May 24, 2023 • 49 mins
In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with producer Sophie Lichterman about the stray dogs who fight cops and guard protesters around the world.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool Dogs. Who did Dog Stuff?
You like what I did?
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I love that the change the title who Loved the Dogs?
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Okay, sorry, yep, now yeah those are your one point
five times you're allowed. So I'm your host. Margaret Kildre
with me today as both my guest and producer, but
not my guest producer because that's a different term for
a different media medium. Is Sophie.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hi, Sophie, I see what you did there?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Thanks, that was nice.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Yeah. Sophie is best known as a producer of podcasts,
but also probably almost equally known as someone who likes dogs.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, equally hard for how beautiful my dog? Anderson shout
out Anderson for being a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful girl.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Anderson's amazing. Ian is our audio engineer and our theme
music was written for us by unwoman.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
You're not gonna try to spell that this this episode.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I guess I could try to do it so I
could get it right this time. I swear I write
for a living you and wo M A N crushed it.
Hell Yeah. This week we're talking about dogs. This is
part two. In part one, we talked about the bummer
stuff is a pun because bumber was then Oh that's perfect, Yeah,
(01:20):
thank you. We talked to the domestication of dogs. We
talked about why dogs and humans belong together and why
mass euthanasia is not the most effective thing that's ever
happened in terms of fixing some of the problems between
humans and dogs. Today, we're gonna talk about riot dogs.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Where are we starting.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
We're starting in Greece. Did you read ahead. So there's
a neighborhood in Athens called Exarchia. I really like Athens
because there's an Athens in every fucking state. Yeah, but
this is the og Athens Athens, Greece, they have a neighborhood.
They neighborhood's called Exarchia. It is the anarchist neighborhood. Is
(02:00):
one of the only ways you will find the word
anarchist in mainstream newspapers, honestly, is if they talk about Exarchia,
you kind of can't. That's how anarchist it is. You
can't not say it. There's all these jokes in twenty
twenty about anarchist jurisdictions. Actually they weren't jokes. There's all
these strange accusations made about why the government should kill
(02:21):
everyone in various cities in the United States for being
anarchist jurisdictions. But exarchia anarchists present about as much political
power as the actual government does, and that balance goes
back and forth all the time. Right now, Airbnb is
fucking it up, and I haven't entirely kept up with
how things have changed in the ten years or so
(02:42):
since I've been there. But there are or were dozens
of squattish social centers. These are huge buildings. Anarchists there
house refugees and immigrants and physically stop any attempts by
police to deport those immigrants. They run pay what you
want cafes. They have open air movie screenings, health clinics,
and language classes for migrants. Even the restaurants you have
(03:04):
to pay for often give out free food during the
general strikes. Greece loves a good general strike, and because well,
it means literally the birthplace of rule by the people,
so they like finding out ways to do that. There
is a large squatted park there called Navarino's Park that
is run by anarchists. Tourist guides say a self managed
(03:27):
park run by locals, which is technically true.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
What a great spin on that, I know.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
It was built in two thousand and nine when folks
just smashed up the concrete and planted flowers and trees
because they were like, you know what would be better
than another building is if this was a park, we
can just do that. And the rules of the park
are be respectful and clean most of the time. In practice,
it gets a little trashed during the week and then
every Sunday volunteers come to the park and clean it up.
(03:58):
In garden. Police tend to only come into Asarchia in
large numbers because when they do they're often met with
molotovs and rocks. People try to solve problems through self organizing.
While I was there, I went to the weirdest anarchist
demonstration I've ever been to, which was the most like
the anarchists are in Charge demonstration. Yeah, it was a
(04:20):
reclaim the streets demonstration. Normally, a reclaim the streets demonstration
is when you reclaim the streets from like government and
capitalism by having a big parade. This time it was
a demonstration led by anarchists of all ages to reclaim
the streets as public space to be shared by all.
Because there's a problem with some of the younger punks
in the neighborhood were harassing older people, and so the
(04:41):
anarchists through it, like leave the old folks alone, new assholes. Yeah,
it was beautiful and it was just and the way
they did that wasn't They showed up and like we're
going to fuck up any of the young punks. No,
they just like showed up with like food and shit,
and they were like, look, the streets belong to all
of us. We are all part of this neighborhood. We
all live here together, like.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
A real community, real mutual aid.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Controversially from a US perspective where we
have the war on drugs, they also drove out the
heroin dealers, who are seen as a scourge and yeah,
and it is argued that currently the dealers are coming
back with police assistants, and I don't know the actual
mechanism of that. As an article in The Daily Beast
(05:23):
put it, the freedom and ease of life in Exarchia
is preserved by the constant and immediate will to set
shit on fire, throw tear gas canisters back at the police,
maintain esthetic control of the neighborhood, and use petrol bombs
to remind everyone. The place is not for sale. It
has been under anarchist control for about half a century,
as far back as far as I can piece together. Literally,
(05:45):
it's coming up on its fiftieth anniversary. Because in order
to talk about stray dogs, we're going to talk about
Greek military junta.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You'll love context.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I do. I love it so much because from nineteen
sixty seven to nineteen seventy four, Greece was ruled by
what's called the Greek Kunta, or more poetically, the regime
of the Colonels. Just a right wing military dictatorship. Yeah,
it probably goes back even further. It goes back to
the Civil War nineteen forty four, when Greece was liberated
(06:18):
from the Axis Powers. Was a civil war between the
communists and the government's and exile. The communists lost. The
right and the left had been really polarized in Greece
ever since, maybe since before then, but that's as far
back as I traced it. In nineteen sixty seven, the
right wing staged a coup. In nineteen sixty eight, a
centrist guy tried to assassinate the military leader, but he
(06:39):
sadly failed. There were large demonstrations, but nothing that really
shook the dictatorship to the core until nineteen seventy three.
Nineteen seventy three, a fuck ton of people were like,
are you just serious? Are you serious? We have a dictatorship?
Fuck this an entire battleship. The H and S Velos mutinied.
Literally the commander was part of the mutiny. Know that
(07:00):
I could still kind as a mutiny, but I guess
if the entire ship mutinies against the higher naval thing right,
they refused to return to Greece. Meanwhile, the students are
fighting against conscription. In nineteen seventy three, students barricaded themselves
into the University of Athens. This is in February, the
first one of these, and the cops were brutal, they
(07:20):
tortured people, they did all that stuff. This didn't stop
the students overall. It probably stopped individual students because of
the death and the torture. In November, students at the
Athens Polytechnic, a university in Exarchia, they went on strike
and their motto was bred education and liberty. Forty years later,
I was inside the Polytechnic while students were preparing for
(07:42):
another demonstration, and I saw one of my favorite pieces
of graffiti ever, which translates to anarchy and stale bread,
with the argument like subtextas I could live off of
only anarchy and stale bread.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I do love that.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, I'd also love bread. Education at liberty, I know,
I know.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
In nineteen seventy three, the students took over the university,
and the two big political groups in the university, the
two leftist groups, including the Soviet Aligne Marxists, were like, no, no,
we don't endorse this because they're trying to keep their
heads down because the whole point of the military junta
was to like crush communism, and so the Marxists are like,
oh fuck, oh fuck, and the rest of the students
were like, all right, Soviet stands, stay the fuck out
(08:27):
of our way. And so they barricaded the place and
they held the cops off for a night and the
second day and this is some shit out of a movie,
I fucking swear is now what's called celebration day. Thousands
of people showed up to support them, and it I
believe this is like basically like when the protests really
got large against this dictatorship, a radio tower inside the
(08:50):
occupied university that they cobbled together like literally out of
like the thing I read was translated was like out
of pieces from the lab, like the science lab. They
just fucking put together radio tower and they started spitting
out demands for freedom, and for the first time, molotods
started showing up at protests in Athens, and the junta
freaked out. They declared martial law, which they had like
(09:11):
kind of I think walked back a little bit because
they'd been around for a little bit. They drove a
tank through the gates of the university. Twenty four people
were killed. And this is the part of this is
like the last words heard from the occupied radio station
before it went dead were hail freedom, spoken in an
adolescent voice.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
And I like, I like that. I mean, I don't
like that.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
It's powerful but very cinematic.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah, totally. And that's like, I mean, that's one of
the things I keep running across with history is like, oh,
we actually all live these very cinematic lives. It's just
a matter of understanding what's happening and framing things. And anyway,
the existing junta was falling in fast. There was another
right wing counter coup, that is to say, another right
(09:59):
wing coup top all the existing right wing coup. They
started cracking down even harder on their own people. This
fells apart. In nineteen seventy four, there were free elections
in Greece once more. A referendum to install the monarchy
failed and Greece became a republic. And the students were
fucking heroes. They had destroyed a dictatorship, I mean, alongside
a ton of other people. So for almost forty years
(10:22):
there was a law that said cops weren't allowed to
enter universities because people were like, oh, I don't know,
maybe giving students defensible spaces as good for democracy because
it was destroyed dictatorship. This was the nineteen eighty two
academic sanctuary law. In twenty nineteen, a right wing government
scrapped that law.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, but exarchia centered around not centered whatever the polytechnic
is in Exarchia, and this became like kind of how
this neighborhood became under anarchist control. Yeah, And in the
nineteen eighties, tens of thousands of anarchists we're living in
the neighborhood, drawn from around the country, and anti state,
anti capitalist politics have been seen as a legitimate force
(11:07):
in Greek society for a long time. There's also a
lot of stray dogs there, not just I was.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Like, when are we getting back, We're back to the dogs.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Dogs, there'd be dogs, and I told this would be
a happy dog episode.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It is. There's going to be more. There's still more
in between every big stories of its stories, the Russian
Nestine Dolls of the podcast world. So there's a lot
of stray dogs in Athens. Greece tries to vaccinate, sterilize,
and track the stray dogs. They don't they don't euthanize,
and they haven't had the success of the Netherlands so far,
(11:43):
but they do actually have done a lot of work
in this direction. Cool, and it's going to be a
story about the dogs, but now we're going to talk
about the riots that made those dogs famous.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
So you tease me by saying the word dog a
couple times, and now we're okay.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Talking about a guy again. Human. Yeah, there's molotovs. I
was like, almost as good as a dog. It's like, okay,
it's like yeah, but there's like there's a big gap
right between molotovs and dogs, but there's not a lot
of stuff between them. You know, there's like people and
they're okay, and then there's molotoss are good, and then
(12:19):
there's like lots of dead air, and then there's dogs
at the top of everything in the hierarchy of trying
to get.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Sophie's all right, just get on with it.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
There's this fifteen year old kid who likes hanging out
in the streets of Xarkia named Alexandro's Grigoropolos. And on
December sixth, two thousand and eight, Alexandros was hanging out
in the streets with his friends when they got into
a verbalttercation with the cops. The cops actually got orders
from higher up to leave it alone, and the cops
were like, now, fuck that, they parked, They came over,
they started yelling at the kids. The kids didn't back down,
(12:52):
and the cops murdered Alexandros. They murdered a fifteen year old.
They claimed that their shot was a ricochet. The autopsy
disagree it. Yeah, shocker there really, yeah, really total news
to everyone. Within an hour, the riots started. Within two days,
there were twenty eight cities across Greece that were on fire.
(13:16):
Basically Athens was burning, Malthous were everywhere. The police station
Outpost Nicksarkia was firebombed by a crowd of one hundred people.
Students went on strike everywhere. Labor unions went on strike.
Air traffic controllers shut down dozens of flights because they
went on strike. And it was about Alexandro's but it
was about more than that. It was about the failing economy.
Two thousand and eight, as everyone will recall, was a
(13:37):
really great time for everyone economically. It was about increasing
financial inequality, and it was about authoritarian control of the state.
It was about people's demands to live lives of self determination.
So a private company that kept records of individual debt
was burned. Their records were burned. Protesters shot out the
(13:57):
tires of a police bus with AK forty seven. By
the end of this even some cops went on strike
and protested against this. Is this like actually surprised me.
The cops went on strike and protested against the cops.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, that's so dope.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
They intended to quote totally, intending to quote state categorically
that social problems are not solved by repressive measures. Oh
do you tell cop, Yeah, there is a line at
which some cops will stop wanting to do that.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Apparently this might not.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Be dogs, but I've enjoying myself a little bit more
and I thought it would be all right.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
See see, the riots lasted in full fervor for three weeks.
They lingered longer after that. There's like famous photos or
just like search like grease Christmas tree fire, and there's
like just a massive Christmas tree that they set on fire.
It's very dramatic. The police response was brutal. Isolated protesters
were beaten to an inch of their lives. A friend
of mine was actually curb stomped by police and Athens.
(15:03):
I think it was during this, but it might have
been during some of the protests a little bit later
than that. I talked to a Greek friend about this time,
and his perspective was that in the minds of the
average Greek person, the anarchists were about as legitimate of
a force within society as the police. Like some people
supported the anarchists, some people supported the police, and the
rest were like, well, both sides have a point, and
(15:24):
that is not a situation that I have ever experienced
anywhere else. A Greek woman, quoted by The Daily Beast
put it quote the day we don't tear things down
because the government murdered a child is the day we
are no longer human? And I don't know. I think
about how often people have to do that all over
(15:46):
the world, you know, in these clouds of tear gas.
Amongst the rock throwing, molotov throwing anarchists who were supported
by a surprising percentage of the Greek population, a hero emerged,
a hero named Canelos, the first modern riot dog.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Hell yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
And because every story is really complicated, it might have
been to as Heyday was before this. There's lots of
conflicting reports about exactly when he first showed up. But
this is the story we're going with.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
But first, it's time four and ad break.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Oh okay, what's another thing you like? Okay for your dog?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
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dogs and you are a human, you most definitely have
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(16:40):
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(17:03):
jumble lamb Chop. Sometimes it's Jumbo black bear, sometimes it's
Jumbo tiger. Sometimes we often do the unicor becaus they're very,
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highly recommend the Jumbo Lamb Chop franchise. I guess hell
yeah toys, right Anderson.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
She concurs, And here's some other ads. And we are back.
In all the pictures of all the black Cloud protesters
with rocks and molotovs, they had a friend, a medium
sized yellow dog of indeterminable breed. It's always a mutt, baby,
(17:42):
always a mutt. There he was barking at cops. There
he was posing with the anarchists. Canelos. Canelos was a mutt,
of course, he was a mutt. No offense to dogs
that had the misfortune of being pure bread. It's not
their fault. But of course the first ride dog is
a mutt.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
His medium size and yellow and his name his name
means cinnamon.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Oh cool.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
And he was on the front lines of every protest
for years. One time he tripped cops as they ran
down the steps of Syntagma Square, just like the main Yeah,
let's go. Yeah. He was legendary. He was in papers
across the world. He was inspiring and an icon. He
was also a way that journalists used to like flatten
(18:24):
the struggle right, because they'd be like, I don't know,
Greeks are rioting. Here's a dog that is not his fault.
It's not fault that he was also adorable, I know,
I know. Like every legend, it's hard to peace out
what's true and what's not. There are three famed and
named riot dogs from Greece from the twenty eight or
(18:45):
twenty twelve and possibly earlier than that, and they all
look really similar. Sometimes people claim they are related, Sometimes
people claim they are the same dog. Sometimes the heroic
deeds of one are conflated with the deeds of another.
I'm certain I will get some stuff wrong here across
and every source I could they all disagree and they're
all anecdotal. It's possible that Canelos actually died in two
(19:07):
thousand and eight before these particular protests, and it was
one of his other yellow dogs that was these ones.
But all these dogs were loved, and all these dogs
fought hard, and we're going to talk about how they fought.
Canelos he ruled. He gave people hope, and he basically
was like, hey, the street dogs are street dogs are
with you. As he aged, he started to get arthritis,
(19:28):
and student protesters got him a wheelchair for his back
legs and then helped him along for more marches. There's
photos of him like being helped along on these marches,
and he's just happy and old. He retired and lived
inside the Polytechnic, the university that brought down the fucking dictatorship.
At one point, the dog catcher was called on him
and the students were vaulted until he was freed good
(19:50):
and he lived among the students until his death at
roughly seventeen years old. Next to Rise, Yeah, next to
Rise in fame Leucanicos, who is sometimes said to be
Canelos's kid. That might be true, I don't know, but
street dogs are often sterilized in Greece, and I think
Lucanicos at least was sterilized based on it did a
(20:12):
lot of weird research. I was like reading the pieces
written by the people who handle the stray dogs in Greece,
as I was trying to figureut which dogs are which
Lucanicos is the next generation famed riot dog and since
this is Greece, the next generation of riots is less
than three years later.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
In twenty ten, the Greek economy was fucked, so it's
leaders were like, hey, what if we got the International
Monetary Fund to bail us out in exchange agree to
all kinds of austerity measures that entirely fuck over everyone
living in the country. And the other leaders they all
nodded their heads and were like, this is indeed a
wise course of action, and not only will it be good,
but people will accept it all right. Shockingly, they were wrong. Yeah,
(20:55):
the Greek population was like, actually, we like having a
social safety net and a society that believes in taking
care of one another instead of all pretending like we
want to be America but poor and fuck each other
over all the time, people saw no reason why they
had to pay for unpopular and bad decisions made by
their leaders, and they had no interest in going along
with these austerity measures. So you've got what's called the
anti Asterity movement, and it was riots and general strikes
(21:19):
starting in a militant fashion. In June twenty eleven, when
the Greek Parliament voted to agree to the austerity stuff.
The protests started out kind of peaceful. Cops were soon like,
fuck you get the fucking line, We're going to hit
you and poison you and fuck you up. So people
were like, I'm doing a lot of paraphrasing here. These
are not direct quotes. People were like, wow, I don't
want to get in line. And also, it turns out
(21:39):
you can make them all tough cocktail pretty easily. All
you got to do is take a bottle and then
and where there are clouds of tear gas, where there
are armies of RoboCop right police marching in uniform is
a show that I wrote this while I was like
kind of excited and just like reading about this with
my dog in my lap. Where there are rock throwing anarchists,
(22:01):
there are riot dogs. Where there are protesters to be
protected and cheered up, there's leucanicos barking at cops. His
name means sausage. I like wonutiful. I know, okay. According
to a Greek person's comment quote that I just found
on a random article, because this is the only piece
that I found of anything anecdotal about this part of
(22:23):
it quote. Initially, Leucanicos would go to the demos with
the left wing student group EAAK, and it was only
later that he changed his political preferences and went to
demos with the anarchists. On another note, I am under
the impression that dogs are not affected by tear gas,
though one would expect them to be. I could not
justify this claim scientifically, but only from experience. Neither Leucanicos,
(22:45):
nor Canelos, nor any of the other dogs that joined
riots in Greece ever show any kind of effect from
the tons of tear gas that the cops constantly threw
at us. So I looked it up. It turns out
you can justify this claim scientifically. Most sites are like Oh,
dogs have more sensitive senses of smell, so they're affected more.
(23:05):
But this is not based on experience or study. The
opposite is true. You want to guess what group has
done the most research about tear gas and dogs without
reading ahead.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, I'm looking at the ceiling. Probably the people that
use the tear gas.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, yep, the bad guy team, the CANA and police unit. Yeah,
they want to be able to work in cs gas
tear gas environments, so they test.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
So you're telling me they tested tear gas on dogs
to see how it would affect them and didn't think about,
you know, the negative impacts of that.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Is that what you're telling me?
Speaker 1 (23:46):
That is what I'm telling you, fucking.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Cops acap geez christ.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah, But both the anecdotal experience of protesters and the
scientific study of putting dogs into tear gas chambers reveals
that dogs are not particularly affected by tear gas, not
to the same degree that humans are, because dogs are better. Yes,
that's the big part of it. Dogs have tear ducks
(24:12):
that are like ten times the size of human tear
ducks because they they have ten times as many emotions
and not just in proportion to their body. Are the
tear ducks bigger, but like literally objectively size, right, So
they flush tear gas way the fuck faster, or lachrymatory
agents way the fuck faster, including pepper spray. They've also
got what's called a nictating nictating membrane or a third eyelid.
(24:36):
That that's what most people call it because it's easier
to spell and pronounce that hangs out on the inside
corner of their eye. It's very effective at protecting their
eyes and spreading tears across their eyes. They also don't
have sweat glands, so they don't absorb the chemicals and
many in as many places, there are long term health effects.
You should not intentionally expose your dog to tear gas.
Looking at you canine units. You should just let all
(24:59):
your dogs tire yep, Lucanicos, and then you should yourself retire. Actually,
Lucanicos won even more hearts around the world than his
maybe dad did. In twenty eleven, he was nominated for times.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I remember that the only time.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Bro was like fuck, yeah, yeah, totally rooting for you.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
And it's funny because they had already changed it from
Man of the Year to Person of the Year, you know,
and so like I just like the yeah. And then
one time when cops went on strike, and this might
have been the two thousand and nine time, and it
might have been a twenty eleven time, and I do
not know, but it was presented as Lucanicos doing it,
so it might have been. There were cops on both
sides of the protests and Lucanicos didn't know what to do.
(25:45):
But then the non striking cops started beating up the
striking cops and he sided with the cops who were
on strike.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Of course he did, because he's a good boy.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yeah, there was another dog named the Doris, or maybe
they're the same dog. The people who tracks stray dogs
in Athens say it's the same dogs. Oh, I don't know.
I think it means like Theodore.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
I think it's just age.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah there was a trend, no I I yeah, no,
there's there's shockingly like when we talk to some of
the when we talk about some of the other South
American riot dogs in a little bit very different naming conventions.
So Theodorus might have been Lucanicos might not have been
all the whatever, they're all great because also these are
(26:36):
just the name dogs. There's like fuck tons of dogs
doing all this stuff, and they're just like always there
and they're always helping people out. And Lucanicos was the
people's dog for much of his life. He had a
collar with his vaccination status that was given to him
by the stray dog people, and he was welcome at
(26:56):
every squat and organizing center in the city. But he
didn't stay put. He would hoop around from one place
to another. He basically couchsurf across the movement. And in
twenty twelve, after a year on the front lines of
this particular protest, possibly longer depending on whatever whatever, in
twenty twelve he was adopted more formally by a guy
and given a loving home. He had food, water, tick collars,
(27:18):
veterinary care, and safety, and he lived another two years
and he died peacefully in his sleep in twenty fourteen.
He was buried in the shade of a tree on
a hill in the center of Athens, and he died
at about ten years of age. And the reason he
died young is probably the veterinary. Report says that it
was in part due to all the tear gass he'd
ingested over the years. There's a bunch of monuments and
(27:41):
murals in his honor. He's a character in the twenty
twenty video game Tonight We Riot Cool. Yeah, So I
started off this episode as kind of a cute like
look its dogs being cool, but honestly, like the more
I was like writing about it, reading about it and
all that. Like, Lucanicos is as much our comrade as anyone.
He worked tirelessly to keep people safe and keep people's
(28:03):
spirits lifted. And like everyone, he hated cops and he
sacrifices health to keep people safe. Long live Lucanicos.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Fuck yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Want to take a quick detour to the next country
over to Turkey. Turkey doesn't give us.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I got to talk about humans now.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
No, very little, maybe a little bit. I'm sorry. The
humans provide the context that all the dogs live in.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah yet no, no, fair enough.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Turkey doesn't give us any named personalities of riot dogs,
at least not that have made it to the Western media.
But it has a beautiful story, which is that there
the struggle goes both ways. The dogs fight for the
people and the people fight for the dogs. Because in
two thousand and four, Turkey passed a law against euthanizing strays,
joining the parts of the world that actually took this
problem seriously. I'm tried and failing to keep my opinion
(28:57):
out of this issue. The government keeps trying to go
back to euthanasia, and people keep saying like, no, fuck you,
we are not going back to this. And it was
this oh fuck no attitude that got the two thousand
and four law passed in the first place, and whenever
municipalities do it anyway, people get real fucking upset at them.
But there's unlike Germany and the Netherlands, there's a ton
(29:19):
of stray dogs in Turkey. They're generally not seen as
a problem. A recent survey says that about a third
of the population sees them as a threat. While there's
a bunch of organizations that sterilize and release strays, they
put ear tags on them to mark them. There aren't
enough of these programs yet, and pets can still be
bought in stores, so a lot of people buy them
and then abandon them. But on the other hand, there's
(29:40):
a ton of cafes and such that care for the animals,
and there's a bit of an attitude. There's more of
an attitude of like, these are our dogs than is
commonly found in more western countries. So people fight for
the dogs. And then in twenty thirteen, like as they should. Yeah, no, totally, yeah, yeah, yeah,
all of the stuff of like oh we took care
of these dogs who took care of us on the streets,
(30:02):
like they make me really happy. So in twenty thirteen
you've got the Gezi Park protests. There's a park in
Istanbul called Toxin Gezi Park, and in twenty thirteen the
government was like, what if this was a shopping mall
instead of a park, And the people of Vistabul were like,
what if the fuck it was not? So it started
(30:27):
with people occupying the park to prevent development. For two
weeks they occupied the place, and then it spread all
over Turkey. Like all major movements, it was about a
lot of things. It was about the park, it was
about public space. It was about free speech and assembly,
about having spaces not be just about places you buy
and sell shit. It was also about fuck ertigan and authoritarianism.
(30:52):
It was also about environmentalism. And then I really like
this part. The government called them all looters. So the
protesters rather than be like, we're not looters, we're the
good protesters unlike the bad protesters. Just all of the
protesters were like, yeah, we're looters. That's the name, that's
that's the word for us. The word is louter cool. Eventually,
(31:12):
the moment passed. Urdigan is still in power, but Guzie
Park is still there. It did not become a mall.
And the dogs who lived in the park were part
of the protest, and all the dogs who were around
the surrounding area, and they were showing up as riot dogs,
and they were, you know, defending people and fighting back
against the police. And there were also pets would come
out and they'd have signs around their necks and stuff,
(31:35):
and they would have like signs that say things like
close the park and I'll shit in the mall. Cops
were particularly brutal to the dogs in these protests, leaving
us with photos of people washing pepper spray out of
some good boy's eyes. And the news wants you to
believe that these dogs were there because of the commotion,
that they weren't there to defend the park, but this
(31:55):
was their home. Militarized police came in and the dogs
joined people fighting back against police coming into their home.
I think all of them are good pups.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah. I mean, if there's one thing dogs are gonna do,
it's gonna protect their territory.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yeah. Yeah, and the people who care for them.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
And finally, we're gonna talk about the most famous riot
dog of the mall, who has the coolest name. But first,
but first, when I what is my dog like? When
I'm driving my dog around in my giant truck, I
have a little like folding dog crate that he doesn't
stay in, but the entire backseat I put the crate
(32:35):
in so he has a place to lie down and
feel safe. And then also while he's laying down, it's
like safer if I get into an accident or whatever.
I really like my travel crate. I have no idea
the brand.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
I have one as well in my car.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah, Anderson is like a soft thing. She can go
in there if she wants to. She doesn't have to.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
If I'm on the freeway, I always zip it up.
It's very safe. It's buckled in. M nice, drive safely
with your own Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
And then these other ads, and we're back and we're
going to talk about El Negro Matapolcos fuck yeah, the
Black cop killer, sometimes just El Negro the Black, which
means that I get to talk about the Argentinians student Uprising,
(33:23):
as is my way of getting everyone to hear about
all these protest movements. Context context, the Argentinian student uprising
of twenty eleven to twenty thirteen, sometimes called the Chilean
Winter because most of it happened in the first winter.
And I always talk about these huge protest movements and
uprisings from fifty one hundred, two hundred years ago, but
it's worth remembering these happen all the time. I'm sure
(33:44):
another one is coming. You can just wait or not wait,
whatever float your boat. In Chile, most education is privatized,
and it was getting more so. Tuition was going up.
The rich, we're getting good educations. The poor, we're not
getting good educations. People didn't like this. It turns out
people don't like when that happens. The uprising was also
(34:05):
about economic inequality, lack of opportunities for people to lead
dignified lives, and the protests led to hundreds of injured protesters,
hundreds of injured police officers, and one dead student, and
once again in the tear gas, a hero arrived, a
medium sized black mutt, always a mutt with floppy ears
and a red bandana and an unwavering commitments of justice. Yeah,
(34:29):
and I actually I have more details about him than
any of the others.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Let's go.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Mattapacos wasn't actually a stray dog, not really sort of
half stray. He was a stray who mostly stayed with
a woman named Maria compos who took him in and
kept a bed for him and fed him, but let
him come and go whenever he wanted. And she basically like,
one day fed this stray and he was like, yeah,
I like it here, I'll stay here. At first, she
(34:55):
gave him a cape that he wore, but after he
came home soaked by a police water cannon, she switched
to a bandana, and sometimes it was red and sometimes
it was blue. She'd change it up on different days
whenever a protest would pop off. There's like, there's a
video of her talking about this. Whenever a protest would
pop off, he'd scratch at the door, desperate to go
(35:17):
out and get into the fray. So Maria would bless him,
drawing a cross on his head with her thumb to
protect him from evil in danger. Then open the door
and he'd go running downtown to the protests. I think
she lived near downtown, but sometimes he took the bus
by himself. I think I've seen video footage of him
on a bus and he's not with anyone.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
That's actually, uh, there's several dogs that have done that.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, cool, it's so cute. Yeah. One day Maria was
like randomly downtown and saw her own dog leading a
march of students on the next street over or whatever.
Students referred to him as a reincarnated student. And a
lot of mythologizing has been done around Motapacos. And it's
(36:02):
beautiful because it's less as compared to poor Lucanicos, where
it got flattened in the media and other countries. This
this feels like it was like mythbuilding by movements. And
also I mean whatever, it's all all these things. Okay,
So a lot of dogs would march with the students,
they would attack police, they would defend students. In a
(36:24):
short documentary about Motopacos, the filmmaker asks some students, have
you ever seen a dog defend the police? The students reply, no,
not even those who walk with them.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Ha ha.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
And in a material sense, the dogs, often dozens at
a time, offer these protests a lot of things. They're
unafraid of chemical weapons and fire hoses. They would like
literally like Rentro would totally do this. They basically play
with the fire hose water. You know. They're like, oh, yeah,
I'm gonna get that water, you know. And yeah, they
(36:57):
form a physical buffer in front of protest sometimes, so
there's footage of water hose tanks on the tanks, like
not tanks of water, but you know, big things on
wheels whatever. Yeah, unable to advance because they can't effectively
clear the dogs off the street. They also serve as icons,
and I mean that in the religious sense when the
while the church during these protests was up there with
(37:18):
the state and the police is one of the major
repressive forces that people are fighting against. Yeah, he was
essentially canonized in a folk Catholic way, right, you have people,
you know, doing the blessings and all that stuff, and
there's images of him with a halo, and he just
became a living symbol of revolt. Him and the other
dogs street dogs defending the streets from those who tried
to deny it. Since street dogs they're defending the streets
(37:39):
from those who try to like deny the streets to
the people, they become this like clear example of downtrodden
fighting back and just being like, no, we've got this,
We're doing this together. And he was not so soon.
Matapacos was not the only dog with a bandana tight
around its neck. Basically, everyone like started going around and
giving all the riot dogs bandanas, and it became the
(38:01):
symbol of it. There's a twenty thirteen documentary about him
called Matapaco that's on YouTube and as English subtitles. If
your Spanish is as bad as mine, and he's just
he's really fucking cool. He he survives all of this.
He is a dog, so he doesn't live as long
as people. El Negro Motapacos died peacefully on Saturday August
(38:24):
twenty sixth, twenty seventeen. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen
years old. I've also seen twelve, but most of the
time I see sixteen or seventeen.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
I'll never forgive whoever made that decision to make dogs
lives so short.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
That is fair. I it is an unforgivable thing that
has been done.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Whatever whoever decided that, fuck you.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah. Yeah, he was surrounded by his loved ones and
there are uncountable murals carrying him on. And as for
the protests itself, I don't think it's accurate to talk
about protests movements like winning and losing. The student movement
didn't win its demands, it laid the groundwork for another
uprising in twenty nineteen. But it's better to just see
(39:07):
history as this ebb and flow of energy and power,
a fight between liberation and repression. We win by being
on the side of liberation, of education, of workers' rights,
of dignity, of helping out the street dogs. And in
twenty nineteen, two years after his death, the black Cop
Killer became a symbol once more as the country sprung
(39:27):
into revolt. A black dog with a red bandana is
now the symbol of revolt for much of the world.
Statues of dog.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I was going to say, like, people probably don't even
realize that that this image is super popular. You probably
don't even realize you've seen it. But it's it's everywhere. Yeah,
and it's dope. Yeah, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
I really like people will go up to statues of dogs,
like any random statue of a dog in a public place,
entire red bandana around its neck. Yeah, and red bandanas
we've talked about before on the show as a symbol
of going back at least as far as the Battle
of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, which you can listen
to our episode from last year about when black and
(40:09):
white miners tied red bandanas around their necks and went
to a literal war against the coal companies that were
murdering them. And this might be and might not be
the origin of the term redneck. And so I like
this continuation of the red bandana as a symbol in
the twenty nineteen and twenty twenty protests. He've got two
more named riot dogs that come up Pepe Matapacos and Elvakita,
(40:33):
which means the little cow. El Waqita won the twenty
nineteen Character of the Year award in his city of Antofagasta.
I suspect it was a person of the year until Elakita.
You know that's so cool. Yeah, And protesters had his
(40:53):
back as well. A little cow. One time he got
lost in a neighborhood and he didn't know he didn't
know this particular neighborhoo after a particularly tough fight with
the police, so protesters used Facebook to coordinate a rescue
of him, and then someone walked him back to the
streets he did know, so that he could find his
way home and when cops he survives this when cops
shot him with a rubber bullet. Protesters get him, get
(41:15):
him to the vet, because we keep us safe includes animals.
And there's one more. There's one more. Yes, we're gonna
talk about another stire dog.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
This one.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
This one's a goat, but still an honorary dog. Biquette
the grind were.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Saying the greatest of all time, and then I was like,
I was like, oh.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
No, she means like a yeah, yeah, no, a literal goat.
Yeah yeah, no, totally when in doubt I am not
successfully using contemporary slang.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Is That's why I was like confused for a second.
I was like, like, don't think that we're getting into
Lebron James today.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
So yeah, who I'm aware of as a player of basketball,
Hell yeah you are, probably because of you. So yep.
Biquett the grindcore goat. Biquett was a goat who loved grindcore,
thus the grindcore goat. Grindcore is this really extreme punk
(42:20):
metal genre. It goes really fast, the songs are like
really short, and people scream about stuff. The anarchist band
Napalm Death is probably the most famous band that played grindcore.
They're in the Guinness Book World Records for the shortest
song ever recorded. You Suffer is one point three to
one six seconds long, so not very long songs. Biquett
(42:41):
lived on a punk rock farm. Have you ever seen
the video the photos of this m m oh, you
should look up Biquett b I q U E T
t E. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
This fucking goat is so metal.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah. Biquett lived on everyone at home. If you're if
you're not out doing a thing, you should if you
haven't already seen his images. Biquette lived on a punk
rock farm. And I can't pronounce French words, and I
try hard, less harder than other countries for some reason
in Mariok, France and this farm through shows, and she
hung out with every band that toured, and she was
(43:15):
always in the audience at every show, and pictures of
her go viral every now and then. And the name
Bequtt the goat translates to goat the goat because Biquett
means a young female goat. The punks at Mariok rescued
her from a slaughterhouse when she was five years old. Basically,
she'd been a milk goat. When she stopped producing enough,
she was going to get sent to the slaughter, but
(43:36):
then the punks were like, give her to us instead,
and she spent the next and last five years of
her life listening to punk sleeping in front of speakers,
trying to eat everyone's cigarette butts and drink everyone's half
empty beers, and basically living her best life. One of
the people on the farm named Flow said about her quote,
she was most connected to grind seen as the barn
floor where we throw the concerts. As wooden, I think
(44:00):
think that she felt the vibrations in her hoofs the
majority of the time. She even laid down next to
the speakers. She died young on December ninth, twenty thirteen.
A goat can live fifteen years easily, but she died
at ten years old. However, she got to live five
years as the punk rock goat instead of dying at five,
(44:20):
which is what her actual fate would have been if
the punks hadn't intervened. And there are many, many more,
very good dogs of many different species. And I'm sure
I'll return to this topic in the future, but for now,
go hug a dog, including cat dogs and goat dogs
and parrot dogs, don't hug bears or wolves. They're not dogs.
(44:42):
They're great too, but they don't need your hugs unless
you work at a wildlife sanctuary or some shit. That's
what I got. So I got about good dogs. I
love this.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
I wasn't sure what to do this week, and then
I was like, no, I'm doing dogs. Yeah, dog time.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
It's good doggo time, which is you know, every day
at my house. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Do you have
anything you'd like to plug? Oh?
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, I'm working on a tabletop roleplaying game called p
Number City that you can back on Kickstarter if it
is currently June twenty twenty three. If it is before
June twenty twenty three, you can look for it on
Kickstarter and sign up for notifications. If it is after
June twenty twenty three, you can just buy it like
a regular person, and then you can play a tabletop
role playing game that I should have a little thing
(45:37):
about in front of me, but I don't. But if
you want to be an occultist who talks to the
dead at seances while your friend who ran away from
the army but kept an exoskeleton is hanging out while
someone else who's an orphan who eats fungus to commune
with rats and send swarms of rats against the priests
who sacrifice gods. All that stuff. Then you might like
(46:02):
this game and you can play it. What do you got?
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Do you like listening to cool Zone Media podcasts?
Speaker 1 (46:09):
I do?
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Do you ever listen to cool Zone Media podcasts? And go?
Oh man?
Speaker 3 (46:15):
That would have been so much better if there wasn't
an AD there.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
I don't know if I'm contractually allowed to say yes.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
Well, I would like to let our listeners know that
we are launching or have launched, depending when you listen
to this Cooler Zone Media in ad free listening experience
and exclusive access to never before seeing bonus content that
is on Apple podcasts.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Well, podcasts are on cool Cooler Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
That would be our entire back catalog of cool Zoned
Media shows and all of our current shows. So you'll
get access to add free access to a kol Zoo
Media shows like cool People do the Cool Stuff. So
you can find Cooler Zone Media in your Apple podcast
app today and subscribe for instant accessless.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
And you can say I'm in when you do it,
and then everyone will think you're probably less cool than
they did before you said it.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Yeah, we Actually there's some pretty cool I really like
the art that is after this that it's it's our ship,
but cooler I haven't seen it, like like literally icy,
like cold. When I was telling when I was telling
our internal team that we were doing this, and you know,
being like, yeah, we're doing this, people get more money.
(47:38):
Hey uh, I just like had the graphic up and
none of them knew what it was, and I was like,
this is great, right, Like what the fuck are you
talking about?
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Visual puns that not they're not the right audience for it.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Yeah, I we're an audio medium. They don't get they
don't get the visual stuff it happens.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
But you can get that visual as well as mostly audio.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
And speaking of visuals, if you would like to see
photos of my dog, you can follow me on the interwebs.
I'm at Why Underscore, Sophie Underscore, Why on Twitter where
I post stuff of Anderson. But it basically my entire
Instagram is just Anderson content daily and that is at
Sophie Underscore, Ray Underscore of Underscore Sunshine. There's probably other
(48:24):
Underscores in there. I'm not good at saying it out loud,
but Yeah, there's that, and men, Magpie, you post lots
of photos of your dog on your Instagram.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Right, that's true. I'm at Margot Kiljoy on Instagram, at
Magpie Killjoy on Twitter, and we'll probably eventually actually start
looking at blue sky. At the moment I don't.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
It probably will praps like a dog.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Bye everyone.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome to Cool Dogs. Who did Dog Stuff?
You like what I did?
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I love that the change the title who Loved the Dogs?
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Okay, sorry, yep, now yeah those are your one point
five times you're allowed. So I'm your host. Margaret Kildre
with me today as both my guest and producer, but
not my guest producer because that's a different term for
a different media medium. Is Sophie.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hi, Sophie, I see what you did there?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Thanks, that was nice.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Yeah. Sophie is best known as a producer of podcasts,
but also probably almost equally known as someone who likes dogs.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, equally hard for how beautiful my dog? Anderson shout
out Anderson for being a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful girl.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Anderson's amazing. Ian is our audio engineer and our theme
music was written for us by unwoman.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
You're not gonna try to spell that this this episode.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I guess I could try to do it so I
could get it right this time. I swear I write
for a living you and wo M A N crushed it.
Hell Yeah. This week we're talking about dogs. This is
part two. In part one, we talked about the bummer
stuff is a pun because bumber was then Oh that's perfect, Yeah,
(01:20):
thank you. We talked to the domestication of dogs. We
talked about why dogs and humans belong together and why
mass euthanasia is not the most effective thing that's ever
happened in terms of fixing some of the problems between
humans and dogs. Today, we're gonna talk about riot dogs.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Where are we starting.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
We're starting in Greece. Did you read ahead. So there's
a neighborhood in Athens called Exarchia. I really like Athens
because there's an Athens in every fucking state. Yeah, but
this is the og Athens Athens, Greece, they have a neighborhood.
They neighborhood's called Exarchia. It is the anarchist neighborhood. Is
(02:00):
one of the only ways you will find the word
anarchist in mainstream newspapers, honestly, is if they talk about Exarchia,
you kind of can't. That's how anarchist it is. You
can't not say it. There's all these jokes in twenty
twenty about anarchist jurisdictions. Actually they weren't jokes. There's all
these strange accusations made about why the government should kill
(02:21):
everyone in various cities in the United States for being
anarchist jurisdictions. But exarchia anarchists present about as much political
power as the actual government does, and that balance goes
back and forth all the time. Right now, Airbnb is
fucking it up, and I haven't entirely kept up with
how things have changed in the ten years or so
(02:42):
since I've been there. But there are or were dozens
of squattish social centers. These are huge buildings. Anarchists there
house refugees and immigrants and physically stop any attempts by
police to deport those immigrants. They run pay what you
want cafes. They have open air movie screenings, health clinics,
and language classes for migrants. Even the restaurants you have
(03:04):
to pay for often give out free food during the
general strikes. Greece loves a good general strike, and because well,
it means literally the birthplace of rule by the people,
so they like finding out ways to do that. There
is a large squatted park there called Navarino's Park that
is run by anarchists. Tourist guides say a self managed
(03:27):
park run by locals, which is technically true.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
What a great spin on that, I know.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
It was built in two thousand and nine when folks
just smashed up the concrete and planted flowers and trees
because they were like, you know what would be better
than another building is if this was a park, we
can just do that. And the rules of the park
are be respectful and clean most of the time. In practice,
it gets a little trashed during the week and then
every Sunday volunteers come to the park and clean it up.
(03:58):
In garden. Police tend to only come into Asarchia in
large numbers because when they do they're often met with
molotovs and rocks. People try to solve problems through self organizing.
While I was there, I went to the weirdest anarchist
demonstration I've ever been to, which was the most like
the anarchists are in Charge demonstration. Yeah, it was a
(04:20):
reclaim the streets demonstration. Normally, a reclaim the streets demonstration
is when you reclaim the streets from like government and
capitalism by having a big parade. This time it was
a demonstration led by anarchists of all ages to reclaim
the streets as public space to be shared by all.
Because there's a problem with some of the younger punks
in the neighborhood were harassing older people, and so the
(04:41):
anarchists through it, like leave the old folks alone, new assholes. Yeah,
it was beautiful and it was just and the way
they did that wasn't They showed up and like we're
going to fuck up any of the young punks. No,
they just like showed up with like food and shit,
and they were like, look, the streets belong to all
of us. We are all part of this neighborhood. We
all live here together, like.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
A real community, real mutual aid.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Controversially from a US perspective where we
have the war on drugs, they also drove out the
heroin dealers, who are seen as a scourge and yeah,
and it is argued that currently the dealers are coming
back with police assistants, and I don't know the actual
mechanism of that. As an article in The Daily Beast
(05:23):
put it, the freedom and ease of life in Exarchia
is preserved by the constant and immediate will to set
shit on fire, throw tear gas canisters back at the police,
maintain esthetic control of the neighborhood, and use petrol bombs
to remind everyone. The place is not for sale. It
has been under anarchist control for about half a century,
as far back as far as I can piece together. Literally,
(05:45):
it's coming up on its fiftieth anniversary. Because in order
to talk about stray dogs, we're going to talk about
Greek military junta.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You'll love context.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I do. I love it so much because from nineteen
sixty seven to nineteen seventy four, Greece was ruled by
what's called the Greek Kunta, or more poetically, the regime
of the Colonels. Just a right wing military dictatorship. Yeah,
it probably goes back even further. It goes back to
the Civil War nineteen forty four, when Greece was liberated
(06:18):
from the Axis Powers. Was a civil war between the
communists and the government's and exile. The communists lost. The
right and the left had been really polarized in Greece
ever since, maybe since before then, but that's as far
back as I traced it. In nineteen sixty seven, the
right wing staged a coup. In nineteen sixty eight, a
centrist guy tried to assassinate the military leader, but he
(06:39):
sadly failed. There were large demonstrations, but nothing that really
shook the dictatorship to the core until nineteen seventy three.
Nineteen seventy three, a fuck ton of people were like,
are you just serious? Are you serious? We have a dictatorship?
Fuck this an entire battleship. The H and S Velos mutinied.
Literally the commander was part of the mutiny. Know that
(07:00):
I could still kind as a mutiny, but I guess
if the entire ship mutinies against the higher naval thing right,
they refused to return to Greece. Meanwhile, the students are
fighting against conscription. In nineteen seventy three, students barricaded themselves
into the University of Athens. This is in February, the
first one of these, and the cops were brutal, they
(07:20):
tortured people, they did all that stuff. This didn't stop
the students overall. It probably stopped individual students because of
the death and the torture. In November, students at the
Athens Polytechnic, a university in Exarchia, they went on strike
and their motto was bred education and liberty. Forty years later,
I was inside the Polytechnic while students were preparing for
(07:42):
another demonstration, and I saw one of my favorite pieces
of graffiti ever, which translates to anarchy and stale bread,
with the argument like subtextas I could live off of
only anarchy and stale bread.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I do love that.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, I'd also love bread. Education at liberty, I know,
I know.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
In nineteen seventy three, the students took over the university,
and the two big political groups in the university, the
two leftist groups, including the Soviet Aligne Marxists, were like, no, no,
we don't endorse this because they're trying to keep their
heads down because the whole point of the military junta
was to like crush communism, and so the Marxists are like,
oh fuck, oh fuck, and the rest of the students
were like, all right, Soviet stands, stay the fuck out
(08:27):
of our way. And so they barricaded the place and
they held the cops off for a night and the
second day and this is some shit out of a movie,
I fucking swear is now what's called celebration day. Thousands
of people showed up to support them, and it I
believe this is like basically like when the protests really
got large against this dictatorship, a radio tower inside the
(08:50):
occupied university that they cobbled together like literally out of
like the thing I read was translated was like out
of pieces from the lab, like the science lab. They
just fucking put together radio tower and they started spitting
out demands for freedom, and for the first time, molotods
started showing up at protests in Athens, and the junta
freaked out. They declared martial law, which they had like
(09:11):
kind of I think walked back a little bit because
they'd been around for a little bit. They drove a
tank through the gates of the university. Twenty four people
were killed. And this is the part of this is
like the last words heard from the occupied radio station
before it went dead were hail freedom, spoken in an
adolescent voice.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
And I like, I like that. I mean, I don't
like that.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
It's powerful but very cinematic.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah, totally. And that's like, I mean, that's one of
the things I keep running across with history is like, oh,
we actually all live these very cinematic lives. It's just
a matter of understanding what's happening and framing things. And anyway,
the existing junta was falling in fast. There was another
right wing counter coup, that is to say, another right
(09:59):
wing coup top all the existing right wing coup. They
started cracking down even harder on their own people. This
fells apart. In nineteen seventy four, there were free elections
in Greece once more. A referendum to install the monarchy
failed and Greece became a republic. And the students were
fucking heroes. They had destroyed a dictatorship, I mean, alongside
a ton of other people. So for almost forty years
(10:22):
there was a law that said cops weren't allowed to
enter universities because people were like, oh, I don't know,
maybe giving students defensible spaces as good for democracy because
it was destroyed dictatorship. This was the nineteen eighty two
academic sanctuary law. In twenty nineteen, a right wing government
scrapped that law.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, but exarchia centered around not centered whatever the polytechnic
is in Exarchia, and this became like kind of how
this neighborhood became under anarchist control. Yeah, And in the
nineteen eighties, tens of thousands of anarchists we're living in
the neighborhood, drawn from around the country, and anti state,
anti capitalist politics have been seen as a legitimate force
(11:07):
in Greek society for a long time. There's also a
lot of stray dogs there, not just I was.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Like, when are we getting back, We're back to the dogs.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Dogs, there'd be dogs, and I told this would be
a happy dog episode.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It is. There's going to be more. There's still more
in between every big stories of its stories, the Russian
Nestine Dolls of the podcast world. So there's a lot
of stray dogs in Athens. Greece tries to vaccinate, sterilize,
and track the stray dogs. They don't they don't euthanize,
and they haven't had the success of the Netherlands so far,
(11:43):
but they do actually have done a lot of work
in this direction. Cool, and it's going to be a
story about the dogs, but now we're going to talk
about the riots that made those dogs famous.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
So you tease me by saying the word dog a
couple times, and now we're okay.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Talking about a guy again. Human. Yeah, there's molotovs. I
was like, almost as good as a dog. It's like, okay,
it's like yeah, but there's like there's a big gap
right between molotovs and dogs, but there's not a lot
of stuff between them. You know, there's like people and
they're okay, and then there's molotoss are good, and then
(12:19):
there's like lots of dead air, and then there's dogs
at the top of everything in the hierarchy of trying
to get.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Sophie's all right, just get on with it.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
There's this fifteen year old kid who likes hanging out
in the streets of Xarkia named Alexandro's Grigoropolos. And on
December sixth, two thousand and eight, Alexandros was hanging out
in the streets with his friends when they got into
a verbalttercation with the cops. The cops actually got orders
from higher up to leave it alone, and the cops
were like, now, fuck that, they parked, They came over,
they started yelling at the kids. The kids didn't back down,
(12:52):
and the cops murdered Alexandros. They murdered a fifteen year old.
They claimed that their shot was a ricochet. The autopsy
disagree it. Yeah, shocker there really, yeah, really total news
to everyone. Within an hour, the riots started. Within two days,
there were twenty eight cities across Greece that were on fire.
(13:16):
Basically Athens was burning, Malthous were everywhere. The police station
Outpost Nicksarkia was firebombed by a crowd of one hundred people.
Students went on strike everywhere. Labor unions went on strike.
Air traffic controllers shut down dozens of flights because they
went on strike. And it was about Alexandro's but it
was about more than that. It was about the failing economy.
Two thousand and eight, as everyone will recall, was a
(13:37):
really great time for everyone economically. It was about increasing
financial inequality, and it was about authoritarian control of the state.
It was about people's demands to live lives of self determination.
So a private company that kept records of individual debt
was burned. Their records were burned. Protesters shot out the
(13:57):
tires of a police bus with AK forty seven. By
the end of this even some cops went on strike
and protested against this. Is this like actually surprised me.
The cops went on strike and protested against the cops.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, that's so dope.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
They intended to quote totally, intending to quote state categorically
that social problems are not solved by repressive measures. Oh
do you tell cop, Yeah, there is a line at
which some cops will stop wanting to do that.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Apparently this might not.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Be dogs, but I've enjoying myself a little bit more
and I thought it would be all right.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
See see, the riots lasted in full fervor for three weeks.
They lingered longer after that. There's like famous photos or
just like search like grease Christmas tree fire, and there's
like just a massive Christmas tree that they set on fire.
It's very dramatic. The police response was brutal. Isolated protesters
were beaten to an inch of their lives. A friend
of mine was actually curb stomped by police and Athens.
(15:03):
I think it was during this, but it might have
been during some of the protests a little bit later
than that. I talked to a Greek friend about this time,
and his perspective was that in the minds of the
average Greek person, the anarchists were about as legitimate of
a force within society as the police. Like some people
supported the anarchists, some people supported the police, and the
rest were like, well, both sides have a point, and
(15:24):
that is not a situation that I have ever experienced
anywhere else. A Greek woman, quoted by The Daily Beast
put it quote the day we don't tear things down
because the government murdered a child is the day we
are no longer human? And I don't know. I think
about how often people have to do that all over
(15:46):
the world, you know, in these clouds of tear gas.
Amongst the rock throwing, molotov throwing anarchists who were supported
by a surprising percentage of the Greek population, a hero emerged,
a hero named Canelos, the first modern riot dog.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Hell yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
And because every story is really complicated, it might have
been to as Heyday was before this. There's lots of
conflicting reports about exactly when he first showed up. But
this is the story we're going with.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
But first, it's time four and ad break.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Oh okay, what's another thing you like? Okay for your dog?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
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dogs and you are a human, you most definitely have
come across or purchased a little fluffy toy called a
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(16:40):
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The Jumba Lamb trop also comes as Jumbo Unicorn. Lamb
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(17:03):
jumble lamb Chop. Sometimes it's Jumbo black bear, sometimes it's
Jumbo tiger. Sometimes we often do the unicor becaus they're very,
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highly recommend the Jumbo Lamb Chop franchise. I guess hell
yeah toys, right Anderson.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
She concurs, And here's some other ads. And we are back.
In all the pictures of all the black Cloud protesters
with rocks and molotovs, they had a friend, a medium
sized yellow dog of indeterminable breed. It's always a mutt, baby,
(17:42):
always a mutt. There he was barking at cops. There
he was posing with the anarchists. Canelos. Canelos was a mutt,
of course, he was a mutt. No offense to dogs
that had the misfortune of being pure bread. It's not
their fault. But of course the first ride dog is
a mutt.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
His medium size and yellow and his name his name
means cinnamon.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Oh cool.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
And he was on the front lines of every protest
for years. One time he tripped cops as they ran
down the steps of Syntagma Square, just like the main Yeah,
let's go. Yeah. He was legendary. He was in papers
across the world. He was inspiring and an icon. He
was also a way that journalists used to like flatten
(18:24):
the struggle right, because they'd be like, I don't know,
Greeks are rioting. Here's a dog that is not his fault.
It's not fault that he was also adorable, I know,
I know. Like every legend, it's hard to peace out
what's true and what's not. There are three famed and
named riot dogs from Greece from the twenty eight or
(18:45):
twenty twelve and possibly earlier than that, and they all
look really similar. Sometimes people claim they are related, Sometimes
people claim they are the same dog. Sometimes the heroic
deeds of one are conflated with the deeds of another.
I'm certain I will get some stuff wrong here across
and every source I could they all disagree and they're
all anecdotal. It's possible that Canelos actually died in two
(19:07):
thousand and eight before these particular protests, and it was
one of his other yellow dogs that was these ones.
But all these dogs were loved, and all these dogs
fought hard, and we're going to talk about how they fought.
Canelos he ruled. He gave people hope, and he basically
was like, hey, the street dogs are street dogs are
with you. As he aged, he started to get arthritis,
(19:28):
and student protesters got him a wheelchair for his back
legs and then helped him along for more marches. There's
photos of him like being helped along on these marches,
and he's just happy and old. He retired and lived
inside the Polytechnic, the university that brought down the fucking dictatorship.
At one point, the dog catcher was called on him
and the students were vaulted until he was freed good
(19:50):
and he lived among the students until his death at
roughly seventeen years old. Next to Rise, Yeah, next to
Rise in fame Leucanicos, who is sometimes said to be
Canelos's kid. That might be true, I don't know, but
street dogs are often sterilized in Greece, and I think
Lucanicos at least was sterilized based on it did a
(20:12):
lot of weird research. I was like reading the pieces
written by the people who handle the stray dogs in Greece,
as I was trying to figureut which dogs are which
Lucanicos is the next generation famed riot dog and since
this is Greece, the next generation of riots is less
than three years later.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
In twenty ten, the Greek economy was fucked, so it's
leaders were like, hey, what if we got the International
Monetary Fund to bail us out in exchange agree to
all kinds of austerity measures that entirely fuck over everyone
living in the country. And the other leaders they all
nodded their heads and were like, this is indeed a
wise course of action, and not only will it be good,
but people will accept it all right. Shockingly, they were wrong. Yeah,
(20:55):
the Greek population was like, actually, we like having a
social safety net and a society that believes in taking
care of one another instead of all pretending like we
want to be America but poor and fuck each other
over all the time, people saw no reason why they
had to pay for unpopular and bad decisions made by
their leaders, and they had no interest in going along
with these austerity measures. So you've got what's called the
anti Asterity movement, and it was riots and general strikes
(21:19):
starting in a militant fashion. In June twenty eleven, when
the Greek Parliament voted to agree to the austerity stuff.
The protests started out kind of peaceful. Cops were soon like,
fuck you get the fucking line, We're going to hit
you and poison you and fuck you up. So people
were like, I'm doing a lot of paraphrasing here. These
are not direct quotes. People were like, wow, I don't
want to get in line. And also, it turns out
(21:39):
you can make them all tough cocktail pretty easily. All
you got to do is take a bottle and then
and where there are clouds of tear gas, where there
are armies of RoboCop right police marching in uniform is
a show that I wrote this while I was like
kind of excited and just like reading about this with
my dog in my lap. Where there are rock throwing anarchists,
(22:01):
there are riot dogs. Where there are protesters to be
protected and cheered up, there's leucanicos barking at cops. His
name means sausage. I like wonutiful. I know, okay. According
to a Greek person's comment quote that I just found
on a random article, because this is the only piece
that I found of anything anecdotal about this part of
(22:23):
it quote. Initially, Leucanicos would go to the demos with
the left wing student group EAAK, and it was only
later that he changed his political preferences and went to
demos with the anarchists. On another note, I am under
the impression that dogs are not affected by tear gas,
though one would expect them to be. I could not
justify this claim scientifically, but only from experience. Neither Leucanicos,
(22:45):
nor Canelos, nor any of the other dogs that joined
riots in Greece ever show any kind of effect from
the tons of tear gas that the cops constantly threw
at us. So I looked it up. It turns out
you can justify this claim scientifically. Most sites are like Oh,
dogs have more sensitive senses of smell, so they're affected more.
(23:05):
But this is not based on experience or study. The
opposite is true. You want to guess what group has
done the most research about tear gas and dogs without
reading ahead.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, I'm looking at the ceiling. Probably the people that
use the tear gas.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, yep, the bad guy team, the CANA and police unit. Yeah,
they want to be able to work in cs gas
tear gas environments, so they test.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
So you're telling me they tested tear gas on dogs
to see how it would affect them and didn't think about,
you know, the negative impacts of that.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Is that what you're telling me?
Speaker 1 (23:46):
That is what I'm telling you, fucking.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Cops acap geez christ.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah, But both the anecdotal experience of protesters and the
scientific study of putting dogs into tear gas chambers reveals
that dogs are not particularly affected by tear gas, not
to the same degree that humans are, because dogs are better. Yes,
that's the big part of it. Dogs have tear ducks
(24:12):
that are like ten times the size of human tear
ducks because they they have ten times as many emotions
and not just in proportion to their body. Are the
tear ducks bigger, but like literally objectively size, right, So
they flush tear gas way the fuck faster, or lachrymatory
agents way the fuck faster, including pepper spray. They've also
got what's called a nictating nictating membrane or a third eyelid.
(24:36):
That that's what most people call it because it's easier
to spell and pronounce that hangs out on the inside
corner of their eye. It's very effective at protecting their
eyes and spreading tears across their eyes. They also don't
have sweat glands, so they don't absorb the chemicals and
many in as many places, there are long term health effects.
You should not intentionally expose your dog to tear gas.
Looking at you canine units. You should just let all
(24:59):
your dogs tire yep, Lucanicos, and then you should yourself retire. Actually,
Lucanicos won even more hearts around the world than his
maybe dad did. In twenty eleven, he was nominated for times.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I remember that the only time.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Bro was like fuck, yeah, yeah, totally rooting for you.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
And it's funny because they had already changed it from
Man of the Year to Person of the Year, you know,
and so like I just like the yeah. And then
one time when cops went on strike, and this might
have been the two thousand and nine time, and it
might have been a twenty eleven time, and I do
not know, but it was presented as Lucanicos doing it,
so it might have been. There were cops on both
sides of the protests and Lucanicos didn't know what to do.
(25:45):
But then the non striking cops started beating up the
striking cops and he sided with the cops who were
on strike.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Of course he did, because he's a good boy.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yeah, there was another dog named the Doris, or maybe
they're the same dog. The people who tracks stray dogs
in Athens say it's the same dogs. Oh, I don't know.
I think it means like Theodore.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
I think it's just age.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah there was a trend, no I I yeah, no,
there's there's shockingly like when we talk to some of
the when we talk about some of the other South
American riot dogs in a little bit very different naming conventions.
So Theodorus might have been Lucanicos might not have been
all the whatever, they're all great because also these are
(26:36):
just the name dogs. There's like fuck tons of dogs
doing all this stuff, and they're just like always there
and they're always helping people out. And Lucanicos was the
people's dog for much of his life. He had a
collar with his vaccination status that was given to him
by the stray dog people, and he was welcome at
(26:56):
every squat and organizing center in the city. But he
didn't stay put. He would hoop around from one place
to another. He basically couchsurf across the movement. And in
twenty twelve, after a year on the front lines of
this particular protest, possibly longer depending on whatever whatever, in
twenty twelve he was adopted more formally by a guy
and given a loving home. He had food, water, tick collars,
(27:18):
veterinary care, and safety, and he lived another two years
and he died peacefully in his sleep in twenty fourteen.
He was buried in the shade of a tree on
a hill in the center of Athens, and he died
at about ten years of age. And the reason he
died young is probably the veterinary. Report says that it
was in part due to all the tear gass he'd
ingested over the years. There's a bunch of monuments and
(27:41):
murals in his honor. He's a character in the twenty
twenty video game Tonight We Riot Cool. Yeah, So I
started off this episode as kind of a cute like
look its dogs being cool, but honestly, like the more
I was like writing about it, reading about it and
all that. Like, Lucanicos is as much our comrade as anyone.
He worked tirelessly to keep people safe and keep people's
(28:03):
spirits lifted. And like everyone, he hated cops and he
sacrifices health to keep people safe. Long live Lucanicos.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Fuck yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Want to take a quick detour to the next country
over to Turkey. Turkey doesn't give us.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I got to talk about humans now.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
No, very little, maybe a little bit. I'm sorry. The
humans provide the context that all the dogs live in.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah yet no, no, fair enough.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Turkey doesn't give us any named personalities of riot dogs,
at least not that have made it to the Western media.
But it has a beautiful story, which is that there
the struggle goes both ways. The dogs fight for the
people and the people fight for the dogs. Because in
two thousand and four, Turkey passed a law against euthanizing strays,
joining the parts of the world that actually took this
problem seriously. I'm tried and failing to keep my opinion
(28:57):
out of this issue. The government keeps trying to go
back to euthanasia, and people keep saying like, no, fuck you,
we are not going back to this. And it was
this oh fuck no attitude that got the two thousand
and four law passed in the first place, and whenever
municipalities do it anyway, people get real fucking upset at them.
But there's unlike Germany and the Netherlands, there's a ton
(29:19):
of stray dogs in Turkey. They're generally not seen as
a problem. A recent survey says that about a third
of the population sees them as a threat. While there's
a bunch of organizations that sterilize and release strays, they
put ear tags on them to mark them. There aren't
enough of these programs yet, and pets can still be
bought in stores, so a lot of people buy them
and then abandon them. But on the other hand, there's
(29:40):
a ton of cafes and such that care for the animals,
and there's a bit of an attitude. There's more of
an attitude of like, these are our dogs than is
commonly found in more western countries. So people fight for
the dogs. And then in twenty thirteen, like as they should. Yeah, no, totally, yeah, yeah, yeah,
all of the stuff of like oh we took care
of these dogs who took care of us on the streets,
(30:02):
like they make me really happy. So in twenty thirteen
you've got the Gezi Park protests. There's a park in
Istanbul called Toxin Gezi Park, and in twenty thirteen the
government was like, what if this was a shopping mall
instead of a park, And the people of Vistabul were like,
what if the fuck it was not? So it started
(30:27):
with people occupying the park to prevent development. For two
weeks they occupied the place, and then it spread all
over Turkey. Like all major movements, it was about a
lot of things. It was about the park, it was
about public space. It was about free speech and assembly,
about having spaces not be just about places you buy
and sell shit. It was also about fuck ertigan and authoritarianism.
(30:52):
It was also about environmentalism. And then I really like
this part. The government called them all looters. So the
protesters rather than be like, we're not looters, we're the
good protesters unlike the bad protesters. Just all of the
protesters were like, yeah, we're looters. That's the name, that's
that's the word for us. The word is louter cool. Eventually,
(31:12):
the moment passed. Urdigan is still in power, but Guzie
Park is still there. It did not become a mall.
And the dogs who lived in the park were part
of the protest, and all the dogs who were around
the surrounding area, and they were showing up as riot dogs,
and they were, you know, defending people and fighting back
against the police. And there were also pets would come
out and they'd have signs around their necks and stuff,
(31:35):
and they would have like signs that say things like
close the park and I'll shit in the mall. Cops
were particularly brutal to the dogs in these protests, leaving
us with photos of people washing pepper spray out of
some good boy's eyes. And the news wants you to
believe that these dogs were there because of the commotion,
that they weren't there to defend the park, but this
(31:55):
was their home. Militarized police came in and the dogs
joined people fighting back against police coming into their home.
I think all of them are good pups.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah. I mean, if there's one thing dogs are gonna do,
it's gonna protect their territory.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yeah. Yeah, and the people who care for them.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
And finally, we're gonna talk about the most famous riot
dog of the mall, who has the coolest name. But first,
but first, when I what is my dog like? When
I'm driving my dog around in my giant truck, I
have a little like folding dog crate that he doesn't
stay in, but the entire backseat I put the crate
(32:35):
in so he has a place to lie down and
feel safe. And then also while he's laying down, it's
like safer if I get into an accident or whatever.
I really like my travel crate. I have no idea
the brand.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
I have one as well in my car.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah, Anderson is like a soft thing. She can go
in there if she wants to. She doesn't have to.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
If I'm on the freeway, I always zip it up.
It's very safe. It's buckled in. M nice, drive safely
with your own Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
And then these other ads, and we're back and we're
going to talk about El Negro Matapolcos fuck yeah, the
Black cop killer, sometimes just El Negro the Black, which
means that I get to talk about the Argentinians student Uprising,
(33:23):
as is my way of getting everyone to hear about
all these protest movements. Context context, the Argentinian student uprising
of twenty eleven to twenty thirteen, sometimes called the Chilean
Winter because most of it happened in the first winter.
And I always talk about these huge protest movements and
uprisings from fifty one hundred, two hundred years ago, but
it's worth remembering these happen all the time. I'm sure
(33:44):
another one is coming. You can just wait or not wait,
whatever float your boat. In Chile, most education is privatized,
and it was getting more so. Tuition was going up.
The rich, we're getting good educations. The poor, we're not
getting good educations. People didn't like this. It turns out
people don't like when that happens. The uprising was also
(34:05):
about economic inequality, lack of opportunities for people to lead
dignified lives, and the protests led to hundreds of injured protesters,
hundreds of injured police officers, and one dead student, and
once again in the tear gas, a hero arrived, a
medium sized black mutt, always a mutt with floppy ears
and a red bandana and an unwavering commitments of justice. Yeah,
(34:29):
and I actually I have more details about him than
any of the others.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Let's go.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Mattapacos wasn't actually a stray dog, not really sort of
half stray. He was a stray who mostly stayed with
a woman named Maria compos who took him in and
kept a bed for him and fed him, but let
him come and go whenever he wanted. And she basically like,
one day fed this stray and he was like, yeah,
I like it here, I'll stay here. At first, she
(34:55):
gave him a cape that he wore, but after he
came home soaked by a police water cannon, she switched
to a bandana, and sometimes it was red and sometimes
it was blue. She'd change it up on different days
whenever a protest would pop off. There's like, there's a
video of her talking about this. Whenever a protest would
pop off, he'd scratch at the door, desperate to go
(35:17):
out and get into the fray. So Maria would bless him,
drawing a cross on his head with her thumb to
protect him from evil in danger. Then open the door
and he'd go running downtown to the protests. I think
she lived near downtown, but sometimes he took the bus
by himself. I think I've seen video footage of him
on a bus and he's not with anyone.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
That's actually, uh, there's several dogs that have done that.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, cool, it's so cute. Yeah. One day Maria was
like randomly downtown and saw her own dog leading a
march of students on the next street over or whatever.
Students referred to him as a reincarnated student. And a
lot of mythologizing has been done around Motapacos. And it's
(36:02):
beautiful because it's less as compared to poor Lucanicos, where
it got flattened in the media and other countries. This
this feels like it was like mythbuilding by movements. And
also I mean whatever, it's all all these things. Okay,
So a lot of dogs would march with the students,
they would attack police, they would defend students. In a
(36:24):
short documentary about Motopacos, the filmmaker asks some students, have
you ever seen a dog defend the police? The students reply, no,
not even those who walk with them.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Ha ha.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
And in a material sense, the dogs, often dozens at
a time, offer these protests a lot of things. They're
unafraid of chemical weapons and fire hoses. They would like
literally like Rentro would totally do this. They basically play
with the fire hose water. You know. They're like, oh, yeah,
I'm gonna get that water, you know. And yeah, they
(36:57):
form a physical buffer in front of protest sometimes, so
there's footage of water hose tanks on the tanks, like
not tanks of water, but you know, big things on
wheels whatever. Yeah, unable to advance because they can't effectively
clear the dogs off the street. They also serve as icons,
and I mean that in the religious sense when the
while the church during these protests was up there with
(37:18):
the state and the police is one of the major
repressive forces that people are fighting against. Yeah, he was
essentially canonized in a folk Catholic way, right, you have people,
you know, doing the blessings and all that stuff, and
there's images of him with a halo, and he just
became a living symbol of revolt. Him and the other
dogs street dogs defending the streets from those who tried
to deny it. Since street dogs they're defending the streets
(37:39):
from those who try to like deny the streets to
the people, they become this like clear example of downtrodden
fighting back and just being like, no, we've got this,
We're doing this together. And he was not so soon.
Matapacos was not the only dog with a bandana tight
around its neck. Basically, everyone like started going around and
giving all the riot dogs bandanas, and it became the
(38:01):
symbol of it. There's a twenty thirteen documentary about him
called Matapaco that's on YouTube and as English subtitles. If
your Spanish is as bad as mine, and he's just
he's really fucking cool. He he survives all of this.
He is a dog, so he doesn't live as long
as people. El Negro Motapacos died peacefully on Saturday August
(38:24):
twenty sixth, twenty seventeen. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen
years old. I've also seen twelve, but most of the
time I see sixteen or seventeen.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
I'll never forgive whoever made that decision to make dogs
lives so short.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
That is fair. I it is an unforgivable thing that
has been done.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Whatever whoever decided that, fuck you.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah. Yeah, he was surrounded by his loved ones and
there are uncountable murals carrying him on. And as for
the protests itself, I don't think it's accurate to talk
about protests movements like winning and losing. The student movement
didn't win its demands, it laid the groundwork for another
uprising in twenty nineteen. But it's better to just see
(39:07):
history as this ebb and flow of energy and power,
a fight between liberation and repression. We win by being
on the side of liberation, of education, of workers' rights,
of dignity, of helping out the street dogs. And in
twenty nineteen, two years after his death, the black Cop
Killer became a symbol once more as the country sprung
(39:27):
into revolt. A black dog with a red bandana is
now the symbol of revolt for much of the world.
Statues of dog.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I was going to say, like, people probably don't even
realize that that this image is super popular. You probably
don't even realize you've seen it. But it's it's everywhere. Yeah,
and it's dope. Yeah, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
I really like people will go up to statues of dogs,
like any random statue of a dog in a public place,
entire red bandana around its neck. Yeah, and red bandanas
we've talked about before on the show as a symbol
of going back at least as far as the Battle
of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, which you can listen
to our episode from last year about when black and
(40:09):
white miners tied red bandanas around their necks and went
to a literal war against the coal companies that were
murdering them. And this might be and might not be
the origin of the term redneck. And so I like
this continuation of the red bandana as a symbol in
the twenty nineteen and twenty twenty protests. He've got two
more named riot dogs that come up Pepe Matapacos and Elvakita,
(40:33):
which means the little cow. El Waqita won the twenty
nineteen Character of the Year award in his city of Antofagasta.
I suspect it was a person of the year until Elakita.
You know that's so cool. Yeah, And protesters had his
(40:53):
back as well. A little cow. One time he got
lost in a neighborhood and he didn't know he didn't
know this particular neighborhoo after a particularly tough fight with
the police, so protesters used Facebook to coordinate a rescue
of him, and then someone walked him back to the
streets he did know, so that he could find his
way home and when cops he survives this when cops
shot him with a rubber bullet. Protesters get him, get
(41:15):
him to the vet, because we keep us safe includes animals.
And there's one more. There's one more. Yes, we're gonna
talk about another stire dog.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
This one.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
This one's a goat, but still an honorary dog. Biquette
the grind were.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Saying the greatest of all time, and then I was like,
I was like, oh.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
No, she means like a yeah, yeah, no, a literal goat.
Yeah yeah, no, totally when in doubt I am not
successfully using contemporary slang.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Is That's why I was like confused for a second.
I was like, like, don't think that we're getting into
Lebron James today.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
So yeah, who I'm aware of as a player of basketball,
Hell yeah you are, probably because of you. So yep.
Biquett the grindcore goat. Biquett was a goat who loved grindcore,
thus the grindcore goat. Grindcore is this really extreme punk
(42:20):
metal genre. It goes really fast, the songs are like
really short, and people scream about stuff. The anarchist band
Napalm Death is probably the most famous band that played grindcore.
They're in the Guinness Book World Records for the shortest
song ever recorded. You Suffer is one point three to
one six seconds long, so not very long songs. Biquett
(42:41):
lived on a punk rock farm. Have you ever seen
the video the photos of this m m oh, you
should look up Biquett b I q U E T
t E. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
This fucking goat is so metal.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah. Biquett lived on everyone at home. If you're if
you're not out doing a thing, you should if you
haven't already seen his images. Biquette lived on a punk
rock farm. And I can't pronounce French words, and I
try hard, less harder than other countries for some reason
in Mariok, France and this farm through shows, and she
hung out with every band that toured, and she was
(43:15):
always in the audience at every show, and pictures of
her go viral every now and then. And the name
Bequtt the goat translates to goat the goat because Biquett
means a young female goat. The punks at Mariok rescued
her from a slaughterhouse when she was five years old. Basically,
she'd been a milk goat. When she stopped producing enough,
she was going to get sent to the slaughter, but
(43:36):
then the punks were like, give her to us instead,
and she spent the next and last five years of
her life listening to punk sleeping in front of speakers,
trying to eat everyone's cigarette butts and drink everyone's half
empty beers, and basically living her best life. One of
the people on the farm named Flow said about her quote,
she was most connected to grind seen as the barn
floor where we throw the concerts. As wooden, I think
(44:00):
think that she felt the vibrations in her hoofs the
majority of the time. She even laid down next to
the speakers. She died young on December ninth, twenty thirteen.
A goat can live fifteen years easily, but she died
at ten years old. However, she got to live five
years as the punk rock goat instead of dying at five,
(44:20):
which is what her actual fate would have been if
the punks hadn't intervened. And there are many, many more,
very good dogs of many different species. And I'm sure
I'll return to this topic in the future, but for now,
go hug a dog, including cat dogs and goat dogs
and parrot dogs, don't hug bears or wolves. They're not dogs.
(44:42):
They're great too, but they don't need your hugs unless
you work at a wildlife sanctuary or some shit. That's
what I got. So I got about good dogs. I
love this.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
I wasn't sure what to do this week, and then
I was like, no, I'm doing dogs. Yeah, dog time.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
It's good doggo time, which is you know, every day
at my house. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Do you have
anything you'd like to plug? Oh?
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, I'm working on a tabletop roleplaying game called p
Number City that you can back on Kickstarter if it
is currently June twenty twenty three. If it is before
June twenty twenty three, you can look for it on
Kickstarter and sign up for notifications. If it is after
June twenty twenty three, you can just buy it like
a regular person, and then you can play a tabletop
role playing game that I should have a little thing
(45:37):
about in front of me, but I don't. But if
you want to be an occultist who talks to the
dead at seances while your friend who ran away from
the army but kept an exoskeleton is hanging out while
someone else who's an orphan who eats fungus to commune
with rats and send swarms of rats against the priests
who sacrifice gods. All that stuff. Then you might like
(46:02):
this game and you can play it. What do you got?
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Do you like listening to cool Zone Media podcasts?
Speaker 1 (46:09):
I do?
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Do you ever listen to cool Zone Media podcasts? And go?
Oh man?
Speaker 3 (46:15):
That would have been so much better if there wasn't
an AD there.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
I don't know if I'm contractually allowed to say yes.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
Well, I would like to let our listeners know that
we are launching or have launched, depending when you listen
to this Cooler Zone Media in ad free listening experience
and exclusive access to never before seeing bonus content that
is on Apple podcasts.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Well, podcasts are on cool Cooler Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
That would be our entire back catalog of cool Zoned
Media shows and all of our current shows. So you'll
get access to add free access to a kol Zoo
Media shows like cool People do the Cool Stuff. So
you can find Cooler Zone Media in your Apple podcast
app today and subscribe for instant accessless.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
And you can say I'm in when you do it,
and then everyone will think you're probably less cool than
they did before you said it.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Yeah, we Actually there's some pretty cool I really like
the art that is after this that it's it's our ship,
but cooler I haven't seen it, like like literally icy,
like cold. When I was telling when I was telling
our internal team that we were doing this, and you know,
being like, yeah, we're doing this, people get more money.
(47:38):
Hey uh, I just like had the graphic up and
none of them knew what it was, and I was like,
this is great, right, Like what the fuck are you
talking about?
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Visual puns that not they're not the right audience for it.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Yeah, I we're an audio medium. They don't get they
don't get the visual stuff it happens.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
But you can get that visual as well as mostly audio.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
And speaking of visuals, if you would like to see
photos of my dog, you can follow me on the interwebs.
I'm at Why Underscore, Sophie Underscore, Why on Twitter where
I post stuff of Anderson. But it basically my entire
Instagram is just Anderson content daily and that is at
Sophie Underscore, Ray Underscore of Underscore Sunshine. There's probably other
(48:24):
Underscores in there. I'm not good at saying it out loud,
but Yeah, there's that, and men, Magpie, you post lots
of photos of your dog on your Instagram.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Right, that's true. I'm at Margot Kiljoy on Instagram, at
Magpie Killjoy on Twitter, and we'll probably eventually actually start
looking at blue sky. At the moment I don't.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
It probably will praps like a dog.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Bye everyone.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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