What Will Become of the Pandemic Pets?
Some dead animals we eat, others we mourn. No creature on the planet kills or coddles other species the way humans do. The scenario of a global pandemic erupting from a wet marketfrom exotic carcasses in dubious circumstancesclarifies the mind, no matter the viability of the lab-leak hypothesis. Animals, or, really, our mishandling of them, may well have got us into this mess, and in many ways we have been relying on them to get us through it. Our fraught relationship with the beasts under our dominion may make us the most exotic animal of all. No matter how you run the numbers, pet adoption became an obsession in the time of Covid. A story line emerged that people, confined to their homes, deprived of contact with the outside world, and often suffering emotional or psychological distress, were adopting more pets than usualanother boom, along with sourdough baking and butt implants. Doodles bounded in. Veterinarians were slammed. The vet network BluePearl, which is owned by Mars (whose pet-care business dwarfs its candy business), reported that visits were up more than twenty per cent in 2020and that more than half of them were from new patients. Vets, eager for more space, became an unlikely engine in the sputtering commercial-real-estate market. Kate Perry, a trainer and the co-author of Training for Both Ends of the Leash, said, In my world, its puppies, puppies, rescues, rescues, more puppies. Everyone was desperate at the same time. Petcos sales rose by eleven per cent, Chewys by forty-seven per cent, and Morgan Stanley has predicted that the pet-care industry will almost triple in size in the next decade. (It should surprise no one that private equity is horning in.) A recent survey found that three out of four American millennials own a pet, a fashionable generalization being that since they cant afford to buy homes and dont want kids, they are nesting instead with their fur babies. Little dogs in bags and strollers, on laps at restaurants, in funny hats and sweaters. A bull terrier blows by in an Adidas tracksuit: Spuds gone chav. Some people seem to privilege pets over spawn. Perry said she was teaching courses in how to detach from your dog and prioritize your baby.  Social feeds, doom aside, became a balmy menagerie of influencer pugs and lets-all-make-one-another-feel-better terriers and mutts. Some people were using their animals as magnets for likes or even as entrepreneurial fodder. Others just wanted to spread the cute. Bunny, the talking sheepadoodle, has 6.7 million followers on TikTok. Happiness is a warm JPEG. A tweet, from the writer Sarah Miller: Someone was just complaining about the whole Im sad show me your pets routine . . . and this made me sad so . . . Im afraid . . . I need to see . . . your pets!  Fashionable breeds, their value rising amid sudden demand, turned up in the crime blotter. In December, a man from Cameroon was arrested in Romania for catfishing Americans out of thousands of dollars for phantom miniature dachshunds and teacup Chihuahuas. The prosecutor, a U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania, felt compelled to state, The desire for companionship [is] higher than ever. In February, on a quiet residential street in Hollywood, three men stole two French bulldogs belonging to Lady Gaga, and shot the dog-walker. Gaga offered half a million dollars for their safe return, and soon enough a woman came forward, claiming to have found them, only to be charged not long afterward as the thieves accessorycompanionship of another kind. The numbers only sometimes support the narrative. Although dognapping appears to be up, pet adoption is not, according to animal-welfare groups. The pandemic pet boom seems mainly to be one of increasing attentionand perhaps a deficit in other social and cultural pursuits. Andrew Rowan, a former president of Humane Society International and now the head of WellBeing International, an animal-advocacy group outside Washington, D.C., has been on a one-man mission to set humans straight. In a thousand shelters and rescues nationwide (representing a fifth of all animals handled), adoptions actually dropped by about twenty per cent in 2020. Its possible, but unlikely, that people compensated for that decrease by getting more dogs from breeders, or from pet shops, which are supplied by puppy mills. (The Amish notoriously maintain big operations that essentially raise dogs as livestock.) The number of dogs admitted to shelters declined by more than the outflow did. It became harder to get a dog, or at least the dog you wanted. The shelters thinned out; the waiting lists filled up. The dog supply is very tight, Rowan said. Even in the shelters in the South, the supply is dropping. Virginia has gone from being a net exporter of dogs to a net importer, in the last four years. What youll likely see is puppy prices increasing.  Its been a while since Ive felt the breeze in my hair. Facebook  Twitter  Email  Shopping Cartoon by Amy Hwang  Rowan calculates that there are approximately eighty million dogs in the U.S., a number that goes up by about a million every year. The number of strays is only about one per cent of the total. In 2019, before the pandemic, shelters took in four million dogs. More than half a million were euthanized. We used to have fewer dogs and kill a lot more of them. In 1973, when the dog population was less than half what it is today, seven million dogs were euthanized. 1973, as it happens, was a year of pet crisis. With New York City a turd minefield, the media took up the theme of overpopulation. Thousands of unwanted pets roam the countryside, feeding on small farm animals and wildlife, the Times reported. They inhabit the empty lots of cities, coming out of abandoned buildings to pick through heaps of garbage. . . . Frightened residents, particularly in slum areas, report packs of wild dogs terrorizing their children. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society, and other groups responded by pushing harder for sterilizationa planned parenthood for pets. In 1970 in Los Angeles, for example, just ten per cent of licensed dogs were sterilized. By 1975, it was fifty per cent. Now that share is more than ninety-five per cent. Micky Niego, a behavior counsellor in Rockland County, helped transform the animal-adoption apparatus in New York City in the early eighties, as a kind of matchmaker. The A.S.P.C.A. was a kill shelter, she said. They had the contract. It was the garbage can of New York City. She facilitated adoptions by getting a clearer profile of dogs and of humans. She says that shelters have got much better at finding homes for dogs and at treating them humanely, but then again, she told me, maybe theres no hope for dogs, because look at what people do to their children and their wives.  Pandemic life has shrunk our horizons, narrowed our focus. For many, the cat was the only companion, and the dog walk, if you even bothered, became the only trip outside, the rare encounter with strangers. Home alone with their animals, people paid them closer attention. Helicopter petting: they fixate on every lump or limp, to say nothing of the hour-to-hour mood swings. Usually when youre at work, you dont see what your dog does all day, Perry said. Now its I didnt know you did that all day.  Scratch, whine, howl: A big thing is the triggered barking. The sliding of boxes across a hallway floor, in apartment buildings. The distribution of the packages. The UPS guy.  Theres a lot of talk of a looming separation-anxiety crisis, as unsocialized, spoiled hounds encounter a new era, in which the humans go through the door thing to earn the bread that pays for the kibble. Andrea Tu is a behavior veterinarian in Manhattan, which makes her the equivalent of a psychiatrist: she can prescribe medications, including, but not limited to, popular S.S.R.I.s such as Reconcile (doggy Prozac), sertraline, and paroxetine, as well as a range of fast-acting basics like trazodone, gabapentin, clonidine, and various common benzodiazepines. Were looking at three-month waits, she said. Were seeing a ton of cases where people are in over their heads. Now they cant leave the dog alone for ten minutes, much less for ten hours. Many vets are concerned that shelters may begin filling up again.