"How to stop judging people who pay for purebred dogs"

It's not me, it's you.

Original column: Carolyn Hax, January 3 2025

My take: This post is about disagreement, so I thought I’d start with a list of the things we used to be able to discuss with each other, but are now too political.

I don’t mean Republican-Democratic political, which is so manifestly poisonous it no longer even bears mentioning. I mean household stuff. Even our homes are criss-crossed with political trip wires…

I’m sure I’ll forget some, but here’s my partial list, to start:

What you eat (sustainably grown?), how you cook it (gas, electric, or induction?), what you wear (fair trade?), where you shop (chain stores or independents?), what you drive (fossil fuel or electric?), how you landscape (are those native plants, or do I see a lawn?). And of course, what pet you have (shelter dog, or purebred?).

All these decisions have acquired a political color. When asked, nearly everyone deplores this, but since we’re all pointing fingers instead of listening, solutions elude us.

I was encouraged, then, to see that Carolyn Hax has a new column about purebred dogs. The letter-writer asks how he* can “be less judgy” of people who buy purebreds from breeders instead of adopting from shelters.

Carolyn’s interested in this issue, but to her credit, she knows the letter is really about judging, not dogs. So she proposes “a simple, deliberate, repetitive practice” to stop judging in general.

The very thing we’ve been waiting for! So what’s the practice?

It has two steps. The first is “wanting to be less judgy.”

“Judging,” Carolyn writes, ”is carbs for the ego — so tasty and hard to resist and havoc when overdone.”

Shoutout to her for “carbs for the ego.” What a metaphor, and so true!

But that’s just step one. Step Two is what Carolyn calls “openness to understanding others’ choices,” and this is where we run into trouble.

Practicing Step Two, she writes, means creating “mental lists you compose of good — or at least sympathetic — reasons people might do the things you’re tempted to judge.”

For instance, a person might choose a purebred dog over a shelter dog because of “1. Allergy mitigation. 2. Very specific needs, like a working dog. 3. Low confidence and felt ‘safe’ with a breeder. 4. Breed-specific rescue. 5. Ignorance, bad information, bad experience.”

Nice try, Carolyn, but this is absolutely not “openness to understanding others’ choices.” It’s supplying your own explanations for their choices. It’s finding ways to persuade yourself the other actually shares your values, and would act on them, but for special circumstances.

Truly not judging means recognizing the other has different values or preferences. In this case, it would require the LW to accept that the dog owner he wants to judge may just want a specific breed. She may never have considered a shelter dog at all.

Carolyn says her two steps echo the two levels of yoga: one that’s a set of moves, and another that’s “a state of mind.” She says her practice will have “the secondary effect of creating a more forgiving state of mind.”

And maybe it will. But forgiving someone for disagreeing with you is not the same as not judging them.

Carolyn says what she’s advocating is a form of Mind Your Own Business. AdviceObsessed has nothing against MYOB! It wouldn’t be a bad place to land. It’s probably the most realistic path to peace, about dogs and a lot of other things, too.

But it isn’t the same as learning and understanding, and as such, it leaves the door open to future rage. Carolyn even acknowledges this, writing that her practice can also “help identify…true acts of bad faith.” How? You know you’ve found bad faith when “the list-making process turns up no good reasons, just a lot of self-interest doing even more harm.”

In other words: If you can’t think of an excuse for the person with whom you disagree, that person is acting in bad faith. By implication, you’re free to judge her. But this nullifies the other person’s right to her own opinion, which—I promise—she won’t consider an “excuse.” Carolyn’s practice never even invites her to share it.

The whole business reminds me of what a friend once told me. As time passes, she said, only one thing perplexes her. “Why,” she wondered, “aren’t other people more like me?”

But she was joking.

Remember the slogan, “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires”? It’s old. You probably don’t. You can see, though, how usefully this can be applied to other problems. AdviceObsessed recommends “Only You Can End Polarization.”

*The letter-writer uses no pronouns. As always, for syntactical simplicity I’m picking a gender. This time I’m assuming he’s a man.