BRATTLEBORO — Whether you are an avowed dog lover or have merely found yourself smiling at the antics of a puppy, the documentary One Nation Under Dog is a film well worth seeing.
The film is divided into three segments that, taken together, explore the complicated and often-eccentric relationships people have with dogs.
The first segment, “Fear,” could have just as easily been titled “Failure.” Focusing on a dog bite case in Connecticut, it's apparent that both the bite victims and the dogs were failed - the former by a legal system that should have done more to protect them, and the latter by owners who didn't do enough to manage and train them.
Of note, and something not discussed in the film, is that research has shown that there is a correlation between the methods used to train dogs and their level of aggressiveness.
The more force and pain used to train, the more aggression a dog displays. That the dogs with bite histories in the film are seen wearing both shock and choke collars is likely no mere coincidence.
The second segment, “Loss,” looks at the intense emotional responses that owners have to their pets. The extremes of a culture that produces people who can, without a second thought, spend $155,000 to clone a beloved pet, yet at the same time allows conditions that lead to the killing of millions of a dogs a year, will provide fodder for anthropologists and psychologists for decades to come.
“Betrayal,” the final segment, confronts - with brutal honesty - the realities of dog overpopulation. This portion of the film should be required watching before anyone steps into a pet shop or goes online to buy a puppy.
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The film highlights the contradiction of dogs as the recipients of our best intentions and also the victims of our worst inclinations.
How we think about the animals lauded as our best friends may be best described in this quote by Henry Beston.
“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.
“In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
“They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
It is up to us to determine the shape and quality of the nets we are entwined in together. Animals' lives and our humanity might very well be defined by how we choose to do so.