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Angus the Bold, you are getting older. Silver threads predominate in your once deep golden coat, and though you still bounce out on our long morning walk like a young puppy, you pad back painfully slowly on arthritic toes. You are the last of the litter of six golden retriever pups that tumbled over each other and my twin nephews in one enormous dog basket at my brother’s house thirteen and a half years ago. They say that every doggy year counts as seven human ones, so that makes you 85.
You’ve been the best companion in the world – an unexpected asset, acquired for the children, but, like all such pets, ending up as part of the old homestead now they have all left home. I had never thought of myself as a dog-owner, but your unqualified adoration has proved most acceptable in the rougher passages of midlife crises, and both our figures have benefited from twice daily exercise.
But when you do pass on to the happy-sniffing grounds, I won’t be replacing you. Dog-owners in cities are a beleaguered species these days. Parks often ban dogs altogether, or insist on their being corralled in one zone or be kept on leads. Every lamp-post is blazoned with aggressive directives to us to be Responsible Dog-owners and Clean Up After Our Dogs and bright red bins stinking with sordid little bundles of polythene and faeces stand sentinel by every footpath sign. I dare say doggy-colostomy bags will be compulsory soon.
Of course it’s right to ban the fouling of pavements. But it isn’t difficult to teach your dog to crap discreetly, and I can’t help thinking that the stuff would do much more good fertilising trees and hedgerows than adding to waste disposal problems. In Scandinavia, instead of bins at the entrance to parks, they have elegant gravel squares labelled ‘hund-toilets’, doggy-heavens which are enthusiastically patronised.
Inappropriately-laid fewmets are not the only reason for such prohibitions. Disciplining dogs is as much out of fashion as disciplining children. Oxford’s vast Thames-side Port Meadow has room for any number of well-behaved dogs, but in recent years I have seen cows and horses hotly pursued by fabulously beautiful dogs with exotic pedigrees, had my ankle bitten by a Yorkshire terrier and seen Angus gashed in the face twice by the same distinctly dotty Dalmation. Ineffectual halloos and vapid grins are all the apology owners have offered.
A dip into Pet Patter in the vet’s waiting-room confirms the new climate of canine indulgence. Billions of pounds are spent on pets every year. In grooming parlours, ‘Gucci pooches’ now enjoy organic hot oil armomatherapy massages, pet Jacuzzis and hair-dos to match their owners’ outfits – a picture shows a Bichon (a stocky poodle which already looks like a toy) dyed pink for a child’s Barbie-party. Dog couturiers design wedding outfits – a kilt and tam o’shanter for a Jack Russell whose owner is being married in Scotland, hair braids for a bearded collie in the colours of the bride’s favourite football team.
Something is going badly wrong. A12,000-year-old skeleton of an elderly woman with her hand on the skeleton of a curled-up puppy proves that dogs have been our companions for thousands of years. Research shows they benefit us both physically and psychologically, and cities, so full of lonely people, need them more than most places. But the combination of turd-hating termagents and over-indulgent pooch-smoochers is putting dog-owning into steep decline.
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