Knaan with her three dogs, Ziggy, Spice, and Elmo (Credit: Elizabeth Gindroz)

Deborah Knaan’s office is cluttered with animal pictures. Framed photos of small, scruffy white dogs on her desk. A holiday card featuring a Sheltie mix on Santa’s lap. Walls plastered with mutts posing next to superheroes and police officers, extolling the virtues of shelter adoption and railing against the injustices of animal cruelty. It’s an appropriate setting for a woman who oversees the prosecution of the vast majority of animal crimes in Los Angeles County. Knaan and her army of 28 prosecutors handle nearly every beating, burning, and killing of cats, dogs, and other creatures that result in arrests in this 4000-square-mile area of nearly 10 million people. She’s won accolades from the Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and her efforts have inspired other prosecutors nationwide. And yet, by Knaan’s own admission, she “didn’t give a rat’s behind” about animals until 13 years ago.

That’s when she met Ziggy. In 1999, Knaan and her husband purchased the Jack Russell Terrier puppy from a backyard breeder. “That’s how little I knew about animals at the time,” she told me. “I had no clue about shelters, or rescues, or pet overpopulation.” Still, that didn’t stop Ziggy from changing her life. “I guess,” she paused, thinking back to the day she first held the dog in her arms, “it’s a feeling that most women have when they have a child.” From that moment on, Knaan decided that she would dedicate herself to helping animals. She became a vegetarian. She educated herself about animal cruelty. And she began visiting local shelters, looking for the most hard-luck cases she could find: 14-year-olds with heart conditions, mutts missing most of their teeth, blind dogs with arthritis that were about to be euthanized. Knaan took them back to her place, cared for them, and found them homes. But it wasn’t enough. “There were tens of thousands of dogs I wasn’t helping,” she said. “I was essentially sticking my finger in a dyke.”

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A peek inside Cell Block B. (Credit: Sheriff Joe Pelle)

I never imagined that writing a book about cats and dogs would land me in the Boulder County Jail. But there I was on a Friday afternoon in late September, surrounded by 15 inmates in the middle of Cell Block B—and looking for the exit.

At that moment, I was more cold than afraid. The guards had cranked up the AC, and I stood shivering, my arms crossed tightly against my chest. The cell block was large and sterile, with a drab gray floor, chalky cinderblock walls, and round, convex mirrors hinged to every corner. The only color came from thirty dark orange doors that framed the room, each branded with a large white number and harboring two narrow glass slits for windows. At a signal from a guard a few moments earlier, the doors had swung open, and the prisoners emerged from their closet-sized cells, pouring into the middle of the space in which I was standing. One—heavily-tattooed with a bald head, tan skin, and a long, ragged goatee—headed straight for me. He had something in his hand.

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Dog tombstone from a Victorian-era pet cemetery. (Credit: Philip Howell)

In October of 1859, a white Maltese mix named Nero was run over by a cart on a West London street. The dog suffered for months before his owner, the notable Scottish letter writer Jane Welsh Carlyle, could bring herself to have him put to sleep. “I grieve for him as if he had been my little human child,” she wrote a friend. In her note, Carlyle spoke of her “belief in the immortality of animal life” and of her desire to know if she would see Nero again in the hereafter. “What is become of that little beautiful, graceful Life?”

That’s a question a lot of pet owners were beginning to ask at the time. For only if dogs and cats had souls could they evolve from mere companions to family members—a transformation that would eventually set them on the road to personhood.

Carlyle lived in the Victorian era, a period that marked a dramatic rebound in the status of cats and dogs. Though both pets had once been highly revered—cats in Ancient Egypt, dogs in Ancient Rome—the Middle Ages had taken its toll. Back then, the animals were blamed for spreading death and disease, and thousands were slaughtered. Cats in particular were vilified. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued his Vox in Rama proclamation, which linked felines with the devil, and for centuries cats were thrown into bonfires and tortured as allies of witches and incarnations of Satan. Dogs fared slightly better, though in the seventeenth century they became popular subjects of vivisection. Early practitioners, including the famed French philosopher Rene Descartes, had no compunction about dissecting them alive. Animals were mere machines, he said, devoid of thought and emotion. Once revered as gods, dogs and cats had been robbed of their souls.

By the mid 1800s, however, thanks to the Victorian era’s ideals of kindness and sentimentality, cats and dogs had clawed their way back into the human heart. More attention and love was lavished on them than ever before. In paintings and books, they featured as an indispensable part of domestic life. It’s perhaps no surprise then that people like Jane Welsh Carlyle began to wonder if they would see their pets again in heaven—speculation that set up a battle with the Bible.

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