The Canine Revolution

I may offend some people here, more so than usual. Not because I am going to talk about religion, or about politics. Not because I am, like Rowan Williams, going to say something so utterly confounding and stupid, however genuinely well-meaning he may have been trying to be, that it turns the stomachs of the general population. No. It is because we are, first and foremost, a nation of animal lovers, and I am going to talk negatively about dogs. Indeed, it would be interesting to compare the donations received by the RSPCA and the NSPCC, which are for animals’ and children’s rights respectively. One glance at the hideously voice-overed animal home advertisements will show you what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I like animals, so long as they are not dogs.

Dogs. The most useless organism to ever have risen from the malaise of the primordial soup. They should probably have remained in their aeons-past fish-state for ever, patrolling the oceans and keeping dolphins awake with their incessant yapping. They are the animal equivalent of cluster bombs, you never know when you will run into one, they exist only to fulfil the narrow, blinkered needs of their owners without regard for the dying around them, skin shorn from their ankles, groaning. The worst thing about them is that despite their supposed intelligence, they seem incredibly adept at doing stupid things. Maybe a golden retriever did design some software behind a tree in scrubland in the Russian steppe. But that doesn’t stop it shitting in the street with impunity. Perhaps, as may have been documented, a Chihuahua in Iceland was the first animal ever to navigate down a geyser shaft without breathing equipment. But that doesn’t stop it humping your leg. And just maybe, it is an American dog not a human that will be the first organism to steer a spacecraft to Mars, completing the two-year mission successfully much to the chagrin of our Chinese brethren, but that won’t stop the little bastard yapping all hours of the night because it suspects that the pizza-smell emanating from the shop below is actually a burglar.

Many millions of people have been duped by the creative affection with which they become enwrapped. It is all a ploy, however, the dog is trying to get to your wallet. They are like small gangs of thieves, using the most cynical means necessary, feigning of love, to worm their way into your lives. Once they are there, they earn a place in your most coveted bubble of security. From there, they are able to exercise the power which they most seek – to make other people’s lives a living hell. Bastards.

Let us look at the charge sheet for dogs:

Count 1: Rampant fouling of the street: No other animal is able to get away with this, apart from pigeons, and they are roundly discriminated against, being banned from Trafalgar Square by the good-intentioned, but horribly unpleasant person, the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone. I would like to lead a bear around Glasgow, but I doubt I will ever be allowed to lest it defecates on a taxi bonnet. A case of hypocrisy if ever I found one. Incidentally, the bear would signify the strong-arm politics that I would hope to sell should I ever become Overlord of the City of Glasgow, a new post that will be created above Lord Provost, free from political affiliation. In a similar vein, a friend of my sisters once lead a donkey around Drumchapel in the name of the church, and it wasn’t even killed once. I am sure that had the donkey shat in Kinfauns Drive it would have been shot by a police sniper.

Count 2: Extreme propensity to bark at nothing: Dogs are loud. They have been given vocal chords in order to whittle down the human population using a way of sonic attrition. While this is a laudable aim, it doesn’t mean that I can’t scream while I go down in flames. There are many ranges of barks. There is the endearing low ‘wulph’ of the Saint Bernard who, child-abductor Beethoven aside, are about the most stomachable of dogs. Then there is the familiar ‘ruff’ sound of medium-size but non-inquisitive dogs. They are vaguely tolerable, so long as there is enough of a degree of separation between you and it. Like a river or a motorway interchange, for example. The noise of these dogs is tolerable if they are barking for a reason, such as, because someone’s foot is on their head, they are trying to dissuade a helicopter gunship from nuking a Palestinian shop, or they are trying to save a child who is not an actor, from a mine-shaft. Finally, there is the high-pitched scratching ‘yap’ of smaller dogs like lap-dogs. One strike and you’re out for these I’m afraid. Death sentence by strimmer. It is the most humane way.

Count 3: Breeding with people’s legs: Legs are nice things. If you have two you can walk. If you have three, you can run up behind a member of the Cabinet and kick him up the arse without breaking step. If you have four, you can star in films such as Black Beauty, without even needing to put on an accent, perfect your grief-face or put yourself in the shoes of a nineteenth-century farmhand. But anyway, we like legs and we want to keep them. Both of them. We don’t want to have one humped right off by the hairy, knee-high, parcel-sized bundle of rapist that we lovingly label ‘a dog’. Also, if dogs are so intelligent, how do they mistake a person’s leg for a female dog? Do they get into such an ecstasy over being let out into the street after their justified incarceration that they get the canine-equivalent of beer goggles? How have they managed to breed and survive this far if they have been attempting to copulate with everything that has the slightest association with a female dog, i.e., that they both have skin, on the off-chance that one day they will happen on their natural partner? I think we should conduct an experiment. For example, will a dog attempt to copulate with a elephant’s leg? And will the elephant be so tolerant?

Count 4: Feigning Intelligence: Everything that is associated with a dog’s intelligence is down to conditioning. Whether it is getting a dog to salivate by ringing a bell, or simply telling the dog to ‘sit’. Also, all this intelligence is motivated by a selfish greed for food. You can make a dog do anything by willing it with the reward for food. In this respect not much separates them from me. You could probably make a dog play the piano with its foot by promising it a gnaw on a lamb’s bone afterwards. And the thick bastard still wouldn’t be able to sook the marrow out afterwards. There have been a few cases of ‘acting dogs’. But I contest that chimpanzees and parrots make far better actors, even when compared to many human soap-stars such from as the all round adolescent misery-fest that is Hollyoaks. I reckon no human, or dog, could shout down a parrot. They are skilled and adept at tactical manipulations. In fact, it will be one of my goals when I become Overlord to orchestrate chess-games between parrots, with perches hung from the ceiling so that the parrots can move the pieces with their beaks. I don’t understand chess, and am hoping that these versatile and conversational creatures can teach me without the condescension that a human master of the game would exhibit. But back on point. Dogs are not intelligent, they are just programmable, just like computers. And just like an accidental mis-association on your part on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet could fuck up your finances, so a wrongly programmed dog can cause great harm.

Count 5: Duping their owners into become slave-bots: Don’t get me wrong. If you are a dog-owner then you are not in need of punishment, but rehabilitation. The dog’s only purpose is to subvert your intelligence and free thought so that you may come under its total jurisdiction for evermore. A suitable treatment would be to have your eyes held-open using a Clockwork Orange-style eye-brace (I will use this word for it from now on, it features highly among treatments for the many ills of the world), while watching videos of dogs tearing into rotten meat left on city pavements. In order to heighten the strange sense of such unpalatable events being at odds with the setting, rotten-meat-dogs could be put in front of Buckingham Palace, or in an elegant rose garden, or in a crèche, or in the Sainsburys salad counter. Only by conditioning dog-owners into seeing the foulness of the beasts can they be successfully rehabilitated, poor souls.

Count 6: Becoming a fashion accessory: Many self-confessed ‘hard men’ will walk vicious dogs about the streets which will eye-up and occasionally bite innocents. This gives a legitimate method for the bastard to get away with assault. It is far more difficult to pull up an animal for its behaviour than a human. If you want to portray an image of danger, why not just buy a car? You can cause far more mayhem and death with a car by, say, driving it down a pedestrian precinct than even the most genocidal dog would be capable of. Or if it must be an animal, how about a shark. Sharks are readily available, and free. Not two miles from my flat is the Forth and Clyde Canal which is festooned with sharks. Err, possibly. They are attracted to cheese and onion crisps, and if you glue them to a mannequin which is then dipped into the canal, you are bound to attract a fine specimen indeed. Then it is a simple matter of knocking up a wooden tank with wheels on it and filling it up with water. If you are kind, you will use Evian or some other kind of bottled water. Sharks are pretty picky and you don’t want to piss them off. Then wheel it down the precinct and watch in awe as people get out of your way. One sight of that dorsal fin peeking from above the wooden tank-walls will send that muppet with his rottweiler scampering for the safety of a greeting card shop awning. Also, some young women in places like Santa Monica have tiny dogs that they keep in their handbags. There are no words to describe how pitiful this act is, therefore please just shake your heads slowly in disbelief with me.

Count 7: Killing people: Dogs kill people. They do. Whenever cats kill people, they are the large wild things like leopards that people don’t normally keep in their houses unless they have the kind of adrenalin-seeking nature that downhill skiers possess combined with the propensity for masochism of ritual body-piercers. Dogs on the other hand, routinely kill people. Occasionally there will be a story about how some rottweiler or pit-bull has mauled the face off a toddler. Their jaws clamp tight, so that often the only way to get them to release their grip is to slam their head in a car door. Alternatively, apparently you should pull both their front legs outwards to the side which obviously breaks something pivotal in their bodies. Then, some minister will be invited onto the evening news and they will make grandiose promises about changing dog legislation and then literally nothing will happen. But anyway, why take the risk of having the dog in the first place? If there was a homicidal maniac who occasionally lashed out with a knife, but by and by, he was pretty good to have a round due to his witty banter, would you still keep him in your house? There should be some sort of licensing system, and the owners should be made to sit some kind of physical training test, much as they did on “Dog Borstal”, to prove they were not total half-wits that would let their chair-sized packages of violent death maul the nearest child. Or else they could make the dog sit a test. A simple multiple-choice test would suffice, they could hold the pens in their mouths.

Anyway, so that is my case against dogs. There are other things, like the way they just sniff around you for no reason as they pass you in the street, and the way they follow you for no reason. Today, while walking along the Kelvin towpath, a dog did just that. I should have shot it and thrown it in the river, but I don’t own a gun, and anyway since dogs are the devil incarnate it would just have leaped out the river, mended itself and then wrapped its jaws around my neck. And then there was that dog that, years ago, came out of nowhere and followed me along the West Highland Way as I returned to the city and then followed me through the streets until I lost it in the traffic (I was cycling). You may call me heartless, but I would say it was more Darwinian. As is the case when a dog chased after a jeep that a friend of mine was in. They were travelling relatively slowly and when the dog finally caught up it ran right under the back wheel and was run over. Muppet.

I recognise that people would miss their dogs so I propose the following solution to make the pain easier to bear. Take forty marshmallows and melt them into a saucepan. Take the mixture out and pour it into a semi-spherical mould. When it solidifies you will have half a sphere of marshmallow. Next, take some spaghetti, boil in a pan and flavour with salt. When suitably drapable, drape on top of the marshmallow semi-ball, and through the flat-side plunge a mop handle. Call this object Puppy and have it as your pet. It has a number of uses. You can still use it as a mop, and it won’t bark. You can use it to fend off burglars, they hate getting marshmallow on them, and it still will not bark. And when you get bored of it you can eat it, and even then it will not bark. If the giant marshmallow is still not good enough company for you - perhaps it is too intelligent and not docile and blindly affectionate like your exiled dog - then you could always have a child. Children rarely kill people, and most of them don’t bark. For authenticity you could give it a suitable dog-like name like Rover, if it’s a boy, or Wolverine, if it’s a girl. In fact if I ever have a daughter, she is going to be called Wolverine anyway, though for strictly and intensely personal reasons.

This being Britain, it will be difficult to dispose of all the dogs without journalistic scrutiny and uproar from the public. In my capacity as Overlord, it will not be my desire to cause undo cruelty to dogs. Therefore, I propose the following method. The dogs will all be shot with tranquilliser darts. The dose will be the same regardless of the particular dog, which has the advantage that it will probably induce an ever-lasting slumber in the smallest lap-dogs immediately. The other dogs will be laid out on bridges and docksides with strips of seasoned bacon draped on them so that seagulls, the evil flying carnivorous pterodactyls of the 21st century, can feast upon them. This has the advantage that it should satisfy their appetite for many years, thus delaying the inevitable day when they migrate inland and destroy civilisation.

Incidentally, and unrelated:

On the television is the strangest fusion I have ever seen. Someone is performing a rock number with a live band while models strut across the stage and perform some kind of jig with him before walking off. The rock bloke is prancing like a hallucinating ape and making it just as dangerous for the models in their tripping gowns as if they were cat-walking across a high-speed freight line. Still, models don’t get about much. It will be good for their immune system and sense of real life to put some danger in their paths once in a while. Perhaps making them walk around courses avoiding traffic cones chicane-style like in the “Lovely Girls Competition” in Father Ted would work. I’ll bear that in mind when I become Overlord. Oh fuck now Lily Allen’s on. I might have to throw this television contraption out of the window. If I’m really lucky it will take out a Number 9 bendy-bus on its way down. They like to make noise at the bus stop outside my bedroom window, though in a more intelligent manner than the dogs do.