Breed standards motivated by pack mentality and need for esteem

A post on Psychology Today from December 2009 looks at human motivation. Author Robert Evans Wilson Jr. says humans are motivated by their status as a pack animal.

He says that, when Abraham Maslow created his Theory of Human Motivation in 1943, he identified five levels of motivation, or five needs, that humans strive to satisfy: survival, safety, social, esteem and fulfillment.

Status in the pack is an esteem need, he says, and, regardless of where we fall on the economic ladder, we all strive to achieve status.

“Whether we admit it or not, we all want to feel as if we are a little bit better than the people around us.”

Wilson says we try to establish that hierarchy in the pack with status symbols that can create the powerfully motivating emotion of envy in others.

Unfortunately for dogs and horses, they wound up being the acceptable status symbol of the day.

The BBC documentary “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” in 2008 attributed the rise of “purebred” dogs as status symbols to Britain’s new Victorian middle class in the mid-19th century. People got the idea that they could produce “perfect” specimens of different dog breeds and have more “perfect” dogs than everyone else. The whole focus changed from being concerned with the function of a dog breed, or what it traditionally was used for, to its physical appearance.

Ironically, Americans who bolted from Europe to get away from a human caste system that judged people on things other than their ability have embraced a caste system for animals wholeheartedly, because free and equal Americans are still looking for a way to lord it over their peers. People want animals that are “better” than those of their friends and enemies.

And, of course, for one’s animals to be “better” than another’s, one needs to create breed standards that reflect one’s own animals and excludes the traits of an enemy’s animals. How else can anyone justify breed standards? There is no basis for the rules set down on paper other than somebody made them up to mirror his or her own animals.

I have been scratching my head trying to figure out why otherwise seemingly reasonable people — particularly in my circles of the Connemara world — think creating breed standards, and barring certain animals because they don’t meet those standards, is an acceptable practice, particularly in the United States, long after Hitler’s eugenics movement — the exact same concept in the human world — was stamped out with the force of war.

I guess they lack self-esteem. Does anyone have a better suggestion?