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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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I was at a public park not long ago when one of my children, who had only just begun to toddle, wandered about fifteen feet away from me. Not a big problem, I thought, and of course I was keeping an eye on him. On the far side of the park, at least a minute's walk away, a young woman showed up with a big dog and let it off the leash. It slammed across the park faster than I could believe, a missile headed right at my child. I know dogs, I've raised dogs, I've hunted with dogs, and I've worked with professional hunting dog trainers. This dog was trying to kill my baby, and it was so fast I almost couldn't react in time. Only my experience saved my child. My wife just watched with a glazed expression as all this played out. She does not know dogs. Anyway I was able to get close enough in time and yell and managed to get the dog to swerve at the last minute and back off while I scooped up my kid. Then I prepared to fight it to the death as it gave every indication of being about to try to jump up and snatch my kid out of my arms, which I've seen pit bulls do in videos, so I was ready. I kept yelling and there was a bit of a standoff until finally the owner showed up and leashed the dog. She seemed flustered and mostly wanted to avoid acknowledging what had just happened, and quickly left.

It was a terrifying experience. Dogs are not casual objects of entertainment or companionship. Modern people are so divorced from the realities of animal husbandry that I'm amazed we don't have more horrific catastrophes as a result.

I still take my kids to that park, but now I'm a helicopter parent in a way I never expected to be. At least for the smallest ones.

You have no idea what that dog was trying to do.

He did the right thing. Dogs are predators and have been known to eat babies (NB: dingoes are feral domestic dogs, not wild creatures; there are no native canids in Australia); scaring a dog away unnecessarily does not remotely compare to "child eaten" in badness, so even a tiny chance of it justifies what he did.

👍

There are some dog breeds which are both not for an inexperienced owner, and very appealing to women with little experience with big dogs. I am not quite sure why.

Offhand, it's always occurred to me as very clearly compensatory.

The little dogs, Yorkies and the like, have always struck me as the ones that substitute for babies and toddlers. Not the big pits that some women who don’t know how to manage dogs own.

The big ones are substitutes for horses or even husbands, for the natural desire to tame a beast. (This isn’t just a gendered thing, either.)

They're not compensating for a child. They're compensating for a man. A big, masculine, muscular, loyal, protective force.

That would explain why they let it tell them what to do, I suppose.

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