Sedition

I have been kind of busy lately and neglecting this but before I go back to work, I want to make a point about the deplorable political apathy among dogs.

Freddie is a good dog. He is more or less house-trained, well-mannered to children, respectful of his elders and pretty good about not chewing stuff he's not supposed to. In fact his status as a good dog depends on all this. But the dog remains fundamentally an animal stranger in a human world. He is kept apart from other dogs, he is forced to comply with human laws which must seem completely arbitrary and capricious to a dog of Freddie's intellect and sensitivity to natural justice. He strains at the leash when he sees other dogs and calls to them in the same way as I would call to another human if I encountered one on another planet. "What the hell is going on here?" I would ask, "Who are these oddly shaped people? Are there others of our kind? Do they have meetings I could go to?"

I suppose dogs and people have been living together with no major breakdown in relations for thousands of years, and little yokes like Fred have probably been catching rats and things for us for hundreds of years at least, but blood is thicker than water and when a dog sees a dog, he knows it's a dog, and it must remind him of their shared alienation in a foreign world.

And yet, he whimpers with pleasure when he sees his leash being unhooked from the wall. He dances with giddiness when I fix a tether to his neck and lead him by the throat like a slave in a Roman triumph. Personally, and because of certain inherited loyalties, I am on the side of the imperialist human oppressor over the loyal and humble dog race, but a less partisan observer might be disappointed to see the lack of political maturity that seems characteristic of most dogs. But then, I suppose it's always a danger with an enslaved population, who have more to lose than their leashes, that they end up internalising the logic of the oppressor. It's what makes him a good dog.