Sometimes I will see two different TV programs, or read two magazine articles, withing a day or two of each other, that are completely unrelated on the surface but are deeply connected at a second glance. Call it coincidence or something else.
Today this happened while watching a History Channel program on feral dogs and once it ended, I surfed the channels and landed on author PJ O'Roarke promoting his latest book
Driving Like Crazy. Yes, there was a significant connection between the two programs. Serendipity at its best. Read on.
Dogs Returning to the Urban Wild:
The History Channel program was
Monster Quest, and this time the monsters were domestic dogs that had run away, been abandoned, taken up the wild life and killed humans. The show covered the Stephen King book and movie
Cujo, about rabid St. Bernard that goes on a killing spree. (I wish King had not used a good Akan African name for the dog). The monster quest also re-enacted the killings of three people in two separate incidents by packs of dogs. In one attack, a pack of pit bulls killed two people in rural Michigan. In another, a boy was killed in St. Louis by a pack of dogs, but there were no witnesses to confirm the breed(s) involved.
I will praise this series
Monster Quest, for its frequent references to Indigenous peoples. (An earlier episode featured mountain Seminole people and the reports of Sasquatch in the mountains of eastern Oklahoma.) The narrator mentioned that Native Americans were the first people to bring the domestic dog into the Americas from Asia. Also mentioned was the U.S. military's use of Cuban-bred bloodhounds to hunt down red and black Seminoles in Florida.
But the bulk of the show depicted a reality-show-style coverage of scientists trying to capture a feral dog in East St. Louis, Illinois, attach a camera and tracking device, and take a blood sample to determine its genetic makeup. East St. Louis, across the Mississippi river from St. Louis, Missouri, was once an industrial city and the site of one of the largest massacres of African American people to take place on US soil. Ironically, it became an almost totally black city by the 1970s, and a spiral of crime, underfinancing, and inadequate services (like schools and sewers) forced people out
. Monster Quest did not mention all of this, but did mention a recent 60% drop in East St. Lou's population.
Huge portions of the city are abandoned. The cameras showed rows of houses standing empty, and lots of empty factories are being taken over by prairie brushland and forest. We got to see a pack of the East Saint Louis dogs and the crew captured two of them. The dogs were mostly small and black, with standup ears, almost wolf-like in appearance. They did not bark at all. They had been born in the wild and their capture by the science team was probably their first contact with humans. A couple of them quickly became "trap savvy" and could not be captured the same way twice.
The program spent less time on an effort in Detroit to photograph the movements of feral dogs in the vast expanses of abandoned factory land in that city. But more on Detroit later.
DNA Testing of Feral Dogs
The DNA testing, which was held up until the end of the program, revealed some interesting data. The canine genome (like the human genome) has been sequenced. Also, all the different pure breeds' genes have also been analyzed and sequenced. It turns out the East St. Louis pack had some paternal ancestry from pit bulls and English bull terriers, but was predominantly Alaskan malemute and Chow. Pit bull genes were not a surprise, because pit bulls are popular in poor urban areas and abandoned pit bulls could easily have joined the packs of urban feral dogs. However, the ferals did not resemble pit bulls in the least. They had long hair (like chows) , the more standard pointy snouts and slim builds of sled dogs (like Malemutes). They had the compact look of multi-generation strays in urban India. Life in the "urban wild" had reduced any influences from the highly specialized breeds, like chihuhuas, poodles, yorkshire terriers, or pit bulls, that had little survival value outside of human protection.
I understood this immediately, because I have seen with my own eyes how fighting pits can behave when they are abandoned in urban areas. In the city where I live, a pack of dogs, including one pit, attacked two people, sending both of them to the hospital. Another time, I saw a pit take over a police car. It seems these pit bulls have been bred and trained to fight, and if they escape or are abandoned, they do the one thing they know best---attack and bite.
The problem is, going on the attack right away is not a long-term survival strategy. It draws immediate police attention and usually a quick death at the hands of Animal control. Clearly, some of the male pits had survived in the wild long enough to mate, but none of the E. St. Louis feral pack resembled pit bulls at all. They were aggressive only when cornered, and their preferred survival strategy was flight when they encountered humans. This is what wolves and coyotes do.
In some ways, it was more surprising that the E. St. Louis ferals had the genetic predominance of Alaskan Malemutes and Chows. Neither of these breeds are the most popular breeds in urban areas, yet their genes survived overwhelmingly in the wild state, much more so than the genes of other breeds. Chows and Malemutes, bred by Indigenous people of east Asia, the Asian and Alaskan arctic, had made their combined comeback as the Eurowestern industrial civilization had retreated from portions of the landscape. That says something about the continued survival of Indigenous peoples, too.
PJ O'Roarke Promotes Driving as the American Way
I surfed the channels and came to C-SPAN, where author/reporter PJ O'Roarke was promoting
Driving Like Crazy, his take on the importance, personally** and nationally, of the automobile. He quotes David Davis, the iconic auto enthusiast, writer who once ran
Car and Driver magazine, who said that politicians hate automobiles because people can use them to leave their jurisdictions. O'Roarke views the car as the fulfillment of the dream of the Founding Fathers of the U.S.--to pick up and leave whenever you choose.
And I think O'Roarks is on to something here. The America we know is impossible without the automobile. Even the most non-driving urbanite depends on cars (or trucks) to deliver to the corner store down the block. Does any car-hating urban planner really want return to deliveries in horse-drawn wagons? O'Roarke cites the car as a democratizing force, allowing unprecedented mobility to the masses for the first time in human history.
The choice to leave is very American. After the Civil War, many Union and Confederate veterans remained on the road as itinerant workers as mobility had become an accostomed way of life. Newly-freed slaves would also take to the road, just because they could. Some just took a walk for a few days, just to feel free, and returned to the plantation for wages. But is was nice to exercise the choice to leave.
Native Americans had been exercising the right to pick and go for centuries before European or African settlement.
Leaving the Cities Nothing New
Native Americans not only moved as individuals and families, but as entire communities. The Creeks would rename the new location of their town after the old one. That's how Tulsa, Oklahoma came to be named after Tulsa town, in what became Alabama. In fact the largest Native American city, Cahokia, was a few miles from the site that later became East Saint Louis. Tens of thousands of people walked away from Cahokia once its theocratic government (and possibly an epidemic) no longer worked for them.
It was doubly ironic that I saw the wild dog episode on Monster Quest , where another team tracked the packs of feral dogs in abandoned auto-factory lots in Detroit, right before I saw PJ O'Roarke discuss the demise of the US Auto industry.
This all brought to mind the futile cries of American activists bemoaning the decline of many US cities. They usually blame the automobile, or racism. But they are ignoring one crucial fact about Americans and cities: people can leave them. Yes, leave. For a good reasons or no reason. That's what freedom is partly about. It is a very ancient American tradition. It's not even just "white flight," because in Detroit and East St. Louis, "black flight" is the most recent reason for (human) depopulation. Before either, it was "red flight."
And when people move out, trees, weeds, and wild dogs move in.
**I must confess my love of road trips. I credit this to my parents driving from Alabama to Seattle, across the Rockies on two-lane mountain highways without guardrails, in my father's 1954 Plymouth. I was the five-month-old infant in the car-bed in the pre-seat-belt back seat, secured in by packs of diapers. I don't remember this, of course, but just having this imbedded in my subconcious must account for my instant feeling of relaxation once I am on the road. The road is a lullaby.
