DOGS are dirty. I feel almost as though I should apologise for that statement but instead I’ll try to explain it. You see, I come from an age when dogs were dogs, when dogs lived outside, when they weren’t allowed inside ever, when they rolled in anything that stank, when they had an unsavoury preoccupation with their own pudenda and the rear end of anything with a tail (and sometimes without a tail), and when they at least tried to kill cats on sight.
Cats, of course, are clean.
People and dogs got on very well when both people and dogs knew that a dog was a dog but they didn’t get on nearly as well as they do now, now that neither people nor dogs see dogs as dogs. Just how well they get on is illustrated in the results of a survey by the Petcare Information and Advisory Service. Petcare found that in the homes of single people 80 per cent of dogs and cats sleep inside the house and, amazingly, that almost a third of all dogs spend virtually all their time indoors. Shockingly, half of single people’s pets sleep in the person’s bedroom and a third sleep on the bed. Petcare says on the bed but it’s a fair bet it is in many homes in the bed. The situation in families is little better, with only one in five dogs and cats spending most of their time outside.
Now, if these inside and bed-mate pets were cats not even the rabid cat haters would raise an eyebrow, because, as we’ve agreed, cats are clean. Indeed, my Tilly or my wife’s Lilly, depending on which one gets there first, sleeps on the end of our bed often, in winter in a cat basket on the end of the bed. Lucy the poodle was out the back in a dust bowl she'd scratch in the dirt, but recently Lucy went to doggy heaven, my mother's, where she is no longer a dog.
Many of these pets in the Petcare survey inside and on (and often in) the bed are dogs – filthy, dribbling, panting, cat-poo-eating dogs that are the source of more smells and emissions than Orica on Kooragang. People who sleep with their dogs should be identified by a badge or somesuch so that we can avoid direct contact with them, so that, shudder, we can be sure the woman making our salad roll is not a dog sleeper.
Something has changed dramatically. When I was a lad only the community’s trash had dogs inside, and it may be that this hasn’t changed at all. And anybody who slept with a dog was mad, literally, or living in a humpy on the outskirts of town, and maybe that’s still the case. But I'm inclined to put this intimacy with dogs down to a general decline in decency. Do you agree? And where does your dog or cat sleep?
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