WELL, BUGGER ME

Absolute proof that dogs just do not care.

A drunk who claimed he had been raped by a dog was yesterday jailed for 12 months by a judge. Martin Hoyle, 45, was arrested by police after a passing motorist and his girlfriend found a Staffordshire bull terrier, called Badger, having sex with him at the side of a road in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
Yorkshire Evening Post

Don't you just love that little detail, 'called Badger'? Rather untypical of an English paper not to give his age though, wouldn't you say? I am curious as to whether the whole sordid episode could be explained by either adolescent compulsion or middle aged desperation.

One has to assume that the motivation of the buggeree in question will forever be unknown to us. After all, just how drunk would you have to be? Or maybe he had drunk himself into such a state that he saw with perfect clarity that, when faced with a Staffordshire Bull in attack mode, the only option available to him was to drop his kecks and assume the position. Surely he would have been wiser to have gone for a plea of self defence.

And I cannot help but wonder at whatever spirit it was in which said passing motorist and his girlfriend alerted the local constabulary. They could hardly argue that the act was non-consensual and breached their ideas of animal rights. I am left with the conclusion that they acted as they did out of a sense of moral outrage or, to put it in a more old-fashioned term, disgust.

It may indeed be the case that the poor dears are even now suffering post traumatic stress disorder and are in need of a lengthy course of counselling before applying for a guest spot on Oprah or some such ("We can't ever do it doggy style again and he'd never even asked me about the possibility of anal before...") but it seems to me, in this case, symptomatic of a wider malaise in our society, an inability to take the random blows of life on the chin, to get up, dust oneself down and stagger onwards.

I mean, just whose interests have been served by that 12 month sentence? Staffordshire Bull Terriers'? Society's? The man was absolutely arseholed (forgive me) for chrissake and possibly beyond all reason. Would it have been such a travesty of justice had the dibble hauled off the dog, made the necessary sartorial adjustments and taken him home to sleep it off?

Oh well, at least it was a bloke otherwise we might have had the problem of what to do with the heir of the dog.

Down boy.