A big part of my problem is that I don’t understand why people do the things they do.
I was walking my dogs across a meadow and I looked behind to see a large, tan vizsla running towards us. He was entire, so I called Poppy and Cydney to heel and put Cydney on the lead because she is also un-neutered.
The vizsla hurtled towards us, so as a precaution I scooped Cyd up into my arms. The vizsla then decided that if he couldn’t get to the bitch he’d hump the owner, in her nice tight Lycra leggings.
He threw himself at my back, wrapped himself around my legs and got to it. I screamed and looked behind me for the owner, who I expected to be running over to help. But the owner was 300 yards away sauntering through the meadow. Sauntering.
I shouted at her to come and get her dog and she called her dog with a pleasant, casual intonation: ‘Oscar! Come here!’
Half staggering, half crawling, I hung on to Cyd while poor Poppy stood and watched the churning of this obscene three-headed beast made out of her owner, her sister and another dog who had moulded himself to them.
I looked back at the owner and she was still sauntering. Sauntering. The ground she had covered was so little that by the time she managed to complete the distance between us I would just be a mauled, shagged pile of Lycra on the ground.
With hindsight, the thing to do was to run towards her. But when you’re being sexually assaulted by a randy Hungarian pointer you don’t always think clearly.
So I started running home with Cyd in my arms. And as I ran, the vizsla ran with me, leaping cheerfully on top of me every few steps so that I had to keep turning and flapping at him with a dog lead, all the while screaming at the owner to help. And the owner continued to saunter. Saunter.
It then occurred to me that the human race, western division, has forgotten how to run. Think about it. When was the last time you saw anyone apart from an athlete running? No one runs anymore. We used to be a pretty trim bunch of hunter gatherers but now we can’t move our legs in rapid succession.
Look, I know evolution is going backwards. I know we have virtually no survival skills left. I’m not expecting us all to know how to wring the neck of a chicken. But can we now not even run in an emergency?
When the barbarians appear over the brow of the hill, and they will, we civilised idiots won’t be able to flee.
Has anyone thought about this? When they’re telling us it’s fine to be as fat and useless as we like because, you know, it’s all a condition, and no one’s to blame, have they thought about what is going to happen when the enemy starts hunting us down? Or the mutant space monsters?
So I was being shagged senseless by this vizsla as I tried to run away, because I’m one of those weirdos who still tries to stay fit and I can still run. And as I looked back at the distant, sauntering owner, her dog all but pulling my leggings down as he scratched me half to pieces, I shouted the only thing I could think of: ‘Can you run?’
And as I shouted it I knew that it was going to land me in trouble because this woman probably considers herself a member of some minority grouping with special rights not to be challenged about their inability to perambulate at speed because, let’s face it, almost everybody belongs to a special category now, and you’re not allowed to say anything to most people but ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘how does that make you feel?’
She didn’t answer. She was probably working out how to sue me for invading her emotional safe space because no, of course she can’t run.
She carried on sauntering. Sauntering. She never reached me. I ran all the way home as she walked very, very slowly in the general direction of where her dog had been when she last saw it dragging a screaming human being to the ground.
The next question I want to ask is this: if you can’t run, what are you doing walking an un-neutered dog off the lead?
If you can’t catch up with your dog, why have you a) left him with his bits and b) let him loose in a meadow full of other dogs and people who don’t necessarily want to be shagged by him?
You see, I don’t understand why people do the things they do. And that’s a big part of my problem.
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