One Can Only Wonder At How Her Children Would Behave…

Melissa Kite on dog (non)training:

The man at the next table looked down at my fidgeting spaniel and shook his head. ‘Not trained,’ he said.

How rude. There I was, having a quiet drink with my friend at the local pub, when the man at the next table decided to give me some unsolicited advice about how to control my dog.

Turns out, you need it...

The noise of the spaniel howling and the chair scraping across the flagstones and me gasping ‘Oh, Cydney, please!’ every few minutes was rather ruining the ambience of one of Surrey’s most modish gastropubs (clientele include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and there is often a queue for the helipad).

Also, it was quiz evening, so the howling did rather interfere with the compère calling out the questions. But you have to understand that Cydney has sat through a lot of these quizzes and is beginning to get a bit hacked off.

Then leave the dumb beast at home! It's not like he answers many questions, is it? And if your pooch is 'hacked off', imagine how the rest of the pub feels...

But the man at the next table didn’t see it that way. The man at the next table was in a party of people that included a visually impaired lady who had a guide dog. An impeccably behaved guide dog. A guide dog who lay at his owner’s feet and barely moved, except when Cydney pulled me across the floor on my seat and threw herself on top of it.

/doublefacepalm

The man was something to do with guide dog training and had also tamed bull mastiffs, which was just about as impressive a thing as anyone on planet earth could do. He told us so after striding over to our table to make clear that my dog was what those in the dog-training business like him would technically term ‘not trained’.

Those of us not in the dog training business have choicer descriptions of it. And of the owner...

‘UP!’ he yelled furiously at her. She batted the Lab with her paws. ‘NOW!’ She stood up and turned her back on him. ‘SIT!’ She looked over towards the bar. ‘It’s no good,’ I tried to explain to him. ‘She doesn’t do sit.’

Oddly enough, it seems she had an uncontrollable horse, as well. Are we starting to see a pattern here? We can only thank god this woman has a child substitute, and not a real child...