POOR DOG (OR IS HE ?)

I’m not sure whether we should ever dare to under-estimate the intelligence of dogs. Maybe if our politicians took some notice of them we might have more sensible laws than ever emanated from the Federal Department of Stupidity.

For a brief moment let us just float off into the realms of fantasy and try to imagine, as they sit there looking fondly into our eyes, what these mutts are really thinking.

Dogs do have a stupid side just like we humans. Take for example the day that I installed a Doggie Door. It was this occasion that made me believe that maybe he was a little dyslectic. At first he was happy to enter and exit through the flap and all was good in the world.. However after a couple of days I attached a sign found in the shed which read ‘Beware Of The Dog’.

Well … it seems I had put the non-existent cat in amongst the non-existent pigeons for after that attachment he stood back trembling and unable to use it. Asking him what was wrong his reply surprised me.

“I’m not going in there” he said, “that sign says beware of the God.”

“Don’t be silly”, I said, “that word is Dog”

“I don’t care, even if it’s a dog do you think I’’m going through that flap to be mauled?”

The dog also seems to worry about where he is going whenever we drive away from home he whimpers and whinges and drools constantly all over the dashboard of the car. However, when driving back home he curls up on the passenger seat or his fluffy pillow behind the passengers seat and drifts to wherever dogs drift off to.

While Peppie is out of the room, probably for a poop, I might mention that the poor thing has such a low image of himself and a self-esteem that is almost non-existent, he worries like mad every time I leave the room, he wants to be my constant companion and seems to find great pleasure in nuzzling up against my bag of nuts when he sits with me on the lounge watching ‘Wibbly Pig’.

He will not leave me alone it’s like living with an obsessive compulsive body hugger, and the eyes, the bloody eyes, they constantly follow you around the room either looking sad and depressed as if contemplating suicide or bright and happy as if he just found an endless tube of bone marrow.

Medically speaking dogs must have extremely acidic tummies almost capable of dissolving rocks. He can gnaw down a bone the size of a steers leg to swallowing size in one sitting but it doesn’t come back out that way. I seem to expect that he should be grimacing in pain trying to pass a sheeps shank out his anus in the same condition it went in.

I noticed too that he can be a tad jealous at times if he thinks his position might be being usurped. The day I brought home my first two goats, Mum Donna Kebab and her son Shish, Peppie was eager to hop up into the tray of the ute so I allowed him in. Immediately he was up and mounting Donna to show her who was the boss around here. I separated them and put the goats in the small yard for quarantine.

The next morning, after he realized that the goats did not sleep in the house he was content to let them be. He’s good with the goats although there is the occasional brief confrontation between them over some misunderstanding in the yard. Usually while Peppie is playing marbles with their droppings.

As an aside, I advise readers not to purchase goats from anyone down a Teesdale. The first morning in quarantine showed every indication of a massive infestation of worms in their guts to the point where four week old Shish was a close to karking it just as I am preparing to let them loose.

A good drench a week apart and they are fine again. However I do believe that the impossibly slow growth of Shish was caused by these worms. After six months he is little bigger than when I first brought him to Godfrey Zone.

Since becoming the foster parent of a whippet there are a number of things I have noticed about dogs.

Unlike Alpacas they know when to come in out of the rain just like we humans.

To smell like as Fox you roll in their shit and then come and sit on the Lounge. Fox Poo is particularly nasty.

They know how not to do things for themselves. Even though he has a doggie door I still find I am occasionally opening the whole door for him.

If humans really are at the top of the evolutionary tree how come it’s us who have to pick up their poo.

Dogs know how to give you ‘the eyes’’, little wonder we always run out of the best biscuits.

“Alright but this is the last bickie!””

Yes - Dogs are sometimes smarter than us.

“ I don’t sleep in your bed why do you try to sleep in mine”

I suppose I should sum up this story with a couple more short tales. I have already mentioned that he seems a little dyslectic and I’m sure he’s trying to tell me he has Obsessive Repulsive Disorder, he has difficulty concentrating on the television even when ‘Wilfred’ is on and seems he is overly worried about the fact he might get Procrastinate Cancer if I don’t keep providing him with big bones.

He is presently on a diet having topped twenty kilo’s from his normal sixteen and seems to dislike me calling him Lardarse and claiming he is just big boned. His weight gain was more than likely being brought on by the fact that he had recently lost a couple of gonads somewhere in Ballarat. What a day that was, the moment he realized he was about to lose them he went off like a bloody Catherine Wheel that had fallen off its stick and his tail grabbed at every stick of furniture between the front door and the sleeping theatre.

When asked by his girlfriend Diva where they had gone he claimed that he had hit his head, got percussion and they had just fallen off so as to avoid admitting he had been taken advantage of.

DEDICATED TO HORROR

Recently on TV the feature film by Francisa Ford Coppola 'Apocalypse Now' was rescreened. Whilst I had seen it on its original release I saw it this time in a different light given recent history has introduced a new and even more menacing threat than the fictional 'domino theory' - that of a fanatical adherence to an imaginary God called Allah and variously reported as either Jihadism, Islamist or Criminally Insane.

The climax of the movie was the clash between the assassin Martin Sheen and the rogue US Officer Marlon Brando. Marlon has surrounded himself with blood-thirsty savages willing to kill, maim and slaughter anyone who gets in their way. He claims it is 'perfect warfare' blind obedience to a cause without conscience.

Brando gives an example of how a village of children was innoculated my a medical team against a fatal disease only to have the village overtaken a short ime later by the other side. Promptly the command went out, and followed to the letter, to cut the innoculated arm off every child and how these arms were then piled up for public display and gruesome warning.

This epitomises todays Terrorist, a illiterate moron who will follow blindly every command given to them regardless of the meaning or the consequences. ISIS and all the other mad mobs will follow their insane mullahs, imams and sheiks without thinking and without conscience.

Anyone who actually believes that this is good for humanity, even faux-Australian citizens, should be removed from the human race and I for one would shed no tears on their passing.

Redneck Salute

ON YOUTH GENOCIDE

(Another Travelogue)

Cambodia is one of those countries where the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the most despicable of acts of genocide since WWII were perpetrated against a peaceful and spiritual community, and where Australia now pays to case manage our so-called illegal boat people.

Politics is a dirty business and the dirty business goes on more than two decades after a few million people disappeared off the face of the earth. Everywhere you go in Cambodia you are faced with grinding poverty, entrenched corruption, continually changing political allegiances, and a Royal family that despite being descendants of a long line of apolitical ancestors has managed to lurch conveniently from the extreme left where the concept of royalty or class doesn’t exist to the extreme right where royalty determines every persons life in their very vertically structured class system. Cambodia is still ruled by a chain-smoking puppet of Vietnam, it has never known in the last half decade any leader but a foreigner brought in to continue with a virtual one-party state controlled from Hanoi.

For those of us who are Monty Python followers people of power, and subsequently the ones with all the money, are easily recognised on the streets of Pnom Penn, ‘ they are the only ones not covered in shit’

Pol Pot wiped out the value of the currency by simply burning it all, wiped out any evidence of ownership by burning it all, destroyed as much as he could of the religious institutions as well as their temples, imprisoned anyone who could read and murdered anyone who could write as well. Impossible rules were put in place whereby anything but ‘Yes’ meant a death sentence. You are a reactionary? Yes! You like this government? Yes! You love being tortured? Yes! The Killing Fields are highly productive and lucrative? Yes!

The only things that appear to have remained untouched were Ankor Wat because it was so huge they couldn’t blow it up, the Golden Pagoda because it would upset the King, and Royal Cambodja Airlines because flying was the only way the Khmer Rouge could travel around the country.

Even when I visited more than 25 years after the genocide and Pol Pot was languishing in Hell, driving down a suburban street could be done no faster than 5Km an hour so that one didn’t end up with whiplash from the jazz-beat jolting in and out of the potholes. In fact the only way shopkeepers could get customers was to constantly be running out and filling the potholes with little rocks to smooth out the road in front of their business.

Half the foreign aid going into Cambodia goes straight into the pockets of the ruling elite, politicians and military leaders. This of course includes anything we pay to them to take these bloody boat people.

The dilemma faced by foreign aid workers is to either allow this situation to continue or stop the aid and see most of the population starve to death. The ruling elite seem also to be the only ones that have a house, when those who were still alive returned to the cities it was first in first served and anything that still had a roof was closely guarded by armed soldiers reserving it for the next up in rank.

Pol Pot’s concept of returning Cambodia to its rural roots and thus to its glorious past was a reasonable concept, to rid the country of everything that was decadent as a means of introducing social equality, strip the country of its shameful colonial past and its capitalist future, in effect to start all over again with ‘Year Zero’, may have been philosophically palatable but totally destructive. It was the way in which he plunged the country back into the Stone Age where bumping off anyone who didn’t belong to your tribe or religion was considered an acceptable, practical and honourable thing to do. Very cleansing and remarkably similar to what the Islamic fundamentalists are trying to do to each other today.

To get to the real point of the story. How are we going to solve the social problems without the radical practice of the moral genocide of our young people? Half the government funding into welfare goes straight into the pockets of the ruling bureaucrats and the social services elite both in non-government and private agencies.

The dilemma faced by dedicated and useful welfare workers is to either allow this situation to continue or stop the money and see most of the population of unemployable young people drug themselves to death. The ruling elite hand down unrealistic dictates according to this theorist or that child psychologist which chew up resources, like the robber barons of the faux-employment training industry.

When we are working with young people who we feel are totally out of wack with normal behaviour, whose practices are socially unacceptable we can’t use the ‘Year Zero’ approach of going back and rebuilding their life from scratch. The damage has already been done. The Buddhist concept of the Willow bending with the wind until the storm passes and then continuing to grow is perhaps a lesson that we might all need to learn.

Can we not accept drug use, prostitution and violence as being part of many an adolescent psyche instead of obstinately sticking to our guns and our own out-dated moral values. Perhaps bending with the whirlwind created by damaged youth and hang in until the storm passes and their energy is sapped before quietly and patiently redirecting their energy into more productive outcomes may be the better option for the community as a whole.

In Cambodia you have a choice of right and left hand drive cars depending on what neighbouring country they were imported from. Should we not have a similar right and left hand concept of working with young people depending from where they have come from?

Do we wipe out their currency, the means by which they survive? Should we burn all their baggage and pretend it didn’t exist in an effort to begin rebuilding again. The Year Zero concept is to expunge them from our thoughts, to not deal with their problems until they become more compliant to our case management principles.

In the words of Ingersoll ‘regardless of what we do to a person we cannot force anyone to think or act differently’.   

PETER PIPER PICKED A PECK OF PICKLED PEPPERS

And that allows us to segway into the subject of P.E.T.A which stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is supported by the Rabid Vegan Lobby and not as someone suggested to me as People for the Eating of Treated Agriculture which is a different group supported by the Genetic Modification Lobby.

I think that our first argument against this truly crazy cult is that if God didn’t want us to eat animals then why did he give us the spear and the fishing rod. According to ‘his book’ animals were created and put on this earth (at least the ones saved by Noah) to serve mankind and I don’t think he meant for them to work at Café No.80.

So if they don’t believe in God then what do they believe in, here are ten examples from the P.E.T.A Code of Ethics.

1. Humans should not eat honey because that is stealing the bees hard work.

2. As we do not pay our animals that is akin to ‘slavery’.

3. The confinement of animals against their will is contrary to the law of ‘habeus corpus’.

4. Animals are given no Public Holidays nor Annual Leave.

5. Female animals are not allowed to enjoy ‘Labour Day’.

6. Animals should not be forced to grow unwanted skin, fur, wool or feathers just to meet market demand.

7. Cows should be permitted to give free milk to every sucker that comes along.

8. Milkers should be forced to warm their hands first.

9. Dogs should be free to sniff everyone’s butt.

10. All animal slaughter facilities should be forced to close the week before Sunday.

But do true Vegans understand the horror taking place when they eat their toasted facuchio?, fuckarchio? pinnochio? Bloody hell - when they eat their tomato and lettuce sandwiches.

We are told by the most avid gardeners (who know all about growing things) that talking to your flowers invigorates them. And how does a seed know which way to grow? This would indicate that they can hear us which would support the argument that vegetables have brains. If they have brains, they have veins, and air, and nerves, sex and all the other things that make up life. Bloody hell…. Eating vegetables is Cannabalism. O.M.G

Now I feel guilty about the Mung Beans sautéed in Cogi Berry Juice not just about the Pigs Nipple Chips I bought at the Markets. What would vegans feel about the grubs and bugs they eat accidentally in the garden salad their neighbour tosses onto their plate, or the spiders and bugs consumed when sleeping with your mouths open.

Sometimes, every now and then people who believe in some of this rubbish should sit down in a quite place on a regular basis and either reconsider how stupid they really are or just take a knife and slit their wrists. After all they’d be doing us a favour in volunteering to become compost, which will grow grass, which will then be eaten by a bloody goat. What a turn up for the books that would be - being eaten by the very animal you just saved.

BEN DENISE