by Rory Kress
“What about you? How was the masturbatorium?”
“They had everything you could possibly want in there.”
“Like?”
“A big recliner—”
“Weren’t you grossed out to sit in it?”
“Absolutely. But they had it lined up just right to see the TV—”
“There was a TV?”
“Of course there was a TV.”
“A little 8:00 a.m. porn?”
He laughs shyly. Dan’s old-fashioned, and my probing is making him blush.
“You didn’t just use your phone?”
“No service.”
“So they just had porn playing on a loop?”
“No. They had a DVD collection.”
“How’d they have that organized? The Gooey Decimal System?”
It all sounds so easy—fun, even—compared to the invasive tests I go through every time we visit the clinic. After all, repeating the tests is a formality; we know Dan’s numbers are fine. I, on the other hand, am an exercise and health-food junkie just a couple of months past my thirtieth birthday and have the fertility prospects of an elderly, chain-smoking coal miner. This is the second clinic we’ve tried—the first one rejected me unless we would agree to use donor eggs, so sure we could never conceive with my own. This one accepted us and our cash but not our insurance. Good enough.
My mother had me when she was nearly forty. I always thought I’d tackle my career first and start considering children in my late thirties. I just hadn’t had the itch yet. So as a precaution, we decided to do some baseline fertility tests to make sure we had time adequately on our side. After all, it hadn’t yet seemed as though our lives had reached enough of a stasis for us to create new life. In our first five years together, we’d moved cities four times and changed apartments and homes seven times. Our careers had been on uncertain trajectories, and we were still finding our footing. It only seemed fair that we’d have a couple of years to enjoy the happy calm of young coupledom without any major disruptions. But of course, those just-in-case tests turned up a much grimmer answer than we knew to expect. So here I was, working my hardest to have a baby I wasn’t even sure I was ready for yet—but didn’t want to miss out on forever.
But then there’s Izzie. She’s been the one constant in our lives. Often, I introduce Dan as “the father of my dog” to get an easy laugh—but there is some truth to it. When we’ve come home, time and again, heartbroken by the news from a fertility specialist, she’s always been there. She doesn’t know; she doesn’t care. When I hole up in bed to mope, she hustles upstairs like a nurse racing to a Code Blue, her paws beating an urgent song against the hardwood steps. She noses open the bedroom door and presses her back to my empty belly and waits for me to pull her close as a teddy bear. She doesn’t recoil when I cry into her feathery neck, though I know she hates even a drop of rain to land on her hair.
But Izzie couldn’t be the sole bearer of our secrets forever. At one point, I decided honesty was the best policy. My parents knew what was going on, but I wanted Dan’s parents to be informed as well. When I told them that I might not be able to give their son the children he was otherwise perfectly capable of having, Izzie just lay on the floor on her back, waiting patiently for someone to address her available tummy. She didn’t care whose fault it was, if there even is such a thing. I focused on her as I told our dreary tale. Sometimes love means not caring at all. That’s how it always feels with Izzie.
Sure, these days I ask Dan a lot if we can get a second dog if having a human child doesn’t work out for us—as if another dog could just be like Izzie squared and could replace the hole in our lives that we assume would be left. But there’s another question I ask him too: Would we be happy if Izzie is the only baby we ever have? It’s a silly question, meant to surf above the undercurrent of tension in our lives. Dan always says he’d be happy no matter what. That’s the easy answer the supportive husband is supposed to give to his fertility-challenged wife. But I’m not Izzie’s mother. Dan’s not her father. We love her. We care for her. We’ve spent our fair share of nights holding her shaking body and cleaning her bloody vomit and diarrhea when she’s fallen ill from a shared water bowl at the dog park. Nevertheless, she’s not our baby and never will be. She’s a dog.
But the more I try to become a mother myself, the more I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not Izzie’s mother. So who is—or was—Izzie’s mother, and what happened to her?
Dog used to be man’s best friend. Woman’s too. The dog was a loyal companion, a trustworthy pal. While Izzie was the first dog for both my husband and me, my parents grew up with dogs in the 1950s and 1960s. They were happy, tail-wagging creatures that enjoyed their dominion mostly outdoors: in a suburban yard, in a doghouse. The dogs don’t appear in family photos. In fact, there’s no evidence of their existence at all other than a name remembered now, more than half a century later. Neither of my parents speak with overwhelming feeling about these animals. He was a dog, my mom has said with a shrug of Sparky, her family’s cocker spaniel. He was great.
Dogs, then, were kept at a distance. The doghouse, so common a concept that it became a part of popular speech—Dad’s gonna be sleeping in the doghouse tonight!—is now a largely antiquated concept. Along with urbanization, our dogs have been forced to come inside to live with us. Today, they sleep in our beds, not in the doghouse.
Dr. Leslie Irvine is a professor of sociology at University of Colorado–Boulder. She has written extensively about the human-animal bond—and, in particular, the ways in which we relate to dogs. She too has noticed a growing trend of dog owners infantilizing their pets.
“I don’t think we have a vocabulary to describe the relationship other than to say: Oh, my baby, my little girl, [she’s] like a child to me. It’s not enough to say that we’re friends or even my best friend. Because we don’t let our best friends sleep with us—although I guess sometimes we do,” Irvine says with a laugh. “The family is the closest place we can put that relationship.”1
Dr. Alan Beck, director of the Center of the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University, cites studies that reflect this increasingly close relationship with our dogs.
“You ask people ‘What’s the role of the animal in your family or your life?’ The response is, ‘It’s a member of the family.’ They don’t mean it biologically, but it’s the best metaphor we have for giving something more importance than just the simple description allows. It’s like having a good family friend and calling her your aunt. It’s capturing that our relationship with dogs has been evolving—and the dog itself has been evolving, so it really is now different than a food animal,” Beck explains, noting however that by sheer numbers, there are still more people on the planet who would eat a dog than those who would keep it as a pet or consider it a member of the family.2
Beck says that studies done today to measure human attachment to animals would never have registered even a decade ago.
“When we measure how attached people are to animals, some of the tools we use would not have made any sense ten or fifteen years ago. Like: ‘Do you carry pictures of your animal on your phone or in your wallet?’ or ‘Does your animal sleep in your bed or bedroom?’” Beck says. “Part of it is generational, and part of it is that more and more people are coming to urban environments, and that’s where you see the indoor cat, the indoor dog—the dog may even be in the bedroom. Whereas you don’t see that in the rural farmer’s dog. It’s a very real phenomenon, no doubt about it.”
As a result, there’s an inherent culture clash between the rural parts of the country, where dogs can often be detached from family life, and the urban areas, where the dog lives in close quarters and is considered to be a member of the family. That difference of opinions is what, in part, causes puppy brokers and transporters to thrive: transferring the dogs that are churned out by breeders in rural areas of the nation’s heartland to be sold at a five- to tenfold profit in cities thousands of mil
es away.
Once these puppies find a home, however, we can see the way that we increasingly treat them as members of the family is reflected even in their names. While certainly not every dog in the 1950s was named Rover or Fido—my mother’s dog, for example, was the aforementioned Sparky, and my father’s was Taffy—for the most part, dog names seem to have had a decidedly whimsical, nonhuman quality. Even Lassie is a name you’re unlikely to hear in any kindergarten classroom.
In the past, the national trends in dog names weren’t widely documented and surveyed as they are today—perhaps proof in itself that this was not as consequential of a question to most. However, anthropologist Dr. Stanley Brandes of the University of California–Berkeley, turned to the pet cemeteries of America to document naming trends in dogs of generations past. While certainly not every pet dog is interred with a headstone, Brandes’s technique demonstrated at least some trend toward increasingly human names.
Before World War II, Brandes noted dog names like Jaba, Teko, Dicksie, Punch, Snap, and Rags. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, nonhuman names continued to prevail, Champ, Happy, Clover, and Freckles to name a few. But at the same time, more and more human names begin to appear: Rivka, Daniel, Rico. But from the 1990s and 2000s on, the names become not only predominantly human but also very gender-specific: Oliver, Max, Timothy, Chelsea, and Maggie. Brandes pointed out that whereas in the past, it would be impossible to know if Jaba, for example, was a male or a female dog, today, human names often tell the tale. In cases where the name is non-gender-specific—Izzie would be an example—Brandes wrote that many owners add a feminization in either the spelling or the writing of it. For example, Nickie might become “Nickie Girl” but certainly not “Nicky,” which could be misconstrued as a male dog.
Perhaps even more indicative of the role that our dogs have come to play in our households: only recently have they been afforded the luxury of the family’s surname on their headstones, a trend that Brandes wrote only seems to have arisen in the last twenty years. Same goes for dogs that, from 1990 onward, are given headstones bearing religious iconography to match their parent families.3 I’ve even seen this odd trend at Izzie’s own groomer, who is now selling Star of David dog tags with a Jewish prayer engraved in Hebrew to add to our pup’s collar. Then again, I live in Denver, where this same store also sells cannabidiol drops to help our dogs bliss out right alongside their owners who pop into the marijuana dispensary down the block. Dogs: they’re just like us.
Sometimes Dan and I joke that we shouldn’t have given Izzie the name we did—it would have been our go-to choice for a child. But human-animal naming is a one-way street. A dog can take a human’s name. But it’s simply insulting for a human to be named after a dog.
Right?
According to the American Kennel Club, the top ten female dog names in 2015 included Chloe, Sadie, Lucy, and Bella.4 These four also appear in the top one hundred female names for human babies born in 2016, according to the Social Security Administration’s most recent ranking.5 Of the top ten male names for puppies registered with the American Kennel Club, two also make the top one hundred list for human babies born in 2016: Cooper and Jack. With so much overlap, it’s getting harder and harder to say who is being named after whom. More importantly, it’s clear we now see dogs as deserving of human names we once reserved only for our offspring.
I can say—reluctantly, I might add—that as a child, family friends named their dog after me. I don’t know whatever happened to the other Rory, although I do know that the other Rory was a male dog, which, neutered or not, added insult to injury. But perhaps if it weren’t my own name, I might have agreed. Rory is a pretty great name for a dog.
CHAPTER EIGHT
From Hogs to Dogs
If urbanization is having such a strong impact on our relationship with our dogs, it is important to understand how rural America also has an effect on these animals. After all, the reality of the American puppy mill is inextricable from the history of our nation’s agricultural industry—a fact that is underscored by the USDA’s assigned oversight of commercial dog breeders. While these facilities may now churn out high-priced, designer puppies to be purchased for thousands of dollars in big-city pet shops, they are the product of shifts in the farming industry more than half a century ago.
So how did we get here?
Before World War II, family farms were commonplace. At the start of the twentieth century, nearly half of the country’s workforce was employed in agriculture, and the majority of the nation’s population lived in rural areas. But with industrialization and new technology, the work of the farmer changed. No longer was the family farm a reliable source of income as tractors began replacing horses and mules and small operations simply could not keep up and compete with the new order.
According to the USDA, the number of farms in this country has fallen by 63 percent since 1900 while the size of the average farm has ballooned by 67 percent over the same time period.1 In short, these figures mean that, by and large, the family farm that once relied on around five products to sustain its income is now a thing of the past. In its place are today’s larger commercial farms, devoted to a single commodity that is churned out by industrial production techniques and technology.
After World War II, these improvements in technology spurred a mass migration to urban areas, leaving the nation’s family farms in a particularly challenged state. In an effort to help farmers find another source of income, some animal welfare advocates allege that the USDA actively encouraged down-on-their-luck farmers to raise and sell puppies. While I searched high and low to substantiate this claim, I was unable to find a direct link between the USDA and this initial impetus to breed puppies. However, it is clear that farmers, one way or another, realized that puppies were a veritable cash crop that could be grown right in the rabbit hutches and chicken coops that were otherwise sitting empty.
“When the industry got started, most of the breeders were farmers’ wives who, in the past, used to raise chickens for egg money. When the egg business was taken over by these large corporations, they didn’t have a way to supplement their income, so [dog breeding] fell right into their hands,” Bob Baker of the Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation (MAAL) tells me.2
When Baker first started his fight to improve animal welfare in the heartland more than thirty years ago, he took a job selling kennel equipment to gain access to dog-breeding facilities that otherwise would have never given him entree. His first red flag that these dog-breeding facilities were more like factory farms came when one dog broker he was visiting told him to rethink his footwear for this job.
“He said, ‘You better get yourself some tall boots for when you go into these places…[because] you’ll probably find more dogs in chicken coops nowadays than chickens.’ He wasn’t too far wrong, and it was certainly true.”
Because of the deep agrarian roots underlying the history of commercial dog breeding, the majority of these facilities are concentrated across the farm belt of the United States: Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Arkansas. Other states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that are somewhat geographically separated from this area but have larger farming communities are also home to a high concentration of commercial dog breeders.
Baker notes that as family farms died out and their industries were taken over by big, agricultural conglomerates, the trend toward raising dogs as a crop became increasingly evident—particularly in Missouri.
“That was a main problem in Missouri because…in the 1980s, the pork industry was taken over by these large conglomerates like Smithfield Foods and Cargill and places like that. We lost a lot of pork farmers,” Baker explains.
Baker recalls one particular lawmaker’s protest during the battle to pass Missouri’s 2010 anti-puppy-mill legislation.
“His biggest argument was that he had a lot of veterinarians who were unemployed because of all the hog farms going out of business. They were making up that business by working for the dog breeders,”
he says. “That was as recently as 2010 to 2011 that you were still seeing that effect.”
Most haunting is the way the trend is so easily summed up in the Show-Me State. “Here in Missouri,” Baker says, “we went from hogs to dogs.”
This sharp decline in the fortunes of Missouri family farmers was the cause of the state’s particular explosion in dog breeding. As of 2016, Missouri was home to nearly 678 USDA-licensed pet breeders, more than any other state in the country. At a distant second place is Iowa with 208.3 Given this unrivaled concentration of dog breeders in the Show-Me State, Missouri has had to create additional legal protections for commercially bred dogs with its own legislation and state inspectors to enforce it.
Former Assistant Attorney General of Missouri Jessica Blome was instrumental in crafting the state’s anti-puppy-mill legislation known as the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act. Passed in 2011, the law heightened state regulations and allowed her office to prosecute commercial breeding operations that, while still licensed by the USDA, were very much violating the dogs’ welfare. Her work led to the rescue of more than six thousand animals and forced hundreds of substandard breeding operations—both licensed and unlicensed by the USDA—to shut down.4
“The way we treat farm animals is absolutely abhorrent,” Blome tells me. “People are entering into the pet-breeding business with that same mind-set that these dogs are just there so that we can manage their reproductive systems in order to turn a profit. So you’re going to see that the dogs are treated the exact same way that they might treat a pig in a confinement operation or a dairy cow that lives its entire winter in a barn.”5
The USDA’s failing to protect dogs in commercial breeding facilities was, in large part, the impetus to close the gap with state regulations. Before Missouri’s Canine Cruelty Prevention Act was signed into law, Blome recalls witnessing the USDA’s unwillingness or inability to enforce even its most lax regulations.
