During the past month, I haven't had many spiritual epiphanies but did get a couple more clients. One is writing for a New Zealand-based enviornmental blog called Celsias. I did one of my usual cute yet sarcastic posts about what dog owners may have to do in the future when their aren't any more free plastic carrier bags around to clean up doggy doo-doo.
Some of the comments were, quite frankly, appalling. More than one wrote that pet dogs should be banned for the sake of the health of human children. And they seemed to be serious.
I'm not sure what happened in these poor posters' lives to make them so anti-dog, but banning dogs is not the answer to our enviornmental problems. I'm sure Big Oil and Dow Chemical would love to make dogs' butts the scapegoats for global warming, but I don't think this conspiracy theory is gonna last too long.
We need dogs in our lives far more than we need other people. Animals don't pollute like people, they don't complain like people and they don't post nasty comments on blogs about banning humans from dog kennels. Dogs are just as sentient as we are -- perhaps even more so becuase of their abilities to forgive and accept -- and it is only because of them that many people have become more than just selfish consumers with opposable thumbs.
Pet dogs save their owners' lives every day. What's a bit of poo between friends?
5 comments:
Wow, what narrow-minded, awful commentators. I fully agree with you that we need dogs in our lives far more than we need other people!
Also -- I always find it amazing that so many people want to get rid of dogs "for the children's sake." Dogs can enrich children's lives in so many ways, and children have a special affinity for dogs. At least, I had a much happier childhood because of my dogs.
Granted - I'm not a dog person - don't particularly like them. I can't imagine, though how they would be harmful to children.
The only harmful dog stories I have seen are those dumb pit bull owners who display no common sense and let their dog run free to put 100 stitches in a kid (just happened recently here in Vancouver, BC).
It's funny how these people seem to worry about kids, but drive cars - which, seriously, are more harmful to kids in the long run from all the stuff they're spewing than almost anything else.
Pit bulls have to be trained to attack -- they are not inherently viscious. Helen Keller's dog was a pit bull.
The most dangerous things for kids seem to be other kids! But they won't ban other kids, will they?
Well put, Emily. Can I steal that quote from you? :-)
Just an update -- all the comments from the article on Celsias have been removed. Hmmm -- I wonder why!
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