expect from a blood sports enthusiast.
What an obvious, predictable, on-the-nose, boring piece this is. Next time can you send someone who understands dogs? And can write about human to dog, and dog to human, psychology? And go deeper than the cliched, cheap point-scoring, of expenditure?