with dogs at the edge of life

colin dayan

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euthanization of their dogs.”8 On June 19, 2013, the district court granted the state’s motion to dismiss the case.

On April 8, 2014, nearly two years after the court validated canine profiling, Governor Martin O’Malley signed the bill that overturned Tracey v. Solesky. The bill removed liability for land-lords unless the landlord knew that the dog was dangerous. Now owners are liable for injuries caused by their dog, no matter the breed.9 But what happens in the courts or legislatures has little effect on what happens to these dogs on the streets and in the homes of the United States. Certain kinds of humans and dogs, once labeled as expendable, can be sacrificed to the realities of law-ful control.

“O H N O , H E ’ S S H O O T I N G T H E D O G . Stop shooting.” A person on a cell phone is heard as the police in Hawthorne, California, about fifteen miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, restrain a black man and shoot his dog dead in the light of day. That kind of message is heard again and again in the streets of the United States as police assault, even kill, humans and dogs. In New York in August 2012, police shot a pit bull named Star in the head when he tried to protect his companion, a homeless white man named Lech Stankiewicz. The man had an epileptic fit, and the dog tried to stop the police when one of them kicked Stankiewicz as he lay on the street. We see the police shoot the dog and we see him alone, bleeding in the street not far from the person he protected.

But the episode of the Rottweiler named Max and his owner, Leon Rosby, at the hands of the Hawthorne police, though all too familiar in our cities, is much more disturbing. Caught on video, the fatal shooting on an afternoon in July 2013 is hard to watch. Not once but four times the shots hit the body of the dog. The bul-lets hit so hard that Max seems to jump, roll, and bounce off the curb as Rosby, handcuffed by police, looks on.

Rosby was walking Max when he saw a SWAT team approach-ing a house in response to a robbery. Rosby had already filed six

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complaints against the Hawthorne Police Department, alleging mistreatment and racial profiling. Used to the department’s civil rights violations and pattern of intimidating and harassing Afri-can Americans, he started to videotape the SWAT team. Officers approached him, and he returned the dog to his car, where music blared from the radio. Rosby walked over to the police. They did not talk; they handcuffed him and roughed him up. As you hear in the video, Max is barking, barking, barking. The dog sees his friend Rosby tackled, manhandled, held by the police. When the police get tougher, Max jumps out the window to protect Rosby. You hear Rosby telling Max to get back. “No, Max!” he calls. Max does not attack the officers. He comes toward them, backs up, and then turns to Rosby. The police start to yell, and another officer comes running over. That policeman shoots the dog not just one time, not just to stop him, but several times, to make sure he is dead. The dog stops after the first bullet. He tries to get away. Three more bullets, and the dog somersaults over the curb and rolls off onto his back. His legs churn the air, like those of a dying roach trying to live.

Rosby never gets to hold his dog again. He is pulled away and shoved into the police car. Care and grief are no longer allowed in this America. “He wasn’t just a dog, you know,” Rosby said, speaking about Max after the killing. “He’d lick on my face, lick on my ear. . . . The dog wouldn’t have lunged at you if you hadn’t approached him like that, I know it, I know my dog.” Later he explained that his dog “was trying to stop them from beating on me.”10

As I watched the video, I heard Malcolm X’s words from nearly forty years earlier: “If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog. If a dog is fixed on a black man when that black man is doing nothing but trying to take advantage of what the gov-ernment says is supposed to be his, then that black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sicks the dog on him.”11 Noth-ing seems to enrage police these days more than a black man who owns a dog, and it is worse for the black man who loves a dog. It is almost as if somewhere in the minds of these police they believe

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that dogs were made for hating blacks, not for loving them. That is the horror and the tragedy caught by Samuel Fuller in his film White Dog, adapted from the novel by Romain Gary.

I think about growing up in the South in the 1960s and, closer to home, about my neighborhood in Atlanta where I learned to watch out for the white men in uniforms. They threatened us through our dogs. They were called “the laws” when they weren’t called “dog catchers.” We never knew the difference between them. Police took away your dogs. Dog catchers picked up dogs in their nets, loaded them into the back of their trucks, and took them to the pound. Both could do whatever they wanted to the dogs and their owners. Theirs was an alternative laying down of the law as old as the day is long. From the days of slavery, through aboli-tion, down to the present, dog catchers have been granted “police power.” Anything is permissible as long as it is in the interests of the community: its health, safety, and welfare. That community is still understood to be white and affluent.

If I say that nothing has changed for the majority of blacks in this country, I can back it up with the words: all you have to do is look at the treatment of their dogs. There is the proof. There is the rub. Shooting family pets—especially pit bulls, but any large dog will do—has become a habit, a ritual that reminds citizens of the reach of lawful predation. Whether these are dogs too large to be allowed in public housing or too insignificant to be taken on buses from Hurricane Katrina, whether they are shot dead on the streets or even in the backyards of their homes, is no matter. It is instruc-tive to watch how prejudice works—the one-on-one lamination of the pit bull onto the African American male, the circuitous routes it takes, the consequences of reducing persons to their accessories: you know, it’s not the men you’re afraid of, it’s their dogs.

When I saw the video of Rosby’s arrest and Max’s murder, I tried to tell my husband the story. The only way to get him to feel the horror was to reenact it. So I became the dog. I barked. I jumped and ran toward my husband. Still barking, I leapt. First, one bullet; then, three more bullets. I did a somersault on the floor

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of the study and rolled over on my back, my legs in the air. He looked at me in silence. I cried. My dog Stella ran in the room. She came over, laid her body on top of me, both legs and paws pressed on my chest. I was enveloped by her care, her knowledge that something big and awful had just happened to me. She stayed there close and licked my face, tongue hard against my cheeks, with a passion I had not felt in a long time.

H O W C A N I S E I Z E O N D O G L I F E I N W O R D S ? Dogs live on the track between the mental and the physical and sometimes seem to tease out a near-mystical disintegration of the bounds between them. What would it mean to become more like a dog? How might we come up against life as a sensory but not sensible experience? We all experience our dogs’ unprecedented and peculiar atten-tiveness. It comes across as an exuberance borne by a full heart. Perhaps this is what the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards meant when he emphasized a physical rather than moral conversion. He knew that the crux of divinity in earthbound entities lay in the heart’s “affections.”

What does conscience look like at the boundaries of human-ity, at the edge of a cherished humanism? The ruses of sentiment fail to confront the alternately knowing and doubting relation that matters most between humans and dogs. What does it mean to think outside our selves and with other beings? For dogs, thought is immersed in matter. Not sympathy or sentiment but something more acute and unsettling. When dogs find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, belonging to the wrong kinds of people or protecting too earnestly the homes of their human com-panions, they gather themselves up in their flesh, and in a state of prescience and acceptance, they prepare for the time when life stops, as they slip away toward stillness. It is not that they do not know what is going to happen to them but that they know too well.

Taking the life, death and even breath of dogs as my prompt, then, I want to unsettle our conceptual schemes in order to examine

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another way of engaging with other beings. What would it mean to know like a dog? Ultimately it is a question of palpable antici-pation, not abstract moralizing. Dogs are not, as Donna Har-away proposes, in a twist on the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, “here just to think with,” but also “here to live with.” They might also be the form that thought must take if it is to make a difference to our lives.

Disregard, forfeiture, and extinction. These words can be understood in their reach and dread if we force ourselves to see double: dogs and their not quite kin, the humans with them or against them, loving or hating them. In this time of economic col-lapse, political paralysis, and continuing race hatred, dogs help us to understand the contemporary mixture of disciplinary and penal power. It is with dogs beside us and before us that we are prompted to reconsider the ethical life: the conscience it demands, the liabili-ties it incurs. For those of us who believe that the sharp distinc-tion between human and nonhuman animals is unsustainable, this book offers ways of thinking through the making and unmaking of life on this earth.