Cave canem
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
Jimmy has just appeared in the doorway, pre- cariously holding between his teeth a small earthenware bowl. He deposits this at my feet and wags his tail. Do not tell me dogs are incapable of making or communicating logical inferences; mine can. Several weeks ago he hit on the trick of upsetting his drinking water over the kitchen floor as a housebroken indi- cation that he wished to visit lamp-posts. At first I welcomed the practical convenience of this signal, and even thought the association of ideas it implied rather witty. But no sooner had he got me properly trained, than water containers were being ostentatiously spilt, par- ticularly during rainy stay-at-home weekends, upwards of a dozen times a day. Now the pup is silently blackmailing me. Impossible even for his best friend to ask: Am I being summoned into the streets because your calls to nature are urgent or because you are finding the Frost programme boring?
When Which? directed its attention to dogs a couple of years back, a Swiss ladies' consumer organisation commented, 'Un seal point n'a pas ite traite, sans doute parce qu'il va de soi : les joies et les peines d'un proprietaire de chien.' Without wishing to appear ungallant, I must deny that the emotional consequences of dog- owning are to be taken for granted. That goes particularly for les peines, whose ramifications and nuances include punishments, sorrows, afflictions, anxieties, troubles, toils, difficulties and all non-physical sufferings. No kidding. The canine population of the us, wrote Stephen Baker in How to live with a neurotic dog, is about twenty-five million, of whom about twenty-five million can be classified as neurotic =a conservative estimate.' Anyone who ex- pects a dog to be an uncomplicated outlet for love, a toy for the children or an excuse for taking exercise, had better heed Petronius and steer clear.
Dogs are extremely expensive—not chiefly of money, but of time and of patience. A small dog may be fed for as little as lOs to I5s a week, but it will take much trial and error to determine the amount and kind of diet that suits him. He may be inoculated against dis- temper and other common diseases for IS or less, but if you get through the first year alone without treating him for fleas, worms, diarrhoea, constipation and at least one other ailment, you will be doing fine. He must be regularly romped with, walked, groomed, bathed and trimmed. And even when you com- plete the laborious but essential process of training him, you must still expect lapses into wickedness and be ready to express displeasure by cracking down on the floor or on your hand (but preferably not on the dog) a rolled- up copy of the SPECTATOR.
The two commonest wickednesses are indoor puddling and indiscriminate chewing. In a puppy they are natural and remediable, but either or both can recur if the dog has been badly trained, feels ill-used or is plain bored. (Most carpets, incidentally, can be saved from stain if you mop them promptly with blotting-paper and squirt soda-water on the mark, and most dogs will drop forbidden object t if you snap your fingers against their nostrils.) Should yOu be unsure of your dog's manners or your friends' sympathies, you must not inflict him on them; but neither must you leave him at home by himself if he is liable to bark or howl to the annoyance of your neighbours, nor for lengthy periods even if he is outwardly uncomplaining. He therefore can severely re- strict your social life, unless you make proper arrangements for someone to look after him.
Such arrangements are, of course, vital when you go on holiday, and boarding-out a dog may cost anything from £2 to £5 a week according to his size and the kennel's pretensions. Un- happily, there is no effective national system of inspecting and rating boarding kennels, and accordingly no substitute for personal recom- mendation.- Countless owners make going away to the sea or abroad the excuse for abandoning their dogs, if they have not already discarded them as being too costly, too de- manding or too much of a nuisance, or mislaid them by caring too little. In this country of self-styled animal-lovers something like 5,000 stray dogs, the RSPCA reckons, have to be destroyed every week. One way to discourage people from acquiring dogs they will not keep, says the winter issue of What?, magazine of the National Suggestions Centre, is to make a swingeing increase in the licence fee; at the same time policing its evasion (as in North America) by issuing the licence as a recog- nisable metal tag to be affixed to the dog's collar. I agree. Those who will not accept les peines must be denied les joies.
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