I’m on hunger strike and no one has noticed. The Maze prisoners never had this problem. Like theirs, it’s all about status and privileges. On Christmas Day things were all right. As well as the usual soft toys of indeterminate species, reinforced rubber balls and chews, I was given a large bone-shaped biscuit, a couple of bags of snacks, and a pot of turkey stuff with a picture of a terrier on the front. That’s what really set the old brain cells whirring, that picture. It was quite obviously stating, with no perceivable ambiguity, that small pots of moist turkey dinner were for terriers, and that terriers were for small pots of moist turkey dinner. So why have I been reclassified back to sacks of complete dried food, the sort of thing one would feed to a Rottweiller/whippet cross? So far, though, my cause has yet to be taken up by the mass media or any of the radical political splinterings. I suspect that the Mum, who doles out the slops (note the streetwise prison lingo?) has grasped what’s going on, but her only and pitifully inadequate response has been to put the contents of my bowl back in the sack, mix it around a bit, and refill the bowl, together with a couple of doggie choc biscuits. Doggy chocolate! There’s another injustice – you don’t see the humans eating it, do you?

p.s. I did strike one blow for international canine culinary liberation – I stole half a Fivemiletown cheese that the Dad was about to eat on Christmas afternoon. They didn’t punish me then, because it was Christmas Day, and now they can’t because of that frankly speciesist, if sometimes useful, myth that if you don’t chastise a dog straightaway, you can’t do it at all as he won’t be able to remember what it was he did wrong. Ha!