REAL CRUELTY

It’s pretty hard to torture animals the way people can be tortured because animal mental life is limited, one assumes. For instance, if a mother is tortured by letting her infant die of starvation just out of her reach, is that the same as weaning a calf? Humans tend to think it is. Can animals realize they are about to be killed? Probably not in the same way humans can. But they surely feel pain the way we do -- hunger, thirst, and so on.

In spite of being exposed to some fairly tough stuff in Montana, I turned out to have very limited tolerance for real suffering. Once a pup was brought in who had stumbled into a napalm trap set for garbage can raiders. The owner of the cans was a Vietnam veteran, which is how he knew to make the trap and which is probably why he had become so mentally blunted that he would do such a thing. He was lucky no child stumbled into it. (Another jokester had wired his metal garbage can to the household current but forgot to turn it off on collection day. His garbage hauler punched him out.)

This burned dog, eyeless and furless, had been screaming and hiding in the neighborhood for a day or so before an animal control officer succeeded in capturing it. When I saw it, shaking with shock but still trying to live, it was behind the shelter on the cement slab where Dr. Watts was taking photos so we could try to get a court conviction. Pictures of it dead would not have worked, but this was delaying what could only be a merciful death. I heard my voice far away, demanding that it be killed right away. I was nearly blind and deaf, not from shock but from adrenalin overdose. I can handle death. I cannot handle suffering.

One day the police brought in a dog killed by a gun for an autopsy. It must have been before Dr. Watts was on the staff because the shelter supervisor, an alert and energetic young woman, got the duty of retrieving the bullet. After a lot of feeling around in the wound, she couldn’t find it, so Burgwin asked me to try. In a few minutes both Kathy and I were literally red-handed to above our wrists, but could find no bullet. Then my fingers touched something they recognized: birdshot. Many times I’d prepared pheasants and ducks for supper by first searching for birdshot so we wouldn’t break our teeth. Once we knew we were feeling for a lot of little bb’s instead of one big pellet, we quickly filled a dish with the evidence. So much for AC as CSI. But the point is that we weren’t fazed by dead flesh, though many people are and a media image of us kneeling over a dog with scarlet hands in its wound would have created a sensation. We knew the dog was beyond suffering.

The way the law works, an animal must be nearly starved to death before the owner can be charged with cruelty. This is hard for humane groups or individuals to understand. I had a friend here in Montana who was struggling to get dogs away from an old man who had that compulsion to hoard animals though he couldn’t feed them or even keep them dry. I told her that the only way was to feed the animals, but keep track of the bills and as soon as they amounted to the value of the animals (which could hardly be much) they could go to civil court and seize the animals in lieu of payment. She couldn’t bring herself to suggest it to her group -- it seemed so against common sense, so like adding injustice to what was already unjust. In the end it worked. Our laws are not based on preventing abuse so much as they are on protecting economic value.

One case was so powerful that I ended up making a short story out of it. The call came as “meet the complainant in the field.” An old man had died. The complainant was his niece. The man had had a small terrier-type dog and it had eaten the man around the face and neck. The niece wanted me to promise that I would take the dog straight back to the shelter and personally kill it. She signed the forms. When I put the dog in the tank and pumped the air out, it looked at me through the little round window with total contempt. We watched each other until it was gone. I don’t think either of us was sorry. The real suffering was on the part of the niece.

There was a black man in my mostly white neighborhood who had a dog that constantly got loose. The first time I chased it home and gave him a warning. He said I was just picking on him because he was a minority and that I had a prejudiced belief that he was irresponsible. The second time I wrote a ticket. The third time I found the dog dead in the gutter early on a Sunday morning. I took it over to his house and rang the bell. He came to the door in his pajamas and I just laid the bloody shredded body in his arms and left. An officer can’t do that, you know. But sometimes the stupid cruelty gets to you more than the deliberate torture cases.

Another officer, picking up dead animals, was assailed by a man who parked alongside his truck and yelled out all sorts of insults. He hated dog catchers. The officer calmly got the garbage can he carried for bodies, many of them well ripened since it was summer, and emptied it through the window of the car into the man’s lap. Maybe he just made that story up: no one ever filed a complaint. Doesn't strike me as cruelty -- more like consciousness-raising.

Cruelty is sometimes deliberate, the product of a twisted mind that needs to take advantage of something vulnerable, and some interpret public employees as vulnerable. Accurately. Though it’s not so much a matter of vulnerability as being constrained -- unable to hit back.

Sometimes cruelty is in the eye of the beholder. One old woman used to turn in another old woman who lived in the same run-down single-room-occupancy hotel and owned a poodle. The complainant claimed that the poodle-owner didn’t walk her dog properly but dragged it along too fast and wouldn’t let it smell, which everyone knows is unnatural. Finally the poodle owner got tired of that and stopped walking her dog. Instead, she bought disposable diapers, poked a hole for the dog’s tail, and kept it in all the time. Then the complainant turned her in for forcing the dog to stay inside, which everyone knows is unnatural. The stories about this kind of thing are innumerable and a favorite fodder of tabloids.

Once I got a complaint that a man was beating his dog with a lead pipe. “Want backup?” asked the dispatcher. I said I’d see after I got there. It turned out that the young man -- he was little more than a teen -- was whacking his dog with the cardboard tube from inside a roll of wrapping paper. I gave him the talk about dog obedience training and recommended a few lessons or at least a library book. He was agreeable.

We had an inquiry from the police about a burlesque queen act that involved two Great Dane dogs. Did we think it was cruelty? We were stumped. We asked, “What’s the expression on the faces of the dogs?” They said they’d go watch the show again to check. They weren’t watching the dogs the first time.

Sometimes the most haunting suffering is caused simply by ignorance, without motive, unintentionally. Two mummified Doberman pinschers were found in a basement, chained to pipes and left to die. The owner might have died, might have been arrested, or might have just not cared. No way to know. Previous occupants were long gone -- no forwarding address.

One of my own cruelties that still bothers me involved a baby weasel that was brought to us in Browning forty years ago. Bob Scriver and I often took in injured or infant animals. I had doll bottles for nursing the little critter and made up formula, though I had no way of knowing whether I was getting it right. The baby was soon in pain, writhing and crying. I couldn’t think what to do. It was warm, nested in cotton. I petted it and rocked it. It stopped eating and finally died, distended. What I hadn’t known was that many small animals cannot evacuate their bowels without the mother licking their bottom. This is to make sure no baby excrement accumulates to give away the nest. If I had used a soft sponge or cloth to stimulate evacuation, it mght have survived. We’d succeeded before because we normally just added the infant to the old mother cat’s litter and she took care of it. Plainly, prevention of cruelty is not just a matter of stamping out the impulse to torture, but also a need for specific and detailed information about the care of animals.

Dogs sometimes came in with evidence of cigarette burns. I had a mental image of a drunk idly smoking in front of the TV, bored and angry, hating himself, and turning it all on his innocent dog. I lived across the street from a big Irish grandmother who often took in abused foster children. She said they would have cigarette burns. I wonder whether the statistics on such burns have declined since so many people have stopped smoking, thus removing a handy potential torture weapon.

They say that the neurons that control empathy, which is what makes us understand what others feel and therefore to feel sympathy and compassion, are small frail structures just behind the forehead. It is known when they began to appear in the human brain and genes, and it is believed that they are a key to what makes us human. People who are cruel, thoughtlessly or deliberately, might have had blows to the head that eliminated their sensitivity to suffering. Maybe some people are dyscompassionate the way some are dyslexic. Maybe it's a symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome. It would be worth a study.

Many people speculate on the psychological forces and cultural permissions involved, especially since we are constantly exposed to accounts of such things, official and unofficial. (I have yet to hear of anyone “water-boarding” a dog, but wouIdn’t be surprised by it.) I wonder if that isn’t somehow connected to the rise of the ultra-humane movement, which tries to make towns change their names and women stop wearing fur, which justifies lab terrorism and tries to intimidate meat-eaters. I think maybe they are identifying with the victims, trying to make themselves powerful enough to be safe and don’t know any other way than to band together politically and work emotionally through the media. Too often, for lack of any other powerful adversary, they zero in on animal control, their ally. They don't realize how weak the cruel really are.