by Kim Kavin
What makes America a pernicious leader in this sphere of the dog industry is its general beliefs about pups, beliefs that are, surprisingly, often more in line with the governments of Sochi and Bucharest than they are with those of dog lovers fighting to protect and save canines on the streets worldwide. A solid third of America’s dog-buying citizens believe that the best way to get a pooch is to buy a purebred. Thirty-five percent of Americans say they want a purebred, and a slightly higher percentage say they won’t adopt a dog from a shelter, or even consider doing so, because they believe it’s impossible to know what you are going to get. In the United States, most of the homeless dogs who never make it out of animal-control facilities do not pose any actual problem. The vast majority of dogs being killed are healthy and friendly. Many are puppies, mixed breed and purebred alike. These dogs are dying because not enough Americans believe they are good enough to welcome into homes. The dogs face a stigma that, at its core, is a marketing problem tied to the way Americans understand the dog business.
Workers at Lee County Animal Shelter in Sanford, North Carolina, don’t need to see any surveys to understand this aspect of the problem. Their shelter is typical of many in the United States. It doesn’t charge an adoption fee for the dogs in its cages, and even still, it kills a lot of them because it can’t find anybody to take them home, not even for free. A lot of people just can’t see the value in them, people like the man who walked through the front door in early November 2013. He was the type of person who walks into facilities like Lee County’s every day. He didn’t have a vicious dog to surrender. He didn’t have a sick dog or a troublesome dog or a dog who had ever exhibited any kind of a behavior problem at all. Instead, he had an unspayed dog back at home who had gotten knocked up and produced the boxload of seven puppies he had in his arms.
The puppies were just two weeks old. According to a Lee County animal control officer who posted their photos on Facebook in a plea for help, the man was explicit in his reason for handing them over. They were useless, he said, because they were mixed breed.
That moment didn’t make the news, of course. It was too run-of-the-mill in America to matter.
Even Sarah McLachlan reaches for the remote control when her commercials come on. “I change the channel. I can’t take it,” the singer told the Huffington Post. “I can’t even look at it. It’s just so depressing.”
The Canadian singer’s commercials for the ASPCA have become so ubiquitous since they began airing in 2007 that they now embody the images and soundtrack that countless Americans see in their minds of homeless dogs. The mood the spots set is certainly no national anthem being sung by the cast of Jersey Boys before a dog show. First, viewers hear the haunting opening notes of the Grammy Award–winner’s tearful ballad “Angel.” Then come the photos, one after the next, of dogs behind bars, their big weepy eyes pleading for help, their awful fates sealed unless viewers donate—and fast. Any dog lover who makes it through the first fifteen seconds is likely to end up in tears. Those who hang in until the end are so disturbed that they’ve sent checks and credit card digits totaling more than $30 million to date.
An estimated quarter of the dogs in US shelters are purebreds, but that’s irrelevant to most buyers who care about pedigree papers; once a dog has the stink of a shelter on her, breed no longer matters even to the top breeders. AKC rules state outright that any dog found in a shelter cannot qualify for anything other than alternative listing. These dogs are welcome at performance and other events, just like mutts, but they are no longer acceptable in the primary rings at dog shows like Westminster. Simply having spent one night in an American shelter can turn a $3,500 puppy into a dog in need of a telethon to save her life.
Nobody with a shred of intellectual honesty would argue that breeders, even the most irresponsible ones, are causing all of the problems with homeless dogs worldwide, but at the same time, anyone with a hint of a conscience must acknowledge that the rise of the purebred industry as a whole has helped shift homeless dogs into the position of secondhand options, or even disposable goods, in nations all around the world. Two hundred years ago, a mutt who had come along, guarded the house, and been kind to the kids served just fine. But since the advent of dog shows and the globalization of the purebred message, nonbreeder dogs who are perfectly healthy and friendly have become so much less valued that, in some cases, they become government-sanctioned targets for culling by the millions.
It was inevitable that society would get to this point, given the chosen path. Once the world decided that it was okay to parade some dogs around on stages and televisions as the best that money can buy, then by definition, cheaper alternatives had to exist. And cheaper, in many minds, equates not only with less valuable, but also with less inherently worthy. It’s an economic scale that, when taken to its logical end, terminates as throwaway garbage in any industry.
Prices matter psychologically. Premium pricing versus value brands, Ferraris and Lamborghinis versus Hyundais and Fiats—consumers have been conditioned to respond to the numbers as a measure of quality, even if the far less expensive Hyundai or Fiat will serve basic needs well for ten or fifteen years. As much as people love their dogs as members of their families, the reality today is that dogs are products, just like cars, ones that are advertised and packaged and bought and sold to the tune of about thirty million pooches a year worldwide from breeders, shelters, pet stores, and nonprofit rescue groups. The total market value is somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 billion, based on the average price paid per dog in the United States and typical pricing elsewhere. That’s not money spent on puppy sweaters or orthopedic beds or veterinary care; it’s only the cash plunked down to bring home the dogs in the first place. The people listing dogs for sale, obviously, want consumers to buy from them first, and pricing plays a role, just as it would in any other market. It’s delusional to think otherwise, no matter how different people feel dogs are from other luxury and value-brand goods marked with a price tag.
In fact, fully half of Americans surveyed recently said dogs who come from shelters or rescue groups were low-priced options. That’s a huge percentage of people with an ingrained belief about value—about the same level of market penetration, in terms of messaging, that Apple has in terms of sales with its iPads among all tablet computers. At the opposite end of the belief spectrum, fewer than one in ten Americans say dogs coming from breeders, pet stores, or even puppy mills are low-priced options. Those dogs are immediately thought of as the higher-quality items from the upper shelves. This message on pricing is firmly established in our culture, the value of different types of dogs is set, and it all plays right into the stereotypes about purebred champions and homeless mutts so often seen in the media.
On top of that, most people instinctually crank up the volume of their doubts about some dogs’ quality. Psychologists call it negativity bias, and it refers to the fact that humans have a greater recall of unpleasant things than positive things. It’s believed to be an evolutionary trait. The caveman who forgot that he once saw a certain type of tree had nothing to fear, while the caveman who failed to remember the danger posed by a saber-toothed cat was likely to become supper. The negative image had to be more memorable, to take precedence in the brain’s filing system, so the next time the saber-toothed cat appeared, the caveman instinctively knew to run and hide without even thinking. The human mind is thus quicker to form—and to retain—bad impressions. It’s better to assume the worst when seeking the best chance of staying alive, or at least of preventing arms from being chewed off in a bloody fight with a giant feline. This survival mechanism springs from a crucial time in human evolution and remains deeply embedded in the human psyche, even today, and it’s one reason why people who are dog lovers in general can continue to see certain dogs as innately worse than others.
In a groundbreaking paper published about fifteen years ago titled “Bad Is Stronger than Good,” researchers from the United States and the Netherlands showed how negativit
y bias affects countless decisions people make. The phenomenon is seen across cultures and throughout history, with hardly any exceptions. Whether it’s bad emotions or bad feedback, the human mind processes bad inputs more thoroughly than anything good. The bad stuff gets more deeply ingrained, more wound up in the brain pathways than the pleasantries. Once someone believes something is bad, even if she’s mislabeled a tree, she’s going to react to it like it’s a saber-toothed cat. It happens at an instinctual level. Negativity bias can be that strong of a force from within.
The things most people say they want in a dog—a healthy, friendly pet—can become nonfactors in their thinking once negativity bias takes over. If they’ve formed a bad impression of shelters or mutts, then they intuitively stop looking at who the dogs actually are and instead focus on the ingrained response to other factors like price and source. If the dog costs $200 and is from a shelter, then in many minds, she is by definition not as good as a dog who costs $2,000 and comes from a breeder—even if it’s the same exact dog being marketed two different ways. Remember the study of Americans in which 35 percent said that with a homeless dog, it’s impossible to know what you are going to get? There’s actually no guarantee with any dog, including a purebred, that he’ll grow up to be friendly, healthy, or long-lived. And yet the belief persists that the shelter dogs are the more worrisome option, a belief that may be on the rise in America, despite years of educational outreach, with young adults now saying in one survey that they’re more likely to buy a “more desirable” purebred than to adopt from a shelter.
One reason for the lingering power of stereotypes may be that today’s forms of media exacerbate the beliefs that have been established during the past few generations, creating a feedback loop that is ingraining the messages more deeply. People forty or older can remember a time when the primary media advertising was on television, which they watched for an hour or two at night and saw a few ads here and there between favorite shows on the dozen or so channels that existed. Today, adding things like endless satellite channels and smartphones into the mix, many people spend more time with technology than they do sleeping. Britons average eight hours and forty-one minutes a day using devices. Americans spend eleven hours a day with electronic media. Those negative stereotypes—whether in Sarah McLachlan commercials or news reports out of Sochi—are coming far more often and being further and further reinforced, while the handful of messages promoting the opposite of ingrained beliefs are even more likely to get overlooked because of the constant media deluge.
“When you look at a Facebook feed, the average person has something on the order of 250 friends as well as businesses that they’ve liked, and so it becomes increasingly difficult now to stand out against all of this. Think about Twitter. It’s like an avalanche coming at you,” says Dr. Angela Hausman, an associate professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, specializing in Internet marketing and consumer behavior. “The cultural value for so long has been, ‘Get this wonderful purebred dog because they’re so gorgeous and yada, yada, yada.’ We’ve become used to this, and we think this is normal because it’s what we see.”
Social media also has an aspect to it that makes people more likely to click on photos of sad puppies, which makes trying to get out the message of mutts even more likely to rely on the existing stereotypes. One of the things researchers have figured out is that social media posts with images get more people’s attention, especially if the image is of somebody recognizable, Hausman says. People stop and look at celebrities and friends more often than they stop and look at strangers. And, it turns out, people also stop and look at animals, including puppies. Digital users recognize the emotions on the animals’ faces and intuitively respond to them as something well known. Negativity bias is at work here, too, making people most likely to notice a sad puppy’s face coming through their Facebook feed. Instead of turning these messages off, like a lot of people do with the sad television commercials, social media’s properties make users more likely to stop and click on the message that shows shelter dogs as downtrodden, further reinforcing the belief.
“If you want somebody to donate money, negativity helps,” Hausman says. “It’s very tough to turn it around. Things like the ASPCA commercials are really counterproductive in a lot of ways because they reinforce the stereotype that these rescue animals are somehow undesirable.”
Establishing and reinforcing beliefs about quality: that is how the low end of any market is created, how any product, including a perfectly wonderful, healthy, friendly puppy, can be made to seem less worthy than others or even unworthy of life itself, brought by the boxload into a shelter at two weeks old and handed over like garbage to be destroyed, or captured and killed in the streets by the millions, without so much as a second thought.
What people believe is about the dogs is not always about the dogs. What people say about dogs, and what people accept as truth about dogs, is often no more than what consumers have allowed sellers to convince them of—sellers with fat cows and new purebred styles and sad fundraising schemes who for several generations now have been tapping into innate thought processes that don’t get questioned because they simply feel normal.
John Hibbing and Kevin Smith have been wondering something specific lately about dogs: do people with liberal political leanings see them as somewhat equal family members while conservatives see them more as loyal underlings?
It sounds like a loaded question, the kind that would land the purebred owners Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un in a political nightmare, but it’s where research into things like negativity bias has led the two University of Nebraska–Lincoln political science professors in recent years. In 2013, with their colleague John Alford of Rice University, Smith and Hibbing published Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences. It contained more than three hundred pages of evidence from experiments across cultures documenting how people’s political inclinations, like taste buds or athletic aptitudes, appear to be rooted not in intellect, but in biology. Humans are not so much hardwired to be liberal or conservative, they argue, but people are just as predisposed to political leanings as they are to, say, a love of spicy foods. Environment and experiences play a role in who each person becomes, but humans are not born as entirely clean slates, and those who are conservatives are more influenced by certain things, including negativity bias, than those who are liberals.
“Conservatives and liberals are different on tons of things other than politics,” Smith says. “That is not a question. Our own research and the research of others shows it’s everything from taste in food to taste in art to preference in different cars—tons of things. One of the things John and I have speculated on is difference in pets, that given liberal and conservative tendencies in other areas, would they be attracted to different types of pets, would they treat them differently, what would their relationship be with pets.”
When asked to take an educated guess, Smith added, “My hypothesis would be that conservatives would be more likely to go with purebred dogs and liberals would be more likely to go with mutts from the pound.”
It doesn’t take a degree in political science to see that, around the world today, the mutt-versus-purebred proposition has become something of a tribal political marker, like abortion or immigration. Since about 2005 in America, nonprofit rescue groups have been transporting death-row dogs by the hundreds of thousands from the high-kill shelters in conservative Southern states up to eager adopters in the liberal Northeast. From London to Brussels to Amsterdam, liberals are now waving fingers and shouting with disgust about conservative-minded people from Eastern Europe, where purebred puppies are farmed while strays are slaughtered. One longtime purebred seller from a conservative region in the Midwestern United States has endured similar judgments from people in metropolitan areas who call their dogs, to his befuddlement, four-footed children. He responds by saying, “I don’t have a problem with somebody in New York City or Boston being
a vegetarian or not wanting to go hunting. I’m not saying we should shove our lifestyle down their throat. But they shouldn’t do the same thing to us, either. And I don’t like the term ‘companion animal.’ My companion is my wife. My dog is my pet. What he deserves from me is attention, love, socialization, vet care, a good food source, clean water. But he’s not my companion. He doesn’t own me. I own him.”
These types of comments—not about taxes or military policies, but about dogs—are as politically charged as it gets, and when put into the framework of Smith and Hibbing’s work, they seem to make absolute sense. The authors say that while dogs may be an issue of the moment, they’re one of many things about which people take up sides, and those sides are based on how people feel about a few bedrock social dilemmas. Each person has core preferences for organization, structure, and the way society operates, and those core preferences frame the teams they join when arguing about issues of the day, be they gay marriage or marijuana legalization or which puppy is the best that money can buy. With pretty much everything, the authors say, human leanings boil down to bedrock dilemmas like maintaining tradition versus experimenting with new things, ensuring strength versus encouraging equality, and protecting oneself from outside groups versus being open to them. Conservatives on any issue of the day tend to lean toward the first option in each set, while liberals tend to lean toward the latter.
Additional studies show that conservatives are more prone to negativity bias—which affects all those bedrock dilemmas, too, and every issue of the day that arises, including dogs. Those who are conservative literally and physically experience the world differently than those who are liberal, the authors say. Conservatives have a physiological, more deeply ingrained response to anything that might pose a danger. And anyone who is more sensitive to threats—who has strong negativity bias—is more likely to stick with tradition and order. That person is more likely to want a strong leader who is clearly in charge. That person is more likely to be leery of outside groups with new ideas.