Who’s a good boy, then? Dogs are now fetching us more than sticks and frisbees. Perhaps in return for many millennia of increasingly cushy domestication, they’re on track to bring us a human longevity drug.
Research centred on extending the lives of elderly dogs has progressed so well that the treatment, involving an immune-moderating agent commonly known as rapamycin, is increasingly being investigated for human suitability.
Its efficacy and safety still need extensive further trials, but already, some humans have taken it under medical supervision with mixed-to-promising results.
It’s not a new trajectory – other human pharmaceutical breakthroughs have come from animal research, partly because of the greater expense and ethical hurdles of human trials. Research for racehorses and farm animals has led to new human treatments for malaria, arthritis and the human papilloma virus.
The surging popularity of pet dogs, already evident in the West before being turbo-charged by Covid lockdowns, has drawn extra funding to the longevity science sector, with its promise of longer life for our beloved old woofers. Rapamycin has been shown to protect metabolic health, a holy grail for human longevity and quality of old age.
But not everybody is happy. The anti-dog lobby, while mostly unorganised and therefore impossible to quantify, is nevertheless vocal against this development. Every media report on the longevity drug meets with comment-thread bile.
There are far too many of the smelly beasts already, goes the seething. They soil streets, paw strangers, make inane and irritating dins, frighten and maul people, spread disease and have awful breath.
In vain might anyone point out that humans are guilty of exponentially more of all of the above obnoxious things per capita, while often being nowhere near as endearing.
Painful though it is to write, dog lovers – and this writer is militant among them – must take some responsibility for this extremist anti-dog sentiment and address a few issues before it mobilises.
The first uncomfortable truth is that one’s own dog – like one’s own cat or even child – is not universally interesting, appealing or welcome. Even that flavour-of-the-month-doodle behaving itself perfectly can be a pain to a lot of people.
Never mind that a person is much more likely to catch something nasty from another person or the food in a restaurant than from proximity to a dog’s bum or slavering chops. People have their irritation thresholds, and logic and science have nothing to do with it.
There’s also the steady growth of dog-friendly places in communities where this is a new, and therefore hairy, undertaking. France’s chiens generally know their bistro etiquette and Britain’s hounds have been going down the boozer for generations. But taking an unaccustomed dog into a social zone, particularly a lockdown acquisition with insufficient socialisation, is too often a recipe for barking, lunging and unwelcome deposits.
Paris’s Majestic Bastille cinema is the latest to join a transatlantic drive to boost flagging attendance with dog-friendly screenings. While there seems little harm in such daftness, it’s not healthy if it’s popular because people dare not leave their over-anxious pets alone for a couple of hours or because they are so emotionally dependent on them they cannot bear to.
Even to the dog-doting, there’s something nauseating, solipsistic and mercenary about the whole “designer dog” craze. Had dogs foreseen Instagram, infantalising costumes and cruel breeding practices, they might have stayed wild.
Meanwhile, if you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear your treat pouch. Dog owners there outnumber parents, and it’s not even the most densely dog-populated US city. The world’s dog loathers seem doomed to be outnumbered for the foreseeable future – even if, thanks to dogs, they might one day live to loathe for longer.
