MARCH/APRIL 2010
Dead Dogs
Breed bans, euthanasia, and preemptive justiceEarly on Friday morning, March 11, 2005, a caravan of vehicles drove from New Orleans to a home outside the city of Lafayette, in the heart of “Cajun country.” State police, a SWAT team, U.S. customs officials, and federal agents, with the aid of the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (LSPCA) and the Humane Society of the United States, raided the home of Floyd Boudreaux. They confiscated 57 American pit bull terriers and arrested Boudreaux and his son Guy on 48 counts of dogfighting. The dogs were loaded into a truck and driven back to New Orleans.
That night the LSPCA began killing the dogs by injection. They did not stop until the next day. By the time the Boudreauxs were released on bail on Monday morning, their dogs had already been cremated.
The dogs were not crippled, maimed, or blinded. Some had scars. Some had calluses. Most were healthy, described as “normal” on the LSPCA’s intake forms. Nineteen of the pit bulls were puppies, less than one year old. One of them would have whelped that weekend. Dr. Wendy Wolfson, a veterinarian with the LSPCA, testified that she conducted a hands-on exam of each animal: “We did a whole barrage of things to each dog,” she said. She later testified that she found evidence of dogfighting injuries and that the animals were labeled “fighting dogs.” During my visit to his clinic in Lafayette, J.W. Lambert, Jr., Boudreaux’s veterinarian, told me, “God couldn’t have created a more efficient destruction of evidence.”
Once categorized as fighting dogs, the pit bulls were assumed inherently dangerous, too aggressive to live—no matter the evidence of their friendliness and vigor and regardless of the absence of any proof of actual fighting. Deemed “threats to the public,” they could be killed summarily. According to Louisiana law, “fighting dogs are contraband per se.” An arbitrary label put an end to their lives, without any recourse, appeal, even notice to their owners. Not only were they no longer personal property, but once seized from their owners, the dogs were legally disposable too.
Three and a half years after the raid, in October 2008, the Boudreauxs were acquitted of all the charges against them. The judge found no evidence of any crime. During the proceedings, Jason Robideaux, Boudreaux’s lawyer, condemned the LSPCA: “I believe the state’s purpose was to seize the Boudreaux’s dogs and kill them to end the bloodline. I don’t want to speculate on the reasons.”
The seizures, detentions, and exterminations of pit bulls—sanctioned by laws in many states—expose the statutory logic for making preemptive justice constitutionally permissible: canine profiling supplies the terms for inclusion and ostracism, and even the suspension of due process rights. No criminal conviction of the owner is required for state seizure and destruction of property. In other words, the Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which prohibit the government from depriving anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” can be suspended for the public good without evidence, without trial, by classification alone.
In legal rationales, realities are created. Old inequalities and radical discrimination are repackaged in unexpected forms. In breed-specific legislation, the taint and incapacity of the disenfranchised live on. At a time when our government is labeling certain persons as threats—alleged terrorists, enemy aliens, illegal immigrants, ordinary people who want to get on airplanes—we need to ask how the seizure and destruction of dogs deemed contraband becomes a medium for the intimidation and debasement of humans in turn. Who should suffer deprivation without redress so that we can live in reasonable—safe and secure—consensus? And who gets to decide?
• • •
Pit bulls were once known as “America’s Breed”: RCA’s “Nipper” (pictured head cocked while listening to “his master’s voice”); Buster Brown’s “Tige”; “Pete the Pup,” part of the Little Rascals gang in the Our Gang comedies; and the pit bull pictured on the celebrated World War I poster proclaiming: “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.” Sergeant Stubby, the most decorated dog in military history, fought for eighteen months in the trenches, saved several soldiers’ lives, and captured a German spy. Now the pit bull is the most demonized breed, the poster dog for dogfighting, the herald of criminality and drug-dealing, the mauler of children.
In 1987 Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, and Time Magazine all ran articles featuring pit bulls. Rolling Stone’s “A Boy and his Dog in Hell” reported on pit bulls used in street fights by gangs in North Philadelphia. Valued as proof of their owner’s mettle, the dogs were subjected to unimaginable torture and death if they lost. The cover of Sports Illustrated showed a snarling pit bull with the headline “Beware of This Dog” and branded these dogs with the locking-jaw myth and “a will to kill.” It was bested by Time’s “Time Bombs on Legs,” which compared the pit bull to “the vicious hound of the Baskervilles.” According to the Time article, the pit bull “has seized small children like rag dolls and mauled them to death in a frenzy of bloodletting.”
Dogs are liable to extermination if their presence signals disturbance or danger, even if they themselves are not dangerous.
Since then the pit bull has been the media’s choice for horror stories about dogs labeled “four-legged guns” or “lethal weapons.” Citing pit bulls’ “vicious propensity,” hundreds of towns large and small throughout the United States have adopted the first ever breed-specific dog bans. Regulations vary from one city to the next, but once a ban has been enacted, any dog considered a threat to public welfare can be summarily seized and put down. This despite the fact that other breeds of dogs also bite, but we hardly ever read about them. “Dogs that bite people,” as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, “are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog.” That is, what predisposes a dog to bite is not its nature, but its environment. The most loyal dogs are the most abused. Ever ready to please, these dogs become victimized by those they love most. They are either the tools of human-initiated aggression or, as Karen Delise writes in The Pit Bull Placebo, the targets of “every type of positive or negative emotional and physical circumstance humans are capable of imposing on dogs.”
When I say “pit bull,” I include American Staffordshire terriers (known as Amstaffs), as well as other dogs that merely look as if they might be part of the bully breed. The debates distinguishing between American pit bull terriers and American Staffordshire terriers or Staffordshire bull terriers continue. Most generally, the dogs are considered cousins, bred from British bull and terrier combinations. The breed registered with the United Kennel Club and the American Dog Breeders Association is an American pit bull terrier, and with the American Kennel Club an American Staffordshire terrier. But they do look different. The pit bull is leaner, slightly higher up on the legs, while the Amstaff is stockier, with a squarer—more robust—wedge-head and the body lower to the ground.
As the late animal trainer, poet, and philosopher Vicki Hearne, Gladwell, and advocates of the breed explain, contemporary bans do not distinguish among the various members of the breed. The specter of outlawry tracks pit bulls, and indeed Amstaffs, and any dog categorized as a “pit bull type.”
How does a dog, a breed, get labeled “dangerous?” Are “vicious propensities” revealed by a bite, or simply the result of an alleged or a perceived ability to injure?
The summary disposal of dogs branded as “dangerous,” “offensive,” or a “threat” to the public can be traced to the early common law and later to the range of police measures instituted ostensibly to protect community interests. “The act to regulate and license the keeping of dogs is an exercise of the police . . . and is constitutional,” a Wisconsin court ruled in 1862. Dogs are liable to extermination if their presence signals disturbance or danger, even if they themselves are not dangerous. In spite of an abundance of concern for dogs throughout the nineteenth century, a dog without a license faced death by gunshot or beating not just from the police, who were entitled to destroy any threat to public welfare, but from anyone.
But more critical to their legal status than this canine outlawry was the early common law judgment that dogs were not property. Unlike “useful” or “domestic” animals such as cows or sheep, dogs could not be owned, and persons had no rights in them. Considered “base” or “inferior” to more valuable animals, dogs were entitled to less regard and protection.
Dogs’ disposability was always enshrined in legal judgments; current legislation against pit bulls takes the general legal discrimination against dogs and focuses it on one breed. Yet some appellate cases in the nineteenth century repudiated such summary execution. Questioning the necessity of legalized violence against dogs and their owners, a few judges not only shared their enthusiasm for dogs but also revealed a respect for their independence, nobility, and gameness.
In September 1905 John Domm was bitten by a dog while playing billiards in a saloon in Seneca, Illinois. More than a year later, he sued the owner, George Hollenbeck. Over a period of five years, four different courts grappled with questions about the dog’s temperament: was the dog fierce and malicious? Was the “face of a dog” inevitably “an index to his disposition”? This dog was identified as a “bull dog,” the generic term used to identify breeds that originated as bull baiters or pit fighters, though most no longer performed these functions. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of Illinois, whose decision tells a story exceptional by today’s standards in the attention paid to the dog’s relationships and his popularity.
We know that Hollenbeck had owned the dog only six weeks when he left him with friends. Subsequently he left the dog at another friend’s butcher shop. The dog remained there for two days. A grocery delivery wagon drove past; the driver’s friend noticed the dog with his “shiny harness” and whistled to him, and the dog jumped into the wagon. Sitting in the delivery truck for most of that day, the dog “acted in a quiet and inoffensive manner.” Later, the dog was brought to the saloon. What happened then remains unclear. Did the plaintiff provoke, push, kick, and chase the dog with his cue before being bitten, or did the dog attack first, chase him around the bar and onto the pool table, biting his arm and leg?
Though these questions were never answered, lower courts found that the bite alone proved “vicious propensity,” and such proof of threat remained impervious to any evidence to the contrary. Domm was awarded $750 for damages and costs.
A final appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, however, reversed the decision. Numerous witnesses testified to the dog’s good nature and his elaborate trappings: a “fancy, ornamental harness, with brass buttons or tags” wound around “the legs and chest” and “a ring in the collar.” Not only was he “nice, quiet, sensible, good natured,” but “anybody could do anything in the world with him.” He had never “been used for fighting
purposes . . . and had no marks to show that he ever was in a fight.” We also find out how he fared in the company of humans. Children played with him, wrestled with him, threw him down, and rode on his back through the streets. At the Keeley Liquor Cure, which promised a treatment for drugs and alcohol addiction through what was known as the “gold cure,” he became known as the “jag dog,” which meant something like “binge dog.” He followed recovering patients and became “a source of amusement to them.”
For the Supreme Court, no dangerous-dog determination could be made without first hearing ample evidence about the dog’s behavior or disposition—and his good nature, the brass buttons, the happy children, the recovering alcoholics redeemed him.
Hollenbeck’s dog nonetheless met a bad end. A guest described a visit to the dog’s owner, reporting that he had seen a skin or a robe on the floor. Hollenbeck said it was a bulldog’s skin: the dog had accidentally hanged himself by a rod that caught in his collar.
Though the Illinois Supreme Court proved a fair arbiter, most courts and legislatures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw dogs as disturbances or threats, and tougher regulations demonstrated the peculiar vigilance of the modern era. Nowadays, dangerous-dog hearings decide if dogs live or die. Vicious-dog law, or what some simply call “dog-bite law,” usually precludes any legal challenge—especially if the offending animal happens to be identified as dangerous simply because of the breed.
Today’s pit bull bans tell us more about ourselves than about the breed. The drive to label, condemn, and exterminate has become a moral enterprise.
In May 2005 animal-control units began to round up all pit bulls within the Denver city limits. Dogs were taken from their homes and put down regardless of their disposition or demeanor. Last summer the New York City Housing Authority issued a ban on pit bulls (also identified as American Staffordshire terriers or Staffordshire bull terriers), rottweilers, and Doberman pinschers—“all of these either full breed or mixed breed”—or any other full-grown dog over 25 pounds in all public housing. So New York, the most urbane of American cities, now boasts the harshest public-housing dog regime in the country. What Gladwell described a few years ago as “a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general” anticipated the undesirable, if not toxic, effects of unfounded prejudice.
In May of last year, Judge Burke F. McCahill of Loudoun Circuit Court in Virginia ruled legal Loudoun County Animal Care and Control’s current “No Adopt Out” policy. That meant that any abandoned dog identified as a “pit bull,” even if judged temperamentally sound by animal-behavior specialists, had to be euthanized rather than adopted. In the past three years, more than 200 dogs have been put down in Loudoun County. McCahill ruled that “a Citizen’s right to own a pit bull is entirely different than a citizen’s right to adopt.” So if you already possess a pit bull you can keep it, but anyone who wants to acquire one from a shelter is prohibited from doing so.
• • •
Today’s pit bull bans tell us more about ourselves than about the breed: about the rituals and the illusions that have become necessary to our survival. The drive to label, condemn, and exterminate has become a moral enterprise. No wonder the stories about pit bulls—at once labeled “vicious” and brutalized by those who so label them—confound the ability to know right from wrong, to judge injury, to discriminate between victims and predators, cruelty and care.
On a hot day in June 2009 Fabian Henderson threw his year-old pit bull Oreo off the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building. She survived the fall of six floors, breaking her two front legs and a rib and sustaining severe injuries to her liver. The New York-based American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) used donations from concerned dog-lovers over the next four months and longer to nurse the “miracle” dog back to life—and then put her to death on November 13.
The ASPCA remains a paradox: a private organization paid for by donations that is also an arm of the state, endowed with police powers; a society instituted to prevent cruelty that kills dogs to be kind. In order to protect Oreo’s “quality of life,” Ed Sayres, ASPCA President and CEO, ordered that she be deprived of life. Although individuals and organizations—such as Camille Hankins of Win Animal Rights, and the no-kill animal shelter Pets Alive in Middletown, New York—begged to take Oreo, they were ignored or rebuffed.
Hearne, who observed the sanctimonious compassion that heralds the extermination of animals, doubted the pretense of humane treatment. In her preface to the 1994 edition of Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, she wonders
why the rise of the animal rights movement and an increased interest in ‘humane’ and ‘not for profit’ activities should coincide with, and at times be indistinguishable from, relentless enforcement activities targeting dogs.
Faced with the proliferation of breed bans and the escalation of police control, Hearne targets the well-meaning language of animal welfare. She argues that self-righteous care not only justifies, but also masks violence. The history of “humane law enforcement” prepares us for Oreo’s fate at the hands of the ASPCA. “I had to protect public safety,” Sayres said.
Nineteenth-century state regulatory policies and the police power that accompanies them always resurface. If a dog was a stray, the state had the right to unleash familiar practices of discrimination and violence. In Sentell v. New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad Company (1896), the precedent-setting case still used today to dispose of allegedly “dangerous and vicious dogs,” Justice Henry Billings Brown called for “legislation of a drastic nature” for “property” deemed offensive or harmful.
Even if dogs are considered property in “the fullest sense of the word,” Brown writes, they are comparable to rotten “meats, fruits, and vegetables.” If decayed, they “do not cease to become private property,” but “it is clearly within the power of the State to order their destruction in times of epidemic, or whenever they are so exposed as to be deleterious to the public health.” What counts as disposable, and when can due process be surrendered? He adds that “rags and clothing” must be destroyed if “they become infected or dangerous.”
In 1866 the state legislature of New York passed the country’s first anti-cruelty law. In the same year, it issued an Act to Incorporate the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and granted it power in vague terms: “An Act for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and empowering certain societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals to do certain things.”
These “certain things” creditably included arresting anyone who tortured; tormented; deprived of necessary sustenance; or beat, mutilated, or killed “any living creature.” But that was not all. In 1894 a new law gave the ASPCA in New York control over stray and unwanted animals. Along with this responsibility, it was granted the power to order a license tax on dogs and the right to seize and dispose of dogs it had not licensed. A few years later, a New York court in Fox v. Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society ruled this authority unconstitutional, since no state could delegate a private corporation to levy or collect taxes. The court questioned the validity of a statute that gave the Society the right to seize unlicensed dogs. Such a dispensation—and the profits that followed—gave it a special immunity and privilege not granted to others.
But on appeal the court upheld the statute. Though recognized as a private organization, this humane society was now legally authorized to enforce the law, to levy canine taxes, and to impound and destroy unlicensed dogs without notice to the owner and without any judicial proceeding.
The state’s power over dogs expanded in tandem with its empowerment of the newly established societies for “humane treatment.” So too did claims of humanitarian enlightenment. Dogs were no longer as legally insignificant as before, but they continued to be subject to the rigor of law: judged as dangerous, accused of damage or injury, impounded or killed. Their representation and treatment—cared for, beaten, ignored—offer limit cases in the extravagance of status-making in law.
Dogs thus legally disabled take their place along with vagrants and criminals. Around 1900, courts rallied to support legislative acts that led not only to re-enslavement through convict lease and chain gangs, but also to vigilante justice. Just as someone who summarily killed an unruly, stray, or unmuzzled dog was seen as peaceable and law-abiding, so lynch mobs tortured and murdered, knowing that they were respected as guardians of the community. Police departments, especially, used tramp acts or loitering and vagrancy laws to control persons the public viewed as nuisances. The language of threat, used to warn against the allegedly noxious, was the same whether the subject was human or animal. Police power was justified in the name of civil order—for the public safety, welfare, or morality of a community.
• • •
What does Oreo’s death teach us? How can the best way to protect an animal be to kill it? Since the much-publicized indictment of Michael Vick for dogfighting at his “Bad Newz Kennels” in Virginia, the ASPCA and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) have led the campaign against cruelty, rescuing dogs from alleged dogfighting operations. Once Vick’s surviving dogs were saved from abuse and confiscated, however, the same HSUS, along with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), argued for their destruction. According to PETA spokesman Dan Shannon, “the cruelty they’ve suffered is such that they can’t lead what anyone who loves dogs would consider a normal life.”
In November 2009 Time portrayed the mutilated, crippled, and blinded dogs rescued from a Michigan dogfighting ring. No longer to be feared, neither lethal nor hellish, these defeated dogs deserve our pity, or so the article suggests. They were more fortunate than the 146 pit bulls—including 60 puppies, even newborns—seized from breeder and convicted dogfighter Ed Faron’s Wildside Kennels in the mountains of North Carolina. Numerous organizations tried to adopt the dogs. They included Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah, where Vick’s dogs were rehabilitated and renamed “Vicktory Dogs” in spite of the HSUS and PETA’s determination that they were beyond hope. Nevertheless, a superior court judge ordered that Wilkes County Animal Control must destroy them. Again, the HSUS publicly endorsed the court’s decision to kill the dogs, describing the “fight crazy” instinct, the irrevocable nature of “game-bred dogs.”
These accounts of deprivation and injustice return us to the deaths of the Boudreaux dogs of Lafayette. In confronting their summary disposal, we see how cruelty thrives in the guise of compassion. The possibility of such collective social derangement makes intellectually coherent actions that are incompatible with moral integrity.
LSPCA’s Kathryn Destreza, in her twenties when she led the raid and directed the “euthanasia” of the dogs, was recognized for her dedication to animal welfare and her role in this high-profile case. In February 2006 she was promoted from Chief Humane Officer to Director of Humane Law Enforcement for the LSPCA. A couple of years later, she was presented with a replica of a vintage ASPCA peace-officer badge. She received special recognition from Ed Sayres, the ASPCA chief who decided Oreo’s fate. He praised her “extraordinary zeal in providing mercy to animals.” Interviewed after the dogs’ destruction, she confessed that she had cried when the dogs were led, one by one, to Room 9-5, the LSPCA’s “euthanasia room”:
Seeing those big dopey looks from those big brown eyes . . . . I cried, yes, but I made sure not to cry in front of my staff . . . . Even as we were loading them onto the truck, you couldn’t help but think about what was eventually going to happen to them. Trying to breed another line like Boudreaux would be like trying to re-create Elvis. You can make some gold records, but there’s only one Elvis.
The collusion between humane organizations and the police functions of the state in seizing and dispatching dogs, once revealed and understood for what it is, has a frightening and well-known political analogue in Nazi concern for “life not worthy of being lived” and the euthanasia program of the Reich, which murdered over 100,000 incurably ill, severely disabled, criminally insane, or physically deformed persons. It was known euphemistically as Gnadentod—“mercy killing” or “death by grace”—among well-meaning health officials.
Henry Bergh, the founder of the ASPCA, once noted, “mercy to animals means mercy to mankind.” Perhaps we should not be consoled by this cliché.
PETA’s Daphna Nachminovitch responds.
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About the Author
Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor of Humanities at Vanderbilt University, is author of Haiti, History and the Gods; The Story of Cruel and Unusual; and the forthcoming The Law is a White Dog.
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Regarding the Pit Bull story, the issue of 'classification' relevant to decision-making in such diverse arenas as 'destruction of dangerous beasts,' 'incarceration of 'drug addicts,' "drug dealers," "execution of 'too dangerous and depraved humans,'" going back to the German classifications of "communists" "mixed race individuals" and "Jews," is a very big topic which is being 'worked' at its most devious level by a powerful media combine describing a modestly liberal Harvard Law graduate as a 'secular socialist' and radical - all of which is being promulgated by an Australian immigrant of great wealth and his wealthy and ignorant supplicants.
I wonder if we shouldn't start at the top in eradicating the dogs of our times, rather than at the 'bottom' in Louisiana, although I don't disagree with the author that this issue in my home state raises some issues. Not, however, in the same magnitude of Murdock's minions.
Howard M. Romaine
Attorney at Law
Member Tennessee, Louisiana and
other bars associations.
(Louisiana in 'remission')
1501 Jefferson St.
Nashville, TN 37206
615-321-3268
Ian Craven.
Sydney, Australia.
I kept them overnight, till our no-kill shelter could pick them up. They barked very little. Although my fear of the female kept me from interacting with them, the animal control officer (a young woman) encountered no trouble at all. She leashed the female, and I took the male to the truck, where they both climbed in docilely.
Because I was concerned that there were puppies, I went back to where I'd found them with my hound to look. It was near a dumpster, and I followed a path of strewn bits of trash into the nearby woods, where'd they set up house. No puppies, but clearly they'd lived there a little while. You could see the spot they bedded down, and things like fast food containers and a steak bone they'd carried from the trash. I had never seen a pair of dogs who were so plainly a couple, so attached to each other. I've compressed my observations here, but I'll never forget them.
I later learned that the owner claimed them from the shelter within hours. I didn't know whether to be glad.
Defenders of the breed use Nipper, the RCA dog, as a good example. Well, bad choice. The dog was named Nipper because he bit people!
The truth is that these groups do not only target pit bull owners. They target anyone, including private owners of mixed breed pets. Their "raids" routinely involve intimidating and frightening innocent people into surrendering their animals. The act of surrendering does not preclude criminal charges, and deprives the owner of every due process guarantee under the US and state constitutions. There are lawsuits all over the US, most recently in Hawaii, in which innocent people are fighting back, in federal court, because their rights were violated.
This isn't about dog fighting or pitbulls. These groups do not know what they are doing, their people have an agenda, and they are being given law enforcement powers. They know how to use the law against innocent people with whom they do not agree, and most people do not have the money to fight back. Their animals are taken from them and are put down immediately or lost in some "rescue" system with no checks or balances.
Beware these groups because they are not the benign entities you think they are, and they want to be the puppy police in your state.
Think of the craziest animal rights fanatic with a badge and a nightstick and the power to take your pet dog away from you. The fanatic shows up at your door at 2am to respond to a "complaint", and bullies and threatens you until you agree to turn over your pet. No search warrant, no evidence, you have no right to consult with counsel, you get no hearing. You're tried and convicted right then and there and your pet dies within hours.
That's what is happening all over the US. This article just scratches the surface.
Now let's take it a step further. If the dog was small and dainty looking, say a pekinese, and it failed the temperament test would it be euthanized? I admit to never having asked this question of a shelter, but my expectation is that the small dog would not be killed for failing the test. It would take much more evidence of viciousness would be required before the little dog was put down, and I would expect that barring an extreme case these dogs would be put up for adoption "to the right owner".
One can make the argument that a little dog can't physically hurt someone the way a big dog can, so the comparison between pit bulls and pekinese is inapt. It's not though, because the test is a temperament test, not a test of actual harm. SInce it is temperament alone that determines the death sentence than it should be applied equally to all dogs. But let's go ahead and consider another situation: a hypothetical 75lb golden retriever who fails the temperament test. Will that dog be euthanized? Or will it be given a second chance, or a third chance, or another chance in a quieter, less-stressful environment where it is more likely to pass? Again, I don't know the answer to this question buy my expectation is that the golden retriever would be given a much greater opportunity to pass than a pit bull would, even though, as Gladwell points out in his Feb 2006 New Yorker article, goldens bite people more frequently than do pit bulls.
"Prejudice" is attitude or behavior that comes from pre-judging someone or something. Once a sufficient number of news stories link a specific breed (even if as with dogs commonly called "pit bulls" almost all are mixed breeds) to an attack on a human being, people will associate that breed with violence against people. That type or breed of dog will become a "scary dog" in the pubic mind. Thus "everyone knows" that pit bulls as a breed are dangerous dogs that should be euthanized in the interest of the public good, and "everyone knows" that golden retrievers and labs, among others, are sweet gentle dogs that are great with kids and deserve nice homes. That prejudice cannot help but carry over at shelters when dogs are being temperament tested.
Then there is the question of whether "pit bulls" are even a breed.
Yes, there are some breed standards, and there may be "breeders" in the same sense that other breeders breed champion show dogs, but most of the "pit bulls" you see are mutts that have a pit bull ancestor or two in the mix. There's no scientific test you can apply to determine what breed a dog is. It comes down to looks. Any medium to large short-haired dog with a squarish head and muscular body is likely to be labelled a pit bull. Pit bulls are scary, so any dog that looks like a "scary dog" must be banned or destroyed. I don't wish to take this discussion off-topic but to a degree this fear of scary looking dogs reminds me of the bans on "assault weapons" in the 1990's. I do not, nor have I ever, owned one of these weapons, but I was surprised to hear so many of my friends support these bans simply because these weapons looked scary and aggressive. And I recall the conversation I had with two state crime lab techs in a state with one of the most restrictive laws against assault weapon ownership. Their job in the firearms unit provided them with information about every firearm used in a crime in that state. They thought the ban had no effect on crime in that state because even in pre-ban days assault weapons were virtually never used in crimes. I bring this up only as evidence, from experts, that bans are not always instituted in response to real problems.
There may also be a deeper socio-economic factor behind laws banning pit bulls. "Nice people" don't own pit bulls. By "nice" I mean white, middle or upper middle class people. These people are much more likely to own one of the most popular pedigreed breeds. I submit that a survey of this same group of people would reveal that they associate pit bulls with these terms: black, drugs, red-neck, white trash, fighting, criminal, ghetto, gangsta, hispanic, poor. Seen in this light pit bull ownership marks a class distinction involving status and often (but not always) race. In this analysis governments ban pit bull less out of concern for pubic safety than because it is an opportunity to legally oppress a lower-status group of citizens. The unspoken corollary to these laws is that if someone wants to own a pit bull they will have to move out of town. It would be unconstitutional to pass a law requiring a given racial or economic group to move out of town, but it is a different matter to pass a law that says "move out or we'll kill your dog".
As a symptom of a wider tendency to label and condemn, consider American attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. Ever since 9/11 the enemy has been muslim, frequently generalized to being Islam itself. If you stopped people on the street and asked the what the first word was to come into their minds when you said "muslim"....how many would say "terrorist"? And given that, how many towns across America do you think would, if they could, pass laws banning Muslims from living within their borders.
An aside to Mr. Craven, above: common law in the U.S. refers generally to "case law", or the decisions rendered by appeals courts. Precedent is relied upon but every case under review raises the possibility that new law will be created because the facts of a case are often unique and therefore require a fresh analysis. Thus our common law is not immutable and fixed for all time.
Why are there so many? Because they are used as 'walking weapons' by thugs, who mistreat the dogs, render them mean, and let them roam loose terrorizing the neighborhoods.
We have had numerous vicious maulings of small children here, and I wish the district would outright ban the beasts just as neighboring Prince George's County has.
I support both gun control and pit-bull control.
Link:
http://tinyurl.com/yeuw8yp
Backyard breeders are also known to breed the dogs specifically for aggression, but I leave you to google that one.
The logic goes on: "why else would they be there?" Well, in the rustbelt city of 60,000 where I work pit bulls almost always picked up by Animal Control because they are roaming loose. These dogs have no chip, no tags, and no one ever comes looking for them. They tend to come from one particular neighborhood of about 2 mi square that has a high rate of both poverty and crime. I have seen at least a couple of dozen of these dogs come through the local vet clinic where these dogs are taken if they need medical care, and only one of them showed any aggression toward humans.
Here are some exerpts from Malcolm Gladwell's 2006 New Yorker article, which you can read here: http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_06_a_pitbull.html
"....the Ontario ban prohibits not only these three breeds [the Staffordshire bull terrier, and the American pit bull terrier-sic] but any "dog that has an appearance and physical characteristics that are substantially similar" to theirs; the term of art is "pit bull-type" dogs. But what does that mean? Is a cross between an American pit bull terrier and a golden retriever a pit bull-type dog or a golden retriever-type dog? If thinking about muscular terriers as pit bulls is a generalization, then thinking about dangerous dogs as anything substantially similar to a pit bull is a generalization about a generalization. "The way a lot of these laws are written, pit bulls are whatever they say they are," Lora Brashears, a kennel manager in Pennsylvania, says. "And for most people it just means big, nasty, scary dog that bites."
"A Georgia-based group called the American Temperament Test Society has put twenty-five thousand dogs through a ten-part standardized drill designed to assess a dog's stability, shyness, aggressiveness, and friendliness in the company of people. A handler takes a dog on a six-foot lead and judges its reaction to stimuli such as gunshots, an umbrella opening, and a weirdly dressed stranger approaching in a threatening way. Eighty-four per cent of the pit bulls that have been given the test have passed, which ranks pit bulls ahead of beagles, Airedales, bearded collies, and all but one variety of dachshund. "
"A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings. A pit bull is dangerous to people, then, not to the extent that it expresses its essential pit bullness but to the extent that it deviates from it. A pit-bull ban is a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general. That's a category problem."
'"I've seen virtually every breed involved in fatalities, including Pomeranians and everything else, except a beagle or a basset hound," Randall Lockwood, a senior vice-president of the A.S.P.C.A. and one of the country's leading dogbite experts, told me. "And there's always one or two deaths attributable to malamutes or huskies, although you never hear people clamoring for a ban on those breeds. When I first started looking at fatal dog attacks, they largely involved dogs like German shepherds and shepherd mixes and St. Bernards—which is probably why Stephen King chose to make Cujo a St. Bernard, not a pit bull. I haven't seen a fatality involving a Doberman for decades, whereas in the nineteen-seventies they were quite common. If you wanted a mean dog, back then, you got a Doberman. I don't think I even saw my first pit-bull case until the middle to late nineteen-eighties, and I didn't start seeing Rottweilers until I'd already looked at a few hundred fatal dog attacks. Now those dogs make up the preponderance of fatalities. The point is that it changes over time. It's a reflection of what the dog of choice is among people who want to own an aggressive dog."'
Sure, there are people who intentionally breed and train dogs to be aggressive but the solution is to punish the people who are responsible.
Dayan's point, far from simply defending pit bulls against their detractors, is that the violent character of pit bulls is instituted in the law. In reality, any dog—or person—may have any disposition: delightful, boring, aloof, downright menacing. However, in the case of a certain ill-defined breed of dog, the law is such that it may have only one disposition. Just as, at various times and in various places, the law has been written such that certain people are saturated with some characteristic stereotypically associated with groups of which they are a part: see, the examples in this article (blacks, Jews), and, increasingly, Muslims, whom many in the West consider inherently violent. We are at a precipice: will we jump over and decide that legally all Muslims (or some subset thereof—foreigners, Arabs, ones with engineering degrees) are suspected terrorists? Until a few weeks ago, our airport security laws made essentially that claim.
Treatment of dogs is obviously a provocative subject, and understandably since dogs are a huge part of what makes life worth living. But we shouldn't lose track of the important question here: just how far can the law go in defining who we are, and, by extension, what we have the capacity to become?
I support both gun control and pit-bull control.
Pit bulls are dogs, like any other dog. I'm sitting here with one curled up next to me as I write this. I know these animals very, very well. They are far less likely than almost every other breed to be human aggressive - the one sitting next to me was rescued from an extremely abusive man who was raising him to fight. After what he's been through, any other dog would be aggressive and fearful toward humans. But not this guy. Pit bulls are, by nature, friendly and loving dogs and it is a very rare one indeed who makes the news for biting people. But sadly, it's even more rare for any breed other than a bully to make the news for biting, even though thousands of dog bites occur in this country annually, mostly by dogs other than pit bulls.
Any large dog you do not know is potentially dangerous, and all of them should be kept under control - leashed or in a fenced yard or inside. I would not trust any large dog not to bite me, unless I knew the dog very well. That's just caution. But if I took that caution and extrapolated from it that all dogs are monsters and therefore all should be killed, that's just pretty crazy. And that's what these people are doing regarding pit bulls.
She is the dearest little cat, and we are crazy about her. Her little life is worth living, and she has a right to it, and I shudder to think that because of her lack of sight that she might have been deprived of her chance to live.
Animals are not disposable products, and breed bans and summary executions are a thread to all of us who value the lives of other species.
I keep getting tickets in the mail. We've knocked on all our neighbors' doors, politely, beagle in tow, asking whether they complained and trying to introduce them to the animal, who after all, we are trying to stop from howling and who's just got a lot to say. I know, sounds at 9pm can be annoying. But I work here during the day.
During the day, there is not a single one of my neighbors who doesn't employ a gardener to come with an illegal gas-powered leaf blower and raise dust, fumes and ear-splitting noise for at least several hours. Other than Sunday mornings, there isn't a time of the week we're without these monstrous noises and irritants. I've called and emailed the cops -- leaf blowers are illegal in this town, and there's a $150 fine for using one -- but no one cares.
Nonetheless, the complaints about the beagle continue to mount. She's not bad. I would know; I'm home most of the time, and obviously a noisy or barking dog would bug me, too. But looking at it; come on. You can send an anonymous complaint out, and get the city to fine your neighbor for you, over a beagle howling once in a while, and then turn around and hire a gardener to commit misdemeanors for you on a regular schedule, monday through friday? And the city goes after the beagle?
/vent.
Anyway, good article, plenty of food for thought. I think the writer's spot on.
The comments for and against "pit bulls" show a classic disagreement over definitions. If you perceive the "pit bull" as a beast that kills, that can "tear you to shreds," that is somehow more aggressive and more likely to bite, that is a walking handgun, then of course, you would support "pit bull" bans and you would support killing them all.
From the opposite perspective, those of us who have hands-on knowledge of not only "pit bulls" but many other types of dogs realize that this definition is nothing more than a social construct. The reality is that "pit bulls" are just dogs, and taken as individuals, they are essentially nothing more or less than any other dog. They aren't the strongest dogs, they aren't the most unpredictable, they aren't the most vicious.
You simply can't judge a dog by its breed, no matter how much we would like to pretend that we can (oh, wouldn't it be so easy to find the right pet, like picking out a car or a piece of clothing!). Take it from someone who's handled practically every kind of dog out there, of every size, shape, and background. Every single dog is different. Treat a dog like its breed standard, and you're going to be surprised, possibly in a bad way.
As this article observes, breed bans aren't just about profiling a type of dog. It's also about profiling a person. The mere ownership of a "pit bull" (however you may define that term) makes you undesirable, no matter who you really are. I've got a graduate degree, I work in education, I have a nice house, and I've not even received a parking ticket--yet because of the way my two adopted, trained, CGC and TT certified dogs LOOK (we do not know their breeds for a fact, but society and the government do not allow us to call them "mutts," we must label them something), it is apparently perfectly acceptable to call me a drug dealer, a gang member, a criminal, white trash, various racial epithets, and more.
It is also apparently acceptable to pass laws that discriminate against me. Laws don't discriminate against dogs, because laws are not for dogs to follow. People must follow laws, and breed-specific laws are discrimination against people because of the way their dogs LOOK.
Breed bans have nothing to do with the way a person raises or trains his/her dogs, nor do they have to do with a dog's behavior or the way it's being kept. Nor do they have to do with the actual physical capabilities of the dog. All bans have to do with is a general fear about a certain appearance.
So under a "pit bull" ban, a person who raises a Standard Poodle as a vicious attack dog has more rights and is more acceptable in a community than a person who has successfully taken their "pit bull" through the rigorous training required to become a certified therapy dog. It makes a dog owner wonder: why bother raising and training your dog in a socially responsible way, if you are to be judged acceptable or not simply by virtue of your dog's appearance?
Breed bans are, as the article notes, a sort of displacement of racial bias. To say that a breed ban has nothing to do with discrimination against people is a fallacy. When you observe the dialogue that takes place among authorities who are considering a breed ban, you will hear things like "We don't want that type of person here," or "Pit bulls are usually owned by drug dealers." Part of the fear of "pit bulls" stems from a stereotype about their owners, a stereotype that makes legalized discrimination not only acceptable, but necessary. Often, the proposed ban is defeated when a bunch of responsible, law-abiding, respectful, intelligent "pit bull" owners testify against the proposed law. The defeat of the owner stereotype means the defeat of the breed-specific law.
Wait, are we talking about pit bulls or Jewish people or cannabis or what again?
Hey how about if we make aids illegal? Very few pit bulls attack humans, you can't say the same thing about aids which indiscriminately attacks humans whenever given the opportunity.
Nothing specific to Jewish people is harmful, you can't say the same thing about aids which really does nothing other than harm itself.
No cannabis actively attacks humans, you have to intentionally pursue it, kill it and consume it and even then it's one of the least harmful things you can put in your body other than... like grapes and apples etc. You can't say the same thing about aids, which attacks whether you pursue it or not and then proceeds to kill you and anyone to whom you get close enough.
So... how about we stop outlawing life forms that don't actually attack people eh? We don't outlaw the ones that DO attack us.
However, pit bulls are the reason that I'm terrified to walk my own dog (Shetland Sheepdog) in my neighborhood unless I'm carrying a weapon. I live in a lower income neighborhood in a suburb north of Houston. There are 5 families with pit bulls on my street and 4 of the 5 are extremely aggressive towards other people and especially towards other dogs. As far as I can tell, the dogs aren't abused at home. I see the families playing with them, they're properly fed, etc...
Back when my dog was only about 3 months old, I was working on my car in the driveway and had my dog leashed to my workbench in the garage. It was a long leash, so she was walking around out in the yard. I was just about to close the hood of my car when I heard a dog barking from out in the street and I looked up to see my neighbor's pit bull making a beeline for my dog. He managed to bite her once before I fought him off with a wrench I grabbed off the workbench, but luckily she didn't get hurt badly. Another of the pit bulls in the neighborhood frequently escapes from the backyard and has chased us back into the house before proceeding to scratch and bite at the door. Calling animal control has been a waste of time. They seem content to wait until one of the dogs kills someone.
The terrifying part about the dogs isn't that they're aggressive though. My mother-in-law's chihuahua is one of the meanest dogs I've ever seen. That's fine with me though. Why, you ask? Because when he's bitten me, he's not even strong enough to break skin and I can shoo him away with a soft kick in the butt. A pit bull on the other hand is strong enough that without a weapon (knife, tazer, gun), you're not going to be able to fight it off. If it decides to attack you, there's a very good chance you're going to die unless you're lucky enough that someone is there to help you or you have a way to kill it first. That's the real reason the dogs are so easy to villify. There's almost nothing you can do once it does decide to attack, so people are afraid.
Do I think all pit bulls are scary, bloodthirsty beasts? Not at all. But after living in this neighborhood, I'm afraid of being killed by a dog for the first time in my life and each of the dogs I'm afraid of is a pit bull.
Nope. Not a good breed in a metro area
...Idiots who fail to properly contain & control their dogs will simply fail to contain and control the next Breed/type they choose to own and then people will want that Breed/type to be banned.Laws must be directed towards owners and then must be enforced and there must be serious penalties for non compliance.
You`re simply falling for the Media hype.
http://tinyurl.com/yakt8un
"Do pit bulls inflict injuries unlike other dogs?
No breed or type of dog has a particular method of attack or inflicts an exclusive type of injury. Claims that one breed of dog inflicts injuries unlike other breeds have no merit."
Calgary Alberta Canada has what is called a Responsible Ownership Bylaw.They have no Breed Bans,no pet limits,no mandatory spay neuter.They use Education and serious penalties for those who don`t comply with laws.If you`re a good owner they leave you alone regardless of what you own and they target those who are a problem regardless of what they own.That`s a smart use of A/C resources and THAT`S what will make your neighborhood safer.
Read more about Calgary here.
http://saveourdogs.net/category/successes/
Just 'pit bulls'?
http://tinyurl.com/y7qwkts
How about the other 51 or so Breeds that have been involved in the extremely rare fatalities?
How about Parents/Caretakers?
They kill far more children than ANY dogs?
There are ~75 million dogs in the U.S.
There are ~25 fatalities by ALL Breeds/types per year.
That hardly justifies an extermination.
Dogs are EXTREMELY safe.
99.99996% of dogs will never kill anyone.
I think perhaps you`re the one who needs to get a grip.
pit bull owners are like Hitler.
Now, invoking Godwin's Law, I proclaim this discussion thread closed (-minded).
Then there is the question of giving police power to private organizations without holding them to the same constitutional standards to which the govt is held. If it starts with animals, where might it go from there? Is there a slippery slope? Is that worth thinking about?
I agree with the other posters who have pointed out that the article is about more than pit bulls. It's really about a growing tendency in our society to label, condemn, and exterminate without the necessity of evidence or due process. Pit bull bans are just an example. Labeling is a way of simplifying an increasingly complex world. It would be an easier world to live in if every situation was black or white, but the reality is that we live in a world full of grays.
It's people who wrecked them. As Cesar Millan says, there are no bad dogs, only bad owners.
There is no such thing as a bad pit bull, only a bad pit bull owner. If any dog is socialized and trained properly and has sufficient outlets for its energy, it doesn't matter if it's a pit bull or a Pomeranian. Pit Bulls have a better chance at a good quality of life than many other dogs, actually, because people haven't distorted their forms the way we have with pugs and English Bulldogs. English Bulldogs can't breed or give birth without human assistance, and yet--as lethargic little dogs who can't really bite because their teeth don't line up properly--they'd probably be allowed in those NYC public housing facilities. People like to think that they care about dogs, but most people are guilty of either dog racism (thinking that the breed determines aggression) or dog eugenics (arbitrarily selecting or breeding dogs based on looks or on the possession of traits desirable by the human and not necessarily beneficial to the dog). People choose dogs based on looks more than anything.
It's truly sad what's happened to the dog species, but like anything else in the world, it can change. I hope it will change, and that people will start "putting their money where their mouth is" when it comes to dogs: making decisions that truly consider the dog's welfare as much as the person's own.
wow. I come from a white middle class family. We currently have a pit mix and a boxer mix. We have previously had other pit mixes as well as labs, shepherds, a cocker spaniel and most recently a chow mix. I volunteer at our local shelter, which on any given day has about 75% pit mixes. People ask all the time, why are there so many pits here? Well... I don't know, but they are some of the sweetest, smartest dogs we have. And as soon as we are down to only one dog at home, another pittie will be coming home with me. I worry about BSL being enacted in my state. It currently is only in Miami-Dade county, and it is specific only to pit bulls. Has it helped them? No. Do they still have high numbers of dog related injuries? Yes.
Pit bulls are just dogs. Every one is an individual. They are highly intelligent and want nothing more than to please their owners. It is not the dog's fault that they are taught bad things by irresponsible owners. It is the owners fault. Period.
--middle-aged professional pitbull gal
Whenever I'm out with a pit, my own or a foster, strangers inevitably comment how well-mannered, what a sweet dog--then ask what breed. I've had people stroking them exclaim, "but I'm terrified of pit bulls!" who have never actually met one. No dog strives to please like a pit and they work tirelessly to be whatever their owner wishes. Vicious people want aggressive dogs. Responsible people want well-behaved dogs. Both types of people reinforce the behavior they want and dogs --WHATEVER THE BREED-- respond accordingly. Irresponsible and criminal owners MUST be prosecuted, period. But don't blame the dog. Animals don't have free will, only people do. And it's time humans, with our big brains, placed responsibility squarely where it lies: on OTHER HUMANS. People kill more people than dogs ever have--who is more civilized?
the commonality of fatal dog bites is size, not type or temperament. the fact is that big dogs are more powerful and can inflict more damage. that doesn't mean they are more aggressive or dangerous cause small dogs have killed humans too. not everyone should have one and you shouldn't have one unless you're ready and pick a breed fits your lifestyle. not one that you find cool or cute. bottom line is owners need to be more responsible.
pit bulls are the most maligned, abused and misunderstood breed in society. the problem is the media has everyone believing that if it looks like a pit then it must be one. can you find the pit?
http://www.pitbullsontheweb.com/petbull/findpit.html
- "Pit bulls are like Nazis, pit bull owners are like Hitler."
Thank You. Thank You for being one of the most ignorant, prejudiced, uneducated, and clearly racist individuals I have ever had the pleasure of not knowing. I am so glad that you think of me, a proud "pit bull" owner, as Hitler. You don't know me, obviously, anymore than you know anything about any other pit bull owners and who we are. I am decidedly about as far from Hitler as you can get. I am not racist against my own heritage, nor do I promote the eradication of any one "breed" or race. I love many other dog breeds. I own cats and horses aside from my pit bull, all of whom get along quite beautifully as the cats and dog sleep together.
You also refer to pit bulls as being "walking weapons". Yet again your lack of any real knowledge regarding "pit bulls" is oozing. I'm willing to bet that you believe all the propaganda and political hype that the media shoves down your throat on a daily basis. Gullible much? Have you ever met a pit bull? Or do you just turn and run screaming bloody murder when you see a dog that looks like it might be? Educate yourself. Not one of the "pit bulls" I know, or have ever met, have even come close to your generalization, and yes, that includes several who were abandoned and left to fend for themselves for refusing to fight.
@suggest
-"Dogs are not people. They have the right not to be treated cruelly, but they have no right to live or to be exempt from 'profiling'. All dogs are, over the course of their lives, unpredictable. The idea that we should allow the kind that can tear you to shreds is just silly."
I have never in my life read anything so absurd. You say it yourself that ALL dogs are unpredictable. It is apparent to me that you believe dogs as a species should be eradicated. so here, olcbyh, here is your Hitler.
As horrendous as are the problems of cruelty to animals, murdering dogs and cats at "shelters", and many other injustices suffered by cats and dogs, even more disturbing are the permitted violations of our constitutional rights. How absurd that raids by hordes of law enforcement officers are conducted for so many trumped up reasons and that our prisons are full of people, many of whom should be on work-release programs if punished at all.
Our overbearing government is going to turn me into a Libertarian yet. Meanwhile, the masses party on while "Rome" burns.
BTW, this has nothing to do with Obama. I dare say every administration has featured an assault on our basic liberties. It's unfortunate that govt "freebies" along with controlled and uncontrolled substances placate far too many citizens. Most of us can't even be bothered to vote, much less try to save the life of animal or two.
I guess it's true that people really do have the government they deserve.