Random musings and forgotten stuff

Okay, so I am not an expert or anything but I’ve been studying dogs and dog breeds for a long time (like my entire life) and reading a lot on the topic and I’ve got some thoughts I’d like to write down.

Most dog breeds in the AKC and UKC list are NOT dogs that were invented by professional breeders and dog fanciers.  Most dog breeds are just dogs that were owned by the common people of the community who used the dogs for companionship and daily life.

Rottweilers are the descendants of Roman war dogs that got left in some hick-ass town in Germany, and then spent 2000 years guarding and driving cattle for the local residents. Siberian Huskies are just the dogs that lived with Siberian Chukchi people pulling their sleds. Corgies have been around for more than a thousand years dodging the kicks of cows and sheep with their short height. Afghan hounds were hunting dogs with long coats because Afghanistan is fucking cold up in the mountains.

Dogs that served the needs of the culture they lived with, those dogs were fed and loved and allowed to have puppies.  And all of the dogs of one working type in one town or village or region all happened to look similar because they lived in isolation from dogs of the rest of the world, just like how people who come from the same region of the world also kind of look similar.

So the question is?  Is this process still going on?  Is there a race of Dogs that is evolving along side American Culture?  The same way Chow-chows evolved along side Mongolian culture and Chihuahas evolved with the Aztecs?

Yes.

America’s dog is the Pit Bull Terrier.

In the United States, our common-people dog is the Pit Bull.Think of what the average American wants in a dog:  A companion animal with a trainable and reasonably friendly temperament, good with kids, but still willing to protect the house.  Small enough to live in any type of housing but big enough for everything fun to do with a big dog.  Low maintenance grooming, few health problems.  You get a dog that looks a lot like a pit bull

Pit Bulls have always been common-people dogs.  They were used as generic all-purpose farm dogs in America’s early days.  

Their bravery and toughness made them pretty useful from everything from catching rats to hunting boar.

And as you can see from these pictures Pit Bulls are pretty unchanged over the last centuries.

Even Dog Fighting, which is what Pit Bulls are often assumed to have been bred for, reflects their origin as dogs of the working class. Dog fighting only requires two dogs and a small ring, no expensive equipment or space or tools, so its very easy to see how it was a sport that working class people could attend and participate in.

A lot of dog experts say “Pit Bulls” aren’t even a real dog breed because no professional kennel club really recognizes them, (The AKC recognizes the Stadfordshire Bull Terrier and American Stadfordshire Terrier, But no one I know who own’s a pit bull identifies their dogs as either of those breeds.)

This is because today, Pit Bulls are STILL common people dogs.  Most Pit Bull puppies now-a-days are not being bred by professionals.  Most are being bred by pit bull owners whose dogs happen to have puppies. They are a breed that is continuing to evolve alongside American Culture in a very organic way.  They don’t fit into the elite purist ideas of professional kennel clubs.

Some people who advocate for breed bans complain that pit bulls make up only 2% of the dog population but 20% of dog bites.  But go to anly American Dog Park, visit any American Dog Shelter, or walk down any American street and you will quickly see that the 2% statistic is VERY misleading.  Pit Bulls actually make up between 20-33% of dogs in shelters.  (So it makes sense they would be responsible for 20-30% of dog bites). Again, most people who own pit bulls do not register them with the American Kennel Club, so if you only look at AKC registries for data on dog breeds, you cannot get accurate information.  

And because Pit Bulls are the dogs of the people, living along side the people and reproducing along side the people, they have to absorb all of the stereotypes that come with being a dog of the proletariat shall we say.

It makes sense that urban, underfunded Black and Hispanic communities would be filled with pets that are low-maintenance and can be obtained affordably.  Working class people are going to have working class dogs suited to their lives.

And of course white soccer moms see Black and Hispanic people walking their dogs and think that those must be the dogs of drug dealers and gang bangers, and that those dogs must therefore be viscous.  Because the idea that Black and Hispanic working class people enjoy having companion animals due to the fact they are human beings isn’t going to occur to a white soccer mom.

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man: