Low life
Animal crackers
Jeffrey Bernard
I've just been listening to another of those nutty, veterinary psychiatrists talking on the radio and this particular one was on about how he'd tried to cure dogs of biting postmen. He advocated postmen giving the horrid things titbits and morsels to begin with and said that they'd eventually be on patting and stroking terms. Have you ever heard such nonsense? Take my word for it, if you ever meet a dog that you know is going to bite you, take a running kick at it as if it was sitting on the penalty spot. Alsatians and Dobermanns, by the way, you're entitled to kick nigh unto death. But anyway, what on earth is a postman expected to do, carry a sack of bones and sweets on his shoulders as well as the mail? Now, it's a load of rubbish and if it doesn't work with humans why should it work with dogs? It doesn't matter how many gins-and-tonic and lunches you buy women, they stiII snap at you and my suspicion that the vet in question probably received a hard cash grant from the government to conduct his futile researches makes the whole business even more irritating. My own enquiries into the nature of beasts have all been independently financed and cases of kamikaze bitches financing their own taming have been extremely rare.
But that is beside the point I am straying from. The vet on the radio did say one thing I thought smacked of honesty. He said he hadn't had much success in curing nervous and withdrawn cats and as the part owner of two neurotic cats I can well believe it. Daisy and Felix have beer4 with me for 18 months now and I am still no nearer curing them than I was when they first lay down on my sofa. I gather from my wife that they both had pretty unhappy kittenhoods having kicked off with an incestuous affair — they are brother and sister — before being spayed and neutered for their pains and I am sure they weren't exactly helped by being born into an 'artistic' Chelsea family where, as we all know, anything goes. I think that in Daisy's case she hasn't been helped by preferring to lie on old sheets of the Guardian Women's pages to the rugs I've provided for her. I am positive she reads them because she hasn't smiled once since The Times folded. Felix, on the other hand, is a straightforward case of that tiresome old thing — the male menopause. Sometimes, when he's staring into the fire he looks just like Peter •Barkworth.
Actually, I'm surrounded by wretched case histories. In a paddock next to my garden there lives a bull called Ferdinand. I used to look at him with something akin to envy when he first arrived and, as I fed him the lusher grass from my side of the fence, I used to ask him what was it like to be nearly half a ton of teetotal sexuality. Then one day I heard his tale of woe. The poor brute is a teaser which explains his passive friendliness. He has been vasectomised and he is just there to test the cows before he is pulled off to make way for the rosette-covered professional stud. I've changed his name to Parkinson now and he bears up well to everything considering. His only outward and audible symptom of his lot is a bellow of anguish that breaks both our hearts, that he lets out when the cows go back and forth from the milking shed. I haven't heard anything like it since I saw an editor walk past Bill Grundy in El Vino's one day. The other unbalanced animals we have on the premises are pheasants. My landed landlord breeds them in a compound a stone's throw from my oven. They get fed every day and being fed they get pretty tame. Last Sunday I was approached by one of them at a run, obviously practising to go solo, while I was picking redcurrants for the jelly-making to come. Never have I see" such a weary and resigned look on the face of a bird. There's little doubt that pheasants are masochists to a man. I am sure that some rural sage will be telling me any day now as the season approaches that pheasants enjoy being shot at just as foxes adore being hunted. What we animal psychiatrists enjoy in the course of our work is the transference stage. Sooner or later Daisy and Felix will come to regard me as their father and the sooner the better for them if they want me to remove their straitjackets.
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