In response to a report in The Times this week that “children run less risk of being sensitive to allergens if there is a dog in the house in the early years of their lives”, a dog writes:

“Well, that's charming, isn't it? As if human beings have not spent long enough boring us all rigid with their worries about domestic cleanliness and just how many germs it is safe to expose little Cedric to to ensure that he lives to 103 (721 in dog years), now they want to involve dogs.

‘Having a dog provides just enough dirt of the right kind,' said The Times. Cheek! I have a good mind to cancel my subscription. I have been lying curled up on The Times for the best part of 57 (dog) years and have always found it the most comfortable basket liner on Fleet Street, but this goes beyond the pale. I simply refuse to be reduced to the status of ‘dirt provider'. I will chase a stick, I will fetch a newspaper (for the moment), I will even bark at postmen if it makes my family feel safer, but I will not, repeat, not, be considered merely as a carrier of such homoeopathic quantities of poo as might profitably be exposed to a toddler.

And anyway, what dirt? I groom myself constantly. My testicles shine like a pair of billiard balls in a kid glove. When did you last lick yours? Exactly. ‘Right kind of dirt', my arse. My very clean arse. Swabbed spotless as it was only this morning, on the Heath, by Tigger from No 73.

I simply will not have my puppies put on the alternative medicine rack in Boots and brought home in a bag by sniffling vegan whackos along with the St John's wort, echinacea, and other credulous gunk. Ye dogs, you used to breed us to kill deer and savage serfs, now you think we're a bleeding asthma cure? What has happened to you, man? Allergies, schmallergies. You just want to get out more. Chase a cat up a tree from time to time. Get a frigging life.

And I tell you what, it's a poor lookout for dogs, being bought to order by families with toddlers in the house. But nobody thinks of that. You ever kept a toddler? Crap everywhere, I tell you. Talk about a hygiene risk. You come in from the park and just crossing the telly room carpet you have to watch every footstep. It's a minefield. And they think it's funny, too, the perishers. We've got this one at the moment, three years old, thinks it's a huge gas to wee in the dishwasher. When I was his age I had grandchildren.

You ask me, it's the toddlers giving germs to the dogs that you want to be worrying about. But nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody ever says to me: ‘Fido, stay away from Gemima, you might get nits.' Nobody chucks little Cedric out in the rain when he's got measles in case he gives it to the dog.

And have you seen what babies do to the social fabric of a family? Mine used to be such fun. Now you can't have a decent conversation without them always looking around to see where the children are, stopping them from doing this, encouraging them to do that, laughing at their stupid pranks, as if anybody else gave a damn, jamming up the doorway in cafés with their stupid buggies so a dog can't move. And where once it was all ‘fetch!' and ‘good boy' and ‘who's a pretty spaniel?' now it's just endless mind-numbing chatter about catchment areas and ‘sibling priority'.

Look, I appreciate that I am probably sounding a little hot-headed. But I just hate to see dogs once again being treated as a convenient panacea by science. ‘Scientists have found...' began the Times report. Do you have any idea what sort of images a sentence like that summons up for a member of the dog community? Images of rows of laboratory beagles in neck vices, is what, chain-smoking Marlboros like Amy Winehouse on a quiet night in, to see if... I don't know what. To see if there is anything in a beagle that might be extracted to make fags tastier.

They're still doing it. Long after it's proven that smoking give people cancer, and people have stopped doing it, beagles are still being made to smoke all over the world, presumably to make absolutely certain that fags give beagles cancer. In fact, I am by no means exaggerating when I say that since the smoking ban of July 2007, dog smokers now outnumber human smokers by three to one and...

Wait a minute, wait a minute. It's just occurred to me: in this health-crazy world what is the one kind of dog that a family with a toddler would never, ever, want to have around their baby? Exactly. A dog who smokes.

Have you got a light, pal?”

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