For some months now, I’ve been mildly haunted by a phenomena that mystifies me, has no ready explanation, and defies much of life’s experience. Generally, I associate hostility with men. Men invented violence, commit most of it, fill up our prison system, wreak economic and environmental havoc, fight wars, have rigid and unyielding models of negotiating. Online, men created the flaming and trolling and tradition of hostile e-mailing that destroyed countless open sites and crippled open speech. Blogs were created in part as a response to permit moderation of comments.

As I’ve often written, I fervently hope women gain political control of the world in order to save it from the deprivations of men.

Yet in my own experience writing about animals and the animal world (along with other things), I have seen a completely different pattern and it is so marked I feel the need to write about it.

I get hundreds of thousands of messages via e-mail and social media each year, usually more than 1,000 a day. I have almost never received an angry e-mail from a man. Every angry e-mail I get is from a woman, and  almost every one of those seems to own a small dog, a dacschund or toy poodle or other lap breed if you can go by their photo profiles. Angry e-mails are a rare thing on my sites, I have long discouraged hostile comments and am happy to ban or block anyone who posts comments that are hostile, I consider that opportunity a gift. I have only banned 17 people in the time my blog has fed onto Facebook – and about 50,000 people a day come onto my Facebook page.

But every one of these people is a woman, nine had photos of dacshunds for their profile image, six had toy poodles and two were other small breeds. The angry messengers are always always accusing me of some act of cruelty or abuse, either from  reading my books or looking at the blog. They are familiar in tone.  Most anger in the animal world seems to me to emanate from a kind of victim culture – people who have been mistreated themselves and are quick to fury if they think anyone is mistreating an animal, and those definitions of mistreatment are very broad and arbitrary.  Social media is host to countless sites of incestuous communities who fuel this tendency to see animals primarily in terms of their abuse and mistreatment and who – like the outraged political posters of the left and the right –  give people license to use the love of animals or opinions they disagree with as a club against humans.

Psychologically, it makes sense – fractured people can feel better about themselves by caring for animals and channeling their  disappointment and fury at people, there are simply no end of stories about animal suffering (you will never see a website online about how well many animals are treated.)  There is an us-versus-them jihadist quality to some of these messages and I have always believed that many of these messages come from people who have been mistreated by men – and that is a lot of people.

Behaviorists have long studied the correlation of mood and identity that exists between people and their pets, so do attachment theorists and when I posted this question about anger and small dogs on my Facebook pages many people – mostly women – said they had encountered this behavior themselves, they considered it a fascinating question and often linked it to some owners of some small breeds. Generalizing is always dangerous, I am fond of small breeds – I love dacshunds – and know many people, male and female who own them and are quite nice and grounded and who do not write angry messages. I also know many women who own large dogs and many men with small ones.

The only idea I  have so far is that some small breed owners may be more inclined to see their dogs as intimate extensions of themselves, to personify them as victims in ways that justify anger and rage at the outside world. I still get angry messages about my decision to euthanize Orson, the dog in “A Good Dog,” and I have noticed over time that a disproportionate majority of these messages come from small breed owners and almost all from women – they almost always use the dog as their profile photos, in itself a statement of identity and attachment: I am my dog, literally. I wonder if smaller dogs don’t engender strong protective and nurturing instincts, if they don’t project a need for protection.   These angry posters are not interested in facts or dialogue, just in expressing anger and when challenged, they invariably run away, as if they are afraid to confront human targets or wish to get banned or blocked.

I wouldn’t rush to any broad conclusions, generally my sites – which have a distinct majority of women posting – are very safe zones, filled with thoughtful and interesting comments. My readers and I have worked hard to make them that way, the sites are self-policed and live up to the promise of Internet communities, save for confused newcomers or these aberrant and occasional invasions of  angry posters.  I wouldn’t want to blame dacshunds any more than I would blame pit bulls for the bad behavior of their owners.

But I realized recently that this was one of those strange patterns,  one of those fascinating Internet cultural and behavioral ticks that permeate  the animal world. I’d love to figure it out, it is sort of what I do.