Being Kind to Dogs Is ‘RACIST’, University Professor Says

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Being kind to dogs is racist, leftists university professor claims

Treating dogs humanely is racist, according to leftist university professor Katja Guenther.

Yes, really.

Guenther has published a book claiming that “white supremacy” is to blame for non-white people abusing animals.

Areomagazine.com reports: In her recent book The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, Katja Guenther claims that dogs are being killed because of “capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy and patriarchy.” She argues that allowing dogs to sleep inside is a privilege reserved for the white and wealthy and that policies against keeping dogs chained up in backyards are intended to oppress people of color by imposing “middle-class norms of animal keeping in which companion animals are considered family and treated accordingly,” which ignore the fact that people of color “are themselves trapped in poverty, may have few options for legitimate income generation and possibly rely on their dogs for … status.”

Unfortunately Guenther’s misguided book is gaining traction. Shelter director Kristen Hassen opines that Guenther “gets it right” in concluding that “racism, classism and the caste system are at the heart of the broken animal sheltering institution.” Arguing that laws to prevent mistreatment of dogs discriminate against “anyone in the US other than white, middle class and upper-class individuals,” Sloane Hawes, Tess Hupe and Kevin Morris of the University of Denver Institute for Human-Animal Connection cite the book in their proposal to relax enforcement of animal protection laws—a proposal that threatens to reverse decades of hard-won progress.

Intakes Reflect Service Area Demographics, Not Racism

Guenther writes that, because of racism, the overwhelming majority of the dogs who ended up at the Baldwin Park, California shelter where she worked as a volunteer had belonged to poor people of Asian and Latino heritage and, to a lesser extent, black people. But this simply reflects the demographic make up of Baldwin Park itself. When I ran a shelter in a predominantly white community—a shelter with a higher per capita intake rate than the Los Angeles County pound system of which Baldwin Park is a part—most of those who surrendered animals were white. Indeed, of all the counties in the US with a 90% or better placement rate, the one with the highest per capita intake—over five times that of Los Angeles County—is 90% white, only 3% Latino and less than 0.5% black. In other words, the ethnicity of the people who surrender animals to shelters is largely a function of demographics, not of race.

Guenther deliberately rejects objective evidence of this kind, admitting that “it is not possible for me to be impartial”: “I was trained in sociology, a discipline that emphasizes impartiality and the need to systematize observations and analysis in ways that distance the researcher from the researched. I deliberately turn away from these tendencies and instead embrace the messy possibilities of being a researcher with complex ties to the social setting I am analyzing.”

At best, the book presents subjective feelings, anecdotes and even guesses as compelling evidence for its conclusions—at worst, it ignores evidence to the contrary.

Guenther Stereotypes and Infantilizes People of Color

Evidence shows that dogs in inner cities are neither disproportionately dangerous nor poorly treated. People in inner cities live with dogs for the same reasons as the suburban wealthy: they want companionship and social connection. Guenther’s book perpetuates unsubstantiated prejudices about the inability of people of color to provide appropriate care for their animals. And she denies their individuality by referring to all Asians, Latinos and black people as “the collective Black.”

In Guenther’s book, moreover, white people do things; people of color have things done to them. For example, people of color who abandon their dogs in empty apartments are victims “ensnared in the legal system,” forced to leave their animals behind “under the duress of sudden eviction or deportation or arrest.” Guenther even claims that such people actually believe that what they are doing is for the best, because of “the constraints of their knowledge and resources, both of which are limited by the nexus of their class, status as immigrants, and ethnicity.”

When a Latino man on a bicycle drops a dog “while escaping from mall security officers … after stealing a pair of Wrangler jeans,” she explains this away as the result of his “status as marginalized.” When a woman leaves her dog to die at the pound after she has finished breeding her and selling her puppies to buy drugs, it is the fault of her “status as a poorly educated queer woman of color.” Guenther laments that “rescuers … critique urban Black and Latinx communities for not seeing companion animals as sufficiently part of the family and instead seeing them as resources, whether protective (as in guarding) or financial (as in breeding or possibly fighting).”

She appears to be arguing that if a person of color can turn a profit or build a reputation through animal exploitation that excuses animal suffering—even in the case of sadistic animal abuse: “From a class perspective, wealthy people are believed to be too ‘civilized’ to engage in barbaric activities like dogfighting, and it’s no coincidence that the only affluent person who has been publicly shamed for dogfighting in the U.S., Michael Vick, is Black, newly wealthy after growing up in poverty.”

Dogfighting, however, is not considered barbaric because it violates the norms of wealthy people—who, after all, have historically had their own versions of animal cruelty masquerading as entertainment, such as fox hunting and pigeon shooting. Nor is dogfighting considered uncivilized because of the skin color of the organizers—many of whom are white—but because of what it does to dogs.

At Michael Vick’s property, investigators found decomposing dogs who died by “hanging, drowning, and being slammed to death.” As one of the rescuers involved wrote,

The details that got to me then and stay with me today involve the swimming pool that was used to kill some of the dogs. Jumper cables were clipped onto the ears of underperforming dogs, then, just like with a car, the cables were connected to the terminals of car batteries before lifting and tossing the shamed dogs into the water. Most of Vick’s dogs were small—40lbs or so—so tossing them in would’ve been fast and easy work for thick athlete arms. We don’t know how many suffered this premeditated murder, but the damage to the pool walls tells a story. It seems that while they were scrambling to escape, they scratched and clawed at the pool liner and bit at the dented aluminum sides …

I wear some pretty thick skin during our work with dogs, but I can’t shake my minds-eye image of a little black dog splashing frantically in bloody water … screaming in pain and terror… brown eyes saucer wide and tiny black white-toed feet clawing at anything, desperate to get a hold. This death did not come quickly. The rescuer in me keeps trying to think of a way to go back in time and somehow stop this torture and pull the little dog to safety. I think I’ll be looking for ways to pull that dog out for the rest of my life.

That—and not his skin color—is why Vick was condemned publicly along with many others—many of them white people—who have been held accountable for harming animals.

Rescuers Perpetuate Compassion

While Guenther explains away mistreatment if the perpetrator happens to be a person of color, she has plenty of harsh words for those trying to save animals. Day in and day out, rescuers and volunteers show tremendous courage and compassion when they visit their local pounds. At many high kill shelters, they face hostile treatment from staff and endure heartbreak at seeing animals destined for lethal injection or gas chambers. And yet they go back, again and again.

Despite acknowledging these traumas, because most of the volunteers Guenther encountered were white, she accuses them of working to “reinscribe hierarchies of power and status within the shelter” against the non-white workers and thus “maintain existing social inequalities between humans even as they seek to help animals.” When a rescuer laments the condition of a dog “with sagging belly skin, elongated nipples, and enlarged genitalia” and expresses dismay that the former owners “confined their dog outdoors” and “used the pit bull primarily for income generation through breeding,” Guenther dismisses the criticism as “the animal practices of white rescuers.”

On the one hand, Guenther writes that people of color should not be held responsible if they mistreat animals (“including medical neglect”) because they lead precarious lives. On the other, she criticizes rescuers for using “the animals as instruments for reproducing whiteness” when they take “the dog out of the ghetto” and give it to “the ‘right’ kind of adopters, namely those who will treat their dog as a family member and have the financial means to care for their dog at a high level for the duration of the dog’s life, for example by providing specialty-brand food, toys and beds, and extensive veterinary care should any illness or injury occur.”

Rescuers and shelters have an obligation to the vulnerable animals they serve. They can and should focus on a potential adopter’s ability to provide for an animal’s physical and mental health, rather than on income or skin color. Guenther suggests that rescuers and shelters are obligated to place animals in knowingly unstable situations (which she problematically equates with darker skin color) or engage in the greater harm of racist behavior.

Lack of Lifesaving Programs Explains Shelter Killings

Larger societal factors do impact shelter outcomes. Discrimination against companion animals in rental housing increases the number of shelter intakes and is responsible for an estimated loss of over eight million adoptive homes every year. And even before the coronavirus pandemic propelled “the poverty rate into double digits,” roughly one in four pet households had difficulty affording necessary veterinary care, leading some to relinquish their animals to shelters.

Racism has even played a role in pound killings, such as in the enactment of pit bull bans. Denver, Colorado’s breed ban, for example, was enacted after the demise of the local energy industry resulted in white flight. But many of these bans, including Denver’s, have since been repealed (21 states and hundreds of cities now expressly prohibit them) and views on pit bulls are more likely to reflect age than race. It has never been easier for shelters to adopt out pit bullsespecially to millennial and Gen Z families.

But Guenther is wrong about the causes of shelter killing and how to prevent it. The evidence does not suggest that “everyday and sustained collisions of capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy and patriarchy” are to blame. It points to more mundane causes and more practical solutions. “Feral” cats impounded by the Los Angeles County pound system are killed because the director of that system opposes non-lethal sterilization. Orphaned, neonatal puppies and kittens are killed because of a lack of comprehensive foster care. And other animals are killed because of a failure to implement the services that allow shelters to achieve high placement rates. Guenther alludes to all this when she laments that “volunteers offered a significant pool of time and skills … that would have increased the success of these programs, but [staff] declined most of their help and made it very difficult for volunteers to maintain those programs that [the county] did permit.”

But there is hope. It is far easier to compel a shelter director to implement common sense alternatives to killing than to foment a social revolution.

Guenther Threatens to Turn Back the Clock on Animal Protection

The most dangerous thing about Guenther’s book, however, is her view that human-animal relations are “a zero-sum political struggle involving identity markers like race.” In the early nineteenth century, cruelty to dogs was not recognized in law because they were considered property. Likewise, harming a homeless dog was not illegal because there was no property interest at stake. The animal did not matter. Guenther is once again suggesting a standard that excuses harm based on the interests of those causing it.

For all her professed concern about hierarchies of privilege, Guenther’s prescription for human-animal relations could not be more inequitable, uncharitable and unkind. Her premise that not all animals should have the same rights and that not all humans bear the same responsibilities to those animals threatens to popularize defeatist and counterproductive dogmas of the kind that kept shelters killing animals for decades until the current generation found common sense alternatives.

If such ideas gain traction, I fear the current moment will be remembered as a brief interlude between the ideological intransigence of two generations—both of which subordinate the rights of animals to the interests of those who harm them.

29 Comments

  1. One of the most brilliant people I ever know, head girl of her high school ,my maths tutor at uni and a distinguished lecturer left academic and told me she had to go through a process of un learning in order to grow as a individual with her own thoughts and beliefs revived and resurrected from the conditioning mind control centres of establishment programming. Its good advice for any person who has a strong internal locus if control .All things in life slip away ,all is illusory ,temporary ,only your self is eternal. If you surrender yourself yoy gave nothing but materialism, things which rust and moths can eat and nothing you can take with you.

  2. This yet another insane excuse for bad Black people behaviors, where Blacks prefer to blame White people or a phony White Supremacy phantasm for their violent criminal tendencies.

    Kids that abuse animals are born criminals.

    Adults that abuse animals are career criminals.

    US universities are infested with Affirmative Action psychos masquerading as teachers.

    • So true. My employees have often told me they would love to “come back” as one of my dogs as they are live a very good life. Much better than the kosher mafia’s mud monsters that are often released upon the whites. 1 4 8 8

      • Refreshing to see the truth. I to am a proud racist and a person who has been awake to what the J ew s truly are since my early days in the 1940s. ditto 1 4 8 8

  3. Great! Here’s another example of “critically acclaimed research and more non nonsensical drivel”.

    I’m sure that in certain “circles” Katja and her wife are animal saviors and feminists extraordinaire. Yet, to say petting or embracing an animal is racist is like saying turtle tears and bat farts will warm the planet and end the world. Both are uneducated statements.

    It’s time we stop posting this irrelevant and questionable research in the media. In fact, if any canceling or revocation of degrees needs to occur for harmful and damaging content, here’s a prime example of such an instance!

    Please contact the University of California, Riverside, Gender & Sexuality Studies department for further discussion.

  4. Another Harvard graduate (2009) whose convoluted bullshit is designed for two reasons, (1) her undeserving paycheck (2) increase the racial divide to aid the globalists in their quest for world domination. Do not donate to universities that are working toward your destruction. How anyone can even begin to make up such crap must be indicative of brain damage.

  5. these Professors have zero credibility
    why does anybody even listen to them
    and they might want to start watching their backs

    • Whoever this professor is, Badger Badgerism, he’s totally unhinged. What planet does he live on? I’ve gotten to like dogs a lot, ever since I used to live with 5 of them in North Laurel, MD. Now, I live in Columbia, where I can take walks around Wilde Lake and eye and talk to dogs and their owners.

  6. Then I am the biggest racist in the world, and if so damn proud of it. Hey I am also white and damn proud of it, hey I believe in God almighty and Jesus Christ, hey BLM and Antifia are terrorist and cowards, hey democrats are proving they are insane, hey Trump won easily, lots more but your probably running for a safe place by now and I have lost you.

  7. This is highly ridiculous!!! I know many POOR white families that will keep their pets inside because “PETS ARE FAMILY.” Your wealth has nothing to do with choosing to have your pet inside or not!

    I have been homeless, I have been poor, I still put my pets FIRST. When I lived in sh**holes, my pets were still INSIDE. It is an individual choice. I know MANY colored individuals that also have their pets INSIDE. My best friend growing up was poor as well, colored, and she kept her dog indoors. Her dog was FAMILY.

    Whites dont get punished for abuse to dogs more often? Where do you live??? In my state, they dont care who you are! If you abuse an animal, you are a P.O.S. and will be charged accordingly. On the news, it’s always white a**holes getting severely fined/arrested for animal abuse. I’ve WORKED for rescues!!! We dont discriminate. If you abuse an animal, you are getting in trouble and we are taking your pet away.

    This article is completely absurd. Racism is a big problem in this world that needs solving. Racism is everywhere and comes in many forms. We need unity not some made up article that is a large stretch from a woman that is grasping at straws to write something so that she gets attention for it. If you really want to get noticed for your work, try fixing up communities in need instead of writing such absurd articles(ex: donate to schools, donate food, help communities that are being polluted because let’s face it… the poor areas are forced to have facilities like waste management that pollute their area). That will actually help people!!!

  8. Absolutely ridiculous. Standards of animal care are the same as standards of child care. They are across the board. Are we supposed to believe that anti child abuse laws are now “racist” too because they hold everyone, including non whites to a certain standard? So many non whites are so butt hurt about being held to the most basic standards of behavior, as if it’s some sort of heresy to expect the minimum standard of decorum and decency out of them. They only make themselves look like total fools by whining about having to properly care for a pet. Oh boo hoo, you have to feed and shelter your dog. Let me break out my tiny violin so I can play a musical accompaniment to your diatribe about not abusing animals being “racist”. Just when you think clownworld has peaked……

  9. European ppl have the longest history with dogs, we domesticated them after all! Tens of thousands of years of inter-reliance. If not for dogs most of us wouldnt be here…. In fact Europoids have a longer history with canines than we do other races No wonder the occupy a special place in our hearts. The entire article is just woke Marxist CRT garbage… Imagine “choosing to” see the world through this lens… lol what a bunch of absolute losers. No wonder I prefer my dogs.

  10. Being humane towards animals is a modern Western concept. Animal cruelty such as dog fighting as well as outright animal torture is still very popular all over the world in non-white countries.

  11. The author wants to make a name for herself as an angry, radical leftist lesbian feminist communist atheist, she hates everyone who isn’t like her, and yet every one of these fools calls themselves “openminded”. Insanity at its best…

  12. I have heard a lot, but this runs right up there toward the top of the list of moronic, meatheaded statements I have heard in my 74 years.
    Along with that she is either a cat loving dog hater or a lunatic.

  13. I don’t think I’ve read anything more asinine in my life. This chick is really scraping the bottom of the barrel to excuse bad behavior. At least she’s consistent in her hatred: dogs, black folks, white folks, Asian folks, Latino folks… She hates us all! Bless her lump of coal heart. There is not enough psychotherapy available that can help this case.

  14. …sooooo can anybody take responsibility for themselves anymore or is it ALWAYS someone else’s fault?? This type of thing always happens in democrat run cities though kinda weird.

  15. Nkgoo, geniş kapsamlı bilgi platformudur. Her konuda bilgi içeriği üretme amacıyla yayın hayatına başlamış referans kaynak sitedir. Ayrıca telif hakları konularına da özen gösterilmektedir.

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