Doggy Dog World!

Once, I had a dog. Itsy B, a Basenji type I named after that song... itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini…? Yeah. It was brown with white patches all over, or the other way round. I shortened the name for one reason only. Oh! you’ve guessed it already... didn’t want my parents to find out I’d ever heard of that last word. I’d bought him for around 2 dollars at a local market, and that was after some hard bargaining. Dogs can be expensive! Either way, I prided in having Itsy B on a day out hunting rabbit’s or hanging out at the local. Sometimes however, he was a dead giveaway at night in a rural Kenyan village full of “stone” snipers. Somewhere along, three years or so, I moved to the city and he got involved in a brawl with some neighbourhood terriers, and died later.

I was watching some news clip on dogs and that brought Itsy B back to mind. The best place for a dog to live is in Europe! That’s according to some pollster. Statistics, they are but I don’t know how they qualify what makes a dog happy! Room in the house? some cuddly kids? dog food from the supermarket? a nice walk in the evening? a car ride to a local dog show and a monthly visit to the vet to cup it all up? Well, surely, they do.

In all fairness, by any standards, my dog was happy. The nicest of places to stay was in the wild and free rural Kenya. There were no worries for food, lots of wild animals to take care of that. The thrill of chasing rabbits, squirrels, the occasional antelope and the pride of tearing into the well earned meal were simply unmatched. Well, there is the left over food business but look at it as sharing… alright? Sometimes, I’d snatch the rabbits from him too. Hygiene? Well, he had the world to drop anything and the river is 50 metres from the house, he could take a dip anytime he felt like. He could hang out with the local dogs at night for company and keep the neighbourhood safe at the same time. Sometimes he’d be gone for a whole day on some dog day out errands with no questions asked. Visit to the Vet? are you serious!, our local veterinary doctor was strictly a cows and sheep man.

Maybe if he’d watched TV and seen all those niceties in dog Europe, he’d have a change of heart, only for a while, and then, just like a day out, he’d come running back home to those bones in the trash bin.