 Pet Nation of America, wow. Mark Cushing, he wrote the book, and he is the CEO and founder of Animal Rights. Animal Policy Group. Policy Group, which is much more important. And he joins us, where are you? You're in the East Coast, Mark? No, I live near Scottsdale in Arizona. Okay, better, much better in my opinion. Thank you for joining us today. We wanna talk to you about the Animal Rights Group, a rather animal policy group, and we wanna talk about what you're doing and what's in your book. And we wanna talk about the relationship, the bond between animals and people, especially in the time of COVID and the time of families that disappear to the far corners of the earth. So first, I'd like to just tell you that I learned early that the remarkable thing about dogs is that they were our first friends. Am I right? They didn't get to live in the caves with us for no reason. They got to live in the caves with us because they had certain characteristics that made us want to have them there. You're familiar with that? Can you talk about it? Well, yes, I mean, that is the original experience of what we call the human animal bond, which believe it or not now, the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine Library has 32,000 entries relating to research and discussion of the human animal bond. And it's actually the secret sauce that explains as far back in cultures you wanna go why people and dogs or cats or other pets get along the way they do because your oxytocin level goes up, that's the source of happiness and calm and joy. And your cortisol level goes down, which is anxiety and stress. And that's a physical chemical process in the brain tied to engagement with pets. It's been studied and re-studied and confirmed. And so it's not surprising going as far back as you go. But the truth is for a hell of a long time, dogs became laborers and hunters. And they weren't just having fun around the campfire, but they were given a chance to roam and live more of a dog's life as we used to know it. Cats had a rough time. They were basically sanitation workers to kill mice and rats. That was their job. And they were on ships coming to the US originally to do that job. And they did that job, Jay, in the cities in the East Coast and the Midwest for nearly a hundred years. They were basically the sanitation workers. Then one day public health arrived as we know it. And they were fired and insult injury. They were mass euthanized to the tune of millions of cats a year. So I call cats the comeback kids. I mean, they went from that to having, you know, 90 million pet cats in America treated as royally as dogs are treated, you know, and it's a good story. It's a funny story, unless you were a cat back in the day. But I'm sure. So I was telling you before the show that there's an ad on cable TV all across the channels involving a fellow who's trying to sell car insurance and an ostrich. And whenever I see this ostrich, it's a personal, but I've been meaning to ask somebody who knows about this. So you're the one. Whenever I see this ostrich, I love this ostrich. And sometimes the ostrich is wearing sunglasses, you know, decked out in some kind of outfit. But I always have a physical reaction. I mean, it's physical. I can feel my body reacting. And I'm saying to myself, this has something to do with what we're talking about. The bond between animals and humans existed a long time and it's physical. It's deep in our DNA, don't you think? No, it is. And it's, you know, academic researchers. It's not just like your grandmother's flu remedy that you wonder, is there really any science to this? There's an actual science shade behind it. And that's what you're experiencing. And it's when that oxytocin level goes up, it puts you in a mood to laugh, to smile. You know, you're receptive to the idea. And so here's the best example. One of the real triggers to this whole pet nation, this whole cultural change in the US was when Subaru and Nissan about 20, 25 years ago. And I still can't imagine the CEO of those companies going along with those, but they ran the ads that they were gonna run for the next year, you know, millions and millions of dollars, right? And what were the ads? A retriever in the passenger seat with the window down in a car along the California Coastal Highway and the retriever smiling. And not a word was mentioned about the car, its performance, any feature of the car. And I've gotta believe the CEO said, so where's the ad? What are we doing here? And the agency, Brilliant, said, actually, we just want them to see a dog and associate it with our brand. That's all we're doing here. Don't get complicated and don't overthink it. And I mean, I think it took such courage to say, okay, you tell me this is what people wanna do. Well, you flash forward two years ago, I remember the Hyundai ads over the Christmas holidays and they had five Hyundai's silver from tallest to smallest and in front of them were five dogs, tallest to smallest. And they didn't care if you looked at one car, right? They wanted you to do one thing, see the dog, go, hey, that looks like, and connect it to the Hyundai brand. And that was it. And that's you looking at the ostrich going, I don't know what they're selling, but I'll buy it. It looks like, you know, there's something about this that makes me trust it and enjoy it. So here we are. And you talk about this in a dynamic fashion. What I get is that this process, this phenomenon of the connection of the individual and the pet animals or maybe animals in general is increasing with the complexity of our society. Am I right? Oh yeah, it's surging. And it began in the childhood of baby boomers and any baby boomer watching will remember on Sunday nights what you did. You made sure you watched Lassie, the greatest dog ever. And my puppy on puppy heard that and it's not true, Louie, of course, you know. And here's the amazing thing. The author, the original author of the story that created the dog named Lassie was a friend of Charles Dickens. Okay, well, Charles Dickens wasn't around in the 50s and 60s and 70s. Let me assure you, you know, he was back in the 1800s. But that dog, what did it do? It showed people dogs can be loyal, they're your friend, they're courageous, they're brave, they like to hang out with you, they'll do anything you want, sleep on your bed next to you, whatever you want. And it began and then you had old Yeller and you had Rin 1010. And then you had Scooby-Doo cartoon dogs and suddenly we had animals, but mainly pets, cats and dogs everywhere. And they were fun, they were useful, you wanted to have them. And what that led to was they came inside. So dogs and cats particularly that mainly lived outdoors and in a climate like Hawaii where we live here in Scottsville in Arizona, you could see most of the year that was possible, but they came inside and people began to spend more time with them. And that's when that human animal bond was triggered. People just noticed they felt better, they liked it. And then dog owners decided, well, that's not good enough. I'm just gonna figuratively take our dog out the front door into America. And that's what happened over the last 20 years. Dogs went places we never could have imagined, places that said no dogs allowed and suddenly hotels, hospitals, my favorite example. 25 years ago, if you saw a dog in a hospital, there'd be a nurse or an orderly chasing that dog down the hallway and out the door. You can't find a hospital that doesn't have an animal assisted therapy dog today where the dogs are part of the therapy and treatment of the patients. And that's accepted as good medicine and good science and it's lots of examples like that. In 1988, Mark, my wife and I went to France and I'll never forget this. And we went to a place in Loire Valley, it was called the Inn of the 12th century, albergue du Giam Siak. And we noticed in the inn, in the restaurant there, everybody had a dog sitting under the table on their feet. I had not seen that in the U.S. in 1988 and realized that the French really had an edge on us that way and that there was really no hygienic reason not to have the dog. I mean, I can have a dirty dog, but neopet animal, you're part of your family. And I think that's catching on. Do you know that that's catching on in the U.S.? Well, first of all, there was always a joke that the French treated dogs better than kids. I mean, you could have a dog in a park but you go to Paris with a child and say, excuse me, no children allowed. It was interesting in France, they didn't take it much further than restaurants. What was unique to France was just this, that you would see a dog inside of a restaurant. In the U.S., virtually all restaurants allow dogs only on the terraces like in Hawaii or here in Arizona outdoors. They don't allow them inside. That has not really caught on the way you would think it would were dogs or otherwise everywhere in the U.S. So France hasn't stayed as vigilant, if you will, and people haven't pushed the boundaries there the way they have here. And that part of the story of my book, chapter three is what I call the pet land grab. The whole damn country's run amuck. Just the fact that dogs are literally everywhere. Let's talk about your book for a minute. Why did you write it? Well, I was approached by an agent and she knew that some major publishers and we ended up being published by Penguin Random House were really interested and intrigued by get the inside story of how this all happened. How do we go from where we were with pets to where they're now a centerpiece of families they sleep on top of the bed with pet owners. They're not only not outside, they're not on their little bed next to the bed. They're right on the bed and basically the culture flipped upside down about pets. The economy of pets grew at a staggering pace. The number of pets grew at a staggering pace outstripping the growth of population in the U.S. So they wanted, and I've been thinking about a lot of the topics I've been involved in the industry, Jay, for about 15 years, but I can't see. I wasn't thinking of writing a book but talk with an agent I was introduced to. And I thought about it and I gave her an outline which was pretty much the book as I wrote it. And the publisher looked at the outline and said, yeah, that's the story we want told. With a lot of data, a lot of facts and figures to just give people things to think about. And so I wrote it in 2018 and 19, basically. Why do you want them to think about what's the takeaway? Well, one of them will surprise you. I don't think we have enough pets. Why do I say that? Because of the human animal bond, because of how powerful, of course, that is in a positive manner in people's lives. And then the companion of that, which is the social capital of pets, there were studies done in Perth, in Western Australia, San Diego, Portland, Oregon, and Nashville. And they were blind studies of what makes a community and a neighborhood work. Trust goes up, fear goes down, people meet their neighbors, they're not as isolated. Just what's the glue? Churches, religion, school, sports, music, culture, politics, whatever you want to say. It was pets. And each of those cities, it came back pets. And so my view is we could have more pets. We shouldn't require people to have a pet, but barriers to have a pet. So apartments that don't let you have pets, which I'm sure you have in Hawaii, like we have in the mainland. Sure. Those barriers should come down. I mean, basically I call pets the cheapest medicine in the United States to make people healthier, happier, and make communities work better. Sure, sure, absolutely. It helps bond the family. It helps, you know, do recreation, get you out of your house. It helps, it helps you love. And it gives you love. Those things are not easy to achieve without a pet, actually. So can you read us a paragraph you think would be emblematic of the kind of prose, the kind of message you want to send with this book? Well, I can't. A paragraph. I'll tell you what. I'll tell on a donkey. I'll, I'm going to read the first paragraph because it kind of tells it. Or I could go to the last chapter where I spend three pages arguing with the Pope, Pope Francis I, we should talk about that later, but I'll read the first paragraph. Okay. And the book's available on audio too, by the way, people like to listen to a book. But it's on Amazon. I can find it on Amazon. And Barnes & Noble and all those. Okay. Two strangers meet in a park, each walking with a dog on a leash. They don't ask each other where they work or live or went to college or about the kind of car they drive or their favorite football team. They say one, perhaps two things. What kind of dog is that? What's her name? 20 minutes later, they know everything about each other's pet and then partways as friends. Not have each other over to dinner friends, but friends who look forward to seeing each other and their dogs again. Oh, that's so true. And that's really the essence of this. And it's true in small town America, small town Hawaii, in the middle of Honolulu, the middle of Manhattan. You know, you can walk down a street, you can walk down Fifth Avenue and have six Afghans that look like horses with a handler behind them coming right at you. And 10 years ago, you would have motioned to a policeman and said, hey, can we get these dogs off the sidewalk? And now it's like you go out in the street, you tiptoe around them. But in truth, everybody's smiling, everybody's enjoying it. And that's been the secret of the emergence of dogs and arrival of dogs in public places you'd never imagined because in truth, 70% of the people around those dogs thought, hey, that's fun. I'm going to bring my dog here. You know, how cool that is. Indeed. So the animal policy group. Correct. What kind of policies are we talking about? Is this a nonprofit? No, no, I can say that it's aggressively a for-profit. Okay. I get asked that a lot. No, I'm really fortunate. I have a team of nine that are in all different time zones of the U.S. that work with me. And we represent the biggest players in the pet space, veterinary, pharmaceutical, food, pet smart, the retailer, veterinary colleges, many, many other groups connected to pets and the states, including Hawaii, pretty aggressively in Hawaii, we could talk about that. The states regulate veterinarians and they regulate pets and animal welfare, not the federal government. The federal government regulates cows and pigs and chickens and food animals, but not pets. So we handle for people, all the issues and companies mainly, I should say, all the issues that come up regarding pets. I also do a lot of work getting veterinary schools started and accredited. And then I've created a number of industry associations like the Veterinary Virtual Care Association, which promotes telemedicine now in the veterinary space and other organizations. So I tell people I mainly hired to change things because it was a sleepy industry, kind of a sideshow to America 25 years ago, and then things changed. And particularly as millennials showed up in Gen Z's, they now own 60% of the pets and they're front and center in their lives and they want the same thing for their pets, healthcare, nutrition, you name it, that they have for themselves. And the pet world really wasn't ready for that. So you had a lot of barriers to pet ownership and my clients wanted to see more pets and thought it was a good thing and also a good business. So they would laugh and say, Jay, don't let Mark tell you he's a nonprofit. You know, we got a great idea. So win, win, win. Well, I hope so. I got in accidentally really in 2005 and six when I was a lobbyist and lawyer in Washington, DC and I solved a problem for the industry in Congress and I figured that was it. I enjoyed it. I'd go off and do my other work that I was involved in. And then the phone started ringing, honestly, and the coalition that was involved represented the industry to my great good luck. And they foolishly concluded I knew what I was doing and I could get something done for them. So it led to a year or two and then suddenly I was doing nothing but pets, which my kids forever kid me about. They never saw that coming and it's been fun. And it's accompanied this whole 15 year stretch where pets became so important and so prominent and then COVID hit and it's been like steroids. Since March of 2020 in terms of all the issues, we don't have enough dogs. People I'm sure watch TV ads and think that can't be true. Well, we can talk about that. We have a serious shortage of veterinarians in the country. You now have big cities in the mainland or it's a two day way to get into an emergency clinic. So imagine having your dog hit by a car in Los Angeles and literally not being able to get a veterinarian to see your dog for two days. And sadly there've been deaths. And I've been doing interviews with affiliates in San Francisco and LA because they had friends in that predicament the producers did. And so there's a downside, not everything's happy and perfect with the world of pets as much fun as we have with them. Sure, before I asked you more about that, I wanna ask about the reference you made to the Pope. You know, let's we forget the Pope. What was that reference? Okay, and this my mother devout Irish Catholic is she passed away a few years ago and she knew I had this viewpoint before she passed away and she had a time magazine cover of Pope Francis the first on her coffee table in her assisted living in Portland, Oregon. And I mean, I know right now she's listening. She's like, Jay, don't let him tell you the story. Just ask him something else, but I'm gonna do it because it's a fun story. So let's start with this. Every Pope takes a name for themselves. So if you became Pope, you wouldn't be Pope Jay, you'd pick a name of a saint and that would become your name. Well, he picked Francis the first and he specifically picked St. Francis of Assisi. Well, everybody know you're not to be Catholic to know that's the patron saint of animals. There are St. Francis of Assisi churches all over America. I can picture one in Manhattan and one in Santa Fe that stand out for me. And he's covered with, he's got snakes on his head and birds and dogs and squirrels and you know, there's 20 animals. And it's like the staff person for the Pope forgot to tell him this because here's what he did. He gave an interview to a journalist from Argentina and he's from Buenos Aires and he criticized the culture of pets. And I think he was thinking mainly about America. And he was very critical of the money and emotional time that people spent on pets. And he had this theory. It's called, you're familiar with this zero sum theory. His theory was this, if you love a dog and you love your cat, it takes away and you're not able to love and be kind and compassionate to people. It's like, it's one or the other, it's a choice. And it's frankly absurd. No offense. I would argue, yeah, I would agree. In fact, there's two things about that. There's no evidence that people that own pets are less generous, giving money, donating time, doing things for people, right? And there's great evidence that pets bring the best out in people that they take in many cases, extreme introverts that have a hard time even being social. And because people want to talk about their pet it makes them comfortable. Well, then he went further. So I did a blog about that back in 2015 and had some fun. My mom, you know, she was still alive and didn't want to hear about it. She was like, don't want to hear about your pet there, Mark. My mom, by the way, wasn't really a big fan of pets. Flash forward, he didn't stop. Then he began to give sermons saying, will be the couple that go their lifetime together as married couple and don't have children and only have pets and you're going to be let down. It's going to be a lonely end for you. And I thought to myself, well, first of all a lot of people don't have kids. I am to have five kids, but a lot of people have kids. And that's a little churlish right off the bat. But to say that having pets leads to, you know that lonely last decade or last year, whatever, no. Again, sorry, Pope, no evidence of that. It actually seems counterintuitive to most people. So... I had a client who was well into her 90s and her pets kept her alive. The day after her last dog died, she died. You know what? It wouldn't surprise me. There are, there's now a wonderful nonprofit I'm on the board of called Pets Piece of Mine. I'm not sure if it's active in Hawaii. It should be because we're talking, I'll make sure it is. And they work with human hospices, you know where people go that are at a stage often of cancer where they know that they have, you know a month or two months or maybe six months. But there's no realistic hope of survival. And they arranged to have their pet brought in and they arranged to have the pet adopted when the pet parent passes away or the owner passes away, right? And the staff are trained not to get upset about a pet in a room. Well, the truth is they have fun too. And the quality of life for that last month or two, you can imagine, you know I mean the first video I saw I was in a room of industry executives. There was not a dry eye in the house cause they showed people and they showed people what their dog and what it meant to them. You know what? They went out of the world in peace and calm and content. And they didn't worry about their dog. They knew that their dog had a home to go to. So I think the Pope needs a corgi or something he needs to get down on one of those $100,000 Renaissance rugs he has in his Vatican chambers. And I think he'd have a different take but I have some fun with that. And like I said. Well, it's a great story. My mom. Let me flip this over a little bit, Delmar. So you have a lot of people adopting pets and they come from all places. They come from breeders who may not be humane. They come from ASPCA and humane society organizations who may, I don't know about humanness but that may not yield a perfect match, if you will. And they take these pets thinking as we have been discussing, this is gonna help them in their personal lives and give them love where maybe they don't have love. But they're not capable of handling the pet. And the pet is not a good match for them. And thus, that leads to abuse in some cases. And I'm sure the animal policy group would be concerned about that and try to protect them either through humane societies or ASPCA organizations or the like. But I guess as we develop more pets in our society, query, are we developing more abuse too? And by abuse, I also mean, you know, abandonment. Because that's very tragic. Well, there are so many situations you hear about. Lots to comment on there, a very, very good point and appreciate your raising it. So I'll just give you some random responses to it, the different aspects of that. There really is not evidence of a significant increase in abused pets because of the increase in adoptions. There's a lot more vehicles and services available to teach people how to handle pets. And that was always part of the problem. People didn't know what to do and they get frustrated, the dog goes to the bathroom on the carpet and they wanna take the dog back. There seems to be less of that. I will tell you what there is though and this is very disturbing but it shouldn't surprise people. There have been studies done, academic studies, multiple ones that show many adult felons that are sexually and physically abused women started out abusing animals. It was almost like spring training or prep school that you would, and I remember as a kid, there was one guy down the street and he thought it was great to put a firecracker inside of a frog. Who would do that? Who would do that? Who would do that? But you know what? People did that. So what we've learned is that if you see a child mistreating a pet, get involved right away with that kid because there's more going on than just the sadness with that pet but this may be in spring training for someone that when they're 18, 20, 25 are doing worse things than that. It's interesting the idea that pets get mismatched. There was a slogan used and it's not used anymore. It's called adopt, don't shop. It was a moral argument that you have a duty to go to a shelter and get your pet rather than go to a breeder. You know what millennials have said? We'll get the pet we want. We're gonna study. We're gonna read about the pets. We're gonna think about our lifestyle and we're gonna figure out what we want that fits us. And if we go to a breeder, that's our decision not the shelter. Now with COVID, it turns out the shelters are pretty close to empty in most parts of America. Not everywhere. I always have to point that out but in most areas and most urban shelters are empty so you don't have the choice anymore if you wanted it. So it's a very dynamic situation Jay and it doesn't lend itself quite to an older fear. That argument, you didn't make an argument but that theory about it was probably more true about 10 years ago. I think it's less the case today. On the other side of that, you can really love a pet too much. I suspect that some people really become completely devoted beyond devoted but dependent. Like I mentioned this 90 year old woman, her life was dependent on her pet. And, okay, you wonder if there's a point out there. And then I add this, there are people who have lots of money who say to themselves, I wanna perpetuate this pet. I want to take the DNA from this pet and I wanna use CRISPR or some kind of advanced technology and clone the pet. And I want him to look just like the previous pet. I want him to act just, I want him to be a duplicate of the previous pet. Now that's troubling on a moral ethical basis but I wonder what your thoughts are about that. I mean, maybe that's over the top. It sounds over the top. It's certainly not an industry yet. You're not seeing, I can tell you, I live and breed the world of pets and the business of pets, including every new way to make money involving pets. And that's not a visible trend but I'm not surprised people do that. The truth is, you take, there's a lot of designer breeds now that have oodle at the end, labradoodles, Australian, cockapoo's and so forth. You hear all sorts of things, right? The backend of that is a poodle, right? And why do people like poodles? They don't shed. And breeders can turn out perfect labradoodles and they do tend to look alike. So you wouldn't need to go to that length that you described. You can find a breeder that probably has a labradoodle puppy that looks exactly like yours. But let me give you the shocking news. You know what the street price is today for a labradoodle in the Western US? Thousands. $4,500. Wow. And that leads to a question that I deal with all the time, namely, do we run the risk of dogs becoming a luxury item as we have fewer dogs and shelters and we have breeding breeds so skeptically as inhumane and not a legitimate occupation. So this will shock you. The CDC came out in 2019 and said that we have close to a million, 100,000 dogs coming in from foreign countries to this US, to the US every year. And guess what? Less than 3% have any medical or vaccination or veterinary records. So they're not coming in the front door through customs. And somebody said to me, well, how can a dog get in here? And I said, well, how do you think drugs get into the US? Do you think the cartel checks them through TSA at the airport? No, there are a lot of wheat fields and there's a lot of range land in the West, in parts of Hawaii, not maybe as much in Hawaii. You can land a plane and get out of there at midnight and nobody knows you were there. So the point is we're at a complicated stage where people want pets. We have spayed and neutered to a fine art. The supply is reduced. The man went up and breeding is a frowned upon, you know, in many minds, disreputable activity done behind 20-foot laurel hedges and no one really knows what goes on inside the breeding operation. And that's a collision in the future, but not the distant future. I work on that issue, Jay, almost daily, but every week I'm involved in, you know, how do we get past the current kind of roadblock we have in the traffic jam about how we get pets? Because if you don't solve it, dogs do become a luxury item. You know, you can't make $50,000 a year and go spend 10% of your annual income on a labradoodle. You know, that's not a viable choice for a family. And so we don't want to get into the situation that we're not in yet, but you can see that scenario unfolding if we don't come up with sources of dogs that are less expensive and accessible. Do you worry, Mark, about, you know, this is a look into the future? Charles Dickens look into the future where we may have a decline in our economy. We may find that a certain percentage of the population of this country doesn't have a lot of money or has less money than it has now. And we may find that whether or other disruptions separate people from their pets and their pets are out and about, roaming wild. More pets out and about than, you know, in the home and more people in the home not willing or able to take care of them. And so you have wild pets. Is that a possibility for the future of the country? I'm the last person to say anything is impossible in America's future right now. It seems, you know, you know, what was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times? Well, we certainly do, but I would say this, the in 2015, so not the distant past, a study was done, I was involved in and it was a national study. And it showed that people in America that had annual households that had annual incomes of $30,000 or less, which we would consider to be the poverty group own dogs to the same percentage level as people that made $100,000 a year or more. So just six years ago, we were at a point where money didn't seem to divide dog owners one to the other. That's probably changing. So I think some specter of that future Dickensian vision is possible, it's possible. The good news is we have a growing culture of volunteers as well as businesses wanting to provide services that can be affordable. You can own a pet, you can feed your pet, you can even get veterinary care on a modest income. So because there's so many and the industry's gotten more robust and it's using technology efficiently or more so than it used to, we probably have safeguards to that happening, but I'll tell you one thing, you have to, it takes two dogs to make a puppy. All right, let's just not surprise the audience. Okay, we don't grow puppies in labs, laboratories and reading. Are labradors from laboratories? There you go, great, I was waiting, I was trying to tee that up for you, very great response. Here's the thing, dogs are gonna have to be bred somewhere in the world. And let me tell you about the million or so dogs that come in from foreign countries to the US every year. They come from some pretty rough neighborhoods, all right? They're not coming from Paris and Rome and Ottawa, Canada and Sydney, Australia. I would just say pretty rough hoods. We have no clue how they're breeding dogs there, how they're training them, what kind of disease and if they don't have medical records, you don't know what you're getting. I'm happy for those dogs a million or so a year, they find a home in America, good. They hopefully make a family happy, but there are issues there and we aren't gonna be able to put off too long to sitting at the table, both sides, pro and con on breeders and figure out, what are we gonna do here? Unless we're willing to see the price of dogs, reach a point that the average American family can't afford them. Cats aren't in quite the same league, but by the way, there's even more and more pressure on demand for cats. We have two cats, my wife Natalie and I and a puppy. And I think a lot of Americans are discovering, you can't take them outside the way you take dogs outside. Cats, the old saying is dogs have owners and cats have staff. And I've always thought that that nails it. A cat'll look at you and say, pet me and then they'll say, stop petting me. Come over here where I am, stop. Don't come any further, they go where they wanna go and it's part of the joy of a cat is just seeing how condescending and willful and willful, but they're fun. If you don't have a cat, you're missing out on a very interesting species and lots of fun too. Sure, and they can get along. But I wanna make one comment and I wanna ask you one last question because we're almost out of time, Mark. The comment I make is what I get out of a more complex society that we live in today, not only in the US, but elsewhere is sort of a breakdown of mental health. And you see that National Association of Mental Illness has got more cases, there are more problems in the community, which I would describe to the decline of mental health. And I think that's just a condition as the way it is. However, that also calls for pets because pets are therapeutic for sure, for sure. Nobody would argue and that we need pets for national, if not international mental health. So they play an increasingly important role in an increasingly complex society. That's my view. I would imagine you hold the same view. I hold it and you have a great deal of science and social facts behind you. And I'm now part of a group that are gonna be pushing Congress to do something that you may say you're kidding, but it's right in line with what you're saying. The federal government in the US subsidizes or directly funds all sorts of wellness behaviors, stopping drinking, stopping smoking, good nutrition, better exercise, right? Wellness activities, right? And we have all this data behind us showing that if you do that, you'll live longer and you won't need as much medical care and we'll all be better off. Well, the same can be applied to the ownership of pets and the care of pets. And I think we're at the point of saying to the government, you wanna make an investment that makes Americans healthier and makes communities work better, help people have a pet, help people take care of a pet. 10 years ago, I got laughed out of a congressman's office who said, you're kidding. I mean, he says with a straight face, that's your argument. You know what he did next? He popped open his smartphone and said, but by the way, look at my puppy, I'm gonna do something. And I said, bingo. I said, you know, you wait, now 10 years later, we're not laughed at with that argument. So you can make the case that for people in need, the relatively low cost of owning a pet, maybe I could say the best cheapest medicine we can provide. So it's a great note to end the show on. I think it's gonna become a policy debate that we're in the middle of is to say, what can we do to make it easier for people to have a pet not harder and less expensive? Yeah, and I want to end the show with something you said earlier because it really touched me because you don't want to have a designer pet. You don't want to sit around and agonize over what breed. You want to look deeply in the eyes of this animal and find a connection. And if you adopt a pet that may not be your favorite breed, your favorite, you know, object of, you know, adoption, the pet will appreciate you all the more for it. It's a religious experience for you to adopt a pet of the Humane Society, a shelter dog. And in a funny way, that's a richer experience than finding a labradoral. Well, pets seemed to provide unconditional love. At least dogs do cats. I think they do. They just don't let you get too cocky and take it for granted. But the truth is, it's unconditional and at the end of a rough day, you know, what's better than a dog in your lap or taking a walk or whatever you do with it. So enjoy talking to you. I'm glad you showed an interest. And obviously you're a pet lover and I wish you good luck. I am indeed. And I think that whatever love you're given to a pet, you're gonna get that back and more. Mark Cushing, thank you so much, a pet nation. And one more flash on the book and your website again. markalkushing.com for my author website and animalpolicygroup.com is kind of a mouthful, but if you wanna see what our business does, but I think if you get the book you'll enjoy, you'll learn a lot and you'll laugh and some good stories and it's all about pets. So thanks for the chance. And my wife and I hope to be in Hawaii sometime in the near future. You know, it's not as easy to travel these days but congratulations to you to have a great show in Hawaii. So appreciate the time. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Hello, hi.