So it is no surprise that Ed Miliband shuns real dogs, and grins and bears comparisons with Gromit.
Instead, a politician who shuns the spotlight and famously quipped he prefers "dark, secret rooms" will occupy the centre-stage in Ypres and in Brussels the following day.
But it shuns cable programmes available at plain old Hulu.com, and still includes "limited" advertising (though only a fraction of what appears on regular TV).The wall will eventually crumble.
For example, even if Mohamed ElBaradei's bid to challenge the regime fizzles, the instant surge in enthusiasm for this former bureaucrat who shuns populist talk carried its own message.
The new airline shuns the crowded route between Delhi and Mumbai in favour of second-tier destinations such as Jaipur and Chandigarh.Mr Chandilya also belongs to the steady-as-she-goes club.
She shuns white walls for a digital smoke-and-flame motif, a backdrop that lends energy to the cavernous galleries and the artwork they contain.
Traditional left-wing policies such as land reform have now been supplemented under the state's chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, by a keen search for foreign investment, and support for privatisation ideas that the party shuns at a national level.Solid pragmatism in south Asia does little to excite the comrades in the wider world.
Indeed, the leadership shuns the word "reform", let alone "transition".
The union, in Mr Stern's words, is "exporting our capital to Africa".The flipside of this is that Mr Stern shuns the traditional approach of doing local deals, as big employers nowadays tend to operate on at least a national scale.
Yet while Saudi Arabia's dour Salafist version of Islam, Wahhabism, shuns political life and abhors democracy, the Salafists Nour Partyy in Egypt has played politics eagerly and effectively, capturing a quarter of the votes in last year's general elections.What links these groups is a belief that Islam has been weakened by centuries of accumulated intellectual baggage.
The Conservative opposition, itself divided, shuns the issue.
