Walt Disney’s animated movie Lady and the Tramp (1955) is a telling, through dogs, of a classic human tale. The privileged woman falling for a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. The golden-haired uptown girl and the ethnically ambiguous guy from the streets.
Dogs can easily represent these types due to our notions of ‘purebred’ and pedigree. After millennia of domestication, we gave our pets family trees, and named them as breeds. They acquired an identity reflecting human projection, and symbolised our own increased focus on lineage and breeding. Lady is purebred, Tramp is a mutt.
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