You've probably heard about how having a good paying job is racist. You may also be aware that good credit scores are racist. Even home ownership is racist, according to some.
But what about owning a dog? It turns out, loving your dog is racist too, you dog-loving hatemonger.
This was a hard pill for me to swallow. I love my dog but, like most fragile white people, I don't want to be accused of being racist, even when the accusation has no logical basis or connection to reality. I had no idea that loving my dog was an act of white supremacy. Fortunately we have really smart Leftists to set us straight on critical race theory for dogs.
According to a new report (and a book that you shouldn't bother buying), critical race theory has found it's way to the world of canine lovers.
...in her recent book The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, Katja Guenther... argues that allowing dogs to sleep inside is a privilege reserved for the white and wealthy and that policies against keeping dogs chained up in backyards are intended to oppress people of color by imposing “middle-class norms of animal keeping in which companion animals are considered family and treated accordingly,” which ignore the fact that people of color “are themselves trapped in poverty, may have few options for legitimate income generation and possibly rely on their dogs for … status.”
Unfortunately Guenther’s misguided book is gaining traction. Shelter director Kristen Hassen opines that Guenther “gets it right” in concluding that “racism, classism and the caste system are at the heart of the broken animal sheltering institution.” Arguing that laws to prevent mistreatment of dogs discriminate against “anyone in the US other than white, middle class and upper-class individuals,” Sloane Hawes, Tess Hupe and Kevin Morris of the University of Denver Institute for Human-Animal Connection cite the book in their proposal to relax enforcement of animal protection laws—a proposal that threatens to reverse decades of hard-won progress.
Guenther writes that, because of racism, the overwhelming majority of the dogs who ended up at the Baldwin Park, California shelter where she worked as a volunteer had belonged to poor people of Asian and Latino heritage and, to a lesser extent, black people. But this simply reflects the demographic make up of Baldwin Park itself. When I ran a shelter in a predominantly white community—a shelter with a higher per capita intake rate than the Los Angeles County pound system of which Baldwin Park is a part—most of those who surrendered animals were white. Indeed, of all the counties in the US with a 90% or better placement rate, the one with the highest per capita intake—over five times that of Los Angeles County—is 90% white, only 3% Latino and less than 0.5% black. In other words, the ethnicity of the people who surrender animals to shelters is largely a function of demographics, not of race.
Guenther deliberately rejects objective evidence of this kind, admitting that “it is not possible for me to be impartial”: “I was trained in sociology, a discipline that emphasizes impartiality and the need to systematize observations and analysis in ways that distance the researcher from the researched. I deliberately turn away from these tendencies and instead embrace the messy possibilities of being a researcher with complex ties to the social setting I am analyzing.”
At best, the book presents subjective feelings, anecdotes and even guesses as compelling evidence for its conclusions—at worst, it ignores evidence to the contrary.
CAMARIÑAS, SPAIN - AUGUST 30: A couple of young hikers rest with their dogs and contemplate the lighthouse of Cape Vilan, in the region of Costa da Morte, seen on August 30, 2020 in Camariñas, Galicia, Spain. (Photo by Xurxo Lobato/Getty Images)