wtf

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Hahahhaahahahahahaha This is hilarious. Like an old-timey cartoon dog-catcher villain or something. "Wandering around town with a net gun" hahahahahahahhaah. Omg. hahahahahahahaha. Fuck, seriously, this is high comedy and I respect that rat-salute-2

    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DiabolicalDogCatcher

    Here's the TvTropes for villainous animal control professionals, because that was literally a thing back in the day. I suspect it has a cultural connection to anti-rabies campaigns. Back in the day in the US, today in some parts of the world, feral and semi-feral dogs were a huge and dangerous reservoir of rabies. Dogs aren't instinctual shy around humans the way most animals are and that meant they were much more likely to encounter and approach people. This brought rabid dogs in to contact with people more frequently than other rabid animals and resulted in a lot of death and suffering. Rabies is a terrible disease. Only recently have vaccines been developed. Only I beleive two people have survived after they began showing symptoms and iirc correctly the treatment plan used was something abjectly insane along the lines of spiking their blood with anti-freeze and bringing their body temperature down to 40 degrees for an extended period to kill the virus. One of the people this radical experiment was tried on survived and mostly recovered. there's literally no way beyond these incredibly radical experimental proceedures to save someone once symptoms are evident.

    Really, rabies is terrifying. It hijacks your behavior making you more likely to do things that will spread the virus to other people. Afaik it's one of the most aggressive behavior-modifying diseases in humans and, again, it's completely untreatable once symptoms begin.

    So either way, I think back in the day when the US was aggressively controlling and destroying feral dog populations, there was likely a lot of friction between people who were used to having semi feral pet dogs running around and public health initiatives that sought to destroy feral and semi-feral dogs to control the spread of rabies, canine distemper, and other dangerous endemic diseases, and this villainous dog catcher was how that conflict was presented in media.

    Seriously, a net gun. Lol.