Katie Brown, the woman who duct-taped her dog's mouth shut: obviously what she did was cruel, potentially traumatic. But if you look at her pictures, she was obviously a person who deeply loved her pets. From her perspective, she was trying to teach her dog a lesson, which is extremely difficult to do without language. She wasn't
trying to traumatize her dog. She just did. Animal cruelty isn't something that comes from malice or violence, it's something that happens when people don't know how to treat their pets.
Just like average (not overtly racist) police officers sometimes shoot black people, normal pet-owners sometimes do things that are cruel. You don't just make that go away by locking up the bad people. If you want to stop that particular kind of pet abuse, then you have to reframe the way our culture views nonhumans. We might call what happened in Florida stochastic pet abuse.
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| Look at the way her dog and cat sleep together. Has the owner of these pets raised them to be malicious? Look through her pictures and tell me that this woman is the face of animal cruelty. |
Maybe future pet-owners will learn from this event, and it's probably a good thing to use her as an example, but to me it seems really basic to vilify a woman whose Facebook photos are devoted to loving pictures of her cats and dogs. Again, what she did was cruel, and I advocate for a far more radical approach to animal cruelty than most people are willing to. But if ending animal abuse were really what people cared about, there are bigger and more heinous targets than some redneck Florida woman. How many of those raising their pitchforks against Katie Brown are pledging to go vegan? How many still adopt their puppies from puppy mills? I'm not saying they shouldn't campaign against one form of abuse unless they campaign against all of them, but the hypocrisy raises some flags that maybe people are taking up arms for the wrong reasons.
Treating acts of physical and psychological violence as the hallmarks of criminals, as opposed to the bad decisions of otherwise good people, is not productive. We should be looking to create a world where there aren't bad people, and where people don't do bad things. If punishment and retribution against the perpetrators were the way towards that world, everybody would go blind. Or maybe we're all already blind, and we're just feeling around in a dark, confusing world for something that makes sense.
I think there's a lot to be done about people like Katie Brown, but I don't think it's putting both the perpetrator and the victims behind bars, whether they're in a prison or a shelter. There must be a better way, some form of restorative justice that can both heal the wounds of her dog and make Katie a more thoughtful and compassionate person. Vilifying and punishing individuals hasn't gotten of rid of animal abuse yet, so I'm extremely doubtful that it's the right strategy towards eliminating it.
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