Inspired by a distinctly odd facebook conversation I was a disbelieving viewer of recently. A friend posted a pic of his dog and another person (friend of a friend) commented that he’d never ‘met’ a dog.
From further questioning it seemed that he, someone apparently in his late teens from an American suburb, had never been close to or had physical contact with one of our canine friends, he seemed a bit chagrined by the turn of the conversation but said that his friends or family never had one and he only ever saw dogs at a distance. He wasn’t scared of them or anything, he’d just never had contact with one.
Is that possible or am I overstating the ubiquitousness of mans best friend?
I can’t imagine any American who’s NEVER had contact with a dog. I mean, if nothing else, there’s always some knob who lets their dog jump all over you while they’re on a walk, or a loose dog who comes up to say hi, or a kid with a puppy, and most of the people I know have dogs so any time I’m at their house…
I mean, I suppose it’s possible. But I can’t honestly imagine HOW, without going out of your way to avoid them.
Dogs actively approach humans to give them a sniff. Sounds like nonsense to me.
I worked on a research project once where we tested kids on animals. There was one girl who literally knew nothing, so instead of testing her I just tried to make her feel better by chatting about animals. She had never been near a dog, didn’t know anyone with a dog etc. It was really weird and set off alarm bells with me. I went to ask the teacher: she was severely abused and there were social workers on the case. It was apparently a difficult case because she wasn’t beaten or anything, just permanently locked in a room. That’s the only case I’ve ever heard of where someone genuinely has never been near a dog, and that was pretty extreme.
Unusual, but probably more common than you’d think at first. One generally runs into dogs at a friend’s house or outdoors while walking in the park or just around the neighborhood. Come to think of it, those are the only times I come in contact with dogs. It’s not like they are inside the office or the supermarket.
Consider that this guy is from the suburbs, which are generally designed around driving instead of walking. If none of his friends live in the same subdivision, then it’s possible he doesn’t walk around the neighborhood. Further, if he doesn’t enjoy outdoor sports, it’s not unreasonable that he doesn’t go to the park. The few remaining places where he might be outside: school and retail parking lots, don’t usually have dogs.
If one wanted to be curmudgeonly about it, one could blame it on the dang kids today playing on the MTV videogames instead of running around out in the fresh air like we did while walking to school uphill both ways.
Thanks for the answers everyone, I guess its possible if very unlikely, though I think my initial reaction echoes Rhiannon’s, although I don’t currently own one dogs have been such an integral part of my life I find it difficult to imagine never having had the pleasure of even meeting one.
Though I find it impossible to believe that someone could grow up having never seen the moon, its not even a matter of not looking up, its visible on the horizon looking straight ahead on occassion.
That does remind me of the heated debate I and others once had with my cousin (again in his late teens at the time) who insisted that the Sun and the Moon were the same thing, just viewed at different times of the day… :eek:
I’ve only ever been particularly close to three dogs that I can recall: all owned by family. Any others I’ve seen in passing, but never gotten up close to. It’s entirely possible that if my uncle and aunt didn’t own any dogs, I would never have gotten close to any dogs thus far in my life.
I can’t find the statistic, but the number of kids who grow up in Chicago and have never seen Lake Michigan is simply astounding.
How about elevators? Doesn’t mention numbers, but this article on a west side charter school says:
bolding mine
I met a 14 year old last week who didn’t know how a scale works. I don’t mean the innards, I mean she didn’t know that if you step on it, numbers tell you how much you weigh. No, she doesn’t know if she’s ever been to the doctor before.
With a kid I worked with in Brazil, we drove into a tunnel and he grabbed me and said: “Tia, is it night suddenly?!”. He’d never driven through a tunnel before. He was 11 at the time, I think.
We had loads of fun with those kids on escalators.
When I delivered newspapers I worked with a guy from the inner city who had never been near a dog. He was terrified of them and cats as well.
When he had to get out of his car to deliver to apartments he flipped out when a rabbit hopped by, he was sure it was going to attack him. He was afraid to walk past bushes because you never knew what horrors were lying in wait to attack him.
I was driving through western Kentucky once and saw signs for the Jefferson Davis Birthplace Monument. It had been a long drive, so I pulled off to give it a look. I stopped in a big truck stop to ask where it was. (This was before Garmin, y’understand.) No one there had any idea–they’d never heard of it. I drove into town and asked at the local dollar store. Nothing but smiles and shaking of heads. By now, I had too much invested in this, so I broke out the AAA Atlas. Turns out the monument was in the town 15 miles up the road, which I deemed worth my now-piqued curiousity.
As I drove up the lonely state highway, I saw this tall form ascend from the horizon. At first, with no frame of reference, I thought it was a silo. Then, as it loomed larger, I thought it was an unusual antenna–or even a shot tower from days gone by. The thing just kept getting bigger the closer I got. Turns out it was the monument–353 feet of concrete obelisk. It’s the fifth-tallest monument in the US, fifty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including pedistal. And the 20-somethings 15 miles up the road had never heard of it.
Not as striking as a lifelong San Franciscan never seeing the ocean, but damn, NONE of the people I’d talked to knew it was there.
A friend’s sister moved to Las Vegas a few years ago, and married a local man who had never left the city. When they came back to Virginia to visit last summer, we found out that not only had her husband never seen fireflies before, he didn’t know they were real. His mind had lumped them in with fairies and leprechauns and unicorns, and when he all of a sudden found himself surrounded by thousands of them in the backyard, he was positively awestruck.
I have to say, watching this 31-year-old tough guy dance around agog in the sort of pure wonderment usually reserved for toddlers was one of the more poetic moments of my life.
My daughter has never seen real snow. We live in Southern California, and somehow she managed to get sick every time a family trip to the mountains was planned. Even when the entire fifth grade of her school went to a science camp in the mountains last winter, she caught pinkeye the weekend before and couldn’t go. So this year she made me promise I will take her to the mountains no matter what. Some friends are tentatively planning a trip to the mountains in January. I hope this happens so the Princess can finally play in the snow.
I remember hearing a story, possibly apocryphal, about an Olympic alpine skier from somewhere in west Africa. He’d gone to school in Europe and picked up the sport there, and he got good enough at it to persuade his home country to send him to the Winter Games as a one-man ski team. He said it was often difficult to explain what he did to many of the people back home, who not only had never seen snow but also had never seen mountains.
“You go up on a what covered with what and put what on your feet?”
So this year she made me promise I will take her to the mountains no matter what. Some friends are tentatively planning a trip to the mountains in January. I hope this happens so the Princess can finally play in the snow.