Love Thy Dog

The other day there was a rather moving email circulating on the web.  The writer lamented that he had often heard, and each time with a great deal of distress, “but it’s only a dog” and he was explaining that his pet was more than “only” a dog to him.  I can empathise with him, because I too have heard the same thing from childhood.  My experience started with my mother who was definitely not an animal lover.  Fortunately, my grandmother lived with us and from her I got the clear understanding that it is our duty to care for and about all animals.  My granny was big on duty and I will forever be grateful to her for instilling those values in me.

 Granny and I were conspirators in a no-holds-barred war against my mother and her “no animals allowed in this house rule”.  Over the years we found all kinds of inventive ways to force her to allow us to keep a variety of animals. I remember one incident clearly: we had somehow acquired some hens and a cock and Granny and I used to go outside early every morning to the henhouse to collect the eggs.  Unbeknownst to my mother, we stopped collecting the eggs from one of the hens and within a very short time we had three adorable little boy chickens (named Tom, Dick and Harry) running around the yard.  We naturally named their mother Mammie.  After my mother had stopped cussing, she began to eye our protégés with a view to putting them in a pot.  But I have found that once you name a creature it is very hard to kill it, and she never did.  I don’t remember what happened to our livestock, but I suspect they all died of old age eventually.

 Maybe because as a first child I had a longer time alone with her, my Granny’s influence on me regarding her love for animals was stronger than on my other siblings.  They would not be cruel to an animal, but I don’t think they feel the same connection to them as Granny and I did.  Granny used to talk all the time about her childhood, and animals always played a part in the stories – her father used to tame wild horses and there was a black stallion named Asia that she particularly loved.  She had a parrot that bit her first husband’s very long nose and he wrung the parrot’s neck (I always suspected that this incident might have had some bearing on their subsequent divorce).  She almost drowned one of her boy cousins in a water barrel after catching him drowning kittens in the same barrel. When she came upon the little beast (her description) she held his head underwater until he was almost asphyxiated. Her last pet before she died was a little dog named Tammy that I got for my 12^th birthday but which I had no illusions of ever really owning – that dog was my grandmother’s shadow and lived way beyond a dog's natural life span, I suspect just because it could not bear to be parted from Granny.

 I say all of this to give some context to why anything I perceive as cruelty to animals upsets me so much.  I am physically and psychologically incapable of shrugging my shoulders and saying “Well, it is just a dog” whenever I come across something that I think even borders on abuse.  It goes deeper than a hatred of animal cruelty because it is rooted in my understanding and belief that animals experience physical and emotional pain as deeply as any sensitive human child does.  And as I would feel a child’s pain, I feel theirs. I am willing to allow that dogs might not have all the same emotions that humans do – spite, generosity, hatred, nostalgia, guilt, etc. But they have some of them, and pain, fear and excitement are a few that come to mind. They might be quick to forgive and forget, but that does not mean they don’t feel.  Nothing is going to convince me otherwise.

 It almost seems as though over the years humans have had a parallel program to the Spanish Inquisition going on against animals.  They have hunted them to extinction, just for the fun of it.  They have poisoned their water and air and cut down their forage and homes in the wild.  They have invented ways to contain, train, feed, breed and dispose of them that could only lead an alien from another planet to believe that we are a race of psychopaths. Most of these actions have been taken by people who believe that man’s wishes, whims, fancies and desires supersede any other consideration, especially if the affected and afflicted party is “just an animal/ insect/ fish/ reptile/ bird.”

 Even the most caring of us have often inadvertently inflicted great distress on the animal kingdom – I know I have done so repeatedly over the years, albeit through ignorance.  In recent times there has been a great deal of scientific research that proves a lot of our long-held practices to be harmful to animals and in the rapid communication-friendly world we live in, this information is readily available.  Fifty years ago my grandmother did not know that you should not rub a kitten’s nose in his mess as a housebreaking method – so even though she loved cats, this is what she did.  And I can’t hold it against her.  But I can hold it against somebody who does that now, when there is so much information available at little or no cost. It is not that the knowledge is not there, it is that we don’t bother to access it – an animal is not worth the time and effort – after all, it’s only an animal.

 Do I really expect the same compassion and empathy that we have for our fellow humans to be extended to the animal kingdom?  In a word, yes.  I don’t think that compassion and kindness and empathy should have any boundaries. I don’t think you are really a kind person if you choose who to be kind to.  I don’t think you can call yourself compassionate if you categorize the recipients and degree of your compassion.  It is like people who used to say that that they love mankind, but they kept slaves.  I’ll go further – I think we should try to extend the adage “what you don’t like for yourself, don’t give to others” to include animals. If you don’t think it is kind to cut the tips off a child’s ears, then you should not do it to a puppy.  If you don’t think it is compassionate to leave children alone and lonely for hours on end with nothing to do but sleep or stare at 4 walls in a small dark room, then you should not do it to dogs.  If you won’t like someone to shout and yell at your child and hit him with a stick to make him learn, you should understand that this is not the way to train your dogs.

 As an example of our ‘onlyadog’ philosophy, there is a contraption called a Breeding Stand that is commonly used by breeders of many different animals.  Some people call it a Rape Rack because it allows the male to penetrate the female, whether she is receptive or not.  It is used extensively by dog breeders who depend on the sale of puppies to make a living and if you look at it in use you get a strong image of a passive female being held immobile for the convenience of a dominant male. They say this is not rape, as dogs have no concept of rape.  Well, of course they don’t – there is no such thing as rape in the dog world! If a female rejects a male in the height of her compulsion to mate, then you can be pretty sure it is for a good reason that she has instinctively sensed. And he can jump through hoops, once her bottom hits the ground, he is getting nowhere with his advances.  So no canine rape – until the human breeder entered the picture.

Well, says others, they do it to protect the dogs themselves as some dogs (Pit Bulls especially they say) are very dog aggressive and they will damage each other.  Here’s a news flash – if your dogs have any kind of aggression issues, you should not be breeding them.  The third justification is that it takes the male’s weight off of the female, so it is safer and more comfortable for her.  Unless you are mating a dog the size of a Pit Bull with a Rhinoceros, is this really worthy of a response?  Finally, say the proponents of this device, an owner’s job is to do what is best for his animal, not ask them how they feel about it first.  True.  But isn’t that just the point?  Is a Rape Rack good for the animal, or for the owner?  I think the real litmus test being used is this: in a case where it is not good for the animal, but it is good for the owner, who should win?

 I could write pages on the various ways we exhibit extraordinary cruelty to our dogs – choke chains, prong collars, small dog houses and kennels where dogs are locked up for entire days, poor nutrition, over-breeding, harsh and coercive training methods, the use of steroids – the list goes on and on.  A friend of mine from Norway once expressed her disgust of people who dress up their dogs for Halloween – oh for the day when this country only has that kind of animal abuse to deal with.