Dr. Lou said:
It's as though, due to my european ancestry, I am instinctually ingrained to expect to see those animals and that kind of landscape in my life.
It's not quite such a woo-woo sort of thing. Since you were born you've heard fairy tales that originated in Europe, seen picture books about the lovely European countryside, and seen wildlife programs about the charming European wildlife. We have the same experience in the USA. Brainwashing. We don't get it quite as bad as you do because in many places our flora and fauna are quite similar to Europe's.
Too similar in some cases. About 120 years ago some idiot who was homesick for England brought back 80 pairs of house sparrows and set them loose in New York City's Central Park. They quickly drove dozens of species of native sparrows and other passerines out of their ecological niches. They are now the most common bird in North America and have colonized South America. From the Alaskan tundra, where they are fat and almost white, to the Arizona desert where they are tiny and sand-colored, to Tierra del Fuego (I don't know what those look like). The same thing that happened in your country when that other idiot brought over his bunny rabbits.
I agree that it is sad, australian animals are very uninspiring frankly.
How funny to read that. In America we regard your animals as positively exotic. Many of us dream of traveling there, not to see the wonders of Sydney, the quaint aboriginal art, or a performance by Angus Young on his own turf, but to visit one of those quasi-wild animal reserves where we can pet the wombats and the wallabies. Americans who have never seen a live kangaroo love them as much as our own bison. You guys have a really special place there. Of course the occasional heart-warming film like "Danny Deckchair" that makes Australia and its people look like 18th-century Switzerland doesn't hurt either. And actually Mrs. Fraggle and I, the world's oldest metalheads, would love to see AC/DC play to the home crowd.
Yes, dogs seriously are racist.
But not for the reasons suggested. Different ethnic groups exude different pheromones. If you don't believe me just ask the lady at the cosmetics counter. She'll tell you that in general white people, black people, Asian-Americans, etc., can't wear the same perfumes. Top-end perfume is chosen to blend with your natural pheromones to create a unique but pleasant scent that is for you. What works for people of Chinese ancestry does not work so well for people of European or African ancestry. Dogs' noses are about 1,000 times as sensitive as ours and they can smell pheromones that we only sense unconsciously. A dog that's only been around people of one ethnic group will interpret the new smell of someone from another ethnic group as simply from a competing "pack" and will react accordingly. Raising dogs in a cosmopolitan place like Los Angeles where they were routinely introduced to our friends who hailed from every corner of the globe, they had a much more expanisve definition of their "pack" than dogs that grow up in the back woods of Mississippi, or perhaps even in today's Australia which is probably not quite as racially integrated as your filmmakers want us to believe.
Of course in the bad old days certain people deliberately trained their dogs to dislike people of other races, and the practice is unfortunately not so ancient to prevent me from hearing about it in my own lifetime. But unless you buy your dog from a guy who looks like an extra in "Deliverance," she's probably not that kind of dog.
Rosa said:
If some people, in this case blacks or Hispanic, have a negative atittude towards dogs...
Since you don't live here you can be excused for choosing a very inaccurate example. I can't speak for all of Latin America, but Mexican culture has a very dear place for dogs. It almost seems that there are more dogs in the Latino neighborhoods in L.A. than anywhere else. After all, it was the fierce Aztecs who gave us the delicate little chihuahua, not vice versa.
gendanken said:
Yeah, this imbecile listened to that same imbecile's 'advice'
Uh, no he sure didn't. He was striding off into the forest
looking for bears and trying to make friends with them. Bears have quite a bit of pride and they don't take kindly to confrontations or somebody deliberately invading their territory. They are intelligent enough to know the difference between a wandering leaf-peeper keeping to a trail that smells of ten generations of humans, and a Steve Irwin wannabe deliberately leaving the beaten path, thinking every bear is Winnie the Pooh just waiting to invite him in for a small smackerel of something sweet.
I trust the forest rangers who tell us in interviews in major newspapers that the American brown bear can be sucked up to and you have a good chance of escaping an encounter without a scratch if you assume the most humble posture your body is capable of and
never look him in the eyes. I've heard the same thing said about gorillas. One of the reasons gorillas in zoos look more bedraggled than schoolteachers is that everyone who comes along stares them down.
We've all done dumb things and it's always a shame when one of us pays the price for all of us, but I'm sure glad it was him and not me. About 30 years ago I was riding my motorcycle across South Dakota and came upon a herd of bison that was on both sides of the highway. I just slowed down a bit and motored right on between them. I learned later that I'm lucky to be alive. About ten years before that the hyacinth macaw at the L.A. zoo and I became quite fasincated with each other, him hanging on the bars trying to get his head out closer to me. I stuck my finger in the cage to pet that soft-looking down. He rather gently but forcefully took it in his beak and shoved it back out into my territory. Having watched our own much smaller blue and gold macaw devour a steak bone, I realize I'm lucky to still have that finger.
As for mastiffs, I can't find who said it, but mastiffs did not originate in Europe. They are one of the ten or twenty ancient breeds that were first developed in central Asia when humans got the hang of animal husbandry. Their pedigree goes back about eight thousand years to the same era as the Lhasa Apso and Pekinese. At least somebody at the time foresaw the need to create dogs that were bigger than the ancestral wolf instead of nothing but lap dogs.
