Grrrr. About time too. The BBC (Beagles, Borzois and Chihuahuas) is not going to televise our annual strip-tease parade at Cruft's this year. And now, finally, they've got some rules to make us healthy, so we can all breathe, see and walk properly.

We sentimental dogs call Man our Best Friend. And we put up with his little ways, because we are sociable animals, not lone wolves. GUS, the Greyhounds' Union of Sprinters, will race round in circles under floodlights chasing an unconvincing rag hare for Man so he can throw away his biscuits to bookies. Barking Dog Stadium mad, I call it.

We will point him at our feathered friends, and retrieve them when he shoots them, so that he can dress up in tweeds and plus-fours, and strut as a field sportsman. Our smaller brothers were adopted as lapdogs by Restoration ladies so that they could blame us for any unfortunate wind - why do you think they call us feisty?

And Cruft's was not a bad idea to start with. There was this human called James Spratt, who started a “dog cake” business in Houndborn, London. (Was he the Jack Sprat who could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean? Typical human faddiness. A good dog eats both fat and lean, and licks the bowl clean.) Charles Cruft was Spratt's apprentice, and in 1891 he founded an annual show at Olympia, in which dogs could parade their owners.

And parts of that show were good fun. Most of us enjoyed the obstacle race. And the obedience test, when we lead the humans round the ring, and saw whether they could retain their balance when we ran in and out between their legs.

But, as usual with humans, things got out of paw. They are not pack animals. The big cup goes to their heads. So they took interbreeding us poor canines to extreme ends, that gave Josef Mengele a dog's name when he tried them on humans. So they bred bassets with permanent backache, cavalier King Charles spaniels (the ones that were bred to be feisty) with skulls too small for their brains, pugs with breathing problems, bulldogs with breeding problems and boxers with epilepsy.

They forgot that a dog is a dog, not its name spelt backwards. They forgot our natural roots, as dogs. Why do you suppose that we turn round three times before going to sleep? We are remembering our days as wild mongrels, making our nest in the long grass on Salisbury Plain, in the days before St Bernards were separated from pekinese and papillons. We are Man's friend. But silly breeding has gone too far. And the Kennel Club, the RSPCA and the viewers thought so too. Woof, woof.

Hercules was barking at Philip Howard

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