In the writing of fiction, there is one ironclad rule: don’t kill the dog.
Author Stephen King once related how he received dozens of angry letters from readers who were irate over Greg Stillson—the villain of The Dead Zone—killing a dog in that novel.
King replied to some of them: reminding them that The Dead Zone was fiction.
King’s defense was likely to no avail. A large percentage of the population has an intense, and (I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to, anyway) irrational attachment to dogs.
Why is this? Dogs serve as an object of projection for all ideal human virtues. Therefore, the dog is idealized.
Dogs cannot talk. Therefore, they can’t say unkind things to you. And a dog won’t reject you, so long as you feed it.
This attachment to dogs goes way back, all the way to prehistoric times. Canines and people have a long, evolutionary history together, a fascinating subject in its own right.
More recently, the author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) wrote:
“You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.”
The love of dogs crosses political, economic, and generational lines. My grandfather, a World War II combat veteran, told me about the grief he endured when Rusty, the family dog, died at some point in the 1960s. My grandfather (pictured below with my mom, grandmother, and the aforementioned Rusty) loved dogs.
As for me, I neither love dogs nor hate them. I’m not an “animal” person, even though my mother and my grandfather certainly were. Nor am I going to pick an argument with you if you have what I would regard as an excessive attachment to canines. There are some arguments that simply aren’t worth picking; and that’s one of them.
Kristi Noem, however, apparently never got that memo. In her soon-to-be-published memoir, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, she relates how she killed a hunting dog that was intractably aggressive around both humans and other dogs.
Noem has since been skewered by commentators on both the left and the right. It’s now generally agreed that her “murder” of the aggressive dog will make her too toxic and controversial as a potential running mate for Donald Trump.
I have a friend who keeps hunting dogs. He has told me that especially aggressive dogs are sometimes destroyed when all else fails. People who maintain animals for utilitarian purposes—whether as livestock or as beasts of burden—tend to view them differently than people who keep them as pets. You’re unlikely to find a farmer who names his cattle, even if he primarily keeps them for milking rather than beef. It’s just a different mindset about animals on the farm.
But don’t expect people to be rational where dogs are concerned, any more than they are rational about much of anything else of late. While intense affection for dogs does go way back, it seems to be exacerbated nowadays, as many of us are less connected to other humans.
I’ve also noticed a trend of single middle-aged women and childless couples heaping parental affection on dogs (and in some cases, cats). The expressions “dog dad” and “dog mom” entered our lexicon a few years ago. Not everyone uses such terms in a tongue-in-cheek manner. We now have a National Dog Mom’s Day. Yet another example of twenty-first-century America taking everything to ridiculous extremes.
That said, I make no plea here for a defense of Kristi Noem. She should have known better. As a politician, she is uniquely positioned to know how unhinged America has become.
-ET