Opening up my internet browser this morning, I was unaware that today marked the anniversary of the start of a somewhat recent American event. After seven years, this date has been pushed aside by so many other events in my country that it has been all but forgotten by people such as myself. When I read the one-line Yahoo! News headline that read “Little fanfare for 7th anniversary of war in Iraq” this morning, I was overtaken by so many thoughts and emotions that I could not help but cry. The article text was unimportant for me because as an American, I have seen what the article spoke about live on television in my living room. The “shock and awe”, the fall of the statue, and the explosions of IEDs. I have also seen the hundreds of news stories over the years about soldiers and their families who have been affected so greatly because of physical/mental injuries or death. Now that it is the year 2010 and this war is heading into its 8th year, the images of the war that were once so controversial and talked about have completely faded away into the background of American life.

Toward the end of 2009, there were over 100,000 troops still stationed in Iraq as the issues in Afghanistan were escalating. 100,000 men and women is a lot of people who have to be away from their homes and families for such a substantial amount of time. However, that was irrelevant to the American news media. I remember going to my physical therapist’s office several times a week from October to December, and in the therapy room they had CNN on for general news headlines. One day there was a small headline at the bottom of the screen that scrolled by and said that the number of troops station in Iraq would begin to drop below 100,000 in 2010. This was never actually mentioned on the air by the news anchors or reporters. Instead, almost the entire newscast for days – if not weeks – was about pro-golfer Tiger Woods and his marital issues¹. I was absolutely infuriated. I didn’t care that there were other people in the therapy room so I simply started to rant about how offended and disgusted I was about Tiger Woods’ personal life getting more attention and reporting than the war in Iraq. I must have gone on for 15 minutes – all while CNN happily continued to show a video reel of Tiger Woods and his career – before I was so frustrated that I had to stop what I was saying just to finish my therapy session. However, all of the other patients in the therapy room, as well as the therapy workers, spoke up and agreed with me as they added their 2 cents worth. Even the people who didn’t verbally speak up nodded in agreement to the words myself and the other patients said. Even though we were all vastly different in age and background, we all agreed that it was a genuine disservice and insult to the over 100,000 troops still stationed over in Iraq and their families.

When, how, and why did America become more interested with moral scandal and celebrity gossip versus our own soldiers? After September 11th, 2001, our nation was brought together in such patriotism and unity because our country and all it stands for was viciously attacked. People put aside politics for a while and just became Americans. We honored each other as American citizens whether we were 1st generation citizens or 100th generation citizens. We came together and honored our country, what it stands for, and what it was created for. Students don’t learn about American history – including history before our country was even formed – for absolutely nothing. That history is vital to reminding us, the modern day American citizens, of where we came from as a country and what it really means when you say “I am American.” America is a huge “melting pot” with every nationality represented. Our citizens have heritage and ancestry from across the globe, including myself. Yet a whole lot of us associate ourselves with the term “American” regardless of our heritage. That single word doesn’t represent the color of our skin, our cultural traditions, or our language. It represents our entire history and why the country exists today, including the fact that our citizens have differing skin colors, traditions, and languages. We are a country of many, and the term “American” has always meant that. So when I see these national news headlines splattered across websites and my television that are completely concerned with trivial and shallow topics like celebrity drug abuse and scandal, how popular Twitter has become, and how David Beckham can’t play in the 2010 World Cup, I am pretty damn disgusted. What happened to the news on our own citizens fighting and dying over in Iraq and Afghanistan? I could have sworn that was a little more important.

People say they support the troops these days, and some of them I believe. You see people driving around with the “Support the Troops” ribbons stuck to their cars, and sometimes I wonder, “Do they really think about that often enough?” People who haven’t had a family member go into battle somewhere probably cannot understand what it is genuinely like to have war brought into your own home. My immediate family does not include any past or present service men or women, but both sides of my family have extremely strong roots in serving America in warfare. My father’s side of the family currently has Iraq war veterans and Vietnam veterans, as well as veterans past from long ago such as the American Civil War (1861-1865), the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and the French and Indian War (1754-1763). My mother’s father² who I had the chance to know for several years before his passing, served in Word War II. He was awarded four Bronze Stars³ during his time in Europe in the US Army, and is by all means an American hero for things he did in that war to help his army comrades and foreign strangers alike. So, even though I do not have any immediate family members to relate to the Iraq war, I understand greatly the emotional sacrifices the soldiers and their families go through because it’s their duty. Right now I believe America is so caught up in the politics of the war itself – such as why we went there in the first place – that we forget entirely about the people who are still over there. Our politicians and leaders somehow feel the need to justify why we went, or why we shouldn’t have went, and so many other things; after 7 years, that is all kind of irrelevant. We are there, we made a mess, our troops are there by the thousands, and we need to take responsibility regardless of why we went over there to begin with.

From all that I have seen in the past 7 years, people that are my age and younger do not understand what war really consists of. It has been so glorified by movies, video games, comic books, tv shows, and other junk that young adults and adolescents think it’s “cool” or something similar. There is no way war is “cool” in any situation. You don’t think people just go to war to have fun, do you? I don’t think the families of all the people buried at Arlington National Cemetery would say that. I don’t think any surviving veterans of any war – regardless of country – would say that, either. War isn’t just a word with one singular definition that explains every aspect of it. That is utterly impossible and always will be. War can be about anything in the world. From religion, to land ownership, to racial rights, to absolutely anything you can imagine. Why a war is started is nothing in compared to what goes on during a war. People think seeing men blown up by rockets and grenades is entertaining when they are playing a video game or watching some action film; I don’t think it would be very entertaining if you were in that situation where it could be you that is wiped off the face of the earth at any second.

Today is March 19th, 2010 and the Iraq war has been going on for 7 years. Even though we don’t hear about it at all, it’s still there. Our men and women are still there. Our money and investments are still there. Yet right now, America is not paying attention to it. More so, Americans are not paying attention to America. How did that become the norm here? More importantly, when will people realize that we have to think of our country first before ourselves? Ultimately, everything that this country does as a whole affects every person who lives here. If Americans are living in some state of delusion about that, it’s time for them to wake up and snap out of it. So America, are you listening?

On Friday, February 19th, 2010, it was released to the public that Daddy, a 16-year old male pit bull and number one sidekick of “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan, had passed away. I do not watch Cesar’s show very often, but who owned Daddy was completely irrelevant to me when I heard this news. The words that struck me so intensely and created such an emotional reaction in me were the ones that spoke of how Daddy – a member of a “bad breed” of dog – helped to prove to the public that pit bulls, and other canine breeds with bad reputations, are not born being aggressive and vicious. Daddy was quite the opposite which resulted in him being the perfect example of how even a feared breed of dog can easily be loving, dedicated, and calm.

In just the past 24 hours, I have heard so many uplifting stories from complete strangers across the world wide web about “bad breeds” of dogs; some people owned pit bulls, some owned rottweilers, some owned mixed breed dogs, and some didn’t own one at all. Regardless of the actual scenario, every person I have heard from has said the same thing: these notorious breeds of dogs can be just as loving and sweet as any other domesticated breed of dog out there. It is how a human treats and acknowledges the individual dog that can make them into violent and dangerous animals.

As a person who has grown up in a family that loves a dog of a notoriously “dangerous” breed, this all hit very close to home in every sense of the phrase. My family doesn’t own a pit bull, rottweiler, or other well-known domesticated breed of dog. We were instead blessed with the chance to adopt a wolfdog¹, or a wolf-dog hybrid (as the breed is called by the American Veterinary Medical Association). When we adopted our dog from the Arizona Human Society in 1996, it was illegal to own a wolfdog as a pet, and thus his original owners had lied about his breed to simply be able to have him in their home. Due to his behavior – which is extremely different than a domesticated dog – they gave him to the AZ Humane Society and we were able to adopt him. Since 1996, though, there has been a huge amount of positive progress in terms of public education and legislative changes in the state of Arizona concerning wolves and the wolfdog breeds. It is now legal to own a wolfdog – even without a permit – here in Arizona, and the overall image of the wolfdog has begun to rapidly change for the better.

While Arizona has seen leaps and bounds in the understanding of these beautiful animals, many other states in the USA have not. A large majority of the states in the USA completely prohibit wolfdogs, such as Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, and Illinois (just to name a few). What really disturbs me the most about the laws against owning wolfdogs is the actual worded phrases in the legislation that is made public. Connecticut, in particular, has some of the most poorly written legislation I have ever read concerning animal ownership (including wolfdogs):

“No person shall possess a potentially dangerous animal. Any such animal illegally possessed may be ordered seized and may be disposed of as determined by the Commissioner of Environmental Protection.”

The first sentence is really what reveals that the people who wrote the legislation have fallen victim to the myths about supposedly dangerous breeds of dogs. There is the potential for any dog to be dangerous. I have heard stories on the local news about dogs of the more popular and beloved breeds attacking people as they please here in my own state. There have been German Shepherd attacks on grown men all the way to Chihuahua attacks on small children. Whether a particular dog breed will viciously attack at random is not something that can be documented with 100% accuracy. This is simply because every dog will learn behaviors in a unique way based on their human owner. If the human owner does not properly enforce boundaries, give love and affection, or pay genuine respect to their dog(s), the dog can easily develop poor behavior because they have not been consistently taught otherwise. This is especially true for the so-called “bad breeds” of dogs, including wolfdogs. The term “poor behavior” does not mean “violent behavior” all the time, either. Violent and aggressive behavior in a dog is the result of reinforcement of it from a human. There are many police canine units in this country where dogs are trained to be “attack dogs” on command. Those dogs can do some serious damage to someone if they are sent to attack; in theory, that is a “potentially dangerous” animal. However, those canine attack dogs used by the police force have been trained to be aggressive only when permitted by their master. It is widely known that the attack dogs used by police units live with their master and his/her family, and thus have been called some of the best family pets to ever be placed into a home. Even though they do have the potential to be dangerous and hurt someone significantly, they do not exhibit that potential because they have learned how to behave around humans with a particular attitude, demeanor, and personality.

Training a dog is not just about teaching the dog how to “sit” or “stay” with a verbal command. In fact, the “more aggressive” dog breeds need more training in other somewhat abstract areas versus learning simple behaviors. This became extremely apparent to my family in regards to our wolfdog after we adopted him. Wolfdogs are more so at the very tip of the canine training spectrum, and thus the typical obedience classes and techniques do not usually work for developing good behavior in the breed. Many of the “bad breeds” of dogs have a specific need to decipher the ranking hierarchy of power in their family, human or canine. Our wolfdog is the lone dog in our family, but he knows the hierarchy of our “pack” and that he is not the “pack leader”. He treats each member of our hierarchy very differently based on where they stand in the “pack” and what their responsibilities are in the family. Regardless of our position, our dog always treats us with respect and acknowledges our individual roles in our family. Therefore, we show him the same respect and acknowledgment that he gives us. A dog such as a wolfdog or even a domestic pit bull will not tolerate disrespect and neglect. When those begin to occur, the potential for aggression and violence starts to form.

Cesar and Daddy were a clean, textbook example of how a “pack leader” should treat another “pack member” below them in the hierarchy. They respected each other completely, reacted to each other’s behaviors and emotions, and still showed affection at the same time. To be honest, this would have been the case regardless of the whether Daddy was a pit bull or not. All dogs need guidance and acknowledgment from a leader, whether their leader is their “master” or their “pack leader”. They are animals, and thus have an entirely different behavioral and thinking system than we humans do. You cannot treat a dog like a human because a dog cannot understand the rationale and logic behind certain behaviors that we – as people – may find obvious. Thus, we as humans cannot simply expect and assume our dogs will obey our every command and be perfect companions. Dog owners need to think like a dog because dogs do not have the ability to think like a human. We need to accommodate them, not the other way around.

Right now there are a huge amount of states in the USA that still have severe limitations on ownership of certain dog breeds besides the wolfdog. Outside of the USA, there are many provinces and territories in other nations that have harsh laws against particular breeds, too. If you are an animal lover or pet owner, please find out what your state/territory/province/etc says about dog ownership for particular breeds and what the consequences of illegal ownership are. I am sure a lot of you will be surprised to find that dogs that are owned illegally – regardless of their temperament or past behavior – can be “ordered seized” and “may be disposed of” as the laws of Connecticut so finely state. The human owners of these dogs may also be fined, lose home insurance coverage, or even be charged with a crime.

Is it really a crime punishable by law to love, respect, and acknowledge one of these dogs in our homes? Or is the perception of ignorant and misinformed humans that certain dogs are a public safety risk simply becoming more accepted than the truth behind a different species? If we say that “the dog is man’s best friend”, then why in the world is man becoming dog’s worst enemy? This needs to stop.