The WFH community are finally walking their own dogs — with terrible consequences

Every time I get on a horse I have to face the likelihood that a dog, or pack of dogs, will have me off.

This issue of idiot dog owners walking their dogs for the first time now they are working from home is a situation that has developed since Covid but as far as I’m aware, no government guidelines have been issued to deal with it.

Traditionally, dog owners in the idiot class don’t walk their dogs themselves, delegating that to a dog walker who collects the dog in a van and drives it to a place where it is walked with a load of other dogs.

Either that, or the dog is driven to a place known to idiots as doggy day care. Here, it is put in a paddock with other dogs to bark and whine at the gate until they are all put back inside the van and driven home again.

In Surrey, we have a lot of these doggy day care centres and I don’t think the idiot dog owners can have visited them.

There used to be one that every time I drove past had a van full of dogs parked in its gateway. One day, the barking coming from the van made me stop and enquire of the fag-smoking harridan who was supposed to be in charge whether or not she ever got them out.

‘Yeah, they been out today,’ she said, fag in mouth. ‘They just gone back in the van to be dropped off home again.’ Unconvinced, I stopped by again a few days later at a completely different time and her answer was the same.

The place got shut down but not until a lot of mutts had sat in a van for a lot of hours.