by Hal Herzog
Most of the dogs living in American homes are simply companions, but our attitudes toward them can be as convoluted as Sammy’s relationships with the two categories of dogs in his life. Over half of dog owners think of their pets as family members. A report by the American Animal Hospital Association found that 40% of the women they surveyed said they got more affection from their dogs than from their husbands or children. Yet there is a dark side to our interactions with dogs. One in ten American adults is afraid of dogs, and dogs are second only to late-night noise as a source of conflict between neighbors. (My friend Ross had to sell his house and move because his neighbor’s barking dogs turned his life into a nightmare.) In a typical year, 4.5 million Americans are bitten by dogs, and two dozen people, mostly children, are killed by them.
From a dog’s eye view, the human-pet relationship isn’t always rosy either. Between 2 million and 3 million unwanted dogs are euthanized in animal shelters each year. Then there are the horrendous genetic problems we have inflicted upon dogs in our attempts to breed the perfect pet. Take, for example, the English bulldog, a breed that dog behavior expert James Serpell refers to as a canine train wreck. Bulldogs have such monstrous heads that 90% of bulldog puppies have to be delivered by cesarean section. Their distorted snouts and deformed nasal passages make breathing a chore, even during sleep, and they suffer from joint diseases, chronic dental problems, deafness, and a host of dermatological conditions caused by their wrinkly skin. To add insult to injury, English bulldogs also easily overheat and have a tendency to slobber, snore, fart, and suddenly drop dead from cardiac arrest.
Things are worse for dogs in Korea, where a puppy can be a pet or an item on the menu. Meat dogs, which are typically short-haired, largish animals that look disconcertingly like Old Yeller, are raised in horrific conditions before they are slaughtered, usually by electrocution.
We usually ignore these contradictions but as a psychologist, they began to fascinate me.
FROM THE BEHAVIOR OF ANIMALS TO THE BEHAVIOR OF ANIMAL PEOPLE
In the weeks after I was accused of feeding kittens to boas, I found myself thinking more about the paradoxes associated with our relationships with animals and less about my animal behavior studies. By conventional standards, my research program was a success. I published articles in good journals, received my share of grant funds, and presented my research at scholarly meetings. But it dawned on me that there were plenty of smart young scientists investigating topics like vocalizations in cotton rats, tool use in crows, and the offbeat reproductive habits of spotted hyenas (female hyenas give birth through their penises). On the other hand, there were only a handful of researchers trying to understand the often wacky ways that people relate to other species. Here was an emerging field, one that I could enter on the ground floor and possibly make a contribution to. Within a year, I had closed up my animal lab to concentrate full time on the psychology of human-animal interactions.
Since shifting from studying animal behavior to studying animal people, my research has largely focused on individuals who love animals but who confront moral quandaries in their relationships with them—the veterinary student who tries not to cry when she euthanizes a puppy, the animal rights activist who can’t find someone to date because “just going out to eat becomes an ordeal,” the burly circus animal trainer whose life is completely focused on the giant bears he hauls around the country in the dreary confines of an eighteen-wheeler, the grizzled cockfighter who beams when I offer to take a picture of his beloved battle-scarred seven-time winner.
I have attended animal rights protests, serpent-handling church services, and clandestine rooster fights. I have interviewed laboratory animal technicians, big-time professional dog-show handlers, and small-time circus animal trainers. I’ve watched high school kids dissect their first fetal pigs and helped a farm crew slaughter cattle. I analyzed several thousand Internet messages between biomedical researchers and animal rights activists as they tried—and ultimately failed—to find common ground. My students have studied women hunters, dog rescuers, ex-vegetarians, and people who love pet rats. We have surveyed thousands of people about their attitudes toward rodeos, factory farming, and animal research. We have even pored over hundreds of back issues of sleazy supermarket tabloids for insight into our modern cultural myths about animals. (The original title of our article on tabloid animal stories was “Woman Gives Birth to Litter of Nine Rabbits.” Unfortunately, the editor of the journal to which we submitted the manuscript did not find the title sufficiently scientific and insisted we change it.)
Like most people, I am conflicted about our ethical obligations to animals. The philosopher Strachan Donnelley calls this murky ethical territory “the troubled middle.” Those of us in the troubled middle live in a complex moral universe. I eat meat—but not as much as I used to, and not veal. I oppose testing the toxicity of oven cleaner and eye shadow on animals, but I would sacrifice a lot of mice to find a cure for cancer. And while I find some of the logic of animal liberation philosophers convincing, I also believe that our vastly greater capacity for symbolic language, culture, and ethical judgment puts humans on a different moral plane from that of other animals. We middlers see the world in shades of gray rather than in the clear blacks and whites of committed animal activists and their equally vociferous opponents. Some argue that we are fence-sitters, moral wimps. I believe, however, that the troubled middle makes perfect sense because moral quagmires are inevitable in a species with a huge brain and a big heart. They come with the territory.
I wrote Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat for anyone interested in human-animal relationships. As a researcher, I normally write for specialists whose job it is to wade through jargon-laden prose that can quickly make your eyes glaze over. But I am convinced that scientists have an obligation to communicate with the public, people who do not know the difference between an analysis of variance and a factor analysis but who are eager to read about current research findings and the hot controversies in our field. The trick is to inform readers about the latest results in a way that is interesting, but at the same time respect the complexity of the issues and be honest about what we know and what we don’t.
Many of the topics in the book are controversial. Researchers disagree, for example, about whether your dog feels guilty when it poops on the living room rug; whether children who abuse animals become violent adults; and about the role that meat eating played in human evolution. The passions of the public run high over animal issues such as whether the ownership of pit bulls should be outlawed, or whether trying to discover a cure for cancer is worth the deaths of millions of mice each year. Some of these debates have become bitterly divisive, with the partisans viewing the issues with passion approaching religious zeal. (For this reason, as is customary in ethnographic research, I have changed the names of some of the participants.)
For the most part, I have tried to approach these issues as objectively as I can. This means, of course, that well-intended and intelligent people on both sides of some of these controversies will sometimes disagree with me. That’s fine. To this end, I have included an extensive list of research citations and recommended readings at the end of the book. If you want to delve further into the effects of pets on human health or the psychology of animal activism, I point you to some of the relevant studies. My goal is not to change your mind about how we should treat animals but to encourage you to think more deeply about the psychology and moral implications of some of our most important relationships: our relationships with the non-human creatures in our lives.
Late one afternoon in 1986, I was standing in a hallway of a posh Boston hotel deep in conversation with Andrew Rowan, the director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University. We were at one of the first international conferences on human-animal relationships, and we were discussing the paradoxes that so often crop up in our attitudes toward the use of animals. How can 60% of Americans believe simultaneously that animals have the rig
ht to live and that people have the right to eat them?
Andrew looked up at me and said, “The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency.”
This book is my attempt to explain this paradox.
1
Anthrozoology
THE NEW SCIENCE OF HUMAN-ANIMAL INTERACTIONS
Our failure to study our relationships with other animals has occurred for many reasons…. Much of it can be boiled down to two rather unattractive human qualities: arrogance and ignorance.
—CLIFTON FLYNN
The thirty-minute drive from the Kansas City airport to the conference hotel was much more interesting than the three-hour flight from North Carolina. I had flown in for the annual meeting of the International Society of Anthrozoology. I found myself sharing a ride with a woman named Layla Esposito, a social psychologist who tells me she recently completed her PhD dissertation on bullying among middle school children. Puzzled, I ask her why she was attending a meeting on the relationships between people and animals. She tells me that she is a program director at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She is at the conference to let researchers know about a new federal grant program that will fund research on the effects that animals have on human health and well-being. The money is coming from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Mars, the corporate giant that makes Snickers for me and Tempting Tuna Treats for my cat, Tilly. NIH is particularly interested in the impact of pets on children: Is pet therapy an effective treatment for autism? What role does oxytocin (the so-called love hormone) play in our attachment to pets? Are children raised with pets less susceptible to asthma?
“How much money are you giving out?” I ask. Two and a half million dollars a year, she says. “Fantastic! This is just what the field needs,” I say. I am thinking that Layla is going to have a very full dance card for the next couple of days.
WHY OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH ANIMALS MATTER
While $2.5 million is paltry compared to the $6 billion that NIH doles out every year for cancer research, the funds will be a shot in the arm for anthrozoology, a field you have probably never heard of. Anthrozoology is a big tent. It includes the study of nearly all aspects of our interactions with other species. For example, the Kansas City conference included talks on how caring for chronically ill pets affects the quality of lives of their owners; the effect of pet ownership on surviving a heart attack; how children decide whether a strange dog is friendly or dangerous; sex differences in cat behavior (neutered males are more affectionate to humans than are spayed females); and the existence of morality in non-human species.
While animals are important in so many aspects of human life, the study of our interactions with other species has, until recently, been neglected by scientists. Take my field, psychology. For a hundred years, psychologists have concentrated on uncovering behavioral processes such as motivation, perception, and memory, and have neglected important facets of daily life such as food, religion, and how we spend our leisure time. Our relationships with animals, especially our pets, also fall into the category of things that everyday people care about but psychologists usually don’t.
One reason behavioral scientists have shied away from studying human-animal interactions is that for many of them the topic seems trivial. This attitude is wrong-headed. Understanding the psychology underlying our attitudes and behaviors toward other species is important for several reasons. About two out of three Americans live with animals, and many people have deep personal relationships with their pets. In addition, our beliefs about how we should treat other species are changing, and a lot of us are torn over whether animals should be used as subjects in biomedical research, or killed because they taste good. The debate over the moral status of animals has become such a divisive social issue that FBI officials have called radical animal rights activism America’s greatest domestic terrorism threat. Finally, people are fascinated by anthrozoological research. When I tell someone that I study human-animal interactions, almost inevitably they begin to tell me stories about their wacky dogs or their objections to meat or how their Aunt Sally loves to hunt bears with her Plott hounds.
THINKING LIKE AN ANTHROZOOLOGIST
Anthrozoology transcends normal academic boundaries. Among our numbers are psychologists, veterinarians, animal behaviorists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. As in every science, anthrozoologists don’t always see eye to eye. We differ in our attitudes toward some of the thorny moral issues that arise in human-animal relationships. We don’t even agree on the name of our discipline. (Some prefer to call it human-animal studies.) But, despite these differences, researchers who study our relationships with animals have a lot in common. We all believe that our interactions with other species are an important component of human life and hope that our research might make the lives of animals better.
As academic disciplines go, anthrozoology is a small pond, but in the last two decades we have come a long way. Several journals are devoted to publishing research on human-animal interactions, and the International Society for Anthrozoology holds annual meetings where researchers report their latest findings and argue about whether walking your dog will cause you to lose weight and how long cats have been domesticated. In the United States, courses in human-animal interactions are taught in over 150 colleges and universities, and institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue, and the University of Missouri have established anthrozoological research centers.
To get a sense of anthrozoological research, here are a few examples of hot issues in the new science of human-animal interactions. Take, for example, the effectiveness of dolphins as healers, how we select our pets, and the connection between childhood cruelty to animals and adult violence.
DO DOLPHINS MAKE GOOD THERAPISTS?
One of the most important topics in anthrozoology is whether interacting with animals can alleviate human suffering. Animal-assisted therapy (called AAT by anthrozoologists) has been around for decades. The term “pet therapy” was coined in 1964 by Boris Levinson, a child psychiatrist who found that some children who were difficult to work with would open up when they played with his dog, Jingles. The residents in my ninety-two-year-old mother’s assisted-living facility perk up when the therapy dogs visit a couple of times a week. I find that spilling my guts to our cat, Tilly, helps me work out my little problems. (Tilly takes a tough love approach to counseling. When I start to whine, she just sniffs and walks away. I would probably do better with a low-energy golden retriever with watery eyes—a canine version of Dr. Melfi, Tony Soprano’s shrink.)
But does riding a horse, playing with a dog, or stroking a cat really cure depression or enhance the communication skills of children with autism? Janell Miner and Brad Lundahl of the University of Utah analyzed the results of forty-nine published studies on the effectiveness of AAT in children, adolescents, adults, and elderly people in settings ranging from doctors’ offices to long-term residential care facilities. They found that dogs were the most common animal therapists and that AAT was used most often for individuals with mental health problems rather than physical ailments. In most (but not all) of the studies, the subjects did measurably benefit from interacting with their nonhuman therapists. And, on average, the degree of their improvement was about the same as depressed people get from taking drugs like Prozac.
Dolphin therapy, however, is more controversial than AAT involving dogs or horses. Dolphins used for therapy are, after all, wild animals held in captivity against their will. In addition, many of the claims made about the curative powers of dolphins are over the top: Interacting with dolphins, it is alleged, can alleviate Down syndrome, AIDS, chronic back pain, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, autism, learning disorders, and deafness, and can even shrink tumors. Among the presumed healing mechanisms are bioenergy force fields, the high frequency clicks and grunts that dolphins use to communicate with each other, and even the ability to directly alter human brain waves.
Dolphin therapy sounds great. Go swimming, get well. But before you sign up for a couple of weeks in a dolphin tank, you should check out the science behind these claims. Most of them are based on anecdotes, self-reports, or poorly designed experiments conducted by individuals who have a vested interest in the results. Dolphin therapy is particularly attractive to desperate parents who will pay whatever it takes to help their kids with disorders such as autism and Down syndrome. They flock in droves to the more than one hundred therapeutic swim-with-dolphins programs in places like the Florida Keys, Bali, Great Britain, Russia, the Bahamas, Australia, Israel, and Dubai, all of them hoping that, through some unknown force, these creatures with perpetual Mona Lisa smiles will work their magic. Dolphin therapy is expensive. Two weeks at the Curacao Dolphin Therapy and Research Center in the Netherlands Antilles costs roughly 700 bucks for each hour in the water. Is the money well spent? Will their hopes be fulfilled?
Nature does not give up its secrets easily. Scientists have to work hard to get beneath the veil. Just like everyone else, researchers can be duped, particularly when they have a horse in the race. That’s why graduate students take courses in research methods and statistics: to learn the tricks of the trade that will help keep them honest. We throw around phrases like “internal and external validity,” “placebo control,” “random assignment,” “single and double blind experiments,” and “correlation is not causality.” I won’t bore you with the details except to say that these conceptual tools help reduce the chances that we will unconsciously tilt the playing field our way.
