Underdogs: Pets, People, and Poverty

Animal Voices / Animal Worlds

by Arnold Arluke, Andrew Rowan

Underdogs looks into the rapidly growing initiative to provide veterinary care to underserved communities in North Carolina and Costa Rica and how those living in or near poverty respond to these forms of care. For many years, the primary focus of the humane community in the United States was to control animal overpopulation and alleviate the stray dog problem by euthanizing or sterilizing dogs and cats. These efforts succeeded by the turn of the century, and it appeared as though most pets were being sterilized and given at least basic veterinary care, including vaccinations and treatments for medical problems such as worms or mange. However, in recent years animal activists and veterinarians have acknowledged that these efforts only reached pet owners in advantaged communities, leaving over twenty million pets unsterilized, unvaccinated, and untreated in underserved communities. The problem of getting basic veterinary services to dogs and cats in low-income communities has suddenly become spotlighted as a major issue facing animal shelters, animal rescue groups, animal control departments, and veterinarians in the United States and abroad. In the past five to ten years, animal protection organizations have launched a new focus trying to deliver basic and even more advanced veterinary care to the many underserved pets in the Unites States. These efforts pose a challenge to these groups as does pet keeping to people living in poverty across most of the world who have pets or care for street dogs.

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2020

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Underdogs is the first book I have found that examines pet keeping and veterinary care in low-income communities. It is a sociological study of disadvantaged neighborhoods of urban and rural Costa Rica as well as West Charlotte, North Carolina. The authors capture how distrust between people in these communities and the animal shelters that serve them creates barriers to providing equal access to veterinary care. At the same time, the book also describes how providers try to reduce this distrust within the community, while dealing with their own distrust and suspicion of other groups trying to provide low-cost veterinary care, an interesting parallel.

Underdogs also looks at types of low-cost care, like sterilization, as more than just technological interventions. They are shown to be powerful forces for social change. For example, in Costa Rica, sterilization clinics introduce people into a new social role as "pet owner" that could make them interact with and care for their animals differently. At the same time, these sorts of interventions are charged with other social and historical meanings to people in the community that can make some people hesitate to take advantage of them, even when offered for free. This was most strikingly demonstrated, according to the authors, by West Charlotte residents who hesitated to have their pets sterilized because of the traumatic memory of the state's forced sterilization of young women of color decades earlier.

I also liked when the book broke stereotypes or assumptions about the social definitions of animals or the nature of human-pet relationships. For example, in Costa Rica Underdogs describes how for some people there is not a neat dichotomy of owned pets versus street animals. There was a category in between – referred to as “liminal” pets - that weren't owned in a modern western sense but weren't wild and truly apart from the human community. In the discussion of Charlotte, I liked that the book shatters any notion that low-income pet owners are irresponsible with or uncaring for their pets. Quite the contrary: many cases are reported of people who make enormous sacrifices for their pets' welfare.

Lastly, hidden in the final chapter, is perhaps one of the most controversial points made in the book. The authors challenge the notion of "responsible guardianship" used to measure and evaluate what in middle class society has become a standard in veterinary and animal welfare circles for determining what should be the minimal level of care provided to pets. Given the constraints of life in or near poverty, that standard would fail most pet owners there. Given the reality that people in all communities, regardless of wealth, will always have pets, Underdogs suggests a different standard that is culturally sensitive should be considered when determining an individual's fitness to be a pet owner - and that's the notion of "reasonable guardianship."

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about how social class influences pet ownership and veterinary care.

[Emily Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought -provoking from beginning to end. Working in a shelter in France gave me many parallels both in the Costa Rican and the Charlotte communities. I think this is a must-read for anyone involved in the lives of dogs, both from a shelter perspective and from the perspective of understanding people's relationships with dogs.