As I sat, with my cat, at the vet’s,
Where a ghastly, huge dog with Tourette’s
Snapped and bellowed and whined,
A Grand Scheme came to mind:
Euthanasia For Other Folk’s Pets.

All true … but let us not be too hard on dogs; it’s so easy to see them as unruly embodiments of all that is vulgar and vicious, and to forget that the cur’s owner in this cameo may feel correspondingly ill-at-ease with the little cat – threatened, even, by the placid decorum with which she awaits her final summons into the consulting-room.