All the culture that’s fit to devour, bite by bite!

This morning I read that a woman was arrested in San Francisco for biting another woman in a dispute over a parking place:

San Francisco police arrested Sara Gillan, accusing her of biting another woman over a parking spot around 6 p.m. Tuesday on Jennings Street in The Bayview. Police said the fight began when a car swooped into the parking space that the suspect had apparently been waiting for.

That’s when Gillan is accused of approaching a woman in the other car and biting her in the chest and the arms. The victim showed CBS 5 cameras a large bruise on her arm from the bite.

Some people would scream “There goes the culture!” Really? How many humans are bitten by other humans, much less over parking disputes? An incident does not a pattern make, regardless of how may times it is repeated online.

Last night I read that a family dog killed an infant. Clicking on the link to the story, right under the headline was this picture of this mean-looking brindle pit bull glaring from behind the bars of his cage:

“Oh shit!” I thought. Another “pit bull mauling” which will be recycled endlessly in the relentless propaganda campaign against the breed to which my dog Coco belongs.

But then I read the story in detail, and it turns out that the dog was not a pit bull, but a retriever mix:

Aiden McGrew’s mother called 911 when she got home around 11 a.m. and discovered the boy’s leg was severed by a retriever mix the family had taken into the home a few weeks earlier, Dorchester County deputies said.

The boy died at the hospital a short time later, Coroner Chris Nisbet said in a news release.

The family seems to like retrievers:

The sheriff said that the family apparently had two dogs, one they had for some time and the dog that attacked the child which they adopted in recent days. The dog that mauled the child was in a holding pen behind the sheriff’s office late Friday.

A woman answering a number listed for the home refused to talk about what happened and told a reporter to not call her back.

No one answered the door at the white mobile home in a wooded area with a cluster of similar homes about 30 miles northwest of Charleston on Friday evening. The home had a small doghouse and a small wooden porch in front.

A dreadful incident. Truly one of the worst things that can happen, especially to a family that loves dogs and got a bad one. But that bad dog is NOT an indictment of dogs. Whether retrievers, mixes, pit bulls, or anything else.

So after reading the story, I went back to that picture. Sure enough, they covered their biased media ass with the following caption:

File photo of caged dog. (credit: LUIS LIWANAG/AFP/Getty Images)

Great. I guess that would mean it’s OK to use a “file photo of imprisoned criminal” instead of an actual picture of the accused suspect. Somehow, I don’t expect them to do that.

Assuming that the bite was just a bite as opposed to a fatal attack, I would rather be bitten by a dog than by a human, and here’s why:

…human bites have a reputation for carrying a high risk of infection (about 16% actually) and we assume all bites to be heavily contaminated with bacteria. One textbook I referred to listed 16 different bacteria possible to contaminate these wounds. In reality, early, aggressive treatment with cleaning and elevation of any limb affected, and a good search for damage to any underlying structures will greatly reduce the number of bites that will become infected.

As a reference, about 4% of dog bites will become infected and 30-50% of cat bites will become infected.

What about stories involving humans biting dogs? If post mortem bites are included, such incidents would number in the millions, because dogs are routinely eaten in other countries. We even have a president who has publicly admitted to (essentially bragged about, IMO) eating dog meat as a child. And while “file pictures” have sprung up all over the place, they are used largely in humor. Like this one, which spoofs the president’s characterization of another incident:

Most American presidents did not eat dog meat when they were kids, and while I cannot say for certain that none of them ate dog during their lifetimes, the American consensus is that dogs are man’s best friend, and we do not eat them. (I see dog eating as a betrayal of man’s best friend.) My biggest objection to Obama’s dog eating is not that he ate dog meat as a child, for children should not be held responsible for what adults feed them, but the casual, trendy way he assumes a moral license to have eaten dog meat simply because it is not American. No American politician who ate dog meat as a child in the United States would admit (much less romanticize) such a thing in a biography, and if he did it would count against him. But the fact that the dog eating was a foreign thing makes it defensible, even “multicultural.”

How is a bad thing more defensible because it is “foreign”? It strikes me that a thing is bad or it is not. Had Obama attended a religious stoning of a prostitute, would that have made it more OK because it was done by another culture?

This way of thinking has been called “oikophobic,” and I think it is. It characterizes a certain segment of the left, and it is worrisome to see it in a president.

But I do not think it means “the culture” has been destroyed. It takes more than a oikophobic president who ate dog meat as a boy to do that. I almost said “oinkophobic,” which would have been wrong, for the president has been observed eating pork in public. And photographed eating one of Rudy’s Hot Dogs.

As to the restaurant’s mascot, “Fergie” seems to have survived intact.

What’s especially interesting about the above is the timing. It seems that Obama “annihilated two chili dogs and some fries”… “the day after First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled a new USDA guide for healthy eating.”

“The culture” will survive that too.