Scatter Brained

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA:
 In the 1960s and ’70s 
Mao Zedong decided that dogs (even dogs being raised as 
By doing this, some say, you’re basically teaching your puppy the 
secret joys of coprophagia. But thus far, no one has defi nitively 
discovered the biology behind the phenomenon, which we think is 
just, well, crappy. Honestly, we can send a dog into space but we 
can’t convince him not to indulge in eating his feces? Oh, and 
yes—we 
can
 send a dog into space . . .
C H A P T E R   6

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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
livestock) were fi lthy manifestations of bourgeois decadence 
and had them all killed, proving once again that anyone car-
rying pictures of Chairman Mao ain’t gonna make it with 
anyone anyhow. But now, 30 years later, the Chinese taboo 
on pets is slowly lifting. In a country where Big Brother says 
you can only have one child, these days he’ll let you have sev-
eral dogs.
✖  ✖  ✖
GERMANY:
 Even Hitler had a dog. Blondi was a German 
(surprise!) shepherd who slept by Hitler’s bed every night in 
his Berlin bunker and probably gave an evil man pure and 
unconditional love. In return for this service, Hitler let her 
have a cyanide tablet right before he and Eva Braun ate their 
own.
✖  ✖  ✖
THE HIGH SEAS:
 Animals aboard pirate ships may have 
been well loved, but hard life on the high seas trumps love. 
Whole swaths of the Earth’s oceans were dubbed Horse Lat-
titudes, where winds stopped blowing and horses were 
slaughtered and consumed. As for parrots, they were kept in 
cages and used to bribe port offi
  cials in the 18th century be-
cause their feathers carried considerable value. Oh, and the 
bird  on  Long  John  Silver’s  shoulder?  It  was  an  invention  of 
author Robert Louis Stevenson and would probably have cre-
ated an unacceptable mess for an actual swashbuckler.
✖  ✖  ✖
THE EVERGLADES:
 Pet Burmese pythons have long been 
“set free” in Florida’s Everglades after reaching unmanage-
able lengths, and the python population in the Everglades 
now seems to be self-sustaining. If you fear pythons (and 
who doesn’t?), the man to ask for intercession is Saint Pat-
rick. Th
  e patron saint of Ireland is also the man some  believe 

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 responsible for having thus far kept Ireland a snake-free isle. 
All of which brings us to . . .
03
Patron Saints
What You’ve Got:
 a lost cause
Whom You Need:
 Th
  e problem with Saint Jude Th
 addeus is 
that he was also known as “Judas Jacobi, the most forgettable 
disciple,” which sounds a lot like “Judas Iscariot, the guy who 
betrayed Jesus.” Both were disciples, but J.T. did 
not
 betray J.C. 
for 30 lousy pieces of silver. Early Christians didn’t understand 
that the slight diff erence in name represented a large diff er-
ence in piousness, and thus devotion to Saint Jude became a 
hopeless  cause,  making  Jude  the  patron  saint  of  lost  causes. 
And while he may have gotten no love in the fi rst couple centu-
ries of the Common Era, Jude has made a remarkable come-
back. Besides being regularly thanked in newspaper classifi ed 
ads throughout the world, the saint of last resort has also been 
the subject of two recent biographies.
✖  ✖  ✖
What You’ve Got:
 hemorrhoids
Whom You Need:
 Saint Fiacre, a seventh-century Irish 
monk renowned for his power to heal people by laying his 
hands on them. Of course, this makes us loath to imagine 
how and why he came to be the patron saint of hemorrhoids. 
But Fiacre was something of a misogynist. He never allowed 
women into his hermitage or his chapel, and it’s said that 
centuries after his death, in 1620, a woman from Paris was 
driven mad after entering into his sacred space. Whether or