The history of the U.S. presidency is also a history of pets. Beginning with the first president, George Washington, almost all U.S. presidents have been pet-mad.
Washington himself had three American deer hounds, four black-brown raccoons, a greyhound, a donkey, two racehorses and five stallions, and a parrot... The total number of pets reached twenty-seven. The pets of the second president, John Adams, were similar to Washington's, with three dogs and two racehorses and interesting names, cleopatra and Caesar. The third president, Thomas Jefferson, had two bear cubs, a robin and two Berry dogs. The next two presidents were not fanatics, and the good guys also had a parrot and two dogs.
Dogs, birds, and horses make up the three poles of the White House pet landscape, and there are many other kinds of pets scattered in them, many of which are jaw-dropping. The pets of the sixth president, John Adams, were silkworms, and an alligator, a gift from the Marquis of Lafayette. The pets of the eighth president, Martin Van Buren, were two baby tigers, sent by the Sultan of Oman, and were soon asked by Congress to be sent to the zoo.
The other two who loved animals so much that they finally turned the White House garden into a zoo were the twenty-sixth President Theodore Roosevelt and the thirtieth President Calvin Coolidge. The former has more than fifty kinds of pets, including a black bear named Jonathan Edwards, an American snake, and a Jingbaer named Manchu, very much like a grandfather crouching at the mouth of the alley playing chess.
Coolidge simply built a small zoo in the White House, raising American bobcats, raccoons, lion cubs, antelopes, kangaroos, black bears and hippos. This hippopotamus, billed Billy, was given to Coolidge by the founder of Flint Tire after being captured in Liberia. Later, Coolidge's failed domestication of hippos, so he donated it to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. Today, many of the hippopotamus in American zoos are its descendants. The animal-loving leader famously said, "People who don't like dogs are not eligible to live in the White House." ”
Indeed, there have been several U.S. presidents who have not loved dogs, and Trump has rejected the golden hound that his friend Pope intends to give him because he often flies between Washington and New York and simply does not have time to take care of the dogs. William Harrison raises cattle and sheep, so does Lincoln and Taft, Chester Arthur raises rabbits... There are only ten U.S. presidents who don't own dogs at all, including three who don't have pets at all, namely the eleventh president James Boak, the seventeenth president, Andrew Johnson— if the little mice he found in the bedroom don't count as pets, and Trump.
Several presidents have made it clear that they don't like pets, but they have, under pressure. A more recent example is the thirty-third Harry Truman, who accepted an Irish Shedd as a gift, raised it for a while, and then passed it on to others, drawing criticism from a large number of animal lovers. Lyndon Johnson was treated the same way, as the media exposed him grabbing the ears of the beagles and lifting them up, and Truman didn't know why the media was criticizing Johnson, "what the hell are the critics complaining about; that's how you handle hounds.）。 Of course, this sentence also drew more criticism for him, but his other sentence, which made the audience unable to speak, was "If you need a friend in Washington, get a dog." ”
In most cases, pets can "block brakes". Koi breeding is popular in Hong Kong politics, Tsai Ing-wen adopts a retired guide dog, Cameron raises a cat and awards it the title of "Chief Mousetrap of the Cabinet Office"... The results were excellent. The twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, raised a bull-headed terrier bruce purely to avoid carrying the title of the last dogless president. Another group of animals he had kept helped him a lot, it was a flock of sheep. Wilson's tenure coincided with World War I, and the flock he raised liberated the White House gardeners, saving both money and manpower, and the wool could be auctioned off, which was well received.
In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to run for a fourth term. On September 23, in a nationally broadcast public address, in response to Republican allegations that it was a waste of taxpayers' taxes to leave his Scottish Terrier Farah in the Aleutian Islands and then send a destroyer to rescue him, he issued the following statement: "I don't hate criticism, and neither do my family." But Farah hated them. Farah is a Scottish dog, and if he knew that a Republican media writer had made up such a story, his Scottish soul would have gone mad. It's no longer the dog it was. I'm used to hearing malicious attacks that are fabricated against me, but I think I have a right to fight back against false statements about my dogs. This passage, known as the "Farah's Declaration," helped him run for re-election. Immediately after the Clinton scandal broke out, he also got a dog, and this Labrador named Buddy helped him fend off a lot of media fire.
Of this multitude of pet species, the most favored is still the dog. A two-thirds majority of U.S. presidents who own dogs and make a list of their pets is a list of world-famous hounds, among which dogs originating in the British Isles are particularly popular. In addition to the practical benefits, how do we understand the US president's crazy dog-keeping behavior? How to understand the almost religious moral imperative that Americans want their president to have a dog and love dogs?
First of all, because Americans love dogs, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2012, 54 million American households have dogs, more than the number of second-ranked cat families, more than 12 million, and the number of pet dogs is not as good as pet cats, about 78 million, and the annual money spent on dogs is much more than cats, and the cost of dog owners is almost double that of cat families. From this we can roughly outline the rough outline of the U.S. pet landscape, where standard middle-class U.S. families tend to have one or two dogs, which are members of their family, while families living alone or with smaller numbers tend to have cats, and usually don't have just one or two.
The Chinese scholar Yi-fu tuan, the father of human geography, may explain this phenomenon by his 1984 discussion of pet history in Dominance and Affection: the making of pets. He believes that the formation of pets is essentially an extension of the problem of power and dominance of human beings. In the process of controlling nature, animals and plants, and others, people often show love for them, in other words, people's feelings for pets are embodied in the love of control.
In the relatively well-established power structure of the relationship network, the dog, which is quite sensitive to human expressions and language recognition, and has the practicality of hunting, is even more popular, whether this network is reflected in middle-class families or aristocratic politics. In a relatively equal power environment, or a master who is unable to take responsibility, cats and so on can take care of themselves, and relatively independent pets are more suitable. And that's exactly what happened.
Raising hounds, in the cultural context of the Old and New Worlds, means privilege. Hunting was once an important stage for the nobles to show their privileges. In 1066, the French Duke of Normandy conquered England, and the Norman hunting tradition was brought to England, and the English nobles soon learned this Norman art and raised good horses and hounds to hunt deer and wild boars. Since then, the scope of this privilege has gradually expanded.
During the Stuart dynasty, the landlords and gentlemen who lived in the beautiful countryside believed that the pursuit of foxes in nature would help to cultivate their noble sentiments, away from the hypocrisy and deceit of urban social circles, so the demand for fox horses and foxhounds increased greatly. The pedigree and pedigree of pets is a natural proof of privilege that it is always better to believe that a purebred is always better, not to mention the honorable gifts from other royal families.
The practice of identifying identity and privileges with pets was inherited in the United States. In the early United States, the WASP class firmly occupied the upper class of the United States, living in the vast countryside of the southern United States, investing in land and pastures, and inheriting the cultural memory of the upper class society of the Old World. And their children go to high-end cocktail parties, graduate from the same private high schools and Ivy League schools, and intermarry with each other... They soon formed a clique and became de facto monopolies of wealth, culture, and politics.
In the case of the presidential system, the first few presidents were inextricably linked to the Virginia giants Randolph family. Two members of President Washington's cabinet came from this family, and the mother of the third President Jefferson also came from this family, and Jefferson himself, along with two other U.S. presidents who are alumni, graduated from the College of William and Mary, the second oldest school in North America, the fourth President James Madison and the fifth President James Monroe. Most of the sons of the Virginia elite of the same generation graduated from the school, including, of course, several members of the Randolph family, whose sons, sons-in-law, and nephews together won six of the first ten seats of Virginia governor.
The illustrious Adams family also had to be mentioned. John Adams and his son Quincy Adams were both former presidents of the United States. Their descendants wielded enormous influence in politics, business and academia. Quincy's son, Charles Adams, was a prominent historian, Harvard professor, and former president of the American Historical Society, and his son Charles Jr. was a colonel, railroad designer, and historian during the Civil War. Quincy's great-grandson, Charles Francis Adams III, was the Secretary of the U.S. Navy under Hoover, and his son Charles Francis Adams IV became the first president and chairman of the board of directors of Raytheon, single-handedly building the small business that produced transistors and vacuum tubes into the world's fifth-largest arms dealer...
In such an aristocratic network, dog ownership as a means of identifying privileges collided with the love of dogs by ordinary Americans, gradually forming a unique political tradition in the United States.