Three things wrapped in one

1. Enjoying William S. Burroughs
2. Thinking dubious thoughts about dog and man
3. Abhorring violence in the name of safety

All from The Cat Inside:

I am not a dog hater. I do hate what man has made of his best friend. The snarl of a panther is certainly more dangerous than the snarl of a dog, but it isn't ugly. A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with a pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. But a dog's snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl... snarl of someone got a "Kill a Queer for Christ" sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl. When you see that snarl  you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog's rage is not his. It is dictated by his trainer. And lynch-mob rage is dictated by conditioning.

 On prevention as a safety measure:

At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb and couldn't wait to drop it on the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks, eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician's look about him. He told us stories by the campfire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer — East is evil, West is good.

Suddenly a badger erupts among the boys — don't know why he did it, just playful, friendly and inexperienced like the Aztec Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his 1911 Colt .45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing it with every shot at six feet. Finally he puts his gun three inches from the badger's side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down the slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying.

"You see an animal you kill it, don't you? It might have bitten one of the boys."

 And because I don't want to decamp on that last note:

I have observed that in cat fights the aggressor is almost always the winner. If a cat is getting the worst of a fight he doesn't hesitate to run, whereas a dog may fight to his stupid death. As my old jiujitsu instructor said, "If your trick no work, you better run."