Humane Society president discusses the surge of pet ownership during the pandemic — and what animals can teach us

The gateway dog, I’m going to say, is probably one of the biggest entry points, but people are coming to it in different ways and for a whole host of reasons. My father became a vegetarian when he was 60. He’d been a teenager during the Holocaust, a Jewish man, and he was living in Florida. He was at a railroad crossing one day. He never invested in cars that had air conditioning, so he was standing next to his car and saw a train going by, and he stared into the cars. And he saw eyes staring back at him. He was just floored by it. It was, like, an entire train — very long, slow-moving train — of cows being transported across state lines to be slaughtered. And it really hit him in ways that hadn’t until that point.