Word: doggedly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pets, notably dogs, cats and some birds, can, if treated sensibly, be pleasant, undemanding, entertaining consorts. During wars, insurrections and depressions, particularly, pet ownership seems to proliferate. Aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution claimed in some cases that they had lived because their dogs had repelled or mollified would-be assassins. Even in today's recession-inflation battered economy, when the care and feeding of pets would seem an exorbitant load on the family budget, there are more and more pet owners in the U.S.-deriving, perhaps, psychological sustenance from what Kipling called the dog's "love unflinching...
...attempt to endow their pets with human qualities, deluding themselves and demeaning animals. Many married couples who are unwilling or unable to have children adopt animals instead, embarking on a quasi-parental relationship without the responsibilities and hazards involved in child rearing. "If your romance is going to the dogs," suggests a pet-food-industry publication called Pet Pourri, "you might try a dog to save it." In fact, there are countless cases in which a couple's rivalry for a pet's affection-or occasionally even its sexual favors-ends in divorce, and often a custody battle...
...such pets as alligators, bats, cobras, hedgehogs, octopuses, tarantulas and vultures). Then, too, many pets, particularly the big and exotic species, are less objects of affection than status symbols, notably for the emotionally insecure or sexually maladjusted. In all too many cases, as W.C. Fields observed, "what is a dog, anyway? Simply an antidote for an inferiority complex." (Fields, of course, loathed most humans as well...
Fees and Fines. While private vets charge around $50 to sterilize a cat or dog, Los Angeles has introduced a model system of clinics that spay females for $17.50 and neuter males for $11.50, including all required shots. By thus limiting the number of abandoned pets, the city saves money. Increasingly, reputable dealers like Manhattan's Fabulous Felines will not sell a pet unless the buyer signs a binding contract to have it sterilized...
...Brown. Paperback $1.95 each. No one should be put off by Tintin himself, a boy in knickers with a muffin face and a tuft of hair rising to a curled peak like a Hokusai wave. Or by Captain Haddock, his bearded rum-sodden sidekick. Or by the small white dog, known as Milou in the original French versions of these stories, but for some inexplicable reason called Snowy in English...