Diagnosing America’s Relationship with Pets — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #91 w/ Trainer Hannah Branigan

What is with the weird rela­tion­ship we Amer­i­cans have with our pets? Many of us treat them as our babies, yet of course they’re our cap­tives. Dog train­er Han­nah Brani­gan joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to talk about pets as enter­tain­ment, as hob­by, and as pan­dem­ic com­pan­ions. How can we make this rela­tion­ship as ben­e­fi­cial as pos­si­ble for all involved, and how can learn­ing to be a bet­ter pet own­er inform our treat­ment of oth­er peo­ple? Plus, what do we want out of TV talk­ing ani­mals, dog train­ing TV, and the abom­i­na­tion that is Pooch Per­fect.

Han­nah’s pod­cast is Drink­ing from the Toi­let, and you can learn more about her book and train­ing pro­gram at hannahbranigan.dog. A cou­ple of her pod­cast episodes that we refer to are #129 Treat Every­one Like a Dog, #114 Acci­den­tal Behav­ior, and #80 I Wrote a Book.

And a few arti­cle links as usu­al:

• “House­holds Buy 3.2 Mil­lion Pets in Lock­down” from BBC News
• “The Pet Cul­ture” by Jen­na Goudreau (from way back in 2009)
• “Do Dogs Real­ly Pre­fer Baby Talk? You Might Be Sur­prised.” by Lin­da Lom­bar­di
• “Top Pet TV Shows to Binge Watch” by Han­nah Miller
• “Dog and cat Hal­loween cos­tumes are fly­ing off the shelves as home­bound Amer­i­cans des­per­ate­ly search for ‘a lit­tle joy’ amid a dark year” by Kate Tay­lor and Mary Meisen­zahl

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.