The dog was called Clumsy; Stupid, Dirty or Disgusting would have been other suitable names as far as our family was concerned. Because Clumsy's favourite toilet was immediately outside our front door, and his noisome doings were daily trampled into the chocolate-brown hall carpet by herds of elephant, or children.
Not only that, but Clumsy was a biter or, to be exact, a nipper. A runtish mongrel with vague Border Collie/rat antecedents, he was prone to snapping if you remonstrated with him about his faecal activities. During the four years we spent in the class-riven community of Cromarty in the Black Isle (illustrated by the existence of two playgroups, one for the offspring of council-house dwelling "Croms", one for bohemian brats from listed buildings), we learnt to hate Clumsy.
And now he's dead. At the age of 19, he is not only deceased, but well on the way to legendary status. His death and subsequent burial have been covered by several tabloid newspapers, and a poem in his honour - written by our former next-door neighbour - was performed at an official memorial service conducted by a retired minister, Ken Dupar.
For it seems that Cromarty is in mourning for the dog that used to live beneath the reception desk of the Royal Hotel, and was, according to Revd Dupar, not only "a four-legged institution" but a mutt who "showed the faith and trust we should all have in God".
I have been wrestling with this last statement for days now. Is God somehow represented by a nasty, gnash-prone dog with a tendency to deposit virulent excrement on my doorstep? Was the grace that stopped me ripping the thing's diminutive lungs out divine? Must we trust that, in God's Great Plan, the existence of horrible, spoilt, dirty beasts like Clumsy brings out the good in us?
I think not. Pet sentimentalism always reminds me of the tendency of various senior National Socialists to cuddle furry creatures and giggle at their carpet-soiling while ordering a little genocide before breakfast. Pets are good, but only up to a point. Or Pointer. Or Greyhound.
There are several factors I perhaps ought to own up to here. First, my university career involved a brain-mincing year on the moral rights of animals, which left me vegan for all of two weeks. But then I was going out with an animal rights protester at the time. Second, I own the Greatest Dog In History, Quoyle the levitating labrador, one cat and something approximately feline whose function in life is to kill rabbits and deposit them, headless, on my pillow. I'm not going to mention the pigs and the sheep. They only get in the house by accident. Third, I will personally provide these various pets with a passport to the animal afterlife if they cause harm to any human or become unviably ill. And there will be no memorial service.
There is another canine connected to the household, called Yum Yum, who is currently away being trained to be the sheepdog he physically resembles. Yum (the double-barrelled moniker has temporarily been abandoned as too embarrassing to shout during sheepdog trials) is a family pet whose training has involved forcing him to rediscover that he is, in fact, fully dog: he sleeps in a shed these days, not a bed. The process of instruction is utterly unsentimental, but never cruel. Yum - the most intelligent animal I have ever encountered - is being taught to be what he was bred for. It was either that or have him eat another partition wall.
These animals exist because of and for humans; their lives will be short, and happy in as much as that does not affect human happiness. They are all functional, not just the (eventually) skilled Yum Yum; they either deal with rodents or give excuses for long walks; and I'm sure there are other things cats are good for. I just can't think of them offhand.
Meanwhile, back in Cromarty, they are doubtless raising money for a memorial to Clumsy, the dog whose only function was to evoke in humans a sense of gratitude that they didn't own him. Perhaps that's what the memorial service was really all about. All those fine, stirring words really meant: thank God he's dead, and we don't have to pretend to like him any more. After all, that's the essence of religion, isn't it?
