Tove K. Danovich | Vox

Our love of orcas is making them miserable

2023-12-06T17:03:14-05:00

Tokitae, stage name Lolita, was less than a year from freedom when she died. She had been captured in 1970, when she was 4 years old, and spent the remaining 53 years of her life performing for enchanted audiences at the Miami Seaquarium theme park, in what has been described by some as the smallest orca enclosure in North America. She was 22 feet long; her enclosure was only 80 feet long, 35 feet wide, and 20 feet deep.

For a while, she had another orca, Hugo, as a companion, but he died in 1980, at just 12 years old, after a brain aneurysm many believe was caused by his habit of repeatedly bashing his head against the sides of the pool. Though orcas in the wild form close social bonds with family members whom they spend their lives with, Tokitae lived alone and, at times, with dolphins after Hugo’s death.

Since the 1990s, animal rights activists pushed for Tokitae’s return to her home waters in the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea, to her mother and her family. She was a wild animal, a member of an endangered species — but she was also property. There wasn’t anything animal advocates could do as long as the Seaquarium didn’t want to let her go.

But after Miami Seaquarium was acquired by a new owner in 2021, the park reversed course. Tokitae was to be released to an ocean sanctuary in the Salish Sea, where she would be able to properly swim and dive for the first time in 50 years.

Like for most of the 166 orcas captured from the wild since the 1960s, mostly in the waters around Iceland and Puget Sound, that freedom never came. Tokitae died in captivity at the Seaquarium this past August from old age and multiple illnesses. (Miami Seaquarium did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.) All this because humans had fallen under the spell of marine mammals like orcas and wanted them in a place where we could see them on demand.

Tokitae’s death renewed public outrage over the conditions in which cetaceans — highly intelligent, social marine mammals like whales and dolphins — are confined for human entertainment. In the US, such sentiment has been brewing for at least a decade, since the release of the 2013 documentary Blackfish — an exposé of the marine park industry. It was prompted by the 2010 killing of Dawn Brancheau, an animal trainer at SeaWorld, the country’s biggest and best-known marine park chain, by one of the park’s orcas, Tilikum, in front of a live audience in Orlando. The film alleged that the inadequate environments and lack of natural social connections in marine parks were driving the animals to madness.

SeaWorld Entertainment has called Blackfish inaccurate since its release. In an emailed statement to Vox on behalf of SeaWorld, Libby Panke, senior vice president for the PR firm FleishmanHillard, vehemently denied the claims made in the film, calling it “dishonest, deliberately misleading, and scientifically inaccurate.” SeaWorld also claims that some of the subjects appearing in Blackfish were “disgruntled former employees,” including some who “had never even worked with whales.”

Nevertheless, the film struck a chord with the public. Twenty-one million people tuned in when it premiered on CNN. Musicians pulled out of performing at SeaWorld, and corporate sponsors like Southwest Airlines ended longstanding partnerships. Attendance and profits declined after Blackfish, and the year after the film, SeaWorld announced plans to double the size of its orca tanks.

Now, the days of captive orcas are, at last, coming to an end — for the most part. China is the only country where orcas are still bred for entertainment in captivity. The last wild-caught orcas were captured and confined in Russia in 2018 and later released; in North America, the capture of wild orcas had ended by the 1980s.

But thousands of other cetaceans, mostly dolphins and beluga whales, remain in marine theme parks across the country and the world, entertaining humans; for these species, there is no end to captivity in sight. Meanwhile, marine parks are struggling to justify their existence, increasingly couching their purpose in terms of education and conservation goals that appeal to present-day consumers. Panke pointed out that SeaWorld does conservation work that benefits wild populations, including wild animal rescue and rehabilitation, which, she said, has helped more than 40,000 injured or orphaned marine animals (although in some cases, SeaWorld’s website states, animals deemed nonreleasable are kept in captivity). But many critics still believe that these parks are about bringing in money, no matter the cost to the animals.

A cetacean in captivity is “stripped of everything that makes it magnificent,” Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite told me. “We are not being truly educated about these animals when we see them in small tanks.”

Parkgoers love watching marine mammals perform flips or splash them with their giant bodies, Cowperthwaite said. “Because we’re having fun, we imagine they must be having fun, too.” But the animals are just working for their keep.

“Our whole lives, we’d been hearing animal rights folks and their protesting,” Cowperthwaite said. After Blackfish, the public was finally willing to hear what the anti-captivity crowd had been saying all along.

Westerners used to hate orcas. Captivity taught us to love them.

Americans have been paying to see cetaceans since 1861, when showman P.T. Barnum, a founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus, captured nine beluga whales off the East Coast. They were transported by train inside boxes filled with salt water, and eventually placed in tanks in the basement of Barnum’s New York City American Museum for spectators to view. Seven whales died one after another from the poor conditions; the final two died in a fire.

In the late 1930s, tourists flocked to Marine Studios in Florida (originally opened to allow film directors to shoot underwater footage) to see the first captive bottlenose dolphin, author Jason Colby writes in his book Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator. By the 1950s, dolphin trainers were teaching the animals to do increasingly elaborate tricks like jumping over hurdles and through hoops or taking a fish dangling from a human’s mouth. Marine Studios rebranded as Marineland, the world’s first “oceanarium.” More soon followed. Between 1960 and 1970, aquariums and marine parks sprung up across the US, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere, displaying animals like dolphins, seals, walruses, and beluga whales. The first captive dolphin in the UK was displayed in the early 1960s; by the end of the 1970s, over 30 UK facilities were keeping cetaceans.

Orcas, though, were still more commonly seen as pests. Pacific Northwest Indigenous tribes like the Lummi considered them part of their family, but Western fishers feared them or saw them as competition for salmon. Even their Latin name, Orcinus orca, is foreboding, translating to “belonging to Orcus,” a Roman god of the underworld. All cetacean species are carnivorous, but orcas were long singled out as hunters and killers, best to be dispatched before they could hurt human beings (though they’re colloquially called “killer whales,” they’re actually the largest species in the dolphin family). As a result, writes author David Kirby in his book Death at SeaWorld, “nearly one-quarter of all orcas captured for display during the late sixties and early seventies showed signs of bullet wounds.”

The first orca to survive in captivity for longer than a few days was a result of one of these killings gone wrong. In 1964, Kirby writes, the curator of the Vancouver Aquarium commissioned an orca sculpture. Seeking out a model for the artist to work from, hunters shot a wild orca in nearby waters with a harpoon gun but missed his vital organs — so they towed the injured animal to shore using the harpoon rope as a leash. Thousands of visitors came to see the orca at a makeshift pen by Vancouver’s Burrard Dry Dock Pier, marveling at how docile the “killer” was. He died after 87 days in captivity.

The orca, it turned out, wasn’t dangerous, but misunderstood — and people clamored for the chance to see one themselves. By then, many marine parks had captive dolphins or seals, but an orca would offer spectators something novel. In 1965, Kirby recounts, when a fisherman caught a male orca calf in a fishing net in Puget Sound, the Seattle Marine Aquarium paid $8,000 for the baby, whom they named Namu. Orca hunter and aquarium owner Ted Griffin became the first person to swim with and ride a captive orca — something that later became a staple at marine theme parks — when he got in the water with Namu.

A few months later, a young female orca named Shamu (She-Namu) was captured to be a friend for Namu, but the two didn’t get along. She was sold to a marine park that opened in San Diego earlier that year and had already proven an immense success: SeaWorld. There, visitors watched trainers swim with captive orcas, igniting a dream the public never knew they had about taming these giant, magical animals.

In the orca frenzy that followed, over a hundred were captured from the wild and transferred to various parks’ pools. Ted Griffin’s well-documented Pacific Northwest orca captures led to the accidental deaths by drowning of a number of orcas, who were tangled in the nets used to catch them and couldn’t reach the surface to breathe. In Penn Cove, off the coast of Washington state, where Tokitae was captured, four babies and one adult orca were killed this way.

Captivity enabled scientific study of orcas — which fueled calls to set them free

Marine parks enabled the scientific study of live cetaceans — leading to revelations about their remarkable intelligence that would ultimately contribute to calls to shut down the industry. Before captivity, scientists could only learn about orcas by killing and dissecting them, Colby writes.

“We learned an awful lot about dolphins and whales from research with captive animals,” said Lori Marino, a scientist and president of Whale Sanctuary Project, which works to rehome captive cetaceans into seaside sanctuaries. Captivity taught us about cetaceans’ gestation periods, their sensitivity to human-created noise, and more about their physiology and life cycles — knowledge later used to monitor their population health in the wild. We also learned that dolphins and orcas are among a small number of species that can recognize their own reflections in a mirror — a test often used as a proxy for whether an animal has a sense of self.

But now, Marino argues, captivity just isn’t necessary. “If you study what a dolphin or whale can do [under experimental conditions] in a tank, it tells you about captivity. But if you want to know what they do, you have to go to where they are doing it, and that’s in the wild.”

Research on captive cetaceans drove interest in the animals in their natural habitats, too. The first scientific survey of Puget Sound’s orca population took place in the 1970s, an era when the wild whale-watching industry — now worth over $2 billion a year globally — got off the ground. Virtually everything we know about cetacean social and family relationships, culture, and tool use is from field study, Marino said. This past summer, for example, Iberian orcas started ramming into yachts, in what many scientists believed was a new cultural fad.

After years of seeing the amazing things orcas and other cetaceans could do in marine parks, and having the chance to stand on the other side of thick glass and look into a killer whale’s eyes, the public wanted to protect them in the wild, Colby writes. In 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed, providing ecosystem-level protection for aquatic mammals and making it illegal to harass or kill them. It was a groundbreaking piece of legislation that came after centuries of intensive commercial whaling in the US drove many whale species to endangerment. It was also a moment when the public was primed to care about conservation, with the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

But that didn’t mean the public was clamoring to release cetaceans from marine parks, where they were kept in pools that represented a small fraction of the range they would swim in the wild. It wasn’t until the death of the orca trainer at SeaWorld in 2010, as depicted in Blackfish, that a turning point came, said Naomi Rose, a senior scientist for the marine life program at the Animal Welfare Institute, who has been advocating to improve conditions for marine mammals for 30 years.

The public reaction to Blackfish was so strong, Rose said, because it showed a side of captivity that wasn’t apparent before. The public perception had been that these mammals were happy to perform. “Not just happy, but thriving!” Rose said.

Blackfish alleged that orcas at marine parks frequently hurt their trainers — information that, some ex-trainers have said, was downplayed by SeaWorld. While there have been at most a handful of encounters with orcas in the wild that have resulted in injuries for humans, there has never been a documented example of an orca in the wild killing a human — but orcas have done so when kept in a concrete pool. In 2010, the US Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) brought a case against SeaWorld for “willful” safety violations (later downgraded from “willful” to “serious”). An OSHA news release stated, “SeaWorld trainers had an extensive history of unexpected and potentially dangerous incidents involving killer whales at its various facilities.”

In response to claims that the company kept information about staff injuries from its trainers, SeaWorld told Vox that “there were only 12 incidents” of injury to its orca trainers between 1988 and 2009, most of which were not caused by orcas, and that “any claim that these injuries were somehow hidden from trainers is absolutely false.”

In the wild, orcas live in stable, matrilineal family groups and have dialects and calls that are specific to their home range. Marine parks had little regard for these complex social arrangements, regularly moved animals around, mixed orcas from Iceland with ones from Puget Sound, and separated calves from their mothers. In the wild, they travel an average of 40 miles a day and dive up to 500 feet, but regulations for captive orcas only require that they have pools that are twice as wide as the orca’s length, and half their width in depth.

SeaWorld employees has told guests that the average lifespan of an orca in the wild was only 25 to 35 years, Blackfish showed, making their lives in captivity seem better by comparison. In reality, they can live far longer lives, with females often living between 50 and 100 years and males living for 30 to 60.

After the groundswell that followed Blackfish, California banned the breeding of captive orcas and the use of orcas already in captivity in theatrical presentations (educational programs are still allowed). In 2019, Canada made it illegal to keep any cetaceans in captivity; the country’s last captive orca, Kiska, died earlier this year after spending years alone in a concrete tank.

In 2016, SeaWorld ended its captive breeding program for orcas, and the organization told me in a statement that all of its newly built parks will be “whale-free.” Experts say killer whales in marine parks more broadly will soon become a thing of the past. Despite a few breeding programs at other parks outside the US, more orcas are dying in captivity than are being born. Eventually, the only orcas humans will be able to see are those in the wild. But what does that mean for other marine mammals still living in captivity?

Today, marine parks are struggling for relevance

Today’s marine mammal parks have overhauled their taglines. They now state that orcas and other cetaceans aren’t there for entertainment, but rather serve as ambassador animals that play an important role in research and education, with the ultimate goal of helping wild populations.

An orca show at SeaWorld today both is and is not different from what visitors might remember from before the early 2000s. There’s still a “splash zone,” where the water displaced by a large orca’s splash can get people in the front rows soaking wet. The orcas still do various tricks in exchange for food. Cinematic orchestral music still plays. The main difference is that, for their own safety, trainers no longer get in the water with the animals. Humans and orcas no longer perform “dances” together; trainers are not rocketed out of the water and into the air by the animals. It’s not as spectacular, but it’s still a spectacle.

On a large screen above the pool, a video plays about orcas’ habitats, physiology, communication and hunting styles, and distinct sub-populations and cultures. At the end of the show, SeaWorld details some of the research their captive whales have participated in and how it helps wild whales. Watching a video of one of these “educational encounters,” I notice that the part people still cheer and clap for are the big splashes and the waves that leave small children soaking wet.

SeaWorld told Vox that the changes made to its orca shows “reflect the evolution of how accredited zoos and aquariums care for and display animals, informed by experience and scientific understanding. These changes were not related to Blackfish … Evolving animal presentations into more of an educational experience for guests is consistent with a more contemporary view of how best to inspire the public to conserve wild species.”

To me and others, this feels like a rebrand rather than a meaningful change in how marine parks treat their animals. “The reason they’re focusing on research and education is they know they can’t justify keeping these animals in tanks just for entertainment,” said Marino. In California, the only way to legally display orcas is by making the shows educational. Other cetaceans aren’t included in California’s law, but, Marino believes, the benefits of performances for those species is just as dubious. “It’s hard to find solid evidence that … seeing a dolphin jump in the air has educational value or translates to conservation of any kind,” she said.

Because Blackfish focused on orcas, and because orcas’ size relative to the size of their enclosures can make people uneasy, most of the backlash to keeping cetaceans in captivity has focused on that species. Today, there are fewer than 60 orcas alive in captivity worldwide, compared to roughly 300 beluga whales and 3,000 dolphins. In the hierarchy of how cetaceans adjust to captivity, orcas do the worst, followed by beluga whales, and, finally, bottlenose dolphins. Dolphins are smaller, often swim in shallow waters, and live in fission-fusion societies where they are socially gregarious, Rose of the Animal Welfare Institute explained. Where orcas prefer to spend their whole lives with their families, dolphins in the wild mix and match who they spend time with.

“They cope better with captivity,” Rose said of dolphins. “It doesn’t mean they cope well.” Dolphins have higher mortality rates in captivity than in the wild, and are still forced to live in environments that are small and sterile compared to their natural habitat.

“Safari parks can put zebras in a savannah and they have no idea they’re not in the wild,” said Rose. “But you can’t give cetaceans the ocean.”

The Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, a nonprofit research and education facility, feels more ethical to visit than a marine mammal park because of its apparent scientific orientation. Some of its 27 dolphins are rescues who were injured or orphaned in the wild, while others were bred in captivity. The center’s research focuses on dolphin cognition, behavior, and husbandry, marketing director Allie Proskovec explained in an email.

Some of its studies — like one showing that interaction with a trainer can improve welfare outcomes for an isolated dolphin — seem only applicable to captive animals rather than to their health in the wild. Another Dolphin Research Center study that found human-made noise makes it impossible for dolphins to communicate, impairing their ability to socialize and hunt — the kind of finding that could lead to meaningful changes in marine policy. But we’ve known underwater noise is disruptive to marine life since the 1980s.

Whether or not it’s worth keeping dolphins in captivity for findings like these is debatable — especially when some animals aren’t just involved in research. The Dolphin Research Center also offers “dolphin encounter” experiences for $225 per person. Such “swim with dolphins”-style programs are still quite popular among tourists, whether at a research-oriented facility or a vacation package in the Bahamas. Cetaceans are, admittedly, not inexpensive to feed and care for; maybe performing tricks or swimming through the water while a person holds onto a dorsal fin are just part of life under capitalism (although the Dolphin Research Center, as noted previously, is a nonprofit).

Even anti-captivity activists recognize the role that marine parks have played in changing our view of cetaceans, particularly killer whales. “The fact that [wild] orcas are now totally protected by law and the slaughter of other whales has decreased is, to a large extent, because the public was given the opportunity to meet, know, and love whales,” Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a nonprofit that has employed radical direct action tactics to stop whale hunting, wrote in 1982.

But why did humans need to put these animals in cement and glass pools to care about them in the first place?

Humans love to see and be seen by our fellow creatures. What if we simply stepped away?

“We always coexisted and never thought of [orcas] as a threat. We never thought of them as taking our fish,” Tah-Mahs Ellie Kinley, president of Sacred Lands Conservancy and an enrolled Lummi tribal member, told me. “It was all creatures’ fish.” The Lummi name for orcas can be translated as “our relatives under the waves,” Kinley explained, and there are many stories where killer whales become human. Yet for many Westerners, orcas were creatures we had to learn not to fear.

“We don’t love anything we don’t know. We don’t protect anything that we don’t love,” said Richard Louv, author of Our Wild Calling: How Connecting With Animals Can Transform Our Lives — and Save Theirs. Humans, he told me, are desperate not to feel alone in the universe. We want to not just appreciate the natural world around us, but to have some kind of connection with it. Often this means harming the very things we’re trying to connect with. National Parks are being “loved to death” by tourists. Snorkelers can damage coral reefs through physical contact and runoff from sunscreens. Even whale-watching trips (boats that take tourists to see whales and other marine life in their natural habitats) are contributing to underwater noise pollution and potentially disrupting the animals with their very presence.

“We’re well-meaning in so many ways, but our love is clumsy and can be disastrous,” said Cowperthwaite, the Blackfish director. Think of how visitors at the zoo, looking at our primate cousins, often can’t help but tap on the glass, she said. “We’re not only there to see them — we’re dying for them to see us.” It’s that desire to be seen in return that made so many children go to SeaWorld and dream of becoming orca trainers, what makes us imagine that animals would love us back if we only got close enough for them to have the chance.

But “to truly understand a species and what a species needs, maybe the greatest thing we could do is step away,” Cowperthwaite said.

Today, there’s a movement to free captive cetaceans from marine parks and bring them to sea pens and sanctuaries, where they can have an approximation of their normal lives. Because the animals have lived in captivity and rely on human care, they can’t survive fully in the wild. The Whale Sanctuary Project is working to establish a site in Nova Scotia that could become home to orcas, belugas, or a mix of both. Their hope is that it will become a model for more sanctuary projects — perhaps some even run by organizations currently putting the animals on display, Marino said.

In September, I went on a whale-watching tour near where I used to live, in Washington state’s San Juan Islands, where so many orcas were captured a half-century ago. Our boat communicated with others to find out where the whales were. We sped over to the orca pods like paparazzi. At first, it was magical. Three generations swam and hunted together, including a young calf who was learning from her elders. Ten minutes passed, and then 20, and when the whales moved on, we followed them to a second and then a third location. I felt like we overstayed our welcome.

Our boat drifted as we snapped pictures next to a few other boatfuls of passengers doing the same. Both the benefit and the drawback of seeing whales from a tour is that it’s on our schedule; many tours offer to let customers return for free if there aren’t whale sightings. I began to wonder if seeing animals on our terms took something away from the experience — whether in a cement tank surrounded by other people, or on a boat in the ocean, cameras and binoculars at the ready.

A few times, the killer whales hunted close to shore. I saw kayakers who happened to be in the right place as the animals swam beneath them. People walked out from their homes to the beach to watch the orcas, who were no more than a few hundred feet away. A few hikers, ambling along the coast as the orcas passed, sat on the cliff to enjoy the moment. What a gift to encounter a wild animal by accident, just two species sharing the same part of this immense planet for a moment, before we go our separate ways.

The very cute, totally disturbing tale of the American “it” dog

2023-03-16T15:33:39-04:00

In 2022, the French bulldog, commonly known as a Frenchie, became the most popular dog breed in America, dethroning the lowly Labrador retriever for the first time in 31 years.

If there’s an “it” breed of the 21st century so far, it’s the Frenchie, with their squat figures, flat faces, and outsize bat ears. The American Kennel Club, which announced the breed’s rise to the No. 1 spot, noted that registrations for the breed have risen steadily for over a decade, growing by more than 1,000 percent since 2012. At around 20 pounds and perfectly sized for carry-on luggage, Frenchies have been marketed as the dog best suited to the lifestyles of the rich and quite possibly lazy. They don’t even need much exercise, for the simple reason that their numerous health problems can make too much exercise dangerous.

Rather than requiring human owners to change their lives to accommodate a new dog, the French bulldog is a breed that’s been broken to accommodate us. It’s not uncommon for Frenchies (like other small, trendy dog breeds) to be “housetrained” to exclusively go to the bathroom on pee pads, litter boxes, or turfgrass inside an apartment or on a balcony.

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In 2018, they were the most popular pup in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and in the top five in many other cities. The Frenchie is the most hashtagged dog on Instagram. It’s in ads, on television, and a celebrity favorite. Demand for them is so high that they can easily cost up to $5,000; there’s enough money in them that they have inspired multiple robberies, perhaps most famously in 2021, when Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot and two of her Frenchies, Koji and Gustav, were stolen.

Part of the reason for Frenchies’ exorbitant cost is that the dogs’ heads are so large that litters usually have to be delivered via C-section, an expensive veterinary procedure. The dogs can also cost their owners thousands of dollars down the line, because they’re prone to a multitude of health problems, including skin, eye, and ear infections. There are also the breathing issues common to all brachycephalic breeds — those with flat faces — that can cause respiratory distress, heat intolerance (since the dogs have to pant to cool themselves off), and frequent vomiting. Later in life, Frenchies can show signs of more serious issues like painful spine deformations and nerve pain.

Some of these health issues can be lessened by careful breeding (versus buying from a high-volume breeder, more commonly known as a puppy mill), but many are a direct result of the appearance people want their Frenchies to have — the expressive faces with large ears and eyes that make it seem like they’re always paying attention to us. (A 2017 study published in Animal Welfare found that people who buy brachycephalic breeds do so primarily for the dogs’ looks, followed by how well suited they were to the owner’s lifestyle.)

The Frenchie’s appeal isn’t just aesthetic but vaguely narcissistic. “We’ve bred them to look more like us,” says Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition expert and author of Our Dogs, Ourselves. They have a small nose that’s closer to their faces; their eyes are more wide-set; even their “smile” is vaguely human. When they vocalize or “talk,” it eerily mimics the tones of human speech. Frenchies make it easy for owners to project themselves onto their dogs without having to listen to what the dogs are actually saying.

“If my husband hadn’t wanted one, I wouldn’t want to financially support the industry,” says Alana DeForest, 44, who has two Frenchies. Rather than buying a puppy, she spent years contacting rescues before she adopted her first one, Wu, followed by Donut a year later. “For me, it was a way to show my love for my husband to push this ball up the hill of finding a Frenchie.”

DeForest acknowledges the breed’s many health problems. “That said,” she says, “they are so adorable and sweet.” When she goes out with Wu and Donut, too, people have a tendency to fawn all over them.

Having a Frenchie has made her feel like she’s part of an exclusive club. A restaurant near their home in Kansas City, Missouri, even hosts “Frenchie Fridays” once a month. She likens people with the squat, distinctive dogs to those who bought the DeLorean car in the 1980s: “In our corporate culture where everyone has the same Honda Civic, people crave individuality.” Now that Frenchies are so popular, it’s like people are standing out in the crowd, together.

After all, she says, “it’s human nature to want to belong.”

In 1934, writer Dodie Smith’s future husband came home with a birthday present for her. He told her it was a hat, but then, Smith told an interviewer in 1979, “the hat box began to roll and out of it came a Dalmatian puppy.” The puppy, who she named Pongo, was mostly white. “The spots come later,” Smith would famously write. She fell in love with the breed, and when Pongo died, she got two more Dalmatians — a male and a female — who went on to produce a giant litter of 15 puppies. Smith’s Dalmatians inspired her to write a children’s book, which was adapted into one of the best-known Disney movies of all time: One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The 1961 animated movie was extremely popular, making $14 million in the United States that year and setting off a craze for the personable dogs. Breeder classified ads in newspapers were evidence of the trend: Before the movie’s release, most only had one listing for Dalmatian puppies, but in the following years, major newspapers regularly had between five and nine different breeders selling the spotted dogs.

When a live-action remake of the movie came out in 1996, their popularity surged again. This time, though, the press began reporting on a perhaps predictable consequence: Dalmatians were winding up in shelters in higher-than-usual numbers. “Someone turned in a Dalmatian, and when we asked why, they said, ‘They aren’t acting like the dog in the movie,’” recalls spcaLA president Madeline Bernstein. “They see a trained dog and think all those dogs will act that way.”

Frenchies and Dalmatians are just two in a long line of breeds that have become must-have accessories for pet owners. Lassie and Rin Tin Tin kept Collies and German shepherds popular for decades. Social media and fashion’s recent butt obsession may have helped propel the waddling Corgi into the spotlight. Travel-size mini-Aussies, with their colorful coats and tendency toward eye colors more often found in humans, also had a moment. And untold curly-haired hybrid doodles have become popular thanks to their hypoallergenic fur.

On Instagram, the most popular dog breeds currently are Frenchies, pugs, and bulldogs, which, in turn, only make them more popular. Their flat faces scream cute while the high prices for a puppy make them as aspirational as multi-step skin care routines, Le Creuset kitchenware, and living in a remodeled van.

But as Life magazine noted back in 1958, even before the great Dalmatian era, “The more prestige a breed gets, the worse its future becomes.”

What are people actually buying when they pick out a purebred or designer dog? Literature from the American Kennel Club, which assesses whether a dog is purebred by looking at the dog’s parentage, often describes breeds’ ancient origins. According to the AKC, the bulldog was “created in 13th-century England” during the reign of King John. Of the Afghan hound it says, “An ancient myth says that a brace of Afghan Hounds represented the canine species on Noah’s Ark.” Every breed has an origin story like this — the older the better — despite the fact that every single purebred dog can only be traced back to Victorian England.

Before roughly 1860, people used words like “kind,” “strain,” or “variety” to describe different dogs, write the authors of The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. Dogs were bred for purpose, not aesthetics. A foxhound in one part of the country was taller or shorter depending on the style of hunting. Retrievers were any dog a hunter trained to retrieve game without biting it. Greyhounds looked different depending on whether their intended racing course was located on flat or hilly ground.

The change from purpose to aesthetics came about with the beginning of dog shows in the mid-1800s. Judging animals based on how well they did a certain task, like retrieving a bird their owner hunted, was hard; judging whether they were the right color, height, shape … well, that could be done quickly and seemingly more fairly.

Once breed clubs decided on the definition of their breeds, studbooks for organizations like the AKC were “closed.” In other words, all future “purebred dogs” had to be offspring of the original dogs that fit these standards. So, by definition, all purebred dogs are inbred, related to each other in one way or another.

The development of purebreds made it easier to show dogs and sell them. A mixed-breed dog off the street wasn’t worth much, but an in-demand purebred dog available in small numbers could be sold for more money. More than ever, their worth was tied to their genetics. In the early 1900s, purebred dogs represented only 2 percent of dogs in America, and only the top 5 percent of the population could afford them, wrote Mark Derr in A Dog’s History of America. Even during the Great Depression, the wealthy kept buying specialty breeds, Derr wrote, spending as much as $12,000 on a Great Dane. Throughout the 20th century, however, Americans got better at mass-producing everything — cars, clothing, meat — and purebred dogs became another mass-produced consumer item newly available to the middle class.

“We’ve bred dogs which are pleasing to us for a long time — pleasing-looking, pleasing-acting,” says Horowitz. What’s new is that we’ve commodified them for the Have It Your Way generation, treating them like products with a host of add-on features. “I see breeders continually pushing out new versions of breeds — the smaller, the allegedly hypoallergenic, etc.,” Horowitz says.

Tellingly, none of the features humans seek are particularly beneficial for the animals. We expect the latest iPhone or laptop to operate smoothly and improve battery life with every generation but keep breeding dogs with more likelihood of disease, disability, and early death. On average, the life span of purebred dogs is shorter than that of mixed breeds. But so far, no one has found a way to make thousands of dollars from a genuinely mixed-breed puppy.

Bernstein, who also wrote Designer Dogs: An Exposé, traces the hyper-customization of dogs back to the Labradoodle, which was first bred in 1989 to help a woman who needed a guide dog but whose husband was allergic to the Labradors traditionally trained for the job. When creator Wally Conron bred the first litter of Labrador-poodle mixes, only one of the three puppies didn’t trigger the husband’s allergies. That left two guide-dog puppies without homes. At the time, Labrador guide dog puppies had a three- to six-month waiting list but nobody wanted these mixes, creator Conron said in a 2019 interview. As a marketing gimmick, he asked a publicist to alert the media that they’d bred the first non-allergenic guide dog and dubbed the puppies Labradoodles. “When they were a crossbreed, nobody wanted them. But everybody wanted a Labradoodle,” he said. “Same dog, different name.”

Conron eventually came to regret his experiment, telling the interviewer that the majority of the breed’s animals “are either crazy or have a hereditary problem.” He compared his role in it all to opening Pandora’s box.

After that, Bernstein says, people realized that if you could breed dogs to be hypoallergenic, you could also breed for big eyes or long ears, or a spotted Frenchie, or a dog so small it could be photographed sitting comfortably inside a teacup. “Now everyone is getting on the bandwagon to breed for trait.” Game of Thrones led to a sharp increase in the popularity of Siberian huskies (who were then often abandoned) but also to media coverage of a dog bred to specifically look like the giant, prehistoric direwolf. Now, rather than breeding for something theoretically useful like a dog that doesn’t trigger allergies, Bernstein says, “it metastasized into something evil.”

“People often want to be in the in-group, whatever that might be,” adds Bernstein. For some, that might mean owning an Instagram-friendly Frenchie or Pomeranian. For others, it might be rescue dogs that have become trendy for the same virtue-signaling reasons that people proudly drive electric cars or shop at the farmers market. But even as the #AdoptDontShop movement gains traction, more people still buy dogs than adopt them, and every year 670,000 shelter dogs are euthanized rather than finding homes.

Regardless of an owner’s reasons for getting a specific dog, it’s a problem if people aren’t prepared for the realities of caring for a living creature. “When you have a society based on following trends, it’s not lethal if everyone wants the same haircut all of a sudden,” Bernstein says. But it can be for dogs that are bred to fill a fad. “The problem with trendy dogs,” she warns, “is that they’re discarded when the next trend emerges.”

Every time someone goes out on the street with a dog, the first question people ask is, “What a cute dog. What kind is it?” says Jessica Pierce, author of Run Spot Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets. “Breed identification is the first thing that pops into our mind,” even with dogs that are clearly mutts. There’s a simple reason for this: Humans love to categorize. And without breeds to choose from, we’d be lost in a sea of dogs trying to decide whether to invite one into our homes. It takes a lot of time to get to know a dog, and we have to choose based on first impressions.

But breeds aren’t a guarantee, they’re a guide. There’s as much variation in temperament within a breed as there are between them. Pierce says that if someone gets a whippet, for example, “it will have some whippety characteristics within a range of lots of individual personality.” She’s found that looking at dog personality by types — like hunting group, herding group, toy group — is a better indicator of that dog’s tendencies than its specific breed. In Pierce’s ideal world, there would be no more heavily selected dog breeds, only a return to the purpose-built dogs of the past.

“I’ve walked into exam rooms where I had to raise my voice to be heard over the noisy breathing of the [brachycephalic] dog, and the owner says, ‘What noise?’” recalls Barry Kipperman, board president of the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association and a professor of veterinary ethics at UC Davis. One study found that among 31 owners of dogs with brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome (BOAS), 18 reported their dogs had no breathing problems at all. Snoring, wheezing, or other sounds made by the dogs are now often considered “normal for the breed” by veterinarians and pet owners alike, says Kipperman.

Kipperman knows that these dogs, despite their health problems, are beloved by their owners. He had a pug named Winston for 13 years who has since died. “I understand how adorable they are. I understand what great companions they are. But I also understand how it feels when you take them for a walk and it’s 82 degrees outside, and the dog collapses when you come back in the house.”

Kipperman says he got Winston after finding a good-quality breeder. However, most owners aren’t finding good breeders for the simple reason that there simply aren’t enough of them to go around. Puppy-selling websites such as PuppySpot.com assure prospective buyers that their dogs don’t come from puppy mills — a phrase without a legal definition — despite the fact that owners are never allowed to meet their dogs’ parents and the company’s breeder standards only require efforts as minimal as giving the dogs space to turn around in their enclosure. When breeders are located outside of the United States, as is often the case for Frenchies and other trendy breeds, treatment can be even worse for the puppies.

Last year, a plane from Ukraine arrived in Toronto carrying 500 French bulldog puppies. After the 10-hour flight, the young dogs were weak and dehydrated. Some were vomiting. By the time the plane landed, 38 had died. Dogs entering the US for resale are supposed to be 4 months old and have certain vaccinations, but dogs often arrive much younger than that, and veterinary paperwork is often falsified. In her rescue work, Bernstein has encountered multiple businesses in the US that import dogs while claiming to breed them locally. “People want them and they want them right away,” Bernstein says. This is what it takes to fill that instant demand.

When asked about the future of the Frenchie, both Bernstein and Kipperman had grim predictions. “Their popularity will decline when the emotional and financial burden becomes so great owners think, ‘I won’t do that again,’” Kipperman says. “That’s a sad way for this movie to end.”

While people have been using designer dogs as a status symbol for more than 150 years, many breeds are worse off today than ever before. Today, the average life span of an English bulldog is now only about six years. Sixty percent of golden retrievers now die from cancer, though the rate was comparable to other breeds only a few decades ago. Dogs that are overly fluffy or have cosmetic alterations like cropped ears or docked tails may have trouble communicating with other dogs. And, of course, as a dog breed gets more popular, so is the likelihood that someone will get a puppy that, if it isn’t already sick, is more likely to develop an illness or disability as it gets older.

For some dogs, the circumstances of their birth and genetics are profoundly damaging. It’s unclear whether love or the record $103.6 billion pet parents as a whole spent on their animals in 2020 (mostly food and treats) can make up for it.

Frenchies are marketed as easy, friendly dogs that can adapt to anything and need minimal exercise. Bernstein calls this ironic. Thanks to the breed’s many medical issues, she says, “the dog actually needs everything.”

Owners who can afford it are happy to throw money at the human-created problems that crop up in their breed of choice. But is it fair to our dogs that being a good owner so often consists of fixing the problems we as consumers created in the first place?

We buy pet clothes and toys and grieve deeply when the dogs, with their shortened lives, inevitably leave us. People with purebred or designer dogs care about dogs for the same reason most humans do: They’re always there for us. The question is whether by treating dogs as commodities, we’re there for them, too.

Tove K. Danovich is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Ringer, Eater, and the New York Times, among other outlets.

Update, March 16, 2023, 10:30 am ET: This story was originally published in December 2021 and has been updated to reflect that the Frenchie is now the most popular dog breed.

The Animals Issue

Why the US egg industry is still killing 300 million chicks a year

2021-12-20T17:20:32-05:00

Recently hatched yellow chicks fall off the end of a conveyor belt at an egg hatchery in Russia. | Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images

For every new egg-laying hen born into today’s factory farming system, a male chick is killed — or “culled.” As many as 300 million chicks are killed in the United States every year, and more than 6 billion total are killed around the world.

It’s a disturbing and wasteful practice, and it has its roots in the warped economics of chicken production.

Most chicken meat comes from “broiler” chickens, bred to grow unnaturally big and fast. That is not the case with egg-laying hens, which have been bred to put all their energy toward laying. Consequently, when their egg output begins to wane, they have so little meat on them that they often don’t enter the human food supply and are instead used as pet food, feed for other factory-farmed animals, or simply “landfilled.” This is why egg producers cull male chicks: The males from the leaner breeds used in egg production cost more to feed and house than they would ever sell for as meat, so they’re economically useless to the industry.

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Animal welfare activists have been lobbying against male chick culling for decades, chronicling cute and fuzzy day-old chicks who are gassed or macerated. The thing is, the industry doesn’t like the practice either — it’s inefficient and wasteful, even before accounting for the bad PR. The alternative would be to develop in-ovo sexing technology — technology that can determine the sex of a chicken before it hatches — stopping the incubation process for males before they even come out of their shells and eliminating the need for a wasteful culling operation.

In 2016, the United Egg Producers (UEP), a lobbying group for the egg industry, announced that it was hoping to fund the development of such technology and committed to ending male chick culling by 2020.

It was big news. Vox even referred to it as “the best news for America’s animals in decades.” But 2020 came and went, and chick culling continues unabated.

In July 2020, the UEP put out a statement saying it was still looking for “an economically feasible, commercially viable alternative to the practice of male chick culling at hatcheries.” It added, “We believe this goal is achievable with time and research,” but it didn’t offer a new timeline for the goal or elaborate on what issues still had to be worked out.

USPoultry — an umbrella organization representing various egg and poultry trade groups, including the UEP — has put roughly $100,000 toward research grants for startups and researchers looking to end chick culling. Other than that, the egg industry has not made any additional support for this project public, and the UEP would not answer questions outside of its statements.

Meanwhile, in Europe, two companies are already sexing chicks in their shells and selling limited quantities of no-cull eggs in grocery stores in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other European countries. So what’s taking the United States so long?

The problem is the technology

There are roughly 336 million laying hens in the United States. For in-ovo sexing to stop the bulk of male chick culling, it likely would need to be able to sex close to a billion eggs per year (taking into account unfertilized eggs and male chicks).

But despite the fact that people have been speaking out about it for decades, there still isn’t a viable way to humanely avoid chick culling at the scale the industry requires.

The Humane League (THL), a nonprofit that lobbies corporations to make animal welfare changes, was involved in getting the UEP to promise an end to chick culling back in 2016. David Coman-Hidy, THL’s president, says that he doesn’t see any evidence that the US egg industry is dragging its feet.

However, he does acknowledge there’s certainly a history of the agriculture industry saying better animal welfare — like phasing out the use of battery cages in the egg industry or gestation crates in the pork industry — wouldn’t be commercially viable until consumers and corporations demanded it.

“The difference here is that this is actually a technological problem,” Coman-Hidy says. “We don’t need to develop the technology of ‘don’t put hens in battery cages.’ That technology exists. It’s called a barn. But sexing these eggs at a really young age is complicated.”

To see just how complicated it is, it helps to understand how the technologies already in use in Europe work and why their shortcomings make them a nonstarter for US egg producers and animal welfare activists.

The European companies selling no-cull eggs in local supermarkets — Agri Advanced Technologies (Agri-AT) and Respeggt GmbH — use different approaches to address the same problem.

Respeggt-branded eggs use an endocrinological gender identification technology that’s somewhat similar to a human pregnancy test. Eight to 10 days after incubation, a machine takes a sample of liquid from each fertilized egg and looks for the presence of a female hormone by looking for a color-changing reaction. Male eggs are then used for animal feed and the females continue toward hatching.

All the eggs produced by hens sexed with this technology are sold under the Respeggt brand, free from chick culling. It can currently test one egg per second or at most 31.5 million eggs per year (if run continuously). According to Kristin Höller, Respeggt’s head of business development and global affairs, by the time the cost is passed on to consumers, they’ve seen an increase of about 1 to 2 cents per egg. They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.

The other company, Agri-AT, tests eggs using hyperspectral measurement that essentially scans the colors inside the egg. This method is much faster than Respeggt’s: Its machine can sex 20,000 eggs per hour or at most 175.2 million a year (if run continuously). But a big drawback is that it only works on brown-egg-laying chicken breeds where male and female chicks are different colors when they hatch. Since most egg-laying hens in the US only lay white eggs, Agri-AT’s technology can’t be used at scale here.

Jörg Hurlin, managing director at Agri-AT, said that they don’t yet know how much their technology would cost the consumer, though it will certainly add to the cost of eggs.

One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another. (However, Agri-AT did develop another machine they call “STUNNY” that uses electricity to anesthetize the eggs, eliminating any potential pain in stopping their development.)

The embryo problem is one that the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), a US-based agricultural research organization, is attempting to address. FFAR is sponsoring something called the Egg-Tech prize, which will award up to $6 million to researchers producing promising methods of ending chick culling. The group is hoping for a technology that can be used at scale and implemented before day eight of incubation, at which point there’s evidence the chicks experience sensation.

There’s one other technological solution being pursued that’s worth noting here. At the University of Georgia, Kristen Navara has been researching the potential of finding a way to control and change the sex of chicks before they even hatch.

In chickens, the hen controls whether the resulting chick is male or female. Using hormonal treatments, Navara can change the sex of an egg. Because the Food and Drug Administration bans the poultry industry from using hormones, Navara explains, the hope is that knowing what pathways those hormones operate on might allow her to find and manipulate a gene that could, for example, permanently make all laying-breed chicks female.

If it works, it could be an even more economical option than in-ovo sexing. Not only would chick culling end but hatcheries wouldn’t “lose” half of all fertilized eggs that would have hatched into males.

All in all, the picture that’s emerging on egg-culling is one of promising innovation — and a recognition that progress has been much too slow.

Another way to end chick culling: Raise other chicken breeds

In-ovo sexing might be the solution to end chick culling that’s gotten the most attention from the egg industry, but it’s not the only one. Hatcheries could also go back to how chickens were bred pre-factory farming — which would do away with culling, period.

Until the early 1900s, farmers didn’t worry too much over whether their chickens were male or female. Hens were raised as egg layers while the roosters were the first ones to become Sunday dinner. Some breeds were slightly more suited to one purpose over the other, but did both reasonably well.

So-called “dual-production” breeds like the Rhode Island Red could lay 250-300 eggs per year (a huge improvement over the average chicken’s 80 eggs) and after five months the 6- to 8-pound males could be sold for meat. At the beginning of the 20th century, the birds were considered a marvel.

Then the poultry industry changed. Up through the 1930s, raising chickens tended to happen on small farms mostly run by women. What we have now would be unrecognizable to those farmers: highly specialized and mechanized factory-style farms with chicken breeds that do one thing or the other very well.

Today, broiler chickens — the ones raised for meat — are slaughtered at just seven weeks old, having already reached 6.5 pounds; high-production egg layers produce about 300 eggs each per year. This has made poultry production extremely efficient, but at the cost of animal welfare. Factory-farmed meat chickens suffer chronic pain and have a lot of joint and movement problems, while most egg layers live out their lives in small cages, are unable to express natural behaviors like nesting, and can suffer from bone weakness and breakage.

“The [egg industry’s] hope is to get a cheap sexing alternative and continue on this crazy route of having two completely different birds for different purposes,” says Mahi Klosterhalfen, CEO of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, which focuses on farm animal welfare issues in Germany. While he, too, wants to see the end of chick culling, Klosterhalfen would rather see farmers return to the dual-purpose breeds of the past.

“The laying hens wouldn’t have such extreme numbers of eggs they have to lay and broilers wouldn’t grow so fast they can’t move around after a couple of weeks,” he says.

This would make all chicken products considerably more expensive than they are today (chicken is really cheap, though, so even if it got more expensive it still likely wouldn’t be pricier than even the least expensive cuts of beef or pork).

But if a return to a pastoral era of raising chickens seems implausible, the practice of male chick culling continues to be a moral problem. Six billion chicks gassed or macerated a year is a lot.

And for all its horribleness, culling has received surprisingly little public attention. When the UEP announced in 2016 they were going to stop the practice, consumers were shocked to hear that the practice existed at all. “We started getting calls from reporters immediately asking if it was true that [the egg industry] did this,” the Humane League’s Coman-Hidy says. “It’s one of the most grotesque corners of factory farming.”

Between the financial motivation and the specter of public attention turning to this issue again, he believes in-ovo sexing will happen as soon as technically possible. He may be right. But while the technology to fix the problem may be coming soon, the broader questions that chick culling raises — what we’re willing to do to animals in the name of low prices; what we’re willing to do to animals, period — still loom before us.

Tove K. Danovich is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Ringer, Eater, and the New York Times, among other outlets.