Loving animals is almost a prerequisite for living in Squamish.
We adore our wildlife and our pets, especially dogs.
We have our choice of pet stores, groomers, trainers and dog walkers.
As of April 1, there are 1,593 valid dog licences that have been issued in Squamish, according to the District, but the real number is sure to be much greater.
And dogs have long been the best friends of Squamish residents.
Shopping for Fido
Squamish historian Eric Andersen says he doesn’t think there was a store that specialized only in pets in Squamish until the Station Square shopping centre opened up in the early 1980s.
That store was where Bosley’s is today, he said.
“However, the Stedman’s [Variety] Store owned by Jim and Thelma Kilburn during the late 1960s to 70s — later operated by Jim Mulholland — and located in the Behrner building where Pearl’s [Value and Vintage] is today had everything, including small pets — hamsters, goldfish, birds,” he told The Squamish Chief.
While off-leash dogs are a hot topic today, in the 1960s, ”the expectations and habits of many visitors with respect to off-leash dogs were something new,” Andersen said, in an article called Pound Law that he wrote about this history and forwarded to The Squamish Chief.
There were incidents that generated lots of discussions.
“In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce sent a delegation to council to ask the village council to take action on off-leash dogs. The Dentville neighbourhood and the geese on Mr. Bailey’s small farm across from the high school were being terrorized by badly behaved dogs,” Andersen wrote.
In 1971, Dr. Stein Hoff, then based in West Vancouver, established the first part-time vet clinic here. Dr. Hoff was to be a much-valued advisor to the District council in the years to come, according to Andersen.
Check out the Squamish Public Library’s photo archive of animals for a look at furry locals of old.
(Read Andersen's Pound Law document in full below the story.)
All about the dog
According to the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI), there are 7.7 million dogs in Canada and 8.1 million cats, as of 2020.
Dogs, which primarily descended from wolves, were the first domesticated animal, according to Greger Larson, director of the University of Oxford’s palaeogenomics and bio-archaeology research network, which led a major international project to determine the origins of dogs.
According to Larson, dogs and cats were buried with humans 12,000 years ago, but we don’t know exactly why.
(There is dispute over when the first dogs appeared, with some arguing it was much earlier.)
“It’s been to the advantage of both people and dogs to work together — to be together and live together,” said historian Katherine Grier, author of the book, Pets in America: A History.
Early on, dogs acted as “garbage men” for humans and were used for hunting, she said.
“And then over time, I think that they got domesticated because the friendliest ones were kept and bred,” she said.
Pets have long been a part of human’s private leisure, she added, but not to the extent they are today.
“Euro Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries kept pets, but they also lived in a world where they relied on animals as workers and as a source of raw materials — there was no way around it,” she said.
“The variety of those relationships has gotten more attenuated in modern industrial societies where you no longer have a horse, you don’t have a cow in your backyard giving milk.... We did that really into the 1930s.”
Grier noted while we don’t think of it this way, what we are doing when we single out some animals to be pets is choosing to identify them as individuals.
“That’s why for example, a pet squirrel or pet chicken or anything like that is regarded somewhat differently from a wild or livestock animal, because of the way that you regard it. And the way that you are willing to intervene in its life course, the resources you’re willing to put into it, right?”
While pet stores weren’t on every corner, pet stores show up as early as the 1840s in big U.S. cities, Grier said.
“But in the 1890s, you really start to get — they called them bird stores because a lot of what they sold were caged birds and birdcages and bird food and stuff like that, but they did sell some other animals. And then in the 1890s, in the U.S., you begin to see what I would consider the first really modern pet stores with a wide array of foods and supplies, patent medicines for people to treat their animals when they were sick, beds, coats, you know, all this kind of stuff. “
Before the Second World War, there weren’t the plethora of consumer goods we associate with pets today, however.
“The pet industry...realizes that you’ve got a prosperous post-war middle class, where having a dog or cat or guinea pigs, or parakeets… was associated with having a happy family life. It was definitely associated with a sort of vision of family life and childhood.”
Grier says she collects vintage pet items, including a ruffled rubber undergarment for female dogs in heat from the post-Second World War era.
“One of the things about the consumer market is that it’s always coming up with stuff that we’re not sure we need or we didn’t think we needed,” she said.
“The dog of my childhood had her toys consisting of a ball and then they would take socks that were worn out, and we would tie them together and make them into a tug of war toy. And that was what she had.”
The Canadian connection
According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, dogs were first kept in Canada by Indigenous peoples.
“They had various uses: transportation and draft work, hunting, clothing materials and sometimes human food. Inuit dogs are still used to pull sleds and carry backpacks; they are also used in sealing and provide protection from polar bears,” reads the Encyclopedia article by R.D. Crawford.
There are 187 breeds of dog that the Canadian Kennel Club recognizes. Of those, five are Canadian: the Tahltan bear dog, the Canadian Inuit dog, the Nova Scotia duck- tolling retriever, the Newfoundland dog and the Labrador retriever.
Dogs are popular pets because “they’re really good at figuring out emotions or figuring out how to interact with you,” Grier said.
It took the invention of cat litter to make cats popular indoor pets, she noted.
“The rise of the indoor cat wasn’t possible or was very difficult before the invention of kitty litter after World War Two. Before that, if you wanted to have a cat that was completely indoors, you wound up having a box of ashes or sand or torn up paper and it was a mess.”
The story of cat litter is that a fellow called Ed Lowe was selling granulated clay as an industrial grease solvent to pick up grease off of industry floors, Grier said.
He knew a woman who was complaining about having to use sand for her cat. And so he gave her a bag of his product. She raved about it and Lowe figured out he could sell the stuff to cat owners.
The rest is history.
Grier notes as much as pets are fun, many are also still abandoned at shelters all over North America.
Folks need to understand the power they have in their pets’ lives, she said.
“You are shaping the course of its life. You’re doing everything from controlling its fertility, to managing its health or wellness. And then there’s also some psychological well-being, in the case of many animals,” she said. “The fact of the matter is that they have emotions. They have emotional lives, and they have psychology. And so, I guess that is it. It’s figuring out, you know, how to be responsible that way.”
Find Grier’s book Pets in America: A History on Amazon or go to her website.
Eric Andersen's Pound Law information:
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