On nomenclature

The end of semester has arrived—and with that sense of liberation, perhaps, I'd like to offer what I expect will be a one-time digression. (Anyone who'd prefer to read my usual variety of musings is free to substitute the words "experimental fiction" whenever you encounter the words "dog," "breed," or "pit bull," and this posting will probably still make some sense.)

Although I try to keep this space mostly free from the personal unless it also pertains to writing, this afternoon I was forwarded this CNN video. It's not "news" except in the slowest-day sense, but I found it interesting for several reasons.

For almost four years, I've owned a rescued pit bull who came from Albany's terrific organization Out of the Pits. My wife and I were especially interested in owning a pit bull—because of our experience with friends' pit bulls, because the breed is in crisis, and because of the vast misinformation that exists about the breed based on media and popular narratives that responsible pit bull owners have had a difficult time countering. We wanted to help a dog that could use some help, and to offer whatever correctives we could to the dominant narratives about pit bulls. The very name "pit bull"—which I use here deliberately rather than the less forthright "American Staffordshire Terrier"—is almost always invoked when the media wishes to report on a dog attack, sometimes even when the dog in question is not a pit bull at all. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Michael Vick dogfighting case, for me, was the manner in which the media reporting that story often preferred the word "dog" to the term "pit bull"—perhaps because, in this instance, the dogs were seen as victims. (Here is one story about what happened to Vick's seized dogs; Malcom Gladwell's 2006 New Yorker essay about pit bulls and profiling is another interesting read that makes many of the points pit bull owners have long understood; and this recent NYT article should demonstrate at least some of the ways in which we are displacing our own pathologies onto a specific kind of dog.)

In the video above, the dog is clearly a pit bull, though neither the family nor the journalist refers to it as such. Presumably the family members don't need to mediate their relationship to their pet with specific language. As for the journalist's failure to invoke the words "pit bull" given the opportunity, perhaps this is a case of this dog being subject to another term now so larded with political opportunism and pop-cultural baggage as to be almost worthless ("hero"). Still, I can't help but feel that the KWTV reporter is missing other, more complex stories—about the breed, about the people and families who own such dogs (and who are often, in my opinion, the tacit subjects of breed-specific legislation), and most of all about the assumptions our terminology makes—a dog is the same dog whether we call it a pit bull, an American Staffordshire Terrier, or a dog, but our attitudes toward the names we might give that dog are not the same; if the dogs that many television news-watchers imagine attack people without provocation are "pit bulls," then the dogs that take bullets for their owners should be "pit bulls" as well, so that we might begin to reclaim and redeem that name. And lest anyone think that the behavior of the pit bull in Oklahoma is unusual, please read the story of Weela the pit bull.