bananapeppers:

[warning: this excerpt is from an article concerning the weaponization of dogs by police and white people against black people and other people of color and media representations of police dogs. excerpt contains discussion of author’s experience of being attacked and nearly killed by a dog as a black woman. article and links provided by author contain further and more detailed examples of dogs’ attacking especially black people, latinx people, and Native American people under the direction of police, including illustrations, photos, and videos depicting this.]

Two years [after the author first watched the 1982 film White Dog], I was working as an animal behavior assessor at a small shelter in the Midwest when I was again confronted with the concept of dog racism. Whenever a dog was aggressive to me during its assessment, the shelter manager dismissed it and opted to place the dog up for adoption. Inevitably the dog would bite someone, and I would be left scratching my head and wondering why my assessment was discredited. This went on for months before I finally confronted her. Why didn’t she believe me when I told her that a dog was aggressive?

“Oh,” she said, “a lot of dogs don’t like black people but they’re fine with everyone else.” With that she flipped her blonde ponytail and walked away. Was this just a workplace microaggression, or are these dogs actually racist? I found myself grappling with the idea that not only do actual humans hate me for being black; dogs could also hate me for reasons that are out of my control. I tried to fight her claims with deep academic research into animal cognition and ethology, immersing myself in texts and academic papers to unearth the potential for a dog to distinguish human beings by shades. I already knew that, for the most part, dogs bite people out of fear, generally solicited by underexposure or traumatic experiences. For example, I meet a lot of dogs who are afraid of people wearing hats. But dog discrimination in this context is less black and white than whether or not someone is wearing a hat. How dark would a person have to be for an undersocialized dog to feel triggered? Can dogs even distinguish people by color? Do I emit a smell detectable only to dogs that denotes my status as a human being worth biting?

Later, when I was working at an animal shelter in New York City, I was mauled during a routine walk with a 110-pound dog. The ten-minute attack was punctuated by the dog’s wagging tail, happy soft eyes, and what seemed to be a physical inability to detach his jaws from my leg. “He is having fun,” I thought to myself as I passed out. “He thinks this is a game.” In the ensuing months spent hospitalized and bedridden, dog experts in the field offered their reactions, which ranged from 99 percent blaming me for being attacked, to blaming me 110 percent for being attacked. Surely, they thought, a dog would never ever bite a person without provocation, much less maul them almost to death! But after revisiting the film during my lengthy recuperation process, it finally dawned on me that White Dog, like the dog who mauled me, was not a typical pet dog. He was a highly trained soldier.

Here lies the missing link in my initial dismissal of the film’s premise. In my ignorance as someone who works with pet dogs, I was considering aggression to be what it is in its most common state, which is fear-related reactivity stemming from poor socialization. I was correct in assuming that the pet dogs that I was encountering in Illinois were “racist,” projecting their owners’ choice to exist in a whites-only world, and perhaps even reflecting an inherent bias cultivated over decades of segregation. But I was missing the framework of a world of dogs beyond pets — a world made up of of what I call “weaponized” dogs — in which dogs are trained to violently target specific populations.

What is critically important about the origins of this dog, but is lost in the cinematic adaptation, is the fact that White Dog’s trainer is not an ordinary citizen, but a police dog trainer from Alabama. Director Sam Fuller clearly revised Romain Gary’s memoir to gloss over the fact that the titular dog’s violence is specifically related to state-sponsored police violence. In the book, the man who arrives at Gary’s doorstep to reclaim the dog is actually a former sheriff whose police officer son trained white dogs for two decades: “My son’s just retired from the police, after twenty years. He plans to go into business for himself. He wants to open a kennel. He’s a professional dog-trainer. Police dogs… I used to be a sheriff, myself.”

The sheriff, like the one depicted in the film, is completely unapologetic, even proud. When confronted by Gary with assertions that the dog is racist, he replies, “Yes, Sir, he’s a fine police dog… As good as they come. My boy trained him. He’s been training them for twenty years of his life, he’s a real professional… Fido has three generations of attack dogs behind him, all in the Police Canine Corps, all trained by my boy.”

[…]

[…] Like the dog who mauled me, police dogs are brainwashed from an early age to have fun while they are “apprehending suspects,” and are often looking for an opportunity to play the “bite game” whenever their handler so much as hints at a command to attack. Popular opinion assumes that police dogs are trained to carefully follow a scent to ensure that they are catching the right Bad Guy. The reality of K9 pursuits could not be further from the truth. When there is a suspect in a general area, dogs are released by their handler to rove the area in search of whoever is in sight. When police dogs are triggered by running or quick movement, they hunt and take the trigger down with a technique called “bite and hold” until officers arrive to release the grip of its teeth from your leg, arm or neck — which is often difficult since the dogs enjoy biting so much.

[…]

[…] This form of police brutality, veiled in the guise of a dog’s intent, can serve to alleviate an officer from being held legally accountable for his or her own violence. Culpability is also diminished by the American public’s love affair with all things dog — although the dogs that we see in uniform are not pets, but weaponized animals encouraged from puppyhood to bite with force equivalent to being run over by a small automobile. And, like White Dog, they will continue to rehearse what they were taught until their archaic role in modern American police forces is put to sleep.

There are a handful of dispersed voices within academia and the legal system questioning the ethics and pragmatism of dogs working in a weaponized capacity. Some fairly high profile court cases questioning the viability of drug detection dogs as a tool of mass incarceration have led to a legal examination of whether or not drug detection dogs are acting upon racial bias from their handler, due to the Clever Hans Effect of unconscious cuing. But these voices are only blips in the sea of popular opinion, which extolls working dogs as selfless heroes.

Kelly Mays McDonald, “Our Racist Dogs”, The Awl, September 15, 2015.