Dogs

I used to have a Tom Simpson-style cotton cycling cap with a red patch above the brim. When I wore it, robins used to get close and stare at me a lot.
J had to give her laptop back before we went to India. She’s getting a new one but in the meantime there’s been a bit of territorial tension and a few Lorenz moments around our desktop.
It was in Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression that I read about robins being so enraged by the red of each other’s breasts that courtship always teeters on the edge of extreme physical violence, and mating has to be mediated by an oxymoronic frenzy of placatory behaviour. Mistakes are made.
I’m always knocking dogs, and I am ambivalent about them, but there was a bit of canine behaviour that Lorenz observed that I wish the Great Invaders (Milosevic, Blair, Hussein, Bush, Galtieri &c) might adopt. Lorenz was watching a pair of Alsatians running up and down a fence, their snouts inches apart, barking, yammering, snarling, slavering, snapping. They’d run up to the corner nearest to their respective homes, then down towards the other end, turn and rush back up again. But, he noticed, at the far end, some way from the houses, the fence just stopped. The dogs were going further down each time. What would happen when the fence ran out and they were really face to face? Bloodshed, victory and humiliation, almost certainly.
One run they stopped just short of the hiatus. The next, and they were there, tooth to tooth, no intervening mesh. They froze for an instant, then simultaneously turned and rushed back up the fence again, snapping, yammering, slavering.