Thanks again to the California Globe for running this piece and for providing the photo below - that’s the editor’s dog, Hans Gruber. Visit the website at: https://californiaglobe.com/ . Also, as I tend to do about California-based stories with larger implications, do know this is happening in a society near you, too.
Crate, castrate, and vaccinate – three things you are most often told by the good people at the animal shelter when you finally decide on a dog to adopt.
Why does that sound so unnervingly like what happened over the past few years to humans, too?
Crating – the lockdowns that were zealously enforced by non-medical doctors like LA County’s Barbara Ferrer and the state-run ads telling you that must remain alone.
Castrating - From speech codes to “silence in violence” to woke wordsmiths working wildly to make sure we can’t say what we really mean to the attempted muzzling of the state’s doctors regarding covid , California – as it proudly notes – has lead the pack on curtailing public dissent.
Vaccinating – If you didn’t play along and agree to be injected with an experimental drug, your livelihood was on the line.
What do these things have in common? They are dehumanizing, infantilizing, and counter the very nature of a free society.
Now dogs are not people, no matter how many sweaters we put on them and – if you do not plan to breed your dog – neutering is not a bad option (for some people, too.) And, unlike the non-vaccine covid shot , dogs really need their vaccines – rabies is not at all pretty.
As to crate training when you bring your new pet home, that concept has emerged relatively recently and I personally find it odd, though as not at all a dog expert I may be wrong on that.
But the ideas behind giving your new dog a happy home are strikingly similar to the concepts behind the current restrictions on the public space – stay in the yard - the constant pressure to not say the wrong thing – don’t bark, let alone howl - and, while it may not be literal castration, the overwhelming government/tech efforts to censor anything it does not like have certainly kept different ideas and opinions from reproducing.
What the powers that be have discovered is that it might just be possible to train, to control, to house break the citizenry, to domesticate the public, just like dogs. The pandemic response showed very clearly that – with enough fear and guilt and lies - it is surprisingly easy to nearly instantaneously transform a society.
The crushing pandemic response did, admittedly, have a bit of a head start over what would have been the public’s reaction, say, 20 years ago. The hyper-instant ability of social media to whip up a frenzy – any kind of frenzy – played an enormous role in the effort, but it must also be said that the ground for planting seeds of conformity, as it were, is more fertile now that it has ever been before.
Social-emotional learning in public education, DEI seminars at every level of society, and human resources departments that somehow have been able to set the tone – think small, be small, be a cog, follow the rules, focus on the minutiae – for corporate culture have all been preparing society for its own destruction.
And what do these three malevolent forces have in common?
They all train people.
And now they are training people to love the leash.
PS – I have no idea how cats fit into this equation – I’m thinking either independent outliers fighting the good fight or the owners of Big Pharma. Either way, they’re up to something…