A Reader Says Both Blacks And Whites Have Wrong (Opposite) Attitudes To Dogs
01/10/2019
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Re: James Fulford’s blog post Black Sheriff's Deputy In Arkansas Casually Shoots Nine-Pound Dog

From: Michael [Email him]

James Fulford writes

If you're wondering this is relevant, it's because blacks in general hate and fear dogs, despising white people's affection for them.

Blacks, as you point out, enjoy using vicious dogs to guard their property, and often use them as fighting animals.  Whites, on the other hand, have developed what can only be termed a bizarre pseudo-love for dogs, often using them as a replacement for authentic human affection, which, by the way, is more difficult to attain inasmuch as the demise of the traditional extended family is now mostly complete, and because human relations are so fragmented.  White folk no longer simply have an “affection” for dogs; instead what exists is an unhealthy devolution of proper emotional feeling.

The substitution of dogs for human varieties of love (i.e., the Greek sense of kinds of lovestorge, philia, and possibly among some, even eros) manifest in many current-day examples.  Places where once it was, if not illegal, certainly in bad taste, to take a dog (restaurants, grocery stores, department stores) now cater to dogs. 

Upscale and even regular grocery stores have frozen food sections where one may purchase specialty doggie items.  Hotels allow dogs.  Doggie boutiques, day cares, and dog walking services are available.  Millennials avoid children, but dress their dogs in little outfits, strolling with them in baby carriages, taking the animals downtown to trendy cafes, drinking designer martinis, eating exotic dishes no one ever heard of. 

Television commercials routinely show humans kissing their dogs and, in return, getting licked in the face (please note, dogs to not “kiss.”  That is an anthropomorphism).  Many folks claim to have developed a neurotic anxiety that will not allow them to be in public without a “comfort” dog.

My grandfather worked a family farm (I am 65).  He had dogs.  Several.  But they stayed outside.  They lived under the house, and were expected to work.  He (and others of his generation) would never have let a dog in the house, slept with a dog, or let a dog lick them in the face.  Dogs ate left over table scraps, outside. 

Certainly dogs are loyal, and make good pets, within reason.  They are excellent workers.  However, dogs in their natural state are scavengers.  They roll in waste, and eat their own vomit.  They necessarily follow the way of their nature.  White’s preoccupation with turning dogs into pseudo-children can rightly be viewed as some sort of cultural pathology.

Anent this ‘cult of the dog’, we could mention its corollary, the ubiquitous middle-aged cat lady syndrome.  But that is a topic for another time.

So, while it is one thing to criticize black folk for their treatment of dogs or, as some do, to ethnocentrically wonder about East Asians eating dogs, one must not exclude within any critique white’s degenerate reification of doggie love, one that really underscores the decline of the proper sense and value between the human-animal hierarchy of being.

 

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