I grew up with dogs and then lived a dogless adult life, which means that I keep bumping up against the ways that dog ownership has changed since I was a kid. Some of it was obvious from the outside. "Fur baby" was not a thing people said in my childhood; dog strollers, I think, would have been regarded as a mark of misguided attachment. Dogs were dogs and babies were babies, and they were not to be confused.
We owned a leash for my childhood dog, a mustard yellow leather-ish leash that was stiff from disuse. In our neighborhood in a suburb of New Orleans, dogs could go outside without their people. If they were aggressive, it was expected that they'd be chained up, but mostly dogs could run around. Those free-range dog scenes in the Beverly Cleary books about Ribsy seem so strange now, but it was still like that in my own childhood.
It is much nicer to live in a world with less dog poop lying around. I'd never heard of people picking up after their dogs until I read Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, and I thought it was a weird NYC phenomenon.
When we had our first foster dog, we wouldn't let him sit on the upholstered furniture because that's what we both grew up with: big dogs don't belong on couches. There's a pretty different vibe in the Facebook group for foster families, where there's a lot of concern about whether the animals are sufficiently comfortable. This is not a random sample, obviously, but the difference is striking. In the 70s we were like, "Hey, you get to come inside; don't complain that the floor is hard." Here in the third millennium we are discussing which brand of dog bed is the right amount of squishy.
Recently a German shepherd was relinquished to our shelter. He had not adapted well to the arrival of a new baby and the parents had moved him into the garage. There was much exclaiming about the bad decision-making on display, but it hasn't been all that long since it was normal for bigger dogs to live in similar spaces -- sheltered, but not necessarily climate-controlled.
When Champ first came to stay with us we snorted at the alarmist posts we saw about dogs in the summer. "Make sure your dog is getting enough air-conditioning on hot days!" they cautioned, and we wondered snarkily how dogs had managed to survive until the invention of air-conditioning. I had no idea how the list of hazards had expanded. I was good with "no chicken bones" and "no chocolate," but I didn't know about all the other stuff. No bread dough, no grapes, no alcohol, no stray coffee beans. Don't give them too much ham in training sessions, because it's salty. DO YOU WANT TO POISON YOUR DOG?!?!
Maybe the puppies of the 70s would be glad to know that their descendants would not be house-trained by having their noses rubbed in their own waste. Maybe the puppies of the third millennium would look back wistfully on an era when crate-training wasn't really a thing.
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