Where is the dog?

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

The examined life? "It's important - very important - to examine things", said Dave the other day; "key to a happy dog life", he went on. Dave was showing off quoting Socrates and all that. But Socrates wasn't really talking about happiness as such - he said life "wasn't worth living" if you didn't examine it.  Except, he said it in Greek. But should we examine everything? That's me sticking my head out of the window on the way over to see Dave. Completely happy with myself, sniffing out for rabbits. Admittedly, I was still thinking about the problem of whether  1 + 1 = 2 , but I wasn't thinking about the view; that was a pleasure in itself: sniffing, wagging, barking. That then gave me a bit of a paws-over-the-eyes headache: 1) Was looking out of the window made any different by my examining it later? I don't think it made the smells I could remember smelling smell any better because if it, or the wagging made more w