Fur Babies, Fairy Penguins and the Collapse of Civilisation

An ecologically sound rant against unconditional love, off-leash privilege and the cult of canine emotional outsourcing

Street dog. Hoi An, Tỉnh Quảng Nam, Vietnam. October 2022.

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I know this will cost me. Not in clicks or credibility. I don’t have enough of either to make a real dent. But in standing. In civic legitimacy. In the sacred social covenant that binds this increasingly deranged nation together. Because I’m about to admit the one thing you’re never supposed to say out loud in Australia, even after a couple of beers, even in private.

I don’t like dogs.

There it is. The unforgivable. The social death sentence. Worse than voting Liberal. Worse than living in Devonport. Worse than calling ANZAC Day “a complicated cultural artefact.” Dogs, I’ve come to learn, are above critique. They are sacred. More sacred than children. More sacred than nature. More sacred, possibly, than the internal combustion engine.

Which is odd, given they piss on everything and bark at nothing.

I should clarify. I don’t hate dogs. Not categorically. Not historically. I grew up with them. We had real dogs. Outside dogs. Dogs that didn’t wear puffer vests have separation anxiety or require a $120 consult with a canine nutritionist. They slept in the dirt, chased sticks and ate whatever was put in front of them. Often leftovers. Sometimes chocolate. They seemed fine. We were fine. We didn’t need to centre their emotional journey.

Now, something has changed. Something fundamental. Or maybe it’s me. Because I am now, unavoidably, allergic to dogs.

Not figuratively. Not in the “haha, I’m more of a cat person” way. No. My body literally shuts down. Eyes seal. Airways close. Skin reacts like it’s been exposed to a biological weapon. Five minutes near a golden retriever and I’m reenacting the third act of a Bergman film. Still, they come. Sniffing, leaping, humping. Always off-leash. Always “just saying hello.”

Always, always accompanied by that half-laugh, half-excuse from the owner: “Oh, don’t worry. He’s friendly.”

Yes. So was Genghis Khan. Friendly, but prone to pillage.

I run. I ride. Which means I engage with dogs constantly. I mean constantly. If I listed every encounter I’ve had with an aggressive or overly affectionate off-lead dog, we’d be here until the next ice age. Or at least until Byron Bay floods again. Barking, lunging, biting, chasing. I’ve been nipped on the calf mid-stride. I’ve had a kelpie try to mount my bike. I’ve had a border collie circle me like it was herding sheep, except I was the sheep and also the intruder and apparently the devil.

I get it. I do. Dogs aren’t the problem. It’s their owners. Which is to say, people.

The same people who drink activated charcoal and call it brunch. The same people who describe their rescue labrador as “neurodivergent.” The same people who pretend not to see their dog chasing an echidna into the undergrowth while they loudly discuss salmon farming, property prices and pretend to pick up phantom shit with a scented compostable bag.

Now, we let them. Because dogs are untouchable. Dogs are comfort. Dogs are family. Because dogs are somehow the last permissible form of emotional outsourcing in a society that no longer trusts its own children or partners or neighbours not to betray it.

Nevertheless, I’m starting to think it’s deeper than that. More ontological. More symptomatic. A sign of something else. Something rotting.

This isn’t just about barking. It’s about meaning. It’s about what we’ve become. It’s about fairy penguins, actually.

But we’ll get there…

The Cult of the Fur Baby

We used to keep gods in temples, or on crosses, or in federal parliament. Now they live in our houses, wear fancy raincoats and eat sous vide salmon fillets out of ceramic bowls that cost more than my first hi-fi. They are shaved into seasonal haircuts. They have Instagram accounts, astrological signs, and separation anxiety. Some of them are in therapy. Others are therapy.

I am speaking, of course, about dogs. Though I could just as easily be describing a particularly spoiled Victorian child circa 1885. Except that the child didn’t go to daycare, didn’t wear matching outfits with its owner, and didn’t get publicly mourned on Facebook with phrases like “run free, little angel” or “we’ll see you at the Rainbow Bridge.” This isn’t affection. It’s psychosis.

There was a time, not that long ago, when dog ownership was mostly practical. You had a dog because it barked at burglars, rounded up sheep, or kept your feet warm in a draughty shack. Now we have dogs to fill the aching void left by frayed social ties, affordable childcare, and the impossibility of meaningful adult intimacy under late-stage capitalism. We don’t raise dogs. We curate them. They are emotional artefacts. Pawed companions for the alienated bourgeoisie.

The language is unforgivable. “Fur baby.” “Fur parent.” “Forever home.” I have children. Real ones. With arms and neuroses and access to my Spotify account. I’ve changed their nappies, taught them to ride bikes, and fielded questions about death, war, and climate collapse with some semblance of grace. Never - not once - have I called them my “skin babies.” Yet somehow, we’ve reached a cultural moment where grown adults will earnestly whisper “mummy loves you” to a creature licking its own arsehole while shitting on a nature strip.¹

This is not tenderness. It’s reification. Alienation made adorable. These animals are not free. They are curated, accessorised and commodified. Walked not for exercise but for optics. Dressed not for comfort but content. Rewarded not for instinct but compliance. Dogs, like everything else now, must perform affection while monetising their existence. They are TikTok interns with tails.

It gets worse.

During the pandemic, dogs were bred like they were PPE. Every second household acquired one. Some out of boredom. Others out of panic. All convinced that a traumatised cavoodle was the key to surviving lockdown. Two years later, our streets are full of what the media, without irony, calls Pandemic Puppies: a phrase that somehow makes a national mental health crisis sound like a children’s television special. These dogs don’t know how to dog.² They panic. They bark at prams. They tremble in cafés. Raised in apartments, walked once a week, and never left alone for more than an hour, they now can’t cope with a Tuesday.³

Cue the medication. Cue the canine behavioural consultants. Cue the entire household orbiting around one neurotic schnauzer’s emotional weather system. It’s all treated as normal. Somehow, this is what connection looks like now.

This isn’t companionship. It’s co-dependence. Mutual, curated, high-performance loneliness.

I prefer cats. Always have. They’re cooler, funnier and don’t look at you like you’re a god. They look at you like a landlord. With contempt. Cats are above it, above us. Still, they’re not innocent, either. Environmental terrorists, the lot of them. We forgive it because they do it with style. At least they don’t wear tutus.

Beneath the humour, there’s a quiet rot. Because none of this is about dogs. It’s about what happens when meaning disappears and affection is outsourced. It’s about the emotional detritus of a culture that no longer knows how to love people, only pets. It’s about pretending we’re okay because something furry is nearby when we cry and doesn’t judge us for eating an entire cheesecake in activewear.

We’ve turned our grief into a brand. Then handed it a leash.

Paws on Country

Let’s speak plainly. If cats are apex hipsters, aloof and chaotic, dogs are bogan colonisers. Loyal, destructive, selectively deaf. Australia knows how to talk about invasive species. We trap, shoot, and bait feral pigs, deer and cats with ruthless clarity. Yet somehow, Trevor, the Labrador, is exempt. Even as he barrels through a protected dune system to chase a hooded plover into the sea.

Because Trevor isn’t a pest. Trevor has a birthday. Trevor will have a commemorative urn shaped like a tennis ball. Trevor is someone’s fur baby and has been gifted a forever home.

Meanwhile, entire penguin colonies have been wiped out by off-lead domestic dogs. Hundreds of fairy penguins are shredded in the sand while the owners “didn’t see him run off.” In Tasmania, more than 880 confirmed penguin deaths are attributed to domestic dogs.⁴ That’s just the ones we counted. The ones with feathers still stuck in their teeth.

Some dogs kill wildlife. Most just terrorise it. Studies show birds flush from nests nearly every time a dog passes, even on a leash.⁵ That’s not a quirk. It’s death by panic. When migratory shorebirds are forced into ten or more alarm flights per day, they burn through critical energy reserves. The result is starvation. Failure to breed. Collapse.

Even when they’re not visible, dogs leave scent trails that act as chemical warning signs. Deer, foxes, small mammals and even predators like bobcats avoid areas marked by dog urine. The bush gets quieter, but not in a good way. Not the meditative, back-to-nature kind of calm. The ecological collapse kind. The eerie stillness that follows a mistake you can’t take back.

And the shit. Jesus fucking Christ, the shit.

One average-sized dog produces over a tonne of faeces and two thousand litres of urine in its lifetime. Most of it ends up smeared into bushland, park trails and creeks. Dog poo doesn’t compost. It introduces parasites. It spreads toxocara and strongyloides.⁶ It leaks into waterways. Those forgotten blue bags swinging from trees? Each one’s a time bomb of suburban neglect.

Even the ones who don’t crap on native habitat are still implicated. Every bag of premium dog food comes with a carbon footprint the size of a coal-fired power station’s conscience. The global pet food industry consumes enough meat to make a dent in national emissions figures. If the world’s dogs formed a country, their diet alone would make them one of the top greenhouse gas emitters on Earth.

There are also the flea treatments. You know the ones - those monthly vials of liquid you squeeze onto a dog’s spine while pretending it’s fine to chemically weaponise a vertebrate every thirty days. When that dog then jumps into a river, the runoff poisons aquatic invertebrates. Entire creek ecosystems take a hit because someone couldn’t bear the idea of an itchy staffy.

None of this is hidden. None of it is new. It’s just ignored. Conservationists know. Land managers know. Most dog owners know, too. The denial isn’t born of ignorance. It’s born of love. Or what we’ve mistaken for love.

Because to call out a dog is to call out its owner. Their values. Their habits. Their identity. That’s the problem. We’ve fused the animal to the self. The retriever isn’t just a pet. It’s a lifestyle. An emblem of virtue. Of connection. Of performative earthiness. To admit Trevor is wrecking the place is to acknowledge that we are, too.

We legislate against cats. We shoot pigs from helicopters. We wring our hands about fire ants. Meanwhile, Trevor bounds into a wetland with all the joy of an unleashed god, and we laugh, call him cheeky, and take another photo for Instagram.

While we’ve drawn a line in the sand on invasive pests, Trevor just pissed on it.

What We Owe Each Other (and the Wombats)

I understand why people love dogs. I do. They’re warm. They’re loyal. They offer uncomplicated affection at a time when everything else feels transactional or doomed. They ask for very little, then take quite a lot. Sometimes, they give us a reason to keep getting up in the morning. Sometimes they just bark at the bin and shit on the neighbour’s lawn. Both can be grounding.

None of this is about hate. It’s about the consequences of love unexamined. We’ve built an entire industry around emotional dependence and called it care. We’ve constructed entire identities around leash preferences. We’ve outsourced our need for connection to a species that still eats its own vomit and declared the relationship sacred. This is late capitalism at its most cuddly. We are not dog owners. We are subscribers to a lifestyle product that wags and pants and occasionally mauls a jogger.

The consequences are no longer theoretical. They’re ecological, political, material. The dogs are here. They’re pissing on endangered orchids. They’re barking through national parks. They’re killing wombats, chasing bandicoots and casually collapsing shorebird populations one joyful sprint at a time.

Still, we coo. We defend. We post photos of Trevor in a Santa hat and pretend he’s not the third most powerful environmental actor in the southern hemisphere, right after logging companies and climate change.⁷

We talk a lot about harm these days. About responsibility. About reckoning. This is one of them. If your “fur baby” is driving species to extinction, what exactly are you parenting?

We could be honest. Admit that we’ve gone too far. That some dogs are miserable. That many are maladjusted. That we’ve created a generation of codependent mammals unable to function without curated affection and grain-free kibble. That dogs, in cities at least, are closer to indentured companions than they are to anything resembling a healthy animal.

We could also get creative. Could we not, in theory, train kangaroos to do the same job? Echidnas with little backpacks? Platypus therapy animals in retirement homes? There are options here. Options that don’t require an endless stream of emotional projection and protein-rich landfill.

Of course, none of this will happen. The cult is too deep. The branding is too effective. The silence too comfortable. Most people will keep their dogs, love their dogs, build their personalities around their dogs, and refuse to see the blood on their paws.

And maybe I will, too. Maybe, one day, I’ll get another dog. One with no social media presence. No special diet. No Halloween costume. One that lives outside eats bones and dies with dignity. A real dog. Not a brand. Not a lifestyle. Just a dog.

Until then, I’ll keep running. Past the off-leash zones. Past the eco-signs. Past the turds in biodegradable bags swinging like ornaments from the limbs of dying banksias. I’ll keep flinching at barks and scowling at owners and trying not to cry when I see another wombat slumped on the roadside.

Because someone has to remember. Someone has to say it.

We owe it to the wombats.

1. Which is also, loosely, the format of Sky News After Dark.

2. McEvoy V, Espinosa UB, Crump A, Arnott G. “Canine Socialisation: A Narrative Systematic Review”. Animals (Basel). 2022 Oct 22;12(21):2895. doi: 10.3390/ani12212895. Erratum in: Animals (Basel). 2022 Dec 26;13(1):81. doi: 10.3390/ani13010081. PMID: 36359020; PMCID: PMC9655304.

3. RSPCA Victoria. "Increase in number of pets surrendered due to behavioural concerns," 2022.

4. ABARES. "Integrated assessment of the impact of wild dogs in Australia" (2014).

5. Philip W. Bateman, Lauren N. Gilson. “Bad dog? The environmental effects of owned dogs”. Pacific Conservation Biology, 2025; 31 (3) DOI: 10.1071/PC24071.

6. Curtin University. "Man's best friend may be nature's worst enemy, study on pet dogs suggests." ScienceDaily. 10 April 2025. See: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250409114840.htm.

7. Greenfield, Emily. Pet Dogs’ Environmental Impacts—From Wildlife Disruption to Carbon Emissions. Conservation, Environmental Impact Assessment, 19 Apr. 2025. See: https://sigmaearth.com/pet-dogs-environmental-impacts-from-wildlife-disruption-to-carbon-emissions/.