The Mother State
Jim Engel
Being inherently curious and adventurous gives most of us the propensity to get into all sorts of trouble. Foolish things such as burning our fingers in the fire place, playing in the street and in time even more excellent adventures such as driving fast, borrowing dad's guns, drinking whiskey and encouraging dogs to chase and bite. This, of course, is the reason why we have mothers. And why, as we get older, we seek a bit of distance, to get out with the guys and do these guy things. This is in turn why the adults – mothers, fathers, teachers, uncles, priests, politicians – create laws and empower cops as a sort of super mother brigade to keep us in line.
When the cop shows up to stop our fun we think to ourselves "Why that mother…." We are smart enough to see what is going on, who the cop really is, just the long reach of mother. The cop is the ultimate male stereotype, but this is wrong, entirely backwards; the cop is really the agent for all of the mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers of history, the ultimate sum of feminine power.
So the state is the quintessential mother, and the thing about democracy is that everybody gets to play, gets to help write the super mother rule book. So just when we think we are growing up, getting on our big boy pants, state mother steps in to take the handoff from birth mom. Naturally we miss the subtlety, think of ourselves as rugged individualists going into the world to do our thing. Americans in their minds become the sons of the frontier, the hard riding, hard playing, hard drinking pioneers with our trusty rifles and revolvers holding the land against the barbarians. This was long ago. More recently, we got our noses rubbed in it: the mother state brought forth the 18th amendment; that's right, prohibition. Mother had caught up with us and taken away our whiskey and beer, sent us to bed without booze to contemplate our sins. It turned out to be a ten year sentence, but ultimately we got off for bad behavior, drinking anyway. You can sort of see why even with all of this power mothers do still get frustrated; guys will be guys.
Mother's rules vary from place to place and time to time. Every society gets to choose and attempt to enforce a set of their own prohibitions. Europe in general – and Germany and the Low Countries in particular – has tended to be liberal in terms of alcohol, soft drugs, personal conscience in sexual and reproductive matters but much more conservative and restrictive in freedom of expression and the ownership and use of firearms. America has been generally the opposite, that is had more restrictions on reproductive choice but been much more liberal or permissive in terms of civilian firearms and freedom to advocate unpopular ideas, as for example enforcing the right of American Nazis to sport their swastikas and march on public streets. In Holland you can't have an official "Holland for the Dutch" political party and even saying it borders on the seditious, and our German friends are understandably much less tolerant toward those sporting swastikas and extending a stiff arm marching in their streets behind a freedom of speech banner. The challenge of growing up and living beyond the long reach of the mother state is thus not specific to any time and place, is a universal dilemma; but the emphasis and focus varies greatly over time, cultural environment, the trends of recent local history.
So what has all of this got to do with working dogs? The answer is almost everything: in northern Europe today vastly different attitudes and legal restrictions based on generally pacifist agendas, that is the nanny state in general and the concept of "animal rights" in particular, are having increasing impact on the breeding, training and utilization of the protective heritage canine breeds. Although there is, for the moment, much less of this in America the spill over, as in the ongoing watering down of the IPO program, is an existential threat.
In America there is occasional opposition to ear cropping and other proposed restrictions, but on the whole little comes of it; in a sense the do-gooders seem to be pretty much focused on, and frustrated with, attempts to confiscate firearms. In the early days there was some concern that amateur protection training, previously unknown here, would be repressed legally. But this has faded; in large part because the Schutzhund community has done a pretty decent job in terms of public relations, responsibility and peer pressure not to be stupid with your bite capable dogs.
While Europe has a long history with the protection sport programs, that is Schutzhund, the Dutch Police trials and the ring sports of Belgium and France, in the past several decades they have drifted to the left, becoming ever more intrusive in increasingly intimate aspects of private life, ever expanding government control and interference. This has enabled a powerful social and political movement, the mother of all mothers' rules paradigms, to come forth under various banners such as animal rights, green power, socialism, and multiculturalism. It is political correctness, pussification, run amuck, with the bit in its mouth. Banned or restricted practices include:
- Tail Docking.
- Use of the prong training collar.
- Use of radio controlled electric collar.
- Use of stick in protection exercises.
These are not universal restrictions, in general oppression increases as you move north, with the Mediterranean areas tending more toward live and let live and the Nordic areas increasingly restrictive, that is intrusively, acerbically politically correct.
The underlying problem goes far beyond the actual restrictions, is that many Europeans have become so intimidated by the barrage of oppression that they look for ways to appease, like the dog going belly up not in response to a specific threat but just a general fear of a possible but as yet unrevealed oppression. The problem is you wind up living on your back just to feel safe.
Over the past several years there has been ongoing talk of taking the stick hits and courage test out of the IPO trial in order to appease these pacifist elements. European judges and others toed the line, patiently explained to me there was no way around it, that we had to accept "compromise" in order to be able to exist at all. But appeasement is never enough, shows weakness and invites further encroachment. The agenda is of course absolute pacification, the complete removal of any protective element of any canine trial, and ultimately the emasculation of the dogs themselves. There is no compromise, no stopping point, because like all bullies they live for the power, complete subjugation – the intensive pleasure of seeing us cower.
Yet when the FCI actually announced no stick hits would be applied at the 2014 IPO championship in Sweden I struck back with a series of EMails to some 5000 of my closest sport friends including most European club officers, judges, and trainers in general. In America USCA issued a ringing statement that they simply would not run trials without the stick. Within the week the Frans Jansen led FCI Play Dog Commission yielded to the pressure, reversed the ruling and the sticks were back. If a few Emails from America and a little bit of Euro resistance could stiffen the backbone, perhaps there is a need for some serious new leadership in the European working community. This was of course not a decisive victory but only a successful skirmish, a foray deflected. They will be back.
What this demonstrates is that the inherent problem of the Euro sport community is the timidity of the Euro sport community, it is quite obvious that if the traditional protection dog sports are emasculated it will be because these Europeans were emasculated in the first place, lacked whatever it took to stand up and preserve their culture.
This is a turning point. Social and political trends come in cycles, and the trend in Europe is more conservative in response to economic stagnation in the face of costly socialist programs, immigrant pressure, disenchantment with ultra-liberalism and multiculturalism and the rapidly expanding but not assimilating Islamic population. These trends, and increasing popularity of the sport in more socially conservative Eastern Europe, may offer the opportunity to stem and even reverse the tide. This may over time reduce the influence of the animal rights elements, but turning back existing legal restrictions will be much more difficult than heading them off in the first place might have been. Hopefully more conservative FCI nations in Europe and elsewhere will develop the resolve to stand up to the shrill ultra-liberalism of Nordic Europe. Perhaps we need a chairman of the Utility Dog Commission from the Czech Republic.
Although they are generally quivering in avoidance, our European friends have their fate in their own hands; if they cannot reach out and take it for themselves then their culture and heritage will vanish, and they will have to go on living knowing that ultimately it was because they were insufficient in courage and hardness.
What does this mean in America? Our working dog movement is nearly forty years old, more than a generation. For the past twenty years we have been stagnant, made very little real progress. We are still heavily dependent on and subservient to Europe. Mentors and teachers are good and necessary, but when the student is approaching forty and still far from educated, mature or self-sufficient the question becomes: why?
Are we inherently incapable of establishing our own standalone culture? Are our mentors and teachers encouraging dependence, holding us back? There is a little bit of truth in both of these propositions, but the reality is much more subtle and complex.
When you get right down to it we are forty years into a good twenty year plan. There is no reason to think another twenty or forty years will yield real progress; as Einstein said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
We are on the treadmill to nowhere. The Europeans are not going to save us from ourselves, indeed, the whole they benefit from our subservience and dependence. If the American working dog culture is ever to amount to anything it is time for a fundamentally new paradigm.
In order to become relevant we need to establish relationships with American police and military agencies and trainers, make participation in our sports affordable for a younger generation and evolve our programs to be more relevant to actual working functionality rather than the style and opinion trials they have evolved into. Each of these things will be incredibly difficult; indeed if the means of implementing them was obvious then they would have come to pass long ago. But there is no realistic alternative.
The time has come for American working dog affairs to be run by and for Americans. The alternative is the ongoing descent into triviality.
Orginizations and Conflicts
Legacy Lost, the Other Breeds
The Americans
Style and Opinion Sports
Has Sport Subverted the Trial?
How We Play the Game
Commercialization of Schutzhund
The Mother State