Home life
Muzzled by red tape
Alice Thomas Ellis
Ihave been asking myself why govern- ment is so perverse — why it loves telling us not to smoke or drink or contract Aids or throw our sweetie papers out of the car window, and yet is so reluctant to make people register .their dogs. They say it would be too much trouble. What can they mean? Are not income tax forms too much trouble? And VAT forms, and forms for passports and insurance and benefits and grants and instruments of permission to change the use of your back yard, and the documents prepared by men with hard eyes who want to put up leisure complexes
over your few remaining shops, and the reams of petition with which the informed citizen responds. Are not these too much trouble?
I know doctors and farmers and builders who have no time to lance boils, shear sheep or lay bricks because they are too busy tunnelling their way through forms. Is this reluctance evidence of tender care for the dog-owner or a tacit acknowledgment that the ship of state would founder under one more scrap of paper? It has only recently dawned on me that savage dogs are kept not so much by law-abiding home owners to protect their legitimate property as by deep-dyed villains to discourage those of an enquiring turn of mind police, VAT men, customs officers, the NSPCC and possibly the RSPCA — from peering too closely into their affairs. If these malefactors could be prevailed upon to spend the long winter evenings filling in forms pertaining to their ownership of dogs, then they would surely have less time to murder, steal, rape, or peddle drugs.
Also, I must confess, I see no reason why we shouldn't all carry identity cards. Certainly I would probably lose mine as I have lost my passport, marriage lines and birth certificate, but that is no reason for dismissing the scheme. Some say it would be an intrusion on our ancient liberties, but have they not heard that the VAT man is entitled to walk into our home, our castle, the last bastion of individual freedom, and scour the place without so much as a by-your-leave? From cellar to attic he may go at his leisure without let or hindrance, and I daresay he only does it to the virtuous who have registered, while ignor- ing the rest who have not and who have a slavering rottweiler positioned at all the doors and windows and roaming the patio. I don't know why we make it so easy for the criminal: building great motorways to facilitate his getaway, anonymous housing estates where he can creep about unseen and unknown, and even making a Channel tunnel so that he can skip with ease to the Continent where his rottweiler (concealed in the boot) will doubtless catch rabies and bring it home to infect the poodles, pekes and harmless .mongrels who used to be man's best friend.
But I have strayed from the point. Sometimes I wish, not only that people had identity cards, but that they had their names blazoned on their foreheads in something glittery. After a few drinks they all look the same, and if everyone's yelling over the music you never hear their names in the first place, let alone remember them. On three occasions I have had a profound and delightful conversation with the same man; I count him as a close friend; I haven't the faintest idea what his name is and by now I know him much too well to ask. Damn the dogs. I just wish names would register. At least you can address a rottweiler as 'Boy' before it severs your jugular.
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