Cats
and dogs are taking over from cockroaches
by
Robert LaFrance
It is now about mid-August of a fine
summer, weather-wise, and the folks of the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals) are having an equally fine summer, lobbying-wise.
Yesterday my television told me –
without my even asking – that the New Brunswick government had now passed a law
that prevents dog owners from keeping their pets tied outside between the hours
of 11:00 pm and 6:00 am.
I realize that such laws are put
there to stop ignoramuses and cruel people from mistreating their pets, but
like gun laws, this one will only result in inconvenience for one and all. It
will not make cruel people treat their pets any better. There are already laws
on the books that are supposed to protect animals from mistreatment, but week
after week we hear of some cat lady with 3,288 pets or of someone who left his
or her dogs in their closed car during a hot day and killed them.
I am not quite sure what country
people with outdoor watchdogs are going to do now; there’s little enough
protection against prowlers. It’s 10:59 pm – “Come on inside, Rover, you might
freeze your little paws.”
Our dog Kezman and his predecessors
always slept out on the porch at night and they had to be tied or else they
would have ripped the arms off a 3:00 am visitor. Their job at night was to
make a noise, period, but they couldn’t have heard the burglars if they had
been snug in the living room and watching ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ re-runs. Instead,
at night our dogs slept in their insulated doghouse with lots of water and food
handy.
I’m thinking that the SPCA folks
need to focus their energy more on ‘preventing cruelty to animals’ than on
mounting massive campaigns designed to keep dog owners subservient to their
pets. Apparently dogs, in their view, are those small yapping snapping
jumping-up creatures that are forever annoying everyone but their owners who
are busy funding the multi-billion dollar pet food industry. Oops! Did I say
‘owners’? How can one be the ‘owner’ of such a wonderful entity? If you look
around, you will note that, today, it seems to be the other way around anyway;
the pets own the humans.
It’s always interesting to see one
of those TV commercials for Lysol, or one of those other chemicals in spray
cans used to distribute that chemical on furniture so the pet odour is replaced
by springtime fresh aroma. It never seemed to occur to anyone to keep their
pets off the furniture.
Enough of that rant. We don’t allow
dogs or cats inside our house, but the fact that others do is their own
business. As long as a pet is not abused, people should be allowed to keep them
outside. Our dog Kezman would never want to come into the house; in two minutes
he would whine to go out to his comfortable doghouse where he wouldn’t have to
listen to the TV news reporting yet another good-intentioned law that wasn’t
well thought out.
It is said that, if the world were blown up in
nuclear explosions, the only thing that would survive would be cockroaches. The
way dogs and cats are coddled these days, I’d have to say they now have the
edge, in radiation proof cocoons while their owners – sorry! – fry to a crisp.
***********************
To get away from all that serious
stuff, I am also here to report that apple season is here and that I have found
a new and very efficient way to make apple pies.
The yellow transparents were the
first to ripen; they were at their best between 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm on
Thursday, August 14. I am not kidding. If you aren’t standing right under the
tree when they ripen you miss it, something like peonies, but then you don’t
eat them. Just as a guess, if a yellow transparent apple is green at noon, it
could just as easily be ‘past its best’ and mushy by supper time.
But back to the subject of making
apple pies: As soon as the first hundred YT apples got ripe and fell off the
tree, I grabbed the lawn mower, set the blades at a medium level or height and
went over the area. After that, I was left with a hundred peeled apples which I
quickly put in a bag and took them inside to ‘she who must be obeyed’. I didn’t
wait for her exclamations of gratitude, but I fancied I heard them after I
dashed out to get another hundred.
Curiously enough, there was no apple
pie for supper dessert, but I am sure that must have been because she made the
pies and then froze them for a tasty treat in January.
-end-
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