The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Joan Schaffner is thinking about presidential debates. It’s not that she ever expects to find herself on the dais as a candidate; yes, she works in Washington, DC, but it’s not as a congresswoman or senator. Instead, Schaffner directs the animal law program at George Washington University, just a few strides from the infamous Watergate building. On any given day, she’s breathing the same oxygen as people aspiring to be the top boss in the White House, and she’s wondering when they might be forced to articulate their stance on how we treat dogs and other animals before they are allowed to become the leader of the free world.

  In her mind’s-eye, Schaffner imagines sitting in front of the television like so many other citizens, watching presidential candidates field questions from a moderator. If she tunes her vision back, say, fifty years, the moderator isn’t asking anything about the environment. It’s not even on the public’s radar. If she adjusts her vision to the present, the moderator is asking not only about green energy options, but also about same-sex marriage. The public’s priorities have changed. And when she expands her vision to the future, the moderator is asking something that, to this day, has never been put to a presidential candidate in a debate, something along the lines of “Do you believe all publicly funded shelters should be forced to take a no-kill approach and save every treatable or manageable dog?”

  “If that could actually be a question during a presidential debate . . .” she says, the sentence trailing off as she gasps at the thought of it happening during her lifetime. “Or, ‘What do you think about the right of a Georgia aquarium to import eighteen Beluga whales from Russia?’ That would be huge. It would be phenomenal.”

  Politics and the law go hand in hand, and it’s possible, Schaffner says, for citizens to force a change in the law regarding dogs before the lawyers do. She’s not as optimistic as Favre and others who believe change will come in the next few decades, at least not fundamental change to the status of dogs as property, unless elected lawmakers act before the judges do. Politicians being held accountable by voters can force legal change much faster, a fact Schaffner knows in part because of what she has seen happen in the gay community in recent years. In addition to teaching animal law, she also is a faculty advisor to her university’s gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender organization, and she believes changing social attitudes are the reason laws in that area are evolving so quickly after centuries of discrimination.

  “If you had asked me twenty or thirty years ago, did I think we’d see same-sex marriage in our lifetime, I would have said no,” she says. “I am absolutely shocked at how fast the LGBT movement has changed our society, at least as a matter of law. The states are just dropping like flies on same-sex marriage. That’s incredible to me, how fast that changed around.”

  Neiswender also cites civil rights changes as an indicator that animal law could have its breakthrough cases in the near future—especially because the speed of ideas spreading digitally is a new tool that can be hard for entrenched institutions to combat. Humans no longer live in the age of information traveling on horseback from castle to castle across the Italian countryside. Same-minded people from Assisi to Alaska not only can communicate instantly, but also can get organized and lobby for legal change, fast.

  “We talk about environmental rights today as a given. It’s part of every election. That did not exist forty years ago,” she says. “Ask any gay guy around forty years ago if he could’ve envisioned what’s happening today, and he’d tell you no. With social media, it’s old before you’ve written it. If you had told a guy walking in Selma [Alabama] in 1963 that we’d have a black man in the White House in 2008, he’d have called you crazy. Things move fast now, and we can do it for dogs, too.”

  Favre believes the first nation to change the status of dogs from property will be the United States—but he’d take a side bet on Switzerland making the first real progress, too, because the Swiss have already created a place in their law that says animals are not things. “As a society and as a legal system, they’re thinking about the word dignity, and that animals have dignity,” he says. Whether that will translate into something more is yet to be seen.

  Yolanda Eisenstein, an animal law attorney in Dallas, Texas, and author of the American Bar Association’s 2014 book Legal Guide for Dog Owners, believes dogs are likely to remain property for the near future, but the inroads lawyers are making are substantial, even if they’re piecemeal. If the current legal efforts weren’t likely to succeed, she says, there wouldn’t be commercial-scale dog breeders and agricultural businesses fighting back so hard in the legal courts as well as in the court of public opinion.

  Eisenstein also says the way people are choosing to live their lives bodes well for laws changing even further in favor of dogs everywhere.

  “I think that society needs their companion animals more than they ever have,” she says. “We have more people living alone, people living to be older and their spouses die—dogs and cats have become family members in a sense that they weren’t before. Unless that changes drastically, dogs are always going to have a very special place in our lives, and the law will have to follow. It’s going to have to change.”

  For her part, Neiswender understands that change takes time. She looked at the buildings in Assisi and realized how long they took to create, how long they have stood for Western society’s moral center, and how likely they are to stand well into the future. Their time on the world stage has been long, far longer than that of the birds to whom St. Francis used to preach.

  Even still, all seasons do change, and for dogs and other sentient animals, the time for a new spring may be now. In April 2015—for the first time in world history—a judge in Manhattan Supreme Court issued an order to show cause and writ of habeas corpus on behalf of two chimpanzees, Herculus and Leo, who are being used for biomedical experimentation on Long Island, New York. Only a “legal person” may have an order to show cause and writ of habeas corpus on his behalf. In essence, the ruling meant the court believed the chimpanzees could be legal persons, and the case was continuing as of this writing, according to the Nonhuman Rights Project.

  Neisweinder says it’s likely that even more significant rulings are yet to come.

  “You have to choose your battles, but eventually, somebody is going to file a lawsuit that gives chimps the right to exist in peace,” she says. “Some judge is going to do that in the next few years, and the minute that happens, it’s going to be just like gay rights. You’ll watch the dominoes fall.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SMART SHOPPING

  “Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.”

  —Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  We, the dog lovers, would be silly to wait for the lawyers to sort all this out. Or the politicians. Or, for that matter, the people who now stand at the top of the dog business, from the auction houses to the distribution companies to the massive nonprofits to the most successful shelters. While many good things can be said about the leaders on all sides of today’s global dog industry, and while the past few decades have included great strides toward ensuring more pooches have better lives, the fact remains that nobody has yet figured out how to resolve the root problems. We still have regular, horrific animal cruelty busts. We still have dogs exterminated by the thousands in the streets as a matter of everyday business. We still have pups being killed by the millions, behind closed doors, at taxpayer expense, often for no reason beyond human convenience.

  Making sure dogs are treated the way they should be treated is like trying to organize a giant puzzle of irreparably mismatched pieces. It involves uprooting a global industry built on history, tradition, religion, culture, politics, gender, societal obligations, and personal responsibility—all the stuff of humanity’s greatest world wars. Almost every individual interviewed for this book said he or she was a person who loves dogs, and almost everyone meant it in a different way. People who grew up believing dogs are outside animals who need only dry kibble every day
are never going to understand people who let dogs sleep in their beds and eat homemade organic treats. People who believe a dog’s life is incomplete without a daily walk in the park are never going to understand people who believe it’s okay for a dog to live her entire life in a pen. People who have spent their lifetimes believing they can improve a certain style of dog more than nature itself are never going to understand people who feel they’ve gotten an awesome deal when buying a mutt for a thousand dollars.

  Trying to fit the mismatched puzzle pieces together is about as likely to work as uniting conservatives and liberals, Christians and atheists, men and women. Instead, we dog lovers must use our collective power to speak the only language everyone in the dog industry understands: the language of money. More of us good-hearted people are out there in the world than bad guys trying to make cash by treating dogs badly. We dog lovers need to embrace our potentially game-changing role in the marketplace, because we’re the only ones who can ultimately put the worst players out of business.

  For more than a century, dog lovers have left this job up to others, and the results have been mixed at best. Groups like the AKC, Britain’s Kennel Club, and FCI may imply that they have the breeders under control, but that’s untrue because plenty of lousy breeders make as much, if not more, money selling dogs as their responsible competitors. Government agencies from the USDA to the European Union can institute all the laws they want to protect dogs, but it’s not enough if there’s still money to be made in treating them badly, as evidenced by regular puppy mill busts. Humane societies and nonprofit rescue groups can collect hundreds of millions of dollars, euros, and pounds sterling, and they can do a great job of finding homes for more dogs than in the past, but they cannot ultimately resolve the root challenges because they’re up against a global industry with an ever growing supply of consumers.

  Because it all starts with us dog buyers, it can only be resolved in large part by us, too. Every cent and pence that is made, every dog whose life is affected or ended, all of it comes back to regular people and how we choose to spend our money from the start. As long as enough of us keep feeding the worst parts of the system with our cash, the system as a whole will remain unchanged. It really is that simple.

  The thirty million or so dogs brought into homes every year have to come from somewhere. Pointing fingers at breeders or rescuers is not the answer. Neither side is going anywhere. When all the arguing is done, there will still be breeders, there will still be shelters, and there will still be for-profit and nonprofit middlemen working the market in between. All of them are necessary to satisfy customer demand. That’s the marketplace we’ve created.

  The fastest way to create change for dogs today, therefore, is not ethical, legal, or political. It is financial.

  Our pooches, no matter how much we love them as members of our families, are legal products for sale. Whether we’re signing a contract that says “sale” or “adoption,” and whether we are standing in an auction house or a shelter, we are handing over cash to fund not just one segment of the $11 billion industry but also an individual seller. The good news is that almost everyone dealing in dogs is a mom-and-pop business, or slightly larger at best. Nobody, not even the biggest pet store chains and nonprofits, has cornered the global market on dog sales like a multinational Walmart or Tyson Foods. Dog lovers are not buying into a system that is beyond the scope of change. We’re buying into a system that is still evolving worldwide, and that will reshape itself depending on where we allow the most money to be made.

  The biggest challenge, really, involves not what most breeders and rescuers are doing, but instead what we, ourselves, are thinking and feeling. Many of us love our dogs so much that contemplating their existence as products feels unconscionable. One recent study showed that more than 80 percent of us believe our pups are members of our families, equal in status to children, and that more than half of us call ourselves pet parents instead of pet owners. A 2014 headline in the New York Post, citing data on childbirth and dog buying trends, read, “More Young Women Choosing Dogs over Motherhood.” Feeling this depth of love for our pups is a wonderful thing—but it’s blinding us to the action that will solve their problems in the broader world today. If we want to change things for the better for all dogs, then we have to approach this issue not as pet parents, but instead as smart buyers. It’s not heartfelt desire but cash flow that is the eternal counterforce to shady sellers. The role of the dog lover is to be a conscious consumer. As things stand today, money is the best leverage our beloved dogs have.

  Once we understand and accept this reality, we can put our $11 billion a year to use with more savvy than any dog-buying generation in history. We can be the first truly conscious consumers of dogs. It starts with understanding the scope of the industry, and it continues with using that knowledge to see through the sales pitches the next time we decide to buy a dog—to ensure we truly are giving our money to a seller for the right reasons.

  When Harold Herzog talks about social contagion, he’s not talking about Ebola or the flu. He’s instead talking about one of the many underlying forces that persuade us to hand over our money to one dog seller versus another, one of the forces we must learn to understand if we’re going to be conscious consumers the next time we go shopping for a pup.

  Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, worked with colleagues at University College London and the University of California–Davis to study trends in AKC dog registrations between 1946 and 2001. The data set, taken from what is believed to be the world’s largest registry of purebred dogs, included more than forty-two million pooches. And it showed that, decade after decade, decisions about which dogs to buy had less to do with the dogs themselves than many of us might believe. Consumer choices instead have followed a classic power-law distribution curve, or what in recent years has become known in business circles as a “long tail curve” (a most fortunate nickname when discussing dogs). It’s basically a fancy way of saying that dog buying is often no more than a culture-wide popularity contest, or a series of fads.

  The nickname long tail comes from the shape of the graph that a power-law distribution has when it’s plotted on a standard X axis and Y axis. There’s a huge spike where the line starts up in the top left corner, and then the line has a precipitous drop that flattens out and goes on and on forever to the right. That’s the long tail.

  In buying and selling, the power-law distribution curve is the stuff of blockbuster movies, platinum records, and bestselling books. Whatever it is that lots of people are buying creates that huge spike in the line at the top left, while the less-popular content exists on the long, thin tail, selling just a few copies apiece. Nowadays, Labrador Retriever sales would be up in the top left spike while sales of Cesky Terriers, Otterhounds, and Canaan Dogs would be at the far end of the tail. Everything that is for sale, eventually, becomes part of the long tail as its popularity wanes, but every seller’s goal is to keep a product up in the top left corner. That’s where the money is to be made, in being the most popular product for as long as possible.

  Knowing the magic mix that gets a product into that top left corner is what makes legendary marketing careers, but researchers have shown it often includes hidden drivers, like social contagion, that most people never notice. The idea of social contagion is that we have a tendency to copy what we see others doing, whether or not we’ve even met the other people. It’s why top-ten lists are everywhere: Consumers seem to have an innate desire to follow other people’s buying instincts and choices. We do it when picking baby names. We do it when deciding whether or not to take up the habit of smoking. Researchers have proved that people are copycats with all kinds of things, including, according to Herzog and his colleagues, deciding which dog to buy.

  “Over the past five decades, shifts in preferences for some types of dogs show the boom-bust patterns that are hallmarks of fads,” he writes. “Fluctuations of this magnitude suggest that social contagion is a majo
r factor in the choices people make for their animal companions. In this regard, pets are no different from popular music, athletic shoes, and clothing styles. In short, dog breeds have become a form of fashion.”

  Herzog also determined, in looking at AKC registration data, that the average time any breed spends in the top popularity spot is fourteen years. Each of the popular breeds has had a boom-bust cycle no different than any other fad in our culture, be it bell-bottom jeans during the 1970s or Madonna albums during the 1980s or Harry Potter books during the 2000s. Dog lovers make one style of purebred the favorite for a while, and then tire of it and bring in a new blockbuster, right on cue.

  Rin Tin Tin is a great example. His run of popularity starting in the 1920s was approximately thirteen years, from the date of his first starring movie role until the German Shepherd breed was replaced in the number-one purebred popularity slot—by the Cocker Spaniel, which held sway for more than a decade as well. The current favorite, Labrador Retriever, has enjoyed a reign of ten to fifteen years, depending on how one judges the statistics. Odds are good there will be a new favorite soon, no matter how many people claim today that Labs are the best dogs in the world. Arguably, today’s trends in buying mutts may include a social-contagion factor. “Rescue is my favorite breed” T-shirts and magnets are now becoming as ubiquitous in some places as “I love my Labrador” merchandise was in its heyday.

  This phenomenon of social contagion is what underpins comments made at the core of the dog market by people like Chadd Hughes, who said, back in chapter 1, while coaxing breeders to invest in underpriced dogs at the auction house: “Anybody in the dog business knows that if you have the dog when the trend hits, that’s when you make your money.” The phenomenon is also a reminder of what happens when a whole lot of consumers jump on the bandwagon and rescuers end up inundated with Dalmatians or Jack Russell Terriers. “Fads may also be a factor in euthanasia of unwanted pets,” Herzog writes. “Individuals who choose a puppy on the basis of unconscious social contagion may find that the now-grown dog is not suited to their living situation.”