Joe Bennett: Dogs biscuit behaviour offers life lesson for humans

Unlike humans my dog always wants a biscuit and he never pretends he doesn't, says Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

The wine was called Posada del Rey. I bought a case. I was powerless not to.

We human beings love to boast of our ability to reason. Uniquely on this teeming earth we think, and having thought we act, and thus with our enormous thrumming brains we steer our rational way down the Path of Rightness that runs through the Meadows of Wisdom and leads us in time to the Palace of Truth. Well, ha to all that.

You and I and the girl next door are about as wise and rational as my dog. Less wise and rational indeed, for the dog is what the dog is and he never pretends to be otherwise. So he cannot lie and he cannot be a hypocrite and he cannot delude himself.

My dog always wants a biscuit and he never pretends he doesn't. He never claims it's the last biscuit he'll ever eat, or that he'll just have the one, or that eating a biscuit is a significant aesthetic experience, or that it's a religious one. He just looks at the cupboard with the biscuits in and tries every trick he knows to get the biscuit - from sitting to looking winsome to straight theft. And either he succeeds and gets the biscuit whereupon he eats it and that's that, or he realises he is not going to get the biscuit whereupon he gives up and that's also that.

But having given up he does not hold a grudge for not having got the biscuit, nor if he is later offered the biscuit does he pretend he doesn't want it now. He takes the biscuit and eats it and then looks around for more nice things such as a walk or a pat or indeed another biscuit, and if none of these things is on offer he curls up and sleeps until one of them comes bobbing along on the ever rolling stream of time and happenstance.

Wine is as variable as dog biscuits but has a single simple function. Just as a dog biscuit is a nutrition-delivery system, so wine is a drug-delivery system. Photo / Getty Images

Because of all this, and here is the point, the dog can never fall for marketing. But we can. Nearly always on a packet of dog biscuits there is an idealised golden retriever, a dog whose faultless teeth, brushed coat, winsome manner and perfect symmetry contrast sharply with my aged, plump and time-battered mongrel. But the picture's not there for the dog. It's there for me, the deludable dog-owner, the fantasist, the idiot whose emotive brain may loosely associate the biscuits in the packet with the god-dog on the packet and thus be more likely to buy them.

In contrast, my dog in his wisdom judges biscuits only by their biscuitness. He reads the book and is never seduced by the cover. He thinks straight, accepts who he is, sleeps the sleep of the honest and never needs a drink. Which brings us to Posada del Rey.

Wine is as variable as dog biscuits but has a single simple function. Just as a dog biscuit is a nutrition-delivery system, so wine is a drug-delivery system. There is no shame in that. There is shame only in pretending it isn't so.

I get my wine delivered by the case, partly because it's cheaper, partly because I live on a hill and wine is heavy, but mainly because it gives me a sense of security to have three cases of wine in the garage as a bulwark against any tsunami that might wander up the stream of time and happenstance.

I buy on price. I suspect any wine over $12 of pretension. I suspect any wine under $10 of being vinegar. But between those two figures I have nothing to go on but the name. And when I saw the name Posada del Rey I was dunked instantly and inescapably in a warm bath of nostalgia. I was 17 again, long-haired, moody, self-pitying, self-deluding, fiercely alive, besotted with the unspeakably beautiful Andy Grant and sitting in an underground bar in Ship St, a dive that has long since disappeared, but that went by the name of, you guessed it, the Posada. And my soul unfurled and reached out and plucked the credit card from my wallet and bought a case of yesterday. Posada del Rey, the inn of the king. In my flat and featureless 60s I'd taste again the intensity of youth.

The wine arrived last week. I gave it a few days to settle. Last night I fetched a bottle from the garage, opened it, poured it, swirled it and sipped. It was all right. Like any other wine, really. The dog was curled up on his chair, and, with the restraint that behoves the superior species, he said nothing.