According to one of my mistress’s friends she likes her men to have four legs and no thumb. So dogs and cats are fine but humans are definitely not. ‘Why no thumb?’ I asked naively. That apparently is to stop them being able to use a remote control. So whilst on the one paw I fit the bill, on the other paw (or in fact any one of the remaining three) I would be a sad disappointment to her as it wouldn’t be the first time I had sat on the remote control and inadvertently changed channel!
I have been thinking about global warming. Obviously as a dog there are a lot of things I don’t understand and being not quite a year old doesn’t give me many other years to compare the weather with. It all started when I was listening to someone on the radio talking about carbon dioxide offset. Apparently some very nice people have set themselves up to help me have less of an adverse impact on the environment. If I go on a flight I can voluntarily give them some money and they will allocate me a tree to compensate for all my pollution. There is the problem, ‘allocate’. I don’t want a tree that another dog has already peed on. I want them to plant me a whole new tree of my own that I can christen and visit at times of my choosing. Now don’t get me wrong, if I do visit I will of course have another tree allocated to me to cover the pollution caused by the first visit, but it is important to feel I have added a tree and not simply given them some money to maintain the status quo. They even give me a nice little calculator to work out how much pollution I create but how do they know whether my plane is full and how much my luggage weighs? They tell me the tree will not be felled for 99 years but what if it blows down? I live by a forest and there are always trees falling down. I wonder if my forest has been ‘allocated’ or whether I can save the middle man and claim that my journeys are already being offset?