The dog cull of 1760 divided London | Hacker News Reader

The dog cull of 1760 divided London

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We (the British) exterminated 750,000 in preparation for WWII. Voluntarily.

"People were worried about the threat of bombing and food shortages and felt it inappropriate to have the 'luxury' of a pet during wartime"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_pet_massacre

Question for anyone: Do you see this as a bad thing? It's simply the nature of war isn't it?

Humans can shoot guns back at invaders, dogs can't.

I'm an animal lover and conservationist but don't disagree with this decision, it was reasonable in a food shortage.

This is sadly not a unique quandary. From personal experience, if you search for "Dogs of Sarajevo" you'll see some interesting (as well as heartbreaking) happenings and hard decisions within our own lifetimes.

Not sure why you're downvoted btw; it's a legitimate if hard/difficult question and spurs discussion. And it's easy for us today from luxury of our homes to point out to sterile facts of "average calorie intake".

Having a pet in a war is difficult. When there's bombing, do you leave the pet in home or do you take them to shelter? If there's snipers and bombs pestering the city every day for years, how do you take them out to do their business? How do you give them exercise and love and attention and play with them when your friends and family just got killed, when you yourself are a shell of a terrified, stressed out, depressed, uncertain human being? How do you explain to the animal what the terrifying nightly sounds are that make it go berserk and attack furniture and other pets and human children in sheer terror, while keeping it confined to a couple of small rooms for years?

I don't think the cold simplified wikipedia article gives any justice whatsover to the actual emotions and situations and difficult decisions and tradeoffs those people had to make.

Heck, in the middle of the war, every day you have to make decision for yourself and your family - are we going to live another day? Should we end this? Is this suffering worthwhile? Is there end in sight? Is there any rainbow or light or good ending to this? Pets are simply part of that larger heartbreaking awful equation we as human beings inflict on each other.

> Having a pet in a war is difficult. When there's bombing, do you leave the pet in home or do you take them to shelter? If there's snipers and bombs pestering the city every day for years, how do you take them out to do their business? How do you give them exercise and love and attention and play with them ...

You act as you would for your children, you feed them, shelter them ... and kill anyone and anything that threatens them.

There is an assumption in your statement that every person considers a pet equivalent to a child, in all circumstances, including extreme existential ones.

It may or may not surprise you that is not universal.

I for one admit to being speciest. If I have to choose between my dog and my son I will not be thinking very long.

It is not even remotely hypothetical btw. Most of us, when our dog threatens and bites our child, will get rid of the dog and will not rid of the child.

In my mind either:

1. You did not fully think through and empathize with war situation and mentality. That's possible and even likely and I would not judge for that. E.g. Many Ww2 and Vietnam veterans famously persisted In telling people "you won't understand unless you've been there". that's infuriating and insulting yet true. It is difficult for a person in comfortable situation to empathize with extreme situations.

2. You are not being fully honest (either with yourself or us). I.e. You'd LIKE to think you are kind and giving to pets and don't want to admit that in extreme situation you might make a difficult decision and harm a pet.

3. You genuinely put pets and humans on the same level. That's certainly possible. I would say that when push comes to shove (as opposed to internet theorizing) that would put you in minority. Don't get near my children, especially if you remotely meant your last sentence - which would be TERRIFYING.

And if they're barking up a storm because they hear boots of enemy soldiers on the floorboards above your crawl space, what do you do then? Probably die? Maybe you have a duty to live for beings other than a pet that you cannot reason with to tell them to be quiet..

> it was reasonable in a food shortage

It's not like anyone was starving, there were of course shortages of certain products but the daily calorific from rations was 30-50% higher than what is recommended today. I don't think anybody had to resort to eating dog food?

At its worst the UK was estimated to be less than one week from being unable to supply the civilian population with their rations.

The British mainland isn't anywhere close to self-sufficient on food, and wasn't during WWII. So it needed shipments of food. Literally shipments because it's an island. Now, under ordinary rules of war ("Cruiser rules") you can't just blow up civilian transports moving food, you need to search the ships, find illegal shipments and then you can sink them after making their crews safe. But that's not how you win a war quickly against people with more resources than you, so Hitler ordered instead "Unrestricted submarine warfare" which is if you see a merchant vessel, attack and destroy it, they all drown, too bad.

There's a down side to unrestricted submarine warfare of course, unlike wearing badges with skulls on them (like the Mitchell & Webb sketch, but something elite military units on every side in conflicts have tended to do) blowing up unarmed merchant ships and killing their crews in order to starve civilians is clearly something that bad guys do, so, no moral high ground for you.

However in terms of starving Britain it was close to success. And the British government of the day assumed that, if starved, the civilians would demand their government surrender to Hitler to receive food. Would that have happened? We don't know. The Japanese experience suggests that civilians might just accept starving to death rather than surrender.

Indeed, rationing is often seen as people having to cut back on their food intake. In fact, its aim was to guarantee a decent minimum for _everyone_. The people working in factories making vehicles, munitions, ball-bearings, etc. needed to be healthy enough to keep churning them out.

today a kid time in my hometown because stray dogs attacked him, chased him and he fell into an open drain and died.

https://kashmirlife.net/fell-in-drain-struggled-for-days-for...

the government was pressured into "animal rights" by lobbyists who wanted to hug and care for stray animals but that has resulted in conditions like these.

i truly feel for "animal lovers" and their convictions but if a human life is lost because animals who could be put down are not put down, that makes me very very sad. and angry but very sad mostly.

Guns would not have been relevant in the defense of the UK. The danger was that of a calorie shortage caused by U-Boats.

I wonder how well Matt Hancock's supposed discussion during the pandemic about having the government kill all British cats would have gone in practice? I suspect it would make Partygate look very tame in comparison, not least because Hancock is no Churchill.

Several comments have mentioned that culling cats in response to covid didn't happen but I had reason to walk the streets of London in the relevant years and I have only just begun seeing mostly very young domestic cats around the town in recent months. Like pretty much everything Boris Johnson claimed he has said, I have a very strong suspicion the culling of domestic cats did happen in London England. That, or COVID-22 is lethal to all living things. I'm going with both those statements being true on the evidence I've seen.

Edit : red: " covid lethal to all living things " the insect population of the city of London vanished towards the end of the official pandemic measures. Maybe the job was considered done because only this January the most lethal covid variant was culling infants and young children in Japan killing in under two weeks through multiple organ failure and the day after NKK broke the story Rishi Sunak the prime minister of the UK ordered air routes to and from Japan to be fully opened up from lockdown rules completely without any review.

Are you implying that there were secret cat death squads roaming around London during COVID and somehow nobody noticed?

I would imagine it's more likely that people kept their cats indoors or stopped feeding ferals.

Or are they claiming that covid killed cats?

Yes

>When it was unclear how easily pets could transmit the virus to humans, the UK government considered ‘that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain’.

I know this is probably true but it just sounds so ridiculous.

So, _allegedly_, according to a junior minister, some minister suggested a Cat Genocide, yeah. Important context is that the government at the time had a _huge_ number of junior ministers, and due to the Tory party's constant purges over the last decade most of them were rather new inexperienced not-super-competent MPs. "Random Tory MP has stupid idea, talks about it stupidly" is a far cry from "War on Cats seriously considered as actual government policy".

> due to the Tory party's constant purges over the last decade most of them were rather new inexperienced not-super-competent MPs. "Random Tory MP has stupid idea, talks about it stupidly"

I really don’t believe that the broadcasting of stupid ideas was/is due to inexperience. Some of their most ludicrous crap was from their experienced MPs.

I think the purges also filtered out a lot of the more competent experienced MPs. Particularly in the Johnson era; quite a lot of people effectively got the boot for insufficient faith in Dear Leader.

It's also worth noting that "Government has a terrifying plan!!!!" is dumb fear mongering. You would HOPE your government has experience and practice war gaming and planning and simulating very very scary situations, because that's when you need them to work the most!

That's the reason the US has war plans against "Canada" and "Britain", for training and practice and experimenting, not because we seriously think King Charles is a HOI4 player with eyes for the former colonies.

This doesn't appear to have been the _government_ though, it was a 'minister' (and given how replete Johnson's government was with pointless junior ministers, that likely really just means a random MP). It's unlikely the actual apparatus of government was in any way involved in this; no civil servant was writing policy papers on poisoning Whiskas or anything.

Probably no one better to write about this!

> Stephanie Howard-Smith has a PhD in the cultural history of the lapdog in 18th-century Britain from Queen Mary University of London.

It's worth noting that unlike other countries, you won't find stray dogs in the UK.

It's worth noting that unlike other countries, you won't find stray dogs in the UK.

I have lived in 5 different countries, and I have not noticed significant numbers of stray dogs in any of them (I am sure the number is technically non-zero, but I never saw them). I have visited many more countries, and I have only ever really seen stray dogs in Costa Rica. YMMV.

Central and South America had a ton of stray dogs when I was there, and I hear they are very common in India too - they are probably common in much of the developing world. Like you, I don't recall seeing many of them in Europe at all. Lots of stray cats in Turkey and Greece, as I recall.

On the other hand we have a ton of foxes in and around London. Gorgeous creatures but quite a nuisance at times, like when they get into bins or making ungodly* noises at all all hours of the night.

* I originally misspelled this "undogly", which also works, I guess.

Now here is a person who can answer that timeless koan: "What does the fox say?"

Stray dogs are a pretty common sight in Greek streets. Although what's truly wild is the number of stray cats, especially in the suburbs!

In Istanbul, uniquely for a Muslim country, stray dogs are tolerated and are “regulated” by the city government. One day I saw a huge pack stampeding down the road en mass. Turks seemingly have a penchant for owning giant dogs, too.

Turks breed kagals. Hearding dogs big enough to keep bears and wolves away.

Those are scary big dogs.

I thought this was universal (in Greece) until I moved in the city center of Athens. I now only see stray dogs as an exception, e.g. in tourist-heavy, central places. I genuinely have no idea if it's the state's responsibility.

Cats of course, are still everywhere.

> what's truly wild is the number of stray cats, especially in the suburbs!

The smell of a cat colony has to be smelt to be believed. It’s up there with the worst smells I’ve experienced.

That's an interesting triple entendre sentence build around "smelt", which is a past tense (archaic maybe?) of smell, often written smelled, and a smelt is a little silver fish, so quite stinky, and smelt is liquid metal.

That's a rare sentence that pretty much works all three ways.

Yikes. It was 3am and I was sleepless. Smelt rather than smelled… poor.

In Brooklyn a couple of decades ago (1990s/2000s), I saw a very large pack of dogs roaming one of its business districts (I cannot remember where…)

It was 3:00 AM so there was no human activity, and seeing 20+ dogs 5 to 6 blocks running around even while in a car was unnerving.

around that time I was chased out of the gownus area while looking at buildings by stray dogs. I lived next to the Wiliiamsburg bridge and there were strays in that neighborhood. I think they liked the industrial area lots space not many people.

I’ve never seen stray dogs in the US while living here and I haven’t seen stray dogs in the 6-7 Western and Southern European countries I’ve traveled to.

I don’t think there’s anything remarkable about no stray dogs in the UK. Further, since dogs don’t breed as rapidly as other stray animals (especially cats) and also have far shorter lifespans, there are far easier and far more humane ways and of eliminating stray dogs without mass killing them.

There's definitely stray dogs in the US. It probably varies a bit by location though. I've not seen any in an urban area but plenty of rural areas have them running around, sometimes in packs.

We also came across them from time to time in Afghanistan.

Are they actually stray, or just allowed to run loose?

Friends of mine have a farm in central VA. There is a pack of dogs that crosses their property, but they aren't truly stray - one of the neighbors "owns" them (I use "owns" loosely, as they aren't kept as house pets in the normal suburban sense of the word).

There are most definitely stray dogs in the US. But the US is very big and varied in climate, terrain, and population density.

I'm in the suburbs and a stray dog would be caught and taken to a shelter. There are some coyotes, though.

I have memory of the definition of a stray dog being one unaccompanied by its owner, at least in the UK, in the legislation that introduced dog licenses.

That requirement for a licence but not the actual legislation was withdrawn meaning that definition of a stray I just gave will be the law if I recall correctly.

After the passing of a amendment to remove the mandatory dog licence then began this present era of human killing violent and uncontrollable breeds that kills innocents in the UK on a daily basis.

I want to see this definition enforced to control professional untrained and incapable in any case dog walkers who parade with entirely patently pack behaviour animated hounds around our streets and parks.

Besides fouling our byways and recreation grounds on a industrial scale concomitant with the damage to human health that entails, this is unlawful menacing of the public and private unlicensed enterprise founded on the breach of the law and hence must be eradicated.

To my horror I'm recently seeing pirate dog walkers inside the old City of London aka the square mile our beautiful and peaceful financial district where you will stay for weeks without ever seeing a law enforcement officer because we don't need them to intervene in anything because civilian life carries on peacefully regardless just as I well remember it always did almost everywhere just a few decades ago.

I can't remember seeing stray dogs in France. People usually call animal control pretty fast if a dog looks lost.

> I can't remember seeing stray dogs in France

There are barely even any pet dogs in France

Then who is leaving all the faeces on the streets of Paris?

Americans.

Unfortunately, this is not an unreasonable determination.

Additionally, the public restroom procedure in Paris is hyper-alien to anyone from a major US city. I imagine there are a lot of very ignorant 20-something US kids dropping nuggets at night in shrubs out of sheer necessity.

Imagine a normal, closeted US kid, doing a weekend or Semester abroad in France. They go to a friendly looking Irish expat pub, put down a pint or two, head to the loo, and just see A HOLE IN THE FLOOR.

If I was that sheltered child, I'd poop in the shrubs too.

There are about 7 million dogs in France, about 1 dog every 10 humans.

https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1014881/population-chie...

What a weird idea! Can I ask where you got it from ?

How is such a miracle achieved? Dogs never escape or are abandoned in the countryside?

They are abandoned, judging by the “a dog is not just for Christmas” ads. I think it’s the well funded charities like Battersea Cats and Dogs Home, who can collect them, and a reasonably strong culture for looking for a dog at these shelters before a breeder.

Another effective method is high rates of neutering for pets. There are geographically segregated areas in the UK that can somewhat confidently say they have no strays.

It can take a while to catch a stray, plenty long enough for them to successfully breed, which just multiplies the problem!

People neuter/spay pets

People will NOT feed strays

People will adopt strays

Local councils (municipalities) collect them and there are a lot of shelters

(there is zero rabies here which helps a lot as strays are not inherently dangerous)

There’s no rabies in any animal that’s likely to run up and bite you. A variant of rabies is still present in bats in the UK.

Such dogs almost always die. I think the frequency of strays may be related to how easy it is for a former pet to survive, and it's presumably harder in colder countries.

It's not a miracle. It's just that they are pretty much immediately reported and captured by the likes of the RSCPA or local councils.

I am sure in the 20th century and before you would

A monetary incentive from British authorities for mass killing of a certain species? Those never go wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...

I ve read Denmark switched to a more grain based diet over the course of the war. If humans have to cut back it makes sense to do the same for pets..

Rabies is a horrific disease. I can only imagine what it was like when it suddenly arrived on the scene. Apparently it spread from the New World, finding lots of new hosts in the varied European dog breeds[1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5620125/

> Apparently it spread from the New World,

That'd be a neat trick, considering that the Sumerians wrote about it. (per Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies#History)

Oh, it seems you're right; I was misreading the paper. Thanks for the correction!

I guess it's actually a bit muddy, but best guesses are that it's Old World indeed. Apparently it's hard to be sure since we don't know when/where dogs were domesticated, nor whether it started in bats.

So yeah, definitely did not "suddenly arrive on the scene" as I had thought.

----

If you're interested, see the paper I linked; the section "The origin of rabies lyssavirus"

They're probably thinking of syphilis (although even its origin is debated via yaws)

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