Inalienable Rights

There was this man who owned a dog
that howled all the time.

It howled when it was shut in
and when it was locked out
and when it was over-sexed
(which, it seemed, was mostly)
and when it was left alone for the night.
Just about the only thing it didn’t howl about
was being asleep.

The man’s neighbours were at first very tolerant,
although very tired.
They didn’t want anything dreadful done to the dog,
but they did feel it was
overdoing it a bit.

The man didn’t seem to care
that everyone around him was disenchanted with dogs,
or that after a while people never spoke to him,
but yawned a lot.
Keeping a dog, he said,
was his Inalienable Right –
which fact was presumably supposed to justify everyone’s loss of sleep.

Inalienable Rights, it should be explained,
were at that time The Thing.
Indeed, one had only to label almost anything
Inalienable Right, Please Do Not Disturb
to have it tacitly sanctioned,
blessed and legalised.
It was odd, however,
how often one man’s Inalienable Right,
was another’s Intolerable Agony.

But, to the man and his dog…

The dog howled for a year
and several neighbours moved away.
The man said (and was quoted)
That dog is a part of me;
I like it more than any damn neighbour
and more of his neighbours moved away.

The surrounding houses were eventually bought
by deaf old ladies
and dog lovers whose pets could hold their own,
and soon everything in the garden was lovely,
except in patches.

Then one day, while the man was exercising his dog,
it bit him.

Next day, exercising an inalienable right,
he had it put down.

Eric Millward – by permission of the author