The Renaissance of Pet Care: A New Age of Awareness in the 18th Century
In a churchyard in eighteenth-century Britain, someone paid to have a few lines of verse cut for a dog. They were not alone in it. The historian Ingrid Tague, who studied this period closely, catalogued the pet epitaphs and elegies of the era and counted fifty-three written for dogs, seventeen for cats, twelve for canaries, and six for monkeys (JSTOR Daily, citing Tague). To grieve an animal in verse is to say, in public, that the animal was family. That small, strange archive is one of the clearest windows we have into the history of pets — the long, uneven story of how animals crossed the line from livestock and labour into the emotional centre of the household.
It is a story most pet owners have never been told as a whole. Here is the chronology, dated and sourced, from the first grave to the family on your couch.
When did people start keeping pets?
The relationship is older than agriculture. The dog came first — Greger Larson, the Oxford geneticist who studies domestication, identifies the dog as the first domesticated animal, and the archaeological record bears it out: dogs were given deliberate burials alongside humans as far back as roughly 12,000 years ago, and special burials at least 8,000 years ago (Smithsonian). A grave is not nothing. You do not bury a tool.
Whether those early animals were "pets" in our sense — kept for companionship rather than work — is harder to say, and honest history admits the ambiguity. What's clearer is that by antiquity, smaller animals kept for affection were unmistakable: the Romans bred toy dogs roughly 2,000 years ago, small enough to be carried, useful for nothing but company.
Lapdogs and status: pets in the Renaissance
By the Renaissance — the 15th to 17th centuries — the pet had become something you could read socially. A small dog in a portrait was rarely just a dog; it was a statement of leisure, gentility, and the means to feed an animal that earned nothing. The painter Lavinia Fontana, working in late-16th-century Bologna, returned to lapdogs again and again in her portraits, where they signalled the refinement of their owners (Artnet).
That trope has never fully gone away, which is the uncomfortable part. As recently as 2024, the artist Sara Berman built a solo exhibition — "Lapdogs and Fools," shown at Vielmetter Los Angeles from November 2024 into January 2025 — explicitly reworking the old lapdog-as-status, lapdog-as-folly idea for the present (Vielmetter). The pet as a mirror for its owner's self-image is a five-hundred-year-old habit. I'd rather we look at it directly than pretend we've outgrown it.
It's worth noting that the very word arrives around here: the Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of "pet" — for a hand-reared lamb — in 1539 (JSTOR Daily).
The 18th-century hinge: sentience and the split from the farm
If the history of pets has a turning point, it is the eighteenth century — and getting this period right means clearing up a piece of philosophy the popular version usually mangles.
The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes had argued that animals were essentially unfeeling automata — biological machines, incapable of genuine pain or emotion. This is the bête-machine doctrine, and it is the opposite of compassion; it is the view the Enlightenment spent the next century arguing against. The decisive reply came from Jeremy Bentham, who in 1789 wrote the line that still anchors the entire animal-welfare argument: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" (Bentham, via British Journal for the History of Philosophy).
Underneath the philosophy, a quieter social shift was doing the real work. As scholars including Tague have argued, this is the era when companion animals split decisively from farm animals — when the pet became, in one memorable framing, "the one essentially inedible animal" of the household (JSTOR Daily). The epitaphs from the start of this article belong to exactly this moment: the century when grieving an animal in writing stopped being eccentric and started being recognisable.
Who founded modern veterinary medicine?
The eighteenth century also gave companion animals something concrete: a profession dedicated to their bodies. The catalyst was catastrophe. Rinderpest — cattle plague — killed something on the order of 200 million cattle across 18th-century Europe (VMBS News, Texas A&M), and the economic and animal toll made organised veterinary knowledge a necessity rather than a curiosity.
The answer came from Claude Bourgelat (1712–1779), who opened the world's first veterinary school in Lyon in 1761, followed by a second at Alfort in 1765 (PubMed). Veterinary medicine began with livestock economics, not lapdogs — but the science it built would, within a century, be turned toward the animals people kept for love.
When did the animal-welfare movement begin?
Bentham's question did not stay on the page. In Britain, it hardened into law within a generation. Martin's Act of 1822 — named for the MP Richard Martin — was among the first anti-cruelty statutes anywhere, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals followed in 1824, becoming the Royal SPCA under Queen Victoria's patronage in 1840 (RSPCA). The line runs straight from an Enlightenment footnote about suffering to an enforceable protection — roughly thirty years from idea to statute.
The Victorian boom: shows, breeds, and the pet economy
The Victorians turned pet-keeping into a culture with institutions. The first organised dog show was held in Newcastle on June 28, 1859; a larger one followed in Chelsea in 1863; and the Kennel Club was founded in 1873 to standardise the whole enterprise (Wikipedia).
This is also where the history turns genuinely double-edged, and the honest thing is to name the cost rather than skip it. Formalised breed standards gave us the kennel club, the breed registry, and selective breeding as an organised practice — and with them the earliest version of the ethical argument we are still having today, about whether breeding animals to a fashionable look serves the animal or only the owner. The Victorian show ring is the ancestor of both the modern dog fancy and the modern welfare critique of it.
Related Article: Pet Care through the Ages: A Generational Perspective
From the 18th-century hinge to the family on your couch
Trace the line forward and the destination is familiar. The split that began in the 1700s — pet on one side, livestock on the other — widened steadily until, by the 2010s, Americans alone kept on the order of 163.6 million dogs and cats and spent well over sixty billion dollars a year on them (JSTOR Daily). The figure has only climbed since.
What I find worth pausing on is not the spending but the continuity. The person who paid for a dog's epitaph in 1750 and the person who keeps a phone full of photographs of an aging greyhound today are doing the same thing across three centuries: insisting, against the older idea that an animal is a machine or a tool, that this particular creature mattered. The history of pets is really the history of that insistence — slow, uneven, occasionally vain, and, at its best, a genuine widening of who counts as family. We did not invent loving animals. We spent three hundred years building the culture, the laws, and the language to admit that we do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Pet-keeping has prehistoric roots — dogs were buried alongside humans roughly 12,000 years ago — but the modern idea of a pet as cherished family member emerged in 18th–19th-century Britain, when companion animals split decisively from farm animals.
The dog. Oxford geneticist Greger Larson identifies the dog as the first domesticated animal, with archaeological evidence of dogs given deliberate, special burials at least 8,000 years ago.
Claude Bourgelat (1712–1779), who opened the world's first veterinary school in Lyon in 1761 and a second at Alfort in 1765 — prompted in part by a rinderpest cattle plague that killed an estimated 200 million cattle in 18th-century Europe.
Britain's Martin's Act of 1822 was among the first anti-cruelty laws; the SPCA followed in 1824 (the Royal SPCA from 1840). It built on Jeremy Bentham's 1789 argument that the moral question about animals is not whether they can reason but whether they can suffer.
No — quite the opposite. The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were unfeeling automata, or "beast-machines." It was Enlightenment thinkers like Jeremy Bentham who later pushed back, arguing that an animal's capacity to suffer is what matters morally.
