Pets are good to think with. But, of course, pets are also, or so many of the households that include non-humans tell us, good to live with. The two – thinking and living – are never separate, and it is important to begin with an obvious question that brings both together: what function do thinkers imagine that pets serve in the modern world? Or, to put it more simply: why do they think that so many people choose to live with pets?

There are, inevitably, a number of possible responses to these questions, and I begin this chapter by outlining a few of the more mournful suggestions (the book becomes more positive as it progresses). One of the core issues that emerges from discussions of the human–pet relation in this chapter is the role that the animal plays in the conceptualization of the home. This is a conceptualization that is often taken for granted; home is so familiar to us that we frequently forget to think about its meaning and our expectations of it. But a stable sense of home is vital to many orthodox conceptions of human selfhood. For example, artist and novelist John Berger writes that in what he calls “traditional societies”, “Without a home … one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation” (1999: 56).