WAGGLY TAILS
A couple of days back a friend of mine was in town, and asked me if I have a dog. When I said I don't anymore, she said, "Get one for tomorrow!" Yes, she is an idiot. But you know something? It made me want to have a doggie all over again.

And then I was thinking, what sort of a dog do I get...

I mean there's so many things to think about before you home in on the right kind of dog. There's big dogs and small dogs, black dogs and brown dogs, those that lie around all the time and those that run around like they've had way too much sugar. There's dogs that look like walking sausages and others that look like big, hairless rats. There's the travelling blobs of fur and the graceful and sleek ones too.

There's the kind of dog which will assault the casual visitors with cold, and wet noses, which go snuffling everywhere, heading for the most unwanted areas first. There's the dog that'll drive away the crowd with a simple look, maybe a low, relaxed growl, and the calm assured manner that says that it can take your hand off with one bite.

There's dogs dogs and more dogs, and really, I only have one screening test to apply - the mutt simply should not be one of those neurotic dogs that yammers, yelps and yips away endlessly throughout the day, no matter how ridiculously cute it looks.

One of the best tests therefore, to find the dog that's right, is the waggliness test. It's a surefire test that never fails. You simply match up the dog owner and the dog by the waggliness of the mutts tail.

There's the dogs with the big tails, that wag about so fast that any breakables kept carelessly at doggie-tail-level can be quickly forgotten about, because that tail is practically a lethal weapon. These are doggies that don't need big teeth or paws. All they have to do is turn around.

Then there's the little spaniel tails too. They're one of the examples of small tails that have proper waggliness. One very spaniel thing incidentally, is that they run round and round on the spot trying desperately to grab hold of that little tail, which is almost always waggling away at around a million swishes a second.

Now one example of the yipping and yammering variety of dog is the pomeranian, which proves my theory about waggly tails too. A pom is a dog with practically no wag in its tail. I mean that thing isn't even a real tail. It's like a bent piece of fluff which doesn't belong anywhere near a real dog!

Dogs and waggly tails. Clearly there's more to this than I thought. More looking into the subect of waggliness shall follow at some later date.