AR-News: New Orleans Times Picayune Front Page on Hog Dog Fights

[Political Animal]

This is an excellent article that really gives insight
into the hog dog fighting industry.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1082885632107450.xml

 


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CRUELTY OR CULTURE?
Violent rodeos where dogs attack wild hogs pit rural
pastime againts animal rights activists 
Sunday, April 25, 2004 
By Keith O'Brien
Staff writer 
BLUFF CREEK -- In an hour or two, pit bulls will be
barking, people will be cheering and wild hogs --
battle-scarred, frightened, and deprived of their
tusks -- will be squealing something god-awful. 

At that moment, the pit bulls will be biting down so
hard on the hogs -- sometimes tearing at their flesh
-- that it will take five men and what's known as a
breakstick to pry back the jaws and pull the dogs
away. 

 
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But for now, all is quiet on this lonesome patch of
gravel where Chuck Harris holds his hog-dog rodeos in
East Feliciana Parish. Harris, 48, walks alone with
his pit bull, Baby Girl, talking to her in a honeyed
voice as he makes last-minute preparations for the
evening's event. 

"That's my Baby Girl," he says to the dog. "That's my
Baby Girl. She's as tender as can be, aren't you?" He
pauses and adds, "But she's hell on a hog." 

That's what it's all about at a hog-dog rodeo. The
question isn't how tender is your dog, but rather how
fast can he or she catch a wild hog by the ear or leg
or throat, and hold it there in the pen for at least
three seconds while it squeals. 

The dogs are timed. The fastest can catch a hog in a
matter of seconds. And that dog wins its owner money
-- hundreds, even thousands of dollars per fight. A
good catch dog, which is the term owners use for pit
bulls who can catch hogs, might be worth $500; its
picture may appear in Catch Dog Journal, published out
of Pearl River. The feral hog, by contrast, is worth
very little in rural Louisiana. 

It's nothing but a nuisance, people say. Some argue a
hog will otherwise die in a field, shot in the head by
an angry farmer. And so these folks feel no remorse
about removing the hogs' tusks with bolt cutters and
sending them out through a chute to face the charging
dogs. At least here, they say, the hogs survive most
of the time. 

Local authorities haven't seen anything wrong with it,
either. In both Washington Parish, where there are at
least three hog-dog rodeos every month, and East
Feliciana, where Harris started his event last year,
sheriff's deputies have pronounced them legal. 

But now a bill working its way through the Legislature
threatens to ban the contests, and hog-dog enthusiasts
and animal rights advocates -- once separated by both
culture and distance -- are poised to face off over an
issue that many are hearing about for the first time. 

On the one side, there are critics who call the
practice barbaric, torturous and tormenting, no better
than dog fighting, which is illegal, or cockfighting,
which is legal in Louisiana but also at issue during
this legislative session. 

Critics use words such as "spectacle" and "bloodbath"
to describe the shows, but those who come to the
hog-dog events shake their heads at city folks who,
they say, just don't understand. As the proponents see
it, hog hunting is part of the culture. Just last
year, the Legislature declared "Uncle Earl's Hog Dog
Trials" in Winnfield as the state's official hog-dog
event. And changes have been made to the bill in Baton
Rouge to make sure the Winnfield trials can go on. 

At Uncle Earl's, dogs keep hogs at bay, cornering them
without actually touching them, and the hogs still
have their tusks. It's a significant distinction, but
it doesn't impress those who participate in rodeos.
Pit bulls, they argue, are also used on hog hunts.
They are part of the same culture. They attack the hog
after the bay dogs have cornered it. And so, they say,
the rodeos, or "catches" as they call them, are
practice. 

Ban this, and the state will have to outlaw cow
roping, bull riding, deer hunting and, some say, even
the boiling of live crawfish. "What limits are you
going to set on cruelty?" asks Sam D'Aquilla, district
attorney for East and West Feliciana parishes. 

The question is a real one for D'Aquilla and, now, for
lawmakers as well. In the meantime, people will keep
coming to Harris' tin-roofed, steel-beamed, open-air
arena 10 miles outside of Clinton and just west of the
Amite River on Louisiana 63. 

They follow the signs, spray-painted on scrap tin and
posted on the side of the road. "Hog Dog Show," the
signs say. "Tonight. 6 p.m." When they arrive, Marty
King, a longtime friend of Harris', will be there to
take their $6 entrance fee and point them in the right
direction. 

Spectators to the left. Dog owners to the right. King
passes the time doodling on the tabletop near the cash
drawer. He sketches a rather accurate picture of a pig
on the run, and writes a brief message beneath it. 

"Come get some of this." 


No place to hide 

The door to the chute rattles open. The hog hesitates.
Eighty feet away, across the dusty pen, a pit bull
stands on its hind legs, held back by its owner. It
sees the hog. Its teeth are bared. It has been here
before and it knows what it has to do. But so does the
hog. It has no intention of going into the pen. 

Hugh Sims, 18, notices this and hits the hog in the
side with a cattle prod. He stands next to the caged
chute. He'll hit the hog again if he has to, and
others -- age 20, 15 and 11 -- stand on top of the
chute, herding the other hogs with shovels and broom
sticks. 

A moment passes. The hog darts out. It crosses the
orange line at its end of the pen, and the game is on.
The dog comes running. "Go get 'em! Go get 'em!" the
owner yells again and again, and the hog knows it's in
trouble. 

Instead of racing headlong into the dog at the center
of the pen, or scampering to a far corner, it turns
right back around and bangs its snout against the door
of the exit chute. It knows how to get out. But the
door is closed, and the dog pounces. 

Its teeth grab the hog's ear, and the hog, skittering
to the wall, goes down squealing. The "catch" took
five seconds, maybe 10. But it will take closer to a
minute, and the work of a few men, to pull the dog
away. 

One man kneels on the hog's chest. A second places a
boot on the hog's snout. A third takes the breakstick
-- a thin, dull, knife-like instrument -- and begins
to pry the dog's jaws loose. Two more men hover in the
dust until the job is done. 

At that point, one of them sprays the hog down with
apple vinegar. The organizers say it helps heal the
wounds. "In two days," Sims says, "it'll be scabbed
up. It'll be clean. Ready to go." But for now, it's
back through the chute into a smaller, caged pen where
the wounded animal mingles with a dozen other hogs. It
piles on top of them. When cornered, Harris says, hogs
"stack up like chickens." 

Still, he explains, they're dangerous, vicious
animals. A hog took off the top of his index finger
once, he says, brandishing the medically salvaged
digit. He turned his back on it for just a second, and
it attacked him. "I should have known better," he
says. 

Others have similar stories and the scars to go with
them. But they keep coming back with dogs named Trixie
or Honey, Boudreaux or Nitro. Most enter their dogs
for a fee -- at Harris' event the fees range from $15
to $35 -- which the winner recovers many times over.
Others are just there to watch. A few seem to enjoy
being in the pen, prying the dogs off the hogs, while
Harris kicks back on a raised platform above it all,
watching the show he created. 


'Family fun' 

It's not an original idea. For 15 to 20 years, the
United States Humane Society has condemned hog-dog
rodeos. Popular in the South, the rodeos have popped
up from the Florida Panhandle to the deserted prairies
of west Texas, spawning fans, merchandise, Web sites
and finally legal discussions. 

The Florida attorney general addressed them a decade
ago, saying the events clearly violated the
anti-cruelty laws already on the books. Texas did the
same. And a couple of months ago, Alabama authorities
arrested one hog-dog rodeo organizer after NBC
secretly taped the event and aired it on the local
news. 

But Henry Cabbage, a spokesman for the Florida Fish
and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said cruelty,
like obscenity, remains a matter of interpretation.
What might be considered cruelty in downtown Miami,
Cabbage explained, might be considered tradition in a
more remote part of Florida. Local authorities get to
decide. Other states are wrangling with similar
issues. 

In Mississippi last month, Attorney General Jim Hood
decided that "if the animals are fought, maimed,
wounded, injured, tormented or tortured, then the
practice would be illegal." But that would be
something for courts to decide, Hood concluded. 

Meanwhile, as Louisiana deliberates, the sport --
that's what organizers call it -- has spread. Harris
got the idea of starting his own hog-dog event after
he paid a visit to a rodeo in Washington Parish last
year. It was exciting, he thought. His son Jason
Harris, 19, compared it to watching a football game.
They bought Baby Girl that day and brought the puppy
home. 

That's where the training began. Chuck Harris caught
wild hogs in small cages, removed their tusks and then
put them in a ring with Baby Girl. She did well,
Harris says, and soon people were coming to test their
own dogs against hogs. 

A dozen people became 100, then more. Harris had to
start signing people in at a table at the end of the
long, winding driveway that leads back into the woods
to his original pen. Earlier this year, Harris and his
partner at the time, Kenny Miley, decided to move the
show out by the highway. 

Miley had some land down the road. There, it was
decided, they could build a real arena and a
concession stand and take the event to the next level.
Fliers went up. Word got around. And the place took
the name "Head-On Arena," because the hogs and the
dogs would meet there, head on. 

Harris hoped it would be a success. "Bring the family
and come enjoy the fun!!!" it says on the fliers. And
people did just that: Kids 10 and younger get in for
free. 

It all seemed to be going well until the neighbors got
involved, and what started as a complaint at a meeting
in a small town emerged as part of a statewide debate
about animal cruelty. 


The smell, the noise 

The problem, at first, had less to do with cruelty
than it did with more familiar complaints. R.P. Holley
and David Booker, who own property adjacent to the
arena, didn't like what the new residents had brought
to the quiet country neighborhood. 

The hogs smell, they told the members of the East
Feliciana Police Jury in March. The events are noisy.
Sometimes they drag on late into the night. Holley
says he and his wife have had to start living with the
windows closed and the air-conditioner running just to
drown out the sound. And then there was the matter of
the dead hogs. 

"I've seen that myself -- from my yard," Holley said.
"I saw them bury three pigs. They had a hole dug over
yonder and they carried the three dead pigs over
there, put them in a hole, and covered them up. 

"I saw one more dead a couple of weeks ago. They put
it on a little flatbed utility trailer, an 8-by-10
trailer, left and went down the road. Went south with
it. What he's done with it now, I couldn't tell you." 

He asked the police jurors to stop it. The jurors said
they couldn't. 

Lacking zoning laws, the parish doesn't have the
authority to shut down the event for noise violations,
explained jury President James Hunt. So informed, the
neighbors hoped Harris might get shut down for health
violations. He did not. And local authorities, who
visited the event along with State Police Sgt. Dennis
Stewart, said they couldn't do anything, either. 

"I tried to find some wrongdoing," said East Feliciana
Sheriff Talmadge Bunch. But there wasn't any, he
explained. First of all, Bunch said, "There was no
blood, no guts, nothing like that." Second of all, he
said, he didn't see anything wrong with using bolt
cutters to remove the hogs' tusks because, if given
the chance, hogs will "eat a dog, plumb down to the
quick." 

"I think it's a matter of perception," said Stewart,
who visited the rodeo with Bunch. "Would an animal
rights activist perceive that as cruelty to animals?
Probably. Would someone raised in the country, someone
who grew up branding and roping cows, and hunting
hogs, think so? Probably not." 

So the rodeo continued and the locals in Clinton got
to talking about this hog-dog thing down the road in
Bluff Creek. Some liked it. Some didn't. Many came to
see it out of curiosity, and many more decided they
would rather not see it at all. 

Hunt, the police jury president, counted himself in
the latter group, and Dwight Hill, a police juror, did
as well, figuring the animal rights folks would show
up and start picketing soon enough. 

Instead, they called Rep. Warren Triche, D-Thibodaux,
and got him to sponsor a bill that would ban hog-dog
rodeos. Last week it passed out of the House criminal
justice committee by a vote of 8-3, and Triche said
every animal activist group in the state was united in
support. 

But by the time the Legislature shut down for the
weekend, a couple of rural lawmakers were already
trying to derail the bill, using a procedural
maneuver, and they are likely to try again. 


Hooked on hogs 

"Are we ready to get started or what?" Jason Harris
asks his father outside the arena. 

"Yeah. We're ready." 

"Let's go." 

The announcer, Mike Wilson, climbs the steps to the
platform above the pen and welcomes the crowd of about
100 people, and maybe 25 dogs. It's small compared
with past shows, Chuck Harris says. But he expected as
much tonight -- the first night he has held the rodeo
on a Friday instead of a Saturday. 

He made the move so that his events won't conflict
with the popular rodeos in Washington Parish, and he
thinks it will be a good move long-term. Still, he
wishes more people would have shown up as he settles
into a chair and the announcer kicks off the evening's
action with a reading of the rules. 

Some are venerable: no dog fighting, no drugs, no
profanity and no cameras of any kind. Banning cameras,
Harris says, is something all the local hog-dog
organizers have agreed upon, because if an animal
really gets hurt and someone takes a picture of it,
"it will make you look bad." 

Other rules are new. 

"We will no longer tolerate attitude problems in or
outside the arena," says Wilson, reading a rule that
is also posted in the arena in large letters. There
have been arguments over whose dog was fastest to
catch a hog, concedes Amy Wilson, the announcer's
wife, who also works the event. It's timed, of course,
but disputes can arise nonetheless, especially when
money is on the line. And there have been other
problems as well. 

Specifically, some owners haven't acted fast enough to
pry their dogs off the hogs, Wilson says, which has
allowed some pit bulls to "tear the hog up." Now that
sort of thing has also been added to the list of
taboos, the crowd is informed. And anyone who breaks
the rule will "buy the hog." 

The announcer pauses for effect. A man in the pen
says, "Are we ready to dance?" A hog slides into the
caged chute. A dog named Trixie rears up on her hind
legs. They are 80 feet apart, and then they are right
on top of each other. 

One dog after the next, one hog after another, they
keep coming, their owners paying $10 a pop for untimed
"practice" runs. It's a chance to see what a dog's got
before the competition begins. And the crowd, once
scattered across the parking lot drinking beers,
gathers up close around the pen to watch and wait
their turn. 

Once you've seen it, they say, you want to get a dog
and try it. And once you try it, you don't want to
stop. Don Crawford, a 36-year-old tree trimmer, knows
that firsthand. "I've found my drug, if you will.
Right here," he says, nodding toward the pen with his
9-year-old daughter, Amber, and his 2-year-old pit
bull, Belle, at his feet. 

"Yes!" Amber shouts, thrusting her tiny fists into the
air a few moments later when Belle goes back into the
pen and takes down her second hog of the night. The
dog holds on tight. The hog squeals. And the little
girl, understanding what's at stake, has just one
question on her mind: "Is this still practice?" 

It is, but Crawford thinks his dog has "got a taste"
for the hog now, and the night is just beginning. Soon
they are taping a small hog's snout closed and letting
the children chase it. Then they are singing
"Freebird," drinking more beer and complaining about
all those people who want to interfere with their
lives. 

"It's just a bunch of rednecks, you know?" says Blue
Allen, 33, of Greensburg, who like many here considers
the term "redneck" a badge of honor. "It's just a
competition, man. A sport. It's just something to do.
Just something to do on weekends to stay out of
trouble." 

They argue that it's not as cruel as some people make
it out to be. They say the hogs are tough, and this is
good clean fun. And they make plans for the next day,
when many of them will gather elsewhere to do it all
over again. 

. . . . . . . 


Keith O'Brien can be reached at
kobrien at timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3452. 







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