Stanford Prison Experiment

Freddie the dog is home and castrated. I was used to the terms "neutered" and "fixed", but they suddenly felt like some evil euphemism like "enhanced interrogation techniques" when the lady asked said "You're here for a castration..?" The woman who asked me - I don't know if she was a veterinary nurse or what - smiled very sweetly as she said it. I suppose these bright and attractive young women, necessarily good with dogs and probably equally good with people, are used to the sight of men wincing in sympathy when they leave their dogs in to be castrated. For some reason this makes me feel slightly pathetic.

I felt considerably less mawkish about taking the animal to be castrated after he escaped the other night. He turned up in the house of a patient neighbour (it is his home from home) but all my handwringing about respect for the personal physical integrity of my little dog seemed a little wishy-washy in the face of the practical necessity of having him fixed, and by the time the nice lady simpered the word "castration" I had settled into a cosy state of responsible melancholy. I felt bad for the poor dog, but I was only doing what had to be done, and I was only following orders.

I imagine that if I had been involved in the Stanford prison experiment (you know in the 70s, I think, when they randomly assigned the roles of prisoner and prison guard to volunteers and observed the brutality into which the "guards" soon fell) I'd have been a great guard. If I had been a subject in that Milgram experiment about obedience to authority, I reckon I would have turned the electric shock dials up to eleven and expected a reward for taking personal initiative.

Anyway, we got Freddie home, and naturally he is miserable. But it's not because he has suffered the indignity of emasculation, it's that he was under general anaesthetic and he can't go for walks and he has to wear this ridiculous cone around his neck. The cone is at least transparent so he has some peripheral vision, but it makes him look demented and it gets in the way of sniffing. He'll get over this, of course. His stitches come out in ten days and he'll resume his life as a pup, and I suppose it might not be a bad thing to live a life unburdened by sex. It is thought that at least part of P.G. Wodehouse's incredibly prolific output may have something to do with his having mumps as a child and just not being that interested in sex, so perhaps he will become a great artist or something.