Pets: the company we keep says a lot about us

Humans have kept pets since forever, ranging from dogs to cats and even sometimes rocks. But what does that say about us?

The company we keep says a lot about us.

Humans have kept pets since forever. Archaeological evidence dates the habit back over 30,000 years, probably beginning with the domestication of wolf pups. Since then dogs of every shape and size – all descended from wolves – have remained top of the pet pops. There are about half a billion in the world, all wanting to go walkies and chase balls.

Add to the menu or menagerie the pussy cats. Some people, for reasons I cannot fathom, prefer the descendants of sabre-tooth tigers. We are dividable between dog and cat people in much the same way as being Catholic or Protestant. There are many other sorts of pets, too. A man in Alcatraz famously had pet birds, and many of us, not encaged, encage canaries and budgies. Although, it could be said, Tony Abbott kept his budgie in his bathers.

Snakes, tortoises, monkeys, lizards, mice, various insects – all can be pets.

Prisoners other than that Alcatraz birdman have been known to have pet cockroaches. Aquatic animals from dolphins down to goldfish have their fans – and at age four I kept tadpoles in a jar. Trouble with taddies? They turn into frogs and abscond. I had more success with guinea pigs.

Although far too intelligent to play cricket, Chinese aristocrats kept pet crickets in exquisite boxes. I’ve a friend who collects them (the boxes, not the crickets). My biggest pet was a huge black bull I called Malcolm X. He came when I called – charging through any fences in his way. He liked to lift me aloft on his massive head. The missus and the farm manager feared he would kill me by accident, and so when I was away in Sydney one day they sold Malcolm to McDonald’s. That well-intentioned betrayal almost made me a vegan. And I was tempted to convert from Humanism to Hinduism.

Scott Morrison with a lump of coal in parliament.

Some Japanese children had pet robots that looked a little like dogs, but that seemed to me akin to making a pet out of mum’s vacuum cleaner. Even less heartwarming? The Pet Rocks that made Gary Dahl a fortune. As he pointed out, they didn’t eat much or get sick or die. He sold thousands in the mid-’70s, in little cardboard kennels with ventilation holes.

Scott Morrison was this nation’s most famous pet rocker. You’ll remember him smuggling a pet lump of coal into parliament. It was beautifully coiffed and lacquered to prevent smudging Scomo’s suit – though it did smudge his reputation. This was even more eccentric than Abbott smuggling his budgies. (You’d have thought they would have been diagnosed as insane but both became prime ministers. It was the voters who were nuts. And that’s an international problem – think Trump, a bloke with even more rocks in his head, becoming president.)

Which bring us to us. Decades before Artificial Intelligence, a famous Australian scientist warned me that by interfering with slow-moving Darwinian evolution we might well invent super-humans or non-humans much smarter than ourselves – life forms that would make us redundant. Thus tossing ourselves into the dustbin of history.

As you know, that happened last Tuesday.

I’ve never forgotten what this scientist said next. “Some of us might survive... as pets.”