Bandit

The Heart-Warming True Story of One Dog’s Rescue from Death Row

By Vicki Hearne

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2007 Vicki Hearne
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60239-070-6

Contents

Also by,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Epigraph,
Introduction,
Acknowledgments,
Author’s Note,
Prolegomena,
ONE – Why I Did It,
TWO – Biting the Hand That Feeds Him,
THREE – Bandit Himself,
FOUR – Bandit Himself: What He Is Not,
FIVE – “This Isn’t an Animal Rights Case, Professor Wizner”,
SIX – Some Notes On Dog Bites (Just Before the Just City),
SEVEN – Guarding the Just City: A Pastoral,
EIGHT – The Pit Bull Who Founded Rome,
NINE – Beastly Behaviors,
TEN – Whereas,
Coda: – A Thousand Dollars,
Epilogue,
Vicki Hearne 1946-2001,
VICKI HEARNE,

CHAPTER 1

Why I Did It

Every word they say chagrins us and we do not know where to begin to set them right.

— EMERSON “Self Reliance”

THE BANDIT CASE, as of this writing, has been going on for three and a half years. For all but the first six months of that time, Bandit has been my dog. In that time I have used the services of five lawyers, have been threatened with jail and other things that come of contempt of court charges, have heard that some cops were out to get me, others out to protect me, have entertained some very, very strange phone calls and mail, have had my dog alluded to on the front page of the state newspaper as Public Enemy Number One. I have all of that time worried about someone killing my dog for what looked to me like purely political reasons. Some people say that the motives in question aren’t purely political, are more psychological, but that is really scary, so I try to leave those contemplations alone.

Still, I am not especially oppressed, as things go for animal people nowadays, but that is because I have lucid intervals and a really good lawyer, and because I learned to train dogs from the best, and so I have a lot of backup. It doesn’t hurt that I am white, educated, and female, but these are troubled times and you can’t rely on the traditional bigotries the way you used to.

As I said, I have been threatened with jail. Now, this is very peculiar, because I am an animal poet, and in a healthy society, or so I always figured, the animal poet is a ninny, someone who goes around at the edges of things fussing harmlessly and obscurely over Kant’s mistakes about wild animals and Socrates’ praise of dogs, tripping over her Airedale, not making as much sense as her family and friends wish she would. At dinner parties, the animal poet inserts into the conversation unwanted information about the true life history of Toto, the Cairn Terrier in The Wizard of Oz, and is more or less gently tolerated for this.

At the university, especially in the philosophy department, everyone used to say, “Go away, little girl, we’re busy,” and while this was irksome, we cannot any of us have as much of heaven as we want, as the sheepdog Sirrah said posthumously to Donald McCaig. In those days the roof sometimes leaked, but there was so much intellectual freedom for me that I was able to write entire books without even knowing the names of any lawyers.

Nowadays, I let my lawyer see my manuscripts before I let my agent see them, not only to protect me but to protect my dogs, and while my lawyer, Frank Cochran, is proving to be a quite good, though somewhat expensive, creative writing teacher, it means something when an animal poet has to show manuscript to her lawyer. It means what the presence of lawyers usually presages, that there is a major topic slouching toward one to be born, and also that one will probably be unequal to the task. It is a bad sign when the dog story becomes a politically sensitive genre.

The topic in question is: Justice.

Not justice for poets. Like tiger trainers, poets are on their own as far as justice goes, and must make what they can of what comes their way. But the topic of justice assaults most people at some point or another in their lives; to be human is to be fated to such an assault. That is what makes justice such a big topic — not the fact that it is intrinsically all that interesting, but the fact that it is of general concern, like radon or cancer.

I personally do not find justice all that interesting, not nearly as interesting as, say, the pedigree of the pup I am on the point of acquiring, or Landrover Smith, a chimp I met recently, or the poetry of Wallace Stevens, or the prose of Mark Twain, and other things that journalists used to call “human interest,” but the topic — justice — has assaulted me, and I have to do something about it, have to deal, as we say of other crime victims, with the psychological repercussions. I am singularly ill-suited for the task. Once I was going through some back issues of the London Times, looking for the answer to some questions about world peace, and came across a story about a man who was arrested for having a donkey in the passenger seat of his car. He said it was a very small donkey, and the cops said it didn’t matter, donkeys had to be in the back. World peace went out of my head, and there I was looking for more donkey stories.

Now I have a dog story to tell.

At the time of this writing, many Americans believe that there is a breed of dog that is irredeemably, magically vicious. This is not the only reason the current era is going to go down in history as one of the most remarkably hysterical and superstitious of all time, but it is a bigger reason than current speculation allows for. The dog in question is said to be good at guarding dope dens, to suffer from something called the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome, to be an indiscriminate killer of tires, weeds, kittens, and people, to exert two thousand or sometimes twenty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch with its double- or triple-jointed jaws. There is a great deal else said about these dogs that is agonizingly ungrammatical, such as the expert view that they have “vicious genes” and “their training is part of their genetics.” These dogs are popularly called “pit bulls.” They don’t exist, so I call them Voice of God dogs, to distinguish them from real breeds. The God these dogs are a Voice of does not exist, any more than the dogs do; this is not so much a God of vengeance as of grime and banal confusion, and is not to be mistaken for anything real in the way of divinities. What true theologian would be so rash as to suggest that the true God, Who is Owner of the World, or kono shel olam in Hebrew, would own a dog who is a horror largely of banalities and poor clichés? Kono shel olam might own a very terrible dog indeed, but not one that deals dope.

I started using the phrase “Voice of God dogs” one day when a district attorney in Rochester, New York, asked me what I would say if a dog suddenly and out of nowhere attacked someone. The hypothetical bite situation he described was impossible, could not take place, so I asked if he meant, “Like the Voice of God?” He said yes. From this and other events I take it that there are people who believe in some God that the Voice of God dogs represent, and that these dogs must be fought tooth and nail by the district attorneys of the nation, for the sake of … justice?

The unreal Voice of God dogs are to be distinguished from the dogs of God in a wonderful fourteenth-century fresco by Andrea da Firenze, in Florence, which shows the Dominicans guarding the gates of heaven, and in the foreground a row of dogs helping them. The title, Dominicanni, contains a pun on “Dominican” and domini canii, or “dogs of God.” At one end of the fresco are, unmistakably, bulldogs — pit bulls. At the other end are, unmistakably, hunting hounds of the greyhound/ staghound sort now classified as gazehounds. In between, the dogs vary from each other in phenotype by virtually indiscriminable degrees, so that the painting shows a visionary progression from the stocky and stalwart and therefore divine to the slender and swift and therefore divine. It is very much as though the artist were of a Platonic bent and wanted to picture all the actual forms that conceal (or for him reveal) the ideal form Dog. Da Firenze’s dogs and da Firenze’s God were not of course what the DA was asking me about, and not what I mean by the phrase “Voice of God dogs.”

In the Rochester case, by the way, a man was on trial for manslaughter, and I might as well tell you what I know about it. A man named Mark and his dog, Pete, had gone on a Fourth of July picnic. Present also were a man named Mike and his brothers. Mike was throwing firecrackers at Pete. Eventually, Pete bit him on the thigh and fled. Thereupon Mike’s brothers beat Mark up, and then took their brother to the hospital. Eleven days later, Mike was released, or rather was scheduled to be released that day, when he died suddenly of an embolism. There was some attempt on the part of the defense to have entered into evidence hospital records showing that anticoagulant medication, which is supposed to prevent embolisms in the case of thigh wounds, had not been administered, or had not been properly monitored. For some reason, the medical evidence was not deemed admissible.

Pete the dog was killed, of course. Perhaps the death of the dog made it turn out that the hospital was blameless, sort of the way victory in war makes the winning side turn out to be blameless, because once someone is dead they are no good to anyone, and then you can say, “They were no good.”

Pete was eight years old, and in the habit, on walks, of waiting at street corners for his master to catch up, rather than skipping across heedlessly by himself. I thought that showed a sense of responsibility in the dog, and so testified, but try telling a district attorney whose eyes are wide and glowing with a vision of the Voice of the God of Doom that a given pit bull has a sense of responsibility.

The district attorney asked me if it wasn’t true of Staffordshire Pit Bull Terriers that their genes have become vicious as a result of their being owned by unsupervised urban teenagers and dope dealers.

There is no such thing as a Staffordshire Pit Bull Terrier, I told the DA, so he asked me to testify about the breed “whatever.”

Remember: Mark was on trial for manslaughter.

Once the dog was dead, my services as a witness were not called for. I heard that Mark had agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of assault. I spoke with him several times, trying to get him to accept help in the form of funds for a new lawyer, but he insisted he was too frightened, that it would be too dangerous: “They beat me up, they destroyed my car, they will beat me up again.”

They beat him up royally in the local newspaper, which was up in arms about this viciousness. The defense had proposed that outside experts be brought in to evaluate Pete, and this idea was mocked with a cartoon showing a sort of dog on a psychiatrist’s couch, the psychiatrist in tatters.

All that isn’t why I did what I did, but before I say why I did it, I should say what I did to get the topic of justice slouching toward me.

What I did: I meddled in some court cases. I rescued a dog named Bandit, even knowing that dog rescue is one of the most corrupt of all human activities. It can do enormous damage, just like on television, where rescue adventures leave the landscape littered with bodies and create enormous temptations to feel righteous about the bodies. I used to think about television when I heard all those hymns about Emmanuel rescuing the people of God.

Bandit was said to be a pit bull, but he is not. He was said to be uncontrollably aggressive, but he is not, because random aggression requires pretty advanced intellectual capacities, the ability to live by abstract concepts and so on, and Bandit is not that bright. He was said to suffer from the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome, but you have to be human to suffer from the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome, and you have to be able to misread Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bandit can’t read. He was said to be diseased, but he is not. He was said to be untrainable because five years old, but he is not. Untrainable, that is; he was at one point five years old. He was said to have genes, and for all I know he does.

He was said to be “a dog like that!” I do not know what “that” means.

The state of Connecticut wanted to dispose of him because of all of this, or at least that’s roughly why they said they wanted to dispose of him. Perhaps they made better sense to themselves than to me. In any case, they did not get to dispose of him. They wanted to take him away from his owner, an old man, and they did succeed in that.

Bandit is, as near as I could discover, the only alleged pit bull to have gotten off death row in the pit bull wars. The reason no alleged pit bull gets off death row is that the arguments in court are about a hallucination — a Voice of the God of Doom dog — and it is simply impossible to get anything across to people who are hearing Voices.

Bandit is my dog now, has been since a very hot day in late July of 1988. He belonged to an old man in Stamford, Connecticut, an old black man, Mr. Lamon Redd. Mr. Redd went to bat for his dog. He built a six-foot-high chain link fence around his property when the local dog warden told him to, attempting to save Bandit’s life, and he got a lawyer, and he stayed in the fight like a trouper, but I rescued Bandit, and the old man did not get his dog back, which is how and why it turns out that dog rescue is by and large such a corrupt activity.

I hadn’t intended any of this, to get involved with justice and the theology of the Voice of God dogs, or any of the rest of it. What I intended to do in the spring of 1987 was finish my book on horses and stay out of the pit bull wars altogether. I had, it is true, written a piece a few years earlier about what nonsense the superstitious belief in the viciousness of pit bulls is, but it is one thing to write something and quite another to buy a sedate skirt and respectable shoes and go off to a courtroom and become an expert. An authority. To encourage one’s jowls over the collar of one’s tweed jacket under cross-examination and speak with forceful but pedantic impatience. All of this is implausible behavior for an animal poet, but that is what I did, and it is Dan Rather’s doing. Not his fault, but his doing.

I do not have a television and rarely read newspapers, or even the magazines I sometimes write for, but my mother has a television and is one of the last of the news junkies. The quality of news these days is such that it is hard to keep the faith, but she does her best. Onto the screen of my mother’s television in California there appeared, out of nowhere, like the Voice of Doom: Dan Rather, reporting solemnly that in Dayton, Ohio, a man had been innocently jogging down the road when out of nowhere two pit bulls appeared and attacked him and killed him.

This story I found incredible, because the account of the incident didn’t sound like anything I have ever known a dog to do. It is quite difficult to get a dog to perform a full-fledged man-stopping attack off his own property, which is one reason police dog training is a matter that occupies intelligent people for years and years. The picture I was offered, of the man jogging innocently by and the two dogs attacking and killing “out of nowhere” and “for no reason,” simply did not make sense. I also found myself worried silly, because I have always suspected that it is expensive getting a Dog Bites Man item on the desk of a major newscaster, and I wondered who had paid for the crisis.

Various dark thoughts crossed my mind about the victim. Especially, I wondered darkly what the good doctor had been up to, because I had had occasion earlier in my life to look at and reflect on some bite studies in which it turned out that boys are bitten more often than girls, and because it was just all too perfect, somehow. Like the opening of a horror movie. Innocent jogger, evil pit bulls coming out of nowhere. I am all in favor of safety and have spent most of my life haranguing people for indulging their dogs in a way that creates the danger of a bite, but that has to do with reality, and this story Dan Rather was telling had little to do with reality.

I also assumed that in Ohio someone was mounting a statewide pit bull ban. I do not believe that politicians control the media in the way they would like to — when I said that Bandit had been slandered on the front page of the state newspaper, the word “state” didn’t mean what it means in the case of Tass — but there are constraints on what a reporter can use as news that add up to a picturesque pas de deux between the media and policy-making activities. Hence it turns out that if you read the newspapers and watch TV you can make some fairly good guesses about what the politicians are up to, especially if you don’t read or listen to what the politicians say, because they never have anything to say …

And so I heard Dan Rather reporting on what sounded like something out of a horror flick, and assumed that some senator in Ohio was using pit bulls as a campaign issue, and this proved to be the case. A few months after that broadcast, Ohio passed what must be a singularly unconstitutional law, declaring that any animal of the breed commonly known as pit bulldog was prima facie vicious for purposes of that law, except dogs lawfully engaged in hunting or being trained for hunting. Not that the prima facie vicious dog banned in Ohio exists outside the courtrooms and the media and whatever credence we are willing to give to these venerable institutions. Also, there is no such thing as common knowledge of dogs. People get ideas in their heads, but that is not knowledge, common or otherwise. There was, therefore, no such dog as the one banned, no such animal as a dog “commonly known as pit bulldog,” but that did not stop a judge from ordering an entire kennel of Shar Peis out of the state.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Bandit by Vicki Hearne. Copyright © 2007 Vicki Hearne. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.