Dog in the manger
Sir: Alexander Chancellor in his Notebook of 20 February writes that the Post Office claims that, because councils are getting tougher about forbidding tenants to keep dogs in blocks of flats, people often leave their dogs outside all day in order to avoid detection. From this he arrives at one more count in the indictment against tower blocks. I think we can fairly allow tower blocks to collapse under the weight of their Own arguments (e.g. high alumina cement). We hardly need to drag in dumb animals. The alternative is to end by blaming tower blocks for blindness in children who play on infected grass, or for pavements that are delicately lacquered in excrement. It is not the tower block we have got to fight but dogs, dogs, dogs. Actually, one of the nicest things about purpose-built flats is that most sorts forbid tenants to keep pets. One has a better chance of getting an honest night's sleep in one than out in the country, where some wretched hobbledehoy's cur can bay at the moon for hours. It would be unwise to say outright that people who are devoted to animals are incapable of mature relationships with humans, but there is nothing to stop one thinking it. What is clear, however, is that keeping in a town energetic animals that need a lot of exercise
(i.e. in practice, dogs) is grossly unkind to them and us.
Because of our very success at keeping out rabies we have never had to con- template the control of errant dogs by such means as a dog Catcher. This figure was the villain of Walt Disney's The Lady and the Tramp, but actually did a good and useful job. (Cartoondom's values can in any case be judged at their true worth by the fact that mice — insanitary vermin — are por- trayed as sympathetic and cute, while cats — fastidiously tidy and self-sufficient are either wicked or buffoons.) The dog licence is ludicrously uneconomic to collect, but a proposed increase brought a howl of protest in last week's letters to The Times.
It is presumably too much to expect Lon- doners to take little doggy dustpans and brushes around and sweep up after their pets, like the Japanese ladies your cor- respondent described a year or two ago. The right of the British to lumber themselves with all sorts of impedimenta (children, Olde English Sheepdogs) and then turn round and blame Mothercare or Dulux for leading them into temptation, is one of the things we fought two world wars to preserve. One more argument in favour of pacifism.
William Fields
(address withheld to avoid reprisals by Kennel Club members)
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