Vicious

 The New York Times ran an eccentric "man bites dog"–type story yesterday (or, perhaps it is more accurate to say here, a "dog bites man; man smites dog" story) about a 120-pound Anatolian Shepherd named Bruce whose supporters filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay his execution, after a state court had earlier judged him to be incorrigibly "vicious" and ordered him put down. 

Given that the Supreme Court routinely allows human beings to be killed in state and federal death chambers across the country, year after year, it should perhaps not surprise us that they failed to intervene in this case to stop Bruce's euthanasia. Indeed, it would in many ways be grotesque if they had allowed the dog to live when they have not bothered to do as much for so many men and women. 

(Plus the Times article suggests the state ultimately moved so fast to euthanize Bruce that the Court had not even acted on the filing one way or the other before his death.)

But, here as elsewhere, I'd rather level up than down. The Court ought to have long since declared the death penalty unconstitutional for humans, under the eighth amendment, and abolished it across the country. Then we could have a healthy debate as well over the state's power to order the deaths of animals. 

But in the meantime, instead, we have the worst of both worlds. We have a Supreme Court that spares neither human nor canine life, while with the same hand issuing sweeping immunity to the president of the United States from any criminal liability for his official acts—even if they be acts of murder, extrajudicial killing, and illegal wars of aggression (such as Trump has been carrying out around the globe). 

It's hard to escape the feeling, then, that Bruce's fate reflects that "hypocrisy, falsity, and callousness of the Law" that Hugh MacDiarmid wrote about, which "hauls to the scaffold / A poor woman sick at both ends [...] yet kisses the bloody hands of mass murderers..." 

It is said that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners, and I believe it. There are some bad Supreme Court justices and politicians too. I am reminded of Lord Byron's observations in his "Epitaph to a Dog":

... the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,

[...] Unhonour'd falls, unnotic'd all his worth,

Deny'd in heaven the Soul he held on earth:

While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,

And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

Byron goes on, in words that could well be applied to our Supreme Court majority today: 

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,

Debas'd by slavery, or corrupt by power,

Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,

Degraded mass of animated dust!

And to those who protest, "but Bruce was judged 'vicious'"—the same was said of Byron's Boatswain, whose memory the poem honors. 

As A.L. Rowse notes in his book The Byrons and the Trevanions, it is said that Boatswain was "mad" at the time of his death—most likely perishing of rabies. (Rowse therefore reads the poem as insincere, but I think this just shows a lack of emotional and moral imagination on Rowse's part. Wikipedia tells us His Lordship nursed the dog himself even after Boatswain's infection.)

Regardless of last-minute appeals and protests, however, the Times reports, Bruce "was euthanized Wednesday afternoon before the justices had an opportunity to act." Like the lad in Shrewsbury jail in Housman's poem, then, he "hear[d] the stroke of eight / And not the stroke of nine."

Looking at pictures of Bruce that are included in the article, I felt a sudden intense sadness.

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same, as Philip Larkin writes in "The Mower."

His closing admonition to us in that poem also bears repeating as we reflect on Bruce's fate—and the fate of tens of humans executed every year in this country—and the fate of our democracy: 

we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.