Stories

The Times-Picayune
April 25, 2004

Keith O'Brien
Staff Writer

BLUFF CREEK, La. -- In an hour or two, pit bulls will be barking, people will be cheering and wild hogs -- battle-scarred, frightened, and deprived of their tusks -- will be squealing something god-awful.

At that moment, the pit bulls will be biting down so hard on the hogs -- sometimes tearing at their flesh -- that it will take five men and what's known as a breakstick to pry back the jaws and pull the dogs away.

But for now, all is quiet on this lonesome patch of gravel where Chuck Harris holds his hog-dog rodeos in East Feliciana Parish. Harris, 48, walks alone with his pit bull, Baby Girl, talking to her in a honeyed voice as he makes last-minute preparations for the evening's event.

"That's my Baby Girl," he says to the dog. "That's my Baby Girl. She's as tender as can be, aren't you?" He pauses and adds, "But she's hell on a hog."

That's what it's all about at a hog-dog rodeo. The question isn't how tender is your dog, but rather how fast can he or she catch a wild hog by the ear or leg or throat, and hold it there in the pen for at least three seconds while it squeals.

The dogs are timed. The fastest can catch a hog in a matter of seconds. And that dog wins its owner money -- hundreds, even thousands of dollars per fight. A good catch dog, which is the term owners use for pit bulls who can catch hogs, might be worth $500; its picture may appear in Catch Dog Journal, published out of Pearl River. The feral hog, by contrast, is worth very little in rural Louisiana.

It's nothing but a nuisance, people say. Some argue a hog will otherwise die in a field, shot in the head by an angry farmer. And so these folks feel no remorse about removing the hogs' tusks with bolt cutters and sending them out through a chute to face the charging dogs. At least here, they say, the hogs survive most of the time.

Local authorities haven't seen anything wrong with it, either. In both Washington Parish, where there are at least three hog-dog rodeos every month, and East Feliciana, where Harris started his event last year, sheriff's deputies have pronounced them legal.

But now a bill working its way through the Legislature threatens to ban the contests, and hog-dog enthusiasts and animal rights advocates -- once separated by both culture and distance -- are poised to face off over an issue that many are hearing about for the first time.

On the one side, there are critics who call the practice barbaric, torturous and tormenting, no better than dog fighting, which is illegal, or cockfighting, which is legal in Louisiana but also at issue during this legislative session.

Critics use words such as "spectacle" and "bloodbath" to describe the shows, but those who come to the hog-dog events shake their heads at city folks who, they say, just don't understand. As the proponents see it, hog hunting is part of the culture. Just last year, the Legislature declared "Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials" in Winnfield as the state's official hog-dog event. And changes have been made to the bill in Baton Rouge to make sure the Winnfield trials can go on.

At Uncle Earl's, dogs keep hogs at bay, cornering them without actually touching them, and the hogs still have their tusks. It's a significant distinction, but it doesn't impress those who participate in rodeos. Pit bulls, they argue, are also used on hog hunts. They are part of the same culture. They attack the hog after the bay dogs have cornered it. And so, they say, the rodeos, or "catches" as they call them, are practice.

Ban this, and the state will have to outlaw cow roping, bull riding, deer hunting and, some say, even the boiling of live crawfish. "What limits are you going to set on cruelty?" asks Sam D'Aquilla, district attorney for East and West Feliciana parishes.

The question is a real one for D'Aquilla and, now, for lawmakers as well. In the meantime, people will keep coming to Harris' tin-roofed, steel-beamed, open-air arena 10 miles outside of Clinton and just west of the Amite River on Louisiana 63.

They follow the signs, spray-painted on scrap tin and posted on the side of the road. "Hog Dog Show," the signs say. "Tonight. 6 p.m." When they arrive, Marty King, a longtime friend of Harris', will be there to take their $6 entrance fee and point them in the right direction.

Spectators to the left. Dog owners to the right. King passes the time doodling on the tabletop near the cash drawer. He sketches a rather accurate picture of a pig on the run, and writes a brief message beneath it.

"Come get some of this."

No place to hide

The door to the chute rattles open. The hog hesitates. Eighty feet away, across the dusty pen, a pit bull stands on its hind legs, held back by its owner. It sees the hog. Its teeth are bared. It has been here before and it knows what it has to do. But so does the hog. It has no intention of going into the pen.

Hugh Sims, 18, notices this and hits the hog in the side with a cattle prod. He stands next to the caged chute. He'll hit the hog again if he has to, and others -- age 20, 15 and 11 -- stand on top of the chute, herding the other hogs with shovels and broom sticks.

A moment passes. The hog darts out. It crosses the orange line at its end of the pen, and the game is on. The dog comes running. "Go get 'em! Go get 'em!" the owner yells again and again, and the hog knows it's in trouble.

Instead of racing headlong into the dog at the center of the pen, or scampering to a far corner, it turns right back around and bangs its snout against the door of the exit chute. It knows how to get out. But the door is closed, and the dog pounces.

Its teeth grab the hog's ear, and the hog, skittering to the wall, goes down squealing. The "catch" took five seconds, maybe 10. But it will take closer to a minute, and the work of a few men, to pull the dog away.

One man kneels on the hog's chest. A second places a boot on the hog's snout. A third takes the breakstick -- a thin, dull, knife-like instrument -- and begins to pry the dog's jaws loose. Two more men hover in the dust until the job is done.

At that point, one of them sprays the hog down with apple vinegar. The organizers say it helps heal the wounds. "In two days," Sims says, "it'll be scabbed up. It'll be clean. Ready to go." But for now, it's back through the chute into a smaller, caged pen where the wounded animal mingles with a dozen other hogs. It piles on top of them. When cornered, Harris says, hogs "stack up like chickens."

Still, he explains, they're dangerous, vicious animals. A hog took off the top of his index finger once, he says, brandishing the medically salvaged digit. He turned his back on it for just a second, and it attacked him. "I should have known better," he says.

Others have similar stories and the scars to go with them. But they keep coming back with dogs named Trixie or Honey, Boudreaux or Nitro. Most enter their dogs for a fee -- at Harris' event the fees range from $15 to $35 -- which the winner recovers many times over. Others are just there to watch. A few seem to enjoy being in the pen, prying the dogs off the hogs, while Harris kicks back on a raised platform above it all, watching the show he created.

'Family fun'

It's not an original idea. For 15 to 20 years, the United States Humane Society has condemned hog-dog rodeos. Popular in the South, the rodeos have popped up from the Florida Panhandle to the deserted prairies of west Texas, spawning fans, merchandise, Web sites and finally legal discussions.

The Florida attorney general addressed them a decade ago, saying the events clearly violated the anti-cruelty laws already on the books. Texas did the same. And a couple of months ago, Alabama authorities arrested one hog-dog rodeo organizer after NBC secretly taped the event and aired it on the local news.

But Henry Cabbage, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said cruelty, like obscenity, remains a matter of interpretation. What might be considered cruelty in downtown Miami, Cabbage explained, might be considered tradition in a more remote part of Florida. Local authorities get to decide. Other states are wrangling with similar issues.

In Mississippi last month, Attorney General Jim Hood decided that "if the animals are fought, maimed, wounded, injured, tormented or tortured, then the practice would be illegal." But that would be something for courts to decide, Hood concluded.

Meanwhile, as Louisiana deliberates, the sport -- that's what organizers call it -- has spread. Harris got the idea of starting his own hog-dog event after he paid a visit to a rodeo in Washington Parish last year. It was exciting, he thought. His son Jason Harris, 19, compared it to watching a football game. They bought Baby Girl that day and brought the puppy home.

That's where the training began. Chuck Harris caught wild hogs in small cages, removed their tusks and then put them in a ring with Baby Girl. She did well, Harris says, and soon people were coming to test their own dogs against hogs.

A dozen people became 100, then more. Harris had to start signing people in at a table at the end of the long, winding driveway that leads back into the woods to his original pen. Earlier this year, Harris and his partner at the time, Kenny Miley, decided to move the show out by the highway.

Miley had some land down the road. There, it was decided, they could build a real arena and a concession stand and take the event to the next level. Fliers went up. Word got around. And the place took the name "Head-On Arena," because the hogs and the dogs would meet there, head on.

Harris hoped it would be a success. "Bring the family and come enjoy the fun!!!" it says on the fliers. And people did just that: Kids 10 and younger get in for free.

It all seemed to be going well until the neighbors got involved, and what started as a complaint at a meeting in a small town emerged as part of a statewide debate about animal cruelty.

The smell, the noise

The problem, at first, had less to do with cruelty than it did with more familiar complaints. R.P. Holley and David Booker, who own property adjacent to the arena, didn't like what the new residents had brought to the quiet country neighborhood.

The hogs smell, they told the members of the East Feliciana Police Jury in March. The events are noisy. Sometimes they drag on late into the night. Holley says he and his wife have had to start living with the windows closed and the air-conditioner running just to drown out the sound. And then there was the matter of the dead hogs.

"I've seen that myself -- from my yard," Holley said. "I saw them bury three pigs. They had a hole dug over yonder and they carried the three dead pigs over there, put them in a hole, and covered them up.

"I saw one more dead a couple of weeks ago. They put it on a little flatbed utility trailer, an 8-by-10 trailer, left and went down the road. Went south with it. What he's done with it now, I couldn't tell you."

He asked the police jurors to stop it. The jurors said they couldn't.

Lacking zoning laws, the parish doesn't have the authority to shut down the event for noise violations, explained jury President James Hunt. So informed, the neighbors hoped Harris might get shut down for health violations. He did not. And local authorities, who visited the event along with State Police Sgt. Dennis Stewart, said they couldn't do anything, either.

"I tried to find some wrongdoing," said East Feliciana Sheriff Talmadge Bunch. But there wasn't any, he explained. First of all, Bunch said, "There was no blood, no guts, nothing like that." Second of all, he said, he didn't see anything wrong with using bolt cutters to remove the hogs' tusks because, if given the chance, hogs will "eat a dog, plumb down to the quick."

"I think it's a matter of perception," said Stewart, who visited the rodeo with Bunch. "Would an animal rights activist perceive that as cruelty to animals? Probably. Would someone raised in the country, someone who grew up branding and roping cows, and hunting hogs, think so? Probably not."

So the rodeo continued and the locals in Clinton got to talking about this hog-dog thing down the road in Bluff Creek. Some liked it. Some didn't. Many came to see it out of curiosity, and many more decided they would rather not see it at all.

Hunt, the police jury president, counted himself in the latter group, and Dwight Hill, a police juror, did as well, figuring the animal rights folks would show up and start picketing soon enough.

Instead, they called Rep. Warren Triche, D-Thibodaux, and got him to sponsor a bill that would ban hog-dog rodeos. Last week it passed out of the House criminal justice committee by a vote of 8-3, and Triche said every animal activist group in the state was united in support.

But by the time the Legislature shut down for the weekend, a couple of rural lawmakers were already trying to derail the bill, using a procedural maneuver, and they are likely to try again.

Hooked on hogs

"Are we ready to get started or what?" Jason Harris asks his father outside the arena.

"Yeah. We're ready."

"Let's go."

The announcer, Mike Wilson, climbs the steps to the platform above the pen and welcomes the crowd of about 100 people, and maybe 25 dogs. It's small compared with past shows, Chuck Harris says. But he expected as much tonight -- the first night he has held the rodeo on a Friday instead of a Saturday.

He made the move so that his events won't conflict with the popular rodeos in Washington Parish, and he thinks it will be a good move long-term. Still, he wishes more people would have shown up as he settles into a chair and the announcer kicks off the evening's action with a reading of the rules.

Some are venerable: no dog fighting, no drugs, no profanity and no cameras of any kind. Banning cameras, Harris says, is something all the local hog-dog organizers have agreed upon, because if an animal really gets hurt and someone takes a picture of it, "it will make you look bad."

Other rules are new.

"We will no longer tolerate attitude problems in or outside the arena," says Wilson, reading a rule that is also posted in the arena in large letters. There have been arguments over whose dog was fastest to catch a hog, concedes Amy Wilson, the announcer's wife, who also works the event. It's timed, of course, but disputes can arise nonetheless, especially when money is on the line. And there have been other problems as well.

Specifically, some owners haven't acted fast enough to pry their dogs off the hogs, Wilson says, which has allowed some pit bulls to "tear the hog up." Now that sort of thing has also been added to the list of taboos, the crowd is informed. And anyone who breaks the rule will "buy the hog."

The announcer pauses for effect. A man in the pen says, "Are we ready to dance?" A hog slides into the caged chute. A dog named Trixie rears up on her hind legs. They are 80 feet apart, and then they are right on top of each other.

One dog after the next, one hog after another, they keep coming, their owners paying $10 a pop for untimed "practice" runs. It's a chance to see what a dog's got before the competition begins. And the crowd, once scattered across the parking lot drinking beers, gathers up close around the pen to watch and wait their turn.

Once you've seen it, they say, you want to get a dog and try it. And once you try it, you don't want to stop. Don Crawford, a 36-year-old tree trimmer, knows that firsthand. "I've found my drug, if you will. Right here," he says, nodding toward the pen with his 9-year-old daughter, Amber, and his 2-year-old pit bull, Belle, at his feet.

"Yes!" Amber shouts, thrusting her tiny fists into the air a few moments later when Belle goes back into the pen and takes down her second hog of the night. The dog holds on tight. The hog squeals. And the little girl, understanding what's at stake, has just one question on her mind: "Is this still practice?"

It is, but Crawford thinks his dog has "got a taste" for the hog now, and the night is just beginning. Soon they are taping a small hog's snout closed and letting the children chase it. Then they are singing "Freebird," drinking more beer and complaining about all those people who want to interfere with their lives.

"It's just a bunch of rednecks, you know?" says Blue Allen, 33, of Greensburg, who like many here considers the term "redneck" a badge of honor. "It's just a competition, man. A sport. It's just something to do. Just something to do on weekends to stay out of trouble."

They argue that it's not as cruel as some people make it out to be. They say the hogs are tough, and this is good clean fun. And they make plans for the next day, when many of them will gather elsewhere to do it all over again.