My new carers are quite middle class and they read the Guardian Online most days. I was looking over the shoulder of the grey one and noticed an article concerning a town in the USA which has introduced a bylaw which insists that people should only use the toilets designated by the gender shown on their birth certificate. This has caused a little bit of a fuss with the whole “trans” constituency, but I don’t want to get into the re-assignment debate at the moment.
Instead, the issue caused me to ponder on the different gender issues affecting humans and dogs when elimination of waste is top of the list. Clearly, in the US where they call the toilet the “rest room” or, worse, the “bath room”, they are a bit confused about the basic purpose of the room which many humans call “the bog”. They, the humans, seem to be very hung up on who does what, where.
Now we dogs are quite different and far more liberated. Frankly, male or female, we decide where to go when we need to. And that is pretty much whenever and wherever the fancy takes us. The gender is irrelevant. Sometimes the method of delivery is gender specific, but not the location. I think the humans have a lot to learn from us and should be spending less time making rules about which gender can use which facility, and spend more time determining the most appropriate delivery methods for what is often in doggy speak called a “calling card”.