Today
|
Have we gone to the dogs? |
We're
culling cats and silencing canines …
Neil
Humphreys
[email protected]
I
HAVE been goosed before. Not sexually, but in a literal sense and I still bear
the emotional scars.
I
was attacked by a deranged, runaway goose that appeared utterly determined to
render me impotent. Naturally, my mother was involved.
We
were visiting our neighbour's house one Sunday to inspect their latest
additions to their surreal menagerie.
We
were close neighbours and shared everything — food, milk and the voracious mice
that ran under the floorboards between our houses.
After
consulting our neighbour, my mother threw me out into the garden to watch the
wild geese. (The neighbour had two. She wasn't showing the Roger Moore war
movie in the garden.)
"Go
on," my mother shouted, through stifled giggles. "They won't bite
you."
"Yeah?
Then why are you two standing behind the double-glazed doors then?"
"We
don't want to let the heat out."
So,
there I stood, admiring a pair of wild geese, when one of them suddenly admired
my crotch and took off like a waddling speedboat.
Terrified,
I dashed for the neighbour's rockery.
Call
me old-fashioned, but I'd never been goosed from behind before and I didn't
want to break my "duck" with a mad bird. Standing triumphantly on the
rockery, which was about a metre off the ground, I shouted: "It can't
climb up here, can it?"
"Of
course not," cried the giggling women.
Of
course it could. It spread its wings, hopped on to the rockery and targeted my
groin.
I
screamed, jumped, got pecked on the knee and hobbled back to the kitchen.
But
I was rather relieved.
If
that beak had caught me a couple of inches higher, then I would have had no
future role in the Government's baby drive.
Our
neighbours had two dogs, several cats, five children, two geese and an
extremely smelly carpet.
Should
the oceans suddenly rise, their house will be Noah's first port of call.
Yet,
there were never any complaints from other neighbours in our street, and our
council houses packed us in like sardines.
Singaporean
letter writers, on the other hand, don't seem to like noises that emanate from
their fellow mammals, which suggests they should keep well away from me after
I've had lunch in
It's
the turn of dogs this week. Stray cats appear to have been given the week off,
probably because most of them have already been culled.
Last
Sunday, the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority, along with various animal
welfare groups, organised a pet ownership drive, to remind owners that an
animal is for life and not just for birthdays and cultural festivals.
And
the week before, three dogs were tragically poisoned with tainted food in
Clementi and there were calls for tougher punishments for animal abusers.
Somehow,
this message got turned around by several letter writers, who claimed that dogs
are a social menace because — now prepare yourself for this — they bark ... And
barking constitutes serious noise pollution.
Well,
this is a revelation to me. There were dozens of strays in my English hometown,
but their barking went unnoticed. This was largely because the dogs spent most
of their time mating on zebra crossings, which did explain the seasonal traffic
jams.
Fortunately,
letter writers have addressed my ignorance. They are on hand to say: "We must
do something about dogs and their discourteous owners because they bark too
much (the dogs, not the owners).
"It's
noisy, repetitive and disrupts our mahjong games (the tiles of which can be
heard from 10 floors away when shuffled)."
In
that case, why stop at dogs? If we're determined to move into our safe, boring,
artificial, air-conditioned bubble completely, we'd better wipe out hamsters,
too.
Don't
be fooled by their cuddly exteriors. When they start squeaking, those little
buggers can be heard for centimetres around.
And
if they don't get their lettuce quickly enough, guinea pigs whine like newborn
babies, so we should cross them off.
Now,
no one is seriously suggesting we strip off and return to the natural world.
But
a little colour, noise and variety makes
These
bubble-dwellers need a wake-up call ...
Like
a goose in the groin.
Catch
Neil Humphreys on Gold 90FM's The Nightshift with Mr X on weeknights at 11.