[eqan]

introduction post!!!!

i’m katie (they/them) a 21+ white human living in colorado. i’m an occupational therapist on a rehab unit (so i practice physical medicine). i like to read and write and i’m physically incapable of living a life that is not chaotic. welcome!

here are my four dogs:

ranger, a mostly american pit/cattle dog mix with fear reactivity (barks a lot) and the sweetest snuggles you’ll ever have. he was shot at as a puppy and we fostered him for a short time before deciding to keep him (he kept peeing himself during adoption events due to fear). he’s a happy, playful boy who loves butt scratches!

milo, a rat terrier/chihuahua/dachshund mix (?) born at the shelter i worked at for years in college. we fostered him for almost a year before foster failing because he was biting people. he hasn’t bitten a single person since we adopted him. he is intelligent, high energy, and will run around with toys in his mouth and shake/whine violently when excited. he can sit in strangers laps now and get pets as long as he initiates the interaction!

ryker, a mostly cattle dog/german shepherd/american pit/australian shepherd mix who was hit by a car as a roughly 6 week old puppy and spent the first month of his life in a crate getting a lot of care. (you’ll notice one side of his face is wonky.) he’s anxious as a result, but very sweet. all he wants to do is run and chase things and force people to pet him.

dewey, a pembroke welsh corgi, who i will learn more about in the coming months!

this blog used to be home to egan, my heart dog and cattle dog/blue lacy/bull terrier/coonhound mix and pamela, my lab/gsp/border collie mix, but egan passed from recurrent aspiration pneumonia (he had idiopathic megaesophagus) in 2022 and pamela passed from a ruptured hermangiosarcoma in 2021. i miss them dearly.

[eqan]

i’ll be honest gang since having a child it’s been so hard to be a good dog mom. they’re loud, they wake her up from her nap, it’s hard to walk them + her myself, i feel so horrible because it’s only just now that she can walk that we’ve started throwing the ball for them again……….. my goal this year is to enjoy my dogs again 😭

[eqan]

woof woof

[eqan]

i realized today i don’t think i ever gave a dewey update?????

well we follow his new owner on insta and keep up chatting with her regularly and it sounds as though he’s doing wonderfully! he gets along marginally better with his new doggy siblings (at least, he can coexist with them without killing them) and does fun stuff like off leash hikes! his new owner is a pretty experienced trainer (balanced, she does use a collar) and does bite sports and the like. we are gonna visit her + dew in august (-:

EDIT: dewey + new sibs

minus a NEW new gsd sister!

[urgetocreate]

Sueellen Ross (American b.1941), Moving Day, 2024, Oil on canvas

[pitbolshevik]

and this is only tangentially related but it's something I've been thinking of for awhile so i want to talk about it anyway.

a lot has been said by black pit bull owners about the racism that often accompanies reactionary sentiments about pit bulls and as a white guy i don't think that's a discussion i should lead (but here's a post on the subject made by a mutual of mine that you should read)

but one aspect of pit bulls that i think a lot of white pit bull owners don't address often enough (i have absolutely seen black pit bull owners discuss this) is how racist a lot of pit bull advocacy is

bronwen dickey touches on this a bit in her book on pit bulls (which is an excellent book and i cannot recommend it enough. it is easily the best book on these dogs i have ever read and dramatically changed the way i think about animal welfare) but there was sort of a an effort to...almost gentrify these dogs a bit? I've seen pit bull advocates use racially charged language (does anyone else remember the "pit bulls are for hugs not thugs" t-shirts?) and create Twitter trends like "i am a pit bull owner i am the majority" which was essentially predominantly white upper middle class pit bull owners attempting to convince the general public that most pit bull owners were "respectable citizens" like them

(an example)

[pitbolshevik]

and it's not just rescue people either. again, bronwen dickey discusses in her book that many black and latino apbt and amstaff owners felt unwelcome at ukc, adba and akc events and even were asked to leave on occasion.

[notfruits]

I will never be over how incredibly racist breed bans are. The language used, the way they are enforced and policed, the class divide on who can own these dogs and who can't....the history behind it all of it boils down to racism and very specifically anti black racism. They don't work because they aren't meant to stop pit bull attacks, they're a form of racism. In some ways one of the most insidious ways racism shows itself in laws, this kind of association game that drags something as common and innocent as a dog into structural racism, all in the name of safety (for who? who does and doesn't get to own a dog? what makes a dog truly a "dangerous breed"? what markers are we deciding that with? these are important questions to ask!)

[notfruits]

I'm gonna put some tags that this post received on blast here so forgive me - But these really encapsulate my point. This being that these bans are not about the dogs, they are not about stopping dog attacks, they are not about preventing unstable dogs from being bred etc. These bans are a form of policing communities of color and that's it point blank period. These bans are not about dog discourse, they aren't about dangerous breeds, they about any of the common arguments we hear on both sides of the debate, they are a form of structural racism. It's simultaneously an association game (someone really nailed this in a separate post with a statistic that people commonly most associate pit bulls with black communities) and one of those laws that has a really long history with racism and policing - long enough that people have kind of forgotten the original origins and now are kind of in a loop of "well these dogs aren't any more dangerous than [insert here]" kind of arguments. It's missing the forest for the trees, it's never been about the dogs - it's always been about racism and a kind of hysteria around things associated with less desirable communities in a white supremacy dominated state. This examples can be tacked onto things ALSO commonly associated with black communities of color, rap etc. A party loudly playing rap music is more likely to get a noise complaint than a party loudly playing pop, especially in a white neighborhood.

These laws are a form of structural racism in a police state - it's a feedback loop of structural racism (law and the enforcer) and association (enforcing racist laws on things associated with black communities creates more association) It's never been about the dogs. If we all associated like. Cattle dogs with Black people and communities of color (a breed also extremely commonly found in shelters and strays) these laws would be applied to cattle dogs and the same exact arguments would still be had. I cannot stress enough that it's never been about the actual dogs, it's about a sort of white supremacist hysteria generated around black culture. We will never be able to truly undo the sort of structural racism that exist in seemingly innocuous or useless laws until we acknowledge that the point is the racism, not what the law says it's trying to do.

[grison-in-space]

Just to underscore this, you [generic] have to understand that for the most part racism operates "under the radar" with some degree of plausible deniability. This functions both to avoid challenges from black folks and their allies but also, more importantly, to protect the majority of racist white people from the moral dissonance of what they're doing. (Even in the Confederacy, slave owners often deceived themselves with plausible-to-only-themselves lies about how much their slaves "loved" them and what a happy family they all were—while routinely disrupting and dissolving families, enacting harsh and torturous punishments for any perceived infraction, and casually raping enslaved people. Still, white slave owners and anti-abolitionists had to convince themselves that they were fair people operating in a just society, and a lot of racist beliefs go into giving people enough plausible cover to believe these morally inconsistent things without triggering too much dissonance or fear.)

Post-Civil Rights era, especially, that racism had to be furrowed into plausible deniability in order to avoid challenges by civil rights activists. So racist white attempts to enforce a social order with whites at the top have to be cloaked in excuses and hidden... meaning that racism gets expressed in terms of segregation and redlining, and when those are also curtailed, racism gets expressed in terms of things associated with black people without actually being about those things in specific. The moral panic about saggy pants and rap in the 90s was not actually about pants or music, just as the moral panic about pit bulls isn't actually about dogs.

If the goal was actually dog safety in our communities, we know what that looks like, and it involves looking at individual bite histories (a much better predictor of danger than breed is) combined with reducing risk factors for dog bites like tethering dogs and educating children about how to handle a dog in an emergency. If we cared about dog bites, we would study them and examine them systematically and look for ways to reduce them.

But it's not about dog bites, except as a plausible fig leaf. It's about racism. It's about policing the dogs that black folks are associated with, even when those communities have taken it upon themselves to proactively breed dogs for non aggression and ease of handling while retaining the visual look they like. (My neighbor was just showing me his new baby American Bully pup last night. I'm willing to bet that she's going to be a lot easier to handle and less mouthy, for example, than my cattle dog was. Because that's the goddamn point of Am Bullies. Nice classic-looking pup, too; I wasn't initially sure if she was an Am Staff or a bully.)

The point is the racism. It's not the dogs. Changing the actual risk to the public of the dogs doesn't change the racism one iota. Because the dog bite risk was never the point in the first damn place.

[helvyeah1]

robby showing off for dennis 🤝 dennis showing off robby

[eqan]

she loves her meatloaf 💚

[waterfaerie]

Carousel Dogs by Tim Racer

[pocketdogs]

this is how existing has felt for me too lately

[stinkybrowndogs]

She has no business being this cute

[abirddogmoment]

Today was our quarterly puppy torture day! She's clean, degrinched, and sad about it 😔

[eqan]

he’s so peppery :(

[eqan]

i finally bathed them (for the first time since i got pregnant lmaooo)

[odddogs]

i do kind of get the feeling that she doesn't blink ever

[eqan]

he likes to come over and stick his nose on the baby lol

[eqan]

i never force these interactions btw. there are barriers so the dogs can stay farrr away from baby if they want to. they have to choose to be touched by her in order to be touched by her!