More unintentional economics lessons from the media. This time it comes from Moscow’s stray dogs. Apparently, there are about 26,000 of them living in the city, and they’ve adapted to post-Soviet prosperity. In what not-so-former President Putin likes to call the “good old days,” when there were no kiosks around, dogs foraged through garbage for food, lived a semi-ferral existence, and mostly avoided people. These days, now that actual people have things to give away, they’ve learned to beg. And not just to beg, but to be smart about it. Some people report cases where dogs sneak up behind someone eating a hot dog (or whatever the Russian equivalent is) and bark really loudly all of a sudden, causing them to drop their food, which the dog then snatches up and runs off with. Regular little gypsies, diese Hunde!
Better still, they’ve apparently learned how to ride the subway and wait for stoplights. Yeah - back in the USSR, cars weren’t common enough to be trouble. But times change … and so do dogs.
Best of all, they’re more docile now.
Adaptations by individual dogs have added up to a dramatic shift in canine culture. Begging is a submissive activity, so today there are fewer all-out interpack wars, which sometimes used to last for months, according to Mr. Poyarkov. Within packs there are more stable social hierarchies that allow the whole group to prosper.
So today’s lesson is that money is a civilizing force. All those science fiction films you saw that claim that war is in man’s nature? Rubbish. No one fights if he doesn’t have to. People obey traffic signals because it’s the law? Nonsense. They obey them because it’s safe. And innovation? It only happens if there’s something to be gained.
Incidentally, there’s a website devoted to stray dogs in Moscow. To my delight, it also includes some cats.