It’s a dog’s life... but whose lead do you take?

SETS THE CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS

THREE million people pass through Tokyo’s Shibuya Station every day, and in the shadow of a statue of a dog whose name was Hachiko.

This dog is a reminder of how loyalty is such a valuable quality in our day-to-day lives.

Hachiko was owned by a university professor and, every day at 5.30pm, Hachiko would be waiting for his master at the station.

Everybody knew him as a happy dog. Then sadly his master passed away and it seems like Hachiko couldn’t take this cruel re-buff from fate, and so for nine years, every day, he still padded down to the Tokyo station to wait loyally for his master to arrive.

You can look at this touching story in two ways.

Hachiko was either blindly loyal or else just a terrible optimist. The same could be said about us humans.

We are either true to an ideal and pursue our lives quietly, or opt to wing each day as it comes and take our chances that everything is going to work out all right.

Whichever road you take it won’t be easy. Life is calibrated on a series of microseconds where everything can change in the blink of an eye.

My own CD of animal songs – Havananimal Week – included ‘Houndog Ar Buille’, a mixture of Elvis and Seán Ó Riada.

I anthropomorphise the hound stating his preference to come back as a human:

‘Being a hound is a real dog’s life/ Ain’t no wonder that I’m fumin’/ If we’re to come around again/ I want to come back as a human’.

Meanwhile my friend in America had a hound dog called Tramp who enthusiastically lived up to his name.

He was a great one for knocking over trash cans and his master, who was using marijuana for more than medical purposes, saw to it that Tramp, along with himself, was stoned quite a lot of the time.

One time he blew a line of coke up Tramp’s nose and when we went to the local lake, Tramp swam out to the middle of the lake and then swam up and down in a straight line to the amusement of bystanders on the shore.

So which would you rather be, Hachiko or Tramp?

Successful people say that everybody gets a chance to say what they want to say and be what they want to be – but that’s bunkum.

You don’t choose where you are born or the circumstances you are born into.

So to succeed from a disadvantaged start it takes enduring effort and fine focus to be what you want to be.

In the immediate future, when the nature of work will change to match the increasing demand from the technology industries and social media, things as fundamental as loyalty will go out the window.

The long-term contract will disappear and with it the chances of cultivating an attitude that uses loyalty as a weapon of strength.

ON the other hand you can always decide to be a scamp like Tramp and go looking for dustbins to knock over. It’s a much more colourful route and one used by a contrasting parade of wierdos, winos and the wonderful.

If this is your choice, then your only loyalty is to yourself.

How, though, do you go about establishing what constitutes loyalty to yourself? Do you tell the truth? Do you admit to yourself your shortcomings?

Do you commit yourself to a standard you set for yourself? Are you faithful to friends? To partners and spouses? To your country? In your lifetime, you probably won’t have a statue raised to you and you probably won’t get to swim up and down a lake in a straight line.

So is the truth of the matter somewhere between Hachiko and Tramp? Probably.