I like it when the Owner stops at Le Pain Quotidien to buy a scone because it comes with accompanying cheese slices and as you may have surmised, I have an affinity for cheese. Or so I thought. How was I to know that you cannot generalise all cheese served […]
The Owner has been reading the story of my namesake, the Hergest Hound, dog companion of Sir Thomas Vaughan of Hergest, a fifteenth century landowner who lived at Hergest Hall on the border between Herefordshire and Wales. The Hergest Hound had his own bedroom at the top of the house. […]
It is important, for the Moral Dog, to have autonomy. Both Kant and John Stuart Mill were clear on that, and they didn’t agree on much else, I can tell you. The Owner says autonomy is the capacity to be my Own Dog. She suggests that when I decide to […]
The Owner says we should go to Obedience classes. I said fine. Although I don’t think she’s that bad.
I know there’s something down there. I just know. I can’t explain it. I didn’t do it just to pull the rosemary out, it just came out with the soil. Anyway, she can always put it back. She’d have thanked me if it had been the Lost Ark. She says […]
The Owner asks me what is so interesting about fox poo. Where do I even begin? Sadly, it turns out that the question was rhetorical. It is clear that the Owner has no real interest in understanding the magical lure of fox poo. As I begin to explain the lead […]
Today we visit the vet. The vet comments on my tail, which is white (whilst the rest of me is mainly brown). The Vet says not all dogs of my variety keep their tails. He says I seem glad that I still have it. Glad that I still have it? […]
The Owner says she can tell that I am a Happy Dog since happiness correlates with many intuitively relevant dog variables, particularly tail wagging. It is true that I was, for example, extremely happy when I saw the Owner this morning, as I am a Dog of small bladder and […]
Julian Savulescu says that moral enhancement is essential for humanity to triumph because human beings won’t become moral enough fast enough to save themselves just by trying to be better people, even given that they have Greta Thunberg. He means he thinks that science should be used to make people morally […]
The German Shorthaired Pointer is a stubborn dog, although this is something of a value-judgement, since stubbornness is only perseverance viewed from the other side. Where would Frodo Baggins have been without stubbornness? Lording it over us all as a Wraith-Hobbit wearing the Ring of Doom, that’s where. Stubbornness is […]
Life is not always just. The Owner says what goes around comes around but this takes absolutely no account of the basic unfairness of pigeons. Pigeons cheat. I put a lot of effort in. Watching, thinking, stalking, tracking, creeping. The creeping, in particularly, takes a lot of thought. A lot. […]
I like Small Humans. Unlike some (fluffy) dogs I have met I will not joke that I would not eat a whole one at once, it goes against my instincts. I would not even eat Caspar (although light chewing is acceptable). I have the instincts of a Rescue Dog. Today […]
The Owner and I both, it seems, like cheese. How should I look at this? Should I (a) take the narrow survival-of-the-fittest view that velociraptors epitomise, the view that life is a competition for cheese in which I am pitted against the Owner and may, ultimately, have to choose between […]
Usual trip to coffee shop with owner this morning. Met Caspar, who was looking impossibly fluffy. The Owner petted him. AGAIN. So much for monogamy. Attempted to eat him under guise of puppy play. We’ll see who’s cute when she gets dog hairs in her cappuccino. The Owner retrieves me […]
Humans are deeply illogical. In my park, the one where I walk every day for my allotted exercise (some terrible fascist Owner formula decrees that I cannot pull her around the part for more than 15 minutes twice a day lest she wear out) there is a certain illogic. There […]
Hergest, a Hound's Philosophy 