If you own a dog, the chances are it gets quite excited when it sees preparations being made for a walk.
In the case of my two, the mention of that word, or the donning of a fleece, or the reaching for a dog lead, has them going completely stark, staring bonkers. They race, they howl, they yelp, they wriggle and they jump up. Far from finding it sweet, it actually annoys me, as it means that I can never leave the building quietly. They would do it for you, and they would do it just as happily for a house-breaker.
Now, let me just posit that they get this excited because they rather fancy that they are going to kill something. Outside, after all, is where the target species live, and therefore where they want to be. With apologies to my vegan friends, but that is what floats a carnivorous animal’s boat, particularly an apex predator.
At this point, I have to start being a bit careful. I have worked a good deal with scientists this year, and I am aware of Karl Popper’s Falsification Premise, whereby you can prove anything false, or highly likely, but never true. So I think it is highly likely that my dogs, whilst too thick to watch Bake Off, or wire plugs, are smart enough to link the wellie boot through the various stages of logic to, say, a dead squirrel. And when it runs around like a banshee, it has that dead squirrel in mind.
‘Just get me out to the common,’ it is saying. ‘And I will do the rest. You can rely on me.’
Now, the aggregated age of my dogs is about 22.5 years, or around 8,200 days. On just about each of those days, they receive two walks (so 16,400 of them) of approximately 25 minutes’ duration (410,000 minutes.). The rate a dog runs when off the lead, we are talking about them covering in the area of 50,000 miles between them, coincidentally, the exact point at which the turbo on your Audi will fail once the warranty has gone.
You would like to think that an apex predator, with 410,000 minutes of effort and 50,000 miles of distance to show for it, has caught embarrassingly many things. You would think it, but you would be wrong.
Between them, over 8,200 days, my dogs have caught just two things: a pheasant that got its controls muddled and flew straight into a bit of stock fencing, and a rabbit that had been recently hit by a car and may or may not have been dead already. That, I need to remind you, is a dead thing every 10 years, or 25,000 miles. And Boris had the temerity to put on his ‘that was a piece of cake’ face when he trotted back with a huge cock pheasant in his tiny mouth.
Even Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement would have eventually passed through Parliament by the time they caught their next thing.
No, the genius of a dog, or just about any animal, is to apply the very lowest of expectations to anything it is involved in. It is delighted if you remember to feed it, and chuffed to bits if you pat it when it wanders up to you of an evening. With these low expectations, it is almost never disappointed. You can see it thinking to itself that any decade now, it will catch yet more prey, and it may even be worrying that there will be a glut if it goes on like this.
Whereas Man, in the species rather than gender sense, although you never know, is never satisfied. If he shoves someone into space, he wants to put them on the moon; if he plays three right notes on a piano, he wants to write a sonata.
I suspect that Jeremy Corbyn may have asked his own dog to come up with a coherent Brexit policy, and the good news is that the mutt is absolutely delighted with its first three years of progress.
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