It is hard to know where to start with the problems at the Sochi Olympics, but the one that appears to have attracted the widest worldwide outrage is the killing of stray dogs.
Even in Russia, where they have chastised Western media for being on a witch hunt for bad stories, it was a Russian billionaire who stepped forward with a donation to save Sochi’s dogs. Oleg Deripaska heads up several energy and commodities businesses. He is about as pro-Putin Russia as a person can get, yet he did not want to see the dogs “culled” either. Some question whether his funding for animal shelters in Sochi will extend beyond the length of the games, but it is still a big gesture that can be read only one way: One of Russia’s most powerful men thinks the dog-killing policy is wrong.
When news broke last week that thousands of dogs were going to be eliminated in one way or another, Humane Society International and numerous other animal rights groups mobilized their networks and offered help. There are Web sites already up with detailed instructions for people around the world who want to adopt a Sochi dog.
Western media has given a lot of coverage to Russia’s anti-gay policies, among other human rights abuses. There have been protests and social media campaigns calling for tolerance and rights across all genders and sexual orientations. However, the dog stories — with their adorable photographs — stirred a level of outrage that seemed to cross greater political and geographical boundaries. And they certainly achieved faster results. It raises a quandary: Do people care more about what happens to animals than to other humans?
The issues with Russia are not new or unique. CNN war correspondent Michael Holmes lamented in 2008 that he could write about death, disease and suffering in Iraq and other places, but if he included something about an animal being mistreated, the story would elicit a more passionate response. He summed it up thus:
“Of all the stories I have covered during my frequent trips to Iraq, most of the viewer feedback I received asked about the animal victims of war rather than the human ones. I make no judgement on that — it is just an observation.”
Online, people like and support causes and charities having to do with animals almost 2-1 over causes having to do with just about anything else, according to a study that came out in the summer last year. As Sherlock Holmes says, it does not mean it is wrong, but it is notable.
Last year, researchers at Northeastern University in Massachusetts conducted an interesting investigation to test whether humans have more empathy for animals. They wrote a fake news story about a beating and then made four versions of it. The articles varied only in the type of victim that was hurt: a one-year-old child, an adult in his 30s, a puppy, or a six-year-old dog. Participants in the study received one version and then rated their sympathy for the victim. The sympathy rankings were far higher for the dogs than adult humans, although rankings were more even between animals and children.
I saw this tendency play out when I spent several years as an opinions editor of a newspaper in Pennsylvania. One of my tasks was to read submitted letters to the editor. Four topics stand out for generating vast and intensely worded outrage. The first was the Pennsylvania State University-Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse case. The second was the debate leading up to the passage of the US’ Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The third and fourth both dealt with dogs. A person left their dog in a car on a hot summer day for several hours. Someone called the police, which is how local media learned about it. The dog was taken to a local shelter and the ex-owner received hate mail and death threats for weeks. The letters came to the newspaper, too. People could not wait to publicly shame the person and declare them a monster. Another time, a lifestyle columnist wrote a piece about buying a dog with her kids. It was supposed to be a feel-good column, but readers immediately assumed the dog was from a so-called “puppy mill” since it came from a pet store. Again, an avalanche of outrage and death threats.
Helping animals is the right thing to do. The Northeastern researchers concluded that many people view animals as innocent and helpless, similar to children. The treatment of the weakest in a society is a reflection of its people.
I also think that aiding animals like the Sochi dogs is, in many ways, an easier problem to solve than many of the world’s largest human tragedies: war, poverty, child abuse, trafficking, disease, etc. While there are some cultural differences in how we treat certain animals (note the recent dolphin culling by Japan that drew criticism from US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy), we do not have to deal with as many geopolitical and legal issues when helping animals. To put it another way, it was pretty easy to take the dog away from the person who left it in the hot car and find it a new home. It is not as simple to remove a child from unfit parents or a child bride from a spouse.
The outpouring of support for the Sochi strays is wonderful. It is exactly the “spirit” and global mobilization the public wants at the Olympics. However, alongside that, I wish we could raise our sympathy levels and support for other causes. We have to be careful that we are not numbing ourselves to human tragedy.
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