From a reader:

Dear Jonah:
I have a Labrador Retriever, am I being un-american for having a “Canadian” Dog? What’s your policy on ” Axis of Weasel” breeds like the German Shephard or the French poodle? Maybe I should be asking Cosmo…

This is a difficult question if only for my serious bias against poodles, not entirely because they’re French so much as that they’re, well, poodles (sorry Peter). Though I have met poodles I’ve liked, a little. But in general, I don’t believe that dogs buy into the nation-state paradigm at all. Canine loyalty is to the tribe, to the family, the pack. In that sense dogs are very American breeds in that they’re loyalties do not attach at all to genetic kinship. If this reader we’re right than Cosmo — allegedly half-lab, half Australian cattle dog — would be very confused indeed. On the one hand he’d want to fight by America’s side no matter what the sacrifice and then he’d turn right around and whine about us to the UN.