Are We Loving Our Pets to Death?

While dogs are allowed in an ever-increasing number of human spaces — restaurants, offices, stores, hotels, as well as more parks with designated dog runs — their growing presence has not translated into greater independence.

The confinement and isolation, in turn, have bred an increase in animal separation anxiety and aggression, Dr. Serpell said. Roughly 60 percent of cats and dogs are now overweight or obese. And due in part to the burden and expense of modern pet ownership — veterinary fees, pet sitters, boarding costs — more people are abandoning animals to animal shelters, leading to higher rates of euthanasia. In 2023, more than 359,000 dogs were euthanized at shelters, a five-year high, according to Shelter Animals Count, an animal advocacy group.

“We’re at an odd moment of obsession with pets,” Dr. Pierce said. “There are too many of them and we keep them too intensively. It’s not good for us and it’s not good for them.”

Granted, taming an animal has always meant striking a balance between its nature and ours. “Defining freedom to a dog, an animal that has been domesticated artificially and selected by humans for so long, is a really interesting puzzle,” said Alexandra Horowitz, a canine cognition researcher at Barnard College.

She drew a contrast with free-ranging dogs, a category to which most of the world’s estimated 900 million dogs belong. Free-roaming canines lead shorter lives and have no guarantee of food, Dr. Horowitz noted, but they do get to make all of their own choices. “That is an interesting model for us to look at — thinking about how to make a dog’s life more rich with choices so they are not just captive to our caprices all the time, while not endangering society at large,” she said.