America’s obsession with pets
I’m still clawing my way back to health after the flu, so the pace of posts here will continue to be slow for a bit. (The whole moving-to-a-new-house thing won’t make it faster, either.)
But here’s a good (although long) article I read the other day: A Pampered Pet Nation.
A growing number of animal behaviorists, researchers and trainers think we’ve gone off the deep end, anthropomorphizing and infantilizing our pets to the point that we’ve forgotten an essential biological truth: at the level of basic instinct, Tabby is a wildcat and Fido is a wolf. Understand this, the experts say, and you will comprehend such mysteries of the universe as why your cat prefers to sharpen its nails on your favorite sofa and your dog insists on rolling in manure after getting a bath. Ignore the call of the wild in your pet, and you not only diminish the quality of its life; you open yourself to all sorts of bad behavior, from the merely annoying (your cat pees on the bed) to the potentially deadly (snarling pit bulls). “Thirty years ago, dogs were rarely on leashes, they ran loose, they even bit people now and then. They were rarely given human names,� says Jon Katz, author of the best-selling book “A Good Dog� and the upcoming “Dog Days.� “Now, the whole atmosphere has changed. It’s not like we want them biting people, but now they don’t get enough exercise, they don’t do as much, they can’t explore. They’re basically being loved to death.�
Predictably, this backlash against overindulgence has spawned its own multi-million-dollar business with a slew of new books, pet-training services and top-rated TV shows like “The Dog Whisperer,� a “Supernanny� for overindulgent owners who treat their dogs like fur babies. “I rehabilitate dogs. I train people,� explains the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan. He’s the pack leader when it comes to showing pet owners just how delusional we’ve become—a latter-day Barbara Woodhouse, the dog trainer and 1980s BBC television personality who admonished, “There is no such thing as a difficult dog. Only an inexperienced owner.� “The Dog Whisperer,� which is the top-rated series on the National Geographic Channel and begins its fourth season in September, features Millan showing people how to cope with their problem pets: the toy terrier who attacks like a killer Doberman; the shepherd who neurotically chases his tail for hours on end. Millan’s mantra: Dogs need “exercise, discipline, affection,� in that order. Most owners do it backward, showering their animals with affection, but failing to enforce rules and boundaries. “When you start with affection, you are fulfilling your needs first. Dogs in America get more affection than women in most Third World countries,� says Millan, who grew up poor in Mexico. Millan came to California at age 21 with dreams of becoming, in his words, “the world’s best dog trainer.� After cleaning out kennels, then finding work as a groomer, he opened his own training business. This being Hollywood, he found no shortage of indulgent owners begging for his services, and soon was charging $350 an hour to teach the likes of Will Smith, Scarlett Johansson and Vin Diesel how to manage their mutts. That led to the TV show, where Millan gives owners a humbling lesson in proper parenting. The most difficult part is convincing people that their dogs aren’t children. “It’s not that they’re less than human. They aren’t human,� he explains to one owner, who seems genuinely surprised by the news.
When it comes to the animals that share our homes and even our beds (63 percent of cat owners and 42 percent of dog owners sleep with their pets, according to the APPMA), we humans tend to have a tough time accepting biological reality. “That puppy we’re oohing and aahing over is, on some level, really a killing and hunting machine,� Katz writes in his book “Katz on Dogs: A Commonsense Guide to Training and Living with Dogs.� I certainly can’t imagine my dog has an inner Cujo. Though her breed, the Rhodesian Ridgeback, is a fabled lion hunter, she hid her face in the crook of my arm the first time she met a hissing cat. Still, I suspect there’s a hunter in there somewhere. We’ll be on a hike, and Samantha’s nose will start twitching like her “Bewitched� namesake. Then she’ll stop in her tracks, muscles tense as she scans the road and spots her target: a rabbit. Suddenly, I’m being dragged by the leash and Samantha’s pretending she doesn’t understand me when I yell “come.� What she’s exhibiting is called “prey drive,� and it’s what makes all dogs and cats tick. When your Persian cat dances and paws at a piece of yarn, he’s actually showing what he’d do if that yarn were, say, a parakeet. My hound has never caught a rabbit, but I know that if she did it wouldn’t be pretty.
Much of what we consider “bad� behavior is merely a pet’s acting out its basic needs. “People see the cat scratching on their beautiful couch, and they don’t want me to tell them it’s a normal behavior,� says feline behavior consultant Pam Johnson-Bennett, author of the book “Hiss and Tell: True Stories from the Files of a Cat Shrink.� “But you have to realize that scratching is a need a cat has. It’s rooted in their survival.� The trick, then, isn’t to get the cat to stop scratching, but to make it scratch something you don’t value. Johnson-Bennett suggests a scratching post wrapped with sisal or rope—she says the carpeted kind don’t allow the cat to dig its nails in deep enough to be satisfying. She’s also big on “cat trees�: a series of perches that allow felines to climb and leap as they would in the wild.
For the first time in my long pet-owning life (Motley alone lasted almost 21 years), we got got one of these cat trees for Lucky and Hanna, and they adore it. They scratch it, they use it to hide and ambush each other, they race up and down it, they crawl into it for peace and quiet but, mostly, they sit atop it, surveying their domain. I consider it money well-spent.
To live with us as domesticated members of our families, dogs and cats have sublimated their prey drives—to a point. But the drive is still there. “Out in the wild, a cat hunts, then he feasts, then he grooms himself to get rid of all traces of prey, and then he sleeps. That goes on several times a day, based on how good a hunter the cat is,� says Johnson-Bennett. “But most of us forget about the hunting part, and then all the cat has is feast, groom, sleep. Then he gets so fat he can’t even groom himself.� Indeed, veterinarians say obesity is the greatest health threat facing America’s pets, with at least a quarter of the population overweight (that compares with a 30 percent obesity rate in American adults). Most pet owners don’t realize that when a pet is the correct weight, you can feel the outline of its ribs. “We’re so used to seeing overweight cats that when we see a healthy one, we think it’s too skinny,� Johnson-Bennett says. Which is why we now have Pfizer’s Slentrol, the world’s first prescription diet drug for dogs.
You can expect to see more plump pooches, as owners switch to people food for their pets in the wake of the tainting crisis that sickened scores of cats and dogs and resulted in 60 million units of pet food being pulled from the shelves. But many veterinarians caution that we may be doing our pets more harm than good by changing their diets. “When someone says pets should eat ‘human food,’ all you have to do is walk down the street to see what human food has done to humans in terms of obesity,� says Tony Buffington, a professor of veterinary clinical sciences at Ohio State University. “Nobody’s looking at the health of the animals.� Some owners have taken to feeding their pets a “raw foods� diet of uncooked meats, like they would eat in the wild. But vets warn that these can occasionally be as dangerous as the canned food laced with rat poison that was recalled. “There are multiple studies that show these [raw-food] diets are often contaminated with bacteria,� says Lisa Freeman of the American College of Veterinary Nutrition. “In addition, some recipes include bones, which can fracture the teeth or get stuck in the stomach, esophagus or intestines.� And you thought a steak bone was a nice treat.
The good news is that overly aggressive behavior can be bred out of dogs over several generations. “People used to talk about Dobermans the way they talk about pit bulls. They were violent,� says Coren. “So in the 1950s, the Doberman Club in the U.S. put a temperament standard on the dogs. It basically said that any dog that showed spontaneous aggression would get his breeding certificate revoked.� With aggressive dogs prevented from reproducing, breeders focused on creating more docile Dobies, and, Coren says, “in 10 or 12 years they completely changed the breed, and now it’s the solid dog we know today.� Eugenics like this could improve the temperament of the much-maligned pit: following the mauling death of a 12-year-old boy two years ago, San Francisco passed an ordinance requiring all pit bulls in the city to be spayed or neutered. The idea isn’t just to make the dogs calmer by fixing them, but to prevent individual owners from breeding ever-more aggressive canines; it will also force people to buy their pits from reputable breeders who aren’t trying to create killing machines.
What can’t be bred out of dogs is the trait that makes them bond so well with humans: the pack instinct. What we call “loyalty� in our dogs may actually be a result of the wolf’s nature as a pack animal: the bonding and sociality that keep a wolf pack together are what drive the domesticated dog to stick with its owner. “The family unit here just happens to be cross-species,� says Samuel Gosling, a psychologist at University of Texas, Austin, who specializes in canine research. The fact that wolves are pack animals and wildcats aren’t may help explain why we perceive dogs as loving and needy, and cats as independent and aloof. The pack instinct is also what makes dogs such good communicators, Gosling says. “If I’m hunting in a pack, I’ve got to be aware of how others are behaving. This is why in all the experiments, dogs turn out to do extraordinarily well in social cognition tasks. Dogs can understand pointing, for instance—and if you think about it, that’s quite a difficult task,� he says. Dogs are even capable of lying, or at least masking their true feelings. “A dog will purposely hide the outward expression of aches and pains to ensure it is able to keep up with the pack, and also to avoid a dominance challenge from another pack member,� says Mark Cole, a veterinarian who has written extensively on how dogs exhibit pain. “In times of stress or trouble, the behaviors that help a wolf survive are the same as a domestic dog’s: a wolf’s protection, beyond its own cunning, speed, teeth and claws, comes from the pack.�
Pack psychology is what many dog trainers use these days to get their pupils to, uh, puppy up. “All of my dogs follow me everywhere, looking at me saying, ‘What are we going to do?'” says Flo Walberg of Chatsworth, Calif., who trains dogs for competition. “If you don’t get your pet to respect you, he will walk all over you.â€? The Dog Whisperer likes to work with dogs in packs, positioning himself as the alpha male and letting the canines fall into line in an elaborate hierarchy they sort out themselves according to age, sex and level of dominance or submission. “Dogs need a stable pack leader,â€? Millan says. Watching him step into a pen of 25 snarling pit bulls, Rotweillers, and chow mixes at his “Dog Psychology Centerâ€? is a truly breathtaking experience: many of these animals are here because they’ve attacked someone, and you can’t help but think this compact man with the broad smile is about to become their next snack. But the dogs quickly submit to Millan’s calm yet assertive demeanor as he walks briskly around the pen with his head held high, the pooches prancing behind him like exquisitely trained geishas.
I have no idea why Newsweek thinks it’s a good idea to have huge paragraphs with no line breaks for new ideas or quotes. It certainly doesn’t make for an easy read.
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I love cat trees! I’m always looking for a really well-designed one that will meet the “king of the jungle” needs that Lucky clearly has and yet gives a decent hiding place for Hanna to burrow into.
Comment by Jenn — June 4, 2007 @ 10:25