By Barbara Miller
The wealthy of New Delhi have taken to buying pedigreed dogs as status markers, and the vast majority buys male dogs. Owners are resorting to advertising to find female mates (in the sexual sense, it seems) for their dogs, but the search is often fruitless due to the scarcity of females.
The skewed set ratio among pet dogs appears to be even more severe than in the human population, though perhaps it may be driven by a general societal preference for males that has long been documented by anthropologists, sociologists, demographers and others. In the human population, the larger number of males occurs mainly through sex-selective abortion and neglect of female children putting them at greater risk of death through malnutrition and untreated illnesses.
As with the pet sex ratio problem, highly unbalanced sex ratios among children is not most characteristic of the poor, but is more prominent among middle and upper groups.
Are dog breeders systematically culling female puppies, or are they keeping them as future breeders rather than selling them? Perhaps a combination thereof? Either way, male dogs seem to come out on top, as do men more often than women in India.
Readers with access to JSTOR may be interested in my related article “Female-Selective Abortion in Asia: Patterns, Policies, and Debates” in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 1083-1095, accessible here.
Image: Young mother and her son in a village in North India. By Barbara Miller.
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