The ancient struggle between dog-lovers and cat-lovers traditionally has favoured the canines, at least in the English-speaking world. Dogs were the manly animals, guarded the hearth, herded the sheep, helped at the hunt and shoot, retrieved the newspaper and were usually gentle with children.
Cats cannot really be put to any domestic use, except apprehension of mice and rats. They are often affectionate, but are not very demonstrative companions. But they require almost no attention, don’t need help or advice going to the bathroom, rarely mind being left outside, because even pampered housecats can usually catch their own dinner, and they are magnificent physical machines. The feline faction has gained ground in recent years, because of the profusion of working couples who could not leave a dog indoors all day.
My purpose here is to de-escalate, even slightly, the friction between the vast opposing armies of feline and canine admirers. This reflects my own circumstances, as my wife Barbara has become, in my brief and untoward absence, a caricature of a dog-lover, setting out from our homes in Toronto and Palm Beach kitted out like a British girls’ public school games-mistress with a variety of leashes, whistles, timepieces, enticements and fecal-disposal apparatus. She defiantly sends me, a traditional cat-fancier, photographs portraying her as an apparent fugitive from an Agatha Christie movie who has turned walking the dogs into exotic simulations of an all-weather, open-ended, search and rescue mission.
Conrad Black, “The truth about cats and dogs”, National Post, 2010-03-13
March 13, 2010
QotD: Walking the dog
Comments Off on QotD: Walking the dog
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
