Dear Mum and Dad,
It’s your dog Clancy, writing from the city. I have some urgent news to share. It seems that by licking all the humans in my family, from the babies up, I’ve been helping them to develop nice personalities. Well, nicer personalities than they might otherwise have developed.
My achievement has been revealed by Japanese research into the human microbiome, released last week. The microbiome, apparently, consists of all the weird bacteria that swim around in the stomachs of humans. (I may have some of the details wrong. I’m not a scientist. I never really bothered.)
Good puppy, lick away the sadness!Credit: Getty Images
The point is that the main researcher – Takefumi Kikusui from Azabu University – studied 343 teenagers. The youngsters who lived with dogs were happier and more sociable than those who lived without dogs. The children with dogs also had guts which contained several useful species of Streptococcus bacteria – a bacterium linked to reduced depression and efficiently delivered via a dog’s saliva.
Hurrah. Finally, proof of what I knew all along. It’s vindication of my years of enthusiastic licking, often conducted in the face of a chorus of shouted criticism. Some of the children in my circle first achieved their language skills in an effort to make me stop licking their faces. Their phrases included “Oh, yuck”, “That’s disgusting”, and “Go away Clancy”.
The sentence construction was impressive, but also hurtful. But it didn’t stop me. I make the point: It is the brave pioneer who continues his mission in the face of constant approbation.
Is there anything dogs can’t do? We cure asthma, we teach kids to read, we make humans exercise and – it now appears – we cure their depression.
Of course, people say you should “never allow a dog to lick the face of a baby as disease may be communicated – and in the case of an expensive dog…” That’s a joke from Lennie Lower, which Man insisted I include in this letter home. He thinks it’s very funny. He’s been trying to work it into a column for years.
My point is the baby is the beneficiary of my licking, alongside any other humans who might be licked along the way. Every dog, I now think, should be given a Medicare provider number. One lick from us could prove more efficacious than 20 years of Freudian therapy, and at a fraction of the cost. Dog breeds such as St Bernards or Bloodhounds, with their great ropes of slobber being flung around the room, would be allowed to charge double. If they slobbered over a whole family, with one spectacular arc of slobber, slapping into the faces of children, parents, aunties and nannas all at the same time, they could bulk-bill.
