Nonviolent Canine Disobedience

By: Benjamin Isaac-Krauss

Retired and waiting for adoption at a greyhound adoption center in Victoria, Australia. Sometimes the dogs wait six months for a new home. Credit: Jo-Anne MacArthur / We Animals, 2010

Some years ago, I spent a year living and working on a Palestinian farm in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The farm was on a hill surrounded on every side by Israeli settlements. I was there with other young people from around the world to provide an international presence that would deter Israeli settlers from stealing the land, destroying crops, or worse. While I was there to stand with the oppressed Palestinian people, the animals I was put in charge of taught me a deeper lesson about liberation I had not considered before.

One of my responsibilities on the farm was to tend to the animals. There were two horses, three goats, ten chickens, a flock of pigeons, and five dogs. All of these animals had a strong will for freedom but it was not only my job to feed and clean them but also to lock them in their cages and repair the fences. Their will for freedom conflicted with my role.

While the goats rammed me with their heads and the horses sometimes tried to run away or kick me, our dogs employed a different strategy. During lunch or dinner, they would always break out of their cage and run around barking to protest their lack of food. Every time they did this, I would need to interrupt my own meal and catch them.
Then the strange thing happened.

When I would catch them, they would more often lie numb on the ground and stretch their feet out towards me. They did not try to bite me: they just lay there.
I tried to convince them to go back to their cages by telling them it is my duty to lock them up and that I was sorry I did not have more food for them.

No reaction.

Next, I petted them and promised to try and get extra food though I knew there was none.
No reaction.

On a lucky day I would by chance have some extra food and they would follow me to their cage, thereby achieving one of their main demands — food — while giving up the other — freedom. But most days the escalation would go on. I would grab their scruff and try to walk with them, but they would remain numb, making the task more difficult. In the end, I would need to carry them to their cage and find out where they escaped and repair it before they broke out again. (All in the dark, of course, since it got dark at half past five.) A little later — sometimes a half-an-hour, sometimes two days — they would break out again, using a new hole. When I caught them, they would go numb again. Little by little, they wore me down.

One evening, the dogs actually escaped three times by removing a heavy stone and pushing themselves through the resulting hole at the bottom of the fence. That night, I left them outside and only re-incarcerated them the next morning. At some point, I realized they were using nonviolent civil disobedience against me. But since they were dogs, I decided to call it nonviolent canine disobedience.

They refused to give up their freedom, but they also knew that violence wouldn’t get them anywhere. If they bit me, I would get really aggressive and have justification to treat them worse. But their nonviolent discipline exposed me as the aggressor I was and the other volunteers started reproaching me for putting them in the cage. Their actions were successful at shifting the spectrum of allies.

When I reviewed Gene Sharp’s list of 194 nonviolent tactics, I discovered that the dogs were using at least four strategies in their nonviolent freedom struggle against me:

1. Sit-In (or Lie-in)
2. Noncooperation
3. Crossing fences (escaping from the cage and entering the volunteers’ area)
4. Boycott (one of the dogs refused to eat the extra food I gave him to lure him into the cage)

One working definition of nonviolence I have encountered says this: Nonviolent resistance is used by or on behalf of the oppressed, serves to end their oppressions, and challenges the humanity of the oppressor to stop oppressing.

There are two parties: Oppressed and Oppressors. And nonviolence is the “weapon” of the oppressed.

So, if the dogs were using nonviolence, they were the oppressed.

But wait a minute! That made me the oppressor!

But I’m not an oppressor! I was just doing my job! The dogs have to be in the cage or else they poop everywhere, drag litter from the enormous pile of junk in front of the farm, and scare the tourists!  And I’m even nice to the dogs! Some of my best friends are dogs! There is even a dog we don’t put in the cage because he’s so cute and fluffy.

But these statements are the arguments used by oppressors all over the world — especially those who serve the state by protecting the status quo: from cops who shoot black men to the Israeli soldiers who manage the occupation. When I lived in Palestine, I would see Israeli soldiers whenever I left the farm. They were the same age I was. They were pawns of the occupation. Many of them hated standing at a checkpoint all day, making Palestinians wait the whole time. But it was their job and both men and women are required by law to serve in the military (unless they are Orthodox or pregnant).

These young people are stuffed into uniforms, given guns, and told to keep those terrorists from getting stupid ideas. It’s like Yehuda Shaoul from Breaking the Silence said during my delegation with Christian Peacemaker Teams: “I’ll give you a gun and you can try to control a thousand people who are waiting at the checkpoint. It only works with fear. So you count them and harass every 10th Palestinian. It’s as simple as that.”

At some point, I realized that the dogs had worn me down through their nonviolent canine disobedience and I had responded by escalating the conflict. To keep them from breaking out I put bigger stones around the fence. I thought about throwing them into the cage next time I caught them and rationalized my cruelty by telling myself that if I opened the door the dogs who were already incarcerated would escape. I started to feel a decrease in my motivation to give them food or to spray them against lice. My boss, seeing how the dogs were growing, suggested that we separate them into bigger cages and put them on the corners of the farm so they could each be watchdogs and have more space.

More space, but also solitary confinement.

Throughout my time on the farm, I wrestled with what to do with these dogs. At times I grew aggressive towards them, but in my dreams I found a way to join them, running around howling at the moon at night. The contradiction inside myself kept growing right until I left the farm to start college. The year was not enough time for me to defect from my position of oppression, but the experience left me wondering how many Israeli soldiers dream of dropping their guns and joining hands with the people they have been taught to fear.

It has also left me wondering how creative nonviolent resistance can help them make the scary decision to defect from their familiar world of cages and domination to a new world without cages.

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Benjamin Isaak-Krauss continues to wrestle with what it means for a rich young ruler like himself to follow a God who is on the side of liberation. This question has brought him many places from farming in Palestine, to working with refugees in Greece and France, and most recently to Elkhart, Indiana, where he is studying peace studies and theology with a concentration in creation care at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. This semester he is on a farm again, as part of Merry Lea’s Sustainability Leadership Semester. Luckily, there are no dogs to be caged and all the animals have enough food.

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