Dogs

I went across to the local college yesterday afternoon - it's just across the main road from us - for their "Summe Fayre". It used to be an agricultural college, but it's trying to rebrand itself and get rid of the image of being full of students doing gardening because they are too thick to do anything else. It still concentrates on animal care and floristry and beauty and is still full of students who flunked their GCSEs. Anyway. I've been to their events before, and they were quite fun when the children were small, but I haven't been for ages, so I thought I'd give it another go.

It wasn't great, to be honest, not least because I couldn't find the tea tent. Three ice-cream vans and a barbecue, but nowhere it was possible to get just a cup of tea. A summer fair (or even, fayre) and no tea tent? Mad.

But I was riveted by the dog agility team doing a demonstration in the main arena (or, roped off bit of field). Good grief, they were awful. They followed the cattle show (which looked to me like five or six calves being led round on pieces of string although the MC was assuring us that this was an impressive demonstration of a marketable skill - and I'm afraid you could tell that the students weren't the brightest when the girl with the shovel and bucket ended up at the FRONT of the parade). They spent the first half-hour erecting the course. There must have been a dozen people doing this, apparently without any pre-conceived plan. So by the time the dogs appeared I was already bored.

If I were to be involved in dog agility classes (and admittedly this is pretty unlikely) the first thing I would want to do is to make sure my dog was obedient. Taking a dog into an arena full of equipment, and surrounded by people, without having any control over it, is not a good idea. The MC (a different one from the MC that had managed the cattle show) seemed to think it was enormously funny and expected us to think so too but, as no dog lover myself, I was a little nervous when it became clear that with the larger dogs there were extra handlers posted around the arena in case the dogs ran wild and started eating the small children. (And why do small children offer their hands so keenly to vast brutes with enormous teeth? I keep my hands in my pockets).

Even more frightening than the dogs were their handlers. Or owners. Or "mummies and daddies" as the MC called them. For a start, as I've already said, they appeared to have little control over their dogs. And many of them seemd to have selected the most unattractive dogs they could find. I am no purist when it comes to animals - I don't particularly value pedigree - but I swear to God there were two dogs there which had front legs longer than their back legs. But it was the size of them that was startling. (The size of the owners, that is). I would have thought that one of the reasons for dog-owning is to give you a reason for going out each day and taking exercise. Some of these owners could barely waddle, which is quite a disadvantage when you are supposed to be racing round the ring with your dog as it goes flying up and over and through all manner of obstacles. As a dog-owners agility demonstration it was pitiful.

So the whole thing only supported my belief that intellectuals prefer cats.