1. Life: “Adopt, Don’t Shop” and the Terror of the Fence

We are surrounded—no, engulfed—by a rapidly growing and increasingly self-aware dog-owner culture. As Amanda Mull writes in her Atlantic piece, “Why Are Millennials So Obsessed with Dogs?” millennials have overtaken boomers as the largest pet-owning group in the country, and by some counts, more than half of them own a dog. “The pet-ownership rate is even higher among those with a college education and a stable income—the same people who are most likely to delay marriage, parenthood, and homeownership beyond the timelines set by previous generations.”1 But the ones who are buying homes are equally dog-crazy: a recent survey found that 33 percent of homebuyers gave their dog as the main reason for buying, outranking marriage and children as the incentive.2 Dogs have become walking, breathing symbols of the good life—leading actors in fantasies of how we should live, whether those fantasies are normative or antinormative. Whether we are looking to hack late-capitalist captivity or we hope that conformity with it will bring the relief it promises, more and more and more of us are looking to dogs to “soothe the psychic wounds of modern life.”3

The pandemic created new forms of social life—new isolations as well as new intimacies—and the current moment, in which we are under pressure to return to normal, means some difficult adjustments for dogs and for humans. Sharing a home with a dog became a microcosm for how much better life could be if people had more time and control over how they organize it. During quarantine especially, as families with children struggled to keep up with remote schooling and domestic partnerships suffered from the monotony of spending too much time in one space, relationships with dogs flourished and people reported enjoying quarantine much more as a direct result.4 The disruption of business as usual provided a window into how different things could be, and dogs became the prime actors in that, a projection screen for the positive aspects of being “stuck at home” during the pandemic, as well as the unhappiness many people felt when forced to return to the office. One of the major rallying cries against returning to work has been the narrative about pandemic dogs being dumped in shelters in droves, which turned out to be fake news5 but continues to inspire endless social media posts offering proof of how horrible human beings really are.

The discourse that presents pandemic dog ownership as if it were a universal human experience forgets that only a certain sector of the economy got to work from home and was later saddled with that unhappy office return. For nonessential workers, being “stuck at home” meant not only access to specific resources and spaces but also the upending/questioning of the work-centered lives they knew prior to Covid, that dramatic reshuffling of lifestyle and values we read about in the media. Suddenly the national conversation was asking what really matters in life? as a question for the upwardly mobile creative class.

But what was an opportunity to change our lives quickly became a means to reinforce existing middle-creative-class norms and expectations. As the demand for dogs grew, rescues, or nonprofits that are largely foster based rather than community shelters, were able to be more selective about who was allowed to adopt. Already famously difficult to work with, rescues became even more absurdly selective—and expensive.6

As rescue-dog content floods social media feeds, rescues pull all the most easily adoptable dogs from shelters, charge much higher fees for them than do shelters, and deem most potential adopters unworthy of purchasing one of their dogs. “Adopt, Don’t Shop” started as a campaign against buying puppies from pet stores but has quickly morphed into a movement that argues that no one should get their dog from a breeder, no matter how responsible and well-heeled the breeder’s operation. It forgets this important fact: rescues often stand in the way of what could be perfectly successful adoptions, imposing prohibitive, elitist requirements.

“Adopt, Don’t Shop” creates a false dichotomy between shelters and breeders, when in fact these two (if we take “breeders” to mean reputable, responsible animal-husbandry professionals who charge up to US$5,000 for a puppy, depending on breed and pedigree) represent two distant poles on a very large spectrum of ways that people get access to adoptable dogs. These include Craigslist, where backyard breeders sell their puppies for closer to $300–1,000 (though I once saw an exceptionally photogenic and small pug-mix puppy whose “rehoming fee” was $4,000). People hoping to rehome their dogs often post them on Craigslist rather than surrendering them to a shelter. And the remainder of that spectrum is taken up by different kinds of nonprofit animal rescue organizations, certainly if the desired dog is an adult and/or purebred.

The category “rescues” is broad and more diverse than I have space to explore. I will focus here on some similarities among them, rather than differences, and specifically on those similarities that ultimately result in the creation of the Acceptable Dog Owner, the one whose normative lifestyle matches them well with another creation, the Highly Adoptable Dog.

“Rescue dog” discourse—maintained by the “Dodo” on Facebook, rescue organizations on TikTok, and a long list of videos on YouTube—constructs fantasies of a depth of encounter that changes lives—of both the rescued and the rescuer. But working with a rescue is difficult and often leads nowhere. In the end, rescues reward the lifestyles that they recognize as worthy of maintaining a dog, and adoption is often contingent on proof that these lifestyles won’t change. The difficulties of working with rescues lead many people to “shop” rather than adopting.

“Adopt, Don’t Shop” usually rests on an imagined “us and them” dichotomy between two groups: entitled, young, rich Instagrammers who want golden retriever puppies and real folks like you and me who can waltz into a shelter to find an adult pitbull someone else surrendered and waltz out with it to go live happily ever after. Only the latter is morally acceptable: we, not they, are in it for the right reasons. But this binary doesn’t reflect the reality very well, and in fact has some serious consequences. For one, it discourages people from adopting puppies across the board, without taking into account that some people, especially those with small children, have perfectly good reasons for wanting a puppy and not an adult dog. I might want a puppy if I have particularly active or loud kids (a bad match for most adult shelter dogs), or if I already own a dog-reactive dog (most adult dogs will not aggress on a puppy, while many have problems with other adult dogs entering the home). I keep meeting people who have bought puppies from breeders simply because their local shelter didn’t have any: those highly adoptable puppies had been scooped up by rescues.

Rescues often will not release any dogs, including puppies, unless the potential owners agree to a home visit, provide access to the vet records of all animals living in the house, and bring all the animals’ shots up to date. Some will not adopt out to people who rent rather than own their own home (and they require proof of ownership). Many require a fenced-in yard.7 Meanwhile, buying a home is harder and more expensive than ever, and home ownership is becoming an outdated marker of a middle-class life that is quickly vanishing. Rescue applications reduce responsible dog ownership to economic status, which is mistakenly called “stability,” as if anything economic could actually be stabilized in such precarious times.

But the problem isn’t that the requirements are too difficult to meet. It is the very logic of these requirements, which reduces the essential self to the quantified self,8 that is the problem, since the quantified self is what we long to escape when we long for dogs. Unconditional love, the reason so many people cite for wanting or having dogs, lives in a different world than the one in which we keep up with the Joneses.

When it comes to adult dog adoption, the constraints are even stricter than those for puppies, since puppies are easily placed in a home with children, cats, and pretty much any other animal. I’ve spoken to many people who did not even especially want a puppy but felt forced to “shop” because when they applied for the adult dogs available through rescues, their applications were rejected. The local shelter was full of dogs that were either too big (a common problem in rural areas, where shelters are full of pit bull mixes, lab mixes, and shepherd mixes) or had come in with considerable behavioral issues with which less experienced adopters or those with small children rightly felt ill-equipped to deal. Meanwhile, most of the dogs on Petfinder.com who are in foster homes and belong to rescues won’t be placed in homes with an existing dog. Rescues that allow for other dogs often specify exactly what kind of dog makes an appropriate match (gender, age, size, and activity level are often specified and nonnegotiable).

Like the adoption of human children via agencies, dog adoption via rescues is not something everyone can afford. While you should expect to pay between $100 and $200 for a dog at your local shelter, rescues often charge from $300 upwards for a healthy dog. Those that specialize in purebred dogs, especially showy breeds like afghan hounds or borzoi, can charge up to $900 per dog. The average price of a dog through a nonprofit rescue (rather than a shelter) on Petfinder seems to be around $500. While the intensely sentimental texts that accompany the photos ask, “Could you find room in your home and heart for me?” the real but unspoken question is “Can you afford me?”

The justification for the price is the belief that only people who can afford regular vet care should own dogs. If you can’t afford the rescue price tag, the logic goes, how can you afford to take care of your dog for the rest of its life? But this argument misses one important fact about money: when it’s scarce (which it usually is these days), people tend to prioritize. It also misses the cultural and individual differences between people when it comes to imagining what one can and cannot afford. For example, I come from a family where a massage is considered the height of extravagance. The point is not that I can’t actually afford a massage, but that it’s the last thing I would buy for myself, in part because I am always aware of how my money “should be” allocated. And in a country with such minimal social services as the United States, one of the things I know very well I absolutely have to save for is the rainy day, the emergency. In other words, I am the epitome of a person who both balks at the $700 price tag on the dog I long to adopt and the person who saves precisely so that she can afford her vet bills. There is no contradiction there, and just because I wouldn’t pay the $700 for the rescue dog does not mean that I cannot afford to pay for the vet. An emergency visit to my local vet—Abba recently had a temperature, required bloodwork and multiple medications to fight off a tick-borne infection, for example—costs roughly that much, in fact.

Which brings me to the people who actually cannot afford veterinary care. They are the ones that could most benefit from owning a dog, the ones who are not enjoying economic stability. Data show extraordinary success with the introduction of dog programs into just about any “at risk” population. Prison animal programs across the country are thriving and boast much lower recidivism among inmates who worked with animals in training programs. Dog-training programs are being introduced into rehabilitation for at-risk youth, and therapy dogs are actively at work in long-term care facilities like nursing homes. Service dogs famously help with everything from PTSD to addiction. The long-term effects of sustained interaction with a dog—i.e., a relationship—bring statistically proven improvements to people’s lives, especially lives that are full of stress, anxiety, instability, trauma, and loneliness.

We might ask: How are dogs supposed to help turn us into better people if we must already be close to perfect to be allowed to adopt?9 How are they to bring out our best qualities when the adoption process negates the differences among us and works in favor of a social monoculture? When it reduces us to our paychecks and ignores our potential to turn our lives around?

Anytime there is a mainstream conversation unfolding around what really matters in life—and the Covid era has certainly been a moment for that—dogs feature prominently in the discussion. They become a projection screen for how very different life could be, and indeed, adoption stories focus on the life-changing aspects of introducing a dog into one’s life. Simultaneously, however, dog-adoption practices are framed strictly by a particular version of what it means to have a life at all, one that hardly deviates from existing norms or calls for people to imagine anything the least bit different. The more scarce dogs become—as happened during the Great Adoption of 2020—the stricter the rules we have to follow to be deemed worthy of adopting.

Mull continues, “For people clawing to maintain basic stability (instead of signaling that they’ve attained a middle-class version of it), the barriers to dog ownership are larger than simply having the disposable income to feed another mouth. A lot of subsidized and low-income housing refuses pets or limits the type and number that residents can have, and homeless shelters generally require people to abandon their pets to get a place to sleep. Companionship, whether with a pet or other people, is elemental to human dignity; in America, it’s easier to come by if you have money.”10 Rescue adoption applications are clearly looking for those signals of having arrived and won’t settle for less.

The outdated expectation that an adopter be a “stable,” middle-class homeowner leaves many people with only shelters or Craigslist to adopt from. The “rescue” logic that discriminates against people who don’t wish to spend many hundreds of dollars up front on a dog actually sends many of those folks to Craigslist, where they can pay $100 for a cute pittie puppy from a backyard breeder, thus continuing the cycle of backyard breeding that lands so many pitbulls in shelters and ultimately killed. Shelters are full of dogs that have been adopted and quickly returned, multiple times. Rescues like to blame this high return rate on adopters not being vetted properly. But the actual cause is the complete lack of support for those people who want dogs but can’t work with a rescue because they don’t meet the minimum requirements.

Such an abandoned dog is likely to have behavioral difficulties like resource guarding (including food aggression), separation anxiety, or high anxiety in general, which might result in biting or running away—problems that most people don’t wish or don’t have the time to deal with. When adopters are rejected by rescues or simply wish to follow the imperative to prioritize dogs from their local shelter, they often end up with dogs that are actually much higher maintenance. And the longer a dog stays at the shelter, the more pronounced its behavioral problems become. It is these dogs that run the risk of eventually being declared a danger to shelter staff and being euthanized.

My own experience of trying to adopt a second basenji so that Abba might have a playmate has thus far been a total bust. The one existing basenji rescue organization in the United States, Basenji Rescue and Transport (BRAT), has complete, exhaustive control over every purebred basenji that needs rehoming in the country. Their network is nationwide, volunteer-run, and donation-based, and they are very good at what they do—unless, like me, you have been trying for years to adopt an adult basenji from them. In many ways, I am the perfect adopter for this particular breed, which is notoriously not-great with children, demanding, destructive, active, curious, and drawn to other dogs of the same breed (over other kinds of dogs). I have no children; I live in the country and spend much of my time outdoors; I work from home; and I am a basenji fancier, obsessed with the breed’s history, looks, and quirks. I am basenji experienced and have the time and patience to work at helping a traumatized dog adjust. But I am missing one feature without which BRAT will never rehome a healthy, adult dog to me: a fence.

The terror of the fence, as I like to call it, is prevalent in rescue ads for many dogs, especially ones labeled active or “escape artists.” Entire breeds have been branded as dogs that bolt and will not come when called (basenjis and beagles, for example). But such demands seem to forget that what one is really supposed to do with a dog is walk it. When I adopted my first basenji, my first dog ever and the dog of my heart, I lived on a busy city street in Baltimore. She was given to me because, after multiple rehomings, she could not even stay in the multi-dog kennel in which she had ended up. We fell in love. I walked Z on lead every time she had to go to the bathroom—four, sometimes five times a day. Z did not have a fenced yard, but she didn’t need one. Had she been up for adoption through BRAT, I would have had zero chance. Their requirements effectively eliminate the segments of the population that wish to have a dog because they actually want to walk with it and not simply let it out to go to the bathroom.

Some people will argue that the fenced yard allows the dog to run and romp off-lead, while a leash walk doesn’t. And that’s true, of course, except that most dogs are not that interested in their immediate yards. When they run away from yards, it’s precisely because they are bored there. The fence simply serves to keep in your bored dog, a literal tool of captivity. When it comes to off-lead walks, those should take place in some nature space that’s relatively free of other dogs and humans, and they are opportunities to work on recall, training your dog to come when called. (Some breeds, like greyhounds, and some individual dogs have prey drive so strong that walking them off lead is never advised. But this is something that any owner in tune with their dog’s personality and needs will be able to assess.)

Rescues celebrate the fence as the answer to the fleeing dog, when the real answer lies in spending time with and exercising your dog, with particular attention to training that ensures their safety. Really taking your dog out is the exact opposite of what fencing encourages. Fenced enclosures are great infrastructure for dog owners, among the many things that make owning a dog easier, but they are hardly signs of responsible, engaged ownership, which is how many rescues treat them.

Given BRAT’s stranglehold on adult basenji adoption, a fence-less person like me has two choices: to completely give up on having a second dog of this breed or to shop, spending at least $2,000 on a puppy, when I would in fact prefer an adult (and so would Abba, who is a senior). I have now trial-adopted several dogs from the local shelter but was forced to return them when they showed aggression towards one or the other of my dogs, usually over a resource like space, a toy, or even access to me. But a basenji in foster care that has been vetted and declared not a threat to other dogs in the house is rare, and such rare dogs will only go to desirable owners, namely those with fences.

I have no doubt that BRAT and other rescues’ fence requirement has in fact protected countless dogs from running away and potentially getting hurt and even killed. But staying alive does not make for a life, certainly not for creatures as profoundly embodied as dogs. To treat fences as a minimum requirement of responsible dog ownership is to forget that what dogs bring to our lives is that they take us away from home, from what we—and they—already know. A fenced yard is not to be confused with the outdoors, or with a dog’s running and romping, which is in fact necessary to their physical and mental development. I would argue that it is also necessary to human development: at the precise moment when our time on earth is spent in relation to screens, dogs not only bring us back to our bodies but our bodies back to their environments.

Such profound confusions abound in every aspect of contemporary dog ownership, where a dog’s (and their human’s) basic needs for the outdoors, stimulation, closeness, shelter, and safety—an infrastructure that is as much psychological as it is physical—are consistently translated into consumer goods and services, from gear to professional training.

To be clear, my critique of rescues is not based in the belief that “it shouldn’t be this hard” to adopt a dog. I absolutely believe there should be standards for adopting dogs but not at all the ones that presently rule the rescue scene. We can develop standards for adoption that turn the focus away from some idealized vision of the kind of home and family in which a dog is an appropriate addition to focus instead on dogs as a key to inner life and personal growth. Friendship, acceptance, physical affection, and more time spent outdoors, more mindful living—these are the rewards dogs bring to our lives, around which adoption must be reframed.