Dog blog 23 - count to ten

Count to ten
Dave, here, was out yesterday for his regular morning walk. Or his "constitutional" as he likes to call it: because he likes to think about constitutional politics while he's out sniffing for rabbits. 

His main topic of interest at the moment is the concept of civil disobedience and what criteria might usefully help to decide when disobedience is defensible.

While he was thinking very deeply about that, his "carer" (as Dave likes to call him) was very displeased at the level of interest Dave was showing in a dropped bag of sweets he'd found. Dave wanted to spend a bit longer sniffing out the problem: specifically, whether the sweets might be fizzy. But said carer had other ideas - and started winding in Dave's stretchable lead. 

This all made Dave very cross. And, feeling the sheer affront to his personal autonomy - weighing in at about 4 out of 10 in Dave's "reason-o-meter" (something he's just invented to help evaluate the defensibility of practical reasoning), coupled with a 6 out of 10 love of fizzy sweets weighting - Dave stood where he was.

This resulted in more pulling on the lead, more standing still, and a prompted re-evaluation on the reason-o-meter: with (Dave told me later) the personal autonomy affront peaking at a "high 7". But none of this was particularly helping: Dave's nose was too big to get into the sweetie packet; his neck was getting a bit uncomfortable; and, it would be time for lunch when he got home.

So, Dave decided to count to ten: which was a bit daunting as that's the highest he's ever counted. As he became less cross, he decided his final "balanced reason-o-meter" score (another thing he'd just invented) wasn't high enough to warrant continued standing still. Plus one of the sweets had fallen out of the bag - and it "wasn't all that good, actually". 

Dave wasn't quite sure whether he should still feel affronted - and indeed whether on analysis he had actually been affronted at all, objectively speaking. Nonetheless, the episode  was enough Dave decided - while sticking his head out of the car window on the way home - to allow him to conclude that it had been a very interesting constitutional walk.