Ep 109 Animal Policy Expert Mark Cushing

Midlife Mixtape

“From accessory to center stage”: Mark Cushing, founder of the Animal Policy Group and author of “Pet Nation”, on the emotional, physical, and societal benefits of the human-animal bond at midlife and beyond.

• Pet Nation: The Inside Story of How Companion Animals Are Transforming Our Homes, Culture, and Economy
• Animal Policy Group
• From Sandy Hook to the World by Scarlett Lewis, founder of Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement

New in November from the Grown Ass Lady Squad:

• Are Women’s Lives Just Someone Else’s Business Model?
• How I quit the diet cycle and refocused on what really matters in life
• The Secret to a Happy Life? Friendship!
• DameMagazine.com
• Modern GenX Woman Podcast

Here’s proof that GenX DOES have pets!

Thumbs up.

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 109 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on November 16, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [e-mail] ***

Mark Cushing 00:00

I don’t think there’s a time in your life that the companionship of a pet – by the way, it isn’t limited to dogs or cats – can’t make you feel better.

Nancy Davis Kho 00:11

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:35

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[MUSIC]

Hi everyone and welcome to Episode 109 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast! I’m Nancy Davis Kho, and I’ve been running the show around here since 2017. That feels like a long time ago. Now one of the things I love about this podcast is that – and I’m paraphrasing Vanilla Ice here obviously – if there’s a topic, yo I’ll solve it, check out my guest while the DJ revolves it.

In other words, I was kind of curious about why every single person I see on the street is at the end of a dog leash, or has a cockatiel sitting on her shoulder, or is carrying a cat carrier. And I also sensed that adopting our rescue dog, Arlo, last summer was a good thing, net positive for my husband and me to do in midlife. So, thanks to having a podcast, I was able to find someone who can answer questions like that, and that’s the conversation I’m bringing to your ears today.

Now, if you are one of the 30% of Americans who don’t have pets – and sorry international listeners, I don’t know what the stats are internationally, but either way this holds for you. Don’t turn this off just because you don’t have a pet. One of the most interesting things I learned in this interview is how even NON-pet owners benefit when the people around them are pet-owners. So I hope you’ll stay tuned, and if you’re one of the many listeners who has sent in pictures of your pets in the past couple of weeks, first of all thank you, because that was a highlight of my day every day.

Second, listen all the way to the end of the interview to hear why I wanted that collection, and I’ll tell you where to find it.

Today’s guest is Mark Cushing, Founder & CEO of the Animal Policy Group, and author of the brand-new book Pet Nation, a book that tells the inside story of how companion animals are transforming our homes, culture, and economy. A long-time political strategist, government regulatory advisor, corporate executive and former litigator, since 2004, Mark has specialized in animal health, animal welfare, veterinary and veterinary educational issues and accreditation, developing a cutting-edge practice across these sectors. Mark currently leads several industry coalitions and initiatives and is a law school faculty member at Lincoln Memorial, Lewis & Clark and University of Oregon law schools.

Ok, sit. I said sit. Sit! Sit! Good girl. Good boy. Alright. Let’s see what Mark has to tell us.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 03:53

Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Mark Cushing. It’s so good to have you here today.

Mark 03:58

What a great topic. And you’re in the Bay Area. It’s fun for me to connect with old haunts there. So thanks for having me on your show.

Nancy 04:05

We’ve already established that we may be interrupted at any time by one of two dogs, or one of two cats on both sides. So I think that is very fitting for the topic we’re covering today. Let’s hope so. Right?

Mark 04:18

They only improve every situation they join, right?

Nancy 04:22

Well, yes, that’s how I feel. Mark, before we get to the good stuff today about your new book, Pet Nation, I want to ask you the most important question, which is: what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? You must get asked this all the time talking about animal policy, right?

Mark 04:39

I want you to know that I actually gave this answer to somebody in June in a different forrm, so it’s fresh in mind.

My first concert was at the Armory in Salem, Oregon, a very boring state capitol town. The band was Eric Burdon and the Animals. I was asked back in June, “What’s my favorite all time song?” It’s “House of the Rising Sun”. People said to me, “Of all the songs in the world, why would that be your favorite song?”

Well, when I was in middle school- we called the junior high back then – I would always check with the band at a concert – not a big name band, but a local band at a concert- to see what was the song right before “House of the Rising Sun.” Because everybody played that song. Why would I do that? Because that was about an eight and a half minute long, slow dance. So it was important to be strategic.

This should maybe scare you away from this interview. But I needed to be strategic about my partner for that song.

So if I knew the one before it, I could kind of say, “Goodbye, nice dancing with you!” and shoot across the room to whoever was foolish enough to say yes, for an eight and a half minute dance with me. So, there you go.

Nancy 05:56

Mark in junior high playing all the angles. I love it. Mark, your first concert was Eric Burdon and the ANIMALS. Have you reflected upon that? Could that have set you upon your path?

Mark 06:09

Of course, I was hoping you’d pick that up.

Nancy 06:12

Yeah. Of course, I did.

Mark 06:14

They weren’t the Stones, Beatles, Cream level, but they were just below it.

Nancy 06:20

Do you have a favorite song about pets or animals? I’ll tell you why I’m asking this. I wrote a book that came out in 2019 called The Thank-You Project and each chapter had a playlist and one of the things I wrote about was – this whole book was about how I wrote gratitude letters to people who had helped shaped and inspired me over the course of this one year. At some point, I started writing letters to not-people, and I talked about writing a thank you note to your dog, to your cat, whatever four-legged or winged or scaled animal companion makes your life better. With the playlist for that chapter, I wanted to include a song about pets and I had a really hard time coming up with one. I ended up using a boygenius song called “Me and My Dog” which is just a beautiful song, but there was not a lot to choose from.

Mark 07:11

As you asked me, the only things that came to mind were the theme song for TV shows or movies that have animals on them. This will date me but the theme song to Old Yeller. “Come back Yeller, best doggone dog in the West.” I’ve lived most of my life in the West… not all of it. I grew up outside Portland and went to Stanford and was back east, and the south, and came back to the west. And I would substitute the name of my dog for Yeller and sometimes, sing it to him: “Best doggone dog in the West.” I can’t remember a single lyric of the song beyond that, but Yeller, like Lassie, was a pretty serious dog.

Nancy 07:57

Lassie figures large in your book. I learned many facts so let’s just dive into Pet Nation. The book has just come out. It’s called Pet Nation: The inside Story of How Companion Animals Are Transforming Our HOMES, CULTURE, and ECONOMY.

One stat jumped right out as a measure of what that change looks and feels like. “Since 1998,” you wrote, “The pet population in the US has almost doubled. About two thirds of the country now owns a pet.” That’s just since 1998. So that’s a major change. Mark, what is going on? Can you give us a brief overview of what the reasons are behind that transformation, behind that expansion of pet ownership in the country?

Mark 08:43

Well, it’s more than just the number, but the numbers are staggering. Now, we’re close to 70% of households have a pet.

Nancy 08:51

I was just going to jump in for one second to say, all you non-pet owners who are listening, hang in there. Because we are going to talk a little bit about the benefits of other people owning pets to you, because that was something I hadn’t thought about. Sorry, go ahead.

Mark 09:06

You have the sheer number growing dramatically faster than the human population. That’s number one, and we’ll talk about that.

But the thesis of the book, which I believe is anchored in the reality of the last 30 years: pets went from being an accessory or kind of a sideshow, often in the backyard, little time in the house, but just as I say, kind of an accessory to life to center stage. They came inside.

The secret sauce is that term that’s used, called the human-animal bond. That’s a term that psychologists and veterinarians coined back in the 70s and 60s, with the idea that there’s something that goes on between people and an animal beyond just, “Isn’t my puppy cute? Isn’t my cat a darling?” It’s a chemical fact and at first, it was treated almost like your grandmother’s flu remedy. “Yeah, right. I’m sure that’s not science.”

Now, Purdue University Veterinary College Library has 31,000 entries related to the human-animal bond, many of those peer reviewed studies. What they found out: engaging with a pet causes a person’s – and by the way, the same thing for the pet – a person’s oxytocin level to go up. Ad oxytocin is the agent of happiness, calm, relaxation in your brain. Basically, you’re happy, your cortisol level goes down. Cortisol is a source of stress, worry, anxiety.

I don’t think people studied this in a library and ran home and said, “Let’s go get a dog or a cat.” But they discovered it when pets came inside. They began to engage more, they just felt better, and that began to kind of permeate what I call the childhood of Baby Boomers, the early years of Baby Boomers. Then we watched the show that we’ve already referred to religiously on Sunday evenings: Lassie, the greatest dog in the history of the universe. Loyal, friendly, playful.

Nancy 11:15

What’s up with Timmy? Timmy needed to just get himself organized and calm down. Why so much peril, Timmy?

Mark 11:21

Tim didn’t know what was behind the tree. It wasn’t a cute little kitty. It was a cougar or a robber or a thug or whomever it might be. Interestingly, to push us way back in time, the author that created Lassie was a friend of Charles Dickens, so she knew something a long time ago.

But that confluence of pets inside, people experiencing and enjoying the human-animal bond and then seeing in the media – now all of a sudden pets, Scooby Doo, Peanuts, that series, Old Yeller, Rin Tin Tin, cartoons galore – I mean, they begin to see pets, and what were they always dong? Having fun, they were funny, they were cool. You just want to hang with them.

So those two cultural events in my study merged, and they were best captured… I mention this a lot, because I can remember watching this going, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” It was Subaru and Nissan, two Japanese car manufacturers in the same time period, with brilliant agencies that thought this idea up. They created commercials for their cars as follows. Car going down a California Coastal Highway, Golden Retriever in the front seat, window down, hair flowing, smiling. You weren’t told anything about the car, you weren’t told anything about the engine, about the price. Nothing. I can imagine the CEO turning to the ad agency saying, “When are you going to finish the ad? What are we doing here?” They said, “No, that is the ad. We just want them to connect a happy dog with your brand.”

That is the essence of Pet Nation. This notion that’s just associating with a dog in this case brought goodwill. And the sales for those two companies tracked almost to the month in that ad campaign.

Nancy 13:19

Wow.

Mark 13:20

Now you see that you can barely turn on TV – I watch a lot of ballgames and you can’t go very long, I think almost every other ad has an animal in it in some fashion, not the star but always just there. Because they know what that does – AT&T now has in an ad a bearded dragon and the line is “There’s no dogs so I got this pet.” Those things, the combination of media with the human-animal bond and then what took it over the top was the creation of social media through smartphones.

Nancy 13:57

The facet of how technology and the resulting isolation that we all have experienced, when we’re buried in our phones and separate from one another… The fact that that had an impact of increasing our need, our connection to the pets in our lives was fascinating to me.

Mark 14:15

Well, you know what happened? I remember early on with the big clunker smartphones, we didn’t call them smartphones, you used to see people show your babies. And you had to be nice and say, “Oh, that’s a cute baby.”

Nancy 14:27

“Ya gotta see the baby!”

Mark 14:29

Yeah, exactly. I have 5 children, so I’m all for that. But all of a sudden, kids got pushed off the screen because everybody became their own film editor and director, and what do people want to see? “Yeah, you had a baby. Great. Show me you holding your new granddaughter one time. Thank you. Oh, you’ve got a Shih Tzu? Could you every day supply a video of what your Shih Tzu is doing?”

Nancy 14:54

“I need a feed of the Shih Tzu. Thank you.”

Mark 14:57

There you go. All those forces change and the most visible impact of what I call Pet Nation, this culture of pets, became when dog owners – figuratively now, but it really captures it – marched right out the front door with their dogs and are taking their dogs everywhere in America, to places people never could imagine.

I mean, let me give you two examples. They’re my favorites. Most prominently is hospitals. Alright. In my childhood, if you saw a dog in a hospital, you would also see an orderly or a nurse running down the hallway to get that dog outside. Now, in Oakland, try to find a hospital that doesn’t have an animal assisted therapy dog, multiple animal assisted therapy dogs, where the dogs actually are part of the treatment of the patient. Who would’ve thought that? If you told me that as a kid, I would have laughed and said, “Not happening.”

The other one was hotels. For most of us, just go back 20 years, walk into a hotel lobby with a dog and you’ll be told, “Excuse me. Outside.” If you got past the bellman to the front desk and try to get a room, they’d look at you and say, “Is the dog with you?” “Yes.” “Outside. We don’t have room for dogs.”

Now, the Kimpton Group, which began in San Francisco, and they discovered Wolfgang Puck, and it’s a great chain, often named names other than Kimpton but they’re all over the country, very hip hotels; they now have floors for non-pet owners. How about that? We’ve reached the point where it’s like, “Okay, you can have floor number four. Either you’re allergic or you just don’t like pets, and we won’t bother you. But understand that everywhere else in this hotel, you’re going to run into a dog.”

Nancy 16:50

I love that they bring them on campus during finals. That’s one of my favorite places to see them where the kids can come out and get a little snuggle as a study break. What a wonderful thing for college students!

Mark 17:02

That’s a long, long answer. And there’s one other element, which is I think very important right now in America. It’s not just the human-animal bond for the individual pet owner or pet parent, but it’s the social capital of pets. What do I mean by that? What pets do to a community.

A study was done in Perth, Australia, which is a lot like San Diego, it’s on the Indian Ocean, western side of Australia. It was a blind study. It wasn’t trying to prove anything about pets, but it was trying to figure out, “What’s the most powerful force that makes a community comfortable, less violent, more trustworthy, more engaged?” Schools, churches, sports, politics (I wouldn’t think so).

But the point is, they looked at every factor, and what was number one? Pets. People were just skeptical. I was part of a group that redid this study in San Diego, Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, which is Bible Belt – you might think churches might have won. All three cities. Same result.

Nancy 18:04

Why is it?

Mark 18:05

The key factor is, you and I are walking down a sidewalk opposite and we cross paths, we’ve never met. We probably won’t even look each other in the eye. There’s almost a sense of respecting the privacy or the awkwardness of it. Sometimes you have to think about, “Am I going to look at the person and say hello? I don’t know them.” Chances are you don’t.

You and I walking with a dog on a leash? We stop. We don’t know each other. You don’t say to me, “How much money do you make?” I don’t say to you, “What kind of car do you drive? Where’d you go to school?” None of that. “What’s her name? What does she like to eat? What does she like to play with? Where’d you get her that?” We have a 15, 20 minute conversation, we’re now friends. As I said in the book, not “have each other to dinner” friends. We’re just friends because of our dogs and that’s this common element.

That’s what the name Nation means. Not to pick on the Raiders, but you would say Raider Nation. If two people in the Starbucks were wearing Raiders gear, a cap or a sweatshirt or something, they’d have a conversation. But it wouldn’t be about anything except that team and it’s a communizing…. It doesn’t matter your wealth or anything. That breaks down tensions.

It also makes people feel better and that’s called the human-animal bond. You walk to a park, dogs are playing together, you go to a dog park, and you just feel better, you’re in a better mood, you’re chatting with neighbors. Now this place you live isn’t full of 5000 strangers, and some good restaurants and a supermarket. It’s full of people that you’ve met, and you’re comfortable. You don’t have to become best friends and you don’t have to turn into an extrovert. If you’re an introvert, you don’t have to do that. It’s just made safer and better. And that combination was sort of to me the ultimate value of pets and it’s why it’s not a fad.

So anybody who doesn’t like pets and thinks that this is going to go the way of Beanie Babies, sorry, let me give you the news. Millennials and Gen Z’s own 60% of the pets in this country now. They were the kids that always had a pet in their houses, do you think their kids aren’t going to make sure the first thing they do after school is grab two pets? That’s a lot of what happened in the pandemic, is that existing pet owners, millennial kids – not kids, young adults – got a second dog, they got a first cat, they got a second cat, they expanded there because they wanted playmates for their pets, as well as others got their first time. So I’m sure we can talk about that.

Nancy 20:35

Well, you make a rather surprising point to me that we’re going to run out of pets.

I mean, you kind of make the argument that we need to figure out where all the pets are going to come from, because the Millennials and the Gen Z’s are so accustomed to pet ownership, they’re likely to continue that and maybe double up, triple up with whatever it is they have.

Thank you, Sarah McLaughlin. We’ve done such a good job of spaying and neutering so many pets that we’re facing a shortage.

This is my excuse to talk about my dog, Arlo. It was going to come out at some point. But we started thinking about adopting a pandemic dog last year in 2020, and it took until June 2021 till one of the applications I sent in actually landed us a dog, because the dogs were hitting the shelter and right out the door again the next day. Thank God, I didn’t get anybody but Arlo – I mean, there was a reason we had to wait. But I experienced it personally, that’s just really darn hard to get a new pet.

Mark 21:43

Well, the study that was done, that I convinced a group to fund, it was two studies together. It was back in 2015, so five years before COVID. Let me tell you what prompted that.

I travel – not anymore, but I would travel weekly in my practice, which I’m lucky to represent companies across the country. My daughter, who was in law school at University of Washington, Seattle, to get a little stress relief would volunteer at shelters in Seattle and Seattle Humane Society, it’s a great organization. We began to notice that if you didn’t get to a shelter about noon on Friday, if you’re trying to find a pet – and I mean an adoptable dog, there are dogs that because of medical or behavioral reasons are in shelters, but they’re not capable of being adopted out yet and maybe never. Okay, well, if you didn’t get there by Friday noon, certainly early morning, Saturday, I mean, early morning, like 6am, and there’s lines out the door, you’re out of luck.

So I started to look into that going. Is that just one place? Well, no, I talked to shelter leaders across the country and if you take the Mason Dixon Line, which I always say kind of goes from the Bay Area across the Baltimore, Maryland – all the northern shelters, most of their dogs come from the south or the southwest. Portland Oregon Humane Society gets their dogs from LA, Animal Control in Bakersfield. Dogs in El Paso go up to Denver and dogs from Mississippi go up to Minnesota. Dogs from East Tennessee go to Buffalo and Alabama sends their dogs in New Jersey and so forth.

It was funny. I said, “So they’re not local strays.” These are dogs coming from shelters that don’t have staff, don’t have the resources in communities, that aren’t spaying and neutering as fast as other areas, and they would come up and it was a beautiful system. I call it the Canine Freedom Train. They would take the dogs who were on the verge of being euthanized and give them a life for somebody who lives in Boston. I joked that the dogs either had a drawl or they spoke Spanish. They were just from different parts of the country.

That got me thinking and I started to talk to animal welfare executives, I’ll leave names as anonymous, back in 2014 and I said, “The combination of spay and neutering the demand for dogs, how does anybody know that we have enough dogs and what are the sources of the dogs if we have a shortfall?”

People began to say to me, “Mark, I’m not sure we don’t have a shortage.” I said, “Well, let’s just find out. Let’s do a study. Let’s go see what the facts are.”

It turned out that we were looking potentially at around 2 million dogs a year shortfall. Well, half of that’s made up from dogs that come from foreign sources, not just overseas, but from Mexico or from Canada. The CDC recently said that numbers about 1.1 million a year, and they don’t have medical records. They don’t have vaccine records or veterinary records. Fewer than 3% of these dogs do.

We had this very sketchy system and the truth is COVID just took the covers off and people went, “Good God, that shelter is empty.” It’s not like people are running back, taking Sparky to the shelter now that they’re going back to work saying, “I loved you for the last year, you changed my life. But here, good luck.” Not going to do that.

We don’t have an organized system. One of the reasons we don’t is a political issue, and it’s a powerful political issue. It’s a term that you and your listeners have heard before, called puppy mills. The idea of commercial breeding has been stigmatized by the term “puppy mills.” We don’t encourage people to go into business of breeding dogs at scale for fear that they’re going to turn into factories and their conditions are going to be inhumane and so forth. There are certainly breeders like that around the country. I’m not saying they’re not.

But the idea that anyone who has a lot of dogs in that business is always unsanitary, inhumane and doesn’t care about the animals can’t be proven either. But they don’t talk to each other. It’d be as tough as negotiating peace between Israel and Palestine, I swear, as getting animal welfare groups and breeders in the same room to figure out.

So absent that, you have to ask yourself, do we have a shortage prices? Period. Or availability as you found. If you’re trying to get a dog from a shelter, you have an application, you’re on a waiting list, and that list can be as long as a year. If you try to get a dog from a breeder, there’s some breeds that you’re talking about a three year wait. In the West, a golden doodle puppy now can cost $4,500.

Nancy 26:39

Yeah, that seems to be the going rate for a purebred.

Mark 26:42

Guess what? That’s a luxury item. One of the points I make all the time in talking to industry group is, “This isn’t going to work, folks, if dogs become a luxury item. They’re not meant to be, they shouldn’t be. We can produce as many dogs as we need. Money should not be a barrier to owning a dog, or a cat. But there’s political forces in place.” So it’s a challenge.

The other shortage we face, and it’s acute in the Bay Area, is a shortage of veterinarians. I did an interview with the ABC affiliate in San Francisco and it’s all driven by people that have friends whose dogs died, because they couldn’t get into emergency clinic. They literally couldn’t get in over a 48 hour period. With your dog hit by a car, it doesn’t work to say, “In two days, we’ll take a look and see how he’s doing.” I hate to use such a sad image. But we’re at a tough point right now.

So shortages, which often occur in industries where there’s a burst of success and growth – and I’ll tell you, the pet world, the animal health world, the veterinary world was not ready for the demand, and the scale of service people want right now. My day job is involved in trying to address that shortage in any way we can.

Nancy 28:02

The book is full of really interesting discussions of topics like that, stuff I hadn’t thought about before. It also – Mark, I have to say, as a fellow writer, your footnote game is impeccable. So Mark drops all of these trivia bombs throughout the book, and I’m going to read the one on page 42 because I let out a squawk. “At the age of 17 before inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell taught his Skye Terrier Trouvé to say, ‘How are you grandma?”

What? Mark? We need receipts for that. How did he teach his dog to talk? What are you talking about?

Mark 28:40

You know what? We ran that down and it happened. I have no clue. Of course, the records aren’t around to just sit and listen to the lesson, like a podcast series on how to teach your dog to say your name, or speak French, whatever. And it is interesting how far back in time some great animal stories go. You know the Papillon. The Papillon puppy that was Antoinette’s dog that she handed to one of her servants just before her head was chopped off in the French Revolution. It apparently lived a long life but it wasn’t living in the palace.

Nancy 29:21

It never ate cake again.

Mark 29:23

Never ate cake again.

Nancy 29:24

My sister in law is convinced that she taught her dog to say, “I love you, Mom” and we’re all just like, “Okay, Shelley, that’s what I hear too.” I mean, what are you going to say? Like, I think he just has gas. I’m not sure about it.

We’re going to come back in a minute and talk with Mark Cushing, author of Pet Nation and how to be animal policy group about midlife and dogs. But first a word from our sponsor.

Back in September, I was honored to have my book, The Thank-You Project, selected for its monthly Book Club by Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement. Scarlett Lewis founded the nonprofit Choose Love Movement after her son Jesse was murdered during the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in December 2012. After his death, Scarlett became part of the solution to the issues that we’re seeing in our society and those that also cause the tragedy. She created the Movement and became an advocate for social and emotional learning (SEL) and character development that teaches children how to manage their emotions, feel connected, and have healthy relationships. Speaking across the US and internationally to diverse audiences, Scarlett urges everyone to become part of the solution. My Zoom meeting with the Choose Love Book Club was one of my favorite events this year – such thoughtful questions and of course, gratitude is a big part of Scarlett’s message of healing and connection inspired by the loss of her son. She’s just an amazing person.

Now, she has a book out. It’s called From Sandy Hook to the World and explores how Scarlett Lewis started Choose Love Movement in the wake of her Jess’s murder. Learn how Jesse’s final chalkboard message of “Nurturing Healing Love” inspired Lewis to create the simple yet profound Choose Love Formula and become a leader in character social and emotional development. It includes stories of how the Choose Love programs have transformed educators, students, parents, communities, and workplaces, how people in the US and around the world have embraced the Movement and are helping to create a culture of love and connection. The Movement serves more than 2 million children in over 10,000 schools, in every state, and over 100 countries and it’s growing every year. You can order From Sandy Hook to the World in your favorite indie bookstores and online. I’ll leave a link in the show notes to make it easy for you to get your hands on this beautiful new book.

I also wanted to make sure you’ve checked out all the great new stuff this month from fellow members of the Grown Ass Lady Squad. That’s GALS to you and me. There’s a great piece on TueNight.com by Jo Piazza called Are Women’s Lives Just Someone Else’s Business Model? I loved this line: “Many of us have become nonstop content shops, whether we are creating a business around ourselves or simply laying claim to the women we are or want to claim to be. Our vital need to brand ourselves as a successful author and attentive mother, or a loving wife or a doting daughter simply lets the scroll of sales continue. And through it all, we are their free programming.” Oh my God, why do you have to be so right, Jo? So that’s over on TueNight.

Jumble and Flow has a story called How I quit the diet cycle and refocused on what really matters in life. And Revel’s got an essay called The Secret to a Happy Life? Friendship! I second that. I want to make sure to give a shout out to Dame Magazine – that’s DameMagazine.com – which is a 100% independent, women-led, reader-funded newsroom. They’re covering stories that matter to woman and men that might otherwise fall under the radar. I hope you’ll check out DameMagazine.com and consider becoming a member to support their important work.

And finally, check out the Modern Gen X Woman podcast, all about business and career with lots of life lessons. I’ll leave links to all Modern Gen X Woman Podcast these in the show notes so you can see what’s up the Grown Ass Lady Squad!

[MUSIC]

Nancy 32:54

So we’re back with Mark Cushing who’s talking about his new book, Pet Nation. Mark, I’m going to ask, what particular place do you think that pets have for people at midlife, for what we call “the years between being hip and breaking one”? In what ways can pets make our midlife better, easier, more fulfilling?

Mark 33:16

I don’t think there’s a time in your life that the companionship of a pet – by the way, isn’t limited to dogs or cats – can’t make you feel better, can’t cause you to, in the case of a dog, exercise more which is good for everybody. So there’s no time. I think in midlife, particularly when children have gone off to college if you had kids, and you miss their companionship daily – nothing approaches, not a good CD to use an old fashioned phrase for music – I mean, not a good movie, nothing replaces that daily, steady, unconditional relationship you have with the pet.

Nancy 33:57

Which is also the argument for getting them when you still have crabby teenagers at home too. I’m going to butcher the quote but somebody said, “If you want somebody to be happy to see you when you get home when your kids are teenagers, get a dog.”

Mark 34:09

Yeah, absolutely true.

I’ll push ahead a little bit into kind of midlife to when in your 70s or 80s. There was predictions that Baby Boomers who kicked this whole thing off and forever have had the most pets of any group replaced now by Millennials – well, if their pet passes away, they’re not going to get another one because of fears that they can’t take care of it.

Fortunately, the Amazon’s, the Chewy’s, the telemedicine, the direct consumer service delivery apparatus that pervades our life, has solved that problem. You could basically have a pet and a modest income and almost never have to take it anywhere to get something or do something, if that’s an issue. For many people, it is – people that don’t have cars, and most public transport still not pet friendly. It’s something I’m working on. But the solution is not handy yet.

I tell people, there’s no better time than the last 20 years of your life to enjoy the company of pets and there’s even a wonderful program that was started in Portland, Oregon called Pets Peace of Mind. It’s a nonprofit, and I’m on their board. They’re national now and they’ve trained human hospices, where people go for their last month or last two or three months, that allow you to have your pet with you in your lap. Think about that. They train the staff to deal with it, and arrange for the adoption of your pet so you don’t have to worry.

A lot of people have that fear. It’s like, “I don’t want to get another cat or dog because if I pass away, what’s going to happen to Fluffy?” Well, the answer is there’s solutions there. The service economy surrounding pets is not finished in its development and its specialization, and it’s customizing care and services for people, whatever their situation might be.

I’d say particularly, if you aren’t getting enough exercise – sorry, cat owners, cats don’t really like to be on leashes – get a dog. Just that simple act of a walk around the block half a mile, a quarter mile, it might add up to a mile or two, you’re going to do better physically, you’re going to do better medically.

Nancy 36:33

Not to mention emotionally. The cats, the lizards, the turtles, they’re all great for that.

Mark 36:38

In my book, just a quick highlight. A tremendous specialist veterinarian that lives in the Keys, in Florida, had all sorts of pets, and he talked about the human-animal bond with the fish in his aquarium.

To this day, he’s still crushed at the fact he could not move his entire aquarium apparatus out of his house as he raced out of the Keys to get up to Miami when that last hurricane that just blew through and destroyed the Keys came through. And he said when he came back and his fish died…he said every day when he came home, he saw their eyes and they saw his eyes and so there’s even different pets for different people too. Enjoy an aquarium if you don’t think you can take care of a dog or a cat.

Nancy 37:28

Right. Alright, so Mark, I do this for most nonfiction books that come my way for the podcast. I flipped to the appendix because I’m like, “Oh, he’s talking about Millennial dog ownership, he’s talking about Gen Z,” and I started alphabetically. And sure enough, there’s a reference to Baby Boomers in the appendix and I get to G, and there’s Generation Z.

You didn’t even mention Generation X in your book. So I did a little further digging and I found out according to Statista that sure enough, Millennials own 32% of pets, Boomers own 27% of pets, and Gen X has a paltry 24% of pets. But I think that’s because we’re the smallest cohort.

So what I would love the animal policy group to do – just saying – is a study on per capita, per…if you correct the size of our generation, I bet we were pretty high! Because we were latchkey kids, we loved our dogs and cats that were there for us when our parents weren’t.

Mark 38:23

My wife is Gen X, okay? I’m reminded often in a very articulate manner that every aspect of society and culture seems to skip from Boomers to Millennials, as if there wasn’t anything in between, and you’re right. It’s only a function of the number of Gen Xers, period.

Nancy 38:44

Tell your wife I just gave her a silent fist bump.

Then just to make sure that we are represented, I have invited listeners of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast to send me pictures of their pets. And when this episode airs, there is going to be a slideshow of the most -I’m going to say the cutest pets of all the generations accrue to us in Generation X. I’ve been pulling this slideshow together over the past days and it is a delight.

So make sure you check out the show notes and see a slideshow of Midlife Mixtape listeners’ pets. They’re so cute. As my daughter said to me last night in talking about our dog, “I think God peaked with this one.”

Mark 39:23

I stand humbled and admonished.

Nancy 39:28

Oh, it’s just the Gen X snark coming through. But the one other thing I saw was that, and I think this came from the book, as you said that the 55 and over age group has become the largest proportion of pet owners across all pet types and this goes back to your earlier point. Gen X is hitting that number. So I think probably there will be a groundswell as we experience empty nesting and that need for more emotional and physical connection with a pet.

The last question we always ask on the show: what one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you, or do you wish I could go back and tell yourself?

Mark 40:02

That has to do with pets of course, right? It doesn’t have to do with failed sports teams that you grow allegiance to and suffer from.

Nancy 40:10

You can throw that in on the way by if you want to.

Mark 40:13

There’s no time in your life you couldn’t and wouldn’t enjoy a pet and it wouldn’t improve you in terms of your mood, your humanity, your sensibilities, your empathy, and so forth.

My mom did not like cats or dogs in the house. So I had a childhood that really didn’t have pets. One, Prince, my collie who was smashed over the head with a milk bottle by a milk delivery guy.

Anyway, I would say get a pet. And particularly…it’s often men, but I don’t want to stereotype too much, but there seems to be some truth to it. There’s this myth that somehow guys are supposed to have dogs and women can have dogs and cats, and I’m telling you cats are amazing animals. The phrase that I love taht a veterinarian shared with me is that “dogs have owners and cats have staff.” It’s so true. Cats are so fun. They’re like, “Please come here and pet me. Stop petting me.”

Nancy 41:14

They’re the puzzle you can never solve.

Mark 41:17

I am so happy that we have both two cats, as it turns out, and a dog. It is really fun to watch those species interact. It drives my puppy crazy and makes me laugh with a belly laugh to watch him just watch these cats jump up six feet onto a ledge, go under a couch and he’s like, “Where are you? How did you do that? Get down here. You’re not supposed to be up there. I can’t get up there!” and it’s fun.

So I just think there’s not a time in your life when pets don’t make things better, more entertaining. I like to laugh. I’m a bit of a smart aleck, you can probably tell and pets just feed that. Now that you can take them so many places and we have so many services available, try them both. Don’t typecast yourself as dogs only if you haven’t tried a cat or vice versa.

Nancy 42:06

That’s great advice. Mark, this has been really fun. The book is called Pet Nation: The Inside Story of How Companion Animals Are Transforming Our HOMES, CULTURE, and ECONOMY. Super fascinating. I learned a lot and grateful for you making the time to be on the show today.

Mark 42:20

Thanks so much and I can’t wait to see the photos.

Nancy 42:23

Come back and see our slideshow. I’m loving these pictures that are everybody’s been sending in.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 42:32

Okay. Circling back to my question to Mark about great songs about pets, I couldn’t have timed this any better. Last week, Jenny Lewis, who is one of my very favorite performers dropped a new single called “Puppy and a Truck” and that’s the video I’m going to include in today’s show notes. My favorite line of the song:

If you feel like giving up
Shut up
Get a puppy and a truck

Jenny is always right. Alright, let me know what you thought of today’s show. I’m going to be putting that slideshow up on social media on the very infrequently visited Midlife Mixtape YouTube channel. Don’t spend a lot of time there. There’s not much, but I will put the slideshow there. Drop me a line at [e-mail], or send me a message via Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @midlifemixtape to let me know what you thought.

May today make you as happy as a dog who’s just found an unguarded ham sandwich! See you next time!

[“Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

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