where immovable law meets unstoppable ignorance

The City of Belfast has put down Lennox, a dog for being a "possibly pitbull type," despite worldwide protest, despite North Ireland's First Minister asking the Lord Mayor of Belfast why the order should be exercised if there was an alternative, and despite offers by well-known and credible dog behaviorists Cesar Millan and Victoria Stilwell to take the dog in.

Lennox arguably didn't need a behaviorist, though - there were no complaints against him, and no documented history of behavioral issues beyond a claim by a government expert that it was one of the "most unpredictable and dangerous" dogs he had run across.

Maybe that's true. Maybe it's a government defending the enforcement of an absolutist law banning the ownership of "dangerous breeds". But we do know that seven year-old Lennox was only taken from its owners for no reason other than his breed, which the government later "confirmed" by measuring his nose and the length of his legs.

I hate making very tenuous comparisons, but:

• Passing laws to pre-judge a being based on its race;
  Accepting the physical characteristics of an individual as evidence that the individual is an "undesirable" addressed by that law;
  
• Taking a dog from- if his "family" is not legally accepted - then his owners, and holding him in an undisclosed location without allowing his family/owners to visit (from my understanding, given various articles);
  
• Declaring it in the public interest to end a life when other options that are credible, would protect public safety, cost nothing, and that show compassion are available; and
  
• Ignoring the desires of its electorate and the world community.
  

These sound all too familiar. At the risk of being overly histrionic, let's say some of the things that list, in whole, or in parts, cannot help but cry out in our heads. Racism. Racial profiling. Nazi Germany. Guantanamo. Apartheid. One drop of blood. McCarthyism. Arizona. "You don't look like you belong in this neighborhood." Black kids in hoodies. Suspension of habeas corpus. "Driving while black." Any number of more politically divisive issues - the war in Iraq, the outlawing of guns.

To be fair, a lot of what is evoked is in our past, if not very distantly. Some are the acts of rogue individuals, or discrete (arguably rogue) states, and not our broader governments and institutions. Some are politically divisive. But this is a supposedly enlightened government in a first-world country. This is an absolute law based on absolute ignorance and fear, passed by that government.

If we can do this here, then where else? With what other living beings? What have been violated are not laws about dogs, but are fundamental tenets of good sense and good government and good lawmaking, and most importantly, compassion and morality, that are at stake.

Guarding public safety is government in one of its proper roles, but it's been exercised here without any regard for personal rights, reason, or compassion, without regard for the shame in our human history, or the consequences to which we may doom ourselves by its repetition.

It feels silly in the face of this tragedy to quote a television show, but the quote has stuck in my head as a guiding principle for 25 years: "there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions."

I don't know if I see Captain Picard with a pit bull, but I know he wouldn't have upheld the "Dangerous Dog Act", and that Lennox would not have died on his watch.

RIP, Lennox. Hopefully, you and what we as a society did today won't be forgotten. They can blow out a candle, but they can't blow out a fire.

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