It’s a strange relief that this Presidential election is the first in American history without a pet owner as a major-party candidate. Every week, it seems, comes a disturbing animal story: childless cat ladies, Biden’s biting dog, the eating-the-cats-and-the-dogs hoax. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endured two animal-related scandals—his dumping of a dead bear cub in Central Park and his chainsaw mutilation of a whale carcass, whose decapitated head he strapped atop his minivan. (“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” his daughter Kathleen recalled.) And this was the animal-rights candidate. Kristi Noem, formerly Trump’s Vice-Presidential front-runner, wrote proudly about shooting her troublemaking dog Cricket. The Guardian recently reported that the Project 2025 architect, Kevin Roberts, had bragged to colleagues about bludgeoning a neighbor’s dog to death with a shovel. (Roberts denied the incident.)

Given these allies, it’s not surprising that Trump isn’t an animal guy, though the language of the “Access Hollywood” tape—“moved on her like a bitch,” “grab them by the pussy”—could suggest a latent fixation with dogs and cats. Trump has described antagonists sweating like a dog, choking like a dog, getting fired like a dog, getting thrown off ABC like a dog, getting thrown off “The View” like a dog, begging for money like a dog, lying like a dog, dying like a dog, and getting dumped like a dog. “Robert Pattinson should not take back Kristen Stewart,” he once advised. “She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again—just watch.”

During his Presidency, Trump said of dogs, “I wouldn’t mind having one, honestly, but I don’t have any time.” One can imagine that a simpering creature that submits to an alpha would hold some Ted Cruz-esque appeal for Trump. Then again, dogs can sense fear. Also: germs. “Donald was not a dog fan,” Ivana Trump wrote in her memoir. Her black poodle Chappy barked incessantly at him. As for cats, Trump has had almost nothing to say about them, though his Presidential coterie reportedly included an aide who followed him around with soothing music to prevent temper tantrums: “Memory,” from the musical “Cats.”

A lot can be learned about a political era from the way it treats its household animals. Only three Presidents failed to keep pets; two of them were impeached. Aside from Trump, every President since Reconstruction has had one. Ronald Reagan gave his Cavalier King Charles spaniel Rex a doghouse decorated with framed portraits of him and Nancy, in a ceremony presided over by Zsa Zsa Gabor and her dog Macho. George W. Bush’s dogs Barney and Spot came to his aid when he choked on a pretzel. These were relatively bipartisan eras. The time of the Tea Party, whose symbol was a snake, begat stories of Mitt Romney strapping the family dog Seamus to the roof of his car, and an adolescent Obama sampling dog meat while living in Indonesia.

Almost two-thirds of Americans own a pet. In a poll last year, given the choice to save their drowning pet or a drowning human, respondents were just about evenly split. It’s a curious failure that animal groups haven’t harnessed the power of this potential voting bloc. But there have been a few victories. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor, he prohibited ferret ownership and infamously berated David Guthartz, the executive president of New York Ferret’s Rights Advocacy, who’d called in to his radio show to protest the ban. “There is something deranged about you,” Giuliani said. “This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.”

“As I understand it, when he decided to run for President, in 2008, that’s the only thing the press wanted to talk to him about,” Guthartz said of Giuliani recently, when reached by phone. He was feeding his three ferrets, Butch Cassidy Thief of Hearts III, Mademoiselle Katie Mini Mitts, and Pure White as the Driven Snow Ferret. “That’s why he dropped out.”

Thanks to Guthartz’s pressure campaign, the ban is virtually unenforced, and, Guthartz said, it’s unenforceable: “They bother you because you have a ferret? That’s harassment. They can be arrested.” His next target? Airlines. “None of them are allowing the ferrets to be in the cabin,” he said. “A lot of them are saying, ‘Oh, it’s a rat.’ Ferrets are not a member of the Rodentia order. They’re a much higher order—nothing against rats.”

Guthartz suggested that animal-rights groups could learn from the ferrets’ successes. “If Trump had mentioned ferrets along with the eating of the dogs and cats, yeah, there would’ve been a definite uproar,” he said. “The thing you have to understand for the dog groups is you have the different breeds, so there’s no coördination there, which is a problem. In the bird community, I don’t know of anybody who’s outspoken for the parrots and whatnot. I don’t know anybody who’s outspoken in regards to reptiles and amphibians. You have various exotics out there—nobody’s stepping up. So I have to open my mouth for everybody.” ♦