The main difference between our contemporary relationship with dogs and our orientation to dogs in recent history is that until a few decades ago the love was explicitly conditional
A good dog could get a hero's burial, a bad dog could get a bullet without much hand-wringing
And, no, imposing anthropomorphism on animals is not “one of the most human things we can do.” It is, in fact, a distinctly modern tendency to project human emotions, motives, needs, and social roles onto creatures that experience the world very differently from us. Loving and
