I often sit down to lunch with Sydney's Daily Telegraph, a tabloid Newscorp paper with a reputation for populist right-wing mania, and digest the letters page.
It's OK, don't worry. I haven't gone over to the dark side. As you should know if you've ever read my blog, I merely do this to find material worthy of mockery.
Do I ever find material worthy of mockery?
Why yes, I do.
I generally shoot it out on my twitter stream with a pithy comment and a shot of the offending letter. Usually, I get five or six decent tweets from a day's worth of lunacy, and usually they're quite straightforward to mock. Today there's one that might need a slightly more nuanced response.
Monique has some problems in reasoning here. While, as a cat owner myself, I do sympathise with Monique over the loss of her cat, it's no excuse for the kind of sloppy thinking placed on public display here.
The letter is, of course, a nice example of hasty generalisation, with the last sentence "wake up dog owners.". Laying the lack of punctuation aside, this is a move from the specific to the general, taking as it does the example of two dogs killing a family cat and expanding that to make a call to dog owners in general. I'm sure there are plenty of chihuahua owners out there even now racing to the pet shop for a muzzle so that little Fifikins doesn't savagely eviscerate next door's Tiddles.
I'm both a cat owner and a dog owner. I'm quite aware that dogs are capable of killing other animals, and even gentle family pets are quite capable of treating a cat, rabbit or guinea pig as just another squeaky toy, but that certainly doesn't mean that all dogs are some kind of menace.
I'm also fully aware that domestic cats are one of Australia's more voracious predators, and can take a heavy toll on native wildlife, and are themselves small, furry, fanged-and-clawed murdering machines who are as capable of biting the head off next door's pet hamster as they are of stealing a cooked chicken from their kitchen bench*. Still not valid.
This sort of faulty generalisation is unfortunately common in the lesser-spotted telegraph reader. Often it's generalising from one Labor supporter to the entire party, or from one climate scientist to an entire field of science. It's always glaringly obvious, though.
The second problem is the appeal to emotion inherent in an appeal to "think of the children". In this case, implying that because two dogs managed to kill a cat, that they were also therefore a danger to humans, specifically kids. It doesn't follow, and it merely muddies the argument to throw it in. Again, dogs do attack humans on occasion, but this is still no excuse for overgeneralisation. The fact that a dog has attacked a cat may imply that they're poorly trained and capable of attacking humans. Or it may not. Dogs are almost all equipped to injure a human, but only rarely do they actually do so. There are published statistics, if you want the nitty-gritty.
Overall, I'm not even sure why Monique is bothering to write. It can't be a call for regulation, because we already have quite strict rules and mechanisms in place to handle dangerous dogs. You've lost your cat. You probably have a path to recourse. What the hell are you doing writing to the telegraph? Are you not getting enough attention at home or something?
Anyway, this is why I spend a significant portion of my lunchbreak mocking the intellectually-mired readership of the Daily Telegraph. Most of the time it's funnier than this. Sorry.
* The cooked chicken incident is one I'm still particularly proud of. Well done, Heisenberg.
posted @ Tuesday, August 30, 2011 3:11 PM