RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30823, 7 August 1965, Page 44

RANDOM REMINDER

ANYTHING TO OBLIGE

It’s all very well training the dog to fetch the newspaper from the front gate in the morning, but it has its disadvantages. Say what you like, some dogs slobber. For another thing, dogs just cannot distinguish the days of the week and on Sunday mornings they can be seen dashing up and down the roadway feeding a large anxiety neurosis as they hunt vainly for the paper—as good an argument as any, dog lovers we'll say for Sunday newspapers. You can, of course, get up early on Sundays and drop a dummy paper for them, but this tends to negrate the value of their services on the other six days of the week. An I there is another danger. Dogs are such devoted creatures that if they so much as think you have gained some pleasure from

their services, they will do their utmost to give more satisfaction. In Cashmere there is a dog that has been given almost too much credit by a doting family for the relatively simple task of picking up the paper and bringing it into the kitchen. Here it is normally monopolised by the man of the house; and one day the dog. drunk with praise and possibly thinking that other members ot the family needed a paper too, disappeared and returned a few minutes later with another. It took the cries of surprise for more praise and disappeared eagerly. As they feared, it had another paper. On the next excursion it was seen and tracked to its home. The man said he did not really mind, but he had complained to the delivery department and what sort of

position was he in? The only thing to do was to cure the hound of the habit. They have tried. They have thrown papers at it. They have tied papers to its collar. They have read leading articles to it, backwards. They have tried locking the dog up till all newspapers have been uplifted, but the dog loathes the chain and his barking causes more complaints than his stealing. Now they take turns at returning the papers each morning. They have the names and addresses of nearby subscribers and place them apologetically in the hands of those subscribers. And, we are told, the subscribers love it. In the past they had to walk nearly quarter of a mile down the hill to pick it up. Home delivery, they say, is fine.