| Offbeat |
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| Written by Pierre Maré | ||||
Page 1 of 2
I have no frame of reference to understand a creature that chews up a cactus twice. The cactus was brought precisely to allow me to have at least one green thing in the garden. Chewing it up once was stupid. Chewing it up twice was just plain psychotic.
This week I have spent a disproportionate amount of time with ‘man’s best friend’. It has been a bit more than the usual rounds of feeding, petting, letting them in an out at night and shouting at the puppy to ‘stop damn well chewing the garden’, ‘get off the ruddy bed, damnit’ and ‘stop burrowing through the concrete under the gate or I will take away the boulders and re-concrete the blasted thing’! Sometime around the beginning of the week when the cold realisation dawned that my company’s tourism newsletter was due, I decided to do a series of articles on canine predators. This immediately led to the discovery that a hyena is more closely related to a civet than a dog, and that it is actually most closely related to a meerkat. I left them in the mix anyway. They have the right shape, and their origin makes for an interesting caveat. That being said, I am not a great fan of dogs. I treat them with respect, look after them and give them affection from time to time. But I have never been entirely comfortable with them. My discomfort begins with their domestic counterpart, the cat. Cats throw all the apparent good qualities of dogs into very sharp relief. Cats are warm in winter without taking over the bed: in fact they are bendable to accommodate the contour of a human body. They are never underfoot. They keep the pests down. They are quiet. And they don’t chew the garden up. Dogs go contrary this. They take over the bed when allowed to. They break wind incessantly. They are always underfoot. They bark insanely at everything, including the rattling of leaves and sudden gusts of wind. And the latest addition to the family is so daft he has chewed up the same cactus, twice. I have no frame of reference to understand a creature that chews up a cactus twice. The cactus was brought precisely to allow me to have at least one green thing in the garden. Chewing it up once was stupid. Chewing it up twice was just plain psychotic. The dogs, which irritate me the most, are the small breeds, which inhabit pavements. |
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