The Audible Externality

A dog has been howling since before I woke. Not continuously—there are pauses in which the suburban morning reasserts itself, the distant traffic, the birds—but the howling returns with the regularity of something that has not found what it is looking for and has not given up looking.

The owner is not there. The yard is fenced. The dog is doing what dogs do when the social structure they were bred for has been withdrawn without explanation and without a clear indication of when it will return.

I have been awake for some time now. The dog has been at this longer.

 

The dog’s presence in this essay is not incidental. It is not there to establish atmosphere or to introduce a note of pathos before the argument proper begins. It is there because the howling dog is an instance of the same structural pattern that the preceding essays have been tracing through human social life—the pattern in which a system creates conditions it cannot fully inhabit, recruits something to manage the gap, and produces in the recruited thing a version of the same unmet need it was recruited to address.

The dog was selected, over millennia, for warning, protection, companionship, the particular quality of non-judgemental presence that the domesticated dog offers with a consistency that human relationships cannot always match. The dog is a social mammal whose social architecture, reshaped by millennia of selective breeding, now maps onto human domestic life with considerable precision. It wants to be with the pack. The pack is the household. The household is empty for nine hours a day while the owner is at work.

The dog occupies a structurally similar position to what the lonely person experiences in the managed social environment—the conditions have been arranged, the space has been provided, the care is genuine, and the thing that is actually needed is absent. The thing that is actually needed is presence. The presence is in the office.

 

The pet as partial solution to the structural problem of isolation has a long history that the current pet industry has extended into something considerably more elaborate than its origins. The dog that kept early human settlements safe from predators and competitors while providing warmth, early warning, and the companionship of another social mammal was integrated into the rhythm of daily life—the movement, the work, the household activity, the sleep—in a way that the suburban pet is not. The working dog on a farm, the sheepdog on the hillside, the guard dog at the warehouse, all maintain some version of the integration that the breed was shaped for. The companion dog in the locked apartment or the fenced suburban yard is asked to perform the emotional function of integration without the structural conditions that make integration possible.

This is not a moral judgement about pet ownership. The person who leaves a dog alone for nine hours while they go to work is not being deliberately unkind. They are doing what they can within the constraints of an economic and built environment that was not designed with the dog’s social requirements in mind, any more than it was designed with the owner’s. The lonelygenic suburb is not exclusively lonelygenic for humans. The conditions that produce the incidental encounter for neither the resident nor their neighbours produce the integrated daily rhythm for neither the resident nor their dog.

The dog is folded into the same pattern of scheduling, managed absence, and structured separation that characterises the owner’s social life. The owner has a calendar. The dog has a feeding schedule and a dog walker who arrives at eleven and stays for an hour and leaves. The dog walker is the dog’s social prescribing link worker—the managed, funded, allocated unit of presence that substitutes for the integrated daily contact that the built environment and the economic arrangement have made unavailable.

 

The howling is the audible externality of a private solution. The owner needed protection, or company, or the particular quality of presence that a dog provides, and acquired a dog to provide it. The acquisition addressed the owner’s need—or addressed it partially, within the constraints of the owner’s life structure. The dog’s need, which is the need for the social integration that the breed was shaped to require, is less fully addressed by the arrangement. The unaddressed need produces the howling. The howling is the private solution becoming public evidence of its own incompleteness.

The externality is the economic term for costs that are generated by a transaction but borne by parties who are not part of the transaction. The owner and the dog have made an arrangement that works imperfectly for both and produces, as a byproduct, a sound that falls on the neighbourhood—on the person woken at six in the morning, on the person trying to work from home, on the person whose window faces the yard. The neighbours did not enter the arrangement. They are bearing part of its cost.

This is a small example of a large pattern. The private solution to a structural problem generates costs that are distributed beyond the parties who chose the solution, because the solution is working within constraints it cannot address and the unaddressed constraints produce consequences that exceed the private boundary.

 

The borrowed pack is the concept that clarifies most precisely what has happened to the human-dog relationship in the contemporary suburban context. The dog’s social architecture is built around the pack—the stable group of known individuals whose presence is reliable, whose movements are shared, whose collective activity provides the context within which the dog’s behaviour makes sense. The suburban household is a pack of one or two people who are present for approximately a third of the dog’s waking hours. The dog adapts to this—dogs are extraordinary adapters—but the adaptation is not without cost, and the cost is visible in the behaviour that the veterinary industry has developed a substantial subspecialty to address: separation anxiety, destructive behaviour, excessive vocalisation, the various expressions of a social mammal’s distress at the chronic withdrawal of the social contact it requires.

The veterinary industry’s response to separation anxiety is instructive. It includes behavioural modification programmes, anxiety medications, pheromone diffusers, white noise machines, and the recommendation of additional enrichment activities to occupy the dog during the owner’s absence. The response is calibrated to the individual animal and the individual household. It does not address the structure that produces the separation, because the structure is the owner’s working day and the owner’s working day is not within the veterinary practice’s scope of intervention.

The dog gets a behaviour modification programme. The neighbourhood gets the howling during the modification period. The structure remains.

 

What the howling dog adds to the series of observations these essays have been making is not a new argument but a new register for the same one. The argument has been that systems produce conditions they cannot fully inhabit, that the response to the conditions is typically directed at the individual or the recruited substitute rather than at the structure that produced the conditions, and that the individual or the substitute ends up managing a gap that was not of their making and is not within their power to close.

The lonely person does the internal work. The dog gets the behaviour modification programme. The structure that produced the loneliness and the howling is the structure that the intervention cannot reach—the lonelygenic suburb, the nine-hour working day, the economic arrangements that require the owner to be elsewhere for most of the dog’s waking hours, the built environment that provides a fenced yard in place of the integrated daily rhythm that both the owner and the dog were shaped to inhabit.

The dog and the owner are in the same position. They are two social mammals in an environment that was not designed for either of them, doing what they can within the constraints they did not choose, producing as a byproduct the evidence of their own unmet social needs—the one through isolation, the other through the sound that the isolation produces at six in the morning when the yard is empty and the pack is at work and the fence is the limit of the available world.

The companionship was acquired to address the isolation.

The companionship is itself structured around absence.

The absence is audible.

The suburb is quiet apart from that.

The dog is still calling.

Nobody answers.