It’s not a good time to be an American XL Bully. The breed, an extra-large pitbull variant, has been blamed for a threefold rise in fatal dog attacks in the UK; after a series of high-profile maulings, bullies have today been added to the list of breeds restricted under the Dangerous Dogs Act.
Incidents involving the dogs have been met with a bizarre insistence from some quarters that no, there is nothing especially dangerous about the XL bully. The RSPCA has long opposed ‘breed-specific legislation’, and denies that any breed of dog – including those bred for fighting, or, in the case of one prohibited breed, hunting down escaped slaves – poses more of a risk than another. The Dogs Trust put forward a representative on BBC Breakfast last month to remind us that ‘all dogs can bite’. (This may be so, of course, but not all dogs weigh up to 75 kilograms and are capable of killing fully grown adults unprovoked). Even Boris Johnson weighed in, saying that ‘it’s not the dog that’s the problem, it’s the owner’.
It’s not clear why these organisations have adopted such a ‘dogmatic’ approach, when the evidence seems to point so clearly towards the conclusion that dogs selected for violence are, well, violent – or at least, more predisposed to violence than others.
But it taps into a wider intellectual fashion that considers humans – and by extension, perhaps, also animals – to be blank slates, with nothing pre-written and our character and traits determined by the environment and random chance.
It’s a view that’s easier to hold than ever in today’s virtualised world. Once, broods of siblings and cousins might have illustrated that children raised in the same environment can have strikingly different temperaments and abilities. But now that we have smaller families, and have them later, it is possible for a person to pass most of their life without seeing this demonstration of innateness first-hand. Few of us have jobs that ask much in terms of physical strength (especially those like academics, journalists, and politicians, who are most influential in shaping public opinion), making it easier to persist in the pretence that men are not generally stronger than women. And we no longer live in close proximity to farming and the selective breeding of animals, which provided a regular reminder that behavioural traits are heritable.
As well as this, an extreme belief in nurture over nature is often much more politically comfortable than the alternative. For many, even the most hypothetical discussion on the subject of heredity and biological determinism is enough to set the ‘eugenics’ alarm bells ringing. If human traits were not heritable, then eugenics would be impossible. This means that the belief that traits are heritable takes you one step closer to thinking eugenics could be possible, which in turn is one step closer to thinking it could be advisable. Therefore, using the logic of guilt by association, believing that genes influence behaviour is morally suspect. This caution is understandable, if perhaps overzealous once it gets to the point of denying differences between breeds of dog.
An extreme belief in nurture over nature is often much more politically comfortable than the alternative
But the denial about inborn characteristics goes deeper than that. Progressive politics rests on an unspoken assumption of perfectibility: the idea that by addressing bias and injustice, we can move, bit by bit, towards utopia. We see this in the taboo around acknowledging that crime is not solely explained by poverty and disadvantage – that humans’ innate capacity for selfishness and violence also plays a role. We see it in today’s disability activism, which in its most extreme form maintains that being blind or deaf is only a hindrance because insufficient accommodations are made by wider society, and cannot admit that with all the accommodations in the world, having these disabilities would still be a profound disadvantage. And we see it in the insistence that ‘incels’ can’t get a date only because of their bitter and misogynist attitudes, and the refusal to acknowledge that some people, through no fault of their own, are simply unattractive.
Hereditarianism is the ultimate blow to the idea of an unstoppable march towards equality. If people innately start out on different footings – if some people have written into their genes that they will be less intelligent than others, or less attractive, or more impulsive and therefore more predisposed to commit crime – that is fundamentally unfair. The unfairness cannot be attributed to societal injustice that can be fought; it’s unfair because life is unfair. This cannot be fixed, only mitigated.
But mitigate it we must – and when it really comes down to it, people typically understand this. A particularly glaring illustration comes from the RSPCA itself. Despite publicly arguing for ‘breed neutrality’ when it comes to legislating against dangerous dogs, the RSPCA’s own pet insurance small print includes a long list of breeds it won’t cover – including the American bully. It seems there’s one attitude to denying the facts when there’s a widely distributed risk to public safety, and another when their own money is at stake.
Many of us make similar adjustments in our own lives, too. At a conference last summer, a biologist was talking to me about her discomfort with a recent book that makes the case that intelligence is heritable. But then, surprisingly, she quite candidly admitted that she knew she was being hypocritical: ‘when my wife and I choose a sperm donor to have kids with’, she said, ‘all of this goes out the window of course’. When the discussion is purely academic, all sorts of objections can be floated: IQ only measures test-taking ability, people’s upbringing and attitude matters far more, et cetera. But when your own child’s future prospects are on the line, it’s a different story.
Then there’s agriculture. Though it now takes place out of sight rather than under our noses, the selective breeding of farmed animals and plants has not stopped. Huge corporations now carry out this process on an enormous scale, armed with data and tools our ancestors could barely have dreamed of. Whenever you eat a quick-growing, feed-efficient chicken, blight-resistant wheat, or a seedless banana, you are eating the product of selective breeding. The proof of its effectiveness is in the money saved every time we shop, and in the calories and nutrients that build each of our bodies.
Our approach to hereditarianism when the personal stakes are higher reveals that deep down, we know it to be true. Genes matter, as well as upbringing. It’s time we were able to say so for the sake of the public good as well as for private gain.
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