Stray Dog Blues

There are many glossy magazines on the rack devoted to promoting pet ownership.  Most are marketing organs of the multi-billion dollar pet industry.  Estimates of the world population of dogs are usually in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 million.  In regions that live within temporary bubbles of affluence, pets are four-legged engines of robust profits.  In regions of decline, they can turn into dangerous problems.

PETA’s statement on pets begins with this line: “We at PETA very much love the animal companions who share our homes, but we believe that it would have been in the animals’ best interests if the institution of ‘pet keeping’ — i.e., breeding animals to be kept and regarded as ‘pets’ — never existed.”  They go on to present a number of sound reasons for this position.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to come across the website of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, and it knocked me over: “An estimated 75% of the world’s dog population are strays.”  Wowsa!  You know, I’ve never seen images of mangy packs of vicious mongrels on the cover of Doggie Style magazine.  Well, grab a beer, and let’s take a little visit to the rarely examined world of non-corporate reality.

In The Tracker, Tom Brown described dog problems in his Pine Barrens region of New Jersey in 1977.  Folks would often drive out into the woods and abandon their unwanted dogs and puppies, which would join packs of feral dogs that congregated around dumps.  From time to time, dog packs would get too large and become a nuisance.  They would kill horses, cattle, pets, and entire flocks of sheep.  One dog snatched a baby out of its stroller, and continued gnawing on its head while two men vigorously kicked it.  Going outdoors was risky, because dogs often attacked people.  The miserable dogs were starving, diseased, and covered with open sores and big ticks.  Tom was hired to shoot the pack, and he did, with mixed emotions.

Today, Detroit is playing a leadership role in the process of urban healing — depopulating, decomposing, and returning to forest.  There may be up to 50,000 abandoned dogs running loose and breeding.  Postal workers are fearful of delivering mail to some neighborhoods, because of the packs of mean dogs.  Many residents are increasingly afraid of stepping outside.

In 1977, an earthquake in Bucharest, Romania killed 1,500 people and destroyed a portion of the city.  Thousands of dogs became homeless, formed vicious packs, and by the ‘90s they had taken over the streets.  Residents were regularly bitten and mauled.  A Japanese businessman was killed by dogs on one of the city’s most exclusive streets.  The reputation of the city deteriorated sharply, as did its tourism industry.

Traian Băsescu was the mayor of Bucharest from 2000 to 2004.  During his administration, the number of stray dogs was reduced from 300,000 to 25,000, and the number of injuries caused by dogs dropped sharply.  Today it is fairly safe to be outdoors in the center of downtown (but not in the suburbs).  This reduction was achieved in a manner that was often mercilessly brutal, producing a loud outcry from animal rights advocates, many of whom lived elsewhere, and did not experience an intense fear of vicious dogs on a constant basis.  In 2004, Băsescu became the president of Romania.  Some estimate that there are two million stray dogs across Romania.

Gardiner Harris recently wrote a stunning horror story about the dogs of India.  “No country has as many stray dogs as India, and no country suffers as much from them.  Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children.”  About 20,000 bite victims die of rabies every year, an excruciatingly painful death. 

Joggers and bicyclists are frequently chased, and they defend themselves with rods and rocks.  People walking dogs often witness their pet being ripped to shreds by packs of hungry mongrels.  The mother of a 3-year old child killed by dogs said, “There are stray dogs everywhere in Delhi.  We are more scared of dog bites than anything else.”

Meanwhile, the rising middle class of India is very interested in increasing their social status by paying big money for trendy dogs.  “But many pedigreed dogs end up on the street, the castoffs of unsuccessful breeders or owners who tire of the experiment.”

Poverty is widespread in India, and piles of uncollected garbage provide a steady food supply for assorted scavengers.  But it got to where people were slaying too many annoying dogs, so this killing was outlawed in 2001.  Guess what happened to the dog population.  Some worry that in the absence of dogs, the garbage piles would become the breeding grounds for billions of rats and their fleas, increasing the risk of a plague pandemic.

As we move beyond the temporary bubble of cheap energy, how long will it be before similar scenarios emerge in New York, London, Paris, and your town?  How many potential pet owners are highly confident that the next ten years will include regular employment, a middle class income, and a stable economy?  Do they own several acres of land, free and clear, with sturdy fencing?  Do they have a work life that wouldn’t require leaving pets alone much of the time?

When dogs aren’t adequately fed, they cease being our friends.  In his book, The Plague of the Spanish Lady, Richard Collier described the influenza pandemic of 1918.  The mission boat Harmony had spread the flu virus to a number of small isolated settlements in the arctic.  In the village of Okak, Labrador, only 59 of 266 residents survived.  In Hebron, just 70 of 220 survived.  A village might have 500 sled dogs, and when they got hungry, they would break into huts and eat the dead and dying.  

Mike Davis discussed a similar scenario in Late Victorian Holocausts.  In the drought of 1876-1878, famine killed millions in India, while countless pariah dogs got fat by eating the “skeletonized” and the dead.

Many other cultures have no inhibitions about eating dogs.  In the journal Archaeology, Jarrett A. Lobell and Eric Powell wrote that dogs were part of the regular diet in some Native American societies.  Large quantities of butchered dog bones were found near the Cahokia site, close to St. Louis.  “The Aztecs, whose ancestors were called the Chichimec, or ‘Dog People,’ are known to have bred a hairless dog they called a Xoloitzcuintle to serve at royal feasts.”  Abundant evidence of dog eating has been found at Olmec sites along the Gulf of Mexico.  “Although they had an abundance of food at their disposal, the Olmec ate dogs as part of their regular diet.”

Dogs were convenient livestock.  They remained close to the settlement, didn’t need fences or herders, and they lived on garbage.  During periods of bad hunting, they came to our rescue.  In times of war, when Europeans were trapped in besieged cities, Fido regularly shape shifted into “blockade mutton.”

The pet industry has yet to penetrate large regions of the developing world, and transform dogs into “fur children” and family members.  Hal Herzog reported that in Asia, 16 million dogs and 4 million cats are eaten annually.  In some cultures, dog meat is believed to increase libido and virility (four-legged Viagra).  Don’t tell grandpa.

As the collapse proceeds, growing problems with stray dogs seem very likely.  The issue is emotionally supercharged, and I have no cheap, easy, win-win solutions to offer.  As consumer societies deflate, pet keeping is sure to decline.  We may be near Peak Pets now.

This concludes my canine series.  Thank you!  Have a nice day!  See you in church.

Brown, Tom, The Tracker, Berkeley Publishing Group, New York, 1979.

Collier, Richard, The Plague of the Spanish Lady, Atheneum, New York, 1974.

Davis, Mike, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, New York, 2001.

Harris, Gardiner, “Where Streets Are Thronged With Strays Baring Fangs,” New York Times, 7 August 2012, New York edition.

Herzog, Hal, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2010.

Lobell, Jarrett A., and Powell, Eric, “Dogs as Food,” Archaeology, Sept-Oct 2010.

Beyond Zenith

From the zenith of the Upper Paleolithic, things began a downhill drift.  A number of species went extinct from climate change (ice ages) and/or over-hunting.  Every type of animal had effective survival strategies, like flying, fleeing, swimming, climbing trees, injecting venom, or counterattack.  These strategies were very old, and programmed into genes and instincts.  They worked.  They permitted a survival rate high enough to enable the continued existence of the species.

Clever humans invented ways of outwitting these defense mechanisms, and killing more and more animals.  Part of this was due to continuous improvement in hunting hardware — like spears, lances, nets, bows and arrows, traps, and snares.  We also improved our skills at exploiting enslaved animals. 

“The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound,” wrote Paul Shepard.  “The first domesticated wolves were not pets, guards, companions, or meals but fellow hunters.  With dogs, the first domesticated animals, the ‘conquering’ of nature started toward its final calamity.”  Super-sensitive canine noses were powerful assets for our hunting teams, and working in packs reduced the odds of prey escaping.

During my research, I was surprised to find that war dogs have long been used for killing human enemies — by the Romans, Britons, Greeks Babylonians, and others.  When two armies met, dozens of dogs, weighing up to 200 pounds (91 kg), deliberately underfed, would be set loose to attack, terrify, and kill both soldiers and horses.  War dogs were especially effective in the New World, where the Indians had darker skins, distinctive scents, and different attire than the incredibly sadistic Spaniards.  The dogs had an easier time identifying the designated prey, thus ripping to shreds far fewer white dudes by accident.

The trio of horses, dogs, and humans took hunting and warfare to a new and far more deadly dimension.  Marco Polo described Genghis Khan’s process for acquiring wild meat.  There were two flanks of hunters, each having 10,000 men and 5,000 great mastiff dogs.  The line of hunters would extend to the length of a full day’s journey, and no wild animal would escape their dragnet.  These hunts were like a bloody vacuum cleaner.

On the US plains, vast buffalo herds survived because these animals could run at speeds up to 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).  When Indians got horses, the buffalo lost their speed advantage, and became much easier to kill.  And then came the legions of white guys with rifles, on a sacred mission to eliminate all buffalo.

William T. Hornaday was born on the Indiana frontier in 1854, and he experienced the thunderous roar of millions of passenger pigeons passing overhead for hours.  He was of the last generation to know the incredible abundance of wildlife that once existed in the American west.  He witnessed the final conquest of all lands from coast to coast, and then he was horrified to observe a million bubbas with cheap rifles and shotguns blowing away every wild creature they could find, as fast as they could.  He wrote “that nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States.”

William M. Tsutsui wrote an essay about environmental impacts in wartime Japan.  By the end of World War II, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and dogs had almost disappeared.  Zoo animals had been eaten.  Many millions of songbirds were netted and consumed.  When allied soldiers landed in Japan, it was extremely rare to see a bird anywhere.  In 1945, the Japanese were clear-cutting almost 50 square miles (129 sq. km) of forest each week to make fuel for the war machine.  It took many tons of pine roots to make a single gallon of oil.  Rapid deforestation created many eco-nightmares.  Could this be a preview of our future?

Humans evolved in a world filled with abundant wildlife.  Wild animals played an important role in shaping what we became, mentally and physically.  Shepard noted that hunters were spellbound when observing wild animals, and could watch them for an hour, in a state of absolute fascination.  But the children of tourists at Yellowstone are quickly bored by the sight of a herd of elk.  These kids suffer from an immense deprivation of healthy contact with the natural world, multiplied by the stresses of living amidst crowds of humans, mostly strangers — not to mention their obsession with techno-gadgetry.

With the explosive expansion of the domesticated world, our children have largely lost contact with the shrinking realm of the normal, healthy, unspoiled wild.  Shepard was a dog owner, and he understood that many owners experience genuine affection for their pets.  But pets can never be, in any way, replacements for regular contact with free wild animals.  “Something is profoundly wrong with the human/animal pet relationship at its most basic level.”  Pets were “compensations for something desperately missing, minimal replacements for friendship in all of its meanings.”

In our daily lives, we are bombarded with countless consumer fantasies, including many from the highly profitable pet industry.  In these fantasies, pets have become living toys, and living toy fantasies are starkly different from the real experience of bringing an animal into your life.  Real live pets have little in common with Disney fantasies, and every year millions of people realize that they no longer want a real live pet in their lives.

For each human born in the US, 8 to 15 dogs are born, and 20 to 30 cats.  In Inside Passage, Richard Manning wrote, “Six million to seven million dogs and cats are killed in animal shelters every year.  The city of Los Angeles alone sends 200 tons of dogs and cats to rendering plants each month.”  Should this bother us more than the chicken industry, or mass murdering cockroaches with toxic poisons?

The pet industry has convinced us that feeding human food to pets is unhealthy, and that commercial pet food is excellent.  Laura Sevier explored the ingredients used in commercial pet food (including road kill, euthanized pets, livestock with cancer, moldy grain, etc.).  “Surveys show that overall pet health is declining almost as rapidly as human health.  Cats and dogs are now developing a vast list of degenerative diseases, including autoimmune diseases, allergies, heart disease, diabetes, chronic digestive problems joint and arthritic problems, and cancer.”  Nearly one in three British dogs are overweight, but thankfully diet pills are available (Yarvitan, Slentrol, etc.). 

One in every three dogs gets cancer, and cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs.  Cancer kills between 60 and 70 percent of golden retrievers.  The average bulldog lives a bit longer than six years, and the breed typically suffers from an unusual number of health problems.  In Thinking With Animals, James Serpell, an animal specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that “if bulldogs were the product of genetic engineering by agripharmaceutical corporations, there would be protest demonstrations throughout the Western world, and rightly so.”

Imagine what the pet industry could do with your children if breeders were given the freedom to produce trendy, and profitable new forms of Homo sapiens — adorable little kewpie doll critters with big eyes, or heavily-muscled 800 pound security guards.  Whenever I see a miniature dog, I shudder at what humans have done to wolves.

A study by Dr. Claire Corriden of the British Small Animal Veterinary Association concluded that “eighty per cent of dogs have one or more behaviour problems,” including hyperactivity, phobic behavior, separation anxiety, sleeping problems, anxiety, anorexia, self-mutilation, stress, and depression.

Australian journalist, Ruth Ostrow, was fascinated by the growing use of psych meds for pets and zoo animals.  There was a growing pandemic of mental problems in domesticated animals, including humans.  “It has something to do with depression and captivity, or a sense of captivity.”  There was a connection between freedom and happiness.  Healthy wild animals don’t become mentally unbalanced.  “When the soul feels free, a natural sense of wellbeing follows.  The power of freedom cannot be put into a tablet for animals or humans.”  (I love that last sentence!)  Nothing beats freedom!

So anyway, we’ve been reduced from an amazing zenith of total wildness and freedom to a depressing manmade world of domesticated humans and dogs, many overweight, suffering from degenerative diseases, and widespread mental illness.  Luckily, the temporary bubble of cheap energy is almost over, which will force the status quo into a fundamental reboot.  Our grandchildren will not suffer from the same extreme zaniness that we do, but they are sure to have interesting challenges of their own.

OK, your homework assignment is to imagine new ways of living that might become possible after the temporary bubble of abundant cheap energy is over.  Can you imagine paths to genuine sustainability?

To be continued.

Hornaday, William T., Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1913.

Manning, Richard, Inside Passage — A Journey Beyond Borders, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2001.

Ostrow, Ruth, “Freedom Heals the Soul,” The Australian, September 15, 2012, p. 20.

Paul Shepard, The Others — How Animals Made Us Human, Island Press, Washington, 1996.

Polo, Marco and Rustichello of Pisa, The Travels of Marco Polo, Project Gutenberg, 2004 (Henry Yule’s third edition, 1903).

Serpell, James A., "People in Disguise: Anthromorphism and the Human-Pet Relationship,” Thinking With Animals, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.

Sevier, Laura, “Should My Dog Eat Dog Food?” Ecologist, March 2009.

Tsutsui, William, “Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan,” Natural Enemy — Toward an Environmental History of War, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2004, pp. 195-216.