by gap74 » Fri Feb 18, 2005 1:42 am
As a dog man - by which I mean I prefer the company of dogs to cats, not that I'm some sort of unearthly human/canine hybrid creature, although some may beg to differ - I generally also agree that cats are shit and dogs are great.
However, yesterday I experienced something that cat owners do not have to suffer, and I wanna know why!
I came home from work in the afternoon to find that my visiting mother had let the dog out into the back garden, where he promptly destroyed the back gate and fled. Nothing new there, he does this at least once a week, and repairs to said gate are becoming more and more difficult as he reduces it to splinters.
No point chasing him down, though, he always returns after an hour or so of gadding about and doing what dogs do. And good luck to him, I say!
But no, an hour later a phone call, from the Bothwell Bridge SSPCA centre, explaining that a council dog warden had brought a dog with this phone number on it's tag into the centre. Bah!
Seems he was lifted a mere 200 yards away from the house, within minutes of escaping. Despite a collar and tag with my phone number on it, and a microchip inside him somewhere with the same details, the nice warden had taken him to the SSPCA. Why would they do that, I wondered, when he was clearly not a mangy stray and a quick phone call could have ascertained that he lived round the corner?
Well, perhaps it has something to do with the 43 quid that it cost me to liberate him - 18 to the SSPCA, 25 to the council. Nice little earner if you can get it!
Bah, much annoyed given that the warden could simply have called us when he caught him! I shall be demanding an explanation from South Lanarkshire Council, and a refund - at that rate, I should have asked that he be sent home in a taxi! When I queried the costs, I was told I was just unlucky that he escaped when the sole dog catcher for South Lanarkshire was in the area, and that if I didn't want to pay, they had a large waiting list for dogs like him....!
Why do we never hear of those sleekit, conniving cats being carted off and held to ransom?
Grrr!
Gary (and a disgraced mongrel called Max..)