Southern Europeans are kind to children and cruel to animals; the reverse is true of their cousins stuck across the Channel - or so the old adage would have us believe. I think there are differences between the way the Italians and the British relate to dogs, but they're rather more complex than folk wisdom would suggest. And this is illustrated by two horrific cases which hit the Italian press this week
On Wednesday the
Corriere carried
a report of a lorry driver being ripped to pieces by a pack of stray dogs in a layby near Leghorn. From today's paper I learned
the same fate had befallen a pensioner on the outskirts of Milan. I cannot recall having ever read of a similar event in the UK. In England the victims are nearly always small children attacked by a single dog. The Pit-bull or Rottweiler usually belongs to a young man attempting to compensate for the diminutive size of his brain and penis by parading the streets with an animal almost as repellent as himself.
For the Englishman's dog is an integral part of his self-image. The middle-classes favour Labradors, their origins as gun-dogs complementing the Range-Rover parked outside on the Chelsea street. I've had Border Collies since I was fifteen: no doubt I subconsciously hope that the breed's intelligence and good looks will have a halo effect. In Britain dogs live as part of the family, receiving titbits from the table and purloining the most comfortable armchair. All of which is incomprehensible to Italians: they like a clean home and allowing a dog inside would fill it with hair and muddy paw-prints. It's an animal, not a linguistically-challenged four-legged person and its proper place is in the yard on the end of a chain.
But this doesn't mean that Italians don't like dogs. Luisa still weeps when she talks about her dog who died several decades ago. Our neighbours opposite encourage Meg to jump up and lick them. The husband, Mimi, is clearly fond of his own dog, but when it misbehaves he'll beat it so savagely that he'd be reported to the RSPCA by indignant neighbours if he lived in England. A corollary of the Italians viewing dogs as animals rather than surrogate children is their readiness to abandon them if they prove inconvenient. We frequently see stray dogs. Some look terrified and half-starved, running recklessly across the road; I guess they don't survive long. Most, though, look happy enough even when they're limping, presumably from being grazed by a car. I imagine they know a number of people who feed them. One of them, who'd been wandering around the countryside for several years was eventually taken in by Valentino and Cecilia who've named him Libero to reflect his being a free spirit. Lupo and his new girlfriend have recently adopted a rather unpleasant corgi who appeared in the village a few months ago, and a fellow boarder, Gordon, has taken pity on a dog who was thrown out of a car just outside his house.
Whilst dogs are abandoned in England it's in far fewer numbers and the authorities quickly round them up. On the whole I like Italy's relaxed take on life, but in relation to stray dogs it can be fatal. As the
Corriere put it last Wednesday: 'Il branco. Che trasforma cani abbandonati in predatori' [The pack. The instrument which turns abandoned dogs into predators]. If abandoned dogs meet others in the same situation they change from being harmless objects of compassion into potential killers.
So in Italy dogs kill people because Italians don't think through the potential consequences of their actions when they abandon their animal. In England - in many cases - they kill people because their owner has trained them to be violent. All the deaths are tragic, but at least in Italy they're the result of human fecklessness rather than human wickedness.
