On the road. Scientists are looking for better ways to combat the world's homeless pet problem. (Credit: Victorgrigas, Wikimedia Commons)

Next week, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the 5th International Symposium on Non-Surgical Contraceptive Methods of Pet Population Control. The conference title is a bit of a mouthful, but the basic idea is this: Can scientists develop a drug that will permanently sterilize dogs and cats? Or, put even more simply, can we make “the pill” for pets?

Now a lot of you may be asking, “Don’t we already have birth control for our companion animals?” Well, yes. Spay/neuter has been around for decades. But it’s not a perfect solution. For one, it’s expensive. That means not everyone can afford to sterilize their pet, even at a low-cost clinic. For another, it’s time consuming. That’s been a huge problem for non-profits trying to tackle America’s feral cat problem. With tens of millions of these felines on the streets, volunteers can’t catch and sterilize them quickly enough to keep up with their numbers. And if you think things in the U.S. are bad, consider China and India, which are home to tens millions of stray dogs that bite and spread rabies, yet these countries lack the resources to implement even meager spay/neuter programs. As a result of all of these limitations, millions of cats and dogs are euthanized in U.S. shelters every year, and millions more are shot and poisoned around the globe. If scientists could develop an injection or pill that would work as well as spay/neuter surgery, we might have a shot at eliminating the world’s homeless pet problem.

Enter the Alliance for Contraception in Cats & Dogs (ACC&D). Founded in 2000, the Portland, Oregon-based non-profit has been working with scientists and animal welfare advocates to create a non-surgical sterilant for pets. In late 2009, the mission got a huge boost from a U.S. billionaire named Gary Michelson, who announced $75 million in grants and prize money for the development of such a product. The announcement spurred dozens of research teams to begin brainstorming a solution. Some have proposed drugs that would kill the cells that produce sperm and eggs, treating them, essentially, like cancer. Others hope to go after the brain, shutting down pathways involved in fertility and reproduction. I covered these efforts in my award-winning 2009 article in Science, A Cure for Euthanasia?

ACC&D is behind next week’s symposium. It will be giving an update on these efforts and describing some new approaches to the problem of pet overpopulation. I’ll be talking about the topic of my book and what feral cats teach us about the changing status of pets in society. I hope you’ll check out the important work this organization is doing!

And we're off! Pit Bulls on Parade gets started. (Credit: Ashley Wiestner)

Love them or fear them, Baltimore has been ground zero for pit bulls since 2007. That year, a 10-year old boy from Towson, about eight miles north of the city, was nearly killed by one of the dogs while playing with some friends. The attack set off a series of legislative proposals and court cases that culminated in a 2012 decision by Maryland’s Court of Appeals known as Tracey v. Solesky. The judges ruled that pit bulls and pit bull mixes were “inherently dangerous”, and that anyone harboring them was liable for their actions, even if the dog had never been aggressive before. Since then, the canines have become canis non grata in apartments and neighborhoods throughout the city. But pit bull advocates have been fighting back, hoping to convince the public that these are good dogs that have just gotten a bad rap.

The day before Martin Luther King Day, I drove down to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to witness one of these efforts, a monthly march of local dogs known as Pit Bulls on Parade. The event was organized by Pauline Houliaras, the president and co-founder of B-More Dog, a pit bull advocacy group. She met me at a marina near the harbor just a few minutes before it began. With her was Ruby, a five-year-old yellow pit bull with white splotches on her feet and a purple Baltimore Ravens bandanna around her neck. (Purple would turn out to be the color of the day;Baltimore’s home team was about to challenge the New England Patriots for a spot in the Super Bowl.) “We wanted to improve the image of pit bulls, and show people what the average dog owner looks like,” she said. “What you see on TV is not reality.”

Soon, more dogs began showing up. About 20-odd owners and their pit bulls began gathering around Houliaras. Ruby was whining and whipping her tail, anxious to join the others. “I know, it’s very exciting,” Houliaras cooed to her. “Just relax. This isn’t a play date.”

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Sizing up the competition. Jezebel checks out the newborns.

For nearly three years, I have been researching and writing a book on the changing status of dogs and cats in society. The book’s central premise is that pets are becoming people, not only in our homes but also in the eyes of the law. Couples, especially when they don’t have their own kids, are ever more likely to turn their pets into surrogate children. They send them to doggy day camp, spend thousands on food and veterinary care, and create legal trusts to care for them should they themselves die. But what happens when real children enter the picture? Do we stop treating our pets like offspring when we finally have offspring of our own?

For me, the question has been a purely hypothetical one—until now. Last week, my wife gave birth to twin girls. The newborns join a family that already has two babies: our cats, Jasper and Jezebel. Like many couples, we spoil our pets. We buy them premium food, the latest toys, and take them for hour-long walks every day. (Yes, you can walk a cat. More on that, perhaps, in a future post.) Six years ago, when Jasper went into kidney failure, we rushed him to the pet emergency clinic and spent more than $3,000 on tests and medication. We cried. We lost sleep.  We took a few days off work. Would we do the same thing today?

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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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