Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. These days, Canada
is almost fully open – on the inside – but its’ borders with the U.S. remain
closed, and they will remain closed, because there is the talk of the second wave of COVID-19 by now already. Unlike
fiction – movies, TV series, comic books, ‘just’ books, what else have you –
reality showed that humanity is nowhere near the fictional cohesion in general,
and that the U.S. is not at all superior to the rest of Earth’s civilization in
particular.
…Yes, the RF has ended its’ own lockdown, and will have its’
parade, its’ elections/voting, its’ whatever within the month, and yes, karma
will get them all, but at least they admit it between themselves – the U.S.,
not so much. So, let us talk about something else – the domestic dog, maybe?
…I admit that I have no idea as to what exactly I want to
say about them. Domestic dogs, in all of their various breeds and incarnations,
have existed alongside humans for the last 14+ millennia, (give or take an odd
century or two), and have become some of our closest companions, alongside the
cattle and the horses. Kipling’s ‘Just So Stories’ show this quite clearly – in
one of them, the dog, the horse and the cow are the first animals to come to
the first humans and become their companions/minions/servants/etc. without
questions for some physical benefits, that is all. The cat, on the other hand,
is the last of them, and is able to bargain at least some sort of a semi-independent
position for itself. Yes, this approach comes with ‘penalties’, as neither the
First Man nor the First Dog ever accept or give the First Cat, but that’s a cat
for you – it thinks about itself first and foremost, and everyone else is
secondary.
…Oh yes, there are some exceptions to that rule, and plenty
of them too, but that is because they are exceptions, and that is why we hear
about them. For dogs, they are the rules, and that is why we do not hear about
them as a rule. What next?
The flipside of the rule is that unlike domestic cats,
domestic dogs got a lot of diversity
in their breeds. Domestic cats look largely similar to each other, with some
minor variations, usually in the form of their muzzles and in the
length/coloration/texture of their fur. The variations between domestic dogs go
far beyond that; technically, while the smallest dogs of them all, (the
Yorkshire terrier and the Chihuahua) are the same species as the biggest ones,
(the rizenshnautzer, the great dane, the St. Bernard and the Newfoundland), any
crossbreeding between them is impossible because of anatomy! Hell, the
crossbreeding between the English and the French bulldogs is probably
impossible for the same reason. Why?
Hard to say. Because humans love to breed and to play God,
and they have created many breeds – of horses and cows, of goats and sheep, of
cats and fowl and pigeons and goldfish… The Greek, the Egyptian, and the Norse
pantheons were different from each other, but most of their gods were all
anthropomorphic, (more or less), and all of their deities loved to meddle in
human lives, (though yes, the Egyptian pantheon showed more restraint, proportionally).
Put otherwise, in all of human societies the gods are reflections of the humans
themselves, (I’m quite willing to assume that in the societies of sea serpents
like Nessie, and in the societies of abominable snowmen like the Yeti, that
situation is quite different), and just as gods loved to transform bodies into
different kinds, so do the humans themselves: they transformed their pets and
domestic animals, (and also plants), to be more useful… for the humans. Real
life may suck, but it can certainly be weird as well.
…For now, however,
this is it. See you all soon!
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