Pet Project

Animal lover Katherine Grier takes a serious look at our furry friends in ‘Pets in America: A History.’

By: Susan Van Dongen

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   Tiny little dogs being coddled on their owner’s lap or toted around in handbags is not a trend started by Paris Hilton and other celebrities. Mary Queen of Scots had a favorite lapdog, which accompanied her to prison and eventually to the chopping block. According to author Katherine Grier, it had been hiding under her clothes and wouldn’t leave her body after she had been executed.
   "Lap dogs are an ancient phenomenon — consider the Pekinese," says Ms. Grier. "Periodically there are fads. They’re trendy now but they were also popular in the 1950s and ’60s. The problem now is that they’re bred down so small they have really major health problems. They can’t maintain their own body temperatures, they’re hypoglycemic, they’re physically fragile in a number of ways and we’ve done that to them.
   "The other issue is that when you get a spike in demand for certain breeds, the way it’s fulfilled is through puppy mills," she adds.
   So, in a way, Ms. Hilton and her ilk have inadvertently sparked an animal welfare issue. On the other hand, just 10 years ago big dogs were popular, which was disturbing because city dwellers would try to keep them in small apartments. At least the little dogs don’t need a lot of room to roam. Ms. Grier says they can even be trained to use a litter box.
   A lifelong animal lover as well as a serious historian, Ms. Grier has written Pets in America: A History (Harcourt/Harvest, $16 paper), which traces Americans’ obsession with furry, feathered and sometimes scaly friends. It’s a comprehensive, carefully researched, entertaining account of our long history of animal keeping. Americans’ love for pets goes back farther than one might expect, which surprised Ms. Grier, a former Pennington resident and graduate of Princeton University.
   "That was the most surprising thing I discovered in my research, that everything went back further in time than I thought," she says. "When I first got started everybody told me that I wouldn’t find much about pets until the mid-20th century. But I knew intuitively that wasn’t true. It was clear to me that they were an important part of family life long ago."
   Proof can be found, for one thing, in the Victorian prints and illustrations that depict families interacting with dogs, cats, rabbits, birds and guinea pigs. With the dawn of portrait photography, subjects often posed with their pets, or had them photographed alone.
   The pet "industry" — which has grown from mom-and-pop shops to huge big box chain stores — has also been around for quite a while. Ms. Grier discovered that the first pet stores in the United States opened in the 1840s, when they were often called "bird stores." At the time, the most important animals sold were caged birds, which had been popular for centuries, even going back to the Renaissance. The reason for their prevalence makes perfect sense.
   "They were the background music of their day," Ms. Grier says. "There were no radios or recorded sound, and only the very wealthy could afford to have musicians in the house. If you wanted music or ambient sound, it would have to come from songbirds. People carried the cages from room to room. When I realized this, I said ‘of course.’ They were excellent company."
   An entertaining social history, Pets in America mentions some of the most famous critters kept by legendary Americans. Mark Twain — a cat lover extraordinaire — used to walk around with a cat named Lazy draped across his shoulders like a stole. Teddy Roosevelt’s White House was filled with pets, including a badger named Josiah. A Shetland pony named Algonquin once rode in the White House elevator. One of Roosevelt’s sons brought it upstairs to cheer up a sick sibling.
   But the book also addresses some of the more grim issues of keeping animals, for example, what to do when you have too many of them. Before the founding of the Humane Society, and long before euthanasia, stray or excessive animals had to be dealt with in cruel ways.
   This was an especially troubling problem in cities, where it became common to drown newborn kittens and puppies, maybe leaving just one with the mother cat. Ms. Grier writes, "so many cats and dogs drowned in Philadelphia’s Fairmount waterworks head-race that an 1828 ordinance warned that any person who ‘shall entice, throw, lead, or conduct any dog or animal therein… shall forfeit and pay between $5 and $50 depending on the number and size of the victims.’"
   Shooting larger animals was also commonplace, so much so that the American Humane Education Association included instructions, with diagrams, for shooting horses and dogs inside the front cover of its famous 1904 paperback edition of Black Beauty.
   "There was no going to the vet and asking to have the animal euthanized, there were no pounds or shelters to relinquish an animal," Ms. Grier says. "There wasn’t even any chloroform (until the 1850s). These seem like a cruel solution but there weren’t too many choices. As cities started developing you do find dog pounds, but they were pretty grim. If the animals weren’t claimed in 24 hours they would be killed."
   On a more positive note, Ms. Grier writes about the Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania SPCA, based in Philadelphia and founded in 1869, that supported a more humane treatment of strays, more rational methods of control and kinder methods of killing, via chloroform or a carbon dioxide euthanasia chamber.
   "It’s the first example in America of a humane shelter," she says.
   Ms. Grier, who lives in Wilmington, Del., is a professor of material culture studies in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and the Winterthur Museum Garden and Library, and at the University of Delaware. She and her husband have two cats and a dog, and she says it’s difficult to choose a favorite species of pet. However, she remarks in the book and in conversation about a special cat.
   "I want to acknowledge the late and much lamented Margaret, a very tubby tabby cat, who sat on my work for almost 18 years," Ms. Grier writes. "What mattered a little hair on my keyboard and in my disk drive, compared with her purring company and the attention with which she listened as I read passages aloud."
   "I still miss Margaret," she says, noting the latest reports that there are now more cats being kept than dogs.
   "They’re not really good statistics but it seems like, starting in the ’70s, more cats started to be kept," Ms. Grier says. "Cats began to seem like a good urban pet. Also, when women began to join the workforce more, a cat was a pet that could be left to its own devices."
   She says she wrote the book because there wasn’t "…a historical context for understanding (our relationship with pets). I hope people find this book helpful. I worked hard to make this a book that discussed serious issues but in a way that is accessible and a good read." This is the paperback edition of Pets in America, which was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2006.
   If Ms. Grier could wave a magic wand and undo any disturbing trend regarding pets, she would shut down puppy mills.
   "The American Kennel Club has tried to address this but other groups really need to face up to this," she says. "(The mills) need to be regulated. Communities have to commit dollars for enforcement to shut the mills down. It might even have to take place at the state level."
Pets in America: A History by Katherine Grier is available at bookstores and online sites. www.harcourtbooks.com