The Owner leads me past a pair of rats with bushy tails and I chase them into a tree where they sit, looking down at me, holding their breakfast in their paws. They are squirrels, she says. Aren’t they sweet. Sweet. Sweet? It’s a rat with a bushy tail and […]
The Owner says I should not have eaten the Book. She says she required the Book in order to digest its contents. I don’t understand this. She claims she has been digesting its contents for weeks yet she she hadn’t even taken a single bite. And how is she so […]
The Owner tells a Person in the Coffee Shop we are going to visit some Islands. She says we are going to fly there. The Owner says it will be the first time her dog has flown. She asks the Person if Other Dogs are good when flying. Clearly the […]
We have been watching rugby, a game which involves a group of men chasing a ball up and down a field, with occasional interventions by a whistling Owner to takes it off them then throws it back. These men have the Souls of Dogs. The Owner cheered when the Men […]
There are Some Dogs who don’t share their ball. The Owner says such dogs should all be called Boris. (I say I can’t always tell when she is joking. She says she never jokes about anyone called Boris.) Such dogs carry with them an Aura of Capitalism, the antithesis of […]
The Owner is obsessing about philosophy. She is writing her PhD on the philosophy and law of organ donation and she keeps talking about deemed consent. This is when someone is understood to have consented to donate their organs because they did not refuse. It is possible, if the conditions […]
Today when I wake it is raining heavily. Usually when this happens we stay indoors till it stops, but today the Owner says it isn’t going to stop, the lead is produced, and out, it seems, we go. Come on, she says, we are in it together. Solidarity, Hergest, she […]
This morning, walking through the park, I found a particularly well-concealed piece of silver foil filled with attractive white crystals. I was just beginning to snack, relying on the well established common law principle that if something is abandoned it is res nullius (nobody’s thing) and finders are keepers, when […]
The Owner says that if I didn’t have the wrong bits she would rename me Lady Justice Hale, as this is a name that a Moral Dog would wear with pride. I am not sure which of my bits prevent my being given whichever name she wishes, but I would […]
Well. I had not realised the true purpose of the shower. Identity theft. We entered the shower smelling largely as we should. The Owner, admittedly, still bore more than a hint of chemical geranium tempered with chloroform, which she seems to preload herself with every morning. I was ripe, a […]
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 […]
Hergest, a Hound's Philosophy 