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Saturday 24 June 2017

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Lynne Truss: Enough of the dog shaming already

In her weekly column, Lynne Truss sticks up for the nation's naughty pooches

Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss Photo: Andrew Crowley

One of the great things about dogs is that they live in the present. Ask any dog-lover. They will be loud in praise of their doggie’s gift to experience life without either dread of the future or worry from the past. “If only I could be like you,” I often say. “You never dwell on things, and you never expect a problem to crop up either. Your happiness when things go right is uncontaminated by thoughts of 'Should I have known this would happen?’ What joy to be like you!”

Now, obviously, if human beings had no sense of time at all, we’d be in quite a pickle. We’d keep missing flights, for one thing. We would sit down for our dinners with upturned cutlery in our fists, not having first done any cooking (or even any shopping). We wouldn’t recognise family members. We’d be lousy at the pub quiz. The list goes on and on. Sometimes we might eat six dinners in a single day because we couldn’t remember whether we’d had one already. (I mention this last possibility, by the way, because the dog last week happily consumed two dinners on Tuesday – one from the dog-minder, and then another from me when we got home. And I am sad to report he showed not a smidgen of remorse about capitalising on my mistake.)

Anyway, the thing everyone knows about dogs is that you shouldn’t use complicated tenses when talking to them, because the only tense they know is the present tense, so it just isn’t fair. But I never remember this. “We will be going OUT later, but only after I’ve finished this piece of work, which will be about another 45 minutes,” I inform the dog virtually every day, and then get frustrated that at the word “OUT” he has jumped out of his little bed (which is under my desk) and run to the door, wagging his tail. “No, not now, come back,” I say (making things worse). “Later, before TEATIME, we will go OUT. So, to recap, we will go OUT in about 45 minutes and then, later, it will be TEATIME, but not until we are back from being OUT.”

Of course, at each hearing of “out” and “teatime”, the dog reacts accordingly with excitement – running to the door; running to the kitchen. Even worse is saying to him at the end of the day, “Wasn’t it nice when we went OUT earlier, and then you had TEATIME? I hope you don’t want to go OUT again, by the way, because it’s no longer a remote possibility.”

There is a very popular “dog-shaming” website in which dogs are shown with placards around their necks, looking guilty. I can’t decide what I think of it. Sometimes the placards are very funny, such as, “I hump this blanket whenever company comes over”, or “I’m bored of insoles, so now I’m eating Ethernet cables”, or “My addiction to rolling in worms is out of control.” A particular favourite said, “My non-stop staring makes house guests uncomfortable.”

But with most of the examples being of dogs eating shoes and trousers, or destroying (or soiling) foam sofa cushions, I can’t help feeling it’s the owners who should be publicly denounced, for having unfair expectations of a dog left all day by himself (and for being unaware, as well, that one can be bored with or by, but not of).“I eat bits of my blankie and then I poo my blankie” someone has recently posted – over a picture of a small, nervous­looking pug-type dog – and you can tell by this that the pooing of the blankie is seen by the owner as a wilful and shocking compounding of the original crime, when it is surely just the natural consequence of consuming the blankie in the first place.

I feel there should be an equivalent Dog Owner-Shaming website, for people who forget to supply fresh water, or who leave the dog for eight hours with nothing to do but chew furniture – but worst of all would be the one that said: “I torture my dog with overcomplicated sentences.” Have I actually destroyed his trust by my cavalier use of tenses? Formerly my dog understood the word “OUT” to have an immutable (and happy) meaning, but lately he has started to hesitate when he hears it – he looks wary. Even if I’m waving his collar and lead at the same time, he turns his head slightly and looks at me sideways. Do I mean it? Or don’t I?

IN PICTURES: Movies stars and their dogs

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