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Pulling at RootsMay 14, 2008 Between the foot of the outside stairs and the passenger door of my truck are a couple of roots that stick up from the ground. Travvy likes to grab hold of these and pull, gnaw, and otherwise try to shake them loose. A small stump provides a similar challenge. So far he hasn't been successful. The whole world has hold of the other end, and he's just one small puppy. Last night a root caught my eye. It wasn't coming out of the ground; it was a link from a dog-related site I was skimming on the Web. A virtual root, if you will. It was a bad-news root, and not news I wanted to hear: it was about a man arrested in Ontario for abusing a puppy. I clicked on it anyway. In Windsor, Ontario, one day in mid-April bystanders saw a man raising a puppy off the ground by its leash. The puppy was choking. They saw the man kick the puppy and hurl it against a fire hydrant. According to an article in the Windsor Star, they told the man to stop, but the man took the puppy into a house. They couldn't follow, so they called the police. When the police found the puppy, she had multiple broken bones, including all four legs. They took her to the Humane Society. Her injuries were so extensive that she had to be euthanized. Her name was Kiki. She was a Siberian husky. She was four months old. The story gets worse. The owner, a 23-year-old university student, said he was just training the dog. He said, "I didn't know I need a lot of things to take care of a dog." He didn't know that he could "not just punch animals." And still worse: the university student was from China, his name is Qu Li, he lives on Rankin Avenue, and after his name and address were released a Chinese-Canadian woman named Qing Li whose listing in the phone book is Li Q and who lives on Randolph Avenue and her husband were subjected to death threats and massive verbal abuse by anonymous phone callers. The phone callers -- and plenty of the people who commented online -- seized on the fact that the perp was from China. "Deport 'em" was the most temperate of their prescriptions. Two days after the original story, Gord Henderson opened his Windsor Star column with this paragraph: "Crack open the paper-thin membrane encasing our 'progressive and tolerant' society and you'll find a howling, foaming-at-the-mouth lynch mob just itching to bust out and go burn some witches at the stake." It's a great column. And I have to admit: Before I could even finish thinking, How could anyone do that to a puppy?, I was fuming, "Goddamn fucking pricks." Even though in my head and (most of the time) in my heart, I know that the problem has less to do with pricks than with power and privilege. Power isn't bad: it's the capacity to do things and make things happen. Privilege is nice to have. The big problem with power and privilege is that they make shortcuts possible. If you've got more power than someone, you don't have to listen to them, or take their ideas or feelings or wishes into account. You don't even have to see them. You can ignore them. Maybe you can coerce them into doing what you want, or at least not getting in your way. I could choke my Travvy by picking him up by the leash. I could throw him against a tree. I could beat him with the leg of a coffee table. I'm bigger and I'm stronger. If I could do all those things, I could tell myself that I was just training him, and maybe that it was for his own good. I'm not going to do those things, but I've got the power to do them. What's stopping me is my own values, and what I know about puppies, and what I know about myself. This puppy trusts me (he doesn't have much of a choice), and I've taken a sort of oath to be worthy of that trust, one day at a time. Sometimes one minute at a time -- puppies can be infuriating, puppies can try your patience. Maybe that's what Qu Li didn't know, and wasn't willing to learn. Maybe he didn't realize he was in over his head with this puppy, and he didn't know where, or just wasn't willing, to get help. So many of the commenters focus on his nationality, his foreignness, or his youth. At the moment I'm focused on the fact that he's a business student. What I wonder is whether torturing and causing the death of a four-month-old puppy means that he flunked the course, or that he passed. Don't pull so hard on that root, little Travvy. The whole world has hold of the other end, and do you want to face what comes up through that hole in the ground? * * * The URLs for the two stories referred to above are long. If you want to read them, Google on +Windsor +puppy +abuse and look for the link that begins http://www.canada.com/windsorstar. It should be on the first page of hits. The link to Gord Henderson's column is indented right under it. Neither story makes easy reading. The photo of Kiki breaks my heart. She was so clearly one of Trav and Rhodry's tribe. She deserved a much better and longer life.
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