Abstract
Among the countless animals throughout history who have been tamed to serve humans, there is only one who serves by choice – the dog (Wilcox & Walkowicz, 1995). Dogs display “an inexhaustible willingness to form and sustain partnerships with humans” (Hart, 1995, p. 167), and they are the only species that assist humans in various social needs as police, therapy, and search and rescue animals (Udell & Wynne, 2008), sometimes to the endangerment of their own survival (Shewmake, 2002). It is well known that dogs have been selectively bred for socio-cognitive abilities and attachment to humans. They are thus strongly bonded to humans in relationships that consist of attachment behaviors similar to those found in child–parent and chimpanzee–human relations (Topál, Miklósi, Csányi, & Dóka, 1998). Humans have taken advantage of this bond of attachment to create ferocious, fighting dogs – animals that are intensely loyal and willing to fight to the death to protect humans and their property. Taking a creature with toddler psychology and behavior and making it an aggressive fighting dog creates an animal dominated by fear (Meisterfeld & Pecci, 2000) and one who participates in dogfighting out of intense loyalty to the bond he has with humans.
You became responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
(Little Prince by A. de Saint-Exupery)
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Notes
- 1.
The archeological evidence is unclear as to whether the species was a wolf, dog or jackal (see Juliet Clutton-Brock, 1987, p. 58).
- 2.
The word “persona” comes from the Etruscan “phersu” or mask.
- 3.
One of us (Iliopoulou) is a DVM who assesses animal cruelty cases for a local Animal Control organization. Of the 14 dogs she examined over a two-month period in 2010, 13 were pit bulls and 1 was a Rottweiler mix, all were starved, 7 had wounds suggestive of dogfighting, 3 had their ears cropped with scissors, 2 had been beaten by their owners, and 5 were tethered with heavy chains (one of whom had no teeth because of her efforts to chew through her tether). Eleven of the 14 dogs were submissive and exceptionally human friendly (one so scared that she urinated involuntarily every time she was touched) and wagged their tails frantically every time they were praised as good, sweet dogs.
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Kalof, L., Iliopoulou, M.A. (2011). Abusing the Human–Animal Bond: On the Making of Fighting Dogs. In: Blazina, C., Boyraz, G., Shen-Miller, D. (eds) The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9761-6_19
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