by Rory Kress
Finally, there were the feeder mice: those that had been raised and bred as food for reptiles being housed in the building. Their moral status fell into an even murkier area.
“It’s the same thing with dogs,” Herzog tells me. “In some countries, dogs are livestock. In China and Korea, they have dog farms [for food]… But increasingly, we’re thinking about dogs in the category as being one of us. They reflect big issues in terms of what it means to be a human being. All these sort of foibles and inconsistencies reflect human nature in a very deep way.”9
Depending on the context, our society and our laws have precedent for treating the same animal in very different ways. And for many animals, these seemingly semantic differences can be the difference between life and death—or, at the very least, a humane life and death.
CHAPTER FIVE
Why Dogs Can Never Be Livestock
Our history with dogs predates any legal system. Our shared bond even predates the very notion of a legal code or the words we have to describe these animals. So when it comes to applying rules to our long human history with canines, our laws make up a relatively recent construct. And as such, these laws reflect an imperfect and one-sided comprehension of a complex and intricate bond that we’re still learning more about every year.
The idea that a dog could be considered livestock by the law in some states seems to ignore an awful lot of what we know about these creatures. Cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz puts it best in her book Inside of a Dog where she writes that dogs can only be classified as animals “with an asterisk”—now too impacted by their long proximity to humans to ever be fully wild again.1 Penn State professor of anthropology Pat Shipman has even argued that dogs are to thank for the survival of our species. She posits that humans’ early domestication of dogs was the reason our long-ago ancestors bested the Neanderthals.2 So today, tens of thousands of years since our human evolution became a shared evolution with dogs, it’s far too late to legally lump them into the same category as the animals we keep at a distance and raise to be eaten.
“Dogs have been our companions for somewhere between fourteen thousand and forty thousand years. In that time, they have developed an incredible bond with us. They hijack the oxytocin loop that is normally reserved for our children. They also prefer the company of humans to other dogs,” Dr. Brian Hare, founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University tells me.3
Hare points me to an article he wrote for Science with his Duke colleague Dr. Evan MacLean. In it, they delve into a particularly fascinating area of research: the ways in which our common, domestic dog can outperform primates—our closest relatives—in relating to humans.
“Even as puppies, dogs spontaneously respond to cooperative human gestures, such as pointing cues, to find hidden food or toy rewards. By contrast, great apes must have extensive experience with people to show similar skills,” they wrote.4
Hare and MacLean went on to elucidate the ways in which puppies mirror young humans in their reading of social cues—even making mistakes similar to those that newborns make in interpreting eye contact. Wolves, however, require considerable human interaction and contact to learn to interpret our gestures. But unlike domestic dog puppies, wolves do not innately recognize humans as potential friends to be cajoled for assistance with problems they cannot solve alone. Hare and MacLean concluded that this divergence must suggest that today’s domestic dog did not inherit these abilities from wolves—they learned it from us and evolved separately from wolves over the course of millennia living by our side. Now, they’re born with an ability to relate to humans.
“For an animal to be so bonded to us, then to be isolated and abused by the very species who is supposed to take care of them, this is cruelty at its worst,” Hare tells me.
This is a notion that animal cognition experts I’ve interviewed raise time and again: humans are betraying our prehistoric bond with dogs when we fail to treat them not just humanely but with the closeness that our shared evolution demands. Dr. Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado–Boulder, goes so far as to say that when we disrespect this bond, we are actively betraying these animals, who are bred to have a certain expectation for how humans will treat them.
“The dog comes to us from thousands of years of domestication and expectation. That’s not froufrou. I really believe that your average dog comes into this world with some sort of expectation about how he or she will interact with humans. From birth. It’s almost innate. They have these expectations, so when we abuse them, it’s a real double cross… We betray their belief that we’ll do the best we can for them,” Dr. Bekoff explains. “For dogs, it’s genetically in them to expect certain treatment from humans. From the domestication process.”5
With all this information, it’s easy to argue that dogs are special and unlike other animals. I’m not sure I even needed these experts to help me make this argument. Leaving aside the matter of whether dogs are inherently different in their needs from cows, goats, and chickens, it’s quite clear to most of us when we lock eyes with a dog that our relationship with this animal is truly unique. Moreover, it’s way too late now to undo the past forty thousand years of domestication.
Either way, this relationship now mandates a certain level of treatment from us. But with the twentieth century imposition of factory-farming conditions on the breeding of dogs, a long history together is now being subverted in a distinctly new way. And just as humans have made this change for the worse, it’s up to humans to right the wrong.
“The change has to be on the human side,” Bekoff says emphatically. “The dogs aren’t changing.”
So if dogs aren’t going to change back into wild canines, we need to better understand the evolutionary modifications that have brought them to trust and rely on humans as they do today. Let’s start with the fact that dogs demonstrate a preference for human companionship over that of their own species.
PREFERENCE FOR HUMANS OVER CANINES
In a 1996 study published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, researchers from Wright State University and Ohio State University tested adult dogs who had been living with a littermate since they were eight weeks old.6 For the two years leading up to the experiment, these pairs had never been separated at all, even for a moment.
In the first stage of the experiment, researchers separated the pairs for several hours while keeping one of the dogs in its familiar kennel. The remaining dogs, even when alone, did not display outward signs of anxious behavior as they stayed in their home base kennel. Blood tests showed no elevation of cortisol, the stress hormone, in their systems.
However, when the same dog was isolated without its littermate in a new kennel that it had never seen before, things changed dramatically. The isolated dog’s cortisol spiked by more than 50 percent, and the dog displayed outwardly anxious behavior. Even when the pairs were reunited, if moved to an unfamiliar kennel together, the nervous behavior persisted, and the littermates did not display signs of finding comfort in the presence of their lifelong partners.
But it was the next part of the study that changed the way many animal cognitive scientists would forever interpret the human-canine bond. These same dogs, when isolated and placed in strange surroundings with the human who they had come to recognize as their caretaker, would cling close and soothe easily when stroked. Blood tests confirmed this apparent effect, showing that cortisol levels in the dogs’ system only elevated slightly when remaining with their human.
This study appeared to show that dogs can experience a bond with humans that is more profound than their bonds with their own species—even their own littermates and lifelong companions. And, it’s worth noting, the dogs in this experiment were not companion animals. Rather, they were laboratory dogs who had a caretaker they recognized as their owner. But these were not dogs who lived in their caretaker’s home, shared their caretaker’s bed, and enjoyed the same kind of personal relationship
most of us share with our pet dogs. They were kennel-bound with their littermate in a research facility for life, but the soothing effect of their recognized human caretaker in contrast to the lack of comfort provided by their brother or sister was apparent all the same.
Next, I should address the skeptics among us who might argue that a dog’s affection is simple and easily won: humans have food, and dogs love treats. No mystery there, no need for a scientist to dissect forty thousand years of domestication to explain it. Izzie has often been the target of this argument when friends and family have caught me sharing a bowl of blueberries or a plate of sashimi with her. It’s true—she shudders with excitement to see me flip my chopsticks around to dangle a slab of fatty salmon into her impatient jaws. But a 2016 study from the department of psychology at Emory University challenged this misconception that treats alone buy unconditional canine love and devotion.
PREFERENCE FOR HUMAN PRAISE OVER TREATS
Gregory Berns, neuroscientist and author of How Dogs Love Us, put dogs in an fMRI scanner while awake and untethered to a leash. He then showed these dogs several household objects and offered them a hot dog, verbal praise, or nothing at all. Berns found that on the scans of thirteen out of fifteen of his test subjects, the dogs’ brains lit up just as much for human praise as for the treat—if not even more so. In fact, Berns pointed out that the dogs who responded most strongly to praise were more disappointed when it was withheld than when they went sans hot dog.7 While not all the dogs in the admittedly small study responded with a preference for praise over treats, the researchers concluded that the two rewards are very equally weighted in the mind of a dog and that many pups even prefer a resounding Good boy! to a juicy piece of meat.
Okay. You get it. We all get it. We love dogs. Dogs love us. Our interspecies bond is special—even if you’re not, yourself, a “dog person.” But at least maybe it’s now clear to see how a dog should never be classified as livestock given its unique domestication history. It may now be easy to recognize that these studies show how dogs who spend their lives toiling away in USDA-licensed commercial breeding operations are especially harmed by their treatment.
Lifelong confinement, overbreeding, exposure to extreme temperatures, a lack of positive socialization or human contact—it all adds up to years of misery. Even worse, this lifelong subjugation seen in breeding dogs is on an order of magnitude that is uncommon in the rest of the factory-farming industry. When comparing the life of a breeding dog to that of the animals who are farmed for food, John Goodwin of the Humane Society tells me that the dog’s plight is worse even if only for its protracted length.
As I am digging into the research, trying to get a handle on the science of our relationship with dogs, Overall sends me a note. She has some relevant studies she wants me to read before Izzie’s testing. But before I recount what the research suggests, I should pause here to address my own mea culpa.
Yes, as I’ve said, Izzie is a happy and healthy dog whose well-being seems to belie the likely facts of her birth in a USDA-licensed breeder. However, she does have a very serious noise phobia. Overall had told me that noise phobias in dogs are the easiest types of anxiety to spot and that owners are most likely to report these over other, less obvious but still very real psychological traumas. Obvious indeed: anyone who has spent any amount of time with us knows that if Izzie comes to visit, you’d best silence every beep and chirp that any phone, computer, or security system in the home can make.
The default ping-ping of an iPhone receiving a text message is a major source of terror for her. One text message and she will freeze in her tracks and turn the entire neighborhood upside down with surround-sound barking and moaning. It’s so predictably bad that when my husband or I hear this alert outside the home, when Izzie is not around, we both tense up, preparing for the barkfest.
While this phobia has mostly seemed like a curse, there was one instance when it came in handy. Once, when she was just a puppy and we were playing with her on a beach at the Jersey shore, she gave in to the lure of the endless, sandy expanse in front of her. Before we could react, she was galloping off at top speed. Dan and I raced behind her, trying to catch up. Faster and faster, her wheat-colored hair blending in with the sand, she gained more and more ground on us and became increasingly difficult to spot in the distance. Finally, winded and in utter desperation, barely even able to spot her on the horizon, I opened my phone and triggered it to make that ping-ping sound she so hates. Far off in the distance, I could hear her barking. Her outburst gave Dan—admittedly a much faster runner than I am—time to gain ground on her and scoop up the barking sand monster that was our dog. But other than that moment, her noise phobia has not exactly brought much in the way of convenience.
When we first had our home security system installed, we quickly learned that the single beep of the alarm being set was enough to set Izzie ablaze for hours, crying and pacing with worry—our very own Raymond Babbitt. Now, when Dan is on his work trips and Izzie and I are alone, I cannot set the alarm unless I’ve locked us both in the bathroom with the fans, shower, and faucets all running. Even then, she’s smart enough to know I’m hiding something and will still let out a few, mournful whimpers.
And while her noise anxiety can be tremendously disruptive to our lives, we can only imagine how the repeated stress is hurting her. Dan recently cut our doorbell and invested in a fully digital system that would be silent and send notifications straight to our phones. As he slaved over the frustrating circuits and systems throughout an entire weekend, he repeatedly reminded himself that the doorbell had to go, because it was taking years off her life.
So as I pore through the research sent by Overall, I quickly see how things I’d always dismissed as Izzie’s “quirks” might be signs of something much more insidious.
PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF LIFE IN A BREEDING FACILITY
A growing number of academic studies are now demonstrating the long-term impact of living in a commercial breeding facility. A 2011 study led by Franklin D. McMillan, published in the journal of Applied Animal Behaviour Science, examined a group of nearly twelve hundred dogs that had worked as breeding stock in commercial dog kennels. On average, the dogs in the study had already been retired from their former working lives and had been living in their adopted homes as pets for two years. When comparing these dogs to those that had never served as breeding stock in commercial operations, the former breeding dogs displayed higher levels of fear, demonstrated more compulsive behaviors, and were more sensitive to touch. Somewhat surprisingly, however, these dogs were found to be less aggressive than their nonbreeding counterparts.
“At first glance, this would seem to be an unconditionally positive finding,” McMillan wrote of the retired breeding dogs’ lack of aggression. “But when we look at the totality of changes in the puppy mill dogs, it becomes apparent that this finding, albeit desirable in and of itself, is likely due to the paralyzing and intensely elevated levels of fear that these dogs experience. In other words, unlike the typical animal who will use aggression to ward off something threatening, these dogs are often petrified with fear and incapable of striking out.”8
The variety of anxiety-related behaviors combined with a lack of aggressiveness demonstrated that the breeding dogs had spent most of their lives in a state of constant fight-or-flight stress. By chronically activating this response for years, these dogs had developed an ingrained proclivity toward flight. McMillan determined that the most important distinguishing mark that differentiated the breeding dogs from the nonbreeding group was fear. McMillan compared this mental state to the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) seen in humans.9
These long-term psychological scars make sense when the environment of the breeding dogs is fully understood and considered. But what about the puppies, like Izzie, who are whisked away from these commercial breeders at an early age? Surely they’re spared the trauma and are able to lead normal, healthy, social lives. After all, why would consumers shell out th
ousands of dollars for pet store puppies that are irretrievably broken?
As it turns out, that’s exactly what we’re doing. The McMillan study suggests that dogs may be damaged by commercial breeding operations before they are even born. Mother dogs exposed to chronic stress both before and during pregnancy tend to breed hypersensitive, psychologically abnormal, and dysfunctional puppies.
In view of the fact that the prenatal life of breeding dogs occurs in [puppy mills], the conditions and events during this period may play a role in the psychological development of the fetus… Offspring of pregnant animals exposed to various stressors have been documented with neurohormonal dysfunction and…abnormal response to, increased sensitivity to, and impaired ability to cope with stress; exaggerated distress responses to aversive events; impaired learning; abnormal social behavior; increased emotionality and fear-related behavior and fearful behaviors that increase with increasing age…and behavioral deficits and molecular changes in the offspring similar to those in schizophrenic humans.10
When I read this paragraph—“abnormal response” to stress, “impaired ability to cope,” “exaggerated distress response”—all I see is Izzie. This description of the psychological damage done to my dog before she was even born and purchased by me as a puppy rings all too true.
I read it again and again, and McMillan’s words bear repeating: dogs born in commercial breeding operations are at an increased risk of physiological and psychological problems similar to schizophrenic humans. And all this due to damage done to the mother dog before the puppy is even born.
