Dog Days
By CYRIL RAY ix thousand, nine hundred and sixteen dogs "'passed through the portals of Olympia on Friday and Saturday, showing off their points and their paces in Cruft's show. It takes far fewer than that to make the pavement in front of my house sometimes virtually impassable, and one single dog in the country can sometimes make sleep impossible for a whole villageful of humans. Yet Olympia was quiet, ckan and in- offensive to the nostrils. Of course, these were
pretty genteel animals—the kind of beasts for whom stall-holders at Olympia were displaying Amplex tablets for bad breath and chlorophyll shampoos. One wonders how dogs so deodorised can recognise each other : there were products on sale that could have borne the slogan, 'Even your best friend won't know you.'
There were sedative tablets on sale, too, which accounts, no doubt, for the relaxed air of these lordly brutes—an air of relaxation is as much admired, it seems, in the kennels as in the villas of suburbia. But, remembering the state of Islington's pavements, 1 could not help but wonder, at Olympia, how a couple of days of canine costiveness had been ensured. The best brandy?
Pavements notwithstanding, I can be as senti- mental as anybody over the dear little doggies —over the philosophical pointers, the sloppY spaniels, the Newfoundlands looking like peram- bulating hearth-rugs, the stately collies with their sly look, the Old English sheepdogs so blinded by the bangs of hair over their eyes that they cannot possibly see where they are going, and the bulldogs so bandy and asthmatic that they could not go anywhere even if they wanted. I gazed as admiringly as any Tory matron at the mastiffs that looked so worried at looking like Mr. Mac- millan (and the more they worried the greater the resemblance) and started aback to see that poodles are the spit and perky image of Mr. Bernard Levin. Save only that Mr. Levin has not yet taken, at the time of writing, to restraining his rebellious ,topknot, as the poodles do, with a coy little bow of blue satin ribbon.
It was for dogs such as these, I suppose, that the 'Louise' dog bed was designed—in cream and gold, with a velvet cushion in old rose, selling like hot cakes at Olympia at four guineas apiece, though not so fast as the diamante dog-collars at rather less than a couple of pounds. It was for dogs such as these, no doubt, that the stall placarded 'Dogs' Delicatessen' was putting up hors-d'oeuvre at one-and-sixpence a carton, to be followed by steak and kidney or chicken and rice. One could have guessed confidently at which dish for what breed—steak for the big fellows and Chicken for the lapdogs—were it not that guesses at Cruft's can sometimes be wide, indeed, of the mark : those hairy men in hairier tweeds can easily be the breeders of Poms or the tiniest Pekinese, while Great Danes and bull terriers may Well be the property of cuddlesome little women Whose heels are too high for the little trot they have to perform across the judging ring, leading Pets as big as ponies. (I had wondered all day Why little girls at dog shows all wear jodhpurs, and then I realised : I suppose they ride the Nastilfs home.) Oh, a lot of the dogs are pretty and appealing all right. I have been a slave to a springer in mY time and am still a sucker for golden cockers, though I would never keep a dog in town, to foul the streets and pine for rabbits. But 1 could wish that the Island Race as a whole were a little more discriminating in its drooling. I left Olympia by the same door as a woman who, after hours, no doubt, of doting on the doggies, was now shaking a blubbering small boy, his face all red and tear-sodden, to whom she was shouting, `You shurrup, shurrup : I've just about had enough of you today'—as vigorously, if not as eloquently, as the other Englishwoman I had heard earlier in the day, at my local market, screaming at her child, who had asked untimely for a lolly, `Bleedin' kids : I wish I'd bleedin' well drahnd yer I' None of us passers-by pro- tested, or interfered, but they wouldn't have dared to deal like that with their doggies.
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