[wafflemaker]

Interesting, where are you from? Where does this proverb come from?

I know this proverb as (translating from Polish): You're asking the boar if he's shitting in the forest.

[chuckadams]

It's an extremely common phrase in the US, along with "Is the Pope Catholic?" Sometimes the two phrases are humorously mixed together.

[alluro2]

I've never heard it mixed (not from US)...

"Is bear a Catholic?" doesn't seem very funny.

But a notion that everyone knows how Pope is regularly shitting in the woods absolutely is :)

[Jailbird]

We say "are bears Catholic?" when in more polite company and we can't get away with asking if the Pope shits in the woods :)

[smallmancontrov]

I don't know if it is exactly the same proverb -- it isn't about objecting to the bear (or boar) shitting in the woods, it is about our ability to infer that the bear shits in the woods even if we have never seen it happen. We know the bear shits, we know the bear lives in the woods, even people who have lived in the city their entire life and have never seen bear shit can infer that the bear shits in the woods.

In context, my intended meaning was that software enshittification works the same way: we don't have to see a particular private equity firm enshittify a particular piece of software to know that they do enshittify software, just as we do not have to see a bear shit in the woods to know that the bear does shit in the woods.