Humiliation in Dogs

What�s wrong with these pictures?  

If you reacted to these pictures with any kind of repulsion, chances are part of your explanation for your reaction would involve the idea of humiliation.  It�s humiliating to clip a Poodle so that it looks like a My Little Pony toy, or to dress a daschund in a wedding dress.  This raises the question; what does it mean to humiliate a dog, and why is it wrong?  

This question isn�t just reserved for idle judgement, increasingly it's a legal issue.  Since 1992, the Swiss Constitution  has made provision for the dignity of animals.  Part of respecting the dignity of animals, the drafters of the Constitution claim, is protecting them from �humiliation�.¹  In the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals has released a statement suggested that people who dress up their dogs could be prosecuted under some circumstances.²

In this post, I�ll discuss whether dogs really are being humiliated by being subject to extreme grooming and dressing up, and, if they�re not, how we can capture the intuition that there is something wrong. I�ll reconstruct both sides of the argument before concluding that doing these things to dogs is not humiliating, but there is still something wrong with it. 

Before we look at what it means to humiliate a dog, I�ll first explain what it means to humiliate a human being.  When one person humiliates another, she causes him to feel ashamed of himself; like he is less of a person.  Humiliation has a social component - it is done to one person by another, and part of feeling humiliated is feeling the �gaze� of others and feeling diminished in their eyes. Avishai Margalit defines a humiliating act as anything that gives the victim a sound reason to feel humiliated. What counts as a �sound reason� will depend on features of the individual - the sort of things he believes are humiliating given his culture and character; and features of the context.³

The most important part of humiliation is that we can�t be humiliated unless we believe we are being humiliated. This is because humiliating someone is designed to injure their self-respect, so the humiliator has to know enough about the victim to know whether the intended action will humiliate him. Being told to wear women�s clothing, for example, is humiliating to most men, but not all of them. 

On this conception of humiliation, it�s clear that dogs can�t be humiliated because they can�t believe they are being humiliated. They don�t have the kind of complex self-respect that humans do, the kind that link body image to a sense of personal identity.  I�m not saying that dogs don�t have a sense of self, just that if they do it is unlikely to relate to the way they look. With the example of �doggie marriage�, this is unlikely to be specifically humiliating because it is a sham marriage, since dogs can�t understand this concept.  To a dog, walking next to another dog in a silly costume and then doing a sit-stay whilst people say things is unlikely to register as impacting their self-respect.  

MOVING THE GOALPOSTS

So, it is unlikely that we can find an account of dog humiliation just by looking at what it means for humans to be humiliated in terms of their self-respect.  The concept needs to be altered if it is going to make any sense.  If humiliation can apply to dogs it must apply regardless of what the dog is thinking and feeling.  

Again, it might be possible to look at humans as an analogue.  In particular, those humans who don�t have the relevant ability for self-respect - comatose people, people with severe intellectual disabilities, people with late-stage dementia and so on.  If we can humiliate these people, then potentially we can humiliate dogs too.

This would be too quick, however, because the reason that certain actions are humiliating to adults who used to have self-respect, or who have the potential for self-respect, does not apply to dogs. We can think about what these people would have wanted, either before they got into their current condition or if they didn�t have their current condition.  Being left naked, for example, is humiliating to any adult because they would not have consented to it if they could.  This argument still relies on self-respect, so it cannot apply to dogs.  

MOVING THE GOALPOSTS AGAIN

Now that I�ve dismissed two conceptions of humiliation, I�m left with one final description that might apply to dogs.  This is that, by interfering excessively in a dog�s appearance by dressing it up or grooming it outlandishly, an owner is treating her dog like a doll, not like a dog.  Dogs are entitled to a special kind of respect because of the kind of thing they are - a living, sentient creature. Treating them like an object is wrong because it means treating the dog as if they do not have the features that make them worthy of this kind of respect. 

Literally, the word �humiliate� comes from the Latin �humus�, dirt.  Humiliating someone sets them below you, it grinds them into the dirt as you stand over them.  The overall effect is a lowering of status. So treating a dog like a doll is humiliating because it means lowering their status.  This would hold even if the dog can�t understand. 

Even this conception of humiliation does not quite work, because it relies on an indefensibly strong claim that dressing a dog up, or grooming him excessively, is automatically objectifying because it means treating the dog as something less than he is.  If this were true, we would be humiliating babies by dressing them up in little dinosaur costumes, because this would mean we�re seeing babies as entitled to the same respect as dinosaurs, or dolls.  Babies can�t understand clothes, so we can dress them however we like, and many parents enjoy putting their little ones in crazy costumes...

Concern about humiliating babies seems like a futile constraint on parental creativity; what matters is the baby is happy and able to explore and learn about the world in a loving, safe environment.  The same can be said about dogs - it is wrong to treat a dog just like a doll, but if it is possible to dress them up and groom them into weird shapes whilst also paying attention to their welfare, then the dog is not being treated just like a doll and therefore not being humiliated.  To paraphrase Kant, we are not treating the dog merely as a means to an end just by dressing him up, by paying attention to his welfare we are at the same time treating him as an end in himself. 

I would contend that the reaction people have to extreme grooming and dog clothing stems from the perception that the dog is being treated like something less than a dog. Part of this is a worry that the dog is being objectified, which I have dealt with here.  But another part comes from a picture of the ideal, or natural dog - a Lassie, or a Rin Tin Tin.  Deviation from this archetype strikes many people as necessarily a diminishment of what�s essential and good about dogs, and as we�ve seen, the concept of humiliation well captures what it means to diminish someone.  This suggests a �normative essentialist� conception of what a good dog is - an important theme I will return to in a later post.  Suffice to say, for the moment, that just because something is natural, or �the way it always has been�, doesn�t make it good now.  

If there is anything prima facie wrong with dressing dogs up or grooming them to extremes, it is that there is always the potential to overlook the dog�s welfare in the owner's pursuit of her own desires. But this is as true for dog shows, sports, jobs like search and rescue and everyday experiences with dogs as it is for dressing them up or extreme grooming.  Any time a dog is being used, there is always the possibility that it is being used merely as a means to an end, and there's no reason to restrict our worries to the more bizarre examples of the dog-human partnership.  This reminds us that we have a duty to pay attention to what our dog partners are telling us, whether it�s at the dog park or at their wedding.

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1. "The Dignity of Animals" (2001) Joint Statement by the Swiss Ethics Committee on Non-Human Gene Technology and the Swiss Committee on Animal Experiments. Available at http://www.cnz.uzh.ch/BurkiDignity-Animals-2001.pdf
2. "RSPCA says people who dress up their dogs could be prosecuted" The Telegraph, Jan 13 2009. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4227567/RSPCA-says-people-who-dress-up-their-dogs-could-be-prosecuted.html.
3. Margalit, A. (1996)  "The Decent Society" . Harvard University Press.