The Beast Within.

Like most pet owners I anthropomorphise my dogs. In my fantasy world Eva and Meg are simply much younger, considerably  better-looking,  and infinitely more athletic versions of myself, sharing my interests and general attitude to life. But then, every now and again, reality breaks in: dogs are not human beings, they're semi-domesticated wolves - they are beasts.
  Yesterday morning when I took the dogs for their morning walk they chased a sickly cat and cornered it. Fortunately, as it had taken refuge in a bush on the edge of the footpath,  I was able to get the dogs on their leads and haul them off at some personal risk:  the bush was overhanging a precipice and in their continuing attempts to attack the cat they almost pulled me over the edge.
  This morning, walking down the same mediaeval pathway,  I was suddenly aware of Meg's alto yelping, joined moments later by Eva's contralto. I guessed it might be another attack on the cat but this time I couldn't see them. I left the footpath and started climbing through the thickets but failed to find them - although I could certainly hear them. Having called them in vain I walked back up the cliff until I reached the spot where it joins the road. I sat and read the paper on my phone for a quarter of an hour and then walked back down the cliff to the spot where they were continuing to yelp  hysterically. Calling them still produced no results, so I went home and ate my breakfast. Returning once more, I realised that the barking had shifted location. They were now visible from the footpath and they had indeed cornered the same cat as yesterday. Then it broke free and ran into a bush by the side of the pathway. So once again I was able to haul them off. This time, to my horror, I noticed Meg's face and chest were covered with blood. Fortunately, a quick glance at the terrified cat revealed it was physically unscathed: the blood was Meg's own from where the cat had scratched her nose.
  So for almost an hour my dogs, my alter egos, had engaged in a bestial attack on another living creature, baiting it relentlessly. Not the sort of behaviour I would engage in, though it's common enough in the animal kingdom, including the species described below by an eighteenth-century traveller:

At last I beheld several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees.  Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a thicket to observe them better.  Some of them coming forward near the place where I lay, gave me an opportunity of distinctly marking their form.  Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled, and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs, and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff colour.  They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus, which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the ground, for this posture they used, as well as lying down, and often stood on their hind feet.  They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, and hooked.  They would often spring, and bound, and leap, with prodigious agility.  The females were not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on their heads, but none on their faces, nor any thing more than a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda.  The dugs hung between their fore feet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked.
   The hair of both sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black, and yellow.  Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.

To come clean: the first images which came into my mind when I listened to my dogs' unremitting bestial howling directed against a sickly cat were those pictures which came to light in 2004 of Iraqi prisoners cowering beneath the boots of their American captors, torturers and sexual abusers. To be followed by the images conjured up by yesterday's report of the sufferings of three British holidaymakers imprisoned in Dubai. And finally, of course, like Gulliver I have to face up to the truth about the identity of the animal he described above. I can't pretend like Grillo and his deluded followers that there are two sorts of people: decent folk like ourselves and an evil 'other'. As Nick Lowe wrote: 'The beast in me / Is caged by frail and fragile bars'.
   In the end, we're not so silly when we anthropomorphise our furry friends.