Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  Did being associated with Gwendu increase Antoine’s sexual chemistry? Mais oui! While about 10% of the women gave him their phone numbers when he was by himself, nearly 30% of them fell for Antoine’s line when he was accompanied by le chien.

  It turns out that young women are not the only suckers for people with dogs. The researchers also found that French men and women are three times more likely to give money to a stranger who is with a dog (“Sorry, Madam/Sir—do you have some money so that I could catch a bus, please?”).

  So, pets—well, at least cute dogs—can help you get a date and garner the assistance of strangers. But the fact that pets can serve as social lubricants does not explain why people bring cats, birds, turtles, and even rats into their homes and treat them like family members.

  From an evolutionary point of view, pets are a problem. Why should humans invest so much time, energy, and resources on creatures with whom we share no genes and who do no useful work? Most pet lovers, after all, are not handsome young men looking to increase their reproductive potential. Pet industry executives, the American Veterinary Medical Association, and nearly every anthrozoologist I know will tell you that we bring animals into our lives because they make us feel happier, healthier, and more loved. I think it’s more complicated than that.

  Consider these two very different cases of people and their pets.

  NANCY AND CHARLIE: WHEN THE BOND WORKS

  The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor a couple of months after Nancy and Roy Watson were married. Roy immediately enlisted. The army trained him as a radio operator and sent him to fight the Japanese at Okinawa. In 1946, Roy came home and he and Nancy started carving out their chunk of the American dream. Roy landed a job in the parts department of the local Ford dealership. They soon had two sons, whom Nancy stayed home to raise. In a few years, the couple had saved enough money to buy a brick rancher in Asheville, North Carolina, with a shady, fenced-in backyard. There was a lot of activity in the Watson household, but it did not include animals. Roy wasn’t partial to dogs or cats, and Nancy never considered herself an animal person either. Ten years after he retired from Ford, Roy died of cancer, leaving Nancy alone in the house where they had lived for forty years. Roy’s death left a hole in Nancy’s heart. A year later, she was depressed and felt her life was empty. Her sons were worried about her. They didn’t think she could last long rattling around alone in the empty house. There was talk of an assisted living facility.

  A year to the day after Roy’s death, Nancy stopped at a convenience store to pick up a loaf of bread and noticed a handwritten sign at the checkout counter: KITTENS. The girl at the register asked Nancy if she wanted to see them. She said no and drove on home. She did, however, mention the kittens to her son, Aaron, who was visiting for the weekend. He said, “Mom, let’s take a look at them.” To his surprise, she agreed. They found two seven-week-old kittens in the bottom of a cardboard box at the back of the store, one a calico, the other midnight black. She picked up the black one, and it was love at first sight. She named him Charlie.

  Nancy and Charlie have been living together now for eight years. Nancy is spry, cheerful, and sharp. She tells me that she and Charlie are a team. “He has made my life happy,” she says. “I’ve never felt alone since Charlie’s been here. He is all I have.” In addition to being her buddy, Charlie brings structure to Nancy’s life. As soon as she wakes up in the morning, she makes their breakfast—a tablespoon of canned tuna for him, a bowl of cereal for her. Then he goes outside for ten or fifteen minutes. When he returns, he jumps on Nancy’s lap, and they sit and talk for a while before Charlie moseys into the den for a nap. He wakes up in the afternoon, and, if it is sunny, they sit next to each other in matching chairs in the front yard until dark. She makes their dinner and they eat together. Charlie does not like TV so he goes outside for the evening, but he comes back and checks on her two or three times before she goes to bed.

  Nancy admits that there are disadvantages to having a cat for your best friend. While she is sleeping, Charlie morphs from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Then he takes to the woods and does what cats do at night: He hunts. He proudly brings Nancy the results of these forays: a freshly killed bird, lots of voles, a squirrel, and just last week, a baby rabbit. Sometimes the animals are mangled but breathing, and she opens the front door and tells Charlie to take them back outside. And he does.

  Nancy and Charlie illustrate the best of the human-animal bond. Nancy’s relationship with her cat has made her life immeasurably better, and I suspect that Nancy’s good health, mental acuity, and ability to live at home by herself are largely due to their relationship.

  The Nancy and Charlie story is not unusual. It is played out in millions of American homes every day. I saw it in my own parents, who were never animal lovers until Pop retired and they got the first of three dachshunds, all of whom they adored and all of whom they named Willie.

  But, as Sarah Coe will tell you, living with pets is not always sweetness and light.

  SARAH’S DOGS: WHEN THE BOND FAILS

  Sarah is an administrator at a West Coast veterinary hospital and her husband, Ian, works in information technology. They had been married three years when Sarah decided they needed a dog. Ian was not enthusiastic, but eventually he came around. Though she had never had a dog herself, Sarah encountered lots of animals with behavior problems in the course of her work at the veterinary clinic, so she and Ian went about choosing their puppy methodically. They spent months researching the characteristics of dozens of breeds before settling on a Shiba Inu, a foxy Japanese dog bred for hunting small game. The National Shiba Club of America uses terms like “spirited boldness,” “very lively,” “macho stud muffin,” and “fiery little fuzzballs from hell” when describing the breed’s temperament. For Sarah and Ian, this meant trouble from the start.

  Hiro was nine weeks old when they selected him out of a litter in Oregon. He was high-maintenance from the get-go. If they didn’t give him constant attention, he would shriek inconsolably, and he became unmanageable unless they exercised him for an hour and a half a day. Fortunately, there was an off-leash dog park near their house, but Hiro was socially inept and could not figure out how to act around other dogs. His nerdiness soon created conflicts with the other dog owners.

  One afternoon, Hiro, then six months old, decided to play dry-hump with a young Tibetian terrier, also a male. Ian knew that play mounting is a common behavior in young dogs and that it indicates nothing about their sexual orientation. The terrier’s owner, however, started screaming, “No one humps my dog!! No one humps my dog!”

  To no avail, Ian calmly tried to explain to the terrier’s owner that the puppies were just playing. But the conversation quickly escalated into a shouting match.

  After a series of similarly unpleasant incidents, Sarah and Ian grew tired of other dog owners lecturing them about their pet’s bad behavior. They stopped taking Hiro to the park and began paying a professional dog walker $300 a month to take the dog for long runs so they could get an hour or two of peace at home.

  One of the veterinarians Sarah worked with suggested that Hiro’s ADHD might be alleviated if he had a playmate. Big mistake. Nami, their new Shiba puppy, was even crazier than Hiro. She was a bully—unpredictable, aggressive, and demanding. Nami was so jealous that Ian and Sarah had to sneak into bed at night. She would even get upset when Ian kissed Sarah each morning when he left for work. By the time she was two years old, Nami was on both Valium and Prozac. Most dog owners think of their pets as their children. Ian and Sarah’s children were a surly punk and a borderline psychotic.

  Sarah is organized and likes a tidy house: clean floors, furniture that matches. All that changed with the dogs. They chewed up the sofa, destroyed the rugs, and generally wreaked havoc. “I don’t want our house to look like a crazy person lives there,” Sarah told me. Ian and Sarah are pleasant and fun to be around, but the dogs ruined their social life. The couple quit having friends over for dinner because Hiro and Nam
i would bark incessantly and try to steal food from the table.

  Despite the fact that the dogs were ruining their lives, Sarah and Ian were genuinely attached to them. Sarah made outfits for Nami. Ian identified with Hiro. Ian told me that he and Hiro were both round pegs trying to fit into a square world. The Coes tried obedience school and consulted with some of the country’s best dog behaviorists. Nothing worked. Several times a year, they would discuss getting rid of the dogs—adopting them out, even euthanasia. But their timing was out of sync. When Sarah was ready to throw in the towel, Ian was too attached. A few months later, their perspectives would reverse.

  I asked them if the dogs where taking a toll on their relationship, and there was a long pause. They looked at each other and said, yes, that they had started seeing a marriage counselor. A week after I interviewed them, Sarah sent me an email. She and Ian had decided to separate. Sarah was temporarily moving into an apartment. She said that the stress of living with the dogs from hell was a big factor in the breakup of their marriage. It is unclear what will happen to Nami and Hiro.

  WHAT EXACTLY IS A PET?

  Nancy and Sarah show that sometimes the human-pet relationship works out and sometimes it does not. But what exactly is a pet? The historian Keith Thomas argues that pets are animals that are allowed in the house, given a name, and never eaten. This is a good a place to start, but there are exceptions. My neighbors never let their dog inside, and my dentist has not named his tropical fish. Even the eating part has occasional exceptions. One evening when I was a graduate student studying alligator behavior in Florida, Mary Jean and I dropped in on our friend Jim, a retired agriculture professor whose property bordered the lake that was my base of operations. Jim kept a menagerie around his minifarm—goats, bantam chickens, Muscovy ducks, a couple of peacocks, a Chinese pug, and some guinea pigs that were his kids’ pets. His wife and kids were away for the weekend and Jim was making himself dinner. As we chatted, he nonchalantly took a guinea pig from its cage, bopped it on the head with a stick, skinned it and put it on the grill. I guess he didn’t consider it a pet.

  I prefer University of Pennsylvania anthrozoologist James Serpell’s definition of pets. He says pets are animals we live with that have no obvious function. But even with this loose definition, things get weird around the edges. Until relatively recently, most animals in American homes had some sort of job. Dogs, for instance, were often expected to herd, hunt, guard, pull carts, and even churn butter. Cats were tolerated more as biological mousetraps than objects of affection. In the United States, animals whose only function was to amuse their owners were rare until the mid-nineteenth century, when there was an explosion in the popularity of caged birds, primarily singing canaries.

  The range of animals that humans have kept as pets is extraordinary—crickets, tigers, pigs, cows, rats, cobras, alligators, giant eels—the list is endless. But when asked what animals they consider pets, most people don’t say eels or crickets. What do they think of? The answer, of course, is dogs and cats.

  Cognitive psychologists refer to an item that exemplifies a category as a prototype. Right now, think of a bird.

  I suspect you conjured up the image of a sparrow, a robin, or an eagle rather than an emu or a penguin. That’s because robins are more “birdy” than ostriches. Which animals are the prototypes of pets? Samantha Strazanac and I recently asked college students to rate sixteen types of animals—all of which are sometimes kept as pets—on how “pet-ty” they were. Everyone, of course, said that dogs and cats exemplified the concept of “pet.” Goldfish came in third; 75% the students felt they had a high degree of “pet-ness.” Only about half the students thought of hamsters, gerbils, rabbits, parrots, and parakeets as pets. Mice and iguanas scored low on our pet-ness scale, and white rats and tarantulas were even further down the list. Boa constrictors came in dead last; only 5% of the respondents considered them pets.

  Some animal advocates don’t like the word “pet.” They find it demeaning to the animals we live with. They want us to call our furry, finned, and winged friends companion animals and their owners guardians. In Defense of Animals, an animal rights organization, lobbies municipalities to officially rename pet ownership. Nearly twenty cities (most of them in California) and the entire state of Rhode Island have taken them up on it and now use the term guardian rather than owner in their animal control ordinances.

  I don’t particularly like the term companion animal. Many pets are not true companions. When my friend Joe Bill was a child, his favorite pet was a crawfish that lived in a bowl next to his bed. Pet? Yes. Companion? No.

  Substituting the term guardian for pet owner is also problematic. Unlike the guardian of a human child, a pet’s “guardian” is allowed to give away, sell, or sterilize their ward against its will. They can even have their companion animal euthanized if they tire of it. The terms companion animal and pet guardian are linguistic illusions that enable us to pretend we do not own the animals we live with.

  Pet ownership poses a moral quandary for animal lovers like the University of Colorado sociologist Leslie Irvine, author of the book If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. She writes, “If we recognize the intrinsic value of animals’ lives, then it is unethical to keep them for our pleasure, whether we call them companions or pets.” At an intellectual level, she believes it is immoral to breed and imprison animals for our personal pleasure, and she argues that the human-pet relationship is more like slavery than true friendship. The problem is that Leslie is deeply attached to her own dogs and cats. Thus, she goes on, “I dread the thought of coming home to an empty house, no tails wagging in excitement to see me…. But my pleasure in being greeted and kept company does not justify keeping a supply of animals for that purpose.” Leslie is confronted with the classic conflict between head and heart, and as is usually the case, heart wins.

  TURNING PETS INTO PEOPLE

  Like Leslie, a lot of Americans are in love with their animals. According to the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, 63% of American households include a pet. In 2009, we shared our lives with 78 million dogs, 94 million cats, 15 million birds, 14 million reptiles, 16 million small mammals (mice, ferrets, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils), and 180 million fish. Kasey Grier has found that attitudes toward household animals in the United States periodically go through surges. One occurred in the late nineteenth century, when pets became a symbol of domestic tranquility and were viewed, particularly by mothers, as a way to instill an ethic of kindness and resposibility in children. The post–World War II years saw another uptick of interest in bringing animals into American homes, this time fueled by the growth of the suburbs and the idea that having a pet was a necessary component of a normal childhood.

  But while Americans have been living with pets on and off for a long time, the human-pet relationship (and particularly our relationships with dogs and cats) is going into a new phase. In recent years, pets have come to be regarded as full-fledged family members, a trend that the pet products industry refers to as the humanization of pets. Nowadays, 70% of pet lovers say they sometimes allow their animals to sleep in their bed, two-thirds buy their pets Christmas presents, 23% cook special meals for them, and 18% dress their animals up on special occasions.

  While the proportion of American households that include a pet has increased slightly over the past ten years, the amount of money we dole out for the animals we live with has skyrocketed. We now spend more on our pets than we do on movies, video games, and music combined. This includes $17 billion dollars for food and dietary supplements, $12 billion for veterinary care, $10 billion for pet supplies such as kitty litter, designer dog clothes, collars and leashes, food bowls, toys, and birthday cards. In addition, we fork out $3 billion for pet sitters, boarding kennels, washing and grooming services, obedience training, massage therapy, dog walkers, funeral urns, insurance policies, and New Age animal communicators.

  According to Michael Shaffer, author of the d
elightful book One Nation under Dog, the real action in the pet trade is at the high end. Luxury brands now comprise 20% of pet food sales, but generate over half of industry profits. These include menu items such as Fromm Nutritionals’ Shredded Duck Entree (“generous portion of hand-shredded free-range duck simmered in its own natural duck broth with potatoes, peas, and carrots”), which is touted as a human-quality meal. Your pet can wash down her gourmet dinner with Bowser Beer for dogs or enjoy a PetRefresh Bottled Water. The latest trend is for foods that are all-natural and organic. For example, Dr. Harvey’s Homemade Biscotti for Dogs is an all-organic treat made from oat flour, barley, honey, bee pollen, apples, dandelion, broccoli, peppermint, and fennel.

  A lot of pet owners believe their animals enjoy dressing up. Tea Cups Puppies and Boutique, an Internet pet boutique, offers a fetching “Garden Party Swarovski Dress” for $3,000, as well as a lower-priced line of T-shirts, tank tops, jackets, and denim overalls. If you want to tote your pup around all day, Tea Cups offers a slinky python skin pet carrier for $1,995. Barron’s House of Treasures offers panties for puppies as well as tiaras, bathing suits, tuxedos, and wedding dresses. For bikers who take their pooch to the annual hog rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, Harley-Davidson now makes a line of dog motorcycle gear. And serious pet fashionistas would not miss Pet Fashion Week, an annual event held in New York City that features supermodels cuddling Yorkies and Chihuahuas dressed in the latest in canine haute couture.