There’s an element of enigma in our relations with animals, even the most familiar. The diamond-collared pug being toted in a Louis Vuitton bag is still, in the end, a beast, as inscrutable to humans as a giant squid. Yet a human takes that pug into her home, feeds him, perhaps lets him sleep in her bed. He will never unfold the secrets of his heart; he will die, in some sense, a mystery. That mystery trumps every anthropomorphizing human accessory, every impulse to interpret or explain. It locks us out.

That may be their highest use, in the end. The pug’s diminutive size and bugged-out, injury-prone eyes are signs of years of human tampering, his plaid coat and booties tokens of the human drive to humanize everything. But the love heaped—even lavished in commodity form—on his warm animal body suggests a human attitude toward the nonhuman world that, for once, is not about mastery. Even in its consumerist drift, it short-circuits market logic by giving without a guaranteed return. There must be some real value in that.