Canine Racism

There is a young lady right now in Trinidad who is considering doing her MSc thesis on racism.  Not human racism, canine racism.  A few months ago I came across the term “breedism” – which is what dog people are calling canine racism, most likely because we refer to “breeds” of dogs.  People are categorized according to “races”, hence racism.  Personally, I don’t care what you call it.  Breedism or racism, the effect is the same - discriminatory actions and practices against dogs in general, and Pit Bulls specifically.

I also have to say upfront that I understand how people could be racist.  By that I mean that I consider it quite natural for someone to think that people who look like him are better than people who do not look like him.  I believe that one of the causes of racism, a mixture of fear of the unknown and comfort in the familiar, is a very human reaction.  But because I think racism is an understandable human condition does not mean that I accept that it should be condoned. On the contrary, I think it should be fought tooth and nail because its results are evil. The synonyms for racism are also its results: discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, intolerance, bias – as  I said, usually extended to somebody because they are from another ethnic background or tribe. Or breed, in the case of animals.

When I heard about what this young lady was doing, I got to thinking – not always a good thing for me to do - about the way animals are discriminated against, exploited and misunderstood.  I have never studied sociology, but I have lived with racism my whole life and have more than a nodding acquaintance with its many faces, so I felt confident that my opinions had value. And I always think best when I write, so here we are.

As I see it, racism has two components. First, racism is the feeling that people who don’t belong to your tribe are not as good as you.  Secondly, it is the belief that your “betterness” gives you special privileges.  It is not enough to say, 'I am a more superior human being (which automatically makes you inferior) because I am African/Indian/Chinese/Whatever' – you also have to say, 'I am superior, you are inferior and that means I get to live a better quality of life than you do'.

Sometimes, it does not stop at the inferior people not having the same quality of life.  Sometimes it extends to not having any life at all. Hitler was a racist – he put the Jews and others in ghettos and then in the gas chambers.  The American settlers were racist – they put the Native Americans on reservations after doing their best to wipe them off the face of the earth.  King Leopold II of Belgium thought nothing of enslaving and brutalizing and murdering Africans from the Congo by the thousands. In these cases, it is difficult to untangle where the hunger for power left off and the racism began that led the various leaders to attempt genocide.  A question for debate at another time might be whether a leader can conquer people without trying to annihilate their race. Can a person be power-mad without being racist, or is everyone racist but not every racist is homicidal. However, what is clear is that, although racism does not necessarily always end in a holocaust, history has shown us that when racism is empowered, it easily can.

Comparing human and canine racism has one obvious disparity.  Unlike humans, dogs are not racists.  Humans discriminate against other beings just for not being like them. Dogs don't do that. So in effect, we are still talking about human racism – but only directed to animals this time. Humans have extended their animosity against people who belong to other races to animals who belong to different breeds.

In traditional racism, the “other” person is de-humanized.  He or she becomes sub-human.  It is okay to rape a young girl if she is not human; it is okay to whip the back of a man into shreds if he is not human; it is okay not to provide proper education, health care, nutrition and housing for whole families if they are not human. Because being human assures everybody of certain rights.  Not human = No rights. Therefore, it is ridiculously easy for humans to extend their racist attitudes and propensities to dogs because they are truly not human to begin with!

You hear people saying all the time, “I hate cats”.  Why? Why do you hate cats?  “Because they are sly.”  “I just don’t like them.”  “I’ve always hated them.” “Because all cats are thieves.”  “They just give me the creeps.”  “Because they kill children by stealing their breath while they sleep.” Just like all Chinese are sly; and all Indians are thieves; and all Africans are potential rapists.  So perhaps I should add one more criteria to the definition of racism.  It must have no factual basis for existing.  All that is necessary is a willingness to believe in stereotyping.

I have always said that I was very fortunate to be born of a mixed union – I am not speaking so much of my mother’s marriage, but of my grandparents’ union.  My maternal grandfather was black as the hinges of hell, and my grandmother was as white as the driven snow.  From a very early age this taught me that stereotyping was bullshit.  In the days when it was widely known and accepted that all black men were lazy and ignorant, I knew that my grandfather was a child genius, went to a British university on a scholarship he got at age 14 and became a very well known and respected jurist.  Also in the days when all white people were cruel oppressors, I could see that my grandmother was the most kind person I knew (or have ever met in my entire life), who would literally give her last cent to any person who told her a sad story.  It was from her that I learned to love and respect animals and to treat everybody as I would like them to treat me. 

So though I grew up surrounded by racism, including racism within my own family, I was perhaps fortunate that I did not buy into it as deeply as I could have because the foundation stone of accepting stereotyping was missing from my emotional makeup.  I countered every given with “how do you know that?”  I demanded proof.  Basically, I was a pain in the ass.  Which is not to say that I did not develop my own prejudices – but I like to think that I at least give everybody a chance to prove their worth before I decide that I am better than they are.  Though it might even turn out that they are more intelligent, or more caring, or more cultured, or more educated than I am, neither of us will be better than the other simply because of our race.

If it is one thing that I have learned about racism, it is that it is insidious.  It hides in laws and facts that nobody challenges. It creeps.  It slithers and slides and envelopes the atmosphere like a fog.  You don’t notice it, even though it is all around you.  And then when you finally notice it, you begin to see it in places where it does not really exist. 

When I was a child, our next door neighbours were a Dougla family.  Their three girls ranged in hue from the first daughter who brown-skinned, to the middle one who was most aptly called Darkie, to the youngest who was better known as “Reds”.  One day, the family was thrown into turmoil when the eldest girl brought home her first boyfriend because it was found that he was “too dark”. Apparently if the couple were to wed and have children, the offspring would not improve the ‘quality’ of the family. Nobody noticed that they were rejecting a young man with the same skin colour as their second daughter.  As it turned out, they did get married and had three boys, all of whom were lighter-skinned than their mother.  The family’s prejudice was groundless.

An elderly woman I worked with once told me about her grandmother, who would not allow anybody to enter her house with their shoes on.  This was in an effort to keep the floors clean.  Or to be more accurate it was in an effort to keep the floor clean of what she termed “Coolie spit”.  She did not want anybody tracking saliva from the mouths of the surrounding Plantation Indians onto her floors.  When I heard this story, I was aghast.  At least I was, until I visited India and realized that mostly everyone does indeed spit continually on the streets, so it is quite likely that the indentured labourers had brought this habit with them to the West Indies.  Although it would seem that my friend’s grandmother was a racist – her prejudice was based in the fact that it was highly probable that people's shoes would have spit on their soles. And the spit would have come from Indians (or Coolies, as they were called).

An important component of stereotyping, is misinformation. There are so many misconceptions and myths surrounding dogs, especially Pit Bulls, that listing them would take reams of paper. These misconceptions are fatal for dogs because they are what humans have used to create their stereotypes and resulting racist attitudes towards dogs.  For instance, dogs bite with no warning.  Wrong.  Dogs always give warning – sometimes several warnings.  It is just that humans have never taken the time to listen to dogs.  For centuries we have been so busy making dogs into our own version of what a dog should be, and training them to do what we want them to do, that nobody has stopped to ask what the dog is trying to tell us.  You may ask, “You really expect everybody to learn to speak dog?” In a word, yes.  At least make an effort.  If you were living cheek to jowl for centuries with any other species that spoke a different language, you would by now at least know a few words – and they won’t all be commands from you to that person. You'd make damn sure to learn what the person said when he reached his tolerance limit with you and was about to slap you upside the head.

Just the other day in the vet’s office, a very nice woman who said that she owned two Pit Bulls sagely informed everybody in the waiting room that people were afraid of Pit Bulls because once their jaws locked onto somebody, you could not prise them open.  This is such an urban legend!  No basis in fact whatsoever, but it is repeated like the holy grail of Pit Bull characteristics.  Nobody questions it, especially if the person repeating the “fact” has even the most tenuous connection to a Pit Bull.  It always surprises me how many dog experts exist around us - and how many of us believe every word they say just because they tell us they know what they are talking about. 

If necessary, I can lie.  But I don’t quite see the point of putting myself to all the trouble of lying for no good reason.  I have a family member who lies just because he can.  How do I know he is lying?  His lips are moving.  I have met other people like that, and always with surprise because I never expect somebody to lie to me for no good reason.   During the attempted coup d’etat in 1990, a man looked me straight in the eye and told me he had just come (to Diego Martin) from Port of Spain where he had seen with his own two eyes the bombing and total demolition of TTT House on Maraval Road.  That building is still standing to this day, 21 years later.  I have read of people swearing that they saw a Pit Bull attacking a person, when it later turned out to be a dog that looked absolutely nothing like a Pit Bull.  I don’t know if their assumption that only Pit Bulls attack humans made them see a Pit Bull, or whether they knew that if they identified the attacking dog as a Pit Bull it would create a better story.  But the fact is that stereotypes can start as a lie.

It seems that an inordinate number of dogs were bred to guard or be companions to Royalty.  In fact, almost everyone I have ever met with a purebred dog talks about the dog’s ancestral links of some kind to long-ago royalty. Take the Shar Pei for instance.  This is a dog from China whose job as a defender of the farmer’s crops from wild hogs was made redundant by industrialization.  Out of work, he then became known as a good fighting dog.  Because of this, in some areas, he is treated with the same prejudice as the Pit Bull.  But I am yet to speak with a Shar Pei owner who did not inform me that this breed was created specifically to guard Chinese royalty.  Likewise, albeit in a reverse kind of way, with the Pit Bull.  Recently, a radio announcer said that the Pit Bull was not a real dog – it had been genetically engineered.  You have to admit that term has a certain science fiction glamour about it – a kind of Mutant X dog.  Well, the truth is that all dogs in the world have had their original wolf genes interfered with by humans – the gene that made this wolf big was mated to the gene that made that wolf big to create the Mastiff; and the gene that made that wolf fast was mated to the gene that made the other wolf fast to create the Greyhound.  So what?  Does "genetic engineering " mean Pit Bulls should be ‘de-caninized’ like how the African slaves were de-humanized?

I hear people saying that they don’t like Rottweilers (too unpredictable), or PomPeks (too snappy), or Pit Bulls (too vicious), and I have a problem.  Rottweilers can be snappy and Pom Peks can be vicious and Pit Bulls can be unpredictable too – they are dogs, not predictably packaged Pringles.  People buy dogs and either do not teach them how to behave, or use such harsh methods that the dogs become emotionally damaged, and then they are amazed at the resulting undesirable behaviours.  They say, “See what I told you?  Those dogs are vicious!”  It is like ill treating a slave until he runs away and then saying, “See what I told you?  These people always try to run away!”

Now they are instituting laws that are targeting specific dogs.  They are called Breed Specific Laws (BSLs).  If laws that targeted specific human races were instituted, the world would rise up in protest.  But using the same methodology of racism, they do it to dogs.  All dogs can bite and all human can abuse; all dogs are capable of killing – a small dog can kill a baby or a child, a larger dog can kill a human or other dog – and all humans are capable of killing everything in sight.  Humans kill more humans in one day than dogs do in one year.  But all humans are given the benefit of the doubt until proven guilty, and even if they might have committed murder, in some cases they never have to pay with their own lives. Dogs are never given a trial, but are killed instantly, no questions asked, sometimes just for seeming to show aggression.  The other day, in the USA, police shot an elderly, chained Golden Retriever for growling at them when they came into its owner's yard.

But this brings us to the point of whether the same rules that we apply to ourselves should be applied to animals.  I have made this point before, and I will make it again.  You are either just or you are not just.  You are either humane or you are not humane.  You can not decide who you want to be humane to and still consider yourself a humane person.  You can not decide to show justice to only one type of person and expect to be considered a just person.  Compassion, concern, care – they all have more in common that just the same first letter.  They are attributes of a civilized person (strangely, also starting with the letter “C”).  I think it is a good thing to strive to be civilized, don’t you?

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.

Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.

Wouldn't you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,

And they're always glad you came.

You wanna be where you can see,

Our troubles are all the same

You wanna be where everybody knows your name.

“Cheers” Theme Song

Sometimes I wish I could live in a place containing only people who think like I do, especially about the things that I hold important.  ‘People who try to kind’ would be number one on that list.  I am not asking for much, because I know that there are not many people in this world who are as weird as I am, so we would only need a very small area. 

Yes, I know that diversity brings interest to your life and stretches and expands your horizons.  But most of the diversity I meet on a daily basis just makes me sad.  I am tired of rubbing shoulders with people who are unkind – to children, to older people, to poorer people, to people with handicaps, and most especially to animals.  I don’t want to be with them.  As the Desiderata says, they are injurious to my spirit.  They fill the air I breathe with toxicity. I just want to be with people who reflect who I am.  People who I don’t have to explain myself to, to justify my thoughts to, to argue with or force myself to ignore. I want a meeting of minds.  I want to be around soul mates.

Imagine somebody cheerfully announcing that he killed two puppies from his female’s litter because they did not meet the breed’s standard.  Not because they had an incurable disease.  Not because they were so badly deformed that living would have been agony for them.  Simply because they were not perfect, according to what some book told him perfection should be.  He felt he was being heroic and self sacrificing in not selling or giving away those puppies because his ethical code would not allow him to risk these sub-perfect specimens reproducing with another owner. 

"Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives."

- Albert Schweitzer, (Alsatian Theologian, Musician, and Medical Missionary)

How can I begin to express how deeply depressing I found this to be?  I wanted to scream at him “You’re not ethical, you’re maniacal!” but I knew that would end badly and nothing would change. I thought about calmly stating my dissent in a civilized and measured manner because I felt disgusted that my silence would seem to be condoning what he was doing. But ultimately I just wanted to slowly, carefully, back away from him, like you would back away from a cobra with venom dripping from his fangs. I felt sick.

“Dogs are not humans.  We are not obligated to treat them the same way we treat humans. In fact, it is bad if we do.”  Over and over again, I’ve heard so many variations of this theme that I’ve lost track.  No, dogs are not humans – but they are thinking, feeling beings with emotions that include trust, loyalty and unconditional forgiveness towards their human masters.  And I stress the word “masters” because it is the part of dog ownership that a lot of people like the best – to be in total control of something with a pumping heart, and millions of cells and nerves and chromosomes and synapses that we could never in a million years hope to recreate. We can’t make it, but we can destroy it – the power of destruction with impunity, with no repercussions, is in the hands of any idiot who can walk into the TTSPCA or visit a breeder and plunk down some money, or beg, borrow or steal a dog.

And I would argue that we do treat dogs the same way we treat humans.  Historically, mankind has raped, murdered, enslaved, tortured and oppressed his fellow humans, and still continues to do so. Hopefully putting aside the rape, we do the same to dogs. Many years ago I read a book called The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – I still have it, battered and falling apart.  It was about a world after the final holocaust, where because of the radiation from the nuclear warheads used in the war, the chances of breeding true to the standards (which its inhabitants found in a book called The Bible) were less than 50%.  Deviations to the breed standard were considered abominations and rooted out and destroyed – animals, crops and humans.  Fiction based in fact. People who would kill a child for having an extra thumb, as was done in the book, are based on the same people who would burn a young woman at the stake for having a mole under her arm, or put a dog in a bag and throw it in the sea to drown because it dug up a flower bed – or did not have a correctly curved tail.

As Shakespeare said, “the quality of mercy is not strained.”  Mercy is mercy is mercy.  You can’t say you are a merciful person, or a kind person, or a loving person and then decide who you are going to be merciful and kind and loving towards. You can’t filter your mercy. Hitler was kind to children and dogs – German children and German Sheppard Dogs.  Did that make him eligible for the Noble Peace Prize? 

There was a woman once who wrote a critically acclaimed book on dog training.  It was a masterpiece of prose and beautiful poetical allusions.  And it related how she dug holes, day after day, and filled them with water and held her dog’s head under the water, day after day, in punishment for the dog digging up her garden.  Did authoring a beautifully written book make her a merciful person? Because she was a well respected dog trainer, were her actions kind? No, on both counts. But thousands of people read what she had written and calmly accepted her cruelty to that dog - and even applied it to their own dogs.

When I first went to live in Canada, I never saw anybody living on the street. It would have caused an uproar if Torontonians discovered that people were eating out of their garbage cans.  I went back to visit years after returning to Trinidad and was shocked to see Yonge Street filled with homeless people.  And nobody saw them.  I still remember the first time I saw a woman driving a taxi in Trinidad – I was so surprised, (and delighted) that I couldn’t stop talking about it for hours afterwards.  Now, I don’t even notice the hundreds of female drivers we have on the roads. What has this got to do with cruelty?  I am making the point that if we are immersed in a certain way of doing things for long enough we don’t see what we are doing.  We can act cruelly without even thinking about it being cruel. We just accept it as the way things are and it becomes okay for things to be that way.  We stop questioning the status quo, especially if no one else around us is doing it.  We become cruel because we stop seeing. We stop seeing the dog.  We see only the breed.  The species.

Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."

- Arthur Schopenhauer, (German Philosopher)

Yes, we are the masters.  But it is the dogs who are merciful and forgiving.  Perhaps, instead of humans training dogs, dogs should teach humans how to be humane.

C is for Confrontation

Today I took Rescue for a walk in the savannah.  This might appear to be a simple sentence, but it is loaded with nuance. I have never walked Rescue anywhere that somebody has not told me to (a) “hole dat dog hole dat dog”; (b) “he shud haf on a muzzle”; (c) “woman, you kyar hole dat dog, nuh”; or (d) “steups”.  Walking a pit bull in Trinidad is highly recommended as a sovereign remedy for low blood pressure.  I can only hope that Rescue has no idea the amount of negativity that is directed his way, because if looks could kill he would be lying senseless at my feet before we rounded the first bend by Queen's Royal College.

Today we actually managed to get as far as opposite to where Casuals Club used to be without attracting more than a few dozen glares.  Now, it must be clearly understood that we do not walk on the paved perimeter of the savannah.  I gave that up after the first two or three afternoons when I came to the conclusion that seeing almost everybody walking towards me scatter, scream, gasp and cuss was just not worth the while of using the concrete as an emory board for Rescue’s toe nails.  So we walk inside the savannah – far inside the savannah.  This means that if rain had fallen that day (as it did today), both Rescue and I return to the car with mud up to our ankles.  If anyone should ever have to know where every depression, hole, drain or marshy area in the savannah is to be found, then I am the person to ask.  I am also on intimate terms with the various packs of feral dogs who live in the savannah, and having to watch their misery also does nothing to lower my blood pressure or raise my depression.  But, as I said, we had reached the second stretch in our walk when our paths were crossed by two men, one considerably older than the other, who were toting a goal post.  We slowed down politely to let them pass, and the older one looked at Rescue, looked at me, and then said the inevitable “that dog should have on a muzzle.”

 
I did what I always do.  I ignored the fool and walked on.  But then something clicked in my brain and I thought, no.  No.  I am not going to take it this afternoon.  I am going to defend my dog.  So I made an abrupt turn around and with Rescue seemingly just as happy about the directional change of plan, started to walk rapidly after the two men.  I am not the type of person to gracefully walk rapidly, especially not over soggy, muddy ground.  Nevertheless, I slowly closed the distance between us and caught up to them.  If I am to be totally honest I suppose I have to admit that it also helped that they stopped, having reached their destination.  I have no idea why they could not play football nearer to the edge of the savannah, but at the time I felt it was all part and parcel of their inexplicable determination to irritate me.

“Excuse me, sir” (I am nothing if not polite) I called out to the elder gentleman who looked around enquiringly at me.

“Hi – I was wondering – when you passed me just now you said something about my dog needing a muzzle?  I was wondering, what made you say that?”

The man looked a little taken aback. “Well, he is a pit bull…..”

“Yes?” I said in what I hoped to be a neutrally encouraging voice that conveyed kindness but common sense, maturity but not abrasiveness, friendliness and stunning intelligence, all at the same time.  The poor man just looked harassed.

“Well, they have a reputation you know.  They have attacked people….  So I was just suggesting….”

“Sir, I think you would agree that in the United States of America there are many more dogs and people than in Trinidad, right?”  He nodded agreement.  “But in the United States of American more children are killed by their own parents than by all the breeds of dogs combined.  And I have never heard anybody suggest that parents should be muzzled!”

“That’s true, that’s true.  But you have to be careful..”

“Tell me something” I asked.  “Have you ever seen or heard about a dog attacking someone while on a leash?”  You could actually see the computer in his brain checking all of his back files.  After a little while he admitted that he had never heard of a bite, but he had seen dogs on leashes attacking people.

 "Attacking?” I asked disbelievingly.  “While on a leash that was held by its owner?”

 “Yes, I am telling you!  Lunging at people!  And the owners, like they want the dog to do it!  They find it’s a joke.” Oh Lord.  The infamous bad owners strike again.

“Lunging can mean anything.  Lunging is not attacking.  But what made you think I was an owner like that?  I really want to know because you are not the first person to tell me about muzzling my dog, and I want to know what it is about him or about me that makes people feel threatened.”

“No, no – I was really only joking, you know.  Ask this young man here – when we passed you I told him that the dog looked like he was well trained and if he wasn’t so well trained you could never hold him back if he decided to attack somebody.  He’s a real nice dog.  A real big dog – especially the head and mouth.  Real solid body. Plenty teeth, boy.” (Rescue had chosen just that moment to indicate his boredom with sitting in one place by yawning widely.)

Well.  Who could stay vexed at somebody who was clearly a discerning connoisseur of canine excellence?  After that the conversation quickly progressed to a catalogue of Rescue’s finer points,  the conditions under which I came to be owned by him, the near saint-like attributes of pit bulls in general, and all the difficulties we both have to overcome just to live a half-normal life.  At the end of it all we parted the best of good friends, with Rescue grinning companionably at both of them before trotting off with what he thought was a wave of his tail-stub, but was actually only a twitch.