Okay, then, from now on, in order to recount my own enthusiasm, I shall say, “Domesticated horses specifically trained to drag people away couldn’t drag me away.”
-FrL-
Related question. Don’t some old movies have cowboys saying “Get along little doggies!” to… their horses?
Porque?
-FrL-
They are saying it to the calves.
It’s pronounced with a long “o”. There’s a pronunciation clip in the link.
I don’t know about Israel, but in Saudi and Libya, it’s not historical, but very current. Probably in most of the world dogs are seen in that way. In Colombia I once asked my girlfriend why all the dogs were so skinny. She just laughed. “Why should they be fat?”
But here’s a permutation of the question: “Work like a dog.”
My dog doesn’t work at all. In fact, he’s pretty lazy.
Ah, but your dog is a modern dog. If you go back 100+ years, many dogs worked, and hard.
You don’t have to go that far. Sheep dogs in Australia and Scotland, etc. work very hard indeed.
I’ve heard tell of some hardworking dogs up Alaska way.
That’s just what I was thinking of.
The love many dog owners feel towards their animals is pretty much a new phenomenon. Until recently, the vast majority of people, anywhere in the world, have regarded dogs as “useful vermin.”
Anne told Calico Jack “If you had fought like a man, you need not now die [or ‘be hanged’] like a dog.” She was not suggesting that dogs were regularly hanged, but simply that he was about to die like a coward, which is often a considered a doggish trait. Anne was evidently not at her best early in the morning.
Aww, yeah!
It seems pretty obvious to me. If the speaker was the dog, it would be said with pride or aggression, i.e. “I’ll hunt you relentlessly and catch you no matter what, because I’m such a badass” whereas the target being the dog, the phrase is used with a tone of disgust and contempt: “I’ll hunt you down and shoot you in the street like the mangy cur you are”.
“Doggie” (short o) = diminutive for dog
“Dogie” (long o) = diminutive for calf
And no, they’re not saying it to horses.
Maybe some cultures, but in American and Western European history, dogs were highly valued because they were used for hunting. Centuries ago, hunting was something that was reserved mostly for aristocrats, so dogs even acquired connotations of nobility. Dogs have been meticulously bred and maintained for the purpose of hunting (and herding) for centuries, to the point where there’s actually a degree of snobbery in the form of pedigrees. That doesn’t really square with the above.
Sure, but for every pedigreed hunting hound, no doubt there were tens of thousands - no, hundreds of thousands of mangy street mutts who posed public health and safety problems. Dogs are prized exactly as long as they are well-behaved and useful. The moment they become sick or dangerous, they are… well… see thread title. The city dogcatcher has no time for sport.
Err… yes, and no. At that time, if there were unwanted dogs running around, especially in rural areas, they were nuisances–thieves and possibly livestock killers. Most unwanted puppies were probably quickly drowned or otherwise dispatched. Adult strays would have an easy time getting themselves shot. You’d probably have a bigger problem in cities, but animal cruelty was much more casual–street dogs in cities were sometimes hurt or killed for sport. I’ve been reading a lot of 19th century books in the last few months, and people are always casually doing things like setting stray cats and dogs on fire, or cutting off their tails or whatever. Last week it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. You couldn’t turn a page without stepping on a dead cat. Hell, some of my more redneck friends still shoot feral cats on sight.
Anyway, I think the point is, it’s not a reference to a general societal view of the canine race as a whole, but to hunting down actual rabid or otherwise diseased dogs, which were horrifyingly fearful things, hated, reviled.
Here now, Contrapuntal. What is the meaning of this? Repeating what I’ve said before I even say it? That’s like … like … PREplagiarism, that’s what it is!
Somehow I completely missed your post the first pass through. sigh I’ll go write “I will read more carefully before responding” 20 times on the blackboard.
Right. The phrase refers to how such animals are hunted…not as respected quarry, but as a nuisance to be eliminated with a greater regard to expedience than to sport.
Right. I was mostly responding to Alessan’s train of thought; your comment about the hypothetical thousands of verminous street dogs seemed in line with his commentary.
:smack: