I was walking through my local park the other day (I’m using the word ‘my’ in its ‘royal’ and geographical sense: I barely own a packet of crisps, much less a vast tract of land) when I chanced upon a dog. Many dogs, in fact. One after the other. It was a sunny day, you see, quite possibly the best weather we’ve seen displayed across the VDU of our Scottish sky in approximately 600,000 years (give or take), so the park was festooned with dogs. ‘Twas a procession of pooches; a carnival of canines; a festival of former-wolves; a rave of Rovers; a bloody, big old bastarding basket-load of bottom-sniffing barkers. If you think I’m done with my alliterative indulgences then think again, my friend, because here’s one more: ‘twas a veritable smorgasbord of dorgs (sic) (dog then proceeds to eat the sic).

And I did what I always do when I’m in close proximity to dogs: I speak to them like I’m a fucking lunatic. There’s perhaps a little more nuance to it than that. Let me explain. If I pass a dog at speed, thereby denying me a prime patting opportunity, I’ll nod to it like it’s a human man, fix its eyes with mine as it trots past, and let out a rich and sonorous, full-volume, special-needs ‘HIIIIIYYYYAAAA’ pitched somewhere in vocal range between Sloth and Miss Piggy. If conditions are favourable to a down-on-the-haunches pat, I’ll shower that beast with so many compliments a passerby would think I was congratulating one of my own children for winning a medal. Our interaction will include a heavy dose of me sneezing out a succession of ‘yes you are’s’ (sometimes ‘ooohhhh, yesh you arrrrrrreeee’s) after each chunk of praise to the point where its tail will be swishing like a fencer on amphetamines (if I had a tail, it would be wagging, too).

I still get just as excited when I see a dog as I did when I was a child, and one inexplicably got loose in the school playground. Did that ever happen to you? Any teacher operating under those conditions could expect instantly to lose their authority in a flurry of feet and throated yowling as every child in the class made for the window.

“Children, no! Return to your seats and answer the question: if Jimmy gave three people four apples each, how many apples would he have given away?”

“Miss, if we could counter with a mathematical brainteaser of our own: if a beast with four legs and one tail entered the playground, how hard could you go fuck yourself?”

What a scene. Kids lined up along the glass like prison rioters, shouting, whooping, and banging pots – one of them up on the roof with their shirt off unfurling a banner for the TV crews.

A far cry from the days when the dog’s wild and hairy ancestors would be eating children rather than entertaining them, in the days preceding our species’ great gambit to get wolves to work for us by offering them hot scraps from our camp fires, before spending hundreds of years breeding them into the shapes of sausages and other humiliating configurations.

As I beheld the panoply of pups in the park that day, I wondered to myself: are we the only species that keeps pets? The herder ant keeps aphids as livestock, milking them for their sugary essence, presumably so they can better enjoy their cereal of a morning. But that’s less pet-ty and more farmer-y, and farmers don’t tend to feel too pet-ty towards their cattle, as evidenced by how often they send them off to get steel-bolted through the skull.

I once saw a video of a chimp and a frog that was slightly analogous, but I have to discount that on the grounds that a chimp whacking itself off with a frog probably isn’t an ideal example of responsible pet ownership.

There are countless examples of inter-species co-operation, even close approximations of ‘friendship’, but it’s all doubtless explicable either through mutual hunting behaviour – pulling together for a common survival goal – or a mis-firing of the maternal instinct, most of it caused by being in close proximity to us: the weirdest species on earth.

I’d like to think, though, that beneath the ocean somewhere there’s an octopus almost getting one of its tentacles pulled off as it ‘walks’ a frisky Great White along a coral reef, or a semi-famous blowfish strutting about, dragging along a designer handbag containing a miniature haddock. A man can dream.

I probably am going to dream about that now. But as long as there are also underwater dogs in that dream I’ll wake a happy man.