Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 17, 2025
One knew what he meant, and it was hard to disagree with his sentiments. Trump’s initiative was morally and economically unforgivable. It deserved to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
But why drag dogs into it?
I’ve known many dogs over the years. Almost without exception they’ve been fine
and faithful animals. I’ve never known a dog that would dream of imposing a 25%
tariff on the aluminium and steel exports of an old trading buddy.
It’s people, not dogs, who
do such things. So let’s stop smearing the canine community every time a human
being does something that only a human being would be stupid and wicked enough
to do. I say it’s time the phrase “dog act” was retired. I think we should take
it for a long drive into the country and throw it unceremoniously off the back
of the ute.
In 2018, the Oxford
University Press announced that “dog act will be considered for
inclusion in the next edition of the Australian National Dictionary.” Usage of
the phrase, the Press noted, has “clearly increased in recent years.”
They weren’t kidding. The
phrase is everywhere. Here are a few things I’ve recently seen described online
as “dog acts”. A man kicking an unconscious man in the head during a pub brawl.
A married man taking out a secret subscription to a porn site. A guy asking his
mate to pay back an outstanding loan, right after the mate won $10,000 on a
poker machine.
Try as I might, I can’t
see the link between any of these so-called “dog acts” and the behaviour
patterns of the average dog.
So why do we insist on
using the phrase? Partly because it’s an Australian tradition. In Aussie slang,
“dog” has long been an all-purpose synonym for a coward, traitor, or general no-goodnik.
In criminal parlance, a
“dog” is a police informant. For cops, on the other hand, a “dog” is an
internal affairs officer who seems unduly obsessed with enforcing the finer
points of the law.
In the 1860s, the unusually
depraved bushranger Daniel Morgan earned himself the nickname “Mad Dog Morgan”,
thereby stigmatising an entire generation of dogs living with rabies.
Gough Whitlam, on the day
of his dismissal by the Governor-General, used a posh variant of the dog trope when
he called Malcolm Fraser “Kerr’s cur.”
But it isn’t just an Australian
thing. Dogs have been getting the rough end of the verbal pineapple for
centuries. In Othello, the gullible Roderigo is manipulated and finally
murdered by the villainous Iago. Roderigo’s dying words are, “O damned Iago! O
inhuman dog!”
It’s a curious line, because
the brand of villainy Iago practices – villainy without motive, villainy for
the sake of villainy – is a distinctively human thing. No other member of the
animal kingdom does it.
It’s true that cats will toy
with their prey in a way that strikes us as deliberately cruel. But cats don’t
know any better, because they’ve never evolved a sense of empathy. For a
predator like the cat, a sense of empathy would be counterproductive.
Dogs, on the other hand, have
a strong moral sense, evolved over millennia of interaction with humans. Charles
Darwin, who was a great dog lover, observed that dogs can and do feel remorse. They
can behave every bit as decently as human beings do – sometimes a lot more decently.
“Everyone has heard of
the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator,”
Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man. “This man, unless he had a heart of
stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.”
Something weird is going
on, when we use the phrase “dog act” to condemn a misdeed that only a human
being would be shitty enough to think of perpetrating – something like vivisecting
a conscious pooch, for instance. We don’t just impugn a blameless animal, when
we lazily use this cliché. We impugn the noblest animal of them all.
Consider all this from
the dog’s point of view. First we domesticate them against their will. Then we breed
and train them to perform feats of astonishing selflessness. If you get lost in
the snow, a dog will bring you a miniature cask of brandy. If somebody murders
you, a dog will cheerfully follow the scent of your killer.
The dog’s reward? When a
human being does something that no dog would do in a million years, we call it
a “dog act.”
Why do we do it? Do we
want to reassure ourselves that even at our worst, we’re still somehow better
than the best animal there is?
Well, we’re not. “Man,” as
Mark Twain once said, “is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.”
