Patricia Roberts-Miller's Blog, page 35

They do it too!

It’s really common in a comment thread for someone to respond to a criticism of one group with a comment along the lines of, “The other group does it too.” So, for instance, if someone says, “Trump supporters are motivated by tribalism,” I’ll count comments till I get to the, “Liberals are tribalists too” or “Both sides engage in tribalism.” The unintentional irony of that response brings me a wicked pleasure.

It’s entertaining because it’s a response that only makes sense if you think of all political discourse as being about which of the two possible groups is better. In other words, it’s a response that assumes rabid factionalism.

Here’s what I mean: why is the person making that comment?

Imagine this exchange:

C: I’m going to vote for Clinton because Trump supporters are motivated only by rabid factionalism.

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

That’s a discussion in which the “just as bad” response is relevant, because it’s showing that the major premise of C’s argument is inconsistent with his own actions—he’s claiming that his vote is motivated by a rejection of factionalism, so that he’s thinking of voting for someone who promotes factionalism is relevant. (I’m not saying the response is true, but it’s relevant to argue about whether they are just as bad.)

Imagine this one:

C: To win over Trump supporters, we need to show them how harmful his policies are to them.

E: That won’t work because Trump supporters are motivated only by rabid factionalism.

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

H’s comment is completely irrelevant to the question of how to persuade Trump supporters. And it’s irrelevant twice over: 1) Clinton supporters could be carry pitchforks and torches and the most rabid factional supporters the world has ever known and it has no relevance for whether Trump supporters are too factional to be persuaded by argument, and 2) the world isn’t divided into Clinton supporters and Trump supporters.

For that comment to make sense, every single issue would be reducible to the relative goodness of the only two groups that constitute the American political realm. That’s how H sees it. H thinks he’s being “fair” and “objective” because he thinks he’s condemning both groups equally. He isn’t. He’s stuck within a limited and politically damaging ideology about purity and motives.

That is the attitude about politics–that all political disagreements can and should be about which of the two possible groups is better (and it’s a zero-sum relationship)—that fuels rabid factionalism.

Political discourse should be policy discourse. Displacing policy discourse with arguments about relative goodness doesn’t help.

 

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Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

[Much of this is elsewhere on this blog. I’m curious if I’m still having the problem of being too heady and academic.]

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor who spent 1938-1945 in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler. Yet, Neimoller had once been a vocal supporter of Hitler, who believed that Hitler would best enact the conservative nationalist politics that he and Niemoller shared. Niemoller was a little worried about whether Hitler would support the churches as much as Niemoller wanted (under the Democratic Socialists, the power of the Lutheran and Catholic churches had been weakened, as the SD believed in a separation of church and state), but Neimoller thought he could outwit Hitler, get the conservative social agenda he wanted, disempower the socialists, and all without harm coming to the church. He was wrong.

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemoller was persuaded that Hitler would be a good leader, or, at least, better than the Socialists. After the war, Niemoller was persuaded that his support for Hitler had been a mistake. What persuaded him either time?

Christopher Browning studied the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its role in Nazi genocide, narrating how a group of ordinary men could move from being appalled at the killing of unarmed noncombatants to doing so effectively, calculatedly, and enthusiastically. German generals held captive by the British were wiretapped, and often talked about how and why they supported Hitler, many of whom had been opposed to him. In 1950, Milton Mayer went to visit the small German town from which his family had emigrated and talked to the people living there, writing a book about his conversations with ten of them, all of whom to some degree justified not only their actions during the Nazi regime, but the regime itself—even those who had at points or in ways resisted it. Melita Maschmann’s autobiographical Account Rendered, published in 1963, describes how she reconciled her Hitler Youth activities, which included confiscating property and helping to send people to camps, with her sense that National Socialism was idealistic and good. Robert Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats, David Stone’s Shattered Genius, and Ian Kershaw’s The End all describe how so many members of the German military elite not only reconciled themselves to working for Hitler, but to following orders that they believed (often correctly) meant disaster and defeat. Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement gives a depressing number of examples of major figures and media outlets that persuaded others and were persuaded themselves that Hitler was a rational, reasonable, peace-loving political figure whose intermittent eliminationist and expansionist rhetoric could be dismissed. Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland similarly describes American figures who were persuaded that Hitler wouldn’t start another war; accounts of the 1936 Olymplic Games, hosted by the Nazis, emphasize that Nazi efforts were successful, and most visitors went away believing that accounts of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination were overstated. Biographers of Hitler all have discussions of his great rhetorical successes at various moments, enthusiastic crowds, listeners converted to followers, and individuals who walked out of meetings with him completely won over. Soldiers freezing to death in a Russian winter wrote home about how they still had faith in Hitler’s ability to save them; pastors and priests who believed that they were fighting to prevent the extermination of Christianity from Germany still preached faith in Hitler, blaming his bad advisors; ordinary Germans facing the corruption and sadism of the Nazi government and the life-threatening consequences of Hitler’s policies similarly protection their commitment to Hitler and bemoaned the “little Hitlers” below him who were, they said, the source of the problems. The atrocities of Nazism required active participation, support, and at least acquiescence on the part of the majority of Germans—the people shooting, arresting, boycotting, humiliating, and betraying victims of Nazism were not some tiny portion of the population, and those actions required that large numbers walk by. Some people were persuaded to do those things, and some people were persuaded to walk past.

After the war, what stunned the world was that Germans had been persuaded to acts of irrationality and cruelty previously unimaginable. Understanding what happened in Germany requires understanding persuasion. And understanding persuasion means not thinking of it as a speaker who casts a spell over an audience and immediately persuades them to be entirely different. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, isn’t just about what a rhetor (a speaker or author) consciously decides to do to manipulate a passive audience. What the case of Hitler shows very clearly is that we are persuaded by many things, not all of them words spoken by a person consciously trying to change our beliefs. Rhetoric helps us understand our own experience, and the most powerful kind of persuasion is self-persuasion. What a rhetor like Hitler does is give us what scholars of rhetoric call “topoi” (essentially talking points) and strategies such that we feel comfortable and perhaps deeply convinced that a course of action is or was the right one. Rhetoric is about justification as much as motivation. That isn’t how people normally think about persuasion and rhetoric, and, paradoxically, that’s why we don’t see when we’ve been persuaded of a bad argument—because we’re wrong about how persuasion works.

This book is about Hitler, and yet not about Hitler. It’s really about persuasion, and why we shouldn’t imagine persuasion as a magically-gifted speaker who seduces people into new beliefs and actions they will regret in the morning. It’s never just one speaker, it’s never just speech, it’s never even just discourse, the beliefs and actions aren’t necessarily very new, and people don’t always really regret them in the morning.

There are various versions. This one is from here: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

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What it’s like when you’ve been reading Nuremburg Interrogations, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Shattered Genius, The End, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and Trump Administration officials saying they’re protecting America by standing by Trump

A recent anonymous editorial says, “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

This author, call them Franz, wants the Trump administration to succeed, and believes the administration is significantly damaging to the US. So, Franz wants an administration to succeed that he believes is damaging to the US. Wait, wait, that isn’t what Franz meant at all.

The problem with Trump is that he is basically a fascist. He doesn’t want a government accountable to the people through a critical press; he wants (and, to a large degree, has) a media that will repeat in a fawning way anything he wants said, that will defend him through any sophistries and casuistries and outright falsehoods necessary (how tall is he? how much does he weigh?).  Trump wants to be a one-person government, he wants to be head of a one-party state, in which there is nothing but fawning adoration of him, and a government of charismatic leadership. Franz thinks all of that is bad, and yet Franz does everything he can to keep Trump from being held accountable for how bad Franz thinks Trump is.

The sensible (and honorable) thing  for Franz to do would be to step outside the administration and call for impeachment. But Franz isn’t willing to do that honorable thing. Why not? Notice that Franz never explains that point. Franz wants to be seen as a hero without actually explaining why he hasn’t engaged in the genuinely brave action his beliefs would imply–openly condemning an administration he thinks is (sort of–he likes the political agenda, sometimes) bad, but not really, because not bad enough for him to take a hit to his political career.

Basically, this coward has done an anonymous negative Yelp review on Trump.

He says he likes the Republican, not Trump’s, policy agenda. Even without Trump, the GOP has Congress, a reliable propaganda machine, and an increasingly and openly Republican judiciary, and impeaching Trump would put Pence in power. So, why not do it?

Because, and this is what Franz doesn’t want to say, without rabid Trump supporters, the GOP wouldn’t have Congress. Franz wants the political energy and power gained by fomenting Trump’s fascism, but Franz thinks he doesn’t actually want fascism.

Oh, yes, he does. Franz doesn’t want the end product of fascism, but he wants the support of fascists. Franz supports fascism. Franz needs fascists. Maybe Franz should rethink his political agenda since 1) it depends on fascists, and 2) it depends on his hiding his ethical agenda from the public.

The German generals disliked Hitler from the beginning, recognizing him as pretty much a shallow thinker and an idiot about military affairs, and many of them were not Nazis, but they were reactionaries, and they loathed what they thought of as Bolshevism (which included liberalism and democratic socialism). They stuck with Hitler because they believed that “many of [his] policies have already made [Germany] safer and more prosperous.” They would have said that they supported his “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” Because he did all that. Seriously, Hitler did that. Franz would have liked Hitler. Hitler undid the socialist agenda of the Weimar democracy in regard to regulations about labor, he promised industrialists all sorts of things, and he promised the military what it wanted.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No, because I really don’t think he is, but I do think he’s a fascist (not in the loose way it’s thrown around in the media, but in the way scholars like Paxton describe it). I’m making a more complicated point: Franz is presenting himself as a hero and savior. Is he? And the way to answer that question is to ask whether we would praise the same behavior on the part of other people who made the same arguments Franz is. Franz’s way of defending Trump is how supporters of Hitler defended him. It’s a bad way of defending someone.

That was complicated, so I’ll try to be more clear. Franz says that he has to try to mitigate Trump’s awful behavior because he likes Trump’s policy agenda (and he thinks the two are separate). He can’t leave Trump because then he might not get that agenda. And that is exactly the way that various people justified working with Hitler.

Is Franz’s defense a good defense? No. Not because Trump is like Hitler, but because Franz is like the people who supported Hitler. Had Hitler had to rely only on true believers like Himmler and Goebbels, he would have tanked. He succeeded because of people like Franz.

It isn’t about the policy agenda. It’s about the world you create in the course of getting that agenda. That’s what supporters of Hitler didn’t understand, and it’s what Franz doesn’t understand. You’re supporting a toxic process because it will get you the momentary political gains. The momentary political gains don’t matter. The process does.

So, Franz, your desire to hold on to a GOP majority—that is, your tribalism—means you’re throwing the US under the bus. You’re trying to present yourself as a hero, but you’re an enabler. The kindest thing I could say about you is that you’re Franz. Were I less charitable, I’d point out that you’re Wilhelm.

 

The image is from here: http://ww2today.com/24th-september-19...

 

 

The post What it’s like when you’ve been reading Nuremburg Interrogations, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Shattered Genius, The End, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and Trump Administration officials saying they’re protecting America by standing by Trump appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

What it’s like when you’ve been reading Nuremburg interrogations, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Shattered Genius, The End, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and Trump Administration officials saying they’re protecting America by standing by Trump

A recent anonymous editorial says, “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

This author, call them Franz, wants the Trump administration to succeed, and believes the administration is significantly damaging to the US. So, Franz wants an administration to succeed that he believes is damaging to the US. Wait, wait, that isn’t what Franz meant at all.

The problem with Trump is that he is basically a fascist. He doesn’t want a government accountable to the people through a critical press; he wants (and, to a large degree, has) a media that will repeat in a fawning way anything he wants said, that will defend him through any sophistries and casuistries and outright falsehoods necessary (how tall is he? how much does he weigh?).  Trump wants to be a one-person government, he wants to be head of a one-party state, in which there is nothing but fawning adoration of him, and a government of charismatic leadership. Franz thinks all of that is bad, and yet Franz does everything he can to keep Trump from being held accountable for how bad Franz thinks Trump is.

The sensible (and honorable) thing  for Franz to do would be to step outside the administration and call for impeachment. But Franz isn’t willing to do that honorable thing. Why not? Notice that Franz never explains that point. Franz wants to be seen as a hero without actually explaining why he hasn’t engaged in the genuinely brave action his beliefs would imply–openly condemning an administration he thinks is (sort of–he likes the political agenda, sometimes) bad, but not really, because not bad enough for him to take a hit to his political career.

Basically, this coward has done an anonymous negative yelp review on Trump.

He says he likes the Republican, not Trump’s, policy agenda. Even without Trump, the GOP has Congress, a reliable propaganda machine, and an increasingly and openly Republican judiciary, and impeaching Trump would put Pence in power. So, why not do it?

Because, and this is what Franz doesn’t want to say, without rabid Trump supporters, the GOP wouldn’t have Congress. Franz wants the political energy and power gained by fomenting Trump’s fascism, but Franz thinks he doesn’t actually want fascism.

Oh, yes, he does. Franz doesn’t want the end product of fascism, but he wants the support of fascists. Franz supports fascism. Franz needs fascists. Maybe Franz should rethink his political agenda since 1) it depends on fascists, and 2) it depends on his hiding his ethical agenda from the public.

The German generals disliked Hitler from the beginning, recognizing him as pretty much a shallow thinker and an idiot about military affairs, and many of them were not Nazis, but they were reactionaries, and they loathed what they thought of as Bolshevism (which included liberalism and democratic socialism). They stuck with Hitler because they believed that “many of [his] policies have already made [Germany] safer and more prosperous.” They would have said that they supported his “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” Because he did all that. Seriously, Hitler did that. Franz would have liked Hitler. Hitler undid the socialist agenda of the Weimar democracy in regard to regulations about labor, he promised industrialists all sorts of things, and he promised the military what it wanted.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No, because I really don’t think he is, but I do think he’s a fascist (not in the loose way it’s thrown around in the media, but in the way scholars like Paxton describe it). I’m making a more complicated point: Franz is presenting himself as a hero and savior. Is he? And the way to answer that question is to ask whether we would praise the same behavior on the part of other people who made the same arguments Franz is. Franz’s way of defending Trump is how supporters of Hitler defended him. It’s a bad way of defending someone.

That was complicated, so I’ll try to be more clear. Franz says that he has to try to mitigate Trump’s awful behavior because he likes Trump’s policy agenda (and he thinks the two are separate). He can’t leave Trump because then he might not get that agenda. And that is exactly the way that various people justified working with Hitler.

Is Franz’s defense a good defense? No. Not because Trump is like Hitler, but because Franz is like the people who supported Hitler. Had Hitler had to rely only on true believers like Himmler and Goebbels, he would have tanked. He succeeded because of people like Franz.

It isn’t about the policy agenda. It’s about the world you create in the course of getting that agenda. That’s what supporters of Hitler didn’t understand, and it’s what Franz doesn’t understand. You’re supporting a toxic process because it will get you the momentary political gains. The momentary political gains don’t matter. The process does.

So, Franz, your desire to hold on to a GOP majority—that is, your tribalism—means you’re throwing the US under the bus. You’re trying to present yourself as a hero, but you’re an enabler. The kindest thing I could say about you is that you’re Franz. Were I less charitable, I’d point out that you’re Wilhelm.

 

The image is from here: http://ww2today.com/24th-september-19...

 

 

The post What it’s like when you’ve been reading Nuremburg interrogations, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Shattered Genius, The End, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and Trump Administration officials saying they’re protecting America by standing by Trump appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

When Chester brought me a little dog

At one point in my life I was living in a wonderful house on an acre of land, and the front windows looked out to the mailbox. Chester Burnette (a Great Dane mix) was there, and so was Hoover (a Malamute). They had strong feelings about looking out that front window. We had put a couch against the front window, a big couch, but they moved it out of the way so many times we gave up and moved it against the other wall.

There was a woman in the neighborhood who had two tiny dogs, and she walked them with her sweatband and sock tassels matching. Every day, she walked them up to our mailbox, which our dogs could see, and let them shit there. And then she walked away. On weekends, Chester alerted me to this, and I knew he wanted me to do something about it, but, like unstable people who study psychology, I’m a scholar of rhetoric because I’m terrible at it. How do you say to someone, “Um, your dogs’ shitting here everyday is not chance. Dogs shit to send a message. You shouldn’t let them do that. And, by the way, pick that shit up.”? Well, you say it by saying it. But I was raised in a barn by wolves, and I’ll admit I was so gerfuddled by her matching tassel and headband and appalling bad manners that I just wasn’t dealing.

So, one day, when she brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, Chester jumped a six-foot fence, and brought me one of her dogs.

He was saying, very clearly, deal with this.

At that point, things were complicated. She was freaking out, and I loaded her and her dogs into my car, and took them to the vet. And on the way she told me about how her marriage was disintegrating. It is a condition of my family that total strangers unload on us about their lives, and I’m usually okay with that. I like hearing about the lives of checkers, people on the bus, salespeople, but I was not prepared for this. Her husband, a dentist, was leaving her for one of his assistants, and I heard way more about their marriage and him than I ever want to know about anyone. Way, way more.

When we got to the vet, the vet pointed out that Chester hadn’t actually broken the skin of her dog, and I paid the bill, and I took her home, and heard a lot more about her very vexed relationship with an apparently awful person. As far as I could tell, though, she was fine with his being awful till he wanted to bang an assistant openly. Once his awfulness was open, she was claiming victimhood and shock and all sorts of things. But the story she had told me on the way to and from the vet was that he was an awful person she was enabling. She only cared now because his behavior might hurt her.

And I could only intermittently care about the fact that she was willing to enable awful behavior until it hurt her. I just cared that I had fucked up by not earlier objecting to her dogs shitting at my mailbox. And I’m convinced she learned nothing from that whole episode. She thought the problem was Chester fetching her dog, but it really wasn’t. Chester, and my mailbox, and even her dogs had nothing to do with her being in a really toxic relationship with her husband.

I sometimes wonder whether I should have tried to talk to her about her own enabling and toxic relationship with the awful dentist? I didn’t. I just paid the vet bill and drove her home.

She no longer brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, so I guess there’s that. I guess Chester did the right thing. I’d like to think that she stopped wearing sweat bands and matching tassels to walk her dogs, but that’s probably hoping for too much.

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On ignoring _Mein Kampf_

November 1, 1935; The Spectator

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Table of Contents for Hitler and Rhetoric coursepack

Table of contents for the Rhetoric and Hitler course.

This coursepack is in addition to the required texts.

Required texts: Hitler, Mein Kampf (required)

Gregor, How to Read Hitler (recommended)

Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (required)

                                    The Third Reich in Power (recommended)

Ullrich, Hitler (required)

coursepack at Jenn’s (required)

Jasinski, Sourcebook (available as an e-book through the UT   Library)

 

Syllabus

Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction

Kenneth Buke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”

O’Shaughnessy, from Selling Hitler

McElligott, from Rethinking Weimar Germany

Hitler, March 23, 1933 speech

Sample papers

“Advice on Wrting”

Hitler, speech to the NSDAP 9/13, 1937

—. speech, 8/22/39

—. interview with Johst

—. speech, 1/27/32

Tourish and Vatcha, “Charismatic Leadership and Corporate Cultism at Enron: The Elimination of Dissent, the Promotion of Conformity and Organizational Collapse”

Entry on interpellation

Hitler, speech 4/28/39

Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (480-83)

Kershaw, from The End (386-400)

Hitler, speech 7/13/34

Longerich, selection from Holocaust (Nazi evolution on genocide)

Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk 12-16, 422-426

Entry on inoculation

Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62)

Kershaw, from Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (197-206)

Selection from Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (166-173)

“Dog whistle politics”

Selections from Shirer’s radio broadcasts

Selection from Snyder’s Black Earth

Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (75-79)

Selection from Spicer’s Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust

Hitler, speech 4/12/22

“Dissociation” from Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric

Selection from Encyclopedia of Rhetoric

Selection from Eichmann in Jerusalem

Selection from Eichmann Interrogated

Selection from Hitler and His Generals

Selection from Ordinary Men

Louis Goldblatt’s testimony before the Committee on National Defense Migration

Letter to Mr. Monk

Thomas Mann, “That Man is My Brother”

“Masculinity and Nationalism”

“Art of Masculine Victimhood”

Hitler, speech 6/22/41

selection from Longerich’s Hitler

selection from Maschmann’s Account Rendered

 

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Arguing against injustice: Louis Goldblatt before the Tolan Committee

In 1942, after years of fear-mongering about “the Japanese,” the US was seriously considering race-based mass imprisonment of legal aliens and citizens of Japanese ethnicity. The Tolan Committee was formed by a progressive Congressman to have hearings on the West Coast about whether such imprisonment (euphemistically called “evacuation”) should happen. Louis Goldblatt, representing the California State Industrial Union Council, was one of few people to do a fiery anti-imprisonment speech. This is the record of the speech.

       

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Nazis and the undermining of education

From Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free.

A good review of the book is here.

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How we got Pearl Bailey

When Marquis died, I thought I didn’t want a dog for several weeks, but, it is summer, and I’m home more (so Jim isn’t entirely in charge of doggie daycare), and Jacob said he’d like us to get a dog while he’s home, and Clarence cannot be left alone. Jim and I, having been through so many health and behavioral problems with rescue dogs (although some, like Chester, George, and Marquis, were fine) thought we might reward ourselves for almost thirty years of rescue with one dog from a reputable breeder. That would take months.

And, I thought, we could look.

Because Clarence can get grumpy with other dogs, we were clear we needed a puppy. We planned out a day of looking at puppies—there were four sites that we found had adoptions going on. So, Jacob, Jim, and I planned out our route and, as we were heading out, the idea came up of stopping off at Phydeaux (a nearby independently owned pet store). They often have adoption events on weekends, and they might have good advice for where we should go (or if there are reputable backyard breeders in the area—a true unicorn). We walked in and there were some people with puppies!

They were all small breeds—way too small for Clarence (who genuinely doesn’t know what his back end is doing). We told the person  in charge that our fifteen year old dog had died the previous week, that we are good with big dogs, and that we couldn’t take a little one because we had a rescue mastiff at home. And she pulled out her phone and showed us an Anatolian Shepherd/Great Pyrenees mix that was, at that point on the south side of Austin. Each of us looked at the picture, looked at each other, and then looked at the woman. She persuaded us to fill out an adoption form immediately, called that location, discovered there was someone there who wanted the puppy, and said, “Tell them they’re fallback.”

She wanted us to have that puppy. So, we filled out the form, and she was talking about how she could get us the dog today if we had proof of various things (such as our dogs’ being spayed or neutered). And we drove to the south of Austin, and went into the store that had Pearl, and explained we were the people Theresa (who turned out to be the owner of that location) had called about. And we held her, and, yeah, that was that.

She showed up at that moment; we promised to send her the proof; she delivered Pearl a couple of hours later. And she hung out (I still wish I had invited her to have tea, coffee, a glass of wine, or something—she’s awesome). But I kept wondering, Pearl is adorable—why did she decide so quickly that we should have this dog?

She told us that Pearl came from Lockhart (Austin is so good about no-kill that various rescue groups draw from other cities), and that ranchers in that area really like the Anatolian Shepherd/Great Pyrenees mix because they’re great guard dogs for cattle or goats. And, she said, that’s what Pearl is. She knew this because, first, she’s seen a lot of dogs like this (they don’t spay or neuter their dogs in that area), and, second, Pearl was found in the area that has a lot of Anatolian Pyrenees.

But, still, why was she so certain we were the right owners for this puppy? When we saw Pearl, there was another person who wanted her. She’s adorable. Anyone walking into that store would want her. Why us?

So, today, I looked up Anatolian Pyrenees, and I think I figured out why she immediately decided we were the owners for this dog. Information about that mix says:

“[T]hey are not suitable dogs for inexperienced dog owners. You need to have a lot of patience to effectively train an Anatolian Pyrenees… Dog owners who don’t have a lot of experience controlling this dog’s powerful instincts should just go for another breed. Anatolian Pyrenees dogs are not casual pets. They are dominant, self-reliant dogs who will try to manage everyone and everything unless you are an assertive leader who knows how to instill respect… The Anatolian Pyrenees is a hybrid of two very energetic dogs. If you keep the Anatolian Pyrenees in a fenced-in yard at any time, be sure that the fence is at least six feet high… Owners of Anatolian Pyrenees must socialize the dogs to turn them into well-behaved companions. Even though they are intelligent and independent, they can still choose not to obey.”

We told her we have a rescue mastiff. We said one of us works from home.

Well, this will be an interesting journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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