This is not simply a narrative of progress. Thinking is changing but things have not just got better. There have been massive shifts in the ways in which we live: the industrial revolution, urbanization, globalization – all have had and are having their impact on the lives of humans and animals. Being a pet now is not the same as being a pet in 1800. There have been very important changes in consumer culture, health care, legal status and so on that seem to emphasize the increasingly equal status of these animals. But attitudes have also persisted across time that reveal the position of the animal in the home to be ambiguous in other ways. Indeed, there is one paradox that I want to explore here. I want to propose that one way of thinking about being equal – of claiming a pet's human-like status – may be a reason for one of the clearest displays of what philosopher Clare Palmer has called “an attitude of instrumentalism” (2006: 182). This, she writes, is present in human-pet relations in a way that is “unsettling in a relationship described … in terms of companionship or the familial” (ibid.). It is by making our pets human-like that we also, it seems, make them into objects.

Novelist J. M. Coetzee offers one glimpse of this paradox. In his novel Disgrace, which was published in 1999, the same year as King and Timbuktu, and which also deals in themes of home, loss and human–dog relations, the problem is presented very simply by the central character, who is doing voluntary work helping to euthanize dogs in an animal clinic.