DOGS OF THE WORLD

A little boy named Kit and his dachshund Willy are the narrators of this seriously flawed British import written in the style of a child’s illustrated school report about dogs.

Kit wears a 10-gallon hat and declares that he is “a cowboy from Montana in the good ol’ USA.” A short text is combined with clever spot illustrations of Kit and Willy introducing 13 different dog breeds with hand-lettered labels and speech balloons (complete with corrected spelling errors). Problematic text and negative racial stereotyping are present in the narration and illustrations for two breeds. In the description of Afghan hounds, the text states that because of the war, “everyone is too busy fighting to take their Afghans for walks, so they feel quite sorry for themselves.” The illustration shows a character resembling a cartoon-style Native American shooting at Kit (in a tank) with a bow and arrow. The pages on Pekingese dogs include a stereotypical cartoon of an emperor with a conical hat and long pigtail as well as a cook chasing a dog with a meat cleaver. The text asserts that “some people in China eat dogs” so “if you are a Chinese dog then maybe you should think about moving anywhere else.”

Think about buying something else.