“IN THE BEGINNING”: A SHORT HISTORY OF DESIGNING WITH PETS & PEOPLE
By Gordon S. Grice, OAA, FRAIC
January 2025
About 3.8 billion years ago, the first life forms appeared on earth. It took another three billion for the first true animals to evolve. Then after another three or four million years of trial and error, modern humans (homo sapiens) emerged. By scientific reckoning, animals have been here a whole lot longer than we have, and to give evolution its due, we owe our very existence to them, although nowadays, we often assume that the opposite is true.
This is a story about human and animal cohabitation.
Besides the scientific account, there are many other stories about how humans and animals were created and managed to survive. In one popular story, as described in The Holy Bible, Genesis 1:21, on the fifth day of creation:
. . . God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
God waited until the next day before creating humans.
But things soon took a turn for the worse. When God saw “that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,” [Genesis 6:5] he decided to reset by creating a flood that would wipe out everything—except those animals (including “fowl” and “every creeping thing of the earth”) and humans that were offered a berth on Noah’s ark. Noah gathered all the animal species he could find and loaded them onto the boat in pairs. After some time, the flood subsided, the ark settled on Mount Ararat, and the population of the world began anew.
This is partly an architectural story. It represents a very early (possibly the first) example of a structure specifically built to accommodate humans and their animals under one roof. They weren’t quite pets, but they weren’t exactly wild, either. As for the ark’s construction, The Bible even provides the rudimentary design specifications. The ark was to be built of “gopher wood,” with three decks divided into suites. It would be 300 cubits (135m) long by 50 cubits (25m) wide, by 30 cubits (15m) high [Genesis 6: 14–16]. By comparison, today’s largest cruise ship, Icon of the Seas, measures 365m long by 48.5m and is 20 decks high—roughly 20 times the size of Noah’s modest vessel. Modern cruise ships do not permit animals, except service animals, on board.
A description of accommodations aboard the ark would hardly appeal to today’s cruise ship crowd. Quarters were cramped, windowless, unventilated, unheated, unsanitary, and unsavoury, smelling of pitch and excrement, with no provision for exercise. The voyage was also not as advertised. Originally scheduled for 40 days, with no known port of arrival, it stretched into uncomfortable months, until a docking site was finally found.
The theme of animals and humans in a cooperative relationship forms the basis of many of the world’s creation stories. According to the Proto-Indo-European creation myth (reconstructed), the first man, Manu, and his giant twin Yemo cross the cosmos, accompanied by the primordial cow. In the Iroquois creation myth, water animals save the Sky Woman from falling into the ocean that covers the earth and build an island for her to live on. (www.cs.williams.edu). Without their help, the human race would never have existed, and Iroquois Native Americans continue to respect animals, acknowledging how greatly they rely on them to support their needs.
The Ojibway/Anishinabe creation myth, like the Biblical story, also includes discord and a flood. When early people began to argue and fight with one another Kitchi-Manitou (the Great Mystery), sends a flood to destroy nearly all life, except those creatures that could swim or fly. Only Nanaboozhoo survives by clinging to a log, which he shares with the few surviving animals. A heroic muskrat sacrifices its life to retrieve a clump of soil from the bottom of the water, and a turtle, carrying the soil on its back, creates a new land, which eventually grows to become North America.
In many stories, including both the Biblical and scientific accounts, animals arrived first, humans came second. Indigenous creation stories tend to stress the importance of animals and their close connection and interdependence with humans. In many cultures, a deep appreciation, even a reverence, and for animals persists to this day.
The scientifically documented story of humankind’s interrelationship with animals, and particularly domestic animals, follows a slightly dissimilar trajectory. Originally, domestic animals were just that: animals, coexisting with humans for nearly 300 millennia, on the same planet, in separate environments. Then about 30,000 years ago, we reached a detente with dogs. They would provide hunting assistance, guard duties, herding services, garbage disposal, warmth and companionship. We would repay them with food, pack membership and the opportunity to come out of the cold, into our homes. Cats were a little more socially uncommitted. About 10,000 years ago, they agreed (or appeared to agree) that they would look after rodent extermination and avian pest control in exchange for occasional shelter and a more reliable diet. These agreements still hold true, unaltered, in many parts of the world.
For the most part, pet accommodations have never been a matter of great concern and have not much improved from the conditions described aboard the ark—if they have been provided at all. If pets weren’t chained or confined to an unheated shelter, they were allowed to roam freely, their only connection to their owners being the promise of a daily meal.
A few short decades ago, things changed. In the urban centres of developed countries, it was no longer acceptable for our pets to roam freely. It was dangerous and unsanitary. Over a few short generations, domestic cats and dogs lost whatever it was evolution had originally earmarked for them and became members of our households. My daughter’s cat Benny, for example, has never been outside and has never seen a bird or a mouse up close. Our dog Oscar has nothing to hunt, nothing to defend (he greets visitors enthusiastically), and table scraps are not on his carefully controlled diet.
The statistics tell the story: In many cities (Toronto among them), there are more dogs than children. Does this, or should this have any effect on architects and planners? Dogs and cats are adaptable to any environment, so why the sudden interest in animal wellbeing?
In fact, is there any need to consider them at all when we design buildings and spaces? We assume that animals—wild, feral and domesticated—are doing just fine on their own, without our help. Except that they haven’t been left alone at all. As our relentless curiosity and ingenuity propels us forward, we continue to make the environment—built and natural—inhabitable for us alone, and we are not managing even that task very well. Meanwhile, other life forms are driven to extinction or forced to adapt to the world that we have created, which inevitably brings us into closer contact with them. You might say that the ultimate animal adaptative response is demonstrated by house pets. We don’t just tolerate them; we welcome them into our homes and treat them as family.
Quoting from Genesis again, one day after the creation of “every living creature that moveth”:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. – Genesis 1:26
That feels like a huge responsibility. We’ve been put in charge of animal welfare and everything else. In this age of a renewed concern for animals’ well-being, how can our architecture reflect this?
The subject of pet architecture —i.e., architecture with pets—is a growing area of practice, although the subject is not always taken seriously, and many humorous and fanciful pet architecture stories may be found online. But there is an increasing number of architectural practices that offer “pet-friendly” services, not to mention designers providing micro-habitations for pets, such as cat towers, dog dens, etc.
Such exercises in pet architecture may prove to be valuable for human survival in the near future. Once our AI overlords have taken full control of our affairs, we homo sapiens (or will it be homo obediens?) may become pets ourselves.