Cesar Millan said he was surprised many dog lovers from Indonesia came to his S'pore show

How dogs ended up being associated with filth and disease, and shunned by some.

Kayla Wong | March 03, 2019, 02:06 AM

World-renowned dog behaviourist Cesar Millan arrived in Singapore to shoot his new show, Cesar’s Recruit Asia Season 3.

His current trip here has been a long time coming, as he first came to Singapore seven years ago in 2012 to do a live show.

Recalling his first visit, Millan said he was amazed by the response he received from Muslims from Indonesia who love and own dogs, and who came all the way to Singapore just to meet him.

Why the amazement?

Cesar's amazement is not uncommon.

Most people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, commonly think that dogs and Islam do not mix.

This is because dogs are thought of as being unclean, in the ritualistic sense.

What is the history?

Even though contemporary religious practices and beliefs have informed many people about dog's place in the human world these days, those who dig a bit deeper will realise things have not always been this way.

And one such account has been given by an American history professor at Yale University, who has provided an interesting look at the relationship between dogs and Muslims during the early days.

Prophet Muhammad prayed with dogs around

Alan Mikhail, author of the book The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, explains the changes that human interactions have undergone with livestock and dogs in a few centuries.

He wrote an article published in Quartz a few years ago, that sought to shed more light on this somewhat controversial subject.

In it, he said that according to "several authoritative accounts" of Prophet Muhammad's life and teachings, the first Muslims lived alongside dogs and had positive interactions with the animals.

For instance, Prophet Muhammad even prayed when dogs were around.

Many of his cousins, who were the world's first Muslims, also raised puppies.

In addition, dogs were seen hanging around Al-Masjid an-Nabawī in Medina, the second holiest mosque in the world after al-Haram in Mecca.

Dogs worked for the Muslims

The article also raised several instances of Muslims putting dogs to work:

These include:

  • Guarding farm animals and preventing them from escaping
  • Serving as hunting companions
  • Guarding property
  • Keeping places clean by eating trash on the streets, and keeping rats and other pests away from butcheries

The Quartz article also pointed out that for most of history, dogs were not pets, but were workers for humans instead.

This has to be understood in the context of people in the past: Those who relied on dogs were nomads.

So what changed?

But there was a turning point in the past several centuries, and it stemmed from hygiene issues -- possibly as a result of the explosion of packed human populations living in close quarters, due to the shift in how humans organised themselves.

Around 1,000 years ago, there was a gradual shift as people from the Middle East and Europe started to notice a connection between the proximity of plague victims to places such as piles of trash, cemeteries and swampy lakes.

This period coincided with people going from being nomads to city-dwelling residents.

From Damascus and Baghdad to Cairo and Istanbul, dogs were initially relied upon in cities to eat trash, as well as leftover discarded food.

But the shift occurred about 200 years ago, when humans started to have an inkling about contagion and how diseases spread.

This led to a spring cleaning of sorts, with unsavoury trash soon cleared out from the cities to the city walls.

Quite literally this resulted in throwing out the trash together with the dogs.

As trash got pushed to the edges of the cities, the dogs followed.

Those that remained became symbols of filth.

That was how over time people started to shun dogs that ate trash -- associating them with diseases instead when they were just performing their civic duty by getting rid of waste.

The perception of dogs nonetheless slowly began to change.

Instead of useful companions, they were seen as unhygienic animals that people could do without.

In the early 19th century, large-scale dog eradication campaigns were carried out to rid the cities of canines.

This was how the majority of Muslims came to see dogs as dirty, impure, and sometimes even evil.

You can read the full article here.

Top image via Anna Dudková/Unsplash