Out of the Pit and Eco-Trauma

Out of the Pit amplifies the negative consequences of environmental trauma without providing any hope for rehabilitation. By documenting the rigorous and vicious training canine ring fighters endure as gang dogs in Chicago, these dogs have no Zen training to transform them from deadly monster to companion species, despite serving as pets for gang members. Combining interviews with archival footage and direct cinema, Out of the Pit reveals the torturous process implemented to prepare dogs for battle and its long historical roots. 

Dogfighting grew out of centuries of battling canines. In a brief historical overview, the documentary explains that dogs were trained for war as early as 3500 B.C. Mastiffs fought along with the Romans around 50 A.D. By 1100 A.D., pit dogs fought against a variety of animals, including bulls. These pit fights continued into the nineteenth century when the British Mastiff was bred with shorter and faster dogs. By 1835, bull baiting was outlawed, and dogfighting took hold in Britain and the U.S. The pit bull terrier bred for speed, tenacity, and loyalty to humans proved most adapted to the ring. The American pit bull used in most contemporary dogfights serves as evidence of this long history of canine soldiers. Although dogfighting was banned in most of the U.S. in the 1970s, it is still legal to attend fights and possess fighting dogs in some states. And the popularity of the sport in the last 20 or so years has outpaced police response.

The sport has a clear structure, according to the documentary, normalizing the environmental trauma endured by the fighting dogs. The Humane Society outlines three levels of dog fights: professional fight organizations with large kennels and training facilities, hobbyists who may breed and sell dogs within the county and state, and gang related street fighters who raise and haphazardly train pit bulls in their neighborhoods. Pit bulls still are the dog of choice. They are aggressive, loyal, and eager to please, willingly returning to battle even when badly injured. Archival footage shows the training techniques used at the professional level. These are elaborate and intense, with regimens that include running on treadmills and swimming in pools and irrigation ditches, ingesting steroids and hormones, living isolated lives to foster aggressive behavior, developing stronger jaw muscles, and suffering dehydration to limit bleeding. Street fighting rings emulate these techniques in miniature, training dogs more quickly and recruiting neighborhood children to participate in the training. 

Out of the Pit takes the time to show the procedure during actual fights, as well. Although held in private homes instead of larger facilities, street fights follow the same format as professional fights.  The rounds continue until they are no longer capable of going in for the fight. Fights usually last for about 45 minutes but may last as long as five hours. The dogs suffer serious injuries, of course, and they are shown in shock, dehydrated, and bleeding to death by the end of the fights. Fight footage shows the pain and suffering they endure. 

Professionals may treat their dogs as commodities meant to be preserved. But street fighters punish losing dogs by setting them on fire or shooting them.  Despite the contempt police officers, veterinarians, and Humane Society officials show for these street fighters and their torturous treatment of dogs, the documentary offers no hope for pit bulls rescued from the ring. Instead, detailed scenes with county veterinarians reveal that all of the dogs will be euthanized once the gang’s court cases are settled. In Out of the Pit, the environmental trauma faced by fighting dogs always leads to death.

Dogs and Eco-trauma in One Nation Under Dog (2012) and City of Dogs (2016)

In documentaries exploring negative relationships between humans and dogs, people tend to de-personalize dogs, seemingly justifying the terrible suffering they endure. In part three of One Nation Under Dog, for example, animal shelter employees must ameliorate massive dog overpopulation and the overcrowded kennels that results. As the film declares, there are more than three million homeless dogs, and more than 70% of them are routinely euthanized in animal shelters. The documentary takes the time to show viewers the terrible suffering these dogs endure when placed in canine gas chambers. Well-behaved dogs are walked by leash to the chamber and piled on top of one another. The chamber is closed and locked, and the attendant starts the gas. Dogs howl and scream in pain before the gas silences them. When the attendant opens the chamber, we see the lifeless corpses. Now flattened with death, they provide room for another layer of dogs in the chamber. This time the attendant brings in dozens of puppies and drops them on top, again closing and locking the lid. The high-pitched yelps and howls are painful to hear. And when they too grow silent, a dump truck rolls up to take them all to a rendering plant. These dogs are not pets or even subjects. They are trash.

This segment of One Nation Under Dog depersonalizes dogs, so they can be more readily and easily killed. City of Dogs—an episode of Louis Theroux’s LA Stories series--bastardize the relationship between humans and dogs, turning the bond into a vicious and vindictive connection built on blood and driven by commerce and power. Set on the south side of Los Angeles, City of Dogs showcases the chaotic world of gang dogs and the limited solutions for these delinquent canines. As a patrolling pit bull enthusiast exclaims, “It is hard to choose which one to kill today.” Dogs are left behind when homes are foreclosed. Others are bred as puppies and thrown out of their homes, remaining unclaimed when they go back home. They are in pain and suffering from hunger worms, and fleas, and the pit bull enthusiast wants to help as many of them as possible find a new home. Their alternative is death in a dog ring or an overcrowded shelter like that found in One Nation Under Dog. In this violent section of LA, residents even train these dogs to attack assailants. After fighting and killing other dogs, though, these dogs are deemed monstrous menaces and euthanized. There is no hope for rehabilitation.

Only a Zen dog trainer finds hope in these violent canine weapons and retrains a violent German Shepherd. When he removes its muzzle, it doesn’t attack. As the trainer explains, “We created it. It is not what we wanted. Why should we have to deal with aggressive dogs?” but he “hasn’t met a dog that must be destroyed.” The object is to “exist with him emotionally in the moment instead of teaching commands,” and after several training sessions, dogs sometimes become rehabilitated. The documentary explains that dogs are “among us but not truly of us. They are a colonized species whose chief flaw is to misunderstand us.” Many dogs in shelters and on the streets live like death row inmates, waiting for their inevitable destruction. In City of Dogs, the only hope is to accept dogs as companion species, existing with them as does the Zen trainer who successfully retrains attack dogs.

Homeless Children on Film: The Search for Home

Film has explored the plight of homeless children since its beginnings. And a few show these children constructing and reconstructing ecology into something more like a home.  A Lumiere view from 1896 shows Indochina youth chasing coins and rice thrown by their white colonizers. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character adopts a homeless boy in The Kid (1921). But in Wild Boys of the Road(1933), two boys leave home during the Depression to relieve their parents’ economic woes. In Wild Boys, Eddie (Frankie Darro) and Tommy (Edwin Phillips) join Sally (Dorothy Coonan) and a group of boys and girls hopping trains and looking for work and community in both rural and urban settings. One scene in particular highlights their ability to adapt to their tragic environment, reconstructing a “Sewer City” into viable homes. 

After WWII, films of various genres include homeless characters searching for and sometimes adapting their environment into homes. A B-Western, Song of Arizona (1946) centers on preserving a ranch for wayward boys.  The second segment of Rosselini’s war drama Paisan(1946), which is set in Naples, ends with a military police officer taking a young thief home to a community living in caves under the most primitive conditions.   The historical drama Border Street (1948) highlights the trauma that orphaned children suffered in the Warsaw Ghetto by contrasting their tragic environment with that of deluded Hitler Youth.  In the comic fantasy Miracle in Milan (1951), orphaned homeless teenager Toto (Francesco Golisano) builds a communal shantytown for hoboes with the help of a magic dove. A homeless child even appears in the comic The Betty Hutton Show in 1959. 

The stories of homeless children grow more tragic in fictional films from the 1980s. Hector Babenco’s crime drama, Pixote (1981) highlights the devolution of a ten-year-old boy Pixote (Fernando Ramos da Silva) after police arrest him for vagrancy. Life in the detention center is deadly, but life on the street to which Pixote escapes is almost as hard. Another crime drama, Salaam Bombay (1988) and an animated film, Grave of the Fireflies (1988), illustrate the diversity of films about homeless children during this period, but also show how difficult it is to transform hellish environments into homes. 

More recent features provide hopeful resolutions for homeless children adapting hostile environments into homes, especially when responsible adults intervene. In Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated Central Station (1998), the orphaned Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira) spends only a few nights alone in a train station before Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) takes him in and eventually reunites him with his older brothers. Pursuit of Happyness (2006) provides a similar narrative of self-realization, with father Chris (Will Smith) caring for his son Christopher (Jaden Smith) in a subway bathroom only temporarily while he pedals his invention and interns with a brokerage firm. A Gentile Polish sewer worker hides Polish Jewish children in sewers during the German occupation in In Darkness (2011). All these films highlight the search for home and the drive toward more positive evolutionary narratives.