Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Mental Life of Dogs


Sometimes I just can’t believe what I read in the papers. Take Sunday, for instance. A columnist from the L.A. Times wrote a piece about how Mitt Romney put his family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, in a crate strapped to the top of the car for a 12-hour drive back in 1983.
          Wondering if “it’s time to give Romney a break on this one,” the Times columnist, Meghan Daum, further wonders if the dog would “really have been better off crammed into a station wagon with seven humans than up top in a secure, enclosed crate with a windscreen.”
          Politics aside, one wonders whether Daum herself would’ve preferred being jammed inside the car to riding in a crate on the roof. In fact, one wonders who’s the more callous here, Romney or Daum?
Daum quotes a presumed expert to the effect that, “It was a different time. It sounds horrific now, but back then we didn’t know so much about the mental lives of dogs.”
          Really? And now we do? How much insight does it take to recognize that these two options represent no real choice at all? And yes, it certainly does sound horrific now--and it would’ve sounded horrific to me in 1983, as well.
          So, yes, at the risk of being pigeon-holed by Daumer as a “single-issue voter and that issue is the candidate’s policy on pet transport,” I object to such inhumane treatment of animals, especially family pets. I suspect most of us have known some jerk at one time or another who was capable of such dimwitted brutality, but I never thought I’d see the day when a columnist for one of America’s great newspapers would think it was funny.
          It isn’t, Meghan. Shame on you, and the L.A. Times, for not knowing better.

No comments:

Post a Comment