In October of 1990, the Peninsula Humane Society, a nonprofit animal adoption facility based in San Mateo, shocked the San Francisco Bay Area with a newspaper ad that felt like something out of grindhouse cinema.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle and other local newspapers, the four-page ad’s central image featured three barrels overflowing with recently euthanized cats, captured in various stages of rigor mortis. The headline read “This is one HELL of a job,” and then in smaller print, “And we couldn’t do it without you.”
“The design and message of the inserts were outlandish, even by today’s vulgarized standards,” writes Chuck Thompson in his new book, “Status Revolution: The Improbable Story of How the Lowbrow Became the Highbrow” (Simon & Schuster). But the approach spawned a sea change in the way people think about orphaned animals — not just in California, but nationwide.
The ad was the brainchild of Kim Sturla, a Berkeley grad with a degree in psychology and longtime animal-rights activist who oversaw education programs for the PHS. Despite millions in funding for their adoption campaigns, they were having little luck persuading the affluent, bleeding-heart locals to adopt a “shelter” pet. “When most people decided to get a dog, their first stop was a pet store or breeder,” writes Thompson.
Sturla, who had become executive director of PHS in 1990, decided drastic measures were called for.
“Most shelters do a great job of protecting the public from the grisly aspect of dog and cat rescue,” Sturla, who’s now in her 70s, told Thompson. “They sanitize the horrible, horrible reality of just killing animals because you ran out of room. Killing healthy, wonderful beings had become kind of the default. I wanted people to see firsthand the repercussions of their decisions.”
Sturla’s “shock-and-paw,” as Thompson dubs her public awareness campaign, “turned out to be just the opening salvo of a broader war.” PHS proposed a law banning for-profit breeding of cats and dogs. It was approved in early 1992, requiring all pet owners to have their animals sterilized or face stiff cash penalties.
But the biggest change went deeper than just avoiding fines. Now that Californians were adopting strays rather than seeking out purebreds, it awakened something new in them— “something exclusive, emotional, uplifting, and, most important of all, virtuous,” writes Thompson.
Status has come a long way since the Industrial Revolution, when it was clearly divided between the haves and have-nots. Status was a finite commodity in a zero sum game, and having it meant other people had less, or at least less access. But that’s changed in recent decades.
“Status is no longer for the gilded elect. It’s for everyone,” writes Thompson. “How is BMW supposed to retain its reputation for elitism when its cars are routinely piloted by middle school math teachers and Applebee’s managers?”
With status no longer reserved for a select minority with the means to acquire it, it has to be achieved by other means. Like rescue dogs.
Although the term “rescue dog” had been around for decades, it came into vogue during the ’90s, with “no-kill” shelters popping up across the country.
“For trendsetters, a dog was no longer a pet,” writes Thompson. “It was a badge of honor. A badge that said ‘I am a good person, I care about living creatures, I am virtuous, I am better than other pet owners.’”
It conveyed status, he writes, but a new kind of status, “one disconnected from wealth, talent, intelligence, success, religious or professional standing.”
Sturla’s campaign not only brought a dramatic decrease in pet euthanasia — they went from an estimated 17 million a year in the mid-1980s to below 6 million by 1992, and less than 920,000 by 2021 — it also increased the number of dog-owning households, which jumped by 36% between 2006 and 2020 to 49 million households. Today, 38% of US homes have at least one dog. (Weirdly, the number of cats as pets — about 25% of US households — hasn’t changed significantly over the past decade.)
When people want to adopt a pet, for most families it isn’t a question: rescue dogs are the first, and in some states, only choice. “More than 230 US cities have passed bans on the sale of dogs and cats raised by professional breeders, whose fortunes have waned as the revenge of the mutts has become complete,” Thompson writes.
California was the first state to outlaw pet stores, making it illegal in 2017 to sell any dog or cat not obtained from a shelter, humane society, or rescue group. New York state followed suit last month, with the new law going into effect in 2024.
How we got to this point comes back to Sturla, who managed — although she tells Thompsen it was unintentional — to employ the same principles that have been used for years “to sell everything from Cire Trudon candles to Gulfstream jets,” writes Thompson. “Make someone feel lousy, then give them something to make them feel better.”
It’s an egregious tactic to Patti Strand, a woman who represents old-school status in the dog world. She and her husband have bred Dalmatians since the ’70s, and even developed one of the breed’s most prestigious bloodlines, Merry-Go-Round Dalmatians. But her most enduring legacy, writes Thompson, is her “decades-long battle against what she calls negative propaganda against dog breeders.”
In response to Sturlan’s campaign, which she considered a direct attack aimed at people like herself, she co-founded the National Animal Interest Alliance in 1991 and serves as its president to this day. The organization lobbies on behalf of the breeding industry, and pushes back against the media narrative that “puppy mill” dogs are the moral equivalent of sex trafficking.
This mindset didn’t originate on its own. It’s the result of “very well-done and sophisticated cause marketing by shelters on behalf of rescues,” Strand explains. “These rescue groups are making a fortune. Some of the big groups have millions and millions of dollars.”
And not all of that money is going to the well-being of rescue dogs. The total net assets for The Humane Society of the United States in 2020 were $322.3 million, but less than one percent of that money went to funding or supporting shelters, according to HumaneWatch.org.
“They call themselves animal welfare groups,” Strand says. “I call them animal fundraising groups. It’s been thirty years of constant marketing. Everyone has an emotional response to animals, so they’ve been able to easily distort the issue and facts.”
One fact that rarely gets mentioned, she says, is that “rescue groups don’t have dogs to rescue anymore, they’re just not there. So they’ve begun importing dogs.” Of the 5,000 shelter dogs adopted in 2021 in Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland is the county seat), Strand says that 3,900 came from outside the area — like golden retrievers imported from Turkey’s supposed shelter “death camps.”
US regulations on imported dogs are among the most lax in the world, Strand adds, mostly because “nobody ever thought people would be crazy enough to import street dogs from countries that don’t even have rabies under control.”
The battle between purebred and rescue dogs rages on, and there’s no clear winner. The “pandemic puppy boom” was a cash windfall for both sides, which Thompson compares to “the Mac/PC standoff, rival factions with identical interests battling over which side has the more catholic approach.”
Adoption of rescues “skyrocketed during the pandemic,” Thompson writes. “But guess what? So did the pursuit of puppies from kennels, many of which reported a surge in sales that created waiting lists stretching for months, even years in the case of a Canadian breeder of ‘doodles’.”
It really comes down to what French luxury brand strategists Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien once called “the fight between elites,” both trying to “impose their own taste, which is held as superior.”
It’s been more than thirty years since rescue dogs “disrupted an order once indisputably topped by purebred aristocracy,” Thompson writes. And as he’s witnessed firsthand, the moral high ground of rescue dog owners has just gotten more absurd, not less.
He recalls a recent camping trip to Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest, where he encountered a woman in her mid-50s walking a medium-sized German shepherd. “She’s the dog from the bin Laden raid,” the woman announced proudly.
Thompson was confused. Her dog was the actual one who took part in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, who helped take down the century’s most notorious terrorist? The same dog that the Post celebrated with the headline “Zero Bark Thirty”?
“Oh, no, no,” the woman corrected herself. “She’s a Belgian Malinois. That’s the breed of dog that was used in the bin Laden raid. She’s a rescue.”
When Thompson shared this story with Strand, she wasn’t surprised. “I’ve seen it a few thousand times,” she said with a shrug. “It’s called virtue signaling.”
While the Wyoming woman didn’t actually adopt the bin Laden raid dog, in her mind she’d done something just as benevolent. “I’m a good person,” her pet announced to strangers, according to Strand. “I rescued this dog instead of adding more trouble to the world.”