Search results for stand your ground

This is the second of two posts about cruel practices in horse industries. The first was about horse racing.

Yesterday we covered the abuse of horses in horse racing; in this post we discuss a recent video released by the Humane Society. The video highlights an instance of a larger issue, which is how arbitrary human tastes can create incentives for cruelty.

The concern revolves around the Tennessee Walking Horse (TWH), a breed developed in the U.S. in the late 1800s and bred to have smooth gaits, including their distinctive “running walk,”  that are unusual in most breeds. Over time, a more exaggerated version became popular among show judges and spectators at TWH shows; called the “big lick,” it requires horses to shift their weight to their back legs and pick their front legs high off the ground. Fans enjoyed the flashy, unusual movements and horses that performed the gait began taking home more prizes. This created a powerful incentive to get horses to exhibit the unnaturally exaggerated gait.

How do you get this gait? It’s possible to get some horses to do so through careful training. But to speed up the process, or for horses that aren’t learning, trainers developed a range of techniques. These first two are still allowed, under varying circumstances, during training and in the show ring:

• Using padding and weighted shoes to change how the horse stands and moves its feet (akin to how high heels shift a person’s weight and stance).
• Placing chains around the tops of their hooves to encourage them to pick their feet up more highly than they would otherwise (presumably they’re irritating).

• Place screws or nails in different parts of their front hooves or soles to cause discomfort.  While horses’ hooves are hard, the soles are quite sensitive.  The screws or nails make it painful for the horse to put its front legs down, so it shifts its weight back, helping to attain the gait.
• Intentionally cut the horse’s front hooves so short that the sensitive sole hits the ground directly, which is extremely painful (think of what happens if your fingernail gets cut or broken off too short).
• Coating a horse’s hooves and lower legs with caustic substances, then wrapping them in plastic wrap, for as long as several days, until they’re very sore — a process called, aptly, “soring.” This causes the horse to shift weight to its back legs in an effort to reduce the pain from the front feet. This is often used in conjunction with chains, which irritate and rub up against the raw skin.

Many inspectors argue that these practices, once widely accepted in the industry, are still common today. Recently the Humane Society released undercover footage of training practices at Whitter Stables, a facility in Collierville, TN that has been the center of a federal investigation. It is a very distressing video that includes many of the practices listed above, as well as horses being whipped when they have difficulty standing:

In 1970, Congress passed the Horse Protection Act, which outlawed the exhibition of sored horses. So trainers have developed techniques to hide them; they paint horses’ hooves and legs to cover evidence of soring or use boots to cover tacks embedded in their hooves.

They also beat them so that they learn not to show any sign of pain when inspected before a show.  They do this by simulating an inspection and then punishing the horse if it shows any signs of distress (e.g., punching or hitting them in the face or administering an electric shock).  Eventually horses learn that if they flinch, they get hurt twice; hiding signs of pain prevents the infliction of more suffering.

Trainers may also use a fast-acting but short-term numbing agent to reduce the pain just long enough to pass inspections. Other trainers and owners simply leave a show if word gets out that USDA inspectors were present.

The Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders’ and Exhibitors’ Association argues that these practices are not widespread. However, in 2006 the last class in the World Grand Champion competition at the Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration (the TWH show equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, in terms of importance) was canceled because of the 10 entered horses, 5 did not pass the inspection and another was removed by the owner without being inspected. In 2009, the USDA issued over 400 violations at the Celebration.

A USDA report states the organization only had the resources to send their own veterinarians to 6% of official TWH shows in 2007; the other 94% were inspected by individuals hired, trained, and licensed by organizations sponsoring shows, a system the USDA found to be plagued by conflicts of interest. The report also noted that hostility toward USDA inspectors is so high that they routinely bring police or armed security with them to shows.

Jackie McConnell, the trainer in the video, has been indicted on federal charges. But without sustained attention and commitment to punishing violators, the problem will continue due to the pressure to produce horses that satisfy the tastes that have become entrenched in the industry. As one industry insider explained to Horse Illustrated magazine in 2004,

As long as the big lick wins at shows, the trainer must produce it to stay in business….The day a trainer stops producing big lick horses is the day all the horses in his or her barn are removed and taken to another trainer.  The pressure is enormous.

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Gwen Sharp and Lisa Wade are professors of sociology. You can follow Gwen on Twitter and Lisa on Twitter and Facebook.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Cross-posted at The Oreo Experience.

With the summer over, it’s time for Hollywood to pull out a new season of films. Here’s some of what’s coming up this fall and winter. For each trailer, I note what white people get to do and what non-white people get to do.

Let us begin:

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star

Things White People Get to Do: Be part of a loving family, be content with simple things, be blissfully unaware, be sweet, be naive, be oddly cool, progressive parents, live in a small town, live in a big city, parody Almost Famous, be hot, be regular looking, be super hot with a regular looking boyfriend, be the hero.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: be threatening, drive a car.

Contagion

Things White People Get to Do in This Movie: Play craps, have a family, be an expert, cry convincingly, deliver bad news, be unable to accept bad news, probably be the focal point of a conspiracy, populate towns.

Things Not-White People Get to Do in This Movie: Play craps, provide and clarify exposition.

Main Street

Things White People Get to Do: Fake an American accent, come up with a plan, be taken advantage of by the boss, be savvy about the boss, believe a stranger, be troubled, look out for the troubled, work in an office.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: Believe a stranger.

Warrior

Things White People Get to Do: have tattoos, cage fight, announce fights, reconnect with parents, gamble, join the military, lose a home, offer help, make up for lost time, walk around the house in matched undies and undershirt, throw tires around, be an adorable father, kiss the girl, be a war hero, cheer supportability, go head to head.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: walk through frame, lose a fight

I Don’t Know How She Does It

Things White People Get to Do: Have a career AND a family and be totes supes adorbs about it.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: n/a

Straw Dogs

Things White People Get to Do: Watch old movies, be in old movies, be way too aggressive, terrorize innocents, be a cheerleader, have sex, have a nice date, disrespect their partners, sexually harass women, fight back against bullies, go to church, rise to the challenge, wield a tire iron, use boiling water effectively.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: n/a

Drive

Things White People Get to Do: be really good at driving, set up dirty deals, be mobsters, live in a big city, meet guys in elevators, be a stunt person, be a loving single mom, get their hands on more money than they were expecting, kiss the girl, bash someone’s head in, wear freaky masks, slit some throats, be the dad the dad couldn’t be.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: be a felon.

30 more movie trailers after the jump:

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This Course Guide is in progress and will be updated as I have time.

Disclaimer: If you’re thinking about writing a course guide.  I totally overdid it on this one!  It doesn’t have to be nearly this extensive.

Course Guide for
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY
(last updated 5/2012)

Developed by Gwen Sharp
Nevada State College

C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination

Intersection of biography and history as illustrated by:

• Year of birth and life success
• Kids’ exposure to technology
• Baby naming practices and media trends
• Other historical trends in baby names

“the capacity for astonishment is made lively again”

• The background of “Scotch” tape
• Applying the anthropological lens to “dark, mysterious Austria”

Karl Marx/Marxist analysis

• Marxist analysis of current economic crisis
• Invisibility of workers

Emile Durkheim

• The dangers of the ecological fallacy: measuring “sin” statistically

[Because the course guide has gotten to be so long, I’m putting the rest of it after the jump.]

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Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

I am a Londoner. A proud East Londoner, hailing from the working class. And this past week has been one of the most difficult I’ve encountered since I moved to the US nearly ten years ago.  This weekend my hometown was attacked by rioters, just minutes away from my family’s homes and businesses, my high school and a million childhood and teenage memories.  I don’t think I can do justice describing the feeling of watching this unfold from so far away.  Needless to say, I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone.  Thankfully, it would appear that most of the violence has subsided. In its place: a myriad of social commentaries on why this happened.  Not only from journalists, but from the everyman benefitting from the very same social media that helped rioters coordinate.  Indeed, many sociologists have aired their ideas on Facebook, blogs and even op-eds.

But perhaps in our rush to explain and apportion blame perhaps we all missed asking some important questions.  Why did we assume that the rioters are poor?  How do we really know the class background of the rioters?  Why did the media depict the rioters as underprivileged? And why did we accept this depiction unquestioningly?

The sociologist in me fantasizes of a post-riot 10 question survey to be distributed to all rioters immediately after completion of law breaking activities with questions including: what is your average household income, what is your and your parent’s highest level of education, what is your occupation, on a scale of one to ten just how angry with the government are you at this moment, ten being really jolly pissed off?

Short of such a research tool, how did we come up with generalizations of a group of people we really know little about, except for the fact that they all rioted?

As someone who has lived in both nations, I feel class is certainly a nuanced thing in Britain, much more so than in the US. But even with the subtleties of the British system you cannot simply see class.  And for the most part, all the information we initially had about rioters is what we saw on TV and in still photographs.

We just cannot tell.  If you thought you could tell, you’d be guessing, and you’d be basing your decision on ideas you have about the poor.  Some might point to history; past rioters have tended to be from the working classes. But this only offers us the ability to make a prediction. But, most commentaries did not acknowledge that they were predicting who was involved.  Some might argue that those wearing hoodies are poor, as the wearing of hoodies has become synonymous in the British press with certain low-income groups.  But people of all class groups own hoodies.  We also cannot surmise simply from a picture that the rioters were from the area they attacked and attempt to extrapolate social class from that location.  Indeed, early police reports indicate that in some cases there was organized travelling to targeted areas and in my home borough of Waltham Forest, initial records show that more than half of those arrested did not live there.  So how do we ascertain the social class of the rioters?  Their behavior?

Did we see violence, looting and vandalism and assume that this could only be the work of poor people, and passively accepted the media’s categorization of the perpetrators as such?  Or are we so blinded by our ideological beliefs, romanticizing the riots to be exactly what Marx warned us of that we bought this generalization? Or do we want so desperately to blame governmental cuts against the poor that we ignore the lack of solid evidence as to who these rioters really are?  Or did we simply map on our understanding of other riots, and assume that all rioters are the same?  I don’t have the answer to these questions, but think it is worth considering why we made the assumptions we did about the rioters when we had little to no data.

As I write this, on Friday 12^th August, long after many of the commentaries have been published and opinions have been shared, news outlets are beginning to report the demographic information of the rioters who have appeared in court. (Go here and click on “Get the data”; sorry for the broken link earlier!)

Among those rioters who fit the stereotype  — alienated, poor youth — are those who do not fit this type at all. They have already been the subject of several headlines: teachers, an Olympic ambassador, a graphic designer, college graduates and a “millionaire’s daughter.”  The very fact that these “unusual suspects” have been singled out by the press demonstrates the power of this prejudice; we are shocked when it isn’t poor people rioting.  But why? Is it because deep down we believe that the poor are capable of violence, but the rich aren’t? Or is it because this riot is more complex than simply the rage of downtrodden people?

At this point, we are far from really knowing the class backgrounds of the rioters, especially since many people have not, and probably will not, be caught for their actions. We are still without reliable data to draw conclusions, just as we were earlier in the week when so many of us rushed to attribute this rioting to disenfranchised youth. I am not arguing that class won’t be an important factor in our understandings of these riots, and it may well be that these riots were mostly poor people. But my point is we cannot say with certainty at this moment in time that this is the case. And as an East End girl, I ask: what does it say about us, especially sociologists, that we were so willing to believe this about the poor without any solid data?

UPDATE: Kat provided a link to some data that wasn’t available when the post was being written. The Guardian mapped the home addresses of those arrested in the riots; the results indicate that they appear to have been disproportionately, though not solely, from areas that are poor — and getting poorer. Of those arrested, for instance, 41% came from the top 10% of areas when ranked by levels of deprivation.

Faye Allard is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University.  When not busy winning teaching awards, she is working on a book about the African American gender gap in high school educational achievement, called “Mind the Gap.”

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Is the SAT biased?  If so, against who is it biased?

It has long been part of the leftist creed that the SAT and other standardized tests are biased against the culturally disadvantaged – racial minorities, the poor, etc.  Those kids may be just as academically capable as more privileged kids, but the tests don’t show it.

But maybe SATs are biased against privileged kids.  That’s the implication in a blog post by Greg Mankiw.  Mankiw is not a liberal.  In the Bush-Cheney first term, he was the head of the Council of Economic Advisors.  He is also a Harvard professor and the author of a best-selling economics text book.  Back in May he had a blog post called “A Regression I’d Like to See.” If tests are biased in the way liberals say they are, says Mankiw, let’s regress GPA on SAT scores and family income.  The correlation with family income should be negative.

…a lower-income student should do better in college, holding reported SAT score constant, because he managed to get that SAT score without all those extra benefits.

In fact, the regression had been done, and Mankiw added this update:

Todd Stinebrickner, an economist at The University of Western Ontario, emails me this comment:

“Regardless, within the income groups we examine, students from higher income backgrounds have significantly higher grades throughout college conditional on college entrance exam . . . scores.” [Mankiw added the boldface]

What this means is that if you are a college admissions officer trying to identify the students who will do best in college, as measured by grades, you would give positive rather than negative weight on family income.

Not to give positive weight to income, therefore, is bias against those with higher incomes.

To see what Mankiw means, look at some made-up data on two groups.  To keep things civil, I’m just going to call them Group One and Group Two.  (You might imagine them as White and Black, Richer and Poorer, or whatever your preferred categories of injustice are.  I’m sticking with One and Two.)  Following Mankiw, we regress GPA on SAT scores.  That is, we use SAT scores as our predictor and we measure how well they predict students’ performance in college (their GPA).

In both groups, the higher the SAT, the higher the GPA.  As the regression line shows, the test is a good predictor of performance.  But you can also see that the Group One students are higher on both.  If we put the two groups together we get this.

Just as Mankiw says, if you’re a college admissions director and you want the students who do best, at any level of SAT score, you should give preference to Group One.  For example, look at all the students who scored 500 on the SAT (i.e., holding SAT constant at 500).  The Group One kids got better grades than did the Group Two kids.  So just using the SATs, without taking the Group factor (e..g., income ) into account, biases things against Group One.  The Group One students can complain: “the SAT underestimates our abilities, so the SAT is biased against us.”

Case closed?  Not yet.  I hesitate to go up against an academic superstar like Mankiw, and I don’t want to insult him (I’ll leave that to Paul Krugman).  But there are two ways to regress the data.  So there’s another regression, maybe one that Mankiw does not want to see.

What happens if we take the same data and regress SAT scores on GPA?  Now GPA is our predictor variable.  In effect, we’re using it as an indicator of how smart the student really is, the same way we used the SAT in the first graph.

Let’s hold GPA constant at 3.0.  The Group One students at that GPA have, on average, higher SAT scores.  So the Group Two students can legitimately say, “We’re just as smart as the Group One kids; we have the same GPA.  But the SAT gives the impression that we’re less smart.  So the SAT is biased against us.”

So where are we?

• The test makers say that it’s a good test – it predicts who will do well in college.
• The Group One students say the test is biased against them.
• The Group Two students say the test is biased against them.

And they all are right.

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Huge hat tip to my brother, S.A. Livingston.  He told me of this idea (it dates back to a paper from the1970s by Nancy Cole) and provided the made-up data to illustrate it.  He also suggested these lines from Gilbert and Sullivan:

And you’ll allow, as I expect
That they are right to so object
And I am right, and you are right
And everything is quite correct.

In this TED video sent in by BlackCat and Chana Messinger, Tony Porter gives a nice introduction to what it means — for men, women, sons, and daughters — that men are confined by the dictates of masculinity.  (Trigger warning: at about the 9 minute mark, there is a story about a sexual assault.)

Transcript after the jump (thanks to DECIUS for posting it in the comments).

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If you’re interested in cultural representations of Native Americans, I highly recommend the blog Native Appropriations. Recently Adrienne K. posted about an article in a student-government-funded newspaper at Cal State U.-Long Beach that stands out for its disrespectful, hostile tone. The article, titled “Pow Wow Wow Yippee Yo Yippy Yay,” was a “review” of the annual powwow sponsored by the American Indian Student Council. It had never occurred to me that you would review a cultural event as though it were just another form of entertainment, like a new movie, but that’s the least of the issues here. The full article, from the Union Weekly (via OC Weekly):

Some key excerpts:

…it really seemed like a large, Native American themed flea market. Some of the food vendors just seemed to unceremoniously add the word “Indian” to whatever food they were peddling. Indian tacos? What the fuck are Indian tacos?

…like a Mexican pizza from Taco Bell, but shittier. The only experience I have with fry bread is watching a show about how incredibly unhealthy it is to consume, and watching its rapid consumption on campus grounds.

The entire scene felt disingenuous and cheap. Donations are great, and necessary, tossing them unceremoniously on the ground is crass and borderline obscene. Even the homeless have hats and cups.

I flinched several times while reading the article. I grew up in Oklahoma surrounded by Native American cultures, both because I lived in an area where several tribes were very visible and because my mom is part Cherokee herself and several close relatives married people enrolled in other tribes. Even though I know that in most of the U.S. Native Americans are often culturally invisible and most people haven’t gone to tons of powwows or sat around watching the women in the family sewing ribbon shirts in the living room, I still sometimes forget that these things aren’t instantly recognizable and interesting to other people, or that they could see something that I was taught to be respectful and appreciative of and have such a different reaction.

Of course, this article goes beyond being unfamiliar or uninterested. The author, the paper’s campus editor, clearly didn’t want to learn what was going on. I mean, even if you’ve never heard of one before in your life, just a minimal Google search will explain to you than an Indian taco is, more or less, a taco on fry bread (the Osage Nation even has an annual competition). An image of a dancer is used to highlight a mocking, mean-spirited “review,” as though the powwow’s only function was to entertain uneducated outsiders.

The Union Review and the author of the article issued the typical non-apology “apology” statements — we’re just here to let all sides of the debate have a voice! We’re sorry if anyone got themselves all offended, we really didn’t expect this reaction at all! — which is also available at the OC Weekly link above.

As Adrienne points out, though the “Asians in the library ” rant from a UCLA student got a huge amount of attention, there’s been much less about this. It highlights the point Tami made at What Tami Said: overtly disrespectful and/or racist behavior on campuses shouldn’t shock us, if we’re paying attention.

Students of mine who are unversed in race politics frequently use the phrase “colored people.” They hear me use the phrase “people of color” and assume that the phrases are equivalent. This is a truly reasonable assumption, even as people familiar with race-based struggle know for sure that “colored” is an offensive term and “people of color” is typically not considered so.

Occasionally a student asks me what the difference is and, to be frank, I’m not quite sure. I’ve simply absorbed the rules of talking-about-race and have a good idea of how to do so in ways that reflect grass roots language claims.

Accordingly, I was really excited to see a clip of famed activist Loretta Ross at Racialicious explaining the history of the phrase “women of color,” and later “people of color.” She explains that, while “colored people” was a phrase used to delegitimate black- and brown-skinned people, “people of color” was coined by activists hoping to bring all non-white people together into a coalition against racism.

(Thanks to decius for placing a transcript in the comments. I’ve pasted it in after the jump.)

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