How do you know when summer has arrived? Simple. Go to your social media platform of choice and find your feed stuffed with comments about dogs. One, addressed to members of a local Facebook group, goes like this: ‘Dog walkers – if you are out and about after 10am and before 5pm, please remember to walk barefoot on the sizzling black tarmac and wear and (sic) sheepskin coat so you can fully appreciate the agony you are putting your pet through.‘ Yes, I get this. When the ground is hot, don’t walk your dog on it. But who was this person referring to? My guess is everyone and no one.
I don’t really get it, to be honest. If a dog owner doesn’t know by now that walking the dog on hot surfaces is not a good idea, I doubt very much if what appears to be a Facebook rant will enlighten them. I just can’t see some slow-witted buffoon waking up and thinking: that’s a very good point about scalding my dog’s feet. I won’t do that again. But it’s the more individual posts I find more perplexing.
Do they regard their dog-owning Facebook friends – which I know is not always the same thing as being a real friend – as thick? And do they have any evidence these thick people are being cruel? If I did, I wouldn’t arse around on social media: I’d tell the RSPCA. And I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a dog person.
Wandering the streets as I did this afternoon, I saw a grand total of no dogs. So far as I can tell, the people in our village love their dogs and seek to look after them, not potentially cause them harm. The many social media comments about hot dogs has clearly got through to me and I am keenly on the lookout for dog cruelty. But it isn’t there. Not around these parts, anyway.
Social media in general, and Facebook in particular, can be a very strange place. People say and do things they might never do in real life. For instance, people can show sometimes share scores, even hundreds, of photos from days out and holidays. It’s the modern day equivalent of walking up to strangers at a bus stop and trying to show them the entire contents of your holiday snaps, because, as I point out, many people have social media ‘friends’ they barely know and in some instances have never met. You’d probably never walk into your local pub and announce out loud that dog owners shouldn’t walk their dogs on hot days, but for some bizarre reason, it’s perfectly okay to do so on social media. Absolutely bonkers.
Surely, if like me, you have around one remaining functioning brain cell and can work out for yourself that a dog with burnt feet will not be a happy dog, can’t you? How hard can it be?
