alias Bruce.

Good News from the North.

With the melting of the polar ice caps, the casting of an astroturf (i.e., synthetic grassroots) Alaskan governor in the walk-on role of a would-be vice president who denies a human role in global warming, the rejuvenation of a Republican base emboldened in its ignorance and bigotry by said Alaskan actor, and the concoction of a stupendous bailout for the financial captains of the Titanic while the rest of us thrash for lifeboats, you might feel a little short on good news lately.

So here is a photo story from the frigid north to shore up your faith in the possibility of enlightened coexistence -- even if it's not of the human variety.

The background: In 1992 in the northern Canadian tundra alongside the Hudson Bay, photographer Norbert Rosing was taking pictures of the sled dogs of hunter-trapper Brian LaDoon when, out of nowhere, a full-grown polar bear strode into camp and headed straight for one of the dogs. All of the dogs were tethered, and it looked as if this was the end for at least one dog, until... something else happened:

Postscript: The bear returned every evening for a week to play with the dogs.

You can also see a full slide show of this episode, with a spoken narration by Stuart Brown, posted on NPR.

Thanks to Laurie for the tip.

Quote of the Day.

MOST UNINTENTIONALLY IRONIC P.A. SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT OVERHEARD IN THE PAST WEEK BY A BLACK MAN WAITING TO CATCH A TRAIN  AT A MAJOR AMTRAK TERMINAL:

"Please do not pet the police dogs."

"Pets Die."

I have had my problems with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). I think that sometimes, like some of the zealots of the anti-abortion movement, PETA members can be mean, unfair, and abusive toward human targets in their fervor to protect the rights of animals.

But on the PetSmart issue, if the animal rights organization's claims are true, I'm with PETA all the way.

PETA sent an undercover investigator to work at a huge animal breeding and wholesaling facility, Rainbow World Exotics in Hamilton, Texas, which counts PetSmart as its largest buyer. The secretly-recorded video and audio subsequently posted by PETA appears to depict every pet-lover's worst nightmare about the pet breeding industry: animals crammed en masse into cages that are stacked toward the ceiling, sick creatures apparently left to die, rabbits physically forced by humans to copulate, animals trapped in enclosures flooded by faulty sprinkler systems, a botched "operation" on a still-kicking and profusely bleeding animal by a non-veterinarian with a dull blade, sick animals being thrown in the trash before they are known to be dead, a narrator's account of a loose hamster being deliberately stomped to death by an employee. And more, if you can stomach it.

Allegations such as this in the pet business are hardly new. Monopoly capitalism, with its centralized and profit-fixated mega-production systems, virtually guarantees that huge puppy mills and other animal factories will serve as sources for the cute critters in the windows of mall pet stores, just as large-scale corporate meat production assures horrific lives and deaths for most of our supermarket chicken and beef. With a government regulatory system neutered by private industry via campaign donations and the resulting political appointments to key agency positions, the last and best hope for responsible industry -- including the humane treatment of pets and livestock -- lies with the consciences of consumers. That would be you. And me.

If you care at all about animals, I suggest you gird your loins, watch the video and decide for yourself what you think about PETA's evidence and whether you care to set foot in a PetSmart facility again.

Do it sooner rather than later, as it's possible PetSmart may try to legally block PETA from continuing to show the footage.

Dog Days, Part 2.

Sandra Kobrin has a piece in Women's eNews that will get you thinking even more deeply about the Michael "Dogslayer" Vick episode.

It turns out, according to Kobrin, that for years star athletes have been getting off with wrist-slaps, or no professional penalties at all, for beating their wives and girlfriends. She cites a roll call of NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball players who have been arrested and convicted on domestic violence charges with few or no league consequences. Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets, for instance, pleaded guilty to spousal abuse and was not punished by the NBA. Ron Artest of the Sacramento Kings was suspended for 72 games for fighting with fans, but got a mere two-game suspension and a $600 fine (that's chewing-gum money in the NBA) after pleading guilty to a domestic violence charge. Adam "Pacman" Jones of the NFL's Tennessee Titans was suspended for the 2007 season after a series of arrests, most recently a bar brawl in which he bashed a stripper's head against the ground, according to Kobrin. But the NFL has yet to suspend any players who have been convicted of domestic violence, of whom there have been many.

What it comes down to is that dogs outrank women when it comes to teams penalizing athletes for acts of abuse.

My guess is that this is news to you. It was news to me.

One likely rejoinder to this observation is that domestic violence is a personal (read: unrelated to athletics) matter, and that the proper place for its consequences is in the courts.

But just a moment. Abuse of dogs is not a team-related infraction. Nor is fighting in bars and giving head-bashings to strippers. And yet in these cases teams feel compelled to add their own punishments on top of a judge's or jury's verdict. They do so, quite reasonably, because these acts reflect on a player's character and on the reputation of the team.

So how, exactly, does a 200- to 300-pound athlete's beating the stuffing out of his wife or girlfriend rate exemption from this moral calculus?

Anyway, read Kobrin's piece. It adds an entirely new dimension to the Vick case.

Thanks to Karla Scott for the tip on Kobrin's article.

Dog Days.

Except for that one week of 100-degree days I'm trying to forget, it's been a cool August here in Baltimore. But down in sweltering Atlanta, Michael Vick is in the frying pan.

You know the story: the star Atlanta Falcons quarterback has pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges and could do jail time and forfeit his NFL career. The stream of evidence in the case reads like an audit of an abattoir: dog carcasses carted out in coolers from Vick's property in rural Virginia; dozens of living dogs seized in various states of physical trauma and abuse; dogs having being executed by gunshot, electrocution and, in one reported instance, being slammed to the ground. Vick, who has already been sued by a woman for allegedly knowingly giving her herpes, looks more the cretin every day.

The two main threads of public and pundit reaction seem to be, on the one hand, What a despicable human being Vick must be, (e.g., Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins), and on the other, Why Michael Vick? Why a black celebrity? Dogfighting involves tens of thousands of people nationwide. And the cows and chickens we happily devour suffer at least as horribly as Vick's dogs. (e.g., the Post's Courtland Milloy.)

These are not mutually exclusive arguments. I agree with both. What is interesting to me, though, is, as a friend said to me the other day, how much more vehement many whites seem in their outrage about Vick's alleged cruelty to dogs than about, say, the current Jim Crow happenings in Jena, Louisiana (see my 8/16/2007 post). We could make a long list, actually, of atrocities that take a back seat to Vick in the current mainstream conscience: our nation's deliberately delivering vaguely-suspected subversives into the clutches of nations that torture; the civilian and uniformed casualties in an Iraq war championed by a vice president who actively avoided military service and whose personal pension is funded in part by one of the war's largest contractors (I heard a German journalist observe recently that this offense alone would suffice to have a leader yanked from office in Germany); the consistency with which the riddling of suspects' bodies with 40 or 50 police bullets seems confined to black males (heard of an unarmed white male shot 51 times by police lately? And if you're prone to argue that the involvement of nonwhite officers in the Sean Bell shooting pre-empts charges of racism, you may be interested in my post of 11/29/2006.)

There are plenty of reasons why we Americans tend to sit and blink dumbly at atrocity. One is that atrocity is an everyday feature of our current affairs of state. Another is that our junk-news industry so deluges us with tales of the personally awful -- crimes and events too horrible to even contemplate -- that if we allowed ourselves to authentically care we'd end up in a psych ward or on a prescribed regimen of antidepressants (hmm.). Yet another reason, I think, is that our effective disenfranchisement as voters (face it: how much influence have we non-rich voters had on health care policy, the Iraq war, funding of education, and tax breaks for the wealthy?) tends to flip our engaged-citizen switch to "off."

And it is also true that most of we humans feel a primordial attachment to the fellow creatures we call "animals," whether as pets or livestock or subjects on Animal Planet, and when we see animals being abused it hurts us in a way that transcends race or gender or any other detail of humanness.

But to get back to race and dogfighting, I think there is another reason -- a big one -- why some whites who merely shake their heads at Jena will sit up and shake their fists at the mistreatment of Michael Vick's dogs: It's easy.

When it comes to cruelty to dogs, it's easy to invest in outrage. It's easy to put your hand on your moral spigot and let loose a flood of righteous anger. It's easy to congregate with friends or coworkers and vent, from the heart, your feeling of sickness and physical revulsion at the suffering of animals subjected to such human wickedness. Practically everyone you know will agree with you. So will your congressperson and your senators and your president. You can even make your voice public, if you choose, with no fear of being chastised or ridiculed, no questioning of your personal mettle or patriotism, and no risk of ending up on a no-fly list or a warrantless wiretap roster. You don't even have to exert the effort of expanding your knowledge or experience. Everybody knows that dogs should not be made to suffer.

It is not easy, however, to look at the town of Jena and reflect upon what it means that Jim Crow standards of justice are alive and well within the United States. It is not easy to hold your gaze on a city park filled with homeless people and think about why this is so. It is not easy to make the conscious comparison between the windfall tax breaks for the rich and the catastrophic underfunding of drug treatment that creates a 6-month wait for a homeless and HIV-vulnerable addict begging for a temporary bed at a rehab facility. It is not easy to dare to inquire about the actual reasons why so many young black men find gang culture and its violence irresistible. And it is not easy to be at ease with yourself if you contemplate any of these things and fail to act.

So Michael Vick's barbarism becomes this moment's flash point for righteous conscience. Next month it will be something else equally undemanding of effort or risk.

And as for the untouchable and unbearably itchy racial realities that underlie Americans' every waking moment -- well, hey, what can you do?