I’ve never really seen the point in owning a dog. What the appeal of living with a neurotic beast that slathers, shits in the garden, ruts strangers’ legs, chews shoes up, leaves hairs all over the sofa and lets its presence be known by a coded series of barks, whimpers and growls along with a distinctly canine pong, is beyond me. I guess, I’m just not a doggy person but if a dog is your best friend then maybe you should radically reassess your social life.
My thoughts on canine relations were confirmed yesterday when I went to the circus. Just to clarify, this was not the modern variety of circus where all the animals have long ago been sent to the glue factory, meaning the show has to rely on talented human performers demonstrating feats of dexterity, skill and illusion. No,this was an old school animal circus run by enthusiasts.
I was at Valla, a lovely place in Linköping where kids can feed rabbits, ducks and ornamental chickens. There’s goats and guinea pigs and, if you are into that sort of thing, you can send your kids to riding lessons. Every year, to raise money for hay and carrots, the kids put on a show called ‘Cirkus Vallaskojsky’ where all the work achieved by animal rights activists over the last 30 years is thrown out of the window. The horsey hobbyists who normally ride and feed their four legged friends at weekends, make the animals perform a series of stunts in front of a baying crowd of under-tens high on popcorn and orange Festis.
The kids dress up in an approximation of ‘clownery’ – big hats, colourful tights, painted faces… There was one boy whose hat was a lifelike representation of a hotdog, complete with mustard, sitting on a tartan plate. I was tempted to find him after the show to jump him and wrestle it from his head, so impressed I was. The goats were led around the stage by these motley fools and forced to climb on steps and walk across beams. How we laughed as one randy Billy goat butted his 8 year old handler in order to mount a female goat and ‘perform’ in public. Then some other kids showed off their riding skills, which as far as I could gather, amounted to getting on and off a horse.
Without question, it was the dogs, or more accurately, dog owners, that stole the show. These were grown adults who have dedicated not only their time and money, but clearly their every human emotion into forcing their dogs to do stuff like running through tubes or slaloming round poles. Never mind the fact that the dog is being led with the promise of a (possibly heroin laced) dog biscuit. You see things that are simply freakish – One rotund woman had trained her Great Dane to dance with some kind of miniature bulldog, which could literally have fitted in the larger dog’s dribbling jaws. And we applauded this deviant behaviour.
You get the impression from these crazies that they have a similar relation with their animals as Joe Jackson did with the Jackson Five – it’s all fixed smiles and hugs in public, but this is just a paper thin facade to hide the hours of torturous practice that goes in to get the moves right. If the dog gets it right, they get fed, if they get it wrong, then it’s straight to the doghouse.
