Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals (P.S.)
Herzog is an anthrozoologist. That means he studies the interactions between people and animals, including the animal/human bond, how animals fit into human society, and how different cultures treat animals.
Until you’ve suffered a dog bite, you can’t really know how it feels.
Not just the pain, or even, in the case of a bite from a little dog, especially not the pain. It’s the shock. Wounds from a knife in a kitchen accident are bad, but they do not compare to the indescribable outrage and disbelief you feel when your body is gripped by a furious entity who is savagely trying to destroy your flesh.
Who doesn’t love a title?
It’s why celebrities give their unfortunate offspring such soul crushing, toe curlingly faux ‘noble’ names as “Prince” and “Sir Carter”. Some people have even given up their citizenship in a country routinely ranked as the best in the world for the sake of a title. Of course in that case, Baron Black of Crossharbour found that his title was not exactly an advantage among his fellow inmates in prison, so he didn’t seem to have too many qualms about relinquishing it in order to reclaim his Canadian citizenship, post-lockup.
Prince Edward Island, the smallest province of Canada, is famous for Anne of Green Gables. Well, Anne and potatoes, but Anne brings in more tourists.
That beloved children’s book was written in 1908. In it, someone in Avonlea is going into Charlottetown, the provincial capital, to pick out an orphan to bring back with them to help with the work on the farm. Matthew Cuthbert asks that a boy be brought back for his farm as well. They get a girl instead, and the rest is fictional history.
It was a humid summer night. It had not been a great day so far.
It had taken all day for The General’s mother to be discharged from the hospital, where she had had a stent put in to correct a blockage in an artery. Apparently super important heart surgeons can’t be bothered with details like speaking the magical words from their Olympian heights that will produce the prescription necessary for a patient to get the hell out of his domain.
Used to be, it was easy to stop your cat from destroying your furniture, carpet and draperies. You simply had the cat declawed.
The General and I did this to several of our cats. No one, including the vets who did the procedure, suggested to us that it was cruel. The cats’ toes were tender for a few days, but after that, their ability to turn the legs of expensive pine furniture into toothpicks disappeared.
The General and I started our pet resort knowing nothing about the kennel business, other than what we didn’t like about it. This was in 1998, when the internet was just starting to be a thing. We didn’t have HTML content. We didn’t have – gasp – social networks. We were using modems.
If you’re a faithful reader of Auntie Awesome’s stories, you’ll know that I did just about everything wrong when it came to our first dog. If you’re not a faithful reader of Auntie Awesome’s stories, then what is wrong with you??
I do not subscribe to what seems to be a widely held view that dog and cat kennels are almost guaranteed to be terrible places, to be avoided at all costs. If you leave your pet at a kennel, these cautionary tales go, you are just subjecting him to crushing loneliness, illness, neglect and maybe even abuse. What kind of horrible person would do that?
“My puppy has kennel cough!” the voice of our new client on the phone exclaimed accusingly. “You made me show my vaccination certificate, but obviously you didn’t do the same with everyone. Otherwise this couldn’t have happened!”
There was so much wrong information in those statements, it could have appeared in Weekly World News along the Bigfoot and Elvis sightings.