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.