I Wipe My Own Ass! (A Long Overdue Defence Of The Hong Kong Dog!)

Nothing tells me I’m going to have a good day today more than the sight of a Hong Kong person wiping shit from a dog’s arsehole. The smile it puts on my face will invariably last for the whole day and into the following morning when it happens all over again.

Such an act is of course only a small part of a much rehearsed ritual which involves laying newspaper so the discerning doggie doesn’t endure the disgrace of dropping blocks directly onto the pavement. Oh the humanity!

As in cities like Milan and (even more grotesquely so) Paris, most dogs in Hong Kong are simply humanized fashion accessories at best. Sai Kung, an area of outstanding natural beauty in Hong Kong, is transformed on Sundays into an area of outstanding human stupidity as carry-bag canines are paraded by their a la mode masters.

Whilst there, I witnessed one woman screaming at her dog in Cantonese for laying its scent on a bollard and then sniffing around it. I got the feeling if her human child was chewing on its own shit she wouldn’t have cared but for her prize poodle it was a different story.

The dog – obviously still working through the finer points of Cantonese intonations – assumed this to be an invitation to have a quick nibble at his non-existent long-chastised balls; I thought she was going to have an aneurysm.

If you ask me, taking your dog to a place which has been visited by around 1000 others of its species that day is like taking a mainland Chinese person to a property sale; it doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind!

I am of course aware that speaking to dogs in native human tongue and discouraging the ‘instinctive’ behaviours of our pets is typical in the United Kingdom as well. However, there are some cases here where things go too far. One day, I expect to see a Hong Kong dog being wheeled along apace in a pram cackling naively under a jangling mobile whilst the limp and bloodied remains of a three year old toddler tosses and tumbles along behind it strangled on a lead.

And you have to wonder whether the dog really aspires to that kind of ‘luxury’. It’s very hard to lick your itchy arsehole or pant for mere survival when you’re wrapped in 13.5 tog of stifling quilted misery. Then of course, if the cooking canine should overheat to the point of death, it suffers the embarrassment of showing up at doggie heaven in little pink booties and a pink Mohican. Hardly the best way to enter the afterlife now is it?

Now my grandmother’s dog Bart, a Heinz 57 varieties throwback to days when Dr. Moreau had it all together, would never put up with that shit. That pensionable pooch will celebrate its seventeenth birthday in October having battled the odds of the underdog since taking his very first breath.

Bart, who suffered the unfortunate fate of being born about a month after our parents had Sky One installed in the house, was most definitely the runt of a litter born to a lazy bitch. However, he battles on to this day in his dotage despite having all the bite of Ben Elton’s books, more crumbled bones than time team, the fluid retention skills of a drunken diabetic child and also despite trying to have sex with his own mother on three recorded occasions during his lifetime.

Bart outranks his Hong Kong brethren in being the undisputed master of his own shit. Even in lesser years, many dogs are already curling up in their baskets at night and wake to find an unexpected and equally curled up shit lying next to them. He’s an old pro though and by hook or by crook (usually by skitting his arsehole across the carpet to be honest) he retains his doggie dignity by cleaning his own derriere.

I reckon if you put a pair of booties on that grumpy little bastard he’d take his one remaining tooth and stick it in your fucking ankle!