‘Poo-pooing’ happiness

So Dr Killjoy and Sister Misery are back. And on the very same morning as I received my rates demand. One has to wonder whether it’s worth going on. The rates bill was the usual hoot. For the nth consecutive year my rates rose by more than the rate of inflation. Yet nowhere on the multiple pretty inserts did it acknowledge that. There are times when one feels like a dairy cow.

Irked and impotent I drove the dog to the recreation ground. There I discovered that the council, excited no doubt by its imminent windfall, had splashed out on a bright new sign. ‘‘Dogs on leash,’’ it said, ‘‘$300 fine applies.’’ And there was even a drawing of a dog on a leash to pre-empt the defence of illiteracy.

Well now, I’ve been letting a dog off the leash at the rec every day for a quarter of a century. That’s roughly 9000 visits or $2.7 million of potential fines. In that time the number of deaths, maulings, distressing incidents or even minor inconveniences the dogs and I have caused amounts to – one moment while I tap the calculator – zero. And while I’m at it, the quantity of excrement the dogs or I have left behind is also zero. For in a place where kids may play I am scrupulous about picking the stuff up and so are all the dog owners I know.

(There was a time when the council seemed almost on our side. It installed an excrementcollector-dispenser – a shiny metal tube mounted on a pole that dispensed, in theory, a bag at a time. But the council soon tired of restocking it and took it away again.)

Of course, I recognise that some dog owners don’t clean up after their dogs. But by not doing so they are already ignoring a sign and flouting the law. So putting up a new sign and imposing a new law is not going to deter them. It will deter only the law abiding, the good dog owners.

No doubt it was done by the book. Submissions will have been made by the sort of people who make submissions, and meetings attended by the sort of people who attend meetings. But oh, it depresses me.

Dogs run and sniff. We walk and look. To yoke us together is to yoke a Ferrari to a John Deere.

Dogs need to run. Like toddlers they exult to feel the grass between their toes. To see a dog chasing a ball or romping with another dog is to see happiness. All happiness is good by me. But not by Dr Killjoy and not by Sister Misery. For them every dog is a threat and a nuisance, an inferior creature. So the dog must be tethered to its owner, even though dogs and people move differently about the surface of this earth. Dogs run and sniff. We walk and look. To yoke us together is to yoke a Ferrari to a John Deere.

One afternoon last month I spent an hour at the rec with my dog and a keen wind. And dog walkers. Perhaps half a dozen came by in the course of that hour.

The dogs rejoiced. The owners stood around and spoke of the weather and rejoiced by proxy. But that’ll all end now because we’ll never know when some council functionary, whose salary we’re paying, will leap from the bushes with a whoop and a ha and dun us 300 bucks for the crime of giving and finding happiness.

My dog is getting old. If I outlive him I doubt I’ll replace him. It’s just getting too hard. Score one for Dr Killjoy, one for Sister Misery.