by Hal Herzog
I suspect that hoarding sometimes results from a perfect storm of the well-intended desire to save animals and the inability to draw lines in the moral sand. This means that individuals drawn to animal rescue, most of whom are women, are at special risk. For the past couple of years, my students and I have been interviewing members of animal rescue organizations. While the vast majority are perfectly normal, and some of them are saints, occasionally we run into red flags. During these interviews, we ask rescuers how many pets they have. Most people say something like, “two dogs, a cat, and parrot.” But sometimes when we ask about their pets, a rescuer will look down, laugh a little, and say something like, “Oh, hmm…too many, I guess.” These are the people who make it clear that they don’t want us to interview them at their homes.
I got a twinkling of insight into how a person might not be able to just say no, how he or she might have to bring just one more animal into the house, when I was given a behind-the-scenes tour of a municipal animal shelter. I was immediately drawn to a young boxer lying on his side, panting, in a cage in the quarantine room. He lifted his head up, looked at me with the world’s saddest eyes that pleaded, Take me out of here, please? I could feel my chest getting tight, and I was a goner. If he had not been contagious and unadoptable, I would have brought that dog home on the spot.
Eight thousand dogs and cats enter the shelter every year. Forty percent of them will leave with a new owner wearing a big grin. The other 60%, including most of the cats, and nearly all the large black dogs and pit bull mixes, will get a couple of cc’s of sodium pentobarbital injected into the cephalic vein of their foreleg and slip away in a matter of seconds.
Becky, the director of the facility and my tour guide, has worked in shelters for fifteen years and she loves animals. She really does. As we squeeze past rows of stainless steel cages, she points to a Treeing Walker (a type of coon hound) and tells me that it was found running loose near Big Oak Gap, and then she calls an orange cat by its name. The back rooms are crowded and my ears ring from the incessant barking. It is too loud to talk easily. Some of the animals look fine, others are terrified.
Becky’s passion is making life better for unwanted animals. She also has her own pets—three cats, three dogs, and three birds. The paradox of her profession becomes apparent when I ask, “How many dogs and cats have you euthanized over the years?”
She looks at me as if I am an idiot.
“Over a thousand?” I ask meekly.
After a pause, she says, “At least.”
“How do you stay sane?”
“Somebody has to do it. I don’t obsess about it,” she says.
Then she shows me a message that appeared on a Listserv a couple of days ago. It was written by a shelter director who goes home every night and cries. The woman is bitter. “I hate my job.” she wrote. “I hate that it exists and I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much further than the pets you dump at a shelter. I do my best to save every life I can, but there are more animals coming in every day than there are homes.” Becky tells me that the other director is in the wrong line of work.
Remarkably, Becky is cheerful and passionate about her career. She is the right person for the job. This is not, however, true for all volunteers she supervises. She has to keep her eye on a few of them—the ones that have potential to be hoarders, the ones that don’t have the moral strength to be animal rescuers.
THE NATURE (AND NURTURE) OF SEX DIFFERENCES IN OUR INTERACTIONS WITH ANIMALS
After reading hundreds of articles about sex differences in our relationships with animals, I came to several conclusions. The first is that, as a general rule, women have more of a soft spot for animals than men do. The second is that while our stereotypes about the directions of gender differences in relationships with animals are usually on the mark, our beliefs about the size of the differences between men and women are often wrong. There is not much difference at all between men and women in the frequency with which they live with pets and in the way boys and girls play with animals. Sex differences in attitudes of the general public toward issues like animal research are a bit larger, but there is a lot of overlap between the sexes. The big sex differences only come into play when you look at the extremes—at animal activists and animal abusers.
Everyone wants to know if human sex differences are a result of nature or nurture. This is a loaded question. (Indeed, Lawrence Summers lost his job as president of Harvard in part for suggesting that biology might play a role in gender differences in scientific productivity.) It is also an intellectual loser. To think that complicated behaviors like the way humans feel about animals is the result of either nature OR nurture is an example of the myth of single causation. Lots of factors affect differences in how the sexes relate to animals. Some social scientists argue that women are drawn to animal rights because both women and animals are victims of male exploitation and thus women identify with animals more than men do. Others link sex differences to socialization. For example, in his book Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals, Brian Luke argues that our culture instills indifference to animal suffering in boys practically from birth.
Certainly some of the differences between men and women have their origins in exploitation and socialization, but biology also plays a role in human-animal relationships. For instance, hunting is defined as a male activity in every human culture. Well, nearly every human culture. In the Ituri Forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bambuti pygmy women help drive game into nets, and Matses women in the Amazon Basin often accompany their husbands on hunting forays. They spot game and kill animals with spears and machetes. Because hunting trips offer privacy, a round of hot jungle sex can help the time go by when prey is scarce. For this reason, Matses men, who are polygamous, take only one of their wives on hunting expeditions, and women complain when they don’t get invited to “go hunting” enough. Cultures like these, however, are exceedingly rare. In nearly all human societies, hunting expeditions are as sexually integrated as the Green Bay Packers locker room during half-time.
Developmental psychologists have found that some sex differences show up so early that they are unlikely to be the result of socialization. At the age of three months, boys outperform girls at tasks involving mentally rotating objects. And (I know this is hard to believe), several studies have now shown that male and female monkeys exhibit the same preferences in toys as human children. Male monkeys are attracted to “boy” toys (trucks, for example) and female monkeys like to play with soft, cuddly objects. Some differences in human reactions to animals are also found in infants. Baby girls, for instance, learn to associate fear with spiders and snakes more quickly than baby boys.
Our body chemistry also affects our interaction with other species. Several hormones influence empathy directed toward other people and animals. One of these is oxytocin, a chemical that switches on maternal instincts and facilitates social bonding. In humans, oxytocin levels rise during pregnancy and spike during childbirth, breastfeeding, and sexual orgasm. Oxytocin is also related to sex differences in empathy. Men, for example, are not as good as women at reading the emotions hidden in a face, but a whiff of oxytocin temporarily improves their emotional intelligence and makes men more generous.
Is oxytocin the glue that cements the human-animal bond? Meg Daley Olmert thinks so. In her book, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond, she writes that pets are “fountains of oxytocin” and that pet lovers go through their day with an “oxytocin glow.” Unfortunately, this claim is based on a single study that had only eighteen subjects. True, the researchers did find that oxytocin levels rose after people interacted with dogs—but they also found that oxytocin increased nearly as much when the subjects just sat quietly and read a book. More recent experiments on the role of oxytocin in our relationships with pets have reported mixed results. In one study, levels of the hormone increased in women who petted dogs,
but they actually declined in men. A group of Japanese researchers found that whether or not oxytocin increased when owners played with their dogs depended on how much the dog gazed at its owner during the interactions. And a research team at the University of Missouri found that interacting with pets had no effect on their owner’s oxytocin level. So, while oxytocin may be involved in some aspects of the human-animal bond, we need a lot more research before drawing conclusions about the role of this hormone in our attachment to pets.
The male hormone testosterone has the opposite effect on empathy. In both men and women, the more testosterone in the bloodstream, the more aggressive and less empathetic you will be. Testosterone also affects how people interact with their pets. Amanda Jones and Robert Josephs of the University of Texas found that in dog agility competitions, the amount of testosterone in a man’s saliva affected how he treated his canine partner after the event. High-testosterone men whose animals did not perform well punished or even hit their dogs. Low-testosterone men, in contrast, lavished love on their animals no matter how they placed in the trials.
HOW BELL CURVES ACCOUNT FOR HUMAN SEX DIFFERENCES IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH ANIMALS
The bottom line is that sex differences in our interactions with other species are the result of an inextricable mix of political, cultural, evolutionary, and even biochemical forces. Is there a way to make sense of sex differences in how we think about animals without resorting to clichés in the debate over nature and nurture? Yes.
Some years ago, I came across a little-known article in the New Yorker by Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell. The title was “The Sports Taboo: Why Blacks Are Like Boys and Whites Are Like Girls.” In it, Gladwell argued that to really get a handle on racial and gender differences, you need to understand the bell-shaped curves statisticians call “normal distributions.” Bell curves describe many psychological and biological phenomena. The basic idea is simple. For traits ranging from extroversion to the size of goldfinch beaks, most cases will fall near the middle of the pack, with the numbers tapering off as you move toward the extremes of the distribution. IQ test scores are a good example of a bell-curve trait. The average IQ score in the United States is 100. While 50% of people have IQs greater than 100, only 2% score over 130 on IQ tests, and one person in 1,000 gets above 145.
Bell-curve thinking is sometimes—and wrongly—thought of as racist. That’s because in a 1994 book called simply The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein, a psychologist, and Charles Murray, a political scientist, used normal distributions to support their contention that racial differences in IQ are inherited. But bell curves are just shapes. They say absolutely nothing about whether differences between groups are due to genes or environment, or both. While bell curves do not explain the ultimate causes of sex differences, they can help us understand why most animal activists are women and most animal abusers are men.
My position is that many human gender differences, including how we treat animals, are simply the consequence of an elegant statistical principle that even most psychologists don’t understand. It is this: When two bell curves overlap, even a small difference between the average scores of the groups will produce big differences at the extremes.
Height is a good example. In the United Sates, the average man is 8% taller than the average woman. This does not sound like much, but the sex ratio gets more and more out of whack as we go toward the high and the low ends. For example, among people over five foot ten inches, there are thirty men for every woman, but the sex ratio shoots up to 2,000:1 when we look at people over six feet.
The statistical principle that small differences between the average male and average female make for big sex differences at the extremes explains sex differences in many areas of human behavior. The fact that women are ten times as likely as men to die from the complications of anorexia follows directly from the fact that the average American woman is a bit more concerned with body image than the average man. And the enormous sex difference in homicide rates is a consequence of the real but surprisingly small difference in the aggressive tendencies of the average man and woman.
Here is how the Herzog (stolen from Malcolm Gladwell) theory of sex differences plays out in human-animal relationships. Assume for a moment that Americans vary in a hypothetical psychological trait called “liking pets,” and that the distribution of this trait is bell-shaped—most people are in the middle, but a small proportion of people pathologically dote on their animals and a few people truly hate animals. Assume also that the average woman scores slightly higher than the average man on this trait but, as is nearly always the case, that there is a lot of overlap between the sexes. If my bell-curve idea is correct, as we move toward the pro-pet and anti-pet extremes, bigger and bigger gender differences should emerge.
This, of course, is exactly what we find. Among extreme pet lovers (off-the-chart hoarders), women outnumber men ten to one; and among serious pet haters (sadistic animal abusers), the male-to-female ratio is even more skewed. Overlapping bell curves also explain why so many animal rights activists are women. Public opinion polls indicate that as a group, women are more concerned with the welfare of animals than men are. The difference, however, is not all that big, and the magnitude of differences in attitudes toward animals within the sexes is a lot bigger than the differences between the average male and the average female. But, once again, as we move toward the tails, the sexes go their different ways. On the pro-animal side, four times as many women as men donate money to the ASPCA, boycott circuses, and show up at animal rights demonstrations. On the anti-animal side, vastly more men than women find pleasure in shooting animals for sport.
The bell curve explains a wide array of sex differences in human-animal interactions. It works regardless of whether evolution or culture is responsible for the six-year-old girl’s inner voice the first time she visits the zoo—I feel so sorry for that cute little monkey in the cage—or the inner voice of a teenage boy on his first father-son hunting expedition that says, Exhale slowly. Hold. Pull the trigger…NOW.
6
In the Eyes of the Beholder
THE COMPARATIVE CRUELTY OF COCKFIGHTS AND HAPPY MEALS
The people who set one animal against another haven’t got the guts to be bullies themselves. They’re just secondhand cowards.
—CLEVELAND AMORY
Cockfighting is the most humane, perhaps the only humane, sport there is.
—CAPTAIN L. FITZ-BARNARD
I am driving toward Knoxville on Interstate 40 to interview Eddy Buckner, a cockfighter I hung out with years ago while I was writing my doctoral dissertation on the behavior of chickens and the psychology of chicken fighters. Ten miles from the Tennessee line, I notice white feathers whizzing past my windshield. I speed up, pass a couple of eighteen wheelers, and find myself behind two flatbed trucks, each loaded with thirty-four wire crates packed with live chickens, headed for the slaughterhouse. The crates are about three feet wide, four feet long, and ten inches high, and look as if they hold thirty or forty chickens each. I do the math in my head: At three birds per square foot of cage space, that’s over 1,000 animals on each truck, the chickens crammed together like anchovies packed in a jar of oil. It is fifty-five degrees outside and the chickens are exposed to the wind and highway noise. The trucks are doing eighty as we cross the state line into the aptly named Cocke County. The chickens are shivering and hiding their heads under their wings, terrified, feathers flying. I think to myself, Why don’t federal animal welfare laws cover the interstate transport of commercial poultry?
I tail the trucks for twenty miles, past the Wilton Springs exit, only a stone’s throw from the abandoned Four-Forty Cockpit, which closed down in 2005 when the FBI started a full-court press on east Tennessee rooster fighters. While a lot of chickens have been cut down in the Four-Forty main pit over the last thirty years, thousands of times more have died to feed the hordes of hungry Smoky Mountain tourists who will stop at the McDonald’s just down the road for a six-piece M
cNugget Happy Meal. And it dawned on me that the comparative ethics of fighting chickens versus eating them is more complicated than most people realize.
If Molly, our Labrador retriever, had not developed a taste for raw eggs, I would never have discovered the subterranean world of illicit cockfighting that existed in my little community. Shortly after we moved to the mountains, Molly turned thief, and took to stealing eggs out of our neighbor Hobart’s henhouse. I got an inkling that something was amiss when I drove home one afternoon and found Molly lying on the porch with an injured leg and egg, literally, on her face. The next day, Mary Jean ran into Hobart’s wife, Laney, at the grocery store, and mentioned that Molly had been hurt, but we did not know how. “Oh,” Laney said. “Hobart caught her in our henhouse again and shot her in the rear end. Don’t worry none. He just peppered her with birdshot.”
I was not mad at Hobart. After all, my dog was stealing his eggs. But I knew I had to do something fast. The solution, I figured, was to get my own chickens and teach Molly not to mess with them. I looked in the classifieds under “poultry” and found what I was looking for: Chickens—$2.50 each. You catch them. Call R. L. Holcombe, Stony Fork. The price was right and Stony Fork was only a couple of miles away. I hopped in my truck and drove over the mountain. There were a half-dozen chickens running loose around Mr. Holcomb’s place, including some small mousy brown hens and a couple of magnificent roosters. Mr. Holcomb told me they were gamecocks, and that he had once been a serious cockfighter but now he only kept a few birds for pets. After chasing them around his yard for an hour, I managed to catch a rooster and a couple of hens, but more importantly, I got him talking about chicken fighting. That’s when I became aware that I was living in the midst of a world that was largely invisible to my fellow college professors.
