Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  Evelyn’s story says a lot about the complexity of gender in our interactions with other species. Her excitement at bagging her first zebra turned to despair the moment she realized she had killed a creature with whom she identified. How many male hunters would cry all night because they had shot the wrong animal? And if they did, how many would admit it?

  Bill Gibson represents a different type of gender bender. He is the skeptical, hard-nosed research psychologist who inhabits the office next to mine. One afternoon I asked him about the faded photograph of a dog he keeps on his desk. Bill is a math guy, a left-brainer. He designs computer systems that tell which part of your cortex is working overtime. But when he started talking about Blue, a shepherd-husky mix, he melted.

  He told me that he named the dog Blue because he had one blue eye and one brown eye. He bought Blue back in ’84 from a guy who ran a puppy mill. For eleven years, Blue was Bill’s best friend. “Blue would look me straight in the eye. He knew things.” Bill said.

  He told me how Blue had suffered through cancer of the bowel, and the prognosis was bleak.

  “I was with him at the end.” Bill said. “I put a nice blanket on him and gave him a kiss good-bye and talked to him. I had him cremated. I kept the ashes for a while and then later spread them on a mountain. I was a mess. Sometimes I would break into tears. It was embarrassing.”

  Bill started to choke up. “I still think about him every day. I loved him more than I’ve loved any person in the world. I’ll probably think of him on my death bed.”

  Evelyn and Bill illustrate the difficulty of making simple generalizations about men, women, and animals. Cases like these convinced me that my initial hypothesis about sex roles and how we treat animals was wrong—clearly, some men are more sensitive to the plight of animals than some women. But then there are the many instances in which sex differences do fit gender stereotypes. For instance, all the cockfighters I knew were men, and a large majority of animal rights activists were women. I decided to take a more systematic approach to examining how gender affects our relationships with other species. I started amassing every study I could find on the topic. This quest took me from A (animal activism) to Z (zoophilia). I discovered that some aspects of our relationships with animals are profoundly affected by gender. But I also found that both the direction of sex differences and their size depend on the type of relationship we are talking about.

  WHICH SEX LOVES PETS THE MOST?

  Surprisingly, gender differences in attachment to pets are smaller than most people think. In the United States, equal numbers of men and women own companion animals, they are just as likely to buy holiday presents for their dogs and cats and to pay newspapers to publish obituaries for their deceased pets. The sexes are even similar in whether they let their animals sleep in their bed. (Women get the nod, but not by much.) But are men as bonded to their pets as women are?

  Anthrozoologists have developed standardized questionnaires to assess how much individuals love their pets. For example, one widely used scale asks people how much they agree or disagree with statements such as “I would do almost anything to take care of my pet” and “My pet means more to me than any of my friends.” When it comes to pet love, women seem to have a slight edge over men, but the difference is surprisingly small. I examined a dozen studies that reported sex differences in attachment to pets. True, women scored higher than men in most of them, but the difference between the attachment score of the average man and that of the average woman was usually negligible.

  In some aspects of caring for pets, however, big gender differences do show up. You will not be surprised to learn that women are twice as likely as men to dress their pets in little outfits. And, as is the case in many spheres of human life, women do more than their fair share of pet-related chores. In three out of four American homes, women are the ones who usually feed the family dog and clean out the cat’s litter box. Women also make up about 85% of veterinary clients. (Several veterinarians told me that when men bring pets into their clinics, they often carry notes from their wives spelling out exactly what is ailing Spot or Fluffy.)

  I have always assumed that males and females play with pets differently. After all, boys are more apt to engage in the mock wrestling and hand-to-hand combat that developmental psychologists call rough-and-tumble play. In my house, there is gender bias on how we relate to our family pets. For example, Mary Jean and our twin daughters, Betsy and Katie, would gently pat our dogs on the head while Adam and I were more apt to wrestle and play chase and pull-and-tug with them.

  There is, however, little evidence that my hypothesis applies to anyone outside the Herzog household. Italian researchers found that that men and women were not any different in how they played with their dogs, and a study of the interactions between dogs and their owners in veterinary hospital waiting rooms also found no differences in the behavior of men and women. Gail Melson, a developmental psychologist, asked parents to estimate how much interest their children had in playing with younger children, babies, stuffed animals, baby dolls, and pets. As you would expect, girls were much more interested than boys in babies, dolls, and stuffed animals. But, to my surprise, she found no sex differences in how kids play with or nurture their pets. Gail believes that for boys, pets are often the only vehicles that give them experience in caring for another living being.

  Women, however, are more susceptible than men to creatures that are cute. British researchers recently reported that two groups of women are particularly sensitive to differences in the cuteness of infants: those of reproductive age and those taking birth control pills that raise their levels of the hormones progesterone and estrogen. Cute animals have the same effect on women. University of California at Santa Barbara researchers were interested in changes in the attractiveness of a golden retriever puppy named Goldie as she matured. Over a five-month period, they took Goldie to a highly traveled spot on campus where she would sit for an hour with her “owner” (actually an assistant in the study), while the researchers tallied the number of passersby who came over to pet or play with her. Goldie’s ability to seduce strangers decreased precipitously as she transitioned from puppy to adult. Her drop in popularity was especially steep among women. When Goldie was at her cutest, women were twice as likely as men to chat her up. But by the end of the study, the number of women who stopped to stroke her head and say hi had dropped 95%, and the sex difference had completely disappeared.

  SEX DIFFERENCES IN ATTITUDES TOWARD ANIMALS

  Stephen Kellert of Yale University has spent his career investigating the peculiarities of human attitudes toward other species. He has consistently found that women are more concerned with protecting animals than men are. But, at the same time, phobias of creatures like snakes and spiders are three times more common in women than men. And while men know more about the biology and ecology of other species than women, they tend to appreciate animals for what Kellert calls “practical and recreational reasons.” In other words, men are more likely to approve of killing animals for fun and profit.

  These gender differences in attitudes toward animals also exist in other societies. Linda Pifer of the Chicago Academy of Sciences asked adults in the United States, Japan, and thirteen European countries how they felt about using dogs and chimpanzees in experiments aimed at developing treatments for human afflictions. In every country, women were more opposed to animal research than men. Swedish researchers reviewed dozens of studies conducted worldwide and did not find a single country in which more women than men supported animal research.

  Glib generalizations about sex differences and animal attitudes, however, can be misleading. In attitudes about the use of animals, men and women are more similar than they are different. For example, the National Opinion Research Center asked a large sample of men and women how they felt about this statement: It is right to use animals for medical testing if it might save human lives. They found that more men than women “strongly agreed” with the statement and more women
“strongly disagreed.” However, most people were in the middle on this issue, and some women were more supportive of animal experimentation than some of the men. This finding illustrates one of the most important facts about human gender differences. It is that in nearly every human psychological characteristic, men and women overlap. This means that in most cases the differences within the sexes are bigger than the differences between the sexes.

  WOMEN TAKE ACTION!

  But while men and women are fairly similar when it comes to attitudes about animal welfare, the sexes are not at all alike when it comes to taking action on behalf of other species.

  On September 12, 2005, anthrozoologist Leslie Irvine and three of her friends hopped on a plane in Denver and headed for Louisiana. Their destination was the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, the main staging area for animal rescue operations in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina. The group was unprepared for the chaos they encountered. That night, Leslie wrote in her field notes, “Who can imagine the sound of a thousand dogs barking? Until today, the question would have seemed like a perverse koan. But now that I know what a thousand dogs sound like, I wish everyone could hear. It sounds like futility, helplessness, and the desperation of this undertaking…. I am sure it will haunt me for a very long time.” Six days later, Leslie became a Katrina victim herself. Mentally and physically exhausted by nearly a week of animal rescue, she collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Three years later, she was still haunted by the sound of a thousand dogs barking. There were lots of heroes like Leslie who saved (or tried to save) the lost animals of Katrina, and the vast majority were women.

  The modern animal rights movement has recruited women in droves; every study of the sociology of animal liberation has found that three to four times as many women as men boycott circuses, march against animal experimentation, and drive cars plastered with “Meat Is Murder” bumper stickers. Interestingly, the sex ratio of individuals involved in animal protection has not changed at all over the last 150 years. Even in the Victorian era, four out of five members of animal welfare organizations were female.

  The predominance of women among people who take animals seriously is not limited to animal liberators. At the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., hundreds of dedicated volunteers, most of them women, stand next to exhibits for hours on end, patiently explaining a hundred times a day that the alligator snapping turtle really is alive despite the fact that it looks like a hundred-pound hunk of moss-covered granite, that Ambika the elephant is sixty years old, and that a pygmy hippo is not the same as a baby hippo. You also see big sex differences among the keepers. As I strolled around the grounds one snowy day in January, I ran into a zoo employee. She told me that that every one of the keepers who cared for the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in the Great Ape House was female.

  Women dominate nearly every aspect of grassroots animal protection. They make up 85% of the membership of the two largest mainstream animal protectionist organizations in the United States, the ASPCA and the Humane Society of the United States. Among dog rescuers, women outnumber men eleven to one, and three times more female high school students than males call the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s dissection hotline each year because they want to opt out of biology dissection labs for reason of conscience. And more women than men give up meat for ethical reasons.

  THE DARK SIDE OF THE BOND: SEX

  DIFFERENCES IN ANIMAL CRUELTY

  But don’t make the mistake of thinking that all women are nice to animals.

  One Thursday morning in January 2006, Joanne Hinojosa was arguing with her estranged husband in front of his home in South Austin, Texas. At some point in their spat, things took a turn for the worse. She took a swing at him and he ran down the street to call the cops. That’s when Joanne went after his dog. She carried the twenty-pound mixed-breed female named Marti into the house and started stabbing her. The police found Marti lying in a pool of blood with a knife sticking out of her left side. The dog had been stabbed twenty-seven times. They rushed her to the Ben White Pet Hospital for emergency surgery, but it was too late. Hinojosa’s lawyer claimed his client suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She pled guilty to animal cruelty and was sentenced to six months in jail and anger management training.

  Spousal animal abuse is surprisingly common. Pets are often caught up in domestic violence disputes. Developmental psychologist Frank Ascione, executive director of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver, found that over 70% of battered women he has studied said that their partners had abused, threatened to abuse, or had killed a pet. Their violence ranged from shooting the family dog to setting the children’s kitten on fire. What is unusual about the Hinojosa case is that the perpetrator was a woman.

  The data at Pet-abuse.com, a Web site that tracks media reports of animal cruelty cases, offers a window into sex differences in animal cruelty. An analysis of the 15,000 cases in the site’s database reveals that men are involved in 70% of these incidents. But this figure is misleading. The sexes are not very different in the frequency with which they are charged with animal neglect, which is usually the result of apathy, poor judgment, or stupidity rather than malicious cruelty. If, however, we omit these incidents, it becomes clear that men commit nearly all of the really nasty offenses against animals: 94% of beatings, 91% of burnings, 84% of stranglings, 94% of hangings, 92% of stomping to death, 94% of shootings, and 95% of stabbings.

  PEOPLE WHO LOVE ANIMALS TOO MUCH:

  GENDER AND ANIMAL HOARDING

  There is one exception to the rule that most animal abusers are men. Three times as many women as men get caught up in animal hoarding. One semester I invited a woman who was an ordained minister to be a guest speaker in a class I was teaching. After her lecture, she mentioned to me that her house was for sale. I perked up as Mary Jean and I were in the market for a new home. I drove out to look at the house the next day. It was halfway up the side of a mountain near Greens Creek. The property had privacy, a southern exposure, and a big view toward north Georgia. Just what we were looking for. I had my hopes up. Then I opened the front door.

  “Overpowering” does not quite capture the stench of feces and urine. Cats and clothing were strewn about the living room. A forty-pound bag of dried cat chow lay spilled open in the middle of the floor. There was no place to sit. The woman, who had seemed perfectly normal when I talked to her the day before, was in a tizzy. She apologized to me, saying that things had gotten a bit out of hand, that she had tried to straighten things up for my visit. I counted two dozen cats, but there were probably others roaming the nearby woods. I did not stay long, and we did not buy the house. We could have probably gotten it cheap.

  The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, an interdisciplinary group of researchers led by Gary Patronek estimates that up to 2,000 cases of hoarding involving 200,000 animals are reported in the United States each year. People usually don’t think that hoarding is as cruel as beating and shooting animals, but from the animals’ perspective, a hoarding situation can be worse; the suffering can go on for years.

  The stereotype of an animal hoarder is the crazy old lady living alone whose neighbors call the health department when they finally tire of the noise and the stink. Is this image accurate? Sometimes it is. Seventy-five to 85% of hoarders are women. Half live alone, and half are over sixty. According to Arnie Arluke and Celest Killen, authors of the book Inside Hoarding: The Case of Barbara Erickson and Her 552 Dogs, the woman whose house I saw would probably fit into the incipient hoarder category. With twenty or thirty animals living in her house, her life was just starting to fall apart. The numbers of animals confiscated from a hoarder’s home can be unimaginable. The record is the “Great Bunny Rescue of 2006,” in which nearly 1,700 rabbits were rescued from the backyard of a woman named Jackie Decker who lived in a two-bedroom house near Reno, Nevada.

  A recent study on the public health implications of animal hoarding, reported that nearly
all hoarders who have over 100 animals in their homes were women. The living conditions of these extreme hoarders ranged from lousy to horrifying. Things were particularly bad among those living alone. Over half of their houses lacked stoves, hot running water, or working sinks and toilets. Forty percent of the homes had no heat and 80% did not contain a functional shower or refrigerator. The conditions for the animals living in these circumstances are dire—cats, dogs, pot-bellied pigs, rabbits, all emaciated and ridden with disease, all running amok. First responders called in to clean up hoarding situations often encounter half-eaten animals corpses lying about.

  Clinicians have come up with several explanations of why people hoard animals. The wildest theory is that cat hoarding could be caused by toxoplasmosis infection. The idea that hoarding is the result of a parasite that rewires your brain remains unproven, but I find it intriguing. Tox-infected rodents suddenly become attracted to cats and can’t seem to get enough of the smell of cat urine. In humans, tox infection has been associated with mental illness and neuroticism. It is not a far stretch to imagine that a brain parasite might cloud the judgment of people with lots of cats and perhaps even zap out enough neurons so that they become inured to the smell of tomcat pee. The conventional theories, however, link hoarding to dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addictive personality, defects in social attachments, or delusional thinking. Hoarders are usually convinced that their animals are happy and that the hoarder has a special ability to communicate with them.

  While anthrozoologists don’t know the exact cause of hoarding, researchers agree that is nearly impossible to cure the disorder. The recidivism rate among hoarders is nearly 100%. In the Reno bunny case, for instance, animal control officers had confiscated 500 rabbits from the same property just four years earlier. Despite the fact that most of these animals had to be euthanized, a local judge treated the case like a joke and turned down a request for a court order that would have kept the hoarder from obtaining even more animals.