Is America Running Out of Dogs?

Everyone loves dogs, and it doesn’t take much to see it. A trip to Costco for groceries will have you unwittingly sold on doggy orthopedic beds and organic kibble. It's close to impossible to go for a walk around your neighborhood without seeing a dog or two, dogs that will no doubt be fitted out in specially sized harnesses and multi-colored leashes.

Americans love their dogs, and it's estimated that more than 54% of us have them (and counting). It's beginning to raise the question- how many dogs is too many dogs? And could we “run out”?

With the rise of puppy mills pumping out dogs as fast as commercially possible, and a massive increase in the amount of dogs being adopted from shelters, we have more furry friends in the country than we ever have before. 

In his article, ‘How the ‘Pet Revolution’ Unleashed a New Top Dog in America’, Greg Rolansky states, “During the 1990s, more than 10 million dogs were euthanized in America every year. Euthanasia has fallen dramatically, to about 670,000 dogs per year, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). The overwhelming majority of shelter dogs are now adopted rather than snuffed out” (NPR).
This could be for a number of reasons, one of them being how much the pet industry has grown in the past 20 years. You can buy anything under the sun for your dog nowadays, including cute little outfits and Starbucks “puppuccinos”. 

We’ve successfully turned them into fun, furry little play-toys, more like dolls or stuffed animals than they are actual dogs. The more dogs perpetuate every aspect of our culture, the more cute, fun little things you can do with them, the more the demand for them will increase.

This sounds like it should be a good thing, and under normal circumstances, it would be. Who doesn’t love dogs? The more the better. The issue lies in the fact that with the demand for these animals increasing so rapidly, even with puppy mills and shelters all across the nation. The supply and demand for our pets is starting to get skewed- and it's only going to get worse.

 Mark Cushing, founder and CEO of advocacy organization Animal Policy Group, states, “there is a deficit of 2 million dogs per year, and it's growing” (NPR). The worry with this dog shortage is that shelters won’t be able to keep up with the demand, and then dogs- which previously stretched across all classes, ages, genders and neighborhoods- will start to become a luxury item.

Cushing notes that in order to combat this issue, big breeding operations and advocacy groups, like the Humane Society and the ASPCA, need to find a middle ground over mass production of puppies. “We can allow large-scale commercial breeding while also making sure breeders rear puppies in a safe and healthy environment” (NPR). 

This isn’t a clean cut issue, and the politics of dog breeding get surprisingly messy. No matter what happens, it's not all unfortunate- everyone loves animals, and if the direction this country is heading in is just towards everyone owning a dog, then that's not a bad world to live in at all.