11-03-2018, 10:24 AM
The Nazis didn't even allow Jews to keep pet dogs. Cats, sure, to keep rats and mice away. But dogs would have delivered a nasty mauling to a Nazi who broke into a shop window and grabbed some valuables on display or given a fair warning that the SS was there to take the family off to 'resettlement'. Resettlement that goes from a gas chamber and through a chimney.
White people in South Africa have gun rights, but how do they protect their guns? Dogs. Three 80-pound dogs acting as one predator is effectively one lioness, especially in the dark. A burglar can easily recognize that he is no longer the top of the food chain when he meets 'the Other Big Cat'. Lionesses prey on humans, and three medium-to-large dogs can suggest much the same about themselves.
Germans have fewer 'gun rights' today than Germans had under the Nazis (so long as one was on good terms with the Nazis), but by all accounts Germany is about as close to a model of liberal democracy as there can be. Freedom House recognizes Germany as better at human rights and civil liberties than the United States.
Want a defense? Get one with teeth and claws. Dogs give very bad bites, and they do not scratch like cats. They scratch worse. Having been scratched by a pet dog that meant no harm and gotten hospitalized for such, I watch dogs' front paws closely in their presence. In South Africa one would compare a pack of dogs to a lioness. In America, one would compare a pack of dogs to a bear.
I once visited a jewelry store in which the owner, an avid hunter, displayed a trophy bear with fur similar in color to that of my golden cocker spaniel. Except for the ears, the proportions were about the same. About everything was three times as large in linear dimensions, and if you roughly cube the dog into the size of the bear, then that golden cocker spaniel would be hard to distinguish from that bear. Would you like to meet a 270-pound cocker spaniel? Would you break into a house with five thirty-pound cocker spaniels if you were a burglar looking for stuff to pawn for a fix of heroin? Those five dogs might as well be one 150-pound leopard.
White people in South Africa have gun rights, but how do they protect their guns? Dogs. Three 80-pound dogs acting as one predator is effectively one lioness, especially in the dark. A burglar can easily recognize that he is no longer the top of the food chain when he meets 'the Other Big Cat'. Lionesses prey on humans, and three medium-to-large dogs can suggest much the same about themselves.
Germans have fewer 'gun rights' today than Germans had under the Nazis (so long as one was on good terms with the Nazis), but by all accounts Germany is about as close to a model of liberal democracy as there can be. Freedom House recognizes Germany as better at human rights and civil liberties than the United States.
Want a defense? Get one with teeth and claws. Dogs give very bad bites, and they do not scratch like cats. They scratch worse. Having been scratched by a pet dog that meant no harm and gotten hospitalized for such, I watch dogs' front paws closely in their presence. In South Africa one would compare a pack of dogs to a lioness. In America, one would compare a pack of dogs to a bear.
I once visited a jewelry store in which the owner, an avid hunter, displayed a trophy bear with fur similar in color to that of my golden cocker spaniel. Except for the ears, the proportions were about the same. About everything was three times as large in linear dimensions, and if you roughly cube the dog into the size of the bear, then that golden cocker spaniel would be hard to distinguish from that bear. Would you like to meet a 270-pound cocker spaniel? Would you break into a house with five thirty-pound cocker spaniels if you were a burglar looking for stuff to pawn for a fix of heroin? Those five dogs might as well be one 150-pound leopard.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.