Hat Tip to Fred over at One Bark at a Time who has a great post on this topic. Malcolm Gladwell, a renouned writer of books like The Tipping Point and Blink, has a great new article in the New Yorker entitled Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?
Gladwell has writen about "pit bulls' before -- in his 2006 article Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls cna teach us about profiling. And again, he has shown an uncanny abilty to be knowledgable on the topic and use his words wisely to paint very vivid pictures of the stories he tells.
In Offensive Play, much of the story is about trauma-related brain injuries sustained by football players based on the constant collisions they face. If you are a fan of the game of football, you will find that part of the story fascinating, sad and frightening in its own right. But it is Gladwell's relating of this trauma to dog fighting that will likely be what many of the readers of this blog will find interesting. Gladwell writes:
"Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understnading that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It's a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.
Outside of Gladwell's decision to use the term 'sport' when referring to dogfighting, I think you can see where he's going with the article.
Gladwell comes back to the dogs that are being rehabilitated at Best Friend's Sanctuary in Utah. He writes:
What happens at Best Friends represents, by any measure, an extravagant gesture. These are dogs that will never live a normal life. But the kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant gesture in response. In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a “cur,” and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess “gameness,” and game dogs are revered.
In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff—and dogfighting fails this test. Gameness, Carl Semencic argues, in “The World of Fighting Dogs” (1984), is no more than a dog’s “desire to please an owner at any expense to itself....This is why Michael Vick's dogs weren't euthanized . The betrayal of loyalty requires an act of social reparation."
And yet, sadly, it is the human race's betrayal of what may be the American Pit Bull Terrier's best trait, it's loyalty, that has led many not to seek reparations -- but to seek to exterminate the breed. Doesn't make much sense does it?
Read the article -- it's well worth the time.
except that some of the Vick dogs at BF WILL have a normal life (if by "normal" he means life in a home with a family), as this one just did:
http://network.bestfriends.org/campaigns/pitbulls/13456/news.aspx
Dogfighting is repellent and immoral, yes. But having been a fighting dog doesn't necessarily make it "abnormal" and unable to live a normal life. 2 of the most scarred Vick dogs (Leo and Hector), apparent fighters, are now THERAPY dogs, for goodness sake!
Posted by: EmilyS | October 21, 2009 at 08:18 PM
In fairness Emily, in the full article, Gladwell singles out 4 or 5 dogs that were forbidden by the courts from ever leaving Best Friends -- in which case, in reference to those dogs, he is right. Leo and Hector neither one were at Best Friends, and Gladwell did not talk about any of the other dogs from Bad Newz Kennels that didn't go to BF. You are correct -- it would have been nice for him to talk about the many great success stories, but within the context of the article, that passage makes complete sense.
Posted by: Brent Toellner | October 22, 2009 at 05:37 PM