Puzzling About Muzzling

You'd think that by this point, having lived and worked overseas now for a handful of years, I'd be used to The Expression - The Expression I'm frequently on the receiving end of that tells me that my students clearly think that I am mentally feeble.

Don't you muzzle your dogs in Canada? delivered in such a tone so as not only to drive the point home that I'm mentally feeble but that, if there is no such muzzle law in Canada, then Canada is a few rungs lower on the Developing Nation status - hovering somewhere in the region of Burkina Faso - than my students had originally estimated.

I don't know if there's a national law - I don't think so. I mean, I haven't lived there in over 3 years and I've never owned a dog. I think pit bulls might be required to be muzzled in some provinces ... We have a national highway! You don't! We began it some 50 years ago and it's been complete for over 30 and it barely takes 5 hours to travel across your entire country, or it would if you had a national highway but you don't, do you?!!

And so I rambled on, further entrenching myself as mentally feeble in my students' eyes, and my country as woefully backward. This all came about because Pán Kocúr and I had begun noticing how many dogs in Bratislava were carried about in purses muzzled - and frankly, it was a little weird if not disconcerting. So I asked my students if there is a muzzle law in Slovakia and sure enough there is. Interestingly (or at least interestingly to me) muzzles - or the muzzling of dogs here - is limited neither to breed nor weight. So the first time I saw a chihuahua in a muzzle, I had to laugh - its face being too diminutive to adequately fill the muzzle - and to say that the dog looked pathetic and its muzzle pathetically ineffectual goes without saying. (Although I just did).

It would seem that in Bratislava, there exists but one size of muzzle - what the Sears catalogue might have called "husky" boy (or dog) size - and with many of the city's inhabitants smitten with purse-sized dogs, it is obvious that one size does not fit all.

There seems to be two responses to the Muzzle Question: either small dogs are trotting about the city with cages essentially hanging from their heads or owners (or more accurately their dogs) are eschewing the muzzle altogether. The appropriate - if not legal - response might be to either import or produce size-appropriate muzzles but that idea has yet to catch on. Or better yet, fight the law.

I can hardly blame the dog owners who choose not to restrain their dogs: these face-caged animals don't look particularly happy and every time I see one I can't help but thing of Orwell's Winston Smith and his face-mask of starving rats. He wasn't very happy either. But what with this mishmash of non-muzzled and muzzled dogs, dogs the size of elk and dogs the size of rodents on the streets of Bratislava, clearly, it's a dog's breakfast out there.