Pongo & Perdita "Siblings"?

The long awaited release of 'Cruella' starring Academy Award Winner Emma Stone has been released May 28th, 2021. The movie has brought to life to a new origin for the puppy-killing villain. One that is both heart-warming and tragic. This is a story not for the light hearted and even less of a story for children. The rest of this article contains spoilers. Those who have not yet watched 'Cruella' should leave this article now.

The film shows the origins of Cruella's life, the story of a young girl named Estella. Estella always tried to live as her mother wanted her to, kind, good, quiet, and patient. Traits that did not suit Estella well as they w0uld never help her to move forward with her dreams of becoming fashion designer. She ended up creating her persona of Cruella, a fast past, rebellious alias, that allowed Estella freedom. A persona that would end up being causing more trouble than she could ever realize, especially when The Baroness's three Dalmatians kill Estella's mother.

At least the person Estella believed to be her mother. It is revealed that she is actually the only daughter of Baroness Van Hellman, thus the three Dalmatians in fact belong to Estella. At the end of the film, Horace notices that one of the dogs had put on some weight. This alludes to it being pregnant and in a mid credit scene, both Anita Darling and Roger Radcliffe, both whom are introduced in the film as her classmate and The Baroness's lawyer respectfully, receiving a Dalmatian puppy. Anita is gifted Perdita and Roger is gifted Pongo both from Cruella.

This has caused quite a stir as many question now if '101 Dalmatians' is a story of incest. Before touching on that topic, let us first examine the significance of Cruella gifting two of the puppies.

She was childhood friends with Anita and as a young adult working for The Baroness, Cruella came to Anita, a reporter now, for assistance in creating her new label. This gift of a new friend shows that Estella still lives inside Cruella if only a little. She wanted to show her appreciation as best she could and decided that there was no better way than the unconditional love of a puppy. Cruella had that love from her own dog, Buddy, a puppy she found in the trash as a child.

Giving Pongo to Roger however, was a completely different story. She felt responsible for Roger losing his job with The Baroness. Cruella knew that if she never learned of what The Baroness had done to her adoptive mother, that Estella would never have given a rebirth to Cruella. Pongo was Cruella's way of apologizing to Roger for in this more permanent persona, she could never and would never say 'I'm Sorry' to someone she thought an imbecile in person.

The gifts though of two puppies from the same litter that would one day become mates, is what has many people upset. In the animal kingdom, there is no such thing as incest. It is a combination of instinct, survival of the fittest, and scents from pheromones. Dogs often prefer to mate with their own breeds as well. When Perdita and Pongo would meet as adult dogs, they may have recognized their scents and fully grown, would have seen the potential in each other as mates.

This is not uncommon in the dog world, especially for pure breeds. Dalmatians have a high probability of becoming deaf, German Shepherds often end up blind, Beagles and dementia, Labrador Retrievers with joint paints, and these are just a few examples of what happens to pure bred dogs. Slowly breeders have become wiser in how to maintain the health of their future litters. Problem is that many of these problems are now engrained into the dog's DNA that it is a part of them in their evolutionary cycle.

This is something even in our own behavior has humans. Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert and from there believed it was beyond important to keep the royal bloodline pure and thus arranged marriages for many of her children, grandchildren, and other members of her family. This is best seen in the Romanov family. Queen Victoria carried the hemophiliac gene, though no one is quite sure where she inherited it from. This gene was passed down to her granddaughter Alexandra Feodorvna. A gene also carried by Nicholas II causing their son Alexei to be a hemophiliac.

The current queen, Elizabeth II married the now late Prince Phillip, both whom are direct descendants of Queen Victoria and thus both carried the gene that has continued to pass down to their descendants.

Earlier than that, Egyptian pharaohs often married their siblings, there is records of Roman marriages between brother and sister of the same parents. Even in the Judea-Christian bible there is incest as Abraham and Sarah who share the same father but not the same mother.

Even in today's society, one can still legally marry as close as their first cousin. With all the science we now know today as humans and how genetics work, how it is important to share all of our genes with many others so that the bad traits are one day diminished and the good traits survive the next state of evolution, dogs do not see the world that way. They have shorter life-spans (some even shorter due to pure breeding mistakes), and thus they search for a mate that they are not only attracted to, but who they feel is often the best to give the next generation survival. It is that way in the whole animal kingdom.

Should we appalled by 'The Lion King' since the only male adult lions we see in the film are Scar and Mufasa and thus making Nala and Simba either cousins or brother and sister? We must not fear what we do not understand, we must not judge animals for knowing what they want or need. Insteaed we should learn.