Pets Part 2: How come poodles don't come in pink?

Have you ever wondered why your dog doesn't seem to match your clothes? No, me neither. Though some silly people do treat their pooches as accessories - with potentially dire consequences. Take Camilla the chihuahua, for example. Neil Martin, manager at Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary in Edenfield, told the Lancashire Telegraph in 2011, how this poor dog developed a skin disorder from being carted around in a handbag. Yes really. She was treated as a fashion accessory and dumped when the owners could not be bothered to deal with her allergy. Also, carrying dogs around means they do not learn to socialise properly, which is apparently why Camilla is aggressive.

Rather than, or perhaps as well as, being treated as accessories, of course, some pets are laden with accessories.



Photo taken from http://www.pluspets.net/dressed-pets/

Does this dog look happy to you? Dignified, perhaps? I especially wonder about the glasses, though perhaps they are sunglasses and are supposed to actually be useful. I did use to dress up my own dog, but I was 10 years old and still silly enough to not worry too much about the dog's rights. However, why any adult would want to humiliate and encumber their pet like that is beyond me.

Perhaps if more dogs looked like the vision in pink above, my children would not be anywhere near as scared of them. Which brings me onto the question of why many dog owners feel entitled to impose their slobbering killing machines on the rest of us? A few months ago, for example, a big (ish) black dog was bouncing around happily, near our young daughters, who were excited but scared. The owner cheerfully said (in a posh, Surrey accent) that the dog was harmless, as she "looooves children". Perhaps she forgot to add "as a snack", because as my husband bravely protected the girls against this blood-thirsty creature, the dog playfully nibbled at his hand instead of theirs. Of course, I may be "slightly" exaggerating...

 

Perhaps our daughters would be better off sticking to interacting with pets on a screen like the 7 year old girl who adopted me on the walk home from school. She chatted happily about a dog game she owned which meant I ended up having to persuade her that poodles do not "come in" pink. This was obviously before I saw the pinked-up pooch above.

The girl could have had an interesting and totally fruitless chat with the Argentinian man, who thought he was buying 2 poodles, when really he was buying 2 groomed, white ferrets, pumped up on steroids. He bought them at a local bazaar, which makes the story even more, ahem, bizarre. Why he could not tell the difference is anybody's guess, though the ferrets had been given steroids since birth (see below. The ferret is on the right, in case you were wondering).



Image credit: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/home-garden/ferrets-on-steroids-sold-as-poodles/story-fngwib2y-1226615046465

Now, I was going to tell you the true and astonishing story of the Indian man who married a dog, because an astrologer had told him that this would cure his bad leg. I then discovered that this was not the only incident of a man marrying a dog, as superstitious people in India do sometimes arrange marriages to animals in order to lift curses. Another Indian man married a dog in 2007, because he believed that stoning two dogs to death had somehow cursed him (he had been suffering from paralysis and hearing loss since). He believed that marrying a female dog would lift this curse. Sounds dubious to me, but not as bad as the two-year old Indian boy who in 2009 was forced to marry a dog in order to protect himself and his village from wild animals. I - am - speechless. Which never happens. Honestly.