Author Spotlight: Mark Cushing Explores America’s Rise as Pet Nation
October 28, 2021
The D.C. Bar counts among its members many authors whose books and stories run the gamut. To celebrate October as National Book Month, the Bar is featuring some of these attorney–authors who have published works in a variety of genres.
As ubiquitous as pets are today — consider all the dog parks, pet hotels, high-end pet stores, and specialized services available — Mark L. Cushing says that wasn’t always the case. According to his engrossing book, Pet Nation, companion animals reached their high status in the United States only at the millennium. Today advocates are seeking to elevate the status of pets from property to family, deserving of rights and protections as humans. Cushing, a business lawyer and founding partner and CEO of the Animal Policy Group, explores this cultural transformation and its legal and economic implications.
In your book, you argue that the U.S. as “pet nation” was formalized in 1998. Why was that such a benchmark year?
[The rise of the pet nation] is roughly about a 20-to-25-year timeframe. There was a predecessor to it, which was the childhood of baby boomers. We can remember a [TV] show on Sunday nights, Lassie. Everybody watched Lassie and saw this dog that was incredible — a friend, heroic, brave. [That] really kicked off a cultural awareness and [new] view of pets. In the case of dogs, it quickly expanded with cartoon pets like Scooby Doo, the Peanuts cartoons, and then all the movies like Rin Tin Tin and Old Yeller.
Then in the ’90s, leading up to 1998, Subaru and Nissan did campaigns showing a car going along a California coastal highway, window down, golden retriever in the passenger seat, hair blowing in the wind. They wouldn’t tell you anything about the car. It had clicked that pets had become this connector, this symbol, this generator of great affection — and that was all during the period when dogs and cats came inside [the house].
There was no national movement. It wasn’t like people picked up their newspaper and read, “Bring your dogs inside; they’re cold.” But when they came inside, people began to spend much more time with them, and that’s when something called the human–animal bond was experienced by individuals. That combination of coming inside and that discovery kicked this off. But the media had a lot to do with it.
What I think happened in the late ’90s was dog owners figuratively [brought] their dogs out the front door [and] into America. Suddenly they went everywhere. They’re in the mall, they’re in retail stores, they’re in museums, they’re outside restaurants, they’re on planes. So, the book talks a lot about the physical space that pets penetrate [now], and that people don’t want to be away from their dogs. [There are] battle zones today, which is interesting.
What are those battle zones?
One is public housing. Public housing is federally financed; there are laws that say they should be pet-friendly. You’d be surprised how many public housing projects tell people that they can’t bring pets in there. And you can’t even find a member of Congress who even knows if [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] has ever studied that, surveyed it. That goes back to pets [not being] that important [to some people]. I think you’re going to see much more activity in Congress and with the agencies to say you need to enforce that. Low-income housing residents may need a pet more than anybody in this country.
I was in a top 25 population city . . . and I asked [the director of public housing for that city], “Do you enforce that law [that public housing should be pet-friendly]?” “No, I’m not aware that we do,” she responded. “We have other priorities.” Well, if it’s required, is it your job to determine if it’s a priority or not?
But the typical resident of a low-income housing doesn’t have the phone number of a lawyer. They don’t have anybody that tells them, “You have the rights.” A celebrated example was a homeless man in Napa, California, who lived under a bridge with a large dog, his best friend. He won the lottery to get into a new public housing that was built in Napa. He goes over with the dog and they said, “No dogs.” You know where he lives today? Under the bridge. That dog was his best friend, maybe his only friend.
There has also been a lot of research on how much more people like their company if it’s pet-friendly. Even if you don’t own a dog, you’ll like your boss better. So now you have the COVID-19 phase hopefully receding and companies saying, “Come on back.” And one of the fundamental issues is people saying, “No. One of the reasons I want to work from home is my dog or my cat. Or I want a three-day-a-week deal, or two days.” It’s a major issue right now.
The book mentions that Tennessee passed a law allowing plaintiffs to receive non-economic damages, with a limit of $5,000, if their pet died wrongfully at the hands of someone else. But veterinarians were exempt from liability. Do you see any other states following Tennessee’s lead on that?
I’ve spent much of the last 14 years making sure that doesn’t happen. In May, the judiciary committee of the New York State Senate passed out a bill that didn’t have a $5,000 limit and didn’t exempt vets. So, it’s an all-out removal of the non-economic damages ban, and it has not gotten a floor vote yet.
Massachusetts now has a bill — it had two hearings on it this fall — that would have a $25,000 cap. So, in the [pet] industry, I give a lot of speeches about politics and where we’re going. I tell them, “Understand the price of success. When your industry is now in the news as having done as well as it’s doing, it puts a target on your back.” Veterinary clinics have signs saying, “We treat your pets as family.” But when someone sues them, the clinics want [pets] to be treated like chairs.
There’s a thousand-year-old common law rule about pets being property. The argument that we use is the impact it will have on the cost of veterinary care mimicking human health because you now practice defensive medicine. You’re going to be on the witness stand and a good plaintiff’s lawyer is going to say, “Did you run every diagnostic, every test?”
If New York passed that law [where vets aren’t exempt], every New York vet’s premium would skyrocket. Veterinary liability premiums are miniscule. An OB-GYN’s can be as high as $200,000 a year. Veterinary liability premiums are often three-figure amounts, not even four- figure amounts. So that’s the kind of economic argument — that it impacts access to care, prices go up, expenses go up, and people can’t afford vet care.
The other argument is the tort system. You cannot bring a claim for emotional or non-economic damages for injury to your best friend, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your favorite aunt, your favorite uncle, your favorite grandparent, your brother, or your sister. So, there’s a whole cadre of important relationships [for which] the system has just said, “We don’t have enough money for all that.” Or else, if something happens to me, everybody who’s my friend gets to show up and say, “This has really set me back.”
There’s no question that you’re going to see more states take up the issue. And partly, it could be because the plaintiff’s injury bar doesn’t usually miss an opportunity. They’ve obviously moved over to opioids. That’s fine. I’m not quarrelling with that. But you know that the bar is very smart about looking at economic sectors. Fortunately, the pet industry, $110 billion a year, isn’t in the league. It’s not in the pharma or gun lobby leagues. But we’ll see. Those issues are not going away, I’m sure.
Share your thoughts on animal law as a niche practice.
Animal law is a pretty limited field. They tend to be people that get involved for nonprofits on abuse cases, hoarding, pets tethered out in the sun for 18 hours a day in the summer. So, it’s cause work. That takes a special lawyer because it doesn’t compensate in the way you might want to be paid if you go to law school. It’s a very specialized, narrow field, but you won’t find a D.C. firm of any size that has an animal law group. It’s a cause-oriented, not particularly financially rewarding field.
What are the most important things you want readers to take away from Pet Nation?
I want policy makers to seriously take the notion that pets make people better and they provide social capital for communities. They’re a serious wellness source. So, the book is not a story about you and your pet. It’s much more about socially and culturally what’s happened here.
Pets are a wellness provider. The federal government funds or subsidizes or gives credits for anti-obesity [campaigns], stopping drinking, anti-smoking, a whole series of wellness behaviors that we all support and say are good. I would put taking care of a pet on the same level — pets do that much good for people. Having pets provides exercise and lowers stress. So that would be a takeaway: Take the political issue of pets seriously because they could be a cheap form of medicine the country could use.
