In general, I try to avoid generalizing about the generalizers!

I often wish I could write freely and without any restraint what is in my mind, but because this is a public blog, I can’t.

Generalizations are the problem. In general, whenever you generalize about anything, the people who are in any way sensitive about what you’re generalizing about will immediately object. At least many will. (Wouldn’t want to generalize about people who might object to my generalizations.)

It is a nightmare, and it gets in the way of my ability to express myself.

Yesterday I was emailed a link to a story about a dog which was put to death in Ireland not for being a pit bull, but for looking like a pit bull. They actually came to the people’s house and took a tape measure to the dog, then looked up the breed standard and declared him to have the requisite pit bull appearance.

So does that mean the Irish people are a bunch of anti-pit bull bigots engaged in doing to canines what would be called genocide if it were being done to people?

Not really. First of all, bad laws are not necessarily passed by “the people.” They are passed because some people are into getting hysterical (like the woman Sarah described in a recent comment), some people react emotionally as a result of personal tragedies, some have misdirected fears projected onto a convenient target, and there are demagogic politicians who pander to hysteria and hope to get elected by saying that they have “done something” (usually in response to the endless and ever-louder clamor that “something must be done!”)

In this way (and because gruesome images persist online in an ever-present now), a single, well-publicized attack by a vicious dog can trigger an entire breed to be banned. Despite my anger over what I see as human stupidity, I cannot ignore the enormous emotional power that, say, a grieving but determined mother can wield, especially when she can muster a small army of sympathizers. If some cute toddler is attacked and killed by a “dog that looks like a pit bull,” it is natural that people will want something done. But about what? If the owner of the dog is a scummy criminal lout who has neglected and abused the dog and let it run loose the same way he has neglected his kids and let them run loose, the usual remedies will not be considered emotionally satisfying. Even sending him to prison for a year or so will seem lame. So the clamor becomes, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THESE AWFUL DOGS THAT KEEP KILLING OUR CHILDREN!

Easy to say, until they decide that the dog you love will be considered a child killer and must therefore be killed, and then like me you’ll become the one to get emotional! And you start screaming about how it’s like bigotry and genocide. And it is the canine equivalent of that, for it condemns dogs as vicious which are not vicious, simply because they belong to the same breed as a dog which killed a child.

Anyway, it turned out that the story I linked was not really from Ireland, but from Northern Ireland. A much more troubled place. There are, like, tensions there, largely unresolved. People hate each other because of what some of their ancestors did to each other centuries ago.

Sometimes I wonder whether there is an ecological niche for group hatred, group stereotyping, and group generalizations. But even by speculating about it, I am generalizing about people.

Let’s move closer to home.

Because of a horrible attack on a child in Kalamazoo, the city of Saginaw, Michigan is right now talking about restricting pit bulls — and in addition, just about any breed of dog which might be capable of harming a child.

Krease hopes Saginaw City Council passes the much talked about rule restricting “dangerous dogs”.The ordinance would restrict pets on the CDC’s list of the ten most statistically dangerous dogs. They include Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, Doberman Pinschers, German Shepherds, Chow Chows, Presa Canarios, St. Bernard’s, and Great Danes.

Well, there is no question that every one of those breeds would be capable of killing or seriously injuring a child, or even an adult. Just in case you aren’t familiar with canine anatomy, all dogs have large canine teeth, which look like this:

Just as guns are in theory designed so they can maim and kill, so are a dog’s canine teeth. They can rip and tear into flesh and they can kill. However, the dog is descended from wolves that long ago crossed over from the wild kingdom to become man’s best friend, and as part of their bargain they seldom deploy their deadly teeth against their masters. Instead, they use them as a weapon in the event that the master wants them to help hunt, or he and his family run into trouble with animal or human threats. 

Unfortunately, dogs are not readily capable of making moral judgments about the quality of their masters, so they are just as willing to deploy their fine weaponry on behalf of a bad master as they are a good master.

A bit like guns — the difference being that a dog is alive and somewhat sentient, and depending on his training and level of control, can become a danger independent of his master. But with the exception of the occasional feral animals (which are not the subject of this debate) even that danger requires some human agency, for every dog has to have been raised by someone, kept by someone, and supervised — or not supervised — by someone. Dogs don’t just jump over the fence and run down the street and attack someone unless some irresponsible asshole allowed it to happen. Sure, there are unowned abandoned dogs that have been dumped in the street, but they wouldn’t be there had someone not been irresponsible on some level. Behind every bad dog, in almost every case there is a bad human. There are exceptions, such as dogs that are stolen out of yards and houses and then trained to be mean, but the overwhelming majority of dogs that are a menace are the product of people who are a menace. This is not rocket science, but common sense.

What tends not to attract as much attention as the pit bulls which do things to people are the people who do things to pit bulls. I have lost count of the number of incidents I have read about. Pit bulls being set on fire and burned to death. Thrown from buildings. Starved to death, or starved nearly to death and then thrown into a dumpster. (The alleged “human” who committed the latter act is IMO a piece of scummy trash, but her alleged mother defended her by saying “Somebody gave that dog to Kisha, and she couldn’t take care of it.” Can anyone explan how that is a “defense”?)

And pit bulls are also shot, electrocuted, stabbed, and of course beaten, beaten, and beaten to death.

But we can’t ban people who do these things, can we?

Is it, then, surprising that animal abuse might have consequences on a dog’s personality? An animal control worker in Berkeley once told me about a family which adopted a pit bull which had been evaluated and determined to be of a friendly disposition. What the pound didn’t know was that the family had a twelve year old boy with a mean disposition, and who enjoyed beating the dog with a baseball bat. One day the dog just decided enough was enough, and took the boy on, with predictable consequences. The boy lived, and of course the family sued the city. Naturally, this increased the reluctance of the animal control workers to put such dogs up for adoption to the “wrong people.” 

Who, pray tell, are the “wrong people”? I know I’ve said this before in one forgotten blog post or another, but in light of the huge number of these dogs in the hands of so many of the worst kind of people, I am surprised that there are not waaay more incidents of dogs turning bad than there are, and I think it is a testament to the pit bull’s generally good nature (which in a poorly understood paradox, may actually be the result of their having been bred to be handled in the dog-fighting pit.)

On a number of occasions I have walked up to young thuggish types with pit bulls because their dogs have wagged their tails at me (probably sensed I was a friend because of the dog scent), and the idiot owners have become angry with their dogs for being friendly! What sort of asshole is that?

Another lovely story I found involved a man who managed to get his pit bull to attack his own daughter. Why are such people allowed to engage in animal husbandry, much less child rearing?

It sounds like trite cliche, but the problem is bad people.

And while I hate to engage in generalizations, it seems that Saginaw is having a lot of trouble with bad people:

According to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics Saginaw has ranked as the number one most violent city in America from 2003 through September 2010 when the most recent statistics were released. The ranking is based on violent crimes per person for cities with populations greater than 40,000. Included in the definition of violent crimes are murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.^[10]

And they want to ban dogs capable of defending homes????

Excuse me, but if you live in a place like Saginaw, a defense-capable dog is precisely what you need. Preferably a dog like this (who was shot three times by an armed invader and continued to defend his family).

Hope I’m not generalizing too much, but this stuff is getting to be ridiculous.

Mind if break my own rule and generalize about the generalizers? I’m thinking that the problem might be that outraged decent people in places like Saginaw are thinking along the following lines…. You can’t ban certain people (I’m the first to admit a law saying “no scummy lowlife people are allowed in our town” would be unconstitutional), nor can you ban them from owning guns unless they are felons. And of course it is now well settled that you can’t ban guns. But scummy lowlife people are all allowed to have dogs, with no exception for felons. Little wonder the cops are scared to death of bad people’s dogs.  

But they can’t pass a law saying scummy lowlife people are not allowed to have dogs capable of inflicting damage. For starters, how do you define scummy lowlife people? After all, we live in a society with a huge egalitarian fetish. No conceivable, identifiable, or even theoretically identifiable group of people may be discriminated against in any way.

But because dogs are not people, the result is that dogs are becoming one of the few targets left that people who want to ban people can still ban. 

So they become the scapegoat. We can do nothing about bad people having dogs capable of harm, so we must pass laws against all dogs capable of harm. 

We know who obeys these laws, don’t we?

It’s worked so well with guns.