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canine sexual politics.
    Kudu, out with my wife in Clapham at the weekend, fixed obsessively on an Alsatian. She was held on a lead by a respectable-looking man, who responded to Kudu’s attentions by hitting him with a newspaper (it looked like a Saturday
Telegraph
, putting Kudu in the undignified position of being beaten with his own photograph).
    As my wife led him away, she enquired of the Alsatian’s owner whether the bitch was on heat. ‘None of your business,’ he snarled, in a most un-
Telegraph
-reader-like way.
    Clapham Common is not a place to pick a fight – especially not with a man ready to use a broadsheet as an offensive weapon. But was it really not her business that he had brought a sexual detonator into the powder keg of a park full of potentially lustful dogs?
    A moral conundrum lies at the heart of managing walkies for bitches on heat.
    The nub emerged from another difficult exchange – with a young woman enjoying the common accoutred with toddler, Dachshund, picnic and Filipina maid. As Kudu sniffed up in his friendly way, the maid whipped up the Dachshund and heldit above her head. Kudu kept leaping at the little dog, despite my forcefully growled instructions.
    â€˜She’s on heat, I’m afraid,’ said the young woman.
    Thrown by Kudu’s disobedience, I replied, more sharply than I should have done: ‘In that case she shouldn’t really be out.’
    â€˜By that token, nor should he if he’s not neutered,’ came the reply.
    Preposterous logic, surely?
    But it has an uncomfortable echo of the argument about dress regularly advanced by my daughter: she believes she should be able to wear whatever she wants without taking responsibility for its impact on men. When I point out that we live in Stockwell rather than Utopia, and suggest a little less leg on a Saturday night, I am accused of sexist piggery.
    Male dogs are like sports cars. To enjoy them you have to take pleasure in their flashier qualities – good road handling in wet conditions, a facility for throwing up maximum mud from puddles, and purely theatrical throaty noises. But, like the driver of a fast car, the dog-owner must be absolutely in command – no knocking over children, no foraging in picnics, or paws on white trousers, and absolutely no aggression.
    I can now control Kudu in most situations (yes, it was unfortunate when he peed on thatover-dressed Pekinese, but there we are). But I do not believe I could train him to be calm with a bitch on heat – the difference, surely, between a dog and a man. We know of a country Springer whose first bride arrived on a quad bike; he now becomes frenzied whenever he hears one.
    So – I offer this nervously and after deep reflection – when owners take bitches into public places in their season, they have primary responsibility for the behaviour of other dogs, and should not brandish their newspapers at Spaniels.
    But I can also offer them help. In Sweden the neutering and spaying of dogs used to be outlawed (as an infringement of doggy rights), so bitch-owners give them a contraceptive injection like the pill. I know of one Spaniel owner who uses it here; she faced fierce resistance from vets, but she is medically trained and insists the modest health risks are a small price to pay for the freedom her bitch enjoys courtesy of her ‘chemical
burqa
’.
    This piece provoked exactly the kind of vociferous and varied response I had hoped for. I was accused of sexism (‘This is such a male article’) and irresponsibility, and there was something of a hue and cry for Kudu’s castration (the very thought makes me wince and cross my legs). But there was also heavy website traffic in support of my polemic. The offering I most enjoyed – for its pithy irascibility – was: ‘When your bitch ison heat you should be responsible enough to keep it away from dogs and not frequent places like Clapham Common,