[nagdu] satire

[Julie J]

Loved this!  Too funny, and it has some truth to it me thinks.

and I love "It's Me or the Dog" with Victoria Stillwell.  My favorite bits 
are when she lets an owner have it for some outrageous behavior they are 
allowing or encouraging.  Dogs are not little people in fur coats.

Thanks!
Julie



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Meskys" <edmeskys at roadrunner.com>
To: "nagdu" <nagdu at nfbnet.org>; <dogguideUsersNH at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2011 10:52 AM
Subject: [nagdu] satire


> There's a Canine Conspiracy!
> Television Reveals It!.
> NY Times Saturday, 2011_01_08
> By NEIL GENZLINGER. What in blazes is wrong with this country's
> dogs? Such a collection of neurotic, insecure, bitchy, bullying creatures 
> hasn't
> been seen since whenever the latest episode of 'Real Housewives' was 
> broadcast.
> I do not own a dog and never have, but I do own a television, and from the
> evidence
> it emits, the whole danged species needs to go on a lengthy timeout. On 
> the
> National
> Geographic Channel, Cesar Milan is now in his seventh season of grappling 
> with
> ill-behaved
> mutts on his 'Dog Whisperer. On Saturday on Animal Planet, Victoria 
> Stilwell
> returns
> for a third season of unprovoked barking and biting on 'It's Me or the 
> Dog. Even
> the Hallmark Channel got into the act this week; on Monday it rolled out a 
> fresh
> incarnation of 'Petkeeping With Marc Morrone,' which isn't limited to 
> problem
> dogs
> but certainly had plenty of them in the premiere.
> Watch enough of these shows and you come to suspect that they are treating 
> the
> symptoms
> of an epidemic, not the causes. For instance, a superficial analysis might
> suggest
> that Ginger, the Chihuahua in Saturday's 'Me or the Dog,' is unbearable 
> because
> her
> owner, an Upper East Side caricature (and 'Real Housewives of New York' 
> alum)
> named
> Jill Zarin, has lost the ability to distinguish normal human-dog 
> interactions
> from
> abnormal. (The episode becomes unwatchable about the fourth time Ginger is
> allowed
> to stick her doggie tongue up Ms. Zarin's nostrils.) But Ginger isn't 
> yapping,
> biting
> and inappropriately licking just because she happened to be paired with a
> permissive
> human. This kind of misbehavior takes generations of breeding to perfect.
> The same is true of Phoebe, a recent 'Dog Whisperer' poodle who attacked
> anything
> male on two legs; Sydney, a Jack Russell terrier whose hostility toward 
> another
> dog
> puts her on Ms. Stilwell's 'Top 10 Difficult Dogs' list; Shayna Punim, a 
> German
> shepherd
> in the 'Petkeeping' premiere who can't take a simple car trip without 
> incident.
> It's tempting to write these cases off to reality television's penchant 
> for
> focusing
> on the absolute worst of a species, be it humans or animals, but 
> apparently
> there
> is dog trouble all over the land, and multiple kinds of it. Start typing 
> 'dog
> behavior
> problems' into Google, and it helpfully offers you these suggestions:
> dog behavior problems dominance dog behavior problems anxiety
> dog behavior problems biting dog behavior problems chewing dog behavior 
> problems
> barking
> dog behavior problems aggression
> dog behavior problems urinating dog behavior problems marking dog behavior
> problems
> licking
> In contrast, start typing 'dog behavior good' into your search box, and 
> Google
> is
> baffled. Dog behavior good bad,' it says, sounding like a desperate guess. 
> No
> 'dog
> behavior good rescuing Timmy from a well' here; apparently, since the 
> invention
> of
> Google sometime in the last century, no one in the entire world has had 
> occasion
> to inquire about good behavior by dogs. Because there hasn't been any.
> All our dog experts seem to be tied up trying to fix this mess one 
> televised dog
> at a time, an impractical approach, given that according to a news release 
> I
> just
> received promoting -- no kidding -- a weight-loss contest for pets, there 
> are
> 77.5
> million dogs in the United States. So it's left to a nonexpert like myself 
> to
> try
> to figure out the root causes of this orgy of misbehavior. It seems to me 
> that
> it
> can all be traced to three familiar bugaboos:
> 1. THE MEDIA Specifically, television. Dogs, stuck in the house all day,
> probably
> watch more of it than kids do. That was fine in the early days of the 
> medium
> because
> the role models they would see were, basically, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, 
> the two
> finest
> dogs in history.
> Lassie never barked unless a tree had fallen on some family member eight 
> miles
> away
> and certainly never required the kind of dog therapy loose in the land 
> today.
> And
> it's a good thing that TV's Rin Tin Tin -- a German shepherd, like the
> aforementioned
> Shayna -- wasn't around to see Mr. Morrone's prescription for Shayna's 
> travel
> problems
> in 'Petkeeping': he suggested an 'anxiety wrap,' a tight-fitting garment 
> that
> supposedly
> has a soothing effect.
> An anxiety wrap? Mr. Tin might say. For riding in a car? Are you arfing 
> kidding
> me?
> You want anxiety, try rescuing Rusty from 50 armed Apaches. I did that 
> three
> times
> a day, and nobody ever wrapped me.
> Anyway, by the late '60s those paragons were going or gone, and there were 
> new
> dogs
> in town. The neurotic Scooby-Doo arrived in 1969; yes, the title beast 
> would
> eventually
> help save the day, but what the dogs in the viewing audience noticed was 
> that he
> could also, say, eat his master's triple-decker sandwich and not be 
> punished.
> Then came the slobbery 'Beethoven' movies, which turn up on TV a lot 
> because
> they're
> family-friendly, and the even more slobbery 'Turner & Hooch,' which turns 
> up on
> TV
> a lot because it has lengthy scenes with Tom Hanks wearing nothing but 
> black
> underpants.
> And now there's Brian, the more-human-than-the-humans dog on 'Family Guy. 
> It's
> no
> wonder your postmodern mutt, after spending hours watching this kind of 
> stuff,
> thinks
> there are no rules.
> 2. LIBERAL DEMOCRATS The 'barking chain' scene in the 1961 film '101 
> Dalmatians'
> taught dogs how to spread news far and wide, and one of their first 
> chances to
> do
> so was provided on April 27, 1964, by the nation's No. 1 liberal Democrat,
> Lyndon
> B. Johnson. Johnson pulled his beagles, Him and Her, up on their hind legs 
> by
> yanking
> their ears; a photograph of the president demonstrating the stunt with Him
> appeared
> far and wide. Him yipped, and dog lovers howled. ('White House Gets 
> Protests on
> Dogs,'
> read a headline. Telephone Callers Deplore Pulling Beagles' Ears.')
> We can safely postulate that word of the ear pulling reached every dog in
> America
> within a few days and that retaliatory planning began almost immediately.
> Mid-'60s
> dogs were smart enough to realize that a direct attack on a nuclear power 
> like
> the
> United States could not succeed; instead they chose a guerrilla campaign 
> of
> accelerating
> misbehavior, calculated to produce within a few generations -- i.e., 
> now -- dog
> anarchy.
> 3. OVERREGULATION Let's state the unpleasant but obvious: the balance of 
> power
> between
> dogs and humans shifted when we started ordering ourselves to clean up 
> after the
> beasts. In New York that took place on Aug. 1, 1978; that's when the 
> city's
> Canine
> Waste Law went into effect. One man interviewed that day called it 'the
> stupidest
> thing in the history of the city,' but now it's considered standard 
> operating
> procedure
> -- by both us and our dogs. Is it any surprise that dogs don't obey us 
> when they
> view us as their personal hygienists?
> So that's my guess as to what has given rise to the kinds of behavior now
> rampant
> on dog-whisperer TV: the confluence of bad role models, an image of 
> subservience
> and a long-held grudge. Possible solutions: play 'Lassie' DVDs in a 
> continuous
> loop,
> limit dog ownership to landowners with at least 10 acres and have 
> President
> Obama
> issue one of those apologies for historical grievances that have become 
> popular
> in
> recent years. It's either that or get used to dog tongues in your nostrils 
> and
> dog
> behaviorists every time you turn on the TV.
> PHOTOS: Who's the real master? Jill Zarin and her Chihuahua, Ginger, on 
> 'It's Me
> or the Dog. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANIMAL PLANET)(C1); Cesar Milan, the Dog 
> Whisperer,
> helps
> pets like Macy with behavioral issues. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MPH-EMERY/SUMNER 
> JOINT
> VENTURE)(C6)
> .
>
> _______________________________________________
> nagdu mailing list
> nagdu at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nagdu_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nagdu:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nagdu_nfbnet.org/julielj%40neb.rr.com
>