CZM Rewind: Part One: Riot Dogs Are Very Good Dogs

Cool Zone Media.

Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? Your weekly reminder that sometimes we take breaks like this last weekend, which was a three day weekend for most people. Somehow me included, which means that this week is a rerun episode. And I thought to myself, what am I doing this week? Well, I'm trying to hang out with my dog, my rescue dog. This podcast brought to you by rescuing animals. You don't actually have to do the rescuing.

You can just adopt them, and it's actually harder work. Rescuing is hard work, but the actual taking care of them for the next ten to twenty years more work cumulatively. Anyway, I was thinking, boy, I like dogs, so I thought, let's do a rerun episode about dogs. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, Your weekly dose of sometimes people fight against the bad things. I'm your host, Margaret Kilja. With me today as a guest is okay, there was no one else that I could have had as a guest for this episode. With me today as a guest is Sophie Lichterman, who you all might be aware of as the Webby Award winning podcast producer most known for her work with Jamie Loftus. Sophie, how are you doing?

It's my favorite intro I've ever received. Also shout out Jamie Loftus. Pre order her book or by the time this comes out, order her book row Dog. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I literally pre ordered it today after telling other people to pre order it for a long time.

Hey, a pre order is a pre order, okay today.

Yeah, and our producer today is Sophie.

Oh my god, Sophie. Hi Sophie.

Yeah. Ian is our audio engineer, Hi Ian. Once people hear the topic, they'll understand why Sophie is the guest today. Anyway. Ian is our audio engineer Hi Ian. The theme music was written for us by Unwoman. Since people ask me this about once a week, I'm saying unwoman like, not woman like U N w O m e N that is the name I'm saying every week.

No, you're not. You said unwomen. You just spelled unwomen. You're saying, oh god, yes, I can't do anything. Bucked it up and audio wise, you.

Know, as funny as as I was typing is, I was like, why am I bothering to type this out with dashes? I'll just look at the word and spell it, but clearly I'll mess it up either way. So today's cool people, Sophie, have you ever heard of you ever heard of dogs?

Yeah? My reason for living.

Yeah, dogs are the best. If you were to rate dogs into tears, all dogs would be S tier, which is the highest tier.

Uh huh.

That is a scientifically categorizable fact. Co sign with the exception of the Boston Dynamics robot dog, which is not a dog.

No, doesn't count.

Yeah. Those have to be taken individually and judged on their individual actions.

Mmm hmmm.

Today, this week, we're talking about dogs in general. We're gonna be talking about riot dogs. But I'm obsessed with context, so we're gonna talk about dogs.

Let's go, who let the dogs out? Okay? Well, I promish Margaret I wouldn't do the who let the dogs at reference more than once, so I'm getting it out of the way early. So yeah, Margaret, tell me who let the dogs out?

Whoo?

Who?

Probably? No, probably Siberia but possibly Southeast Asia. Actually, so dogs are the first domesticated animal. Yeah, I'm gonna take this way back. Dogs are the first domesticated animal. Dogs are not descended from modern wolves. They are descended from the pleustoicne wolf, the plustoicine wolf, from which the modern gray wolf also descends, so they're like cousins or siblings to the modern gray wolf. Basically, dogs are descended from the wolf that evolve to hunt now extinct megafauna like mammoths and shit. Just part of why dogs are so cool.

They roamed over basically the entire northern hemisphere. These are the wolves. They roamed over the entire northern hemisphere in the last ice Age. They crossed the bearing Land Bridge and shit the same as the mammoths did. And when the megafauna went away, so did these wolves. Let's talk about these wolves. Wolves are cooperative game hunters. They also don't really travel in packs.

Interesting, it's more of like a It's not like a pack, it's more of like a duo, right yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, actually there's often a lot of them, but it's a family unit. It's usually a nuclear family. It is a mated pair and their kids. And I can't talk about wolves that bringing up the alpha wolf thing. I really want to talk about the alpha wolf thing. So I'm gonna do, you know, the alpha wolf thing.

I do because Anderson, my dog, who is perfect shout out Anderson, recovering from surgery and still the baddest of the baddest bitches. I call her an alpha fox because fox cousin of the wolf, looks like more foxy than wolfy. Okay, and Uh has the personality of an alpha fox, which I mean of an alpha wolf.

See that's how well, but but alpha wolves aren't real. This is what I'm trying to tell you.

No, no, it all goes back to, you know, the male male authority. Yeah right, well, am I there?

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna tell the story because I'm really excited about lets because one of my thing favorite things in the world is that when people call themselves alpha males, they're basically calling themselves domesticated. Now that domesticated captive. They are saying, I am in captivity. Yeah you are, because the alpha male thing is entirely based on a combination of lies and misunderstandings about wolf behavior. In nineteen seventy, this guy named David Mech put out a book called The Wolf Theology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. Since then, this guy is still alive. He rules he's spent decades trying to be like, hey, a lot of the stuff in that first book was wrong. We've learned an awful

lot since that book came out, or, to quote him more directly, we've learned more about wolves since that book's publication than we had an all of previous history. But the book is still in print, and he's tried time and time and again to get it taken out of print, but it sells well, so the publisher's like, whatever.

Are we Yeah, I was going to say alpha capitalism.

Yeah, totally the thing that this book got wrong. And he was not the first person to get this wrong.

He was.

I believe it goes back to the nineteen thirties, but I didn't put that part in the script, so I'm not sure. What it got wrong. Was the idea of an alpha wolf in a pecking order. He called it a lead wolf in the book, but it's the same idea. It's what the Alfa wolf people get the thing from. It was about how a dominant male controls the entire pack and picks on the weakest mena and this is only true of wolves in captivity. So next time you meet someone who says they're in alpha, well, I've never actually, have you ever met a human in real life who says that they're in alpha.

Just unfortunately on many many dating apps. Oh god, yeah, a lot of times they lead with that in their bio and that's an intelle.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's horrible.

You've seen go ahead.

I was just gonna say, it's it's a tragedy to deal with this men, it's really horrible.

There's this video that lives rent free in my head and I can't remember the name of the like comedian group that did it, where they're like a bunch of bros going down the street and they're like jumping up and down and they're like, yeah, bros. And then they go up and they're like all right, all right, true or false for a dollar, masculinity is a prison And people are like true, and they're like, true, masculinity could be a prison. Baby. It lives rent free in my head.

You all should look it up somehow. I'm not sure how. Anyway, I want to know how that video reached you.

Who in the algorithm was like Margaret needs that.

I don't know. But next time you meet one of these people on your dating app, it's like they're saying I am in prison and other people are in charge of me, because that's the only way you get alpha wolf behavior. Of course, the prison in this case is patriarchy, and it's real, and it's probably why human men exhibit this behavior, and I mean, frankly, it's why in actual prison you see the same dynamics, but much much worse. Right, it is a thing that people and the wolves do in captivity is they create pecking orders and are terrible.

In the wild, wolves form family units, a mated pair in their offspring. Sometimes the kids fuck off at a year of age and start their own thing, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes they stick around a while longer and help the next round of puppies, and some packs do form with multiple breeding pairs occasionally. I believe in this case it's always the oldest wolf that is the lead wolf.

But to quote a research science Curicassidy quote, the wolves generally in the dominant positions within a pack are not there because they fought for it. It's not some battle to get to the top position. They're just the oldest or the parents, or in the case of same sex siblings, it's a matter of personality.

You hear that Anderson I'm older, I'm the pack leader.

She's like, OK, you haven't proven it. She's like another treat human. I wrote most this script with my dog laid on my lap or running around barking at things that he's not supposed to bark at aka being perfect. Yes, wolves do fight other wolves. This is actually the leading cause of death for wolves. Whoops. But they don't fight inside their own pack. They fight for territory. And this part I thought was kind of cool. The packs that win the most are the packs of the oldest wolf, not the packs with the most wolves, because the elders are calmer and wiser and they're like, oh, we don't actually we shouldn't fight. That's a bad idea when they would otherwise lose. So yeah, Now I want you to guess, Sophie,

how many people are killed by wolves every year in the United States?

Really? None?

Yeah? Yeah, that's the correct guess.

Oh is it actually none?

Yeah? That's how many people are killed by wolves in the average year in the United States. In the past twenty years, wolves have killed exactly one person.

I bet that. I'm like, I bet that person did a dumb I.

Think she was just like hanging out in like backwoods Alaska and someone was a.

Real high you had me at Alaska.

Yeah, in twenty ten in Alaska, wolves killed somebody. Domestic dogs kill thirty to fifty people a year.

That is so actually I was expecting higher number.

Yeah, a lot of people are attacked by dogs, right, And we're going to talk a lot about stray dogs and stuff like that on this episode. But what if we break to a listicle of what animals kill the most people? Because that's what I wrote.

Let's do it then.

All right, okay, so what animals kill the most people in the United States. The answer is, honestly, no wild animals kill enough people to merit any actual worry. But deer top the list.

Oh shit, bam be you know.

And this one's it's messy because deer do occasionally like gore people and trample people. But I think most of these lists include people who die in car accidents caused by deer, right right, right, so I don't know exactly. And then stingy fuckers that's the technical term, like bees and wasps and shit, they're next. They kill on average fifty six people a year.

Yeah, I mean allergies and things like Yeah.

It's almost entirely allergic people. Yeah, dogs are number three, cows number four. They take out about twenty people a year.

Dude, I would think cows would be so much higher. I don't know why, but I think, but I think cows are just like out here, Tramplin.

I know whatever, I like to see a cow. I'm always like, I'm so glad you haven't figured out what you could do if you wanted to know. All they would have to do is sit.

Yeah, totally, Oh my god, and let people are under there, you know, easel sit death.

Yeah. Yeah, if any cows are listening fully endorsed murder, well, it's not really, it's self defense, honestly for a cow to.

Kill personal leave cows alone.

Yeah. Spiders are next.

Yeah, I'm allergic to them. They try to kill me at least three times a year.

Okay, fair enough. Don't become one of the seven that they succeed with.

Yeah.

Snakes only five people a year, which is interesting because something like six again I didn't write this number down is off the top of my head. From my memory from writing this, something like six to seven thousand people are bit by venomous snakes every year.

Are we just good? At science.

Yeah, more or less, it's like, do you just get to the emergency room and you'll probably be okay. So if you get bit by a venomous snake, don't freak out. Just get the fuck to the emergency room. Don't try and suck the poison out.

So I'm just going to assume if our healthcare system was better that it would be none.

Yeah, it seems completely possible, especially now that like there's better backwoods rescue technology like Satelle communicators and stuff. Bears, especially grizzly bears, kill about four people a year, I believe, mostly in Alaska, and specifically they tend to kill people who they who thought they were being friends with the.

Bear, like I said, a stupid Yeah.

Alligators kill one person a year, Sharks kill someone every two years, Mountain lions someone about every four years or so. So now you know, watch out for deer, don't worry about wolves. It's literally just not worth worrying about. You ever watch Alone, m I watched like the first season of Alone, and there's like the person who's like, here's a wolf and is like they didn't let me bring a gun. I gotta go home. It's just not safe, and I'm just like you fucking anyway, So don't worry about wolves. But we're not here to talk about wolves.

We're here to talk about dogs. Dogs aren't wolves. They're closely related cousins, you said, Yeah, yeah, they have the same I guess they make them siblings, right if they have the same parent, the plasticine wolves.

Yeah, I guess. So.

Yeah. So the answer about how they were domesticated and when and where is we don't know.

It's my favorite kind of history.

Yeah, there's and there's a lot of guesses, and a lot of the guesses are backed up by evidence, and so I'm going I'm going to go through best current knowledge, as best discovered by Margaret. What we do know is that dogs are the first domesticated animal. What probably didn't happen, And it's like always always the way I sort of was told to envision it. It's not that like humans like captured some wolves and were like hunt for us, buddy, and then like consciously bred them for docility or some shit.

You know. What is much more likely, infinitely more likely, is something called commensalism, which I had never heard of before.

Yeah, because I have no idea what that.

Is so you know how like in like you know how, like high school science has betrayed us all because it tells us and we think we know everything, we actually know nothing. In high school science, I learned about parasitis, parasitism, and symbiosis. Right, Commensalism is something different, is sort of in between the two. It is where one species gets benefits from another species while neither helping nor hindering the other species. So it's just like an animal, like a raccoon digging through your trash can, especially if it like doesn't leave a mess somehow, is not a parasite right because it doesn't damage the host. It is a commensal, commensial commensal. I'm going to go with that relationship. And

so probably a long ass time ago, most likely currently suspected in Siberia or Southeast Asia. Until more recently people are thinking mostly East Asian Southeast Asia, and now people are leaning a little bit more towards Siberia, and I'm sure it'll change. A bunch of wolves were like, hell yeah, we can eat the food that humans throw out, and they started hanging out near the humans, or it might have even been hell yeah, we can prey on the animals that eat the food that humans throw out, right, and the calmer wolves were able to do better in proximity to the humans since they didn't run away as much.

And so these less fearful, less human aggressive wolves, they evolved physically. Their snouts shortened, and they ended up with fewer teeth, doing less of the killing themselves basically, and soon, Honestly, my suspicion is like, right away, but I don't know, No one really knows. As soon this commensalism moved to mutualism, which is another word for symbiosis that is technically different, and I spent a while trying to read about the difference.

I'm just gonna use the word mutualism where both species gain advantages, and there's so many advantages. Having wolves around probably was part of the direct hunting, right The wolves now dogs would corner prey for humans to finish off, just like how people hunt with dogs today. And or and this is like even more certain or guessed upon, is that they protected the kill from other predators, right, because as soon as you like, bring down a mammoth, all the other animals were like, yo, what's up? Can I have some of that? And you got all these wolves around, being like, no, the fuck you can. You can't have any of it. That's for the humans and me, you know. And also you can sleep soundly at night

because your campus arounded by fucking wolf. And I would argue, and this is my own hypothesis, that emotional support wolf was probably just as important as anything else right from the start. Exactly.

Yeah, who doesn't want the comforting feeling of a wolf in their.

Life, because like this is only like somewhere between thirty to forty thousand years ago when they became dogs, So probably you're going back tens or hundreds of thousand years before that. But you're still talking about Homo sapiens. You're still talking about us. You're talking about someone that could fucking be raised in our society and be a normal person in our society right now. So if you take one of us and they're and a wolf nearby dies, and there's all these wolf puppies and they're like, oh no, what will we do without our mother? Like as cute as shit?

Yeah, I mean, I guarantee they also needed unconditional love back then.

Yeah, yeah, totally, we all need unconditional love, which leads me to my statement, humans and dogs together always have both are better for it. Yes, and this is the thing that like it wasn't a violent controlling act. It's not the destruction of the wildness of the animal. Dogs were domesticated long before the widespread practice of agriculture also, which I thought was kind of interesting. And again we don't know exactly when, but we know that modern DNA science stuff suggests that the evolutionary deviation from regular wolves started forty to thirty thousand years ago, around the time that the ice age was at its iciest, when we probably needed each other the most. Frankly and the first. Yes,

we are one hundred percent certain this is a modern dog entirely. This is a dog. Right is the remains of a little guy who died and was buried with his people fourteen two hundred years ago in what's now Germany. There's more that dogs offer us. To quote from the New Yorker, the Ajibwe people, a North American indigenous group, say that the wolf was given to the first human as a companion. They see wolves as mentres to humans, modeling how to behave in a social group and how to behave while hunting. And this is like particularly interesting when you think about the fact that the alpha wolf thing is absolute garbage and actually, yeah, it actually probably was decent modeling for people. You know. It's also hypothesized

that are packed with dogs is how we out competed the Neanderthals. Basically, we are really good at hunting with dogs. It's like it's like fucked up. It's like just a cheat code, right, you know, You're like, you go chase the thing and corner it. I've got the pointy stick. I'll kill it once you've got its back against a wall, you know. Yeah, okay, and then the weirdest one I ran across. And this might not be true, but it is hypothesized by a scientist. The reason we have whites in our eyes might be because we hunt with dogs.

The selera the like the white of the eye is not white in most animals, and it is white in dogs, and it is white in humans, and it is white in very few other primates. Like there's individual primate to have it, but it's not like a species wide trait in any other primate as far as I can tell. To quote the Guardian, the wolf possesses white celera, as does Homo sapiens, though crucially it is the only primate that has them. And then, according to author Pat Shipman, who's quoted in the same Guardian article, the main advantage of having white celera is that it is very easy to work out what another person is gazing at. It provides a useful form of nonverbal communication and would have been an immense help to early hunters. They would have

been able to communicate silently but very effectively. And it is possible, And is this author Pat's hypothesis that we have ald white celera because we hunted with our dogs. Yeah, I do.

I do always say that Anderson has my eyes. So yeah, science says I am correct.

Yeah, wherever dogs were first domesticated, wherever their people went, they went, and soon you have four distinct haplogs, which is not a term I really understand, but basically subtypes of dogs and dogs just went everywhere. They went across the land bridge into North America. And there's all kinds of arguments about whether some specific types of canines are really dogs or come from the same place, etc. But this is the gist of it. This is the gist of dog existence spread and this is not meant as a slight to cats. They started being domesticated, probably in Western Asia around ten thousand years ago. It seems likely that the thing that the cats sort of offers they prey on the rodents that eat grain stores and such. Right,

but today is a dog day. We're talking about stray dogs, especially we're talking about riot dogs. But first there's more context.

But before you get to that context, do you know what time it is?

Time to learn what's good for us to exchange money for?

Well, I thought it would be fun because I feel like a lot of the listeners listening to this episode will like dogs. You give some for the ad breaks to recommend some of my favorite dog products. Oh okay, as the official sponsor, and if anything else comes up, it is wrong. Okay, I want to recommend these these Anderson's really smart, and she really liked and we used to live in a really tiny apartment a yard to run in or anything like that, and I got recommended these Nina autoson puzzles and you can hide dog treats or whatever snacky in there and they have to like figure out. And Anderson would spend you know, twenty minutes or ten minutes or just pretty smart so like two minutes sniffing through and opening and figuring out how to

do the puzzle and it's really good for the for dog brains and is fun. So yeah, I would like to to plug the Nina Ottison puzzles.

Hell yeah, and then whatever this other stuff is and we're back. So there are stray dogs and there are feral dogs, or as they're sometimes called to try and make them more technical sounding, free range unowned dogs. I don't think anyone actually calls them that, except like articles. Most dogs in the world are free range, unowned dogs.

I didn't realize this. Less than a quarter of all dogs are pets with specific caretakers across a lot of the world. Dogs are more likely to be sort of owned by the community if they're owned at all, like the village or just yeah, sometimes just nobody. These dogs tend to be commensal, like not just the ones who are owned by community, but the dogs that are unowned or whatever. They live off trash and such, right going back to their roots, and stray dogs or dogs that start off living with people. Feral dogs have generally never had a person who they're paying attention to. I hate them.

It's funny I feel like I'm like, I hate the word like owned with my dog. Rentraw is my dog, right, I think the possessive pronoun makes sense, and so I don't mind saying that, but I hate being like, I'm Rentraw's owner, and I'm like, eh, whatever.

See, I'm Anderson's human and she, yeah, she more. She definitely is in charge here, So.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So, both stray and feral dogs both live lives where they tend to avoid or occasionally attack people. They're usually presented as a problem for the human community and that they live in proximity to but not always And that's actually gonna come up a couple times in this week's story. Sometimes the community cares for these dogs. Sometimes they kill these dogs. Sometimes they do a combo move where they care for some of them and kill other ones. And we're going to talk about that in a bit. Unfortunately, that'll be the sad part of the days episode.

But first warn me about this.

Yeah, we're going to talk about them, not right now, will be a little bit later. We are going to talk about the way in which society deals with stray dogs. Most of the individual dogs in this episode do very well Okay, let's talk about a famous and this is a thing. This gets presented as famous. I'd never heard about this in my life. You ever heard of Bummer and Lazarus. You're a California person?

Yeah, I mean, like yes, but no, if that makes sense, like Dartlings, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah, what you got for me?

There is a famous duo famous in the stray dog world, Bummer and Lazarus. All the stray dogs know these dogs. They lived in San Francisco in the eighteen sixties.

From Los Angeles. I don't know about San Francis is the same thing.

It's Alifornia. It's one state. How big could it be? Two New Jerseys?

It's large and in charge.

Three Rhode Islands. I guess. Yeah. If the state is as big as like four Road islands, I guess I could imagine. Not knowing the other side of it, it's.

Like the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world.

Yeah. Actually turns out, well, that's gonna come up. California's outsized economy, even in the eighteen sixties, is going to come up in today's story.

Cool.

So this is decades before San Francisco burn to the ground. There are a lot of street dogs in nearby Los Angeles. Ever heard of it? Yeah, the whole country. Straight dogs there outnumbered people two to one in the eighteen forties.

Man, I wish that was true when I live there.

Well, except that everyone was poisoning them with strychnine all the time.

Oh well, Margaret, you should have led with that.

Okay. Some dogs figured out a way to the strych nine, which was by pleasing people by killing rats and so like kind of like coming out ahead on like I'm a stray dog, and I might like fight your sheep, but you know what, I kill rats, and people are like, all right, So these dogs, the ratters, sometimes they get spared and loved, which brings us to Bummer. Bummer was a Mutz Mutt medium sized, half Scottish terrier. Half I'm quoting a nineteen oh one article that is going to mention a breed that I Google does not know anything about, half Japanese snubnosed poodle. Yeah, that's what one newspaper article.

And let's be honest, it probably was none of those things. It was probably just a dog.

Yeah, it was just a dog. Absolutely. Another book says that it was a Newfoundland mutt. It's just a dog. It's also not nearly the size of anything Newfoundland's shaped. Yeah, anyway, MutS are the best. Yes. Bummer was born in Petaluma and then came with this guy, a journalist named Ned Knight, into the city and then somehow ended up astray. So I hope that Ned died because that is the only reasonable reason that his dog became astray. And otherwise, fuck him one of Bummer's ears. It was like it was like, I was like, you're waiting for you to say it, because it's in the script to.

He said, Yeah, like Ned, I hope you died. Otherwise, fuck you.

One of Bummer's ears was shorter than the other. Maybe it was cut, maybe it had been bitten. He is an ugly little guy. He started hanging out. I mean this in only positive ways. He started hanging out in front of the saloon and killing rats and begging for scraps, and he lived a lonely life until until eighteen sixty one.

A year after he'd found his station, he saw another medium dog in trouble under attack by a larger dog. In comes Bummer drives off the larger dog. David versus Goliath, but it was too late. This other dog, he was fucked up, caught in the leg, not expected to live. Furst him back to health, brought him food, cuddled with him for warmth in the cold streets. Thus was born Lazarus, his companion for years, and the two dogs begged together and ratted together and just hung out in front of the saloon, and everyone loved them. Yeah, they were famous.

There's a really funny reason why they were famous. Every newspaper was writing about them, every journalist. Every journalist was like exaggerating their personalities or inventing new ones whole cloth. Like there'd be like gossip rag stuff about them, you know, because the bar that they hung outside of was the journalists cafe that all the journalists hung out at.

They were like the first dog influencers.

Yeah, totally, Bummer and Lazarus the first dog influencers, and political cartoons would feature them. One day, Bummer survives this to be clear. One day someone shot Bummer in the leg.

Who the fuck shot Bummer in the leg?

I don't know, I don't know. I hope they died, and Lazarus went off to beg with another dog. In the meantime, and the newspapers were furious. What in gratitude? Right, But then the wound healed and Lazarus returned Bummer forgave him and back they went to it. One time they stopped a runaway horse and so they were heroes. One time they killed, like I forgot to write this in a script, they killed like eighty rats in twenty minutes or some crazy shit, just like just fucked ton of rats.

And anyway, but so their heroes. The newspapers are writing about them because there's nothing else happening in the first half of the eighteen sixties in the United States. That's newsworthy. I got like most of the way through this and I was like, ah la, la la, eighteen sixty three. I was like, I think there was bigger things happening.

I was like, that's so cute. They're giving NewSpace to these little dogs, the dog influencers.

Yeah. Completely forgetting the date, yeah yeah uh. To be clear, he one to eighteen sixty five was the American Civil War. California wasn't connected to the rest of the country by railroad yet, so in many ways it was isolated. That came in eighteen sixty nine the Transcontinental telegraph was brand new as of eighteen sixty one. But Californians did do a bunch of anti slavery fighting. Thousands of Californians joined regiments out east, and then California's gold was crucial to the war effort. And they also went and helped prevent the slave Empire of the Confederacy from taking Arizona, New Mexico.

So California did hold its own that collection of four New Jersey sized area or four Rhode Islands right anyway, in eighteen sixty two. Sorry, no, I did get it right, but I wrote it wrong in the script. I wrote nineteen sixty two in the script, but I'm going to say eighteen sixty two because that's when this happened. A new dogcatcher was doing the rounds and picked up Lazarus because Lazarus was astray, and angry mob forced the guy to let Lazarus go, and the city declared that the pair were exempt from the laws against strays because they were the people's heroes. They were still dogs, I was gonna say, because they're dog os. Yeah, exactly, there are still doggos. Bummer used to kill sheep and get into

fights with the other dogs that might have been when I got shot on the leg. I don't know. Both was innocent, Yeah, I support him even if he's innocent. And both of them used to trash shops that they would like go wander into a shop and then it would get locked up behind them, right because the day would end and the person wouldn't notice that the strays had gotten in, so they would just trash the shop.

But I would too if I was locked inside it anyway, And then all dogs eventually come to an end. One day in eighteen sixty three, someone poisoned Lazarus, and his second death, stuck Bummer was inconsolable. In eighteen sixty five, he died as well. Drunk kicked him so hard that he lasted only a few more days. The drunk was arrested, and once he was in jail, his cellmate found out what he did and then quote popped him on the smeller.

So at least there was some kind of both.

This is the problem was, you know, like like it's the same thing as like you go to see a dog movie. You know how it ends.

I know, I'm sorry, I know how it ends.

But also like did did did who poisons a dog who kicks a dog. The fuck is wrong with these people? I agree, despicable. I just read the next sentence.

Oh my god, what so Bummer was eulogized by Mark Twain but in a weird, mean spirited way.

Yeah, well that's Mark Twain for you.

I know. At first I was like, in a quote his eulogy, and then I was like, whatever, fuck Mark Twain Twain. Both the dogs were taxi herm and put on display in the saloon. Yeah, I don't know whether. I don't know how I feel about that one. I don't enjoy that eventually they would donated to a museum that eventually it gets written as destroyed what was left of them. But honestly, I'm gonna go with put them to rest. And there's a plaque up about them now, which ends with quote two dogs with but a single bark, two tales that wagged as won. They were good dogs, beautiful, I know, I know, And they were the first news.

I mean, I'm sure there's other.

News straight a dog influencers.

Yeah, and I think a context I wanted to lead with the dogs, but there's some interesting humans in San Francisco during this time, and I.

Think it just stopped with San Francisco.

Yeah, this is the era of San Francisco eccentrics. Most famous was this guy Joshua Abraham Norton aka Emperor Norton, who I didn't think I was gonna whatever quite make his way into cool people, but actually after about him, I think he qualifies on his own. In eighteen fifty nine, this man who was essentially penniless, declared himself Norton, the first Emperor of the United States. He's a very San Francisco figure. He was an immigrant. He's a white guy born in England, raised in South Africa. This is why he so San Francisco in my mind. He was a real estate speculator and commodities trader who lost everything in some rice market speculation shit. So he declared himself himself emperor, and people were like, yeah, all right, whatever, And he

wore a uniform with a fancy hat and fancy feathers. The Emperor. Basically, I wish we still treated Eccentrics this way. He was granted free ferry rides and train rides because after all, he's the Emperor of the United States. Police officers saluted him as he walked by doing his rounds, quote, inspecting the streets and sidewalk, which is what he spent most of his days. Doing businesses he went too, except andy with his name on it. People gave him food.

Some people actually assumed he was rich, but he was poor as fuck. He lived in a boarding house. People sold souvenirs with his face on it. So it's like kind of a weird trade where basically, like the city made a ton of tourism dollars off of their like guy who called himself emperor. You know. At one point he called up the army to declare war on Congress, but oddly enough, no one came. He did make some good laws, or these might be apocryphal. People argue about what he said. According to a potentially apocryphal story, he announced that anyone who called San Francisco Frisco would be fine twenty five dollars, which is almost six hundred dollars today.

I'm okay with that law coming back. I think it's just needlessly petty, and you know, we're gonna have laws. He also demanded that religions weren't allowed to fight each other. And the thing that I found that is not apocryphal, that I dug in a bunch about and why he's a cool person doing cool stuff is that he tried his hardest to leverage his weird fame to fight against anti Chinese racism in San Francisco. He used the two tools at his disposal. One the newspapers like to publish his eccentric pot proclamations, and two that people let him speak at pretty much any meeting. So for a decade he wrote proclamation saying that Chinese folk should be treated with respect. This is like, during a big, huge let's

be even more racist to Chinese immigrants than people are today.

You know.

Then in eighteen seventy eight, a crowd of racist union guys, because another thing that keeps coming up on this episode is that there's a lot of bastards who are union guys. A bunch of them were forming planning on some let's call them murder riots, which was a common enough thing in the racist Bay Area at the time. So he showed up and he stood on a box and he was like, hey, let me speak on the Emperor. And then the racist Irish guy in charge of the mob was like, okay, yeah, you're the Emperor, you can speak and Basically he was like, as Emperor, I command you all to go home, and it didn't work. But the fact that this guy just walked right into this angry group of thousands of dudes to be like, shut the

fuck up and stop being racist.

It's cool people who did cool stuff.

Yeah, And the tie to Bummer and Lazarus is that in cartoons he was always presented as the owner of Bummer and Lazarus because they became they're all like characters. And this, actually, I mean, it gets into some stuff that like, it's bad when we make animals mascots, it's even worse when we make humans mascots, especially people who are nerd divergent. Right, But he gets presented as the owners of Bummer and Lazarus. And this is not true, but it fits the vibe at the time. He died in eighteen eighty and some rich businessmen paid for his funeral.

Equally popular at the time, but not remembered so clearly today. One final eccentric was Frederick Coombs, sometimes called George Washington. The second he told people he was George Washington. He was also phrenologist. He walked around measuring people's skulls. I kind of like, don't like this guy. He wore a Revolutionary War uniform because he was George Washington, and he had a public beef with Emperor Norton, and eventually he fled to New York City. His argument was that edbur Norton doesn't like me because I'm successful with all the ladies, and he spent the rest of his days trying to sell people photographs of himself visiting Benjamin Franklin's grave and says, I like Norton so much because he spent his all

of his fame trying to stop racism. I've just like decided that Frederick Coombs is the heel in this story. But I have no information about that. I don't know, you know, trust you, I don't know. These are just exceptions or society used to treat like sort of public neurodiversion figures who don't have any money differently and more kindly than they do. But yeah, that's bummer and Lazarus.

Let's talk about dogs, and let's get to the saddest part of all week.

All right, let's do ads first.

Okay, With that, people will totally listen to these ads. They'll be so excited on the edge of their seat, can't wait to come back. Okay, what's the thing I like for my dog? I really like having a hands free leash. I go hiking with rentron all the time. I don't it's funny. I don't know what brand leash I have, but when I go hiking, a.

Really good ones. Yeah.

Yeah, it's great being able to hike with him hands free, and I recommend it.

Don't forget to bring water for your dogs on hikes.

Yeah. I use a little collapsible bowl and Rentrout mostly ignores it unless he's really thirsty. Here's some other ads. We're back and we're going to talk about how society treats animals, which.

I don't like the subtitle for the section of the script, but go off.

This subtitle is euthanasia.

This.

Doing this research changed my opinion about some stuff and really interesting ways. So in that I've learned more about mora alternatives that other countries have developed to euthanasia. I was like going to just like leave that there, and then I was like, people are going to think that I've like anyway, So most of our heroes are straight dogs this week. Generally speaking, straight dogs are seen as a problem for people. Some ungodly high percentage of humans who get rabies get rabies from dog bites. It's like more than ninety percent. Bats are, like, I think, the only other thing that comes anywhere near it, and rabies fucking sucks. Rabies just kills you unless you run quick as hell to get a Rabi's vaccine as soon as

your bit and as one hundred percent mortality without treatment. The first person to survive rabies without a vaccine was a kid in two thousand and four who is bit by a bat, and so doctors I remember this, Yeah, because there's a big.

Very Yeah, this is a huge story that I haven't thought about since two thousand and four.

Yeah. Wow, this kid gets bit by a bat, does not get the like, doesn't realize that it's a problem, so it doesn't immediately go get that. I think it's called prophylactic when you get the vaccine afterwards, and yeah, starts getting sick and they the doctors put her into a medically induced coma and her body fights off the disease on its own. More people have survived using this method now, but it's like not a lot more people.

The most recent article I found about ten years ago and they were like the third person to survive rabies. You know, so rabies is really fucking bad and straight dogs are really good at spreading rabies even when they're not rabid. Packs of wild dogs are not always safe to be around, especially for children, especially for elderly people, And it is a it is a social issue, right.

There are a bunch of different ways of different countries try to deal with the problem of stray dogs. There's two main ones, and I think that they provide I think it provides important context because we're talking about straight dogs and what they face and what they deal with. The US and a lot of other countries just kill them.

You can dress it up in a lot of different ways. Overall, strays are taken to shelters, they're given as sort of limbo period to see if anyone claims them or adopts them, and then they're euthanized. This is generally supported as the best and most humane practice. Literally, the Humane Society does it, as does PETA. I like the only group I want to like say like this pisses me off. It pisses me off that PETA does it, because PETA's whole thing is like humans should need animals, which I've been vegan for all on twenty one years, twenty two year or something like that. I don't think that it's wrong for humans to eat animals. It really annoys me that someone who takes that stance is gonna say, like, well, we

just euthanize animals and that's fine, because it's like, in my mind is like pick one.

And there's a lot of hypocrisy.

Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily hypocritical for other people who care about animals to try and with this problem. But I whatever, I'm going to try not to moralize too much about this. It is the accepted method that I grew up in a society that I have used this as the accepted method. There's no good statistics available, but the main statistic that is cited is that as of two thousand and eight, three point seven million cats and dogs or euthanized a year in the United States.

The US doesn't have a stray dog problem to the same degree as some other countries. So in some ways you could say that this works sort of. I want to compare it to a different strategy that doesn't sort of work, that actually just works or has worked for both the Netherlands in Germany, they have two different attitudes.

In twenty twenty two, the Netherlands declared itself the first country in those stray dogs. They did it without euthanasia. They did it by setting up a program called collect newter vaccinate in return, which does what it says on the tin, Like, that's what they do. They collect, they new or they vaccinate and then they return the animal to the streets. They also put a massive tax on store and breeder bought dogs. I think this isn't nationwide.

I think this is like municipalities do this. So rescue at dogs are the thing, right, you want a rescue animal. Everything else is kind of frowned upon socially and crazy expensive.

Yeah.

And finally they set up a sort of animal cop force, not not like dogs who are cops, but people who police basically people who go around and find people who abuse dogs and then like get them in trouble, right, putting like massive fines go ahead.

I would say, that's the first time I've heard somebody use the word cop in a good way.

No, it's very like, it's very.

It's super interesting.

Yeah, And so you create this environment where animal abuse is taken seriously. Throwing out animals is taken very seriously, and every stray animal is sterilized and vaccinated, so they're not going to be rabid and they're not going to reproduce, so you you just don't have to kill them, and it just makes sense that it works.

Yeah, I mean sure, the Netherlands is a much smaller country and it's a much smaller population than the United States, right, but even in that, in that smaller scale, it's quite impressive.

Yeah, it is. Germany is the other country. It's funny because in twenty two Netherlands declared itself the first nation with those straight dogs. Germany is like ahead of them and does it slightly differently but had worse branding. Yeah. Probably Germany is just like, we don't want to declare ourselves number one on anything. Is this bad? Yeah, we're only number one in self depreciation these days. It's the only thing we're the best at. So Germany has a slightly different attitude, but not incredibly different attitude. There's no euthanasia for healthy dogs allowed, it is.

I'm glad that Germany is taking no euthanasi stances.

Yeah, it is illegal for stores to sell pets. Breeding dogs requires extensive certification. There's like, buying a dog from a breeder costs thousands of dollars. So getting a pet from a shelter is the way to do it unless you have very specific needs like oh I need the following kind of hunt and dog or whatever. Right, their shelters have adoption rates upwards of ninety percent as a result, whereas like I looked it up, but I've done rt in the script, it's like less than a quarter of in the US, unadopted dogs live in the shelters for the rest of their life. This is the main difference between them and the Netherlands and some other countries is that the dogs are never put back on the streets.

They live in the shelters, and that is financed by the government. Right, it is subsidized by the government. And if you're caught abandoning your pet, you get a twenty five thousand euro fine.

That's dope.

Yeah, And I'm not saying this would magically work in the US, right. We have a lot of very different things going on culturally, but slowly building a culture where it's like like there's this thing in the US where people are like oh, I'm gonna make money. I mean, one, everyone's poor, right because the US is fucked, and since everyone's poor, they're like, well, I'm gonna I have this thing that can possibly make me money. If I don't get my dog fixed, it can make more dogs, and I can sell those dogs. And that is like what a lot of people choose to do because of their financial situation, and then they abandon those dogs because they can't sell them right, or they can only sell like one out of ten, or you know whatever.

Just to say though, like, I feel like there has been a shift where there used to be pet stores that had dogs available in their stores, and puppy mills and things like that. Specifically, when I was growing up, there were stores at malls that had these puppy mills. That that doesn't exist. I mean we probate it like childhood meet protested and things like that. Yeah, but these things existed, and now for the most part, they're still breeders.

There's still things like that. But I would say puppy mills and and dogs for sale at stores is very Uh it's it's the outside. It's very it's outlier in the situation.

Would you agree, I think You're probably right. I like, I haven't thought about it. I used to think about puppy mills and stuff like that when I was first getting involved in politics and stuff, and I haven't thought about it in a while, so I haven't like looked. But you know, you're right, I'm not used to like walking into a store and seeing the the cage full of dogs anymore.

And yeah, yeah, I mean there used to be like actual like brick and mortar stores that that is all they sold were puppies and they were in these like little hamster containers that were just horrible, and it was uh yeah, but you know, I mean most people, most people are able to adopt, not shop at this point.

Yeah, yeah, And I and I will say one of the things that my parents did right, they had a lot of things right. My parents are great. They raised me right. All of our pets were rescues. That was it was never a consideration. That's how you get you take care of things that need help, you know. Yeah, but yeah, uh okay. I'm going to close out today with another highlighting of the sadness of the US system.

Cool, cool, cool, Let's tell a funsie at the end.

Yeah, a little little I swear Wednesday's episode fucking all hits it's gonna be so it's all up him from here.

Fuck yeah.

So I want to talk about some hero straight dogs. So a bunch of straight dogs are hanging out US Army based in Afghanistan. Three of them were named Sasha, Target, and Rufus. In twenty ten, in February, a man tried to suicide bomb the base. The three dogs attacked the man. He couldn't get past, so he detonated himself early. The dogs saved fifty soldiers' lives. The US should not have invaded Afghanistan, but fuck the Taliban also, so whatever, I understand people's you know whatever. Yeah, this is not a morality tale that part of it. Sasha died from her wounds from the blast, but Rufus and Target survived and were nursed back to health by the soldiers, and they were heroes. Soldiers pulled strings to adopt them and get

them sent back to the US where they could live with them. They went through all the red tape in order to do it. They appeared on Oprah, you know, with their dogs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I definitely have seen this. A friend of behind the bastard's. Oprah Winfrey, Yeah, yeah, Uh did you hear how that ended? Is it bad? No? I only got I only remember the good dog stuff.

Well, so target escaped from his yard in Arizona. Briefly, animal control picked him up and euthanized him.

Fucking Arizona. What the fuck is wrong with you? This is super fucked up. Yeah, you don't do that.

Yeah, And that's what I like.

Fucking America, what a horrible place.

I know, it was like, I love that these dogs risked their life to defend the people who took care of them, who they cared about, you know, and and the individual soldiers didn't betray them. The country that.

The yeah with death.

Yeah. And Oprah yeah too, equally bad. I don't actually watch Oprah, but I have heard enough behind the bastards to have a sense. But when we come back on Wednesday, we're gonna talk about really good dogs, all of whom lived good lives, loved by the people they loved, none of whom die violently or by like unhealthy youth in Asia, you know, mutualistic protection between protesters and dogs. Because when we come back, we're gonna talk about riot dogs.

I'm so excited. Do you have a a good Rentros story to lighten the mood before we exit this episode?

Yeah, let's see. So today I'm staying with someone who is trying to milk a goat, and Rentroll, with absolutely no training, loves herting, sheep and goats more than he loves his own life. Yeah, and so he struggles a little bit, watching calmly while the goat is being milked. But then when the goat got away, the goat is new to being milked, and it is for the goats, like the goat recently had a smaller goat and whatever. Anyway, and Rintrell runs around, and so as soon as the goat got away, let Rintrall go and Nstraw went and got the goat back or helped get the goat back.

I don't know. I like watching him do his thing. It makes me really happy.

He's so smart and he's so sweet. Yeah, we were we were together recently and rentro Introt does not like cars. Yeah, no, understandably, so a lot of dogs don't like cars, and it's because of the vibrations. But as we were sitting there, I realized there was a pattern with Dtrot that I thought was really fucking cool. Rin Trot only barked at like the traditional gas cars Ryntron never barked at the electric or the hybrids. Yeah, it was so fascinating. Obviously it's because there's like some difference in sound or whatever. Yeah, but I think that's pretty fucking cool. Rentrot is cool dog who does cool stuff.

Yeah, he's always yelling. Industrial society has had some consequences. We need to talk about them.

I love him.

Yeah, me too, And we'll come back and we'll talk about more dogs.

Hell, yeah, I guess this is the time.

Oh plugs right, Yeah, Sophie the guest, What do you got? What do you feel like plugging?

I would like to plug my very good friend Jimmy Loftus's new book, Raw Dog, which if you're listening to this on Monday, comes out tomorrow, so pre order and if you're listening to this beyond Monday, it is officially out as of me twenty third, so check out jimmie social media to figure out where to purchase or request it at your local library. Thank you.

I am kickstarting a tabletop role playing game called p Number City, and I will it will be kickstarting all June in twenty whatever year. It is currently twenty twenty three. And if you go now I think this comes out before June, and you search p number city Kickstarter, you'll be able to sign up for announcements on the very first day of it, on June first. It's going to be twenty percent off the print book. We're going to make the PDFs and stuff as cheap as we can so that people can play without running a whole bunch of money or whatever. But the print books should beautiful.

And I've been working on this tabletop role playing game for like fucking ten years, and two or three years ago finally got together with a really good team of people who can do the things that I can't do, including tell me that I'm not in charge. And it's actually a collective effort and it's really fun and I'll be pit plugging it all the next couple of weeks.

And also go regular order Jamie Loftus's book Raw Dog. Yeah, it's about hot dogs if you like history, and.

There's a dog theme, but it's not the dog that we discussed today.

It's more sadness at least with comedy. Yeah, and we'll see you all Wednesday.

Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of a goole Zone Media and more podcasts and Google Zone Media. Visit our website goolezonemedia dot com or check us out on I'm a Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts

CZM Rewind: Part One: Riot Dogs Are Very Good Dogs

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