32 United States The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019
A
fter almost two decades of visiting and living in India, it was
only after your columnist had his first child there that he
glimpsed the soul of the place. Everyone loves a baby, but Indians
seem to love them more. Housewives and security guards would
trip over themselves to greet Lexington’s newborn on his morning
promenades through Delhi. On domestic flights, suited executives
would unbuckle and demand to walk it shushingly up and down
the aisle. With a baby to hand, Indian social constraints melt away.
Lexington experienced something similar while travelling
home from North Carolina with a six-week-old Jack Russell terrier
bitch. The sight of the small white dog reduced most other travel-
lers to a gurgling mess. Oohs and aahs tracked your columnist’s
progress across the airport concourse in Charlotte. Beaming exec-
utives proffered phones for a selfie with the puppy—or to display a
picture of their own pooch. Getting Betsy (as the white dog would
become known) through security caused pandemonium.
Most rich countries have become strikingly pro-dog in recent
decades. But Americans seem to love dogs more. They are likelier
to own a dog than any other nationality—with a dog for every four
people, they are twice as likely as the French. Not even the doggy
British can match the canine dramas that colour American public
life. Nothing was more damaging to Mitt Romney’s career than the
revelation that one summer holiday he strapped an Irish setter
called Seamus to the roof of his family station wagon. (His presi-
dential campaigns will be remembered for the image of Seamus
defecating in fear.) Nothing is more emblematic of Pete Buttigieg’s
claim to be boringly conventional than his and his husband’s dogs
Truman and Buddy. Dog love is an American condition.
To ponder this your columnist visited the National Dog Show in
Philadelphia. One of only three large “benched” shows—meaning
its 2,000-odd canine entrants are easily accessible to the public,
for petting and one-way conversation—it is also a Thanksgiving
staple. Airing at noon, right after the Macy’s Parade, the show will
be watched on television next week by up to 25m people (roughly
twice as many as Donald Trump’s pre-impeachment hearings).
The show-dogs excited predictable emotions in the crowds
milling around them. “It just brings happiness to see all these dogs
in one space,” said Shari Marder, all aglow beside a parade of Portu-guese water dogs. “You just feel really good inside,” said her hus-
band Mitch. “They’re wannabe humans and I love them,” said their
daughter Eva. Divining human emotions in dogs is a symptom of
canine mania that has reached its apogee in America. It is hard to
switch on television without seeing a dog schooling its owner
somehow, often for the purpose of selling cars or acid-reflux tab-
lets. Indeed, while canine theorists point to the role of loneliness
in fuelling the dog craze, American capitalism appears to be equal-
ly important. Led by the $70bn pet-products industry (represented
at the national show by a thousand stands selling dog accoutre-
ments), it has rebranded canines as people, in effect, only better.
The fact that America’s dog obsession took off in the go-go
1950s and 1960s supports that. Word searches suggests America be-
came suddenly vastly likelier to use the word “pet” at the end of
that period. The initial beneficiaries were pedigree dogs, a creation
of 19th-century upper-class Britons that America’s thriving mid-
dle-classes embraced with gusto. It is even tempting to view this
development, to paraphrase an Indian cricket writer, as a case of
pedigree dogs being an American pastime accidentally invented in
Britain. Nothing is more American than the triumph of man over
nature represented by the weirdly sheeplike Bedlington terrier or
devilish snout on a Bull terrier. Yet the appeal of pure breeds prob-
ably owed less to eugenics than aspiration—and still does. The
Pembroke Welsh corgi, best known for its association with Queen
Elizabeth II, is far more popular in America than Britain.
The example of eastern Europe suggests that a recent agrarian
past is another dog booster. America has that too: dog ownership is
heaviest in the heartland. Averse to regulation, it also disdains the
dog-precluding rules of northern European places such as Swe-
den, where canines cannot be left alone for more than six hours.
There are exceptions to the dog love these conditions have un-
leashed. African-Americans are much less likely to own a dog than
whites. Hispanics, as on many indicators, are in-between. There
are also subtler distinctions in the tenor of Americans’ love. Since
the 1990s, for example, right-on coastal Americans have increas-
ingly spurned pure breeds in favour of a rescue dog from their local
pound. This has forced pedigree breeders to hawk their wares cre-
atively. There was much talk at the National Dog Show of therapy
dogs and the need to “preserve” breeds—and much of it dubious.Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled doggies
The newfangled belief that dogs are good for your health (also pro-
moted by the pet-industrial complex) appears to be exaggerated:
owning a dog is no more accurate a predictor of longevity than
owning a sports car. And most pedigree breeds, after a century of
in-breeding, are in dire need of genetic diversity. Meanwhile de-
mand for mutts (or “randomly bred dogs” as David Frei, the face of
nbc’s dog-show coverage, considered it more respectful to call
them) has outstripped supply in liberal coastal states. This is driv-
ing imports from harder-knock conservative places, such as Ala-
bama and Texas, where dogs are still free to be dogs.
It is heartening to see America quietly smoothing over its re-
gional differences in this way. In the process, social-contagion
theory suggests, it may erode them and America become more un-
ited, in this way and otherwise, one nation under dogs. A whimsi-
cal thought, perhaps. But your columnist offers it as one who has
felt the force of canine contagion. People who bang on about their
dogs are absurd, he has always thought. Yet while he was chatting
to the terrier folk in Philadelphia, a strange force caused him to
show them pictures of Betsy, doing all manner of clever things. 7Lexington Impoochment
On America’s extreme obsession with dogs and what it means