Barking Mad.

It’s been a few years since I last watched Crufts (or should I say paid any attention to Crufts?). I remember settling in one evening, I’m guessing pre-Covid, and laughing at Crufts so hard I got hiccups. Like any competition of this nature, where you are watching animals being asked to bend to the will of humans, it is often worth catching for the unintentional laughs rather than the extreme gravity that is attached to it by the dog owners and a gasping, transfixed audience; all of whom will be very used to finding long hairs in their yoghurt at breakfast time. The Cruft dogs are the kind of dogs that have owners who are so desperate to win that they hire trainers to make their dogs better. Except they forget that by better they really mean look more stupid, and by well trained they really mean able to perform acts of obedience and physicality that no normal dog would ever dream of doing and are therefore thoroughly surplus to both requirement and reason – I should at this point pause to acknowledge that dogs must surely chiefly dream about little more than eating, defecating and sniffing the defecating apparatus of other dogs. And for all the cheap laughs and crude commentary it doesn’t take a lot of undressing to establish that Crufts is actually more about the humans than the dogs and is furthermore a complete waste of time. And money. And dogs. It is also completely deranged.

Not that I’ve got anything against dogs. I can name at least five dogs that I like, though at the same time I recognise the fact that I am only friends with five people who have a dog, and in some cases the dog is the only thing that keeps me going back. In truth I rather like dogs, but I’m almost certain I could live in a world without them, not that that’s going to happen in a hurry. Ever since the siege of Leningrad, when they were seen as a handy alternative to a Sunday roast and cannibalism, dogs have been through a real renaissance and I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I suggested that there have never been as many dogs on Earth before as there are today, right now. In some countries and cultures dogs are seen as a nuisance, but to say you don’t like dogs in Britain isn’t far off as serious as heresy and paedophilia (bearing firmly in mind the paradox that many committed paedophiles are also, oddly enough, dead against heresy). Britain loves dogs, so much so that we can’t seem to get enough of them; sometimes to the point that every once in a while you hear a story about some crazed sociopath who loved dogs so much that they collected dozens of them and then let them starve to death in the hope they would get a starring role in an RSPCA advert. It’s a funny old world.

I haven’t counted them recently but I’m guessing there are around two billion dogs in Britain alone, and that’s around 28 dogs for every man, woman, child and member of the non-binary community. Some dogs are useful: police dogs, farm dogs, gun dogs, guide dogs, hot dogs. Others are quirky and loveable: floppy eared spaniels, sausage dogs. And some are just useless: poodles, those stupid little ones that can fit inside a handbag. I’ve missed a few out, I know, but then the world of dogs is rather baffling to me and now there are all these daft crossbreeds (many of which seem to have been crossbred purely to create a silly new name -eg- cockapooeydoodle) I’ve pretty much given up caring. And given that in the last couple of days I have found myself half-watching some very, almost angrily, enthusiastic dog owners racing their pets in a frantic tennis ball based relay race (a tennis ball that has very likely been liberally basted with Pedigree Chum juices) I can’t say I have any regrets about being so ambivalent about man’s best friend, because some dogs may be stupid but they’re very rarely as stupid as their owners, and that’s why we have dogs around that have been specially bred to suit demanding humans, only to emerge that they will get three sorts of cancer by their first birthday and their eyeballs pop out every time they fart. And that, I think you’ll find, is really quite cruel.

Crufts has been on TV most of this weekend, and because it is a programme on TV it is presented by Claire Balding, who no doubt knows a thing or two about dogs. It is also presented by some twelve year old chap with enormous hair who floats around interviewing fat, poorly groomed old men (who smell of whisky and piss and probably talk to their dogs more often than they do their wives) and lank haired middle aged women (who look twenty years older than they are and clearly spend more money on birthday presents for their dogs than they do on their own clothes). And in between all these discussions about the best food for irritated rectums and how to replace your Doberman’s dentures in the dark and how to translate a vast array of different barks (which is futile as they all ultimately mean either “I’m hungry” or ” I need to go out” or “I’m going to defecate here, in your shoe, whether you like it or not”) there are races and ballets and relays and show jumps and all of them feature dogs that have been trained to within an inch of their lives and owners for whom this moment, here, now, at Crufts, is the most important in their entire lives and the apex of and reason for their very existence. On the other hand I just can’t imagine getting that excited about an animal that can repeatedly mistake a pair of socks for its dinner.

To put it bluntly, Crufts is one giant, dog-smelling arena for the insane. It would save the assessment staff of a prison psychiatric unit hours of unnecessary interrogation by simply asking each new inmate whether they had ever entered a dog into Crufts, as a positive response would render all other questions obsolete: if the answer is yes then the patient is clearly bonkers and must be detained at his majesty’s pleasure for a very, very long time. No event affirms this assertion more than the Heelwork To Music (HTM) round in which mentally compromised dog owners create a bizarre pantomime all around their dog, a pantomime which invariably involves the owner performing ludicrous, homemade dance routines to which their dog contributes with ever increasing excitement until the whole sordid show climaxes in an almost sexual writhing mass on the floor, owner and pet lying together, limbs locked, eyes glazed over, tongues moist with a passion that really would be better off kept to themselves. You can easily tell that these routines have taken months of energy and commitment but it is much harder is to tell why. I suppose it’s all to do with how much one person can love their dog, and that’s the sort of love I’m happy to leave to the doggy people. But what do I know? I’ve never owned a dog and I doubt I ever will. I mean, I can throw the ball and fill the bowl and rummage around behind the ears just as well as the next person but picking up dog flops in the pouring rain, well I’m afraid that’s simply out of the question. And as for Crufts, well that’s enough to put you off for life, because why would you want to look like a dog owner at Crufts?

G B Burton. 09.03.2025