ABSTRACT
As well as keeping animals for food and labour, humans have also kept them for companionship. These animals form part of a special, privileged category, which we know today as pets. Allowed in the house, given names and not usually eaten, pets have enjoyed rights usually denied to other categories of animal and forged close relationships with human beings. This chapter explores who kept pets in the past and asks how pet keeping has evolved over time. It considers what keeping a companion animal meant for humans, and, importantly, what it meant for the animals that were used for this purpose. What constituted a pet? Did animals themselves benefit from their status as companion species? Has pet-keeping taken the same form everywhere, or has it differed significantly between cultures? The chapter asks whether dominance or affection has predominated in human–pet relationships and explores some of the recurring criticisms of pet-keeping, which has been associated, variously, with witchcraft, eccentricity, animal cruelty and social subversion. It concludes with a case study of one of the most popular companion animals in the modern world, the domestic cat, charting the species’ rise and fall in popularity across the centuries.
