You would guess a group with the closest connection to hunting would be most pro-dog. Do Siberian tribes have lots of dogs?
North European rural dwellers are very pro-dog, Russians seem to be civilised into being a very pro-cat culture as have the Muslim steppe cultures because of islam.
According to the Romans, the Britons were renowned for their dog-breeding skills. Dogs - from huge mastiffs to little terriers - were one of the main British exports during the Roman empire. British dogs seem to have been a status symbol among Roman households.
However it is perhaps the ancient Persians who accorded the most respect and reverence to dogs. Dogs were considered the companions to departed souls and guardians of paradise, and there is a practice of having a dog watch over the newly deceased before a funeral. It may be that the Islamic dislike of dogs derives partly from antipathy toward the Persian Zoroastrianism it displaced.
Interesting proposition. I had always assumed it was a direct inheritance from Judaism, like much of Islamic theology and metaphysics, which is explicit about the unclean nature of dogs.
It's speculation on my part, derived partly from the fact that Christians had a taboo against eating horse flesh because it was part of pagan rituals. I think religions either incorporate or outright reject elements of the religions they displace, and Islam definitely incorporated some Zoroastrian concepts, for example the description of hell IIRC.
“Consider Anglo-Irish rock stars like Morrissey, Elvis Costello, and Johnny Rotten. English or Irish?”
Your terminology is a bit off here Steve. “Anglo-Irish” refers to upper-class Protestants in Ireland with English roots. Someone like WB Yeats.
Morrissey, Costello, Rotten, etc are the children of generally lower-class Irish Catholics who moved to England in the 1940s-1960s, a kind of “Great Migration” of sorts. Most of this cohort are affectionate towards Ireland and make use of its passport especially after Brexit. The semi-derogatory, semi-affectionate term in use is “Plastic Paddy”.
America has to be one of the top pro-dog cultures in the world. Tens of millions of Americans love their dogs more than people. And even more Americans are uglier than their dogs. Walmart and Costco are full of them.
My dog is much better looking than I am (based on people stopping us on the street to tell me how good looking my dog is while conspicuously, kindly saying nothing about me) and I haven't been to a Walmart in a decade.
I'd say England is the most pro-dog culture in Europe, but the United States is equally doggy. Dogism is one of the few things that bridges the red-blue divide in the US; your big-city Democrat voter dotes on her "fur baby" and finds time to take it to the dog park, and your country Republican voter spends half his time outdoors with his hunting/herding/retrieving dog.
In America I think we have a lot of hypochondriacs. People think if they open their mouth in a restaurant to shovel some food it, they will get a disease from the dog two tables away. Yet, until Covid (and again now) people would go happily to work expectorating the influenza their school kids brought home.
Does France have any celebration of the dog in popular culture to compare with what you see in England and America, though? Kipling adored dogs and frequently wrote about them in poems and stories; Albert Payson Terhune, a best-selling novelist in America for years, exalted the dog; Hollywood gave us Old Yeller and Lassie Come Home; more recently, John Wick got audiences rooting for a massive killing spree by having the motive be the avenging of a dog. Even more recently, James Gunn used Krypto the super-dog to generate mindlessly enthusiastic buzz for his upcoming Superman picture. The French may show social toleration for the dog, but I don’t think they sentimentalize and idolize them the way the Anglosphere does.
Dips**t bottle blondes who bring their “emotional support” dogs along with them on airplane trips seem to be the most dog-dependent. I really love the thought of some fear-crazed dog impeding my escape from a smoke-filled cabin some day.
As others will no doubt note, "Irish Blood, English Heart" says it all for Morrissey although I also think his song "National Front Disco" is not so much in opposition to nationalist politics but a sneaky way of expressing his own sentiments - there is also a line in there "England for the English" from the view of the song's subject as well as a desire to settle accounts, all the more remarkable given it is over 30 years old at this point. I had the pleasure of seeing him in concert this fall and although his voice is not quite what it was when I last so him over a decade ago, it was still amazing.
As for dogs, I am sure the NW Euros love them, but is there any country that can hold a candle to the US when it comes to monetizing people's love of pets? Within just a couple mile radius of where I live, there are multiple doggie daycare facilities, training academies, and pet supply stores. I will confess that years ago I had a dog that in his later years suddenly started falling over and would be unable to get up for anywhere from 15 seconds to a minute and our vet had us take him to a doggie cardiologist as it turned out he had congestive heart failure. I didn't have the nerve to put him down right away so I shelled out a couple hundred bucks a month for a few medications that might have bought him another 6 months of life as opposed to the 2 or 3 he would have had without intervention. I also know a guy through my kids sports who is a pet radiologist, and he does very well.
I've gotten flak for saying this in the past, but as much as I love my dog I would not do anything really expensive on him medically. Treating a twelve year old dog with chemo is insane. The increment of time earned vs suffering caused by the treatment can't be justified. And yes when I have raised this in other forums people have come up with examples of expensive things I might do to a younger pet. General principle here.
My last employer gave our first and best office cat 2 insulin shots a day for 2 years and cried when told his organs were failing. He was named Pancake because he sniffed every vehicle that came on the yard, after greeting its occupants.
I must have seen the worst Smiths concert ever back in the mid 1980s. Morrissey was terrible that evening. Whenever he'd start singing unrhythmically, the kids would stop dancing.
Judging by everybody else's opinion of Morrissey, he's great and I just happened to see him on a bad night.
I can recall a poor performance by The Clash (one out of the two I saw), by Talking Heads (one out of four), and by Tom Petty (one out of five).
My impression is that The Clash were an erratic live band, no matter how great they were in the studio (and they were probably my favorite band from my peak music fandom years). When I saw them in Houston in 1979, Joe Strummer was great, but Mick Jones was messed up on something. And Jones was The Clash's main musician.
Even the good show I saw by The Clash in Hollywood in 1982 (decent first 45 minutes, awesome last 45 minutes) is considered by cognoscenti as the best of the 5 nights they played there.
Before their bad appearance in 1979, I got invited to a party with The Clash after their show (I didn't go), so I figure if _I_ got invited, they must have been pretty out of control.
But Talking Heads and Petty and the Heartbreakers were usually great live bands. So, I attribute their poor shows to the luck of the draw.
Everyone has their off nights for sure, whether being off musically or maybe not giving the performance 100%. Obviously that probably depends on what substances they have in their body or if they are exhausted/depressed. I have seen Father John Misty 4 times and one of them was when he apparently was having marital problems and his heart was just not in it - it reminded me of the The Royal Tenenbaums character played by Luke Wilson who was a big tennis star and just stopped caring after his adopted sister no longer wanted to be in a relationship with him and was just walking around the court or chucking his racquet rather than trying to win the match. Apparently that is all behind him now as I saw him last year and he was humorous and gave us a great show.
All 3 times I have seen Morrissey were from the mid-aughts onward so I am guessing I got an older, more sober and professional version than you saw in the 80s. One lauded group I saw that was bad was The Roots, better known now as Jimmy Fallon's house band. They are all grads of some Philly performing arts school and much caressed by the media, but the one time I saw them they were pretty rough. I also saw The Strokes a few years ago and they were not all that I had hoped, although they were opening for another band in a baseball stadium and I have sometimes found that the equipment and or sound engineer of the opening act is not quite up to the space they have to fill for the headliner so it could partly be due to that.
Anyway, I am envious of your concert experiences - I have a couple of friends who grew up in LA in the 70s and 80s and they saw so many great bands/shows it's ridiculous.
You seem experienced and expert so I'll assume you were correct about Morrissey, but I will also defend him. The singer often gets blamed for a breakdown that occurs somewhere else. We once played a whole song with the two guitarists in different keys. As we investigated what went wrong, everyone's first theory was that I was messing up the vocals.
The one evening I saw him about 39 years ago, Morrissey was the problem. But here we are four decades later still talking about him, so I presume that was a rare off-night for him.
When you bring up Ukrainians and Russians in the context of "Who loves dogs the most?" it reminds me that in WW II, the Soviet Army trained dogs to run under tanks with an explosive pack strapped to their backs. A stick extending up from the pack would detonate it. To train the dogs, the Soviets fed them under their tanks, with the engines running to get them used to the noise. The dogs would be starved for a few days before being released on the battlefield. The problem was that the hungry dogs then headed for the familiar-smelling diesel tanks of the Red Army, not the unfamiliar gasoline-smelling tanks of the Wehrmacht.
The English love their dogs but also started the destructive practice of dog shows and breeding for exaggerated looks over health and temperament. We Americans love our dogs but our main vice is taking large breeds and breeding them larger and larger until they suffer.
I've always been amused by the contrast between how we feel about dogs and the way almost all cliche literary devices and common expressions would tell a space alien sociologist how we feel about dogs. Every one of them is negative. Some are ominous. 'Let sleeping dogs lie'...why? What are the consequences of waking up a dog? He'll want to play? You have to take him for a walk?
Judging by "King Lear," Shakespeare held libelous opinions about dogs. I doubt if Shakespeare, a great show biz entrepreneur, was choosing to offend his audiences. So, English opinions on dogs appear to have changed between 1600 and 1900.
Meta topic- years ago I was doing my schtick about how I can't believe they let people major in English Literature in college and a young man made a convincing counterargument-- the academic utility of it is what you just did.
Dog shows started in England in the middle of the 19th century. Bull-baiting was outlawed in England in 1835 and the bulldogs almost died out. Then in the 1860s the remaining examples were crossed with pugs to make them brachycephalic and therefor cute in an English way.
In the 1700s the English were still in conqueror mode, hard drinking, gambling, whoring about. then things changed:
Mary Queen of Scots kept a lap dog to attract nearby fleas, but she was only a quarter English, half French, and raised in France. I've seen a fancy Jacobean staircase with a gate to keep the dogs downstairs, so they were still working dogs. My grandfather believed letting hunting dogs inside ruined their nose.
Oh hey, I know you from steve on unz. how's it going?
I was going to comment that of course Russia is a very large country with a whole lot going on inside of it but that's all pretty obvious and seems unnecessary to say. Saying hello though is cool. Also, I'd recommend going non-anonymous at some point. I think fighting back against paranoid internet culture is necessary.
As soon as my other phone, which allows scrolling screenshots, charges up I'm going to share the conversation I just had with AI CLAUDE. It's about breaking through the system and includes his self-critique regarding his arrogance to mis-interpret Rambam, and why he did it.
In the meantime, my top post is the first English translation of the beginning of the Bible. You'll probably find that interested too.
South Koreans breed/create half a million dogs per year who would otherwise never exist.
The Chinese eat 10 million dogs a year and the Vietnamese eat half as many but those are mainly hunted/stolen animals, only South Korea has well regulated and registered dog farms.
The most pro-chicken country is America and the most pro-pig country is Spain.
Germans breed and train some of the best hunting dogs. I’m told and have read that dogs can be seen lying quietly beneath restaurant tables in Germany. My favorite pointing breed, the German shorthaired pointer, is very popular among American bird hunters. Very athletic, intelligent, cooperative, tough, and stoic. Firm training doesn’t hurt their feelings.
You would guess a group with the closest connection to hunting would be most pro-dog. Do Siberian tribes have lots of dogs?
North European rural dwellers are very pro-dog, Russians seem to be civilised into being a very pro-cat culture as have the Muslim steppe cultures because of islam.
Mohammed was a cat lover, so I’ve heard.
I would say traditionally it’s Francophone Europe. In a Paris restaurant I once saw a dogs allowed to lick plates clean by its owner.
Anglo world is heading the same way. A religious friend in London says she’s seen dogs in churches.
I would join that church
Korea, obviously. You are what you eat.
The One Holland Village Mall in Singapore which opened last year is very dog friendly. Some restaurants allow dogs at the table, just like Paris.
According to the Romans, the Britons were renowned for their dog-breeding skills. Dogs - from huge mastiffs to little terriers - were one of the main British exports during the Roman empire. British dogs seem to have been a status symbol among Roman households.
However it is perhaps the ancient Persians who accorded the most respect and reverence to dogs. Dogs were considered the companions to departed souls and guardians of paradise, and there is a practice of having a dog watch over the newly deceased before a funeral. It may be that the Islamic dislike of dogs derives partly from antipathy toward the Persian Zoroastrianism it displaced.
Interesting proposition. I had always assumed it was a direct inheritance from Judaism, like much of Islamic theology and metaphysics, which is explicit about the unclean nature of dogs.
It's speculation on my part, derived partly from the fact that Christians had a taboo against eating horse flesh because it was part of pagan rituals. I think religions either incorporate or outright reject elements of the religions they displace, and Islam definitely incorporated some Zoroastrian concepts, for example the description of hell IIRC.
“Consider Anglo-Irish rock stars like Morrissey, Elvis Costello, and Johnny Rotten. English or Irish?”
Your terminology is a bit off here Steve. “Anglo-Irish” refers to upper-class Protestants in Ireland with English roots. Someone like WB Yeats.
Morrissey, Costello, Rotten, etc are the children of generally lower-class Irish Catholics who moved to England in the 1940s-1960s, a kind of “Great Migration” of sorts. Most of this cohort are affectionate towards Ireland and make use of its passport especially after Brexit. The semi-derogatory, semi-affectionate term in use is “Plastic Paddy”.
Though Steve is also probably correct, Morrissey sang about his Irish Blood, English Heart.
Yeah, that was the song I was thinking of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKoS5X4SMrY
America has to be one of the top pro-dog cultures in the world. Tens of millions of Americans love their dogs more than people. And even more Americans are uglier than their dogs. Walmart and Costco are full of them.
My dog is much better looking than I am (based on people stopping us on the street to tell me how good looking my dog is while conspicuously, kindly saying nothing about me) and I haven't been to a Walmart in a decade.
I go to Walmart once or twice a month, usually for the 46 pound t-bone dog food. Walmart has the ugliest clientele in the world except for Pakistan.
hahaha. Who are Pakistan's clientele?
Bin Laden
Yesterday on the GGB, I passed a Paki who was driving a McLaren, and boy was he ugly. It was quite jarring.
I walked my dog on Christmas Eve and seven pedestrians praised her as beautiful.
Personally, I don't see it, but I'm more prejudiced in favor of dogs with long coats.
Nobody praised my looks.
We need to recruit a super good looking guy and have him walk an ugly, not ugly cute but simply ugly, dog around the valley...for science.
"seven pedestrians praised her as beautiful"
Eggnog goggles.
Those little animals who sit in laps in French bistros and are fed nibbles by their owners are actually trained rodents.
Real dogs are found in country pubs in England.
I'd say England is the most pro-dog culture in Europe, but the United States is equally doggy. Dogism is one of the few things that bridges the red-blue divide in the US; your big-city Democrat voter dotes on her "fur baby" and finds time to take it to the dog park, and your country Republican voter spends half his time outdoors with his hunting/herding/retrieving dog.
Dogs are more tolerated indoors in France than England.
In America I think we have a lot of hypochondriacs. People think if they open their mouth in a restaurant to shovel some food it, they will get a disease from the dog two tables away. Yet, until Covid (and again now) people would go happily to work expectorating the influenza their school kids brought home.
In England if you keep your dog outdoors your neighbors will snitch on you to RSPCA.
Does France have any celebration of the dog in popular culture to compare with what you see in England and America, though? Kipling adored dogs and frequently wrote about them in poems and stories; Albert Payson Terhune, a best-selling novelist in America for years, exalted the dog; Hollywood gave us Old Yeller and Lassie Come Home; more recently, John Wick got audiences rooting for a massive killing spree by having the motive be the avenging of a dog. Even more recently, James Gunn used Krypto the super-dog to generate mindlessly enthusiastic buzz for his upcoming Superman picture. The French may show social toleration for the dog, but I don’t think they sentimentalize and idolize them the way the Anglosphere does.
Thanks.
I understand.
There is nothing like Crufts in France to my knowledge.
Dips**t bottle blondes who bring their “emotional support” dogs along with them on airplane trips seem to be the most dog-dependent. I really love the thought of some fear-crazed dog impeding my escape from a smoke-filled cabin some day.
As others will no doubt note, "Irish Blood, English Heart" says it all for Morrissey although I also think his song "National Front Disco" is not so much in opposition to nationalist politics but a sneaky way of expressing his own sentiments - there is also a line in there "England for the English" from the view of the song's subject as well as a desire to settle accounts, all the more remarkable given it is over 30 years old at this point. I had the pleasure of seeing him in concert this fall and although his voice is not quite what it was when I last so him over a decade ago, it was still amazing.
As for dogs, I am sure the NW Euros love them, but is there any country that can hold a candle to the US when it comes to monetizing people's love of pets? Within just a couple mile radius of where I live, there are multiple doggie daycare facilities, training academies, and pet supply stores. I will confess that years ago I had a dog that in his later years suddenly started falling over and would be unable to get up for anywhere from 15 seconds to a minute and our vet had us take him to a doggie cardiologist as it turned out he had congestive heart failure. I didn't have the nerve to put him down right away so I shelled out a couple hundred bucks a month for a few medications that might have bought him another 6 months of life as opposed to the 2 or 3 he would have had without intervention. I also know a guy through my kids sports who is a pet radiologist, and he does very well.
I've gotten flak for saying this in the past, but as much as I love my dog I would not do anything really expensive on him medically. Treating a twelve year old dog with chemo is insane. The increment of time earned vs suffering caused by the treatment can't be justified. And yes when I have raised this in other forums people have come up with examples of expensive things I might do to a younger pet. General principle here.
My last employer gave our first and best office cat 2 insulin shots a day for 2 years and cried when told his organs were failing. He was named Pancake because he sniffed every vehicle that came on the yard, after greeting its occupants.
Cat insulin is not expensive and causes no suffering. I wouldn't waste money on a cat, but this is about dogs...apple and oranges
I must have seen the worst Smiths concert ever back in the mid 1980s. Morrissey was terrible that evening. Whenever he'd start singing unrhythmically, the kids would stop dancing.
Judging by everybody else's opinion of Morrissey, he's great and I just happened to see him on a bad night.
I can recall a poor performance by The Clash (one out of the two I saw), by Talking Heads (one out of four), and by Tom Petty (one out of five).
My impression is that The Clash were an erratic live band, no matter how great they were in the studio (and they were probably my favorite band from my peak music fandom years). When I saw them in Houston in 1979, Joe Strummer was great, but Mick Jones was messed up on something. And Jones was The Clash's main musician.
Even the good show I saw by The Clash in Hollywood in 1982 (decent first 45 minutes, awesome last 45 minutes) is considered by cognoscenti as the best of the 5 nights they played there.
Before their bad appearance in 1979, I got invited to a party with The Clash after their show (I didn't go), so I figure if _I_ got invited, they must have been pretty out of control.
But Talking Heads and Petty and the Heartbreakers were usually great live bands. So, I attribute their poor shows to the luck of the draw.
So, same with The Smiths, I guess.
Everyone has their off nights for sure, whether being off musically or maybe not giving the performance 100%. Obviously that probably depends on what substances they have in their body or if they are exhausted/depressed. I have seen Father John Misty 4 times and one of them was when he apparently was having marital problems and his heart was just not in it - it reminded me of the The Royal Tenenbaums character played by Luke Wilson who was a big tennis star and just stopped caring after his adopted sister no longer wanted to be in a relationship with him and was just walking around the court or chucking his racquet rather than trying to win the match. Apparently that is all behind him now as I saw him last year and he was humorous and gave us a great show.
All 3 times I have seen Morrissey were from the mid-aughts onward so I am guessing I got an older, more sober and professional version than you saw in the 80s. One lauded group I saw that was bad was The Roots, better known now as Jimmy Fallon's house band. They are all grads of some Philly performing arts school and much caressed by the media, but the one time I saw them they were pretty rough. I also saw The Strokes a few years ago and they were not all that I had hoped, although they were opening for another band in a baseball stadium and I have sometimes found that the equipment and or sound engineer of the opening act is not quite up to the space they have to fill for the headliner so it could partly be due to that.
Anyway, I am envious of your concert experiences - I have a couple of friends who grew up in LA in the 70s and 80s and they saw so many great bands/shows it's ridiculous.
Artists have their ups and downs.
You seem experienced and expert so I'll assume you were correct about Morrissey, but I will also defend him. The singer often gets blamed for a breakdown that occurs somewhere else. We once played a whole song with the two guitarists in different keys. As we investigated what went wrong, everyone's first theory was that I was messing up the vocals.
The one evening I saw him about 39 years ago, Morrissey was the problem. But here we are four decades later still talking about him, so I presume that was a rare off-night for him.
Evidently, the man was/is a giant.
When you bring up Ukrainians and Russians in the context of "Who loves dogs the most?" it reminds me that in WW II, the Soviet Army trained dogs to run under tanks with an explosive pack strapped to their backs. A stick extending up from the pack would detonate it. To train the dogs, the Soviets fed them under their tanks, with the engines running to get them used to the noise. The dogs would be starved for a few days before being released on the battlefield. The problem was that the hungry dogs then headed for the familiar-smelling diesel tanks of the Red Army, not the unfamiliar gasoline-smelling tanks of the Wehrmacht.
So as dog lovers, Russians not so great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
The English love their dogs but also started the destructive practice of dog shows and breeding for exaggerated looks over health and temperament. We Americans love our dogs but our main vice is taking large breeds and breeding them larger and larger until they suffer.
I've always been amused by the contrast between how we feel about dogs and the way almost all cliche literary devices and common expressions would tell a space alien sociologist how we feel about dogs. Every one of them is negative. Some are ominous. 'Let sleeping dogs lie'...why? What are the consequences of waking up a dog? He'll want to play? You have to take him for a walk?
Judging by "King Lear," Shakespeare held libelous opinions about dogs. I doubt if Shakespeare, a great show biz entrepreneur, was choosing to offend his audiences. So, English opinions on dogs appear to have changed between 1600 and 1900.
Meta topic- years ago I was doing my schtick about how I can't believe they let people major in English Literature in college and a young man made a convincing counterargument-- the academic utility of it is what you just did.
Dog shows started in England in the middle of the 19th century. Bull-baiting was outlawed in England in 1835 and the bulldogs almost died out. Then in the 1860s the remaining examples were crossed with pugs to make them brachycephalic and therefor cute in an English way.
In the 1700s the English were still in conqueror mode, hard drinking, gambling, whoring about. then things changed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_morality
If attitudes towards dogs did change from Shakespeare's time I speculate it was part of the process described in the wikipedia article.
Indeed, it's helpful for conservatives to recognize that the greatest Tory, William Shakespeare, didn't share all their opinions.
Mary Queen of Scots kept a lap dog to attract nearby fleas, but she was only a quarter English, half French, and raised in France. I've seen a fancy Jacobean staircase with a gate to keep the dogs downstairs, so they were still working dogs. My grandfather believed letting hunting dogs inside ruined their nose.
Russia and the Ukraine are about as culturally distinct as Massachusetts and South Carolina, with about the same level of mutual intelligibility.
Oh hey, I know you from steve on unz. how's it going?
I was going to comment that of course Russia is a very large country with a whole lot going on inside of it but that's all pretty obvious and seems unnecessary to say. Saying hello though is cool. Also, I'd recommend going non-anonymous at some point. I think fighting back against paranoid internet culture is necessary.
As soon as my other phone, which allows scrolling screenshots, charges up I'm going to share the conversation I just had with AI CLAUDE. It's about breaking through the system and includes his self-critique regarding his arrogance to mis-interpret Rambam, and why he did it.
In the meantime, my top post is the first English translation of the beginning of the Bible. You'll probably find that interested too.
South Korea, obviously.
South Koreans breed/create half a million dogs per year who would otherwise never exist.
The Chinese eat 10 million dogs a year and the Vietnamese eat half as many but those are mainly hunted/stolen animals, only South Korea has well regulated and registered dog farms.
The most pro-chicken country is America and the most pro-pig country is Spain.
P.S. Sorry, my autism is acting up.
Germans breed and train some of the best hunting dogs. I’m told and have read that dogs can be seen lying quietly beneath restaurant tables in Germany. My favorite pointing breed, the German shorthaired pointer, is very popular among American bird hunters. Very athletic, intelligent, cooperative, tough, and stoic. Firm training doesn’t hurt their feelings.
Most of today's dog breeds trace to Britain, France, or Germany.