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The Lassie complex: why are we so obsessed with dogs saving human lives? | Zoe Williams
Sniffing out Covid, saving us from lions … humans love stories of wonderdogs, however true or false they are
When it comes to dogs, we like to project a saviour complex on to them. That is creatively well-documented of course – Lassie, anyone? But we also can’t help ourselves when it comes to real-life tales of incredible dog bravery. Most recently, it was when a woman who was attacked by a cougar while out hiking in California was saved by her “amazing and loyal” Belgian malinois, Eva. The story made headlines around the world, but drill down a little and you’ll discover that the dog, which weighs around 25kg, hit the cougar but was very quickly outclassed by the giant cat. The woman, 24-year-old Erin Wilson, went at the cougar with rocks, a pipe, a tyre iron from her vehicle, her fists, and finally some pepper spray and the help of a passing stranger, in order to save the dog, which had been dragged off the trail she was walking on by said cougar. Can we really say that the dog saved her?
Over the years, we’ve heard of dogs saving people from muggings, fires and bear attacks, and even alerting new parents to very ill babies. In February, an 81-year-old man whose electric wheelchair had lost traction sped into a lake but was saved by his dog (the dog merely barked at some passersby, whom one would hope would have spotted a drowning man, however). None of these are more powerful than the dogs and cancer stories. In the late 90s, a Pekinese reportedly discovered its owner’s breast cancer by barking incessantly at it. It seems this was neither era- nor breed-specific, and has been repeated since by a cavalier king charles that sniffed and pawed at its owner’s breasts, a labrador that also sniffed out cancer, and a border collie that sensed its owner’s cancer while also having breast cancer itself. If you read too many of these stories, you’d walk away with the impression that all dogs were consultant oncologists.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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