How True Blood Got Dog Fighting Right

In this week’s episode of True Blood, we finally saw the dog fighting we suspected caused Tommy’s scars. When that scene approached, I was pretty nervous about what I was going to see. As has been noted before, I’m notoriously squeamish, and given that True Blood rarely avoids the opportunity for gore, I had my hands up, ready to cover my eyes. I knew we wouldn’t see real dogs fighting, but through clever editing and CGI…well, I braced myself.

Leave it to this show to constantly surprise the viewers. Instead of a pair of bloody dogs, we saw the humans reacting while the “dogs” were audible off-screen. But still, the sounds and imagery were disquieting. Stephanie Feldstein at Change.org was also nervous about how dog fighting was going to be portrayed, but found herself approving of what played out on screen. Here are 10 ways she feels True Blood got this horrible activity “right”:

1. You meet the pit bull several episodes before fighting was brought up; he was just another dog who ended up being a victim of people he trusted. Marshall Allman, the actor who plays Tommy, said of his canine actor counterpart, “He’s totally sweet and like the nicest dog I’ve ever met.”
2. The dog fighters weren’t glorified characters a la Michael Vick, nor were they given any street cred for what they were doing. Sam and Tommy’s dad is an abusive alcoholic and all the other guys in the scene were just random small town men there to gamble and watch dogs fight. No one was famous or particularly charismatic.
3. The fights weren’t portrayed as lucrative. A lot of money can change hands at dog fights and focusing on the cash can add a kind of Poker World Tour attractiveness to the abuse.
4. It wasn’t about animal violence. HBO could’ve gone for the cheap thrill of animals attacking each other or the adrenaline at the scene. But they skipped most of that and focused on the human relationships and animals as victims.
5. The fight was hard  to find and well-guarded — a good reminder that just because there aren’t many high profile cases hitting the news, it doesn’t mean fights aren’t happening.
6. There are a lot of ways to portray dog fighting on TV, but apparently facing off two pit bulls isn’t one of them. Allman said, “They weren’t allowed to have two pit bulls in the ring at the same time because of animal protection laws.” So, the presence of other breeds in the scene may not have been motivated by the producers’ desire to take the heat off pit bulls, but for the viewers, the end result was the same: This wasn’t about demonizing pit bulls.
7. Sam freed the dogs from their kennels and they all ran from the scene. None of them went after him or each other, which showed them as prisoners and victims, not wild animals who can’t be rehabilitated or are undeserving of a second chance at life.
8. When you first see the fighting pit, you see a dog — presumably the loser — getting shot, and its body unceremoniously dumped on a pile of other bodies. They could’ve shown some guy celebrating with his bloodied winner, but instead they showed how the dogs are expendable, not beloved pets.
9. By putting a shapeshifter in the ring, it raises the question: Would you do this to a human? Would you put your own child in this situation as the Mickens do?
10. Tommy and his mother’s relationship with their father, who is their handler in the pit, is a classic abusive relationship. Loyalty and guilt keep them with him, even though they get hurt. Now transfer that to their dog forms and, again, in puts dogfighting in a new light. Dog men often say that their dogs love to fight, that they wouldn’t go in the ring if they didn’t. But the shapeshifter angle highlights it as the result of an abusive relationship, not a real choice.

Read more of her thoughts about the episode at Change.org.