Back when RR was president, I hated him and accepted all the liberal talking points of the day, mostly because I figured out by media osmosis that those points were accepted by all the "smart" people...And who doesn't want to consider oneself automatically intelligent, simply by believing in X instead of Y on topic____?
And then I read a glowing article on Sweden, which was then being promulgated as the World's Utopia. And I'm pretty sure the article I read was published by the Reader's Digest, to which my parents had a subscription (that magazine may have been conservative back in the 1950s, but it already wasn't by the 1980s, in my experience.) Anyhow, the article laid out all the reasons why Sweden Was The Best Place on Earth If Not The Universe, and one of the reasons was
Spaying and neutering dogs was banned.
Owners were expected to keep female dogs in heat inside, to prevent unwanted litters.
The rationale behind this law was,"it encouraged responsible pet ownership" and I'm pretty sure that was EXACTLY the way it was phrased.
Bear in mind I considered myself a leftist then-more radical than a liberal-and yet, reading that I felt a disquieting emotion in my stomach and on the back of my neck which I could not identify then, but which I later realized was pure rage.
The law gave the Swedish government the right to treat grown adults as children (Isn't "it will encourage responsibility" precisely why the grownups give children allowances?) and that really bothered me.
(I felt the same rage when I read in the article that the government had created communal dining halls for apartment buildings....And that these halls had so encouraged socialization and cohesion in the apartment dwellers that the government had then made their usage mandatory instead of voluntary.Not every night, only a few times a month IIRC...But being told as a grownup how you WILL spend even one or two nights a month by your government is just too intrusive....And for an introvert like me, who finds people in groups draining, it's The Worst Nightmare Ever.
So in retrospect, a stupid* Swedish law banning spaying is what started my journey from knee jerk liberal to small government (but strong national defense) conservative/libertarian . It took a few more years (I voted for WJC the first time ) and it was an obsession with the Civil war that finally killed off the last of my HS/college liberalism (the state's rights argument on behalf on local self government was too obviously correct-a strong central government was too intrusive even then)...But it was seeing how (over and over and over) it was *Liberals* who wanted to intrude in my private life more than conservatives , and how *liberals* were the ones who wanted to strengthen the government to intrude into people's privacy (in the name of "fairness" and "enlightened opinion", of course) that did the trick.
*And it WAS a stupid law, that years later it was revealed led to a rate of uterine cancers in canines EIGHT TIMES the US average, because we spay our female pets much more frequently.
Question for folks who’ve had female dogs — is it more difficult to have a female dog? I mean — the male dogs will be hounding her when she’s in heat and I don’t know if spaying is “humane” (don’t snap at me — I have no idea, so inform me if you think otherwise).