Call Off the Dogs, Mr. Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/13/opinion/george-floyd-trump-protesters-dogs.html

Version 0 of 1.

When President Trump tweeted late last month that the Secret Service was prepared to sic “the most vicious dogs” on protesters outside the White House, I was dismayed, as both a dog lover and an American citizen. I strongly suspect that the handlers of the highly trained dogs that assist the agents in their duties were deeply shocked, too.

The dogs that serve police forces around the country, at their best, are a phenomenal extension of human agency. They discover children lost in the woods, explosives hidden in luggage, and even — sadly but essentially — cadavers buried under leaves or garbage. These dogs can also be trained to detect and detain suspects. The Secret Service dogs, Hurricane and Jordan, who brought down an intruder on the White House grounds in October 2014 may well have saved that man’s life. The intruder needed medical attention — as did the dogs — but nobody was shot that day.

Mr. Trump, however, wasn’t praising the highly trained dogs that save lives and reassure communities. He was appealing to an older, darker, strain in American history.

The dogs of war were never just a metaphor. Dogs have been instrumental in the suppression of peoples in the Americas since Columbus’s second voyage. On his first visit Columbus had noted that the natives were nearly naked and thus ideal prey for the war dogs that were standard issue in the arsenal of medieval Castile. Columbus first deployed dogs against the natives of what is now Jamaica in May 1494 and he noted approvingly that each dog was as good as 10 men in putting the natives to rout.

White invaders’ use of dogs as weapons did not fade as the Spanish lost control of what is now the United States. President Zachary Taylor, for example, who became a national hero for his victories in the Second Seminole War and the Mexican-American War, and served as president from 1849 until his death in 1850, was a great believer in the value of dogs. Like the conquistadors before him, Taylor reveled in the dogs’ mercilessness and intrinsic ability to distinguish friend from foe: With dogs there was little risk from “friendly fire.”

Throughout American history, slave owners used dogs to control, capture and kill enslaved Africans. After restoration this tradition was maintained by police forces that brutalized and harassed African-American citizens claiming their rights. In the civil rights era, dogs were sicced on protesters again and again: In Jackson, Miss., in 1961; Birmingham, Ala., in 1963; St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964; and in countless other locations throughout the nation. This tradition of brutality has persisted into the present day. In the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in 2014, the Department of Justice reported that, “in every canine bite incident [in Ferguson, Mo.] for which racial information is available, the subject was African-American.” Dogs were also central to the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Guantánamo, Cuba by American forces in the 2000s.

Paradoxically — perhaps ironically — what makes dogs such excellent projectors of human aggression is an exceptional capacity to form strong emotional bonds — for love, if you will. In the journey that a certain tribe of wolves embarked on over 15,000 years ago to become the dogs that so many of us relish today, two major changes took place in the animal’s nature that make it far easier for dogs to connect emotionally with other species.

The first involves what is known as the critical period for social imprinting. No animal is born knowing the species to which it belongs. In infancy, every individual must look around and identify the kinds of beings that will serve as companions for the rest of its life. In all wild animals this process is wrapped up quickly. It has to be. Outside of Bambi and other children’s tales, the animals in the forest are not all friends. Predators must kill prey to survive; and prey must strive to avoid becoming a predator’s dinner. In wild species, the critical period for social imprinting is completed in just a few days or at most weeks of life. That more or less guarantees that species only make friends with others of their own kind.

It has been known since experiments in the 1960s that the critical period for social imprinting in dogs can extend over two or three months — much longer than in wolves and other wild animals. This elongated phase of learning whom to hang out with makes it much easier for dogs to form relationships with members of other species. Every dog I have ever known had met humans during that early period and consequently was happy to make friends with members of the human species throughout life.

More recent research has shown that, among the genes that changed in the metamorphosis from wolf to dog, are three that are also very occasionally mutated in our own species as part of a rare condition known as Williams-Beuren syndrome. This syndrome involves changes in 28 genes, and, consequently, a wide range of consequences. The most curious of these impacts is what physicians refer to as “extreme gregariousness.” People with Williams-Beuren syndrome are renownedly trusting and friendly. The three genetic deviations from the wolf template that dogs share with people with the syndrome are precisely those that underlie the exceptional gregariousness of these people, showing how the loving nature of dogs is rooted in their genes. Hanging out with us has made dogs gentler, more loving, creatures.

Dogs’ capacity for interspecies love is deeply rooted in their biology, but it is this innate drive to please the people they have bonded with that can be exploited to turn them into weapons against those their masters wish harm upon. Because they love us, they bend to our will — and if that includes attacking another person, some dogs will do that for us, too. As the author and dog handler Cat Warren put it in her book “What the Dog Knows,” “Each time a dog accomplishes a particular task for humans isn’t automatically a moment for celebration. Dogs may have co-evolved with us, but they don’t have a lot of say in how we decide to use them, so the “co” gives a false impression of equity. The dog mostly tries to please us … Since domestication, they’ve been used as adjuncts for the evil that people do, as well as the good, and sometimes both at once.”

Sometimes our dogs love not wisely, but too well — their intrinsic good natures subverted by human manipulation to make them tools of oppression. It is on this shameful tradition that Mr. Trump was calling — not the professionalism of the modern police dog handler. Those of us who love dogs — and who love people too — must call out the exploitation of dogs as tools of oppression. Dogs’ love for people can serve as an example to us all.

Clive D.L. Wynne is a professor of psychology and the director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University and the author of “Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.