Excalibur the Ebola dog may rest in peace.

Conspiracy theorists across the world are wallowing in fear. But one dog has managed to do what none of us could: make the outbreak human again

That the internet was upset about the death of this dog makes a basic kind of internet sense. Not much else about Ebola does.

Finally, the west has the first ebola victim it feels bad about. It was a dog.
On Wednesday, Twitter was all aflutter with calls to spare the life of Excalibur, a dog owned by a Spanish nurse’s assistant from Madrid named Teresa Ramos. Ramos contracted Ebola, probably from caring for Spanish missionaries to Africa, and has been quarantined. Her husband was put in isolation to see if he had caught the disease via contact with her.
So far, it looks like he has not. Still, despite some 400,000 signatures on Change.org and public protests, the Spanish government opted to euthanize and cremate the dog, based on only one medical study of questionable accuracy that says dogs can contract the virus and remain asymptomatic.
That sucks. Spain doesn’t suck, but Dog Torquemada, whoever he is, definitely sucks.
That the internet was upset makes a basic kind of internet sense. During horrible human and natural events, people post pictures of dogs to cheer themselves up. There are whole sites and Facebook feeds and Instagram accounts dedicated to the mediating images of dogs being happy in spite of everything.
Dogs are even better in real life. They’re like people with all the stuff that sucks removed. It takes much less time to housebreak them. They don’t talk back. You are always the highlight of their day, and they’re always sad to see you leave. And almost any awful thing you can say or do will be forgiven and then forgotten within half an hour. You will spend the rest of your life remembering every time you ignored them or shooed them away because of some ephemeral distraction – some mean selfishness you will always wish you could retract – and your memory will repay you with the knowledge that your attitude was rewarded with unstinting loyalty. There’s even a Budweiser ad about drinking and driving that relies on making you think of some poor dog dying of a broken heart waiting for someone to come home who never will.
The story of Ramos’s dog resonates with us so much for two reasons. One, many of us know what it’s like to lose a pet. Two, it’s hard to politicize dogs. As much as you might weep to think of those Soviet dogs strapped with explosives and trained to run under Wehrmacht tanks and blow them up from the underside, they weren’t really Soviet dogs. Hitler had dogs, but there was no way his dogs knew he was Hitler. There are no Maoist Third World dogs. And there’s no constitutional conservatism particular to an animal that can lick enthusiastically at its own anus, even if that metaphor is the first thing that leaps to mind watching Bill Kristol or John Podhoretz. Invariably someone tweets a picture of a dog with pro-Israel swag, and it’s always absurd. Often the dog looks irritated to have something on it, or curious what the hell its owner is doing. When it looks happy, it looks about as happy as it would be if some random Palestinian asked who’s a good boy, presumably in whatever language is used to determine good boys in that dog’s household.
But people? You can politicize the hell out of them, to the point where you wipe all meaning they had off the face of the earth, long after Ebola does the same to them physically. Four thousand dead in Africa? They must have died because they’re an intrinsically backward people who believe in magicks. They probably don’t even believe in the constitution. Or they’re just an excuse for President Obama to poison our troops as a really confusing and abstract apology for colonialism. Those 4,000 people must not even have had the honesty to die in some regular way; they died as props.

About the only thing you can hang on a dog is a collar, but you can change the subject by engineering paranoia about people to such an extent that any people or fear will do. There were thousands of Honduran kids trying to come into the US, and they might have had infectious diseases, and Ebola is an infectious disease, so this thing is just like the other thing. Speaking of illegal immigration, Isis could sneak into the US just like arrested phone-tap-fuckup, accused sexual harasser and “whey-faced little shit” James O’Keefe did in the middle of a staged cosplay exercise on the Texas border. Isis could do that! (There’s a Muslim prayer soccer jersey proving they may already have!) That’s important, because Ebola is the Isis of biological agents. Once you think about it, Obama is Isis, because Isis is the Ebola of terroristisms, and Ebola is the Obola of Obama. You know what else originated in Africa like Ebola? The president and anti-colonialism, from his father. The fever dreams are coming from inside his father.
You don’t even have to go as far as talking about people. You can just talk about one. US Ebola patient Thomas Duncan wasn’t actually a human being who fled war only to find himself on death’s door in his adopted country, suffering in agony and terror at the prospect of dying. He must have actually been a trojan horse to get amnesty for illegal immigrants. (Maybe he contracted Ebola from Isis agents hiding among all those Honduran kids. Who knows? Who cares!)
The fact is, it’s a lot harder to dehumanize a dog than it is to dehumanize a person. You can’t impute sinister motives to a dog. You can’t prove that the dog brought it on himself, via a rejection of modernity or liberty or due to elaborate subterfuge. You can’t make the dog an actor in an arcane and hateful agenda to rip the country apart from its innards on out. All you can do is think of the pity of the poor creature, isolated from his loved ones, dying alone.
theguardian.