My beautiful stupid boy. So long and brave as he bounds at light-speed across the sunny fields, looping past the old trees and disused play equipment, a joyful cascade of limitless hope and unhinged, insatiable hunger.
Children point sweetly and parents probably clap, so delighted are they by the strange shape and broad smile and windswept ears of my dog, as he weightlessly leaps through the grasses and fallen leaves into a laughing group of seated friends, whose picnic he is about to completely annihilate.
The laughter stops. The shouts begin. Wince as he inhales four soft cheeses and a gruyere in one heart-stopping plunge (who needs to chew!). Recoil as he destroys an artful arrangement of boutique cured meat (it cost him nothing!). Yelp with us all, in anger and fear, as he crams down an entire baguette in one gulp, and devours such obscene quantities of grapes and chocolate that his stomach will need to be very expensively pumped within the hour.
According to their website, there are just 50 off-leash park areas in the City of Sydney. That leaves more than 400 other parks – more than 70 hectares of them – for people to picnic in. Some of these other parks are the nicest in the country! They have rolling hills and water views, and barely any ferociously ravenous animals at all!
And yet, almost every time I unclip my dog for his run in the off-leash area, he will find one or 20 literal poisons laid out by people in defiance of the signage. And I’ll be the one who ends up meekly apologising.
Not all dogs are cool dudes. Some – traumatised by early starvation – go absolutely psycho around food, no matter how hard they are trying or how well they have been trained. And sometimes there’s nothing we can do but protect these idiots from their worst mongrel selves by taking them to some of the country’s saddest parks for a safe little run that won’t kill them.
Please have your picnic somewhere else. Also, I’m sorry about the cheese, it looked great.
