The Loyalty We Engineered
Rethinking affection, power, and the pets we made in our image.
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These days, we’ve gotten impressively loud about animal rights. Social media feeds are full of rescued hens, petitions for endangered seals, and heated debates about oat milk. We pat ourselves on the back for evolving. For being aware. But are we forgetting about something more familiar? A rights issue that lives with us, sleeps beside us, and greets us at the door with wagging tails and unquestioning eyes?
Maybe it’s time we look a little closer at the modern dog.
Dogs didn’t just happen. We didn’t meet them halfway in the forest. We made them—from wolves, over centuries—through deliberate, targeted breeding. Call it eugenics with a leash. Wolves didn’t slowly evolve into pugs and golden doodles on their own terms. We guided every trait we wanted: friendliness, docility, dependence. We picked the ones who stayed, who didn’t run, who looked at us with trust—or at least the kind of gaze we chose to keep.
And now? They don’t belong anywhere but here. No role in the wild. No niche in nature. They exist entirely in our image, shaped to meet our emotional needs. We choose their shape, their size, even their suffering. Some can’t breathe properly. Others can’t birth without surgery. We liked the look, so we ignored the cost.
We didn’t just select loyalty. We constructed it. Not with malice, necessarily—but with precision. These animals weren’t taught to stay. They were built to.
And that makes the mirror a little uncomfortable, doesn’t it?
This relationship we call companionship is, at its core, a hierarchy. We control their food, their movement, their ability to reproduce or roam. We write every rule—and they follow. Maybe we believe it’s love. Maybe it even feels like love. But how do we define affection when leaving isn’t an option? When the creature can’t survive without the system we placed it in?
We like to frame it as mutual care. And yes, there’s comfort and emotion on both sides. But mutuality implies freedom. Freedom to choose, to stay or to go. This isn’t that. This is a bond with the illusion of choice. And we are the ones who designed the illusion. Even in human history, dependency never meant freedom. There were bonds, relationships, even affection—formed under unequal conditions. But that didn’t make them fair. It didn’t make them right.
And maybe this is the part we don't say out loud: some part of us likes it this way.
We love affection that can’t leave. We trust bonds that are built on dependence. We tell ourselves we would never tolerate inequality—yet we recreate its shape again and again, so long as it smiles at us. Maybe it’s not just about comfort. Maybe it’s about control. About playing god. We say we despise the old power structures. We condemn those who upheld them. But something in us still gravitates to the comfort of being needed, being obeyed, being adored by those with no other choice.
So when a dog follows you across the house, eyes soft and expectant—maybe ask: is this love? Or is it instinct, curated over centuries to mimic affection?
It’s not about blame. Not really. It’s about clarity.
We love them. Of course we do. But maybe the question isn’t whether they love us.
Maybe the question is: Would they, if they could choose?
Join the Conversation
If dogs were capable of true independence, how might our relationship with them change—or would it exist at all?
Can love still be love when it’s born from selective design and total dependence?
What responsibilities do we have toward beings we've shaped to rely on us completely?
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