by Kim Kavin
“I have to admit the offer was tempting, like turning in a lemon automobile for a gleaming new model,” he wrote. “But dogs are not commodities to be discarded when they break, and I assumed that if Woodson were returned, he would be euthanized.”
The puppy lemon laws are, in a way, an outgrowth of a practice that arguably responsible breeders have been undertaking for quite a long time. Many hobby breeders, in particular, advise buyers to bring the dog back because they want to know what the problem is, to try to breed it out in future litters as well as to ensure the dog will receive the care he needs if the owner will not provide it, or to end the dog’s life in what they see as a compassionate way. The lemon laws are often instituted by lawmakers eager to hold less-responsible breeders to these same standards that many hobby breeders have argued, for years, should be considered the ethical business model.
Dorney, the director at WAGS who works with treatable and manageable dogs, says that’s not necessarily illogical thinking. She’d like to see more accountability for certain breeders, too. She says she sees a clear abundance of socialization problems in dogs bought at pet stores versus purebreds from hobby breeders and mutts on the street, and when she’s tried to go back to the pet store suppliers for help after families get overwhelmed and dump their dogs at the shelter, she gets radio silence in response.
“More toward the beginning of my career twenty years ago, the people would bring the dogs in with the papers from the breeders, and we’d call and say, ‘Hey, you made this dog, come and get it,’” she says. “We’ve made the calls dozens of times, where I could look at the papers and hunt down the breeders. And there were two, in all those years, who came down and got the dog. One was a white German Shepherd, and one was a Poodle. That’s where I think the wall gets put up of ‘shelters don’t like breeders,’ and people say that if breeders would stop breeding, we wouldn’t need shelters. Well, that’s not true, but I do think breeders should do their fair share.”
More and more people are starting to realize that, in this context, certain breeders are like big factories that, for generations, have spewed toxic waste into the air and waterways while leaving society, like taxpayer-funded shelters, to bear the financial and ecological burden of cleaning up the mess. Dog owners who fail to spay, neuter, and train their pets of course are part of the problem, too, but because dogs are legal products with which owners can do pretty much whatever they want, and because there are no laws requiring anyone to be a wholly responsible dog owner, the only course lawmakers can take is to go after the breeders when something goes wrong, by calling the pups defective and helping buyers get financial damages.
And now that the very idea of a defective dog is out there in the ether of the universe, it’s sometimes consumers demanding a right to refunds or exchanges. The term puppy lemon law has become something entirely different than an attempt at forcing responsibility. It instead presumes that all dogs should be perfect, right out of the box and forever onward. Otherwise they’re faulty, a product to be returned or refunded.
This mentality can stay with an owner for far longer than the few days it takes to schedule an initial checkup at the veterinarian. In one all-too-typical case, a Pennsylvania family adopted a mixed-breed puppy at about ten weeks old. The puppy had been in foster care with two others from his litter, had a sweet temperament, and was eager to learn. In fact, he already had a pretty good grasp of “sit,” played well with his siblings as well as adult dogs, and was just about housebroken when they took him home. The family had never before owned a dog, and though they registered for a series of puppy kindergarten classes, they failed to teach him to walk nicely on a leash, which made it hard to give him exercise, which left him bouncing-off-the-walls cuckoo in their home. They never let him socialize with other dogs again, and they failed to break the common habit of puppy nipping, which, by the time the dog turned about six months old—and weighed at least sixty pounds—had become not-so-gentle biting at their children’s bodies to get attention. Instead of working with trainers to resolve the adolescent dog’s issues, the family returned him, handing over his leash in the original foster mom’s driveway without even telling the dog goodbye. He was still wearing his puppy collar, which was practically choking his now much-larger neck.
That family believed—without question—that the dog they’d adopted was a lemon. They had gone to six or eight hours’ worth of puppy-training classes, and the dog still turned out bad. It never occurred to them that they had failed in their responsibilities as owners. After they returned the dog to the nonprofit volunteer and saw the puppy’s story explained online as part of a search for a new home, the wife scolded the volunteer by telephone, saying with disgust, “This is why people don’t rescue.”
“Kids go to kindergarten, grammar school, middle school, and so on,” says Liz Palika, a dog trainer and author of more than fifty pet books. “Puppies need puppy kindergarten, adolescents need basic obedience, and adult dogs need a refresher course once in a while. Training keeps the communication open between dog and owner: a vital skill. Plus, a bored dog is going to get into trouble. A dog who plays scenting games, learns new tricks, and participates in other activities with his owner is far less likely to get into trouble.”
Dogs who get into serious messes often end up being evaluated by a person like Nick Jones, a behaviorist in Britain who works with everyday people in their homes on dog behavior and who is regularly asked to testify as an expert witness in police cases that involve biting. He’s worked with upward of a thousand dogs during his ten-year career, everywhere from London to the countryside, and he says that even people who have had dogs all their lives can encounter training issues that are new and seem insurmountable, but that really are more common than they think. After all, even people who have had dogs since childhood have likely known maybe three to five dogs in their homes overall. It’s an awfully small sample size for anyone to believe they will have experienced every behavior a dog might present.
Jones, like Palika, says training issues during adolescence are a common, recurring theme. Even if owners have gone to puppy training classes, new issues crop up almost like clockwork as the dog ages.
“It’s about people’s expectations. They purchase a puppy that may not be right for them and their degree of experience, and then things aren’t working out. Usually the dog gets to about six months before the owners feel they’re really struggling,” he says. “If I showed you my ten most recent inquiries, they will probably be for twelve- to eighteen-month-olds. The average dog I work with is about two years, and that’s because the dogs are reaching peak adolescence or coming into adulthood. The owners may have struggled with their own trainers or looking up things on the Internet, and they’re coming to me close to the breaking point, seeking help.”
Jones’s work has taught him—including with police cases where a dog has bitten a person—that the vast majority of dogs can be turned around. His success rate is similar to the one at progressive shelters like the MCSPCA or WAGS, often exceeding 90 percent. In his behavioral work in people’s homes, he’s surprised if more than one in one hundred dogs each year is unable to make progress that resolves the issue.
Again, it’s often as much about expectations as it is about the actual dog. For instance, dog-on-dog aggression, such as one dog in a home snapping or biting at another, is a common problem Jones sees. The owner may want to see both dogs lolling about as best friends, but realistically, even if Jones can use training techniques to remove 50 percent or 75 percent of the problem, it’s often more than enough to satisfy the owner and keep both dogs safe and happy.
Where Jones draws the line, just as with responsible rescue groups and shelters, is with biting that is likely to endanger people. “A recent case comes to my mind that was a little West Highland White Terrier owned by a mum and dad and a girl ten or eleven years of age,” he says. “This dog was muzzled throughout my visit, but it attempted to bite me twenty-plus times. The dog was exceedingl
y possessive of the young girl in the family. If I tried to go near her at all, he would go mental. The mother in that family would have children come to the home for day care, so it was completely incompatible. The difficulty is, can we rehome the dog? No, not in this state. Can I take the dog? No, I’d have twenty dogs here already. The dog was very young, only six or seven months of age, and in my opinion wired incorrectly. There was something seriously wrong. We tried to give the dog the benefit of the doubt and a bit more time, but on my return visit we made the decision to put the dog down.”
More than a few trainers, shelter directors, and nonprofit rescue volunteers say they wish there were some kind of a law that required buyers to train their dogs: to register for classes, to work with professionals, to identify problems early, and to be responsible for correcting them before they become bigger and get dumped at the doorstep of society. Instead of believing the dog is flawed, people would learn that, in many cases, the problem is at their end of the leash.
So far, lawmakers haven’t been willing to take that step of requiring owners to train, but some leading animal law experts are starting to think about other laws that might force everyone to change their attitudes—and lawyers are pushing for legal changes harder than ever before in world history.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE GENESIS AND THE FUTURE
“Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.”
—Henry Ward Beecher
Kate Neiswender had fallen under the spell of Assisi. Who could blame her? The Italian town is pretty much in the heart of Italy, about halfway between Florence and Rome and as awash as any place can be in the architecture and artwork of medieval, Roman, and Christian history. The Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi—mother church of the Franciscan Order that continues in Catholicism today—stands just as imposing and ornate as it did when it was completed in the 1200s. Much of the medieval castle called Rocca Maggiore still towers as a stone-walled backdrop over the entire settlement, with its tallest points now used for photo ops of Umbria’s lush fields instead of as lookout posts where guards once scanned the horizon for invaders approaching on horseback. Nearby is the small Eremo delle Carceri monastery, where St. Francis of Assisi is said to have preached to birds about God’s love for all creatures. He is remembered today as the patron saint of animals, having urged his followers not only to be kind to them but also to help them if they are in trouble.
Being in that place, surrounded by that particular history, Neiswender couldn’t help but think about the way the earliest Christian teachings continue to affect the way humans treat dogs today. She felt the same breezes on her face that blew through the chapel where Francis used to admonish those who treated animals poorly, and she thought, with great sadness, about how much of what people do nowadays is about as far as anyone could get from the teachings of the venerated saint.
The way dogs are bought and sold and handled, really, all comes down to a single question in her mind, a question she is prepared to answer with a thumb in the eye of even the oldest and most celebrated religious doctrine, in Assisi or anywhere else: “Do we have a right, as a single species on a great big planet, to say every species is subordinate to us?” she asks. “My argument is we do not. No bloody way.”
Neiswender is an attorney from California, where she specializes in land use and environmental law and works in the field of animal law. When she looks at the legal system, she sees that everything people do with dogs stems from the earliest Christian doctrine. There is a reason the first breeders in Victorian England believed it was okay to make dogs their genetic play-puzzles without stopping to think twice, and that people the world over think the same way today about creating ever more new types of dogs. There is a reason people from the US believe it is okay to auction dogs to the highest bidder along with other items they own, just as there is a reason dogs are bought and sold everywhere from pet stores to roadside parking lots as a matter of regular business today. There is a reason it’s legal to kill homeless dogs en masse in public facilities, just as there is a reason shelters and rescue groups can legally give homeless dogs to families while collecting a fee. There is a reason people all across the world continue to believe it’s all right to keep dogs as personal pets. There is a reason the global dog-selling industry came into being, and there is a reason so few people question that industry’s right to exist.
The reason is because the foundations of society say that dogs are not individual beings with rights, but instead are legal property—the dominion of people—a belief rooted in a Bible passage that has permeated human existence for some five thousand to six thousand years:
Genesis 1:26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Neiswender sat in Assisi, thinking not about the gorgeous scenery but instead about that Bible passage. It was like a constant buzz in her brain. She wished she could jump into a time machine and erase Genesis 1:26 from existence. The lives of dogs today, she says, would be much better for it, along with lots of other lives, too.
“I think there would be a significant difference in the way the world works,” she says. “Every time a Western race—the Conquistadors or the English or whoever—is conquering the world, they all go back to, ‘This is God-ordained.’ And why does God tell you [that] you have the right to slaughter other people? Because you have dominion over everything on earth.”
The law as Western culture knows it today stems from the Law of the Twelve Tables in 449 BC. It established basic procedural rights for one Roman against another and created punishments for wrongs. Those laws evolved during the period from AD 529 to 565, when the Byzantine emperor Justinian I sponsored the creation of a legal system, or code, that brought all existing Roman rules into a single collection of law. He wanted everything written down so citizens could be held accountable for reading and knowing the basic rules of society. Even during these early times, one was either a person or property; women, children, and slaves, along with animals like dogs, at one point or another fell into the property category. Fast-forward to the Middle Ages, which continued into the 1400s, and the laws being developed stemmed from that Code of Justinian, only now with a twist. The Romans had been pagans, but the new people writing the laws were Christians. “They took the Justinian Code and then matched it to the Bible, and built it on that,” Neiswender explains. “When you’re talking about Roman law, really, honestly, everything was either owned or there was some sort of relationship between a property-owning male and everything else on the planet. Where you got the dominion over animals comes directly from Genesis. There’s no waffling on that one.”
The laws written in the Middle Ages became the basis for the laws that ultimately followed in the English courts, which in turn formed the foundation for the law in the modern United States and many other parts of the world today. The result is that current laws recognize two entities: people and property. There is we, the people, and then there is all the rest, including dogs, over which people have dominion to do as they please.
That’s why, when people look at someone treating dogs badly and cry out, “There ought to be a law against that!” their personal sensibilities about their beloved pets are often at odds with legal realities. Whether dog lovers are outraged by auctions or conformation shows or high-kill shelters or irresponsible rescue groups or lousy owners or any other instance in which dogs are being treated in disturbing ways, the modern social mores are bumping up against thousands of years’ worth of religious beliefs and regulatory statutes that define dogs as just another form of property.
In fact, in the history people and dogs, the distinct pursuit of animal law is but a footnote in a centuries-long story. It’s true that some of Western society’s greatest thinkers, including Charles Darwi
n, postulated that dogs had abilities such as abstract thought that made them different from other forms of property, but attempts to codify those beliefs into law is a much more recent phenomenon. As recently as 2001, only nine colleges and universities in the United States offered animal law courses, and they were the first of their kind. Today, more than a hundred exist in the United States, along with similar curricula in Canada, the United Kingdom, Austria, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Israel, countries where there is a thriving middle class who keep dogs as pets.
“In most countries I’m in touch with, the first thing that triggers social concern about animals is stray dogs,” says David Favre, who is known in the United States as the father of animal law. “Having a middle class means having enough time and energy to notice what’s around you. People notice that these dogs, who have been on the streets forever, are being mistreated by governments. You have to have a certain level of freedom and capacity before you can really talk about the dogs.”
China, as an example, is undergoing this transformation right now. Dogs are still hunted in some cities in China because they carry rabies, which is a deadly public health concern. Dogs also are still used as food in some parts of China. But as the middle class is evolving from Beijing to Shanghai, a growing number of Chinese are bringing dogs into their homes as pets—just as the Victorians did in mid-1800s England and as the postwar generation did in the mid-1900s United States—and the Chinese of the early 2000s, too, are beginning to think of dogs as beloved members of their families. A generation or two from now, the landscape of animal welfare in China just might look similar to where it stands elsewhere today. “As the dogs become more and more prevalent as pets in the city,” Favre says, “there’s this social transformation about them as animals and enhancing their status.”