So who is poisoning all the doggies, then? I assumed, when the first horrible reports came through from Crufts, that it was either the Russians or the Muslims. Russians seem unable to go more than a few days without feeling the need to bump somebody off. Perhaps they’d run out of businessmen to kill and thought, during this morale-sapping lacuna, it would be wise to keep their hand in by murdering a few dogs.
We were told almost endlessly during Channel 4’s coverage of this year’s tournament — won this year by a small and unpleasant black thing, some sort of painfully sculpted terrier with an embittered expression on its face — that this was now a marvellously international event, diverse in every respect, five of the Best in Show finalists being from beyond the UK, including a white homosexual dog in a tiara from Italy. (It is written into Channel 4’s charter that the word ‘diverse’ must be used in every programme, of course, and always greeted with mass celebration whenever it is uttered.) And there were Russian competitors, along with the Swedes and the Dutch and the Americans. Not that the competitors themselves would have been the guilty parties, more likely some granite-faced shadowy maniac employed by Putin.
Anyway, a Belgian red setter called Jagger has just been cremated and his ashes scattered on the field where he used to run and gambol. And now another dog which competed in Crufts has died, a shih tzu, and several more are reported to be ill, one of them being on a drip. If any of these dogs start glowing like Belisha Beacons and bleeding from the gums, we’ll know for sure it was the Russkies.
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