quality of mercy

* originally titled "dead dogs" - revised March 20, 2011

Things I've been reading recently, about the precarity of dogs in human society, especially those branded as "vicious," "unadoptable," or plainly, "pit bull":

* "Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, preemptive justice" by Colin (aka Joan) Dayan: in grad school I read some of Dayan's work on race, slavery, and prisons. I also saw her give an amazing talk on "cruel and unusual punishment": still the only time I've heard an academic speaker whisper to mark points of emphasis, in almost mesmeric decrescendos that pull the audience forward, body and all. Then I discovered that she is a dog person via an elegant, unflinching essay simply titled "The Dogs." Part memoir, part philosophy, the essay tracks the liminality of dogs in Judeo-Christian thought through a terrible personal memory: under disorienting circumstances, Dayan had agreed to have her 11-year-old dog Dogie put down for a sudden, mysterious illness, a "good death" she later came to doubt. She's one of a small handful of critics/writers I know who has grappled with the fact of dehumanization under racism - of people being treated "like dogs," "like animals" as a matter of state policy and coordinated race and species violence - while treating animals as well as humans as social beings.  [Updated May 2: forgot to note that the "Dead Dogs" article mentions the case of Oreo, the pit bull who survived being thrown from a six-story building only to be diagnosed with terminal aggression by the ASPCA and put to death.]

* Pit Bull Patriarchy: a tough and beautiful blog which explores the life-and-death consequences of breed phobias, co-authored by spotted dog farm (also a photographer - Flickr stream here) and redvelvetfemme. Mulling over SDF's recent post on her "dog bite embroidery" project, it strikes me that maybe pit bull fear is, at bottom, a fear of non-human sociality, of a sociality acted out with bodies that are irreconcilably alien to our own, despite our attempts to make them conform to human desires:

A bite is a most basic form of communication. I mean, dogs don't have hands, or English. What are they trying to say? I've seen dogs bite out of love. Extreme love, and the desire to be close, and to play. My dog bite embroidery is a series of linens that have been "altered" by Kaya, the artist, and then embroidered with phrases that I think she might be feeling while she's shredding my linens. The words are a reminder that dogs want family, a lifelong commitment; they are not bodies to be dumped when mistakes have been made, fear sets in and anger shows its teeth.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

cruel death, good death

"Oreo the Abused Pit Bull is Euthanized," New York Times, November 13, 2009:

Oreo, a dog that was nursed back to health after surviving being thrown off the roof of a six-story building, was killed Friday by lethal injection.

A 2-year-old pit bull, Oreo was euthanized in the New York City headquarters of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals after the organization rebuffed last-minute pleas to spare her life. The organization called the dog a danger to the public.

On Friday morning, Oreo received a last meal of “premium quality” kibble and canned dog food. She was then given a sedative, though she appeared “content, alert and panting,” according to an organization spokesman. Oreo was injected in the leg with an overdose of sodium pentobarbital and was pronounced dead shortly after 3 p.m.

Oreo broke two legs in the fall. News reports of the incident, accompanied by photos of the brown and white dog with her front legs in casts, triggered a flood of adoption offers and financial donations to help pay for the medical care.

However, as Oreo recuperated from her injuries under the care of the A.S.P.C.A., she was increasingly viewed as a danger — difficult to control and “unpredictably aggressive,” according to an organization spokesman.

News of Oreo’s death provoked angry reactions among supporters who had been frantically lobbying the A.S.P.C.A. to delay the euthanasia and allow time to negotiate a deal to transfer Oreo to an animal sanctuary in the Hudson Valley.

Oreo’s case came to public attention in June, when her owner, Fabian Henderson, threw her off the roof of his apartment building at the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn. Mr. Henderson was convicted of animal cruelty and was scheduled to be sentenced in December.

[ . . . ]

The A.S.P.C.A. rejected [pleas to delay the euthanasia], citing the evaluation of staff members and an outside veterinary behaviorist who said that Oreo could not be rehabilitated. “Animal cruelty isn’t pretty and doesn’t always have a happy ending,” said the society’s president and chief executive, Ed Sayres. “It is ugly and sad and, ultimately, tragic.”

Seven staff members were present during the euthanasia procedure. But the dog’s former owner, Mr. Henderson, was not on hand to witness his pet’s final moments.

* * *

A curious mixed-up creature Oreo was.  A pit, a pet.  Aggressive, abused.  Nursed back to health.  Put back to death.  Content and alert, ugly and sad.  Panting.  White on the inside.

* Revised Dec 2, 2009

the difference between sarah palin and pit bulls

What is it with Sarah Palin and animals?

For the sake of my blood pressure, I skipped Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night (yeah, I know, so "me first, country second"). When I came across a reference the following morning to that line about hockey moms, pit bulls, and lipstick, I thought for sure that it was something out of the Colbert Report. It had to be... right???

My incredulity was partly a reaction to the odious gender posturing (I guess she's both more butch and more femme than the rest of us). But part of it was plain cognitive dissonance. The last time I checked the American cultural imagination, the pit bull is the quintessential "gangsta" dog - i.e. violent, criminal, underclass, hypermasculine, and, above all, black. When the story of former NFL star Michael Vick's dog-fighting arrest broke in 2007, the media was awash in breathless insta-reports on pit bulls and black subcultures, as well as lots of poorly framed, zero-sum discussions of racism "versus" animal cruelty, civil rights "versus" animal rights. The feminist and animal ethics scholar Kathy Rudy has a good op-ed piece that addresses the problems with these facile dichotomies.

The dogs in the Vick case were very lucky in that they were seen as traumatized victims from the outset and ultimately granted a reprieve from group execution. (Coincidentally, Palin's pit bull quip comes just as Michael Vick's dogs are on national TV again, in not one but two specials about their rescue and rehabilitation.) But this efflorescence of public sympathy happened against a backdrop of persistent pit-phobia which imagines the breed as congenital killing machines unfit for human society. Pit bulls (and sometimes other bully and mastiff type dogs) are subject to breed-specific bans and disproportionate rates of euthanasia in public shelters. Sometimes the cyno-eugenics cavorts openly with human racism and classism, as this story about a recent breed ban in a Colorado suburb shows.

So how is it that, all of a sudden, we have a conservative white politician - the GOP's newly coronated spokesperson of "small town America" no less - claiming this hated urban beast as a mascot for "hockey moms"? In this Daily Show clip (about 3:10 in), Jon Stewart cuts to the quick: "one is unfairly maligned in spite of evidence that it is no worse than any other dog, and one is an artificial demographic that is no better or worse than any other mom." (Stewart, I just learned, is a pit bull person.)

I know this is just one soundbite, one small thing in a big election. But it does seem fitting that Palin would jokingly identify herself with an animal that's popularly imagined to be killers of other animals - and be more or less tone deaf to the reality of its systematic persecution by humans. After all, here's someone whose "executive experience" in human-canid relations includes support for aerial wolf gunning.