Thinking Through Animals at the Westminster Dog Show

The emerging food movement, which has gained so much prominence in the past few years, is, surprisingly, entering the canon of composition curricula.  At Queens College, the new topics-focused first-year composition curriculum has an entire course devoted to “food.”  Last semester, following the layout of the composition reader I was using, I taught a unit of my first-year writing class on “the culture of food.”  We read essays on agricultural overproduction, the obesity epidemic, and vegetarianism.  But I have found, through my own experience and through listening to colleagues discuss their classes covering food, that it’s a difficult topic for the writing classroom.  Analyzing one’s political relationship to food requires a level of self-awareness beyond analyzing advertisements, mass-media, and education, all of which are cultural modes often explored in general composition courses.

It seems to me that at the heart of the food movement is a reconsideration of how we eat animals.  That is, we need to eat less meat and pay closer attention to how we treat the animals raised for slaughter. I hesitate to use the term “animal rights” because it sounds controversial, as though I am suggesting animals deserve the same rights as humans. Obviously, they don’t: they don’t get to vote or access public schools. But “animal rights” really refers to an idea that animals deserve to live out their lives in dignity, protected from abuse or exploitation. The question, then, is what constitutes abuse or exploitation. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I have very leftist views on this topic. I stopped eating meat twenty years ago, when I was twelve and when vegetarianism was still uncommon. I am also the kind of insufferable consumer, recently skewered on an episode of “Portlandia”, who grills the egg vendor at the farmers market on just how “free range” the free ranging chickens are. Are they pastured eggs, or just cage-free? Because I only eat pastured eggs.

On Monday, I attended the 136^th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden.  I had never been to a dog show before, but my interest was sparked a few months ago when the New York Times Magazine published an article on the bulldog. Apparently, the bulldog’s breed standards, set in this country by the American Kennel Club, have led to questionable breeding practices, which produce a good-looking specimen beset with health problems and a reduced life span.  I was shocked to learn that a society devoted to dogs would sponsor, even demand, unhealthy practices.

I went to the dog show to explore this seeming paradox: that those who care most about dogs might not, in fact, care about their health and well being.  I had an image of the dog show as a place devoted to animal welfare, with booths set up supporting adoption or distributing information on canine care.  I was mistaken. While I don’tdoubt that everybody in attendance cared about their dogs, they clearly did not share my definition of “love” for animals. I saw more than one owner standing next to their show dog wearing a full-length fur coat.  To me, this seemed the essence of irony; at an animal-focused event, a participant was sporting a clear signifier of animal cruelty.

But according to a friend’s mother who was in town just to attend the show, the participants are only concerned with status, which explains the fur coats. My friend’s mother is a dog lover who regularly goes to dog shows, not as a participant but as a spectator.  Because I was new to this world, I had a million questions for her, the main one being, “why does anybody participate in this?” Her answer was simple: ego. She explained that that the animals’ wins are “power trips” for the owners. I asked her if she’d ever want to get involved. “I think it seems like a bad life for the dog,” she said. “They are treated like objects. I just like to go to watch.”

I, too, liked to watch. Mostly, I liked to look at cute dogs and discuss with my friend which ones we would most like to own, if we ever lived in apartments big enough for dogs. But it felt weird to admit that, though we recognized the animals were being treated like objects, we could take pleasure in the proceedings. The level of objectification seemed in some ways harmless, since these dogs were clearly healthy and cared for. On the other hand, pedigree breeding, which breeds for extreme traits, does lead to health problems. This leads us back to the question of what constitutes animal abuse and exploitation. According to PETA protestors, the answer is: The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. But for most of us, it is something less clear-cut.

Negotiating just how sensitive we should be to the objectification or improper “use” of animals is no easy task. The complexity of the issue runs to the heart of the human ego, which might be a touch too heady for a freshman seminar oriented more towards organization and clarity of writing. On the other hand, composition courses often aim to unsettle students’ world-views just a little, at least enough to get them thinking critically. And it would do us all well to think critically about how we share this world with the millions of other species on it, including the more adorable ones.