Dog of the South
by Michael Schaffer

It seems everyone with even the faintest bit of expertise about the pet industry is using the Obama family’s search for a dog as an opportunity to make their various favored points about animals and society. But one person who’s really worth listening to is Hal Herzog, a guy who’s spent two decades studying, among other things, the rise and fall of dog breed popularity. I interviewed him for my book, and cited his really cool articles based on decades worth of AKC registration data. The data showed vast, seemingly unpredictable ebbs and flows in the number of new dogs of a particular breed registered each year. The Irish Setter, for instance, rose steadily from a small base, becoming a hugely popular breed by the early 70s. And then it went bust. Why? Among the things Herzog ruled out was pop-culture attention. It turned out starring in a movie or winning the Westminster dog show did little for a breed’s popularity. Herzog instead favored the idea of random drift, with people copying others. Sort of like the popularity of first names.

This week, Herzog’s in the pages of the the Washington Post arguing that Obama should adopt a dog from the South. The piece gets into another phenomenon I wrote about, the tremendous success of spay-neuter campaigns in the north and on the coasts. One result: Far fewer unwanted dogs. In the shelters of big, coastal cities, the animals a disprportionately likely to be pit bulls or other breeds a lot of people don’t want to adopt. In response, a sort of canine underground railroad has sprung up, shipping thousands of animals each year from southern and heartland areas where spay-neuter hasn’t been as big a deal–and where the pooches are more likely to be popular hounds than scary bulls:

…The rush to pluck the reproductive organs from every household pet in America has been so successful that we may be running out of dogs.

In fact, some leaders in the animal welfare movement worry that the slack will be taken up by puppy mills in countries such as Mexico and China. Meanwhile, others believe that the United States has plenty of dogs to go around. The only problem is that they’re in the wrong places.

There is distinct geographic disparity in the distribution of adoptable pets because spay-and-neuter campaigns have been much less successful in Southern states than in other parts of the country. For instance, the per capita rate of unwanted pet euthanasia is 40 times higher in my home state of North Carolina than in Connecticut. It seems a lot of people in the South don’t like restrictions on the sex lives of their pets any more than they like zoning laws or gun control.

There is, however, an upside to my region’s historic resistance to animal birth control. It is that, on the whole, our shelter dogs make better pets than the shelter dogs in other parts of the country. Michael Mountain, co-founder of Best Friends Animal Society, the nation’s largest sanctuary for abandoned pets, says that animal shelters in the urban North are “overrun with pit bulls.” And because a higher proportion of dogs in Northern shelters have been neglected or abused, many of them suffer the canine equivalent of post-traumatic stress syndrome. That means that they are not good candidates for adoption into the average home.

The bottom line is that most of the people who want to adopt a dog are up north, while most of the dogs in need of good homes are down south.

Sleeping with the Enemy
by Michael Schaffer

I’ve been working on a story about beds. It turns out that in the last decade, sales of queen-sized beds for the first time exceeded those of twin beds–a product of bigger houses, bigger people, and maybe some changes in ideas about sex (people are less concerned that promoting their teenagers to double-wide beds is an invitation to bedroom nookie than they must have been back when the married Ricky and Lucy Ricardo slept in separate twin beds).

Bed size can be a cause of apparently unrelated phenomena as well as result of them. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that beds have also gotten thicker, with mattresses and box springs balooning from a standard eight inches to sizes of up to 20 inches thick. Meantime, years of pet-owner surveys have shown how the dog that lived in the back yard is more and more likely to rest his head on that same bed. And modern nutrition means dogs live longer than ever. Combine these things, and what do you get? An increase in hip and leg problems for dogs who spend years leaping daily from modern America’s gargantuan beds. Luckily, there’s a solution: The journal piece also reported that bed stairs were among the fastest-growing products in the pet retail sector.

Celebs Behaving Badly
by Michael Schaffer

Attention, gossip columnists! Putting a name to this blind item, via dlisted, is a surefire way to get that elusive celebrity scalp on your wall:

Which young celebrity should be reported to the humane society? She made a big fuss over a new puppy a while back, bringing it everywhere with her. Then the dog got older and bigger and more unruly, and the novelty wore off. She stopped traveling with it, and after a few indoor accidents, stopped allowing it in the house. The poor pup now spends half its time completely alone in the backyard, sometimes without food and water for the day if the owner forgets about it. 

America will forgive all manner of celebrity sex tapes, DUIs, and public infidelities. Mistreating a pooch? Not so much.

Putting the “dog” back in “downward dog.”
by Michael Schaffer

Dog yoga? Old news. Dog yoga on Martha Stewart? Intriguing!

Vets and Economics
by Michael Schaffer

In One Nation Under Dog, I spend a lot of time talking about the onward and upward progression of various sorts of pet spending. The book, in fact, started out life as being in part a chronicle of American excess. After a couple years of reporting, I realized I was on to something a lot more complicated–a story about our changing ideas of family, health, nurturing, education, the law, etc., all of them manifested in the seemingly goofy subject of how we treat our pets. And, as it happens, between the time I filed the book at the time it’ll be published, excess went out of style. This might have petrified me a few years ago, but right now my sense is that the Great Recession won’t change the basic contours petkeeping world very much at all.

I’m still waiting for good data, of course, on what’s been going on with pet spending. (I’ll be able to check some of them out at next month’s Global Pet Expo). My hunch is that you’ll see some of the bling-y areas take a big hit.  But I bet some of the other areas will be fine. Once you’ve decided that your basic responsibilities to your four-legged family member include nutritious food, it’s hard to go back to serving what you’d disdained as garbage, no matter how rotten things are. All the same, I’ve picked up all sorts of sad stories about foreclosed families giving up pets because their new rental units won’t allow animals, and veterinary clients unable to afford pricey and crucial procedures.  

That last category, though, may actually be helping spur growth of an industry that has been one of petworld’s economic darlings over the past decade: Veterinary insurance. In my book, I chronicle the explosion of new firms on the market, which the industry trade group has predicted will grow to $500 million next year from $80 million in 2002. Here’s a story suggesting that the desire to hedge against future expenses may be strengthened by the recession. Oddly, one thing I found in my reporting was that Europe, which lags behind the US in most aspects of petmania, was well ahead in the growth of pet insurance, notably in Sweden and the UK. One theory about why is that humans there are much more accustomed to group coverage than we are. Another way petkeeping reflects human lifestyle.

When Poodles Attack!
by Michael Schaffer

What’s the best way to start a blog that is supposed to concern subjects near and far from my forthcoming book? How about one that simultaneously concerns two of my favorite subjects: French politics and canine antidepressants. It seems that former French President Jacques Chirac was rushed to the hospital last week after being bitten by Sumo, his lapdog. It seems Sumo was already being treated for clinical depression, though the meds apparently weren’t enough to keep him from chomping his maitre.  

The saga has earned big play, naturally, in the British press, who leap at any opportunity to play up the stereotype of France as a land of lapdog-coddling wussies. Though Sumo is identified as a Maltese, the headlines, further conforming to national stereotypes, refer to the dog as a poodle. Ironically, much of the stateside animus against Chirac has to do with his decision to oppose George Bush’s plans for war in Iraq. At the time, Chirac was the bad guy while Britain’s Tony Blair was the solid buddy. Back home, though, Blair’s stance earned him a scornful nickname: Bush’s poodle. It’s funny how these things work.

Incidentally, Foreign Policy’s “Passport” blog points out that the Sumo incident was the third recent case of a misbehaving presidential dog: Bush’s terrier, Barney, bit a reporter last November, and Vladimir Putin is said to have used his black lab, Koni, to intimidate dog-phobic German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Coming Soon
by Michael Schaffer

Coming soon!