Dogs. My dogs. Our dogs. Not one of them was a purebred, certified, made-to-order dog. They were dogs. Descendents of wolves, about as much like wolves as most of us are descendents of Adam and Eve and the Image of God. Mongrels. Mutts. Not even shelter dogs. Just dogs.
We have been watching the Westminster Dog Show, again. You know the one! The guy with the marvelously resonant voice calling categories of mail-order dogs, sorted by inbreeding and imaginary utility.
"The Quirky-Queer Dog," the Voice says, "originated in monasteries in Greece, where all the dogs were male, and where they protected the monks from females and Police Inquiry. Today they are fun-loving brutes who will empty the refrigerator if you let them. All they ask for is food, a good bed, and a house without children or cats."
Some of the dogs--if that is what they are--if left alone, would soon disappear under a hay stack of hair, or trip-to-death on their matted coats. Some of them, already, are doomed to early deaths because someone bred them to have short, shoved-in noses, or hips that simply cannot survive long enough to let the dog die of old age. Some have heads that would slip through the eye of a sailor's needle, leaving room for a very narrow brain, probably.
That is to say, I hate the fact that people have taken the descendents of wolves and made them look like cream puffs, or poodles; that shape them by selective breeding to be as fragile as cotton candy, or that cannot walk across the carpet without stopping to rest; that die of heart disease, or that tremble at the sight of sparrows.
Such dog breeders, themselves selected by perverts with too much money and a horrible need for a carpet decoration, ought to be ashamed of themselves, and be put on leashes themselves, and walked in the park, to keep them from getting away.
I scorn the people who measure the intelligence of a dog by how quickly it can learn to roll over, or dance the foxtrot, or give Mommy a kiss. There surely are multitudes of other intelligent beings in the universe, probably too far away from us for a chance meeting, who could easily, if they wished, make pets of us, and feed us, and teach us to sing and dance and roll over, for jelly beans and Oreo treats, and maybe a martini.
Dogs should not be bred to look like mops because we think it is cute, or to be tiny enough to ride in a purse, or hide in a pocket, just because it amuses us. Dogs are wolves that learned how to survive by being useful to us, in return for our being useful to them. It is hard to know whose idea it was.
I watched the first night of this year's Westminster Dog Show, and judging the dogs, not by whether they looked like cream puffs, or whether they had been coifed, but whether they were still dogs; real dogs. Not whether they had been designed. Selected. Chosen to survive and breed again with another freak with a pushed-in face, or hair dragging like a wedding gown.
Corporations aren't people, and dogs aren't property. There are few things finer than friendship with a dog, and few things uglier than treating a dog like a teddy bear that can be bred to make tiny teddy bears, or a skinny teddy bear that can run fast, or that looks like Winston Churchill.
It is a kind of slavery, that began as something mutually beneficial.
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