Is your best friend your dog? Really?

Global heating increases the inclination of dogs to bite the hand that feeds them

Climate change is affecting our lives in many ways. Some are expected and, indeed, were predicted two centuries or more ago. Others may come as a surprise. Our relationship with man’s best friend falls into that second category.

If you see two life forms — one of them’s making a poop, the other one’s carrying it for him — who would you assume is in charge? — Jerry Seinfeld

That Seinfeld gag line speaks to a larger truth about people — that it is almost as though we have a deeply embedded desire to be slaves.

Maybe that explains the popularity of Donald Trump and other charismatic cult leaders.

We have ancient relationships with other animals, but few where otherwise prim people regularly go around fingering plastic bags on their scat. Animal love is deeply embedded in us. And more than that, at a microbial level, there are more other animals’ DNA inside our bodies than our own DNA, by a large margin.

Scaling up from our cells, if you come from the overdeveloped world, you probably had a pet as a child. Most of us did. In the USA, more than half of households own a dog. In the Philippines, there are as many dogs as people.

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Of course, it is not like that everywhere. In Zambia there is one dog for every 45 humans. In Egypt, it’s about five dogs per thousand. Egypt has a cat problem but that is a separate story.

After the US sent contaminated corn to Zambia in 2002, people ate dogs. Can you blame them? It was a famine. The Chinese proverb goes, “If it has legs and is not a table, I eat it. If it has scales and is not a bathroom, I eat it. If it has wings and is not an airplane, I eat it.” While buying, selling and trafficking dogs for meat is now illegal in Zambia, there remains a black market for smoked dog meat.