Going to the dogs at the dinner table

I have a dog. Anyone who knows me knows I have a dog. Many people who don’t know me know I have a dog, because I never shut up about having a dog and will tell anyone within earshot. I talk about my dog a lot. I take photos and videos of her more than is strictly healthy; when I type “dog” into the Photos app on my phone, I get 4,572 results. I write stories about my dog for publications like Daily Maverick, which is widely read by people who are complete strangers to me and who may hate reading about my dog when they have come to their favourite website to read about – let me think… food? 

Which brings me to the point, so don’t go anywhere just yet. I take my dog almost everywhere, and now I am bringing her to this column, and I promise you I have a point. This is where my dog and this column meet. To wit: the increasing evidence that dogs are taking over the world, and the world includes places where we eat food. Should dogs be allowed in the kitchen? At the table? In a restaurant? In a cafe? In a bar? In a world increasingly run by humans for dogs, exactly where do we draw the line?

It is a thriving area of debate in many parts of the world because in many cities there has been such an explosion in dog ownership that it is starting to seem compulsory to have one. 

The Covid pandemic is partly to credit (or blame) for this. 

In many countries, the extended lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 led to a boom in pet ownership. The figures don’t lie. In Australia, a 2021 study found that one million dogs had been brought into Australian homes in the previous 18 months covering the first year of the pandemic. (I was one of them; though that was because I mourned the loss of one dog and then got another in those terrible two years). There are roughly 25 million people in Australian, meaning there is a dog for every five of us. Similar booms have been reported in South Africa, the US and Britain – and that boom has brought with it a range of issues in metropolitan areas. 

There are the normal dog problems: dog mess, dog behaviour, dog aggression and dog noise. And then there are the particular trends that come with rampant anthropomorphism. If you are unfamiliar with the word, anthropomorphism is a fancy way of saying that we lunatic dog people increasingly treat our dogs like humans and imbue them with human characteristics. 

In short, as one academic study neatly summarised it: we are living through the rise of the fur baby. We kid ourselves (and everyone who cares to listen) that our dogs think like we do, feel like we do, act like we do. We think puppy dog eyes mean they love us; it is far more likely that it is just an evolutionary trait developed to make us feed them steak from the dinner table. But good luck convincing a modern dog owner of that. 

Which brings me to the point of this column about dogs and food. Dogs in the house are one thing. Dogs on the sofa are another thing. Dogs on the bed? Yes, that battle was lost long ago in many homes, including mine. 

But what about dogs and the dinner table?

In my hometown of Melbourne, dog-friendly venue numbers seem to have skipped from almost non-existent to  ubiquitous without any pause along the way for much debate about whether this is a good idea. But one can assume people who understand such things have concluded that it is. It must make business sense, because every day my social media feeds (clearly those algorithms know me well) are throwing up ads for dog-friendly cafes, dog-friendly bars, dog-friendly pub crawls, dog-friendly winery tours, even dog-friendly nightspots.

Chilling out: Beach cafes are a stop on Melbourne’s doggy pub crawls. (Photo: Puppy Pub Crawl)

Fine dining: Crepes are on the menu at Melbourne’s Chez Misty, a “human friendly dog restaurant”. (Photo: Chez Misty)