Chihuahua Zero?
by Michael Schaffer

One of my regular journalistic gigs is as a columnist for Obit magazine, where I do a wrap-up and review of how the media has covered the week’s major deaths. To help with the task, I have google alerts and subscriptions to a bunch of services that tip me off when some notable kicks the bucket. One little sign of the times came earlier this week via Celebrity Death Beeper, which sent out an alert to note the passing of Gidget the Chihuahua, star of the famous “Yo quiero Taco Bell” TV commercials. The AP even covered the news.

Via Petconnection, I also came across a very sweet obituary for the dog at PeoplePets.com.

“Other than a few other small cameos, Gidget’s working life didn’t continue much beyond her Taco Bell legacy. But she left quite an impression. ‘One time, I kid you not, she actually pushed her stand-in out of the way because he was still there when she arrived on set,’ [trainer Sue] Chipperton recalled with a laugh. ‘Gidget always knew where the camera was.’”

One thing I’m not so sure about, though, is Gina’s speculation about the grim side-effects of a nationally famous Chihuahua:

It’s a shame that her rise to cultural icon pushed the Chihuahua into every idiot girl’s purse and made it a staple of every quick-buck breeder’s shady operation or every puppy-milling scum’s “inventory.”  A lot of those dogs have been turning up in shelters steadily ever since. Breed rescuers and ethical breeders will be picking up the pieces for years to come.

It only stands to reason that media exposure would boost a breed’s popularity. But while I was researching my book, I spent some time chatting with Hal Herzog, a scholar who has actually crunched the numbers about why some breeds rise and others fall in popular appeal. Though tracking breed population is an inexact science–Herzog uses AKA registration figures, which don’t encompass all dogs and are themselves declining even as the pet population grows–his research suggests that media exposure has little to do with it. Winning the Westminster Kennel Club title, for instance, hasn’t had any dramatic impact on a breed’s population.  Ditto pop culture exposure, where, Herzog writes, famous cases like the run on Dalmatians sparked by 101 Dalmatians was the exception rather than the rule. Of Gidget, he writes:

The majority of the many hundreds of movies, television shows, and commercials featuring dogs have had little or no impact on the popularity of obscure breeds. Take the well-known Taco Bell television ad campaign that ran between 1997 and 2000 featuring a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua named Gidget (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”). The extemsive exposure of the breed during 3 years of media saturation did not produce an increase in the popularity of Chihuahuas. Indeed, registrations for the breed declined 43% between 1998 and 2003.

Now, it’s possible that Gidget affected Paris Hilton, who in turn caused puppy millers to turn their ghoulish attention to Chihuahuas. In fact, that seems the most logical explanation to me. In fact, I suspect Paris’ much-photographed travels with her pup helped shape ideas about the glamorousness of pets–ideas that have had rotten effects in terms of spurring frivolous pet-as-accessory acquisitions as well as well as good ones like helping open more restaurants to pets. But I don’t know that based on any data. The rise and fall of breeds turns out to be one of these very odd phenomena where causality is very hard to tease out.