Saturday, August 8, 2009
I asked some international students to write on the topic of what they thought about Americans and their love for pets. I told them that Americans spent about $20 billion a year on veterinary services, medicines and supplies last year. I showed them a chart showing that about 60% of Americans owned pets and how just 3% owned pets other than cats or dogs. I had them read parts of this article in Business Week, including the story of the woman who spent $380 on her hamster and a couple who paid $3,700 when their cat got sick. I didn't tell them about Neuticles because...well I guess I figured they could find it for themselves if they were really interested in prosthetic testicles for neutered pets.
None of these visitors expressed any surprise about how much money Americans spent on veterinary care and none ventured to criticize such spending. Several of the students mentioned that the situation was quite similar in their own countries. Some said that pet ownership was more common among the younger generation than among the older. In the past, said one, people "were always hungry. They had a hard time to live, so they didn't have room in their lives for animals." Others found a relationship between smaller families and pet ownership. One said that in his country families are usually large and that "people are probably satisfied with the number of members in the family" while in the US many people "have small families or sometimes no children at all, so I think they want to fill the gap by having pets." In Japan, says another, "The number of children is getting small...they tend to have a pet instead of having a child." Another thinks that "Americans love pets and have compassion for them." and that "These pets can be true friends to them and save them from sadness, loneliness, fear and stress." But she thinks this feeling is more common in the U.S. than in her country.
Some of the students also mentioned that feral animals were a problem in their countries and that in some countries a large number of people considered cats and dogs to be dirty and potential disease vectors. One student mentioned that for some people, negative attitudes about animals were sometimes justified on religious grounds. Another student mentioned that some members of her own family thought she was crazy for caring about her pets.
The mention of religion brings up the question of what the bible says on this topic. I know that when the subject of eating animals comes up, meat-eating Christians have been known to claim biblical justification--saying essentially that God made cows for us to eat. Certainly there are a lot of fatted calfs going down in that book. I found a couple of bible-based arguments for vegetarianism, but they strike me as thin on real evidence and high on wishful logic. But how this all relates to taking care of pets is not clear. In Genesis, there is a verse about humanity ‘having dominion’ over the natural world and the need to ‘subdue’ it. But clearly the phrase 'having dominion' can be interpreted in a number of ways, one of which would involve something like a duty to care for and defend animals. For an argument that the bible actually wants Christians to care for the world as opposed to exploiting it, see R. Ritenbaugh's The Bible and the Environment.
The topic of our class this term is globalization. It seems that the desire for animal companions and the willingness to care for them is not just American, but is a worldwide phenomena. My thanks to Aiman Jamhour, Kazutoshi Ogami, Minjeong Kim, Aziz Almotairi, and Nita Prompat for allowing me to share some of their ideas.
