It struck me how related these two reactions I write of below are.
There’s an author I encountered on Twitter—she’s a really fine essayist on matters of personal anguish and anyone who writes that well infatuates me a little at the start. So her naivete on some things annoys me.
She was outraged that I regard pit bulls as especially dangerous and unpredictable dogs and asked if I wanted them banned and euthanized, if I’d be happy if they became extinct.
Yes, I would be happy if they’re banned and become extinct. They are a product of selective breeding and a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. The creator has lost control of his creation.
I had a dog, once, briefly, a street dog that adopted us when we lived in Pakistan, and she must have had some mastiff in her, our Jenny, because she had jaws that could crush a mammoth. I’d let her play with my hand, take it into her mouth, and I trusted her absolutely not to use her capacities against me. But though it never came to a test, I’d have no right to guarantee to anyone that she was incapable of harming them or their children. How would I know what lived inside my Jenny’s head? It was my free will to believe only benevolence towards me lived there.
And I think sometimes of how lucky we were, that she didn’t assert her strength and her ancestry against us. Jenny was to me of angelic temperament as Ann Bauer’s dog is to her. But we possess no surety regarding another living creature’s actions.
The first reaction of Louisville massacrist Connor Sturgeon’s mother made me think of Ann. He must’ve gotten the guns from his girlfriend, Mrs. Sturgeon told the 911 operator as she rushed in terror to the bank to try to avert her son’s action. We’re not a gun family.
Unfortunately you’d become one, mom.
The family said Connor had been under medical treatment for depression and anxiety, but had had no anger issues.
A history of disabling concussions, though, he’d had throughout high school. So bad that he’d eventually needed to wear a soft helmet while continuing to play basketball. He had a badly damaged brain. Who knows what lived inside his head?
What makes a monster is its alien selfness. In whole or in part, it lies outside our comprehension. It isn’t bound by the rules we understand and acknowledge. It may have parts of tenderness and beauty. It may choose to discriminate in what it considers prey. It may even perhaps lie outside the constructs of morality because it can’t understand such a concept. It may even have acquired its monstrousness not in the least of its own volition.
But if we harbor something with the potential for great harm, by nature or maladventure, we must see our loved one with clear and unsparing eyes.
And unfortunately there’s no perfect solution and no guarantee that even with the utmost care, we can avert a horror.
Best not to manufacture monsters in the first place.
I had a history of post-CVA depression following a stroke at age 29. My second stroke came in 2014 when I had a cardiac arrest on a gurney in an OR waiting for surgery.
Pit bulls are no more inherently dangerous than cotton balls. Dobermans, however, if in-bred, can develop psychiatric disorders that cause them to attack randomly.