Using race to defend cruelty

Anyone who has ever loved a dog understands the unfathomable cruelty of isolating a dog and leaving him on a chain for his entire life. Anyone who has ever lived next door to a hopeful puppy brought home to its new life on a chain, or in a kennel, knows the heart wrenching sound of a puppy who cries, and cries, and cries, until it doesn’t.

People often ask, ‘Why get a dog if you’re just going to forget about it in the back yard?,’ but this practice, inhumane as it is, is still going on, all over the country.

My personal experience with animal abuse has been primarily in Gary, Indiana, a city I loved, where I lived for 25 years. As an anti-cruelty advocate, I lobbied the city for several years to adopt tethering restrictions so that dogs would not be left outside 24 hours a day, and it was finally outlawed in 2019.

Although it’s now illegal in Gary and many other cities to leave a dog on a chain for life, enforcement remains a problem. It costs nothing- literally zero- to bring a dog inside from the cold, so in 2022, I went back to the Gary Council for another three minutes at the podium to urge them to do a better job enforcing the city’s anti-cruelty ordinance.

My three minutes were spent at Gary’s Subcommittee on Public Safety. After I asked the city to appropriate funds to spay and neuter, I got to the part about people in Gary who chain their dog(s) 24/7. I knew for a fact that one of council members did that to her own dog.

I told the council that people were leaving the city because of unaddressed animal cruelty; no concerned parent wants their kid(s) to see cruelty on display in the yard next door. There’s plenty of research proving that exposing youth to animal cruelty has real-life consequences. It’s also proven that teaching at-risk youth compassion for animals leads to more resilience, better cognition, and can help lead them away from gangs and crime. That’s why federal agencies like the National Sheriffs Association and the FBI, pre-Trump, adopted policies encouraging local law enforcement to enforce animal cruelty laws: because there’s a direct connection between animal cruelty and crime against people.

Lack of diversity isn’t one sided

My statement about residents leaving Gary because of animal cruelty prompted the committee chairman, Clorius Lay, to racialize it. He interrupted me to announce that only white people care about animal abuse, and did I know that Gary, Indiana was a Black city?

It’s no secret that Gary is a Black-run city: not just the mayors are African-American; 100% of the City Council members are also Black, something I once considered a feature not a bug. But not one of them objected, pushed back, or spoke up to tell Lay that he was wrong to defend animal abuse on the basis of race.

To be clear, what Lay said was objectively false. Many wonderful animal advocates in Gary and around the country are Black; most of the people in Gary who still send me cellphone photos of abuse, pleading for help because the city won’t respond, are Black. The co-chair of the Gary Animal Coalition, a local radio personality, was also Black.

But that’s not the point.

The enduring take away, the one I keep returning to as I watch Trump’s appallingly racist attacks on DEI, universities and Black elected officials, is that an arrogant, exclusionary, and determined lack of diversity leads to ignorance as well as awful government.

Soft power matters

Gary’s population dropped from a high of 180,000 in the 1960s to today’s population of 67,000. In February, Gary’s current Mayor, Eddie Melton, was interviewed in the New Yorker, and he emphasized that the city couldn’t afford to lose any more people.

Like most mayors, Melton is focused on attracting investments to build employment, removing blight, and fighting crime. But, like a short-sighted president who doesn’t understand the value of soft power, Melton doesn’t seem to understand that soft and easy issues- low-hanging fruit like enforcing anti-cruelty laws- can go a long way toward compensating for other city deficits. It could also directly assist in reducing the city’s violent crime rate.

Running a steel-mill city with a diminished tax base, in a state controlled by republicans, is challenging, and if the city keeps hemorrhaging residents, the ledger will get worse. As an advocate, I have told mayor after mayor that residents keep leaving the city over its lack of anti-cruelty enforcement.

Cruelty next door hurts the heart

I personally know dozens of people who have left for that reason; one such resident was a former city attorney. Over ten years, Linda Burton was an attorney for the City of Gary and served as a Deputy Prosecutor for the county, where she prosecuted animal cruelty cases. Abusers would be brought to municipal court on heinous cruelty charges (think dogs starved in crates) only to be let go without a slap. The courts don’t even use a cruelty tracking system to attach a “Do not adopt” label on animal offenders. “Gary,” Burton said, “is a town with no pity when it comes to animals.”

Despite working for years to improve anti-cruelty, Burton couldn’t get the city to take it seriously either. Cruelty next door- her neighbor left a short hair Cane Corso in a tin shed for days when he travelled, even when it was ten degrees- was the main reason she and her family finally left the city.

I don’t think Gary mayors have believed that so many people left Gary because of animal cruelty: with bigger problems in Gary like crime, who would think the suffering dog next door would be the catalyst? But it is, and it was also the reason I left the city.

Reason for hope

As a former member of the Animal Law Committee of the American Bar Association, I’m sad to report that some legislators actually try to block anti-cruelty efforts, especially politicians backed by commercial farming and pharmaceuticals donors. The bad news is that, nationwide, hundreds of thousands of dogs still live their lives chained outside 24/7, regardless of temperature. The good news is that animal organizations are fighting for them. Humane World for Animals, ASPCA, and PETA exist to fight animal cruelty; please donate whatever you can. There’s also an Animal Protection PAC dedicated to electing officials committed to anti-cruelty.

I’m aware that race, culture and the treatment of animals can be complex, but let me be clear, it’s not just Black neighborhoods where dogs live outside for life. JD Vance, uttering a rare truth, has described hillbillies with underfed dogs on chains; anyone who has spent time in poor or rural areas has seen the same thing.

Steve Schmidt writes, “Among the greatest challenges facing America is being able to talk about race openly, honestly and realistically without fear of instant cultural annihilation and backlash.” I observed this first hand in Gary, not from the Black residents but from white animal lovers afraid to speak out about animal abuse for fear they’d be called racist.

I don’t have any such fear, and I reject the soft racism of refusing to hold Black officials accountable. So let me state openly, honestly and plainly as a DEI supporter and anti-cruelty advocate: Gary, Indiana, and other cities like it, will never thrive until they fix their animal cruelty problem.

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. Her columns are found @ Alternet, Chicago Tribune, Howey Political Report, Indiana Democrats’ Kernel of Truth, Inside Indiana Business, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News, South Florida Gay News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.