23 Quotes by Bronwen Dickey

Just a generation ago if you went near a dog when he was eating and the dog growled,” she explained, “somebody would say, ‘Don’t go near the dog when he’s eating! What are you, crazy?’ Now the dog gets euthanized. Back then, dogs were allowed to say no. Dogs.

That is yet another marvel and mystery of the dog: it is the only animal that will place our safety and survival above its own.

Dogs have evolved to understand us better over the millennia, but in modern pet culture we appear doomed to understand them less.

By World War I, pit bulls were so beloved as national symbols that we literally and figuratively wrapped them in the flag. We even called them “Yankee terriers.

The majority of mixed-breed dogs in America are not crosses of two purebred parents, he explained, but multigenerational mutts, or mutts mixed with other mutts mixed with other mutts. Because the number of genes that determine the dog’s shape is extremely small, and so many variations within those genes are possible, looking at a dog’s physical chassis and making a guess as to its probable heritage will inexorably lead to error.

Once the breed label on my dog’s license had the potential to change the material circumstances of my life, including where I could and could not live, I began to notice how breed-focused modern American culture is. “When a cocker spaniel bites,” the journalist Tom Junod once wrote in Esquire, “it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.

Roughly 75 percent of the more than four hundred dog breeds we recognize today are whimsical confections whipped up in the late nineteenth century.

If we want to own dogs, their teeth come along. It is up to us to learn how and when dogs use them and to keep our dogs out of situations where they feel they need to. Aside.

If trained animal professionals with years of dog-handling experience aren’t good at visually identifying breeds, then what does that say about the rest of us?