Bellies stuffed with Thanksgiving turkey, we lean back in our recliners to have our eyes and ears stuffed with Christmas commercials.
We’re not just peddled lawn mowers and getaway cruises. This holiday, pets are being pushed as a spouse’s dream come true or a balm for the desolate, elder soul.
“I have something for you,” a rugged husband tells his doe-eyed wife as they stand in the snow-covered meadow. He whistles and a Saint Bernard puppy bounds over a distant snowy rise toward the ecstatic wife. “I have something for you, too,” the wife coos. She whistles and a high-octane, testosterone-pulsing GMC truck plows through a snow bank, its grill grinding the wintery powder into diamond dust. Presumably, the husband now has an erection that will last for days.
Switch channels and you’ll see an old man lifting a Labrador puppy out of a box because ’Tis The Season, WalMart says.
Okay, pets sell. So what’s the harm? Plenty, if the pet is the intended “gift.”
That truck-owner’s wife may have a rude awakening when she has an important Zoom conference or has to go out of town and asks burly boy to potty the dog or watch him for a few days. It is, after all, her dog. What if he hates slobber and scooping up poop and the thought of the three of them sleeping in the same bed? What if she later decides that those training sessions are stealing time from her budding career? This couple didn’t choose their family addition together.
And what of grandpa and his baby girl retriever? What happens to her when she swells to 90 pounds and lunges at squirrels and pulls grandpa’s shoulder out of its socket? What happens when he can no longer stoop to scoop? Will family step in? Are grandpa and doggie even living with extended family?
Sure as Facebook uses incendiary posts to bump traffic and drive sales, so some Ad People can’t resist pumping products by whatever means necessary.
Sometimes, the use of pets to sell is benign. Cute, even. Subaru’s rerunning campaign features a family of golden retrievers running errands, dropping their kids at school and hailing a bull-terrier “trucker” in the next lane. I have no problem with ads like these because they push pet-friendly products. Moreover, Subaru’s Share the Love fundraisers have raised millions for and helped adopt out tens of thousands of homeless pets.
But a hard line should be drawn between pets and utilitarian things as the objects of gifts. They are not like a pair of aviator sunglasses we return because they’re not our preferred shade or a robotic floor sweeper we exchange for leaving streaks on the hardwood or an ugly sweater we unveil at a white elephant party. They’re not Xboxes or an iPhones crafted for our amusement and convenience. Pets themselves should never be packaged to fulfill what is often a fleeting and superficial need.
Author and lecturer Stephen Jenkinson, founder of Orphan Wisdom, speaks of how we in Western culture are so often seduced by the lure of temporary pain relief that we’ve lost our wonder about the world and abandoned the practice of “courting” its inhabitants. We’ve forgotten that life is not just all about us.
I believe we must return to our primordial traditions of courtship with sentient beings; to fall in love with loving and being loved which is the most enduring gift of all.