The Owner went out without me today. She was gone for hours. The dog sitter and I watched some interesting and informative films.

Then she returned as if she had not abandoned me to whatever fate might bring.

What if the earth had frozen through some terrible climatic catastrophe whilst she was out, leading to an instant ice age, turning all of London to ice wasteland allowing predatory wolves to come slinking down through the Arctic wastes to eat us all? What if the Vogons had arrived and announced that the entire planet was going to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic superhighway, whilst I had been transported by an improbability device to the spaceship of Zaphod Beeblebrox? What if an alien spaceship had landed in the kitchen and left behind some kind of mutant alien with tentacles that had eaten me whole and was, even now, masquerading as me in order to lure her to her fate?

Have you been a good boy, Hergest, she asks?

Why does she want to know now, all of a sudden? She didn’t want to know when the wolves were coming. Why should I imagine she even cares? I could be a mutant alien with tentacles already for all she knows. What is the point of being a good boy anyway? Anything could have happened to me in space and she would never have known my fate. Zaphod Beeblebrox has almost no morals at all.

She rubs my stomach as if I am the same dog that I always was and puts the kettle on.

I get a sense that she has never even thought about the possibility of Arctic wastes, planet-demolishing Vogons or mutant tentacles. Does she have the slightest idea what’s out there? It could be even worse. Perhaps, in fact, the mutant alien with the tentacles has eaten her and even now is trying to lure me into its slavering jaws.

Carefully I edge into my basket and hide behind Squeaky Cat. We watch her for tentacles.

She looks at the dogsitter. What on earth has he been watching? She asks.

It strikes me as Morally unsound to blame the dogsitter. She was the one that left me.

Categories: dog philosophy evolution films philosophy Uncategorized

Hergest the Hound

I am a dog of many thoughts.