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Katherine C. Grier's advice to colleagues looking for research projects might be something along the lines of "follow your hunches."
"If you have a little brainwave or tickler hang onto it and throw it in a file drawer," she said. "You don't know what might be out there."
In the case of Grier, an associate professor of history who analyzes American material culture as a social/cultural historian, her tickler came as a result of her long-held interest in animals and her own personal history of keeping pets.
While researching 19th and early 20th-century American family life several years ago, she kept noticing pet and animal-related items in 19th century periodicals that piqued her interest in a history of pets. Whenever she saw an item, she photocopied it and put it in a file drawer. "When I finished the other research and opened the drawer, it was full," she said. "I thought I had a project."
Did she ever.
A decade later, her book, Pets In America, set for publication in 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press, has spawned a raft of other related activities that have taken on a life of their own.
The project now also consists of a traveling exhibition that will open in the fall of 2005 at McKissick Museum in conjunction with an undergraduate course on animals and humans in society, and an international academic conference on animal-human interaction sponsored by the International Society for Anthrozoology.
"I came by this honestly," said Grier. "I've always been interested in animals and I've always been a pet-keeper. It occurred to me that there was a history here, but nobody knew what it was."
With her previous background in 19th and early 20th century family life in America, Grier decided to focus on what went on with animals in and around American households during that era. Her research looked at when people started keeping animals, what they kept, how they talked about their pets, and what artifacts have survived that documented pet-keeping practices.
The book's first chapter deals with what Grier calls the natural history of pet keeping, followed by chapters on everyday practices, like taking animals in for photographic portraits, buying special food or medicines and even burying them. Two chapters deal with the development of pet supplies and equipment. Another deals with livestock pets, community mascots and celebrity pets.
Most of the book stops in the 1930s because all the elements of modern pet keeping were in place by then, said Grier, though she has an epilogue that takes readers up to the present where she talks about things like pet insurance and other developments.
Exactly how long human beings have domesticated dogs is open to debate, said Grier, who noted that "some people say it goes back as far as 50,000 years and some say it goes back 12,000 years. But certainly we can say for sure it goes back as far as 12,000 to 15,000 years."
The ancient Romans kept pets, said Grier, and the practice has showed up in both large- and small-scale societies through history. Even though it's difficult to establish a firm time line for domesticating dogs, Grier added, "it turns up over and over gain in different societies and at different times and there are specific circumstances for it in each instance."
In the United States, birds were the first pets that were accorded a complete array of food, medicine, and equipment sold specifically for them, Grier said. The first pet stores were called bird stores around 1840 that sold both caged American indigenous birds, and canaries, which were prized birds imported from Germany.
"The people making bird cages started to make other kinds of accessories and objects and they patented them, which is one of the ways you can trace this industry," Grier said. "The American patent system really encouraged a tremendous amount of grass roots innovation."
Birds were incredibly important in American households during the time before recorded music, said Grier, who noted that "you had two choices for sound. Either you or someone else played a musical instrument, or you had a canary or some other kind of bird."
Though 60 percent of today's households have some kind of a pet and more households have cats than dogs, it wasn’t until 1947 with the introduction of Kitty Litter that cats became as popular as dogs for house pets. Dogs have always been popular, but fads in dog breeding and the popularity of different breeds didn't arrive in the U.S. from England until the early 20th century, Grier said.
There is a lot of modern work by developmental psychologists on the human needs that are met by pets. Most of it substantiates popular lore based on what people have known intuitively all along. "Pets prevent people from feeling isolated, but studies have also shown that stroking or petting animals also can lower blood pressure and increase serotonin levels in humans," Grier said.
The Pet Products Manufacturing Association said that in 2000 $28 billion was spent on pet supplies, equipment, and services. But Grier believes the actual figure spent on pets is probably closer to double that amount if one takes into account costs that occur in the "informal economy" of the pet world such as costs associated with adopting a pet from an animal shelter and dry cleaning bills.
Once when she was asked to speak about her project, a member of the audience lambasted Grier for being involved in what he said was "a trivial project" about a practice that wasted money. Grier responded that for every dollar spent in America on pets, four dollars is spent on golf.
"This has been an interesting undertaking," she said, "because people either tell me they think this is a fabulous project or they think it's a ridiculous project. But I'm finding that more people think it's a fabulous project, and I've gotten some wonderful stories from them, some of which I've put in the book."
02/03
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