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Man Bites Dog: The Axis of Evil takes on canines
National Review, Dec 9, 2002 by Jonah Goldberg
If a race of super-intelligent dogs were to land their spaceships on Earth, we would not have a hard time convincing them to join the U.S. in the "War on Terror." They wouldn't even need to see that infamous al-Qaeda tape of the dog being gassed to realize that the enemies of America are the enemies of all dogkind. Indeed, as it turns out, our Axis of Evil and theirs are not all that different.
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"I call on the judiciary to arrest all long-legged, medium-legged, and short-legged dogs along with their long-legged owners," Gholamreza Hassani told worshippers last month, according to an Iranian newspaper, "otherwise I'll do it myself." This Iranian cleric is hardly a maverick; he is merely one of the more outspoken members of perhaps the most anti-canine regime in the world. Iranian officials regularly confiscate dogs and execute them unless the owners can provide adequate paperwork; even then the animals are often beaten and abused, and sometimes put to death anyway. In June, the sale of dogs was banned.
The rationale behind the periodic crackdowns is twofold. First, Islam is, quite simply, anti-dog. While the Koran makes few references to dogs, the Hadith -- the collection of sayings of Muhammad's contemporaries and closest followers that forms the spine of Islamic law -- contains over 400 references to dogs, almost all of them derogatory. Dogs are simply "unclean"; according to one widely cited hadith, angels cannot, or will not, enter a home that contains a dog. Dogs used for hunting or guarding are marginally okay, but even they are seen as spiritually dirty -- the equivalent of useful pigs. (One hadith holds that if your guard dog licks a utensil in your home, you must wash it seven times and -- inconveniently, it would seem, wash it an eighth time with dirt.) It is illegal to bring a dog into Saudi Arabia unless it has been certified as a seeing-eye, hunting, or guard dog. Even in secular Iraq, Saddam Hussein first made a name for himself as a boy by torturing and killing dogs with a white-hot steel bar.
The second reason Iran and other Islamic countries tend to crack down periodically on dog ownership is that it's perceived as a form of Westernization. "Regarding the spread of decadent Western culture in the society, the police have risen up against the propagators of corruption," read a police declaration in the Iran Daily newspaper, according to the New York Times. Other targets of the crackdown: women wearing heavy makeup and shopkeepers who dress up their window mannequins in saucy poses. "Sometimes they go after satellite dishes, sometimes they go after the way women are dressed on the street, and sometimes they go after dogs," Artin Zaman, one of the founders of the Iranian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the Times. "It's a way of keeping people distracted so they don't think about bigger problems."
But there's a larger dynamic at work here: The practice of keeping pooches is, today, a key indicator of Westernization. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon is in East Asia. In 2001, during the run-up to the soccer World Cup in Seoul, South Koreans endured a wrenching national debate about dog-eating. Unlike Islamic societies, East Asian nations tend to see dogs not as dirty but as delicious -- which strikes many of us in the West as horrifying. Joseph Blatter, the head of soccer's governing body, demanded that Koreans "immediately and decisively terminate" the practice; Brigitte Bardot launched a heated PR campaign calling the South Koreans "barbarians" for their culinary practices.
In a very thoughtful and evenhanded editorial, the Korea Herald addressed head-on what it called "another clash of civilizations": "In stock-raising Europe, dogs could become men's best friends as hunting assistants. In agrarian Asia, oxen were the property No. 1 in most families as farming aides. . . . Dogs have little use except for guarding houses, which was mostly unnecessary in ancient Korean villages." But as South Korea modernizes, the editorial continued, it "is rapidly becoming a country of dog lovers [and] chances are high that their owners, mostly children, will make eating dogs a thing of the past."
The nature writer Stephen Budiansky has written that dogs are among the most successful "social parasites" in the world, efficiently working their way into the hearts of mankind for their own selfish reasons. Budiansky's analysis leaves out much in the eyes of dog-lovers, but in a sense he's certainly right: The canine, more than any other species, has persuaded people to look out for it. But, judging from the historical record, some human beings are more persuadable than others; in Western civilization, dogs are especially prized as they help us fight our wars, enforce our laws, police our borders, and search for contraband. They also keep us company, with remarkable loyalty; Alexander Pope's observation that "histories are more full of examples of the fidelities of dogs than of friends" was partly inspired by the heroism of his own dog, who prevented a valet from murdering the great poet.
