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Animal Problems/People Skills: Emotional
and Interactional Strategies in Humane Education
Leslie Irvine 1
Abstract
Recent changes in the organizational culture of nonhuman animal
sheltering, coupled with attitudes that are more progressive
toward companion animals, have made shelters into resources
rather than last resorts. Consequently, shelter workers need the
"people skills" to communicate to a public that urgently needs
accurate information about animal behavior and training. This
poses a difficulty for workers drawn to working with animals but
who find themselves working with people. Based on participant
observation and informed by social psychology and the sociology
of emotions, this study articulates three primary dimensions of
shelter workers' interactions with clients: (a) Narrative
Knowing, (b) Emotion Management, and (c) Deference. From the
analysis of these dimensions, the paper then draws conclusions
about the individual costs of shelter work and suggests
practical steps that workers and animal care organizations could
take to recognize and reduce these costs.
One of the most appealing aspects of working with nonhuman
animals is that it is emotionally rewarding. Animals accept us
as we are, requiring no masks and having no hidden agendas. They
express their emotions freely, showing their feelings with their
entire bodies. In contrast, one of the least appealing aspects
of working with people is that it can be emotionally demanding.
Human interaction requires an intricate process of interpreting
emotional and mental states, adapting behavior and feelings to
smooth out interaction, and coping with the inevitable
misalignment. Most of the time, people take these complex
interactional skills for granted. They constitute a version of
what Illich (1981) called "shadow" labor. This refers to unseen
effort that does not qualify as "real" work, but is still vital
to getting things done. Housework is a good example of shadow
labor. To do it well is to leave no sign of the effort involved.
Likewise, in service jobs in which workers deal with large
numbers of people usually unknown to one another, employers use
their employees' interactional skills as resources that enhance
the status of clients and customers. The ability, however, to
enhance another's status is rarely included in the job
description and seldom given remuneration. Researchers such as
Hochschild (1983) and Pierce (1995) have examined the human
costs of such jobs as well as the ways that social institutions
such as class and the family prepare some people better than
others for "emotional labor" (Macdonald & Sirianni, 1996;
Steinberg & Figard, 1999).
People who work in animal shelters, whether as volunteers or
paid staff, are usually drawn to working with animals. Although
this is an important component of shelter work, shelter workers
usually spend far more time with the public. Whether the tasks
pertain to adoption, relinquishment, licensing, or any of the
other services that shelters provide, time spent with people far
outweighs time spent with companion animals. Moreover, animal
problems are, after all, people problems. People hold numerous
misunderstandings about animal behavior and care; consequently,
animals frequently suffer. Shelter interaction provides a window
of educational opportunity that may open only briefly. The work,
therefore, involves complex interactional skills that draw on
resources far beyond the simple qualification of wanting to work
with animals.
Currently, simultaneous changes in two overlapping cultures
demand that shelter workers' interactional skills must be more
versatile than ever. One set of changes is in the organizational
culture of animal sheltering (McHugh, 1999; Lawson, 2000).
Initially, and until recently, humane organizations focused on
controlling overpopulation through sterilization and euthanasia
- and justifiably so. After all, sheltering began as an effort
to save stray and unwanted animals from cruel deaths at the
hands of pound workers or vivisectionists2. In the United
States., increased spaying and neutering campaigns during the
1980s and 1990s reduced the overpopulation problem considerably.
However, many sheltering organizations have found that
sterilization is only part of the solution. As one shelter
director puts it, something else had to be done "to stop the
flow of animals into the building" (Lawson, p. 10). That
"something else" includes increasing the likelihood that people
will keep their dogs and cats for life. Because even one visit
to a veterinarian, or, in the case of dogs, one training class,
will go a long way toward this goal, shelters are becoming
animal behavior resource centers and not just last resorts. This
transformation entails communicating information about behavior
and training to the public. Shelter workers need new
interactional skills to meet this challenge.
The change in shelter culture has occurred along with - or,
perhaps, because of - a new culture of animal companionship.
Just some of the manifestations of this include the use of the
terms "companion animal" instead of "pet" and "guardian" or
"caretaker" instead of "owner"; non-violent dog training
techniques that use positive reinforcement; new knowledge about
canine and feline nutritional requirements; and microchip
identification to reunite stray dogs and cats with their
families. The new culture of animal companionship coupled with
the shifting organizational culture has changed the nature of
shelter work. When shelters direct their efforts primarily at
controlling overpopulation, as indeed remains the case in many
areas, shelter workers must struggle with the inevitability and
frequency of euthanasia. Along this line, Arluke (1991) and
Arluke and Sanders (1996) have examined how shelter workers
develop a set of on-the-job feelings to cope with euthanizing
animals. However, when the organizational culture focuses on
retention of animals in their new homes, shelter work requires
knowledge of animal behavior and training as well as the
interactional skills to communicate that knowledge tactfully.
Clearly, the public needs accurate information about the animals
who share our world. As shelters dedicate resources to providing
it, workers must marshal new interactional and emotional skills.
In this paper, I analyze common types of shelter interaction
through the lens of social psychology and the sociology of
emotions. I begin by discussing the methods I used in this
research. I then consider several aspects of these interactions
and the strategies they elicited. I conclude by discussing the
sociological and practical significance of these findings for
animal care workers and organizations.
Method
This paper draws on information collected through participant
observation in two roles at a humane shelter. One of these
entailed more than 150 hours of observation on what I will call
the Adoption Mobile, a 30-foot-long recreational vehicle that
serves as a traveling branch of a humane society in a western
U.S. city (hereafter, The Shelter). Five days a week, a
volunteer (such as myself) and J., who administrates and drives
the Adoption Mobile, take a selection of adoptable cats,
rabbits, small mammals, rodents, and a dog to various sites
throughout the county. Shopping centers - especially those with
supermarkets or national chain stores - libraries, local
festivals, and fund-raising dog washes are some of the locations
at which the Adoption Mobile regularly appears. On board, people
may adopt animals, donate food, toys, or money, and obtain a
wealth of information about companion animal care and behavior.
The Adoption Mobile spends four hours at a given site. During
this time, an average of 100 people come on board. For many of
these visitors, the Adoption Mobile is their only exposure to
The Shelter. Therefore, the work entails a high degree of public
relations. My role on the Adoption Mobile involved, in addition
to caring for the animals, welcoming and talking with clients.
This meant discussing a particular animal, or animals, in
general, asking for donations, handling adoptions, and answering
questions about Shelter services or animal behavior. Over the
course of three years of volunteering at The Shelter, I have
received training in many relevant areas, including adoption
counseling, animal behavior, and dog training. In interacting
with clients, I also draw on a lifetime of experience with cats
and, more recently, dogs.
For this research, I took notes about the interaction on the
Adoption Mobile in a small notebook. In addition, J. and I had
numerous field conversations. On several occasions, other
volunteers who were with us also joined these discussions. I did
not focus initially on emotional aspects of the interaction but
remained open to what the setting offered. As the fieldwork
progressed, I examined my notes regularly, coding and analyzing
the data in search for emergent patterns. As my data approached
saturation, the second research role - that of adoption
counselor at The Shelter - came into play. For six months, I
recorded my observations after I met with potential dog adopters
and visitors to the dog adoption area. My comparisons revealed a
consistency across locations. In other words, I found that
humane education required the same interactional strategies,
regardless of setting.
Results
The interactional and emotional strategies that I recorded fell
into three types: Narrative Knowing, Emotion Management, and
Deference. Further, Narrative Knowing and Emotion Management
have two subcategories. "Hearing what is given" and "Feeling
what is given off" constitute the categories of the former.
"Surface acting" and "Deep acting" compose the latter. In what
follows, I offer illustrative cases and discuss the key features
of each strategy.
Narrative Knowing
Each interaction required assessing the person's level of
knowledge about animals in order to know what information to
convey. This meant ferreting out the details of a narrative, or
story, about a particular animal or animals. Even when someone
came on board and said, "I've got a quick question for you," the
question always elicited or was embedded in a narrative of how
the behavior had developed (the animals' alleged motivation),
what course it had taken, and what the person had done to change
it along the way. Interaction, therefore, involved listening to
a narrative with the initial question in mind while also keeping
track of what was said along the way, for the latter usually
revealed more than the question itself.
But there is still more to it. I take seriously the notion that
narrative is "the primary form by which human experience is made
meaningful" (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 1). In using the term
"narrative knowing," I mean to include not only the act of
listening to the words people said, but also to the process of
attending to the range of ways that people give meaning to their
words. This involves perceiving the emotional tone with which
the speaker delivered the words and the ideology that the words
implied. To accomplish this, I have distinguished two processesC
which are, in reality, inseparableC using Goffman's (1959) terms
of what a person "gives" and those that he or she "gives off.."
Thus, in this analysis, what initially sounded like "simple"
accounts of "first this happened, then that happened" became
capsulated ways of knowing people.
Hearing what is "given." The best examples of how solving an
animal problem required parsing it out of a narrative had to do
with beliefs about animals' sexual behavior. Most visitors to
the Adoption Mobile had little or no knowledge about the
reproductive physiology of the animals who shared their homes.
The majority had no idea, for example, when and how often dogs
and cats experience estrus3. Basic knowledge of sex and
reproduction, even in the most rudimentary form, can help people
understand their animals' behavior. However, most often, people
omitted this information from their narratives of animal
problems. They seemed to prefer to see their animals as
childlike and asexual. The inability to accept animals'
sexuality resulted in an ineffective perspective on animals'
motivation. In other words, people's ignorance or fear of seeing
animals as sexually driven meant that they attributed normal
animal behavior to "bad intentions" or "disobedience." Because
these attributions could lead to inept or even harmful treatment
of animals, they needed to be deciphered and corrected. An
example will help illustrate what I mean.
A late-middle-aged couple came on board and looked at the cats
for several minutes. When I engaged them in conversation, they
said they wanted a "replacement" cat for one they wanted to "get
rid of." They got this particular cat as a companion for their
adult male whose longtime friend recently had been euthanized.
They described the deceased cat's behavior as "perfect." She
played with toys and with the other cat - never with things she
wasn't supposed to touch. In short, she behaved just as they
thought a cat should behave. In contrast, they were frustrated
because the new cat had recently become "destructive." Although
she had behaved well all winter, they said, revealing the first
key piece of information, now that the weather was nice, she
meowed to go outside all the time. She showed little interest in
the toys they gave her. Instead, she knocked over their
bric-a-brac, meowed at the windows, and became feisty when they
tried to pet her. She was especially aggressive toward the
husband, who half-jokingly remarked that her behavior was
revenge for his having taken the old cat in to be euthanized.
"She's getting back at me," he said. The wife's perceptions were
harsher. She believed the cat was "just plain nasty."
A series of questions revealed other crucial information. They
had obtained their "perfect" cat as an adult. Because she
already had been spayed, they had no experience with feline
puberty. The new, "destructive" cat was unspayed and about eight
months old. Spring was just starting. She had "behaved" all
winter , but the increasing daylight hours probably triggered
her first heat. She was not behaving out of spite or because of
a "nasty" personality. The couple had no clue that they were
about to have every tomcat in the neighborhood at their doors
and windows. I countered their protests of "But she was fine all
winter" with an explanation of how lengthening days determine
feline estrus. I advised that they get her spayed right away.
When I said, "You have a teenager on your hands," they responded
in unison: "But she's only a kitten!" With that, they indicated
that they had no sense of what the cat was going through. They
both looked skeptical when I said that spaying could change her
behavior so significantly that they might decide to keep her.
They thought that cats just "came with" personalities that were
either "perfect," like their previous cat, or "nasty," like this
one.
Additional questions revealed more about this young cat's
behavior. While she may have had some sixth sense about the
husband's complicity in her predecessor's euthanasia, the far
more likely explanation was that she did not like the way he
"trained" her by snapping rubber bands at her when she did
things that they found unacceptable. I suggested that instead of
snapping the rubber bands, which could hurt, they try squirting
her with water, a technique endorsed by the American Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I reiterated that they
would most likely notice a change after the spaying. I added
that if the spaying did not improve her behavior enough for
their liking they could bring her to The Shelter. We would find
her another home, and they could adopt another cat.
In this situation, listening and simple probes brought
considerable ignorance to light. The story, as the couple told
it, revealed their beliefs about feline behavioral motivation.
For them, animals were just "good" or "bad" and they doubted
that anything could change that. The answer, for them, was to
get a new cat, that is, a "good" one. Although I do not mean to
suggest listening to everyone with an ear to the hidden agenda,
I want to call attention to how effective humane education
requires deciphering the clues contained in the stories people
tell. The clues reveal the kind of "people problems" that occur
along with, and often create or aggravate, "animal problems."
Another example indicates how ideological trappings make it
difficult to get the spaying and neutering message across. In
this case, a man applied his sense of what he thought was right
for humans to his dog and would surely introduce unwanted
puppies into the world as a result. This particular man came to
the Adoption Mobile and asked if we had any male puppies. J. and
I said that we get them frequently. Then he asked if he could
get one who was not yet neutered. J. explained that The Shelter
spayed or neutered all animals before adoption. The man said
that he wanted his dog to have "just one litter" before he had
her spayed. Working in tandem, J. and I gave him all the reasons
not to breed his dog. We explained the increased likelihood of
mammary cancer as well as the difficulty he would have finding
homes for the pups, who probably would end up in shelters. When
I asked why he wanted to breed the dog, I assumed that this dog
had some special talent or bloodlines that he wanted to
reproduce. I learned that it really had nothing to do with her
bloodlines or abilities. She was a "basic" mixed-breed dog. This
man's motives were different. He projected his notions about the
value of motherhood onto his dog. He wanted to breed her so she
could fulfill the dreams he imagined she had about having pups.
He said he "just knew" she wanted the experience because "she
sniffed around male dogs." Then, he said, "You know what happens
to women who don't have babies. They just want to die!" Because
he believed so strongly in maternal instinct among humans, he
assumed that, in order to be a "true" female, his dog would have
to reproduce. No amount of logic would persuade him, but I
learned this after I had wasted my breath and risked alienating
the client. In contrast, J.'s experience told him to quit
talking earlier, reflecting a skill in deference that I examine
further in this paper.
Feeling what is "given off." In lived experience, the
distinction between hearing what a person says and gauging the
emotions we feel toward them is difficult, if not impossible, to
draw. For analytic purposes, however, the distinction is
illuminating. Hochschild (1983) describes using "feeling as
clue," which refers to how "emotion, like seeing and hearing, is
a way of knowing about the world" (p. 29). Emotions provide what
Freud called a "signal function," giving us a sense of our
(often unconscious) perspective on a situation. We acknowledge
feelings as clues when we attend to a "gut reaction" or "know"
something "in our heart." All social interaction relies heavily
on feeling as clue, and the process of sending and receiving
clues is sometimes obvious and intentional; more often, it is
not. Each person's demeanor sends a message to others that, for
better or worse, determines how those others see him or her.
On the Adoption Mobile, I gathered as much information as
possible from visitors and potential adopters. However, what a
person "gave off" was sometimes a more reliable source of
information than the scant clues I was "given." Consider this
example from my fieldnotes:
A couple just adopted Sunny, the dog we brought with us today.
We are at a plaza with a Wal-Mart and a grocery store, and the
woman said she was drawn to Sunny from across the parking lot.
She said she had never had a dog before, but fell in love at
first sight. I had a good feeling about her right away.
In most cases, an inexperienced guardian who falls in love at
first sight raises a caution flag. The Shelter discourages
adoption on impulse. However, in this case, the "good feeling"
signaled, "This is a good person. Give her a chance."
Fortunately, she was also in a position to give the dog a good
home. She and her husband had a large, fenced yard; he had a
flexible work schedule; and they had recently started talking
about getting a dog. In this case, the feeling pointed to
evidence that suggested the feeling was reliable.
Using feeling as clues falls prey to the "halo effect," the
social psychological phenomenon in which a positive or negative
impression of a person affects our broader expectations of him
or her. Here, another volunteer Adoption Mobile worker describes
trying to avoid this:
I just got a bad feeling about them [the potential adopters]. At
first, I couldn't put my finger on it, but I think it was the
way her clothes were all sloppy, and her kids were a mess. I
felt terrible about it, and I tried to give her the benefit of
the doubt, but I figured that if that's the way she keeps
herself and her kids, how's she going to treat a dog? I did
everything I could to discourage her. I told her how much time
dogs take up and how this one needs housebreaking, and I got her
to change her mind [about adopting].
In this case, the feeling provided a "caution" signal. Notice,
however, that the worker "felt terrible" about respecting that
signal. Trying not to judge people by appearances, she
questioned her feelings but ultimately honored them. Granted,
someone with sloppy clothes and messy children might give a dog
a fine home, and this example may say as much about class bias
as it does about emotions. Nevertheless, this indicates that
emotions function as signals only in conjunction with
expectations. Hochschild (1983) explains:
When an emotion signals a message of danger or safety to us, it
involves a reality newly grasped on the template of prior
expectations. A signal involves a juxtaposition of what we see
with what we expect to see...The message "danger" takes on its
meaning of "danger" only in relation to what we expect. ( p.
221)
What an emotion signals depends on one's understanding of the
context in which it occurs4. In the above example, the worker's
emotions - the "bad feelings" - were mediated by her
expectations that the woman would give a dog the same level of
care as she gave her children, which the worker deemed
inadequate. Simultaneously, the worker responded to the signal
function of emotion with another emotion: She "felt terrible"
about making a judgment. For better or worse, however, everyday
interaction relies heavily on such judgmental heuristics (Nisbett
& Ross, 1980; Sherman & Corty, 1984; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
This especially is the case when the issues at stake are
important or when we lack all the information we might need to
make a fully informed decision. When counseling for adoption,
for example, we make decisions heuristically because we do not
see the home in which the animal will live, and our decisions
will directly affect the animal's quality of life. Emotional
clues offer a heuristic that streamlines the process.
In many cases, "feeling as clue" (what was "given off"),
combined with the person's level of knowledge about animals
(what was "given"), provided a sense of a readiness to learn. I
came to think of windows of opportunity as open, unlocked, or
painted shut. For example, one day, a late middle-aged woman
visiting the Adoption Mobile spent some time with the cats,
talking to them softly and petting them through the kennels. She
asked many questions about each cat, such as how he or she ended
up at the shelter, how old each was, and what I knew about each
cat as an individual. She talked about the several cats who
shared her house, how they slept on her bed and how she had
acquired each one. She said then that she especially liked one
particular cat, and would consider adopting her if she were not
female. She had always had multiple cats, she said, but always
of the same sex because she thought that cats of different sexes
couldn't get along.
Here, the woman's demeanor provided clues that, despite her lack
of knowledge (or perhaps because of it), she wanted to learn. I
explained that feline dynamics have more to do with how many
cats there are in a house, with the personalities of the
individual cats, the number and cleanliness of litter boxes, and
other things, than with the sex of the animals. J. supported
what I said, explaining that he has had as many as nine cats at
once. In this case, we convinced her. She said, "Gee, I wonder
what else I don't know about cats!"
Social psychological research on persuasion reveals that people
are most likely to change their views when they receive messages
that are close to their own position. In contrast, views that
are extremely discrepant from their own fall outside their
"latitude of acceptance" (Hovland, Harvey, & Sherif, 1957). In
the above example, the woman already liked cats a great deal and
had experience with a multi-cat household, so changing her mind
about the sexual composition of that household was a small leap.
In other instances, however, the information we offered fell so
far outside the visitor's latitude of acceptance that he or she
ignored or resisted it.
Sometimes, people indicated their positions through statements
such as "I'm just not a cat person" or "I can't stand big dogs"
(or small dogs, or white dogs, or dogs with long hair). A
striking example came from an interaction with a woman in her
60s. She boarded the Adoption Mobile, saw the pair of rabbits we
had along, and said emphatically, "I don't like rabbits!" I
started to explain how these were "houserabbits": wonderful,
sociable companions. She interrupted and said, "The only way I
like rabbits is in stew. Hasenpfeffer!" In this case, it did not
take tremendous sensitivity to see that the window of
opportunity was painted shut. I simply said, "We don't mention
that around them," nodding in the direction of the rabbits.
These two examples highlight the distinction between opinion and
attitude. Since humane education involves both creating informed
opinions and changing attitudes, the distinction bears on the
interactional skills involved. In the first example, the woman
had an opinion, or a belief, about cats. She believed that cats
of the opposite sex would not get along. It was not that she
liked or disliked one particular sex. When she heard
contradictory evidence, she changed her opinion. In the second
example, the woman had a negative attitude toward rabbits, which
is much harder to change. Attitudes have emotional and
evaluative components. Logic will not change the view that the
only good rabbit is a dead rabbit. Interactionally, it helps to
understand what one is facing.
While everyday interaction of all kinds involves sensitivity,
shelter interaction raises the stakes because of the urgency of
the message and the limited window of opportunity. In other
words, shelters provide unique settings in which to change
people's minds about animals. Unfortunately, there is no simple
answer to the question of how to do this. Advertisers,
politicians, and the media - as well as social psychologists -
know this well. It is extremely difficult to change people's
minds solely with direct information. Because emotions factor so
heavily in the process, I turn now to that topic.
Emotion Management
Surface acting. Using emotions as clues is more complicated than
it seems. People can - and often do - disguise what they feel.
This interferes with what an emotion is supposed to tell us and
how we interpret it. People can also pretend not to feel or
change their feelings, and they can do this so effectively that
they convince even themselves. This "emotion management," which
refers to the effort to induce and control certain feelings, is
an essential part of all social interaction. Sociologists who
study emotion, particularly Hochschild (1983), have delineated
two kinds of emotion management. One of these, known as "surface
acting," involves managing our physical display of emotions and
disguising what we feel, such as when we stifle a laugh during a
meeting or put on a serious expression to suit a situation. The
intention in surface acting is not to change how one feels but
to change one's expression so as to convince the other person to
feel a particular way. If we want someone to feel that he or she
is being taken seriously, then managing laughter or displaying
sadness can help accomplish it.
In this research, surface acting frequently occurred in
interactions surrounding "outlaw breeds," especially pit bulls,
but also Chows5. On one particular day, for example, we had two
four-month-old pit bull mix puppies with us. They were very
good-natured dogs who had just begun positive obedience
training. Nevertheless, when our visitors heard they were part
pit bull, most of them recoiled. Those who had children drew
them in close. The negative media attention given to pit bulls
has led many people to make what social psychologists call an
"illusory correlation" between the breed and viciousness. To
counteract this, J and I spent much of the day smiling politely
and telling people how training made all the difference, how
smaller dogs bite much more often and how pit bulls could make
wonderful family dogs. In these instances, I was conscious of
keeping my facial expressions relaxed while still making eye
contact, not so much to appear sincere but to avoid appearing
insincere. Of several instances that "worked," one in particular
comes to mind. A man who was killing time while his wife and
children shopped came by to see the puppies who were with us.
When the man learned that the dogs he was petting were pit
bulls, he was stunned and said, "These are pit bulls?!! I've got
to go get my wife and kids and show them how nice they are!" He
brought his family back, and they all spent a few minutes with
the dogs. I had to go through the pit bull "speech" again with
his wife, but with him there to substantiate what I said. It was
their first experience with pit bulls, and keeping the emotional
tone light made it a positive one--for two generations.
Some interactions not only involved misconceptions about
animals, but ones that potentially could result in cruelty or
improper care. Therefore, it became especially important to find
a way to unlock the window of opportunity. For example, a woman
came on board and told us that she had always been a "cat lady."
Stray cats just come to her, she said, and she feeds them and
patches them up. She talked about the one on whom she had spent
untold fortunes after a head injury, the one she found at a
highway rest stop, and the one who had kittens in her laundry
basket. She explained that she tries to find homes for all of
them but first gets them vaccinated and spayed or neutered. She
also gets them declawed.
Declawing really makes me angry. In this case, I took a breath
and reminded myself that she was, in her own way, trying to
solve an animal problem by preventing the cats from creating a
human problem when they shredded furniture. I resolved not to
voice my anger and, instead, smiled and thanked her for the good
she was doing. I also probed for her readiness to learning. I
asked if she had ever tried getting the cats used to having
their claws trimmed or showed them how to use scratching posts.
She said she never considered these as alternatives to declawing.
Then, since the window of opportunity was unlocked, I explained
that declawing was equivalent to amputation. I added that
declawing may create more problems than it solves. For example,
at The Shelter we have found that cats who are declawed are more
often surrendered for "Litter Box Problems" than cats who have
their claws. Although no extant studies support this, declawed
cats may experience pain when they scratch at their litter. They
understandably develop an aversion to using the box and use
other surfaces such as carpets or bedding instead. Then, a
guardian who thought the problem of scratching the furniture was
solved now has a cat who soils the carpets. I gave the woman
some literature from animal welfare organizations that
criticizes declawing and suggests alternatives so she would see
that this was not simply my pet peeve. We ended up trading
stories about cats we had known and loved. When she left, I felt
like we had become allies.
Deep acting. In surface acting, Hochschild (1983, p. 37) writes,
"the body, not the soul, is the main tool of the trade." Deep
acting, in contrast, involves the soul. It entails not only a
convincing display but also a profound transformation of
feelings. Deep acting is emotion management directed at oneself,
not just at the other person. We all have engaged in deep acting
sometime in our lives, whether we have worked at not feeling in
love with someone who has spurned us or dusted ourselves off
after a stinging rejection letter.
In my own experience, interactions that required deep acting
often involved animals to whom I had become deeply attached.
Although part of me loved to see them go home, another part
became nervous and possessive; I worried that no home could
possibly be good enough. I then scolded myself for feeling that
way, and the deep acting began. For example, my work at The
Shelter includes a weekly shift at the vet clinic, and one
morning when I arrived for my usual shift, a badly injured dog
lay on the floor. Animal control officers had brought her in
after she had been hit by a car. Her tawny coat was bloody;
patches of fur scraped to the skin, and a hind leg looked
obviously broken. In addition, an x-ray revealed that her pelvis
was broken. Since pelvic surgery is very expensive, the
procedure had to wait until the dog's guardian was located. I
wanted to comfort her, but the technicians warned me not to
touch her because she was probably in a lot of pain and even the
nicest dog might bite under these circumstances.
The dog apparently had been missing for some time, because her
guardian had called The Shelter to file a lost report. After The
Shelter referred him to the clinic and he identified her as
"Charlie," he did something I did not understand but have
learned to accept: He surrendered her. I do not know if it was
the expense of treating her injuries or if he simply decided he
did not want her anymore. Regardless, she was in our hands now.
Later that morning, as Charlie lay on the floor of the x-ray
room awaiting surgery, I heard her whimper and went to check on
her. I saw that, because she was unable to move, she had
defecated on herself. I decided to take a chance and clean her
up. She let me do so, and I marveled at her good nature, even in
pain.
About a week later, I was at The Shelter to walk dogs and a
staff member asked if I would keep an immobile dog company
outdoors while he cleaned her kennel. I agreed, and was
surprised when he and a co-worker brought Charlie out on a
stretcher. In the days that had followed her accident, Charlie
had undergone surgery to place pins in her pelvis. As a result,
she also had numerous bandages and patches of fur were shaved to
the skin to facilitate intravenous fluids and pain medication.
The kennel workers set the stretcher down on the grass in the
sunshine. I sat next to her. It was a gorgeous, sparkling-clear
day. Charlie sniffed the air with her dark muzzle and looked
around. She wanted to get up but couldn't - and shouldn't. I
performed Tellington Touch6 on her, and she let me touch her all
over - again showing her good nature. One of the staff members
came out and changed her dressing. Together, we carried her back
to her kennel, made her comfortable with blankets, and closed
the door.
I visited Charlie as she recuperated, and when she was ready to
walk I helped her take her first steps by supporting her belly
with a towel. She went to live with a foster family for several
weeks until she had recovered sufficiently to come to The
Shelter's adoption area. During her stay there, I walked her
regularly and brought her special treats and toys. Before long,
she had begun to recognize me. Although I could not adopt her
myself, I often imagined doing so. She had thoroughly stolen my
heart. Then one day, it was Charlie's turn to join J. and me on
the Adoption Mobile. I loved the idea of spending the day with
her. Within an hour of arriving at our location, a woman came by
and was, I could see, also taken with Charlie's sweetness. She
asked questions about her history and the injury; She passed the
test of "openness." She spent time petting Charlie and talked to
her softly, but as I answered her questions about the adoption
process I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. Adopt Charlie?
No, I thought. Charlie loves me! How could she go home with
anyone when she loves me? Despite my panic, I felt good about
this woman. Through surface acting, I hid my jealousy and
reluctance. I began educating her about training classes and
other resources for dogs, such as the Gentle Leader7 Charlie
wore. We also talked about Clicker training and microchipping8,
and we discussed how crate training would reinforce
housebreaking. Then we talked about the local dog parks and the
leash and license laws in the area. Suddenly, she glanced at her
watch as though she had forgotten an appointment. She said she
had to go, and, as she left, so did my emotional turmoil.
Later that day, she returned, and with her returned my pangs of
jealousy and worry. To make matters worse, she had two children
with her. They adored Charlie, and Charlie seemed to love them,
too. "Wonderful," said half my heart. "It can't be," said the
other. Worst of all, they wanted to adopt Charlie! As J. began
the adoption paperwork, my heart raced and I scolded myself for
what I was feeling. I told myself how great it would be for
Charlie to have a home with children. She really did like the
children, I reminded myself. I focused on how kind the woman was
and on her interest in Charlie's history and needs. I put myself
in the woman's place, remembering the fun I had bringing my
companion dog, Skipper, home. I consciously tried to "empty"
myself of jealousy and insecurity to reach a point of emotional
neutrality. Then I filled the neutral space with the delight
that I remembered feeling with Skipper. I focused on what a good
thing the woman was doing by giving this abandoned dog a family.
Gradually, my worries eased. By the time Charlie boarded their
minivan for the trip home, good feelings had taken over the bad.
A week after the adoption, I telephoned to see how Charlie was
doing, and I was thrilled to hear that she was well loved and
happy.
I offer this lengthy example because it captures the way that
deep acting transformed jealousy and worry into delight and
possibility. In contrast to surface acting, in which I simply
put on a smile or hid my anger, the deep acting entailed in this
interaction involved not only my body but also my imagination,
my memory, and my mind. Here, I was not just trying to put on a
convincing display; I was engaged in a focused effort genuinely
to change the way I felt. I imagined Charlie in a loving home. I
pictured her with the children. I envisioned them feeling the
joy I had felt with Skipper. Then I made certain that my actions
toward the woman and her children conveyed my pleasure in seeing
Charlie go to a good home. It took considerable effort, but
through deep acting I played a role so convincingly that I
convinced even myself.
Emotion Management and Feeling Rules
Given that emotions inform our interaction so heavily, how do we
know what to feel and when to feel it? In her pioneering work on
the sociology of emotions, Hochschild (1983) poses the matter
this way:
Since feeling is a form of pre-action, a script or a moral
stance toward it is one of culture's most powerful tools for
directing action. How do we sense these scripts or, as I shall
call them, feeling rules?" (p. 56)
We become aware of feeling rules when we sense the contrast
between what we feel and what we should feel. That we should
feel anything at all reveals the extent to which feeling
involves an exchange. Feeling is a way of paying respect, of
"bowing from the heart" (Hochschild, 1983). For example, in the
above case I "owed" the woman respect, in the sense of
interactional exchange, because she was genuinely interested in
adopting Charlie. She was doing a good thing. When I felt bad
about it, I felt the contrast between what I felt and what I
owed her and I adjusted my feelings - and my behavior -
accordingly.
Feeling rules vary across settings and groups. Individuals'
responses to them reflect where they stand in the interaction.
Certain groups, such as women and those in service professions,
generally are socialized to have greater awareness of the
feelings of others than, say, males and those in blue-collar
occupations. Moreover, institutions may establish feeling rules,
as in this excerpt from The Shelter's training manual for the
Adoption Mobile volunteers:
Our goal is to educate and inform the public in a thoughtful
manner. [The Shelter] deals daily with animal problems, which in
reality are human problems. If we are to successfully solve
these problems, we must be able to relate to the people who
cause them; therefore, it is vital that we deal professionally
with the public at all times. Excessive anger and rude comments
are not considered appropriate conduct.
Feeling rules are norms that govern emotional conduct. Like the
norms that govern other types of behavior, violations invoke
sanctions, and we most often police our own emotional behavior
internally. We enforce feeling rules when we remind ourselves
that we should not feel this way or that way. I enforced a
feeling rule when I felt the "pinch" over my feelings for
Charlie. However, sometimes violations of feeling rules are
enforced with formal sanctions. For instance, one of the
Adoption Mobile volunteers did not follow the feeling rules
discouraging anger and rudeness. She was a radical animal rights
activist who brought a sense of indignation to almost every
interaction. Her attitude was probably very effective in public
protests, but it alienated clients. As a result, she was asked
to resign.
Deference
The volunteer who became angry and rude was unable to defer to
clients, which is an interactional skill that can preserve other
people's self-concepts and ensure their receptivity in future
interactions. A good example occurred when the Adoption Mobile
was at one of The Shelter's fund-raising dog washes. While I
helped with the washing, I noticed that the next dog in line
wore a choke-type collar with metal prongs that dug into the
dog's neck when he or she pulled on the leash. To me, it
resembled a torture device straight out of the Middle Ages. The
Shelter opposes training methods that use pain, violence, and
punishment, and I wanted to talk to the dog's guardian about
alternatives. When it became the dog's turn for a wash, I began
chatting with her guardian, and she praised The Shelter and its
philosophy. A few minutes elapsed, and I asked the woman if her
dog pulled. Predictably, she answered, "Does she ever! She pulls
terribly!" I said that the prong collar might encourage that
behavior. Dogs' neck muscles are very strong, I said. They can
resist the prong collar, further strengthening the muscles and
thereby learning to pull even more. Besides, I explained, prong
collars hurt.
Quite suddenly, the woman's cognition of herself as a humane,
responsible guardian was dissonant with the cognition that she
used a training method regarded as inhumane. Cognitive
dissonance poses a threat to one's self-concept, and the variety
of dissonance-reducing techniques that people use are designed
to rescue the ego (Aronson, 1999). However, the ego is often
rescued at the cost of preventing people from learning how to
solve problems, such as how to humanely stop a dog from pulling
on a leash. In this instance, I hoped to soften the potential
blow to her self-esteem by allowing her to change her mind about
her approach to training, so I offered a way out and asked if
she had tried a headcollar. Unfortunately, she already had, but
the dog hated it and pawed frantically to get it off. Anyway,
she said, running her fingers under the steel prongs, the collar
really didn't hurt the dog.
With this, she engaged in a common attempt to reduce dissonance:
She rejected the dissonant information by minimizing the
potential harm to her dog. She was clearly committed to her
belief that she was right. I offered another way out. I
explained that many dogs dislike headcollars at first, but by
distracting them with treats, guardians can help their dogs
accept them. Moreover, the dogs who need headcollars most are
often those who object most strenuously. I told her that, for
guardians, it usually requires patiently working through the
adjustment period. I realized immediately that was the wrong
thing to say. I had unwittingly implied that her failure with
the headcollar meant that she was not only inhumane, she was
also impatient. At this, she further shut down communication
with another common defensive device: She appealed to an
authority whom she considered more credible than I. She
explained that her veterinarian had recommended the prong
collar. If a vet recommended it, this implied, it must be fine.
For her, having an animal-care professional on her side
confirmed the wisdom of her position.
In this instance, I had to resign myself to the reality that I
could not influence this woman. She was not ready to change, and
each suggestion I made only put her increasingly on the
defensive. In hindsight, I realize I probably probed too far. A
bit of surface acting--a cheerful smile, perhaps a shrug, and a
statement along the lines of "Oh, well. Some dogs just pull,"
might have been less threatening to her. In the long run, this
would have made her more receptive in future interactions (Goffman,
1959). More precisely, deferring to her would have allowed her
to present the image of self she wanted to present. In the way
that the interaction unfolded, I had, albeit inadvertently, cast
her in a particular roleC that of inhumane guardian. If I had
anticipated this, I could have adjusted my behavior to minimize
her resistance. Whereas the emotion management techniques of
surface acting and deep acting address self-presentation on
one's own behalf, deference refers to the effects of one's acts
on another person's ability to present a positive image of self.
Deference, moreover, acknowledges the presence of power in
social interaction. It acknowledges the control of resources; in
this case, control over the role of the other person. If one can
anticipate the reaction of another to a given act, one can
revise the act to assure the best advantage.
A good example of deference at work comes from the way J.
interacted with an irate woman. The Adoption Mobile regularly
visits a busy neighborhood populated largely, although not
entirely, by university students. The long-term residents have
watched in horror as the spacious homes in their
upper-middle-class neighborhood become rental apartments. The
story these residents tell is that soon after this occurs, the
properties fall into neglect, the extra cars make parking
impossible, and the police make regular appearances to quell
loud parties. This account often includes another debatable
component: The students abandon their animals when they leave
town for the summer. A long-term resident approached the
Adoption Mobile on one of its visits to her neighborhood in this
context. "How dare you!" she shouted to J. "How dare you bring
animals into this neighborhood when these kids aren't even
responsible enough to take care of themselves! You know they're
just going to let them run when they leave."
J. said that he knew he had two choices. He could have tried to
convince the woman that she was wrong about the students. He
could have presented her with evidence that she would not have
found persuasive, and she would have become more defensive along
the way. His other choice, the one he took, was to defer to her.
He allowed her to maintain the role she had created for herself.
Indeed, he even supported her to an extent by explaining that
the Adoption Mobile had come to that neighborhood to work on the
very problems she voiced. The Adoption Mobile was there to
educate about leash laws, licensing, spaying and neutering, and
other aspects of responsible guardianshipC all of which was
true. Of course, if a student had wanted to adopt an animalC and
passed the screening to do soC that could certainly have
happened. However, J.'s main concern was not to alienate the
woman. To do this, he allowed her to present the image of self
that she valued. Because J. did not put her on the defensive,
she was receptive to his explanation of what the Adoption Mobile
was doing. Once they had engaged in a civil conversation, J.
went on to tell her that, in fact, no inordinate numbers of
strays came from that neighborhood when students left for the
summer. By deferring, he was able to accomplish much more than
if he had attempted to set her straight from the start.
Deference illustrates the extent to which interaction does not
always entail presenting accurate information to people who then
rationally choose to abandon what they have erroneously held
true. Dissonance-reducing behaviors such as those the woman at
the dog wash engaged in protect the ego but prevent people from
learning and finding solutions to persistent problems. The
social psychologist Aronson (1999) suggests that we humans are
not so much rational beings as we are rationalizing ones.
Discussion
Humane education, like education in general, requires precisely
the right conditions. The "student" should not feel threatened,
attacked, or belittled. The "teacher" must therefore "read" the
interaction and attempt to make it conducive to learning. Among
other things, this involves producing a positive emotional state
in the students, even while feeling angry or appalled at the
misconceptions they hold. In short, those engaged in education
must manage their "true" feelings in order to create a favorable
climate for learning.
By making civility possible, emotion management has tremendous
social benefits. However, it also has considerable social
psychological costs, the chief one being its threat to
authenticity. Because work in animal shelters elicits some of
the highest and lowest of human emotions, workers are especially
susceptible to this. On any given day, shelter workers might
experience intense joy at seeing an animal placed in a loving
home, profound anger at instances of cruelty, deep sadness
during euthanasia, and shock or horror at the ignorance people
have about animals - all with little opportunity to express or
act on their feelings. The emotion management required to
educate the public about the humane treatment of animals may
leave workers wondering what to make of their "genuine"
feelings. Granted, one could act on those feelings, and, like
the volunteer who voiced her radical position too insistently,
risk losing the chance to educate people at all. Another
alternative is to acknowledge that interaction simply feels
"phony" at times. However, the worker may then wonder what
became of the original appeal of the job, which lay partly in
the emotional authenticity of working with animals. This
situation raises at least three questions. First, if one has to
manage feelings on the job, how does one then recognize a
genuine emotional response? Second, how can animal care workers
cope with the social psychological burdens of emotion
management? Third, how can shelters and other organizations
recruit and retain workers who have skills in coping as well as
interaction?
The question about genuine feelings highlights the way
contemporary American culture depicts emotions. Hochschild
(1983, p. 190) claims that "as a culture, we have begun to place
an unprecedented value on spontaneous, 'natural' feeling."
Although interaction demands an easygoing civility brought about
by managing emotions, the emotions are also thought to have a
"wild side" that indicates our "natural" desires and intentions.
In public, we appreciate the controlled emotional style one
scholar calls American Cool (Stearns, 1994; 1989), but in
private we look to emotions to tell us what is going on
"inside." Thus, the "common-sense" response to emotion
management is Why do it at all? Why not get in touch with and
act on what you feel?
This response indicates an equating of emotions as instinct,
capable of prompting action consistent with an allegedly true
self. This represents a paradigm known as the "organismic" model
of emotions, generated by the work of Darwin, Freud, and James.
From the organismic perspective, social interaction sparks
instinctual reactions, but it does not shape them, as I have
maintained in this paper that it does. Instead, emotion is
considered largely a biological process of elicitation followed
by expression. The organismic model is positivistic, in that it
assumes that emotions are patterned, constant responses to
specific kinds of social stimuli. Emotion thus becomes an entity
that exists apart from both the "feeling rules" that pertain to
the situation and the introspection of the person experiencing
the emotion. Consequently, the organismic model considers
emotional experience as a priori more genuine and, therefore,
more reliable than feeling rules as cues to interaction. People
who strive to get in touch with their feelings presumably would
want to act on their impulses, which offer the most trustworthy
guides to behavior consistent with who one really is. Being in
touch with one's feelings would mean acting quickly on what one
felt, wasting little time on reflection that might contaminate
the impulse. To do anything else would detract from the value of
the emotions as indicators of who one is. By extension, it also
would deny the value of the true self.
Discourse about getting in touch with feelings makes a singular
claim about authentic selfhood. It suggests that the emotions
offer access to what mainstream society has suppressed. In this
sense, the organismic approach focuses on the capacity of
emotions to serve as signals. Emotions indeed convey information
about the world. However, no one has access to raw,
uninterpreted emotion. As I argue in this paper, emotions
function as signals in conjunction with expectations. Granted,
emotions involve a direct, physical experience. Whether a racing
pulse and tense stomach signal life-threatening danger or the
excitement of a first date depends largely on what one expects
from, and knows about, the situation. Thus, the signaling
capacity of emotions involves more than the relaying of
unprocessed information. Culture and expectations already have
mediated the emotion that we feel. What we know about feelings
comes through culture, not through direct contact with something
"real" called "feeling." In a literal sense, there are no real
emotions with which to get in touch.
Consistent with this, the more sociologically informed
interactional model (that underlies this study) focuses on the
social factors that enable individuals to define and give
meaning to the emotions9>. In this perspective, the fundamental
biological components of emotion, that is, the nervous system,
adrenaline, tears, are recognized as contributing to, but not
the source of, emotional experience. Emotions are "primarily
dependent on definitions of the situation, emotion vocabularies,
and emotional beliefs, which vary across time and location" (Thoits,
1989, p. 319). The interactional model rejects the idea of
universal physiological or expressive constituent elements and,
instead, maintains that all emotions are the product of
culturally or situationally specific factors. In other words,
actors must define situations before emotions will be
experienced. Social norms - Hochschild's (1983) "feeling rules"
- determine and direct the emotions experienced in any
situation. The historical and cultural variability of the
meaning and expression of emotions offers convincing evidence of
this (Irvine, 1997; Sommers, 1984; Stearns, 1989, 1994).
In the interactions analyzed in this paper, the dubious prospect
of being in touch with emotions takes a back seat to the
necessity of presenting oneself in certain ways in given
situations, which entails managing emotions. Assuming the
inevitability of emotion management, I turn now to the second
question raised above: How can workers cope with the ensuing
estrangement from feeling? I offer two suggestions. One of these
is to engage in a benign version of the ego-defensive behavior
known as the self-serving bias (Aronson, 1999, pp. 173-177).
Simply put, this is the tendency to give ourselves credit for
the good and deny or minimize our role in the bad. For example,
job applicants who receive desired positions attribute the offer
to their skills and personality, whereas the rejected applicant
blames unfair decisions or bad luck. As long as the self-serving
attribution avoids delusional extremes, an optimistic
perspective has numerous psychological and even physical
benefits (Seligman, 1991). Within the context of shelters, one
ego-defensive strategy workers use is to remember the "greater
good." Regardless of what else is involved, sheltering
ultimately is about helping animals. Perhaps the best example of
the kind of optimism I recommend comes from Peterson and Goodall
(1993). Goodall explains why she repeatedly subjects herself to
the horrors of research labs. "The answer is simple," she
writes. "It is time to repay something of the debt I owe the
chimpanzees" (p. 281). If considered part of the equivalent debt
we owe companion animals, estrangement from emotions might be
easier to bear.
A second coping mechanism, which can accompany an optimistic
style of thinking, is one I call "decompression." A version of
this appears in Goffman (1959). By examining everyday
interaction as theatre, Goffman highlights the importance of
what takes place "backstage," away from the audience, for
sustaining a sincere performance. Anyone who has worked in a
restaurant has experienced a striking version of this. Things
done and said in the kitchen would never take place in the
dining area. Yet the criticizing of customers and managers and
general clowning around have an important function. The simple
act of getting away from the public with co-workers and talking
about clients or the work helps considerably for "team
impression management." Along these lines, Hochschild's (1983)
study of emotional labor among flight attendants calls attention
to how workers benefit from talking with co-workers both on and
off the job. Mutual support can go a long way to coping with the
job's emotional demands.
Shelters and other animal care organizations can undertake
various measures to ensure that workers have the appropriate
interactional skills and to retain those who do. Industry wide,
shelters have a high rate of attrition. Entry-level kennel
workers typically stay at their jobs only for four to six
months. Although there are many reasons for this, including low
pay, the emotional burden of the work is surely a significant
factor. Two suggestions for retaining workers emerge from the
research in this paper. First, shelters and animal care
organizations should acknowledge the emotional labor entailed in
the work and prepare their employees for it. Shelter work
requires not only a deep love for animals but also a willingness
to work with people. It would be helpful for shelters to offer
training in basic acting skills, especially those required for
deep acting. J., for example, who has an acting background,
compares it to "verbal Tai Chi." As in physical Tai Chi, in
which one person relies on balance and timing to turn another's
own strength against him or her, deep acting allows someone in
an emotionally weaker position to defuse a volatile "opponent."
The shelter worker, for example, might feel angry with a client
because of the client's treatment of an animal. Expressing the
anger puts the client on the defensive; he or she walks away
from the interaction still believing he or she is right and
adding to that a bad attitude toward the experience at the
organization. Instead, a worker trained for such situations
could work toward a state of emotional neutrality while reading
the interaction along the way to determine the best course of
interaction. Although some people seem temperamentally more
gifted in such ways, such people more often are made than born.
In short, organizations can, and should, train their employees
in emotion management in much the same way they train them to
care for animals or use computers.
Second, organizations could create more opportunities for
workers to engage in mutual support and "decompression."
Scheduling lunches together, providing a lounge area for breaks,
and offering opportunities for socializing outside of work all
hold promise. Better yet, organizations should actively
encourage workers to create their own opportunities for mutual
support, since increasing worker control reduces estrangement
from the job. Along with this, organizations can recognize
employee achievements and milestones. While pay raises are
always welcome, organizations with limited budgets cannot
necessarily provide rewards commensurate with accomplishments.
Research on management suggests that recognition and
appreciation are the most valuable rewards an organization can
offer.
One of the potential extensions of this research concerns the
other participants in shelter interactions: the animals. As
stressful as shelter work is for humans, it is doubly so for the
animals who must live there, however temporarily. Shelters are
full of unfamiliar and frightening sounds, odors, and sights.
Dogs and cats must cope with long stretches of boredom
interspersed with visits from strangers who poke fingers into
kennels. The shelter environment surely has emotional
consequences for animals. Fortunately, scholars have begun to
take animals' emotions seriously. Related to this paper, the
work of trainer Rugaas (1997) indicates that dogs, too, engage
in emotion management. Rugaas has identified close to 30
"calming signals" that dogs use to reassure themselves - and
other dogs - when they are uneasy. Similarly, behaviorist
McConnell (1998) has written about aspects of training that work
on dogs' emotions rather than their actions.
The work of Rugaas (1997), McConnell (1998), and others
acknowledges that much of animal behavior, like much of human
behavior, is motivated by feeling (Bekoff, 2000). Moreover,
although emotional responses from humans and nonhumans alike
usually appear natural and spontaneous, they are, in both cases,
much more complex than appearances indicate. As research sheds
light on the expression of emotions in all animals, the lines
between human and nonhuman become more difficult to draw. As it
turns out, survival in a pack, whether human or nonhuman,
requires careful, even artful, interaction.
* Leslie Irvine, University of Colorado
Notes
1Correspondence should be sent to Leslie Irvine, Department of
Sociology, 219 Ketchum 327 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder,
CO 80309-0327. E-mail: irvinel@colorado.edu Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Marc Krulewitch and Jackson Galaxy for critiques of
earlier drafts.
2Animals who were not sold to vivisectionists were killed,
usually by electrocution. In the 1860s, two Philadelphia women,
Elizabeth Morris and Annie Waln, began going around the city
picking up and sheltering strays. They found homes for some and
chloroformed those for whom they could find no homes. Work in
animal protection was slowed by the Civil War but continued
afterwards; and, in 1874, Morris and Waln started the first
Animal Rescue League. In 1888, their organization was
incorporated independently as the Morris Refuge Association for
Homeless and Suffering Animals. It became a model for many
humane shelters and still operates today. Caroline White,
another Philadelphia woman and a contemporary of Morris and
Waln's, was outraged that the city pound supplied animals in
quantity for vivisection. She was the first to contract with a
city government to shelter strays.
In the U.S., unclaimed animals were routinely sold for use in
research until 1979 (Finsen & Finsen, 1994, p. 61). The
practice, called "pound seizure," was required by the
Metcalf-Hatch Act. New York, Minnesota, and several other
states, as well as municipalities, had pro-pound seizure laws.
Individual states began to repeal pound seizure laws in the
1970s, but the turning point was the repeal of Metcalf-Hatch in
1979.
3This lack of knowledge has been found in national surveys (Scarlett,
Salman, New, & Kass, 1999; New, Salman, Scarlett, Kass, Vaughn,
Scherr, & Kelch, 1999).
4A classic statement on this can be found in Sartre (1948).
5For a study of how guardians of such breeds manage the
accompanying stigma, see Twining, Arluke, and Patronek (2000).
6Tellington Touch, or T-touch, is a method of bodywork for all
animals. It involves a series of non-habitual touches, unlike
petting, massage, or scratching, that can awaken unused neural
pathways. It is based on the theory that bad habits and
insecurities form in response to tension, fear, and pain. When
the body is stimulated in new, non-habitual, ways, new brain
cells are stimulated. As a result, T-touch can change patterns
of behavior and instill new confidence and ability.
7The Gentle Leader is a brand of canine headcollar that works
much like a halter does for a horse. It works on the theory that
when you control the dog's head you control the body. It
discourages pulling on the leash, allowing opportunity to reward
proper leash behavior.
8"Clicker training" is positive reinforcement training that uses
a click as a reward marker. Microchipping refers to the
implanting of a tiny (about the size of a grain of rice)
computer chip in the scruff of an animal's neck. The chip
contains a reference number that is stored in a nationwide
database. The number is revealed when a lost animal is scanned
by a shelter, vet, or animal control officer. It can then be
traced, through several national organizations, to guardians'
contact information. This technology has reunited thousands of
companion animals with their guardians.
9Though George Herbert Mead introduced the interactional
perspective, John Dewey, writing in 1922, made the claim that
impulse takes shape within a context. Dewey paved the way for
Mead's interactional perspective by claiming that instinctive
processes are situationally organized and the self interacts
with and monitors each situation. For a good overview of this
intellectual history, see Hochschild (1983), appendix A.
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