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where there is ample sexual activity from humans to keep anyone disgusted.’
    At three months into my columnist’s life, I was beginning to stretch my legs and march with a swagger – even risking a little experimentation with the form. One week I gave the space to a piece by Kudu himself.
    Writing in the persona of your dog is a delicate business, and it is all too easy to overstep the mark. If you asked me whether I know my dog well, I would, of course, say yes, but in truth the characteristics I can identify with anything close to objective certainty are relatively few. He is certainly affectionate (but even aggressive dogs can be affectionate towards their owners), and he seems sensitive to human illness or distress. He is gregarious to the point of social promiscuity, and un-aggressive to the point of wimpishness. I suspect – though this is just a theory – that he has the sort of sunny nature that often goes with good looks: if everyone is always pleased to see you it is bound to incline you towards a benign view of the world.
    But beyond that, everything is speculative. Do those deep brown eyes really speak of a certain soulful melancholy? Do the arched eyebrows reflect a baffled concern about the ineffable mysteries of the human world? How does a dog ‘think’ anyway, and would he recognize an ineffable mystery if he saw one? All these questions are unanswerable, and in trying to imagine a ‘voice’ for Kudu, I found myself constantly coming up against his essential ‘otherness’. If I pushed thingstoo far, I realized, I really would turn him into a two-dimensional literary device.
    When the piece was published the
Telegraph
reversed our mug shots, giving him pride of place at the top of the page and consigning me to the foot of the column.
    The world beyond this kitchen is so very cruel
    19 September 2009
    I have – so everyone tells me – expressive eyes, and have found that widening them works wonders with humans; I confess I have in the past exploited their power to solicit a treat or two. But my Master, the wisest of men, has noticed that real melancholy now lies behind them, and he asked me to reflect here on the shame that has come upon my country.
    Usually, flopped on the kitchen floor in dreamy anticipation of a plate that needs licking, I enjoy the hour or so of early-evening gossip between Master and Mistress. But last week she brought shocking news from something called the Dogs Trust. There has, it seems, been a record rise in the number of my species being abandoned: 107,228 of us (what can such a monstrous number mean?) were rescued from the streets of this so-called dog-loving nation. She pointed to a headline: ‘Big Leap in Stray Dogs as RecessionBites’. That human appetite for doggy puns be damned! The story told how nearly ten thousand homeless dogs were – in that chilling euphemism – ‘put to sleep’.
    Once, this would not have worried me: when you are young there are simply too many bottoms to sniff. But my journey to the park takes me past Battersea Dogs Home, and the harrowing howls telling tales of homelessness have become almost too much to bear. Sometimes I meet inmates being walked in the park; one or two are angry – part of the puzzle of life is that some dogs are just not very nice people – but more often they are simply bowed by their misfortunes.
    The park brings the gap between rich and poor sharply into focus. All my friends are back with the autumn, greeting one another with Australian kisses (like French ones, but down under) and telling tales of exotic holidays – there are two terriers who spent a seaside summer on the Isle of Wight, and one flirty young bitch with a collar-bell claims to have flown to Tuscany. I live less glamorously than the Chelsea Set and, of course, have my complaints: why, for example, does my Master root out my carefully hidden bones just as they reach delicious