Let's talk a little more about history: this time, the more ancient sort, before we had the concept that one could 'own' an animal any more than one 'owns' a child.
We'll start with what we can see with our eyes: in every corner of the world, one can easily find ancient graves in which there are animals buried with humans. Often times, they were killed or sacrificed so that they could follow their masters into the afterlife. Incidentally, this is also not uncommon with spouses, particularly wives, although suicide was more common here. In Ancient Egypt, of course, we have millions of mummified cats, ibises, dogs, birds, and whatever else you might think of either given as a sacrifice to a relevant deity (because if your deity is represented by an animal, it logically follows that you should kill it) or, again, buried along with a human to accompany them in the next world. Even in less structured regions, though, from Europe to the Americas to Japan, people are buried with their cats and their dogs.
Animals also crept frequently into the beliefs and the resulting art of these people: whether we're looking at tipi paintings in Montana or carvings on Norwegian jewelry, more often than not an animal will feature, frequently as the central aspect. Old gods are often associated with animals: Horus and the falcon, Inari and foxes, Athena and her owl, Tezcatlipoca and his jaguar counterpart, Thor and his goats. People became associated with animals, too: although when many of us, especially in the west, think of spirit animals, we think of Native American cultures, identical concepts existed all across the world essentially until the introduction of monotheism: the old Norse concept of fylgja mirrors precisely the idea of a spirit animal, which follows a person throughout their lives, representing them as part of their soul, and protecting them while they dream, and families in Japan are still sometimes represented by a zoomorphic deity.
Why was this? What was so important about animals that has been lost today? What has attracted us to animals so much? First of all, from the earliest times, we have relied on them. Today, when we say someone relies on animals, we think of beasts of burden, or food sources; however, until we started living close together in more urban settings, we instead lived closely with our animals. Central heating didn't exist, so in colder climates people would sleep alongside their dogs to keep them warm. Pesticides weren't exactly widespread, and since humans had not yet dethroned rodents as the number one carrier of human disease, cats were very often seen as protecting agents, hunting down those things that would not only deprive them of food but may well be the death of them through contagion.
Secondly, the divide between the human and non-human environments was not so distinct as it is today. People both feared and respected the dwellers of the wild, and that often came to admiration, as we see so often in the association between deities and animals that had not at that time been domesticated. Even as tarantulas bit us, snakes terrified us, wolves hunted us and foxes broke into the hen-house, and we were literally pitted against them, we recognized their power and wished for it ourselves, to be associated with these animals as our gods were. This changed eventually as our prime nemeses in life came not from the climate and other species but from our fellow human beings.
The question we're left with is what precisely this means for us. As noted in a previous post, it means that we're no longer as in-tune with our animal friends; that we have relegated them to a lower point than we once did and assumed them to be inferior to us, often to the point of having no consciousness of their own. It also means, though, that we have lost touch with some of our own nature: many mental disorders, including schizophrenia and certain personality disorders, have roughly equivalent prevalence rates across the globe, mood disorders and anxiety disorders are most common in urban areas, where there is very little contact between species and very high contact within ours. There is also a great deal of research on the negative correlation between depression rates and whether or not someone has a pet. (Hint: dogs are the best, but cats are great too, especially if you're female.) Animals have also proved very valuable in people with disorders like autism, (from Animals In Translation) and have other health benefits.
I already talked a fair bit about this before, so I won't yammer on, but it's something to think about: should we be looking backwards in time for our social and moral salvation? In regaining a more mutual relationship with animals and animal nature, will we have a better sense not only of the world around us, but of who we are, and become more stable as individuals and a society? In some ways, is the old better than the new? I've obviously already made up my mind, but I invite the reader to do some research on his own, looking past the image of a boy and his puppy and thinking about what exactly the partnership depicted in that image means for each of its constituents.
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