CW: discussions of animal abuse, violence, racism, slavery and fascism
Right at the intersection between men who think a lot about the Roman Empire and men who base their entire personality on the breed of their dog there is a guy with some type of mastiff saying his dog descends from those the Romans used in war. And he is annoying.
The History of Dog Weaponization… Is There One?
To our guy’s dismay, it should go without saying that websites listing breeds and telling you this or that one was used by Persian or Roman warriors are lying to you.
Firstly, modern dog breeding is a very recent invention. Texts older than a couple of centuries that refer to breeds or types of dogs must never be understood as analogous to what we, today, call “breed”. Instead, they generally refer to dogs with a certain geographical origin, without any notions of “purity” in their bloodlines, something that only appeared in the Victorian era in Britain [1]. For example, when Aristotle mentioned the “breed” Molossian, he meant both fast hunting hounds and big sheep guardians, not an anatomically -or functionally- homogeneous group of dogs [2].
But secondly, regarding the weaponization of the dogs itself, we tend to make assumptions when we see older texts mentioning the presence of dogs in military conflict, but often the evidence that the dogs were actually used for war is shaky at best. Historian Owen Rees argues that perhaps in these cases we should think about dogs in war, as opposed to dogs of war [2]. That is to say: we have plenty of evidence that people have been taking advantage of the dog’s natural behavioral repertoire -such as barking at strangers- during armed conflicts for a long time, but this is very different from breeding and/or training dogs for that purpose.
What we do know for certain is that societies that allowed the accumulation of wealth at the expense of others and treated animals as property (and those two things usually go hand in hand) created the social structures necessary for the powerful to use dogs against the less powerful. In that sense, we can assume siccing starving dogs on fellow human beings is probably a very old method of inflicting violence. In words reminiscent of those by bald, gay, French sociologists1, dogs in these situations can act as a technology of power [3].
That does not mean there is historical continuity between the dogs used in Ancient Greece to alert soldiers of an approaching enemy and the military dogs the United States used to torture Iraqi detainees in Abo Ghraib just 20 years ago. In fact, suggesting that there is could contribute to whitewash the weaponized use of dogs against people and erase the ways in which colonialism and, later, capitalism, fundamentally altered it. Weaponizing dogs is not some sort of millennia-old tradition, and the ways we see other people and dogs themselves have radically changed throughout history.
It is only with colonialism that the weaponized use of dogs becomes racialized, for example. Christopher Columbus is said to have sicced dogs on the Indigenous people he encountered, the first of a long line of colonizers to use dogs against Indigenous populations [4, 5]. Centuries later, Benjamin Franklin was still advocating for the use of dogs against “Indian raids” [4]. In their violent seize of the land, colonizers used every tool in their disposal, including dogs.
Unsurprisingly, dogs quickly became weaponized against the enslaved population too. Slavers used them for intimidation and psychological torture, but also as a punishment tool for those who tried to run away. Bloodhounds2 were used to track and attack them, often killing them. The people who managed to escape and tell their stories helped in this way dismantle narratives of a “benevolent” slavery. Racist rhetoric of the time portrayed Black people as “naturally suited” for slave labor while underplaying the violence needed to maintain this system. The uniquely brutal use of dogs against them helped shatter this narrative in the North, although only when Confederate soldiers sicced those same bloodhounds against white soldiers in the American Civil War was this called a “crime against humanity” [6, 7].
The use of dogs by the police and the military themselves -instead of by individuals in positions of power- was still very limited at the beginning of the 20th century. In WWI, most dogs were only there as mascots or to find the wounded [4, 8], arguably landing them somewhere between Rees’ “dogs in war” and “dogs of war” categories.
In Nazi Germany, however, Victorian notions of dog breeding combined with nationalism to elevate the German Shepherd to nothing less than a symbol of the nation. The breed was said to have all the qualities the Nazis valued: loyalty, strength, obedience, determination… And as such started to be systematically used against the subjugated population of Jewish, Romani, communist, queer3 and disabled people, etc [4, 9, 10].
These were unequivocally dogs of war in the modern sense. They weren’t simply starved and abused beasts thrown against a political enemy, but dogs carefully trained, and while many of us would still consider their training highly abusive, there is no doubt that their masters greatly cared for them and considered them friends and companions [4, 9]. Dogs who weren’t the breeds glorified by the Nazi party or who were associated to Jews, however, were exterminated [9].
Imperial Japan followed a similar process with the same breed. They imported German Shepherds and made some subtle changes to the breed in order to “Japanize” it. Those dogs also became both a symbol and an instrument of social control during the 30s and WWII [11].
The US military, on the other hand, wouldn’t start using dogs en masse until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Dogs For Defense program, founded in 1942, recruited thousands of dogs from the public to send to the battlefront. After that, military dogs have become commonplace in the US and other Western armies, where they’re used for detecting explosives, tracking, attacking and, unofficially, torture [4].
But police dogs themselves didn’t become widespread until a decade later, throughout the 50s and 60s [5]. German Shepherds again, a breed only a few decades prior had a nasty reputation in the US [5, 8], became a favorite. It was through no coincidence that police forces all over the world predominantly chose those dogs. The “Germanization” of the breed -projecting the qualities of the imagined German nation4 onto it- was later glorified by police forces all over the West, who praised the “German names” in their pedigrees and their “aristocratic” nature. This connection between Nazi Germany and the use of dogs for policing against mainly Black people went even further: some of the dogs used against protestors in that time were actually trained by former Nazis [5].
It didn’t escape Black activists of the time, either, how the weaponization of police dogs against them mirrored the prosecution of enslaved people or the lynching of Black Americans that followed it.
"A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. Today they've taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms. They've traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs and they are still doing the same thing.”
- Malcolm X, interview with Kenneth Clark, 1963 [12].
You might have already noticed one novel feature of the weaponization of dogs by states that appeared in the first half of the 20th century, though. These weaponized dogs were no longer just tools for repression and violence, or symbols only of power, but of something else. When the dog also became identified with abstracts such as “the family” or “the nation”, how did their use by the state change?
Dogs as Symbols
As we’ve seen, modern dog breeding didn’t appear until the Victorian era, and with it came a change of the place dogs occupied in society. Ideas of social darwinism, a dangerous philosophy that tries to apply concepts of “fitness” and “natural selection” to sociology and is closely linked to eugenics, bled into the Victorian understanding of dogs. Of course, it was only the dog belonging to the bourgeoisie that was “fit” and superior to the rest, and the birth of modern breeding was the tool through which this distinction was made [1].
Those dogs became a symbol of white middle class aspirations, the nation and family itself [1, 4]. Britain, it is said, became “a nation of dog lovers” [1], and most countries in the West followed suit.
“There are fewer mongrels in our midst, and the family dog has become a respectable member of society.”
- Robert Leighton, 1910 [1].
This is not to say that people who loved dogs and admired their qualities -or, just as often, ascribed qualities onto them- didn’t exist before the 19th century or anywhere but the West. They did. Not for nothing was Homer writing about the dog Argos being the only one to recognize Odysseus when he returned in disguise after ten years. However, as Philip Howell argues in the book At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain, individuals’ feelings towards dogs weren’t tied to national identity, and dogs were certainly not widely acknowledged as members of society -respectable or otherwise- until the end of the 19th century [1].
“By and large, the only work that the pet dog was assigned was the cultural work of embodying and securing the home.”
- Philip Howell, At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain [1].
Dogs paid a steep price for this recognition. The elevation of some dogs to family members came at the expense of eradicating “curs”5. In Britain, the first modern shelter was infamous for its euthanasia rates, particularly of mutts. Strays, as well as dogs associated to the working class, were disproportionately affected. To become “family” the dog had to first become property, and the mongrel was nobody’s property. At least, nobody whose property was acknowledged [1].
Even most of those who defended the dog’s newly-found legal status tended to do so only for the right dogs. The respectable, purebred, disciplined pet dog was the one to be made into a class-marker and an embodiment of all things virtuous [1]. It was only recently that the low-life curs Victorians were preoccupied about began being granted those same virtues. And, of course, some types of dogs -predominantly associated with People of Color and the working class- are still but “curs” in the eyes of many [8].
Some specific breeds were even more tied to this sense of national identity than others. As we’ve seen, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had a particularly intense dalliance with the German Shepherd. While the process of glorifying them in the US first required their rehabilitation in the public eye through figures like Rin Tin Tin [5, 8] and perhaps wasn’t as specific in its association of this particular breed to the nation, the view of dogs in general as unequivocally good members of the family made them a perfect instrument for police forces.
This is made especially clear when reading texts in favor of police and K-9 units, like Rachel Rose’s The Dog Lover Unit. After properly cleaning the pages covered in the author’s slobber for cops, you find mostly officers repeating as a prayer that these dogs are part of their families and can’t seem to notice the shocking contrast of these sentiments with their own admissions of animal abuse and ruthless violence.
The Realities of Using Dogs for Policing
The police has greatly benefited from dogs being seen as a sort of neutral technology, “colorblind” in their attacks and impossibly accurate in drug and explosive detection. The statistics don’t agree: every report on K-9 units in the US finds that the vast majority of victims (in some cases, all of the victims) are young Black men [5, 13, 14, 15]. And the same thing happens for the use of dogs that doesn’t end in a bite: stops and searches as part of the war on drugs and the war on terror are also biased against People of Color [16, 17] and almost never find anything on the supposed suspect6.
The popularization of “bite sports” in the dog sports world -in itself, a consequence of the glorification of police K-9 training- has also retroactively helped spread the image of a dog that bites the arm of a “suspect” and will release it on cue. The reality is starkly different: as opposed to bites from pet dogs, police K-9s bite multiple times and are more likely to bite the head, neck and chest of the victim [19]. There’s also innumerable accounts of them biting bystanders -so much for the supposed “sixth sense” cops often claim the dogs have for spotting “criminals” [20]-, as well as of not letting go when cued until physically forced to do so [21].
All of this is intermingled with the image of dogs as representatives of a normative way of life we discussed in the previous section.
For example, a more emotional side of dog weaponization is achieved by using our sympathy towards the species against those who need to defend themselves from them. There are even people who demand harsher punishments to anyone who, in self-defense, harms a police dog [22]. The dogs become “heroes” harmed in the line of duty, while the victims remain nameless and dehumanized as “suspects” and “criminals”.
Those who hold this position often conveniently fail to mention that the main danger in a police K-9’s life is the police itself. About a quarter of K-9s who die on duty do so as a result of heat exhaustion, since leaving them inside police vehicles in the summer months is still a common practice7 [20, 23]. More than a fifth of the K-9 deaths on duty reported in the US from 2011 to 2015 were due to gunfire [23], but that doesn’t necessarily mean being shot by the victim. Often, it was the officers’ own bullets that did the job.
“Bad guy reaches for a gun and the dog is on him. Rookie cops try to shoot around the dog, but seasoned cops shoot through the dog.”
- Sheriff Gene Davis, interviewed by Rachel Rose for The Dog Lover Unit8 [20].
This kind of advocacy of police dogs’ “rights” acts to invisibilize state-sanctioned violence as a kind of violence at all. The police dog, in their framing, needs protection from the victim -who, we can assume, should instead lie passively in the face of an attack-, but not from the officers who force them to endure mortal temperatures, shoot them or brutalize them, both during their training and on duty [20, 23, 24].
And it’s not just police dogs that could use some protection from their fellow officers. Between 1998 and 2014, US police killed 6083 dogs, around 350 per year [25]. Police shooting dogs is not an US phenomenon, though, with cases anywhere you look at [26, 27], statistics from the US are simply more readily available. Us living outside of the US need to resist the temptation to think this is a “them” problem, and while police in the US might be particularly brutal in their use of firearms, officers shoot dogs in other countries. Regardless of where you are, chances are they do it in yours, too.
Most of these dogs (between 75 and 85% [25]) were labelled “pit bulls”. Visual breed identification, though, is extremely inaccurate [28, 29], and rarely are these dogs confirmed to be in the cluster of what we call “bully breeds”. What this statistic does tell us, though, is that a dog perceived as aggressive -the usual justification of the officers for shooting them- is immediately labeled a “pit bull”, and a dog being labeled “pit bull” must, in some level, justify their killing to the officers. Giving the long association of bully breeds with Black and Latino communities [8], the racial elements of this problem are clear too.
It would seem that the framing of dogs as family members has helped police and the military whitewash their violence and dehumanize their victims more than it has helped the dogs in any way.
In exploring the subjectivity of the dogs weaponized by police and the military I am not trying to in any way compare their suffering with the suffering of the predominantly Black people they’re weaponized against, nor to appeal to the people who turn their backs on the violence against people but might be moved by the cruelty against animals, because I have no interest in appealing to them. The abolition of police dogs (and police abolition as a whole) has enough justification in the human suffering. The reason to dive into the animal cruelty of this system is simply because the animals are living beings who matter.
"An intimate relationship with a dog (or anyone for that matter) doesn’t somehow implicitly excise it from the logics and constraints of the anthropocentric, militarized, capitalist systems in which it is embedded, and to suggest this is the case is profoundly self-serving."
- Shandell Houlden, Gone to the War Dogs: An Analysis of Human-Canine Relationality in Twenty-First Century Conflict and War [4].
And the animal cruelty doesn’t stop with the number of dogs the police are responsible for killing. It begins much, much earlier, with the conceptualization of these dogs as property of a state.
Because, as much as their handlers call them family members, these dogs belong solely to the institutions they work for [4, 20]. They not only experience more isolation than the regular pet dog, since they’re often housed on kennels when not “working”, but they also change hands whenever a handler is promoted, leaves or moves [20]. They are not allowed to take the dogs with them, as they’re not their dogs. Not really.
In the past, this has had even worse consequences for the dogs -and bystanders. For example, US military dogs have historically been conceptualized as basically cargo, much like any other weapon. This meant that, during and after the Vietnam war, as many as 5000 military dogs were abandoned in Asia [4]. The consequences for the local people, dogs, wildlife, and for the abandoned dogs themselves have not been studied, to my knowledge.
The very training to become a military or police dog tends to be extremely physically and psychologically abusive as well. Dogs are routinely choked, pinched, kicked, yelled at and shocked [20, 24]. One particular study [24] looking into the effects of the shock collar training a particular facility for police dog training in the Netherlands had to specify that they found dogs trained with it to be more stressed even though the rest of the dogs were also being routinely physically beaten.
This training is sold as necessary to produce “disciplined” dogs, but its fallout has been amply studied in many species [30, 31]. It can create animals that are unstable and unpredictable, on top of animals who are suffering. And we’ve already seen how unreliable and dangerous they become in these circumstances.
Finally, there’s the harm these dogs suffer “on duty”. Most of it, as seen, directly inflicted by their handlers, but there’s also the risk of injury and death due to explosives, victims defending themselves, exposure to drugs which the dogs can and do ingest [4, 20, 23]…
It seems particularly cruel that the same system that glorifies dogs is capable of abusing them, treating them as disposable, and worse, use them to perpetuate racism and capitalism. But that is precisely why questioning these narratives of virtuous dogs that are part of the family -even when the “family” consists of police and military forces- must be questioned. Especially for the sake of the victims.
If hearing Malcolm X talk about the self defense of the oppressed (“If a dog is biting a Black man, the Black man should kill the dog” [32]) makes you more uncomfortable than everything discussed so far, maybe you should examine that feeling. I had to, too.
Conclusion
The propagandized version of a weaponized dog’s life seems to be entirely at odds with their realities. How can a dog be family and also be treated with complete disregard for their well-being? How can the cops in The Dog Lover Unit say they’re “dog dads” while admitting to shoot the dogs without hesitation?
There is sadly much less of a contradiction here than it would seem. Most of us have been conditioned to think of the family as a place of love and protection, but the true history of considering dogs “family” has much more to do with using them as status symbols and property than any concern for animal welfare [1].
I know how hard this is to accept for anyone who cares deeply about animals. My cat and my dog are some of the most important beings in my life. I call them my kids, I do everything I can for them, I love them fiercely. It’s hard for me to acknowledge how those feelings can get twisted to make me believe propaganda about police dogs, but they can.
This is part of the reason why I consider it important to constantly remember dogs are not moral creatures. They, no matter how many internet memes we make about it, are not “good” in a moral sense. And maybe that’s better for them. After all, look at what being “good” got them.
So when you see a news story about a police dog saving the day, one that mentions how proud his “dog dad” is of him and how good of a family dog he is, think about what you’re actually being told. What you’re being asked to think and feel. None of us are immune to propaganda, but we’re also not doomed to fall for it.
Sources:
1 - Howell, P. (2015). At home and astray: The domestic dog in Victorian Britain. University of Virginia Press.
2 - Rees, O. (2020). Dogs of war, or dogs in war? the use of dogs in classical Greek warfare. Greece & Rome, 67(2), 230-246.
3 - Neocleous, M. (2016). The smell of power: A contribution to the critique of the sniffer dog. In Body/state (pp. 199-208). Routledge.
4 - Houlden, S. (2020). Gone to the War Dogs: An Analysis of Human-Canine Relationality in Twenty-First Century Conflict and War (Doctoral dissertation).
5 - Wall, T. (2016). " For the very existence of civilization": The police dog and racial terror. American Quarterly, 68(4), 861-882.
6 - Smith, B. L. (2022). “Open jaws of this monster-tyranny”: abolitionism, resistance, and slave-hunting canines. American nineteenth century history, 23(1), 61-92.
7 - Spruill, L. H. (2016). Slave Patrols,“Packs of Negro Dogs” and and Policing Black Communities. Phylon (1960-), 53(1), 42-66.
8 - Dickey, B. (2017). Pit bull: The battle over an American icon. Vintage.
9 - Arluke, A., & Sax, B. (1992). Understanding Nazi animal protection and the Holocaust. Anthrozoös, 5(1), 6-31.
10 - Raglon, R. (2014). Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America edited by Ryan Hediger. The Goose, 13(1), 28.
11 - Skabelund, A. (2008). Breeding racism: The imperial battlefields of the “German” shepherd dog. Society & Animals, 16(4), 354-371.
12 - Malcolm X. PBS interview with Kenneth Clark. (1963). Retrieved from:
13 - U. S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. (2015). Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. Retrieved from: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf
14 - Wall, T. (2014). Legal terror and the police dog. Radical Philosophy, 188(2), 2-7.
15 - Loder, R. T., & Meixner, C. (2019). The demographics of dog bites due to K-9 (legal intervention) in the United States. Journal of forensic and legal medicine, 65, 9-14.
16 - Qureshi, F. (2008). Patterns and trends in stop and search: findings from the British Crime Survey and police statistics (Doctoral dissertation, Loughborough University).
17 - Borooah, V. K. (2011). Racial disparity in police stop and searches in England and Wales. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 27, 453-473.
18 - Ex-Florida deputy gets 12 years for planting drugs | AP News. (2021, July 15). AP News. https://apnews.com/article/florida-14a6407801bf3052443a3b8a1f21eea0
19 - Meade, P. C. (2006). Police and domestic dog bite injuries: What are the differences? What are the implications about police dog use?. Injury Extra, 37(11), 395-401.
20 - Rose, R. (2017). The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World's K9 Cops. St. Martin's Press.
21 - VanSickle, A., Stephens, C., Martin, R., Kelleher, D. B., & Fan, A. (2020, October 2). When police violence is a dog bite. The Marshall Project. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/10/02/when-police-violence-is-a-dog-bite
22 - Proctor, E. (2014). Justice for Canine Heroes: Kentucky's Need to Strengthen Its Criminal Penalties for Killing or Injuring a Police Dog. J. Animal & Envtl. L., 6, 85.
23 - Barberi, D., Gibbs, J. C., & Schally, J. L. (2019). K9s killed in the line of duty. Contemporary Justice Review, 22(1), 86-100.
24 - Schilder, M. B., & van der Borg, J. A. (2004). Training dogs with help of the shock collar: short and long term behavioural effects. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 85(3-4), 319-334.
25 - Gaffney, G. (2018). 6,083 dogs shot and killed: The unknown puppycide epidemic in America. Animal L., 24, 197.
26 - El urbano que mató a la perra Sota, a un paso de ir a juicio por maltrato animal. | El Periódico. (2022, April 30). https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20220430/guardia-urbano-muerte-perra-sota-maltrato-animal-13589981
27 -Jackson, L. (2023, May 8). Met Police shoot dead two dogs and Taser man in Poplar. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-65523821
28 - Simpson, R. J., Simpson, K. J., & VanKavage, L. (2012). Rethinking dog breed identification in veterinary practice. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 241(9), 1163-1166.
29 - Olson, K. R., Levy, J. K., Norby, B., Crandall, M. M., Broadhurst, J. E., Jacks, S., ... & Zimmerman, M. S. (2015). Inconsistent identification of pit bull-type dogs by shelter staff. The Veterinary Journal, 206(2), 197-202.
30 - Ziv, G. (2017). The effects of using aversive training methods in dogs—A review. Journal of veterinary behavior, 19, 50-60.
31 - Destrez, A., Deiss, V., Leterrier, C., Boivin, X., & Boissy, A. (2013). Long-term exposure to unpredictable and uncontrollable aversive events alters fearfulness in sheep. animal, 7(3), 476-484.
32 - Malcolm X. Interview At Berkeley. (1963). Retrieved from:
Sacré Dieu
Dogs used to prosecute enslaved people were called “bloodhounds”, but remember, before the 19th century we’re not really talking about “breeds” in the same way that we would now. The reason to still use the term “bloodhound” is that people at that time called those dogs bloodhounds. We just need to keep in mind that the word might have a different meaning for us.
As many tantrums as our dear JK throws, yes, that did include trans people.
All nations are imaginary.
Remember, according to the social darwinist ideas popular at the time, those curs weren’t just inferior, but their very existence was a threat to the whole dog population. Their blood, after all, could taint future generations through interbreeding. This philosophy doesn’t stop as framing part of the population (of any species) as inferior, but also considers their survival and reproduction a threat. That’s where its worst dangers lie.
Not all is lost, though. Sometimes they find stuff they had previously planted themselves [18]. Take that, drugs!
Shockingly, this is one of the things admitted in Rachel Rose’s propaganda-dressed-as-a-book The Dog Lover Unit. Among cops openly admitting that they shock dogs until they shut up, yell at them routinely, etc, there are cops in the book worried that another handler might leave their dog in a vehicle with no air conditioning and kill them.
I did tell you this book sucks ass.