I decided to watch my neighbor all the time. Dog poop on the lawn means that I need to teach him a lesson.
I took out my reading glasses and showed the dog my history book. I asked him to read the section beginning on page 80 about the Black Plague. This was his first lesson. Over the years I taught that dog many lessons. Mostly just the ones I had recently learned at school, but a few times I was able to teach him lessons that my father had taught me, lessons about balancing a checkbook, for example. My neighbor was very thankful. The dog was able to do my neighbor's taxes for several years before he died. Of course the dog died. Dogs only live to be in their teens, usually. It was very sad for everybody, but especially his constituents. Oh, didn't I mention? My neighbor's dog became our local city councildog. It was a very well-run council, and the dog had been elected in a landslide. There were some controversies, but there was nothing in the bylaws to say dogs couldn't be council-dogs. It was perhaps a generous interpretation of the election laws that his campaign was able to establish his age in dog years.
Congratulations for ranking in the top 20. Your reward is...
That you get to be council dog. So began his reign. There were 20 members of our local town/city council, and every single other member of the council was human, so you can see we had many years of speciesism to overcome. My neighbor's dog paved the way, and now our council is majority human, sure, but by a much smaller margin. There are 15 council people, a council cat, 2 council parakeets, and 2 council dogs.
This year, a fish is also running and seems to have a good shot at replacing the most virulent anti-vegan member of the board. It's ironic because this fish is a piranha and would gladly eat all the other members of the board. That's why his candidacy is so popular. He appeals to both sides. Only the moderates don't like him. But to be honest, there's nothing moderate about the moderates. They want everything to stay the same, and we are in some extremely dire straits.
Why, just the last year, hundreds of kittens were found who had no homes, no shelter, and many were without basic medical attention.
The trumpet was loud at my neighbor's dog's funeral. It carried the mournful overtones of a much larger dog's howl. He was a spry little thing, only a few dozen pounds, but he packed a political punch. Whenever he barked, people listened. But he didn't bark much. He always indicated that the most important part of his job was listening, and you can't listen if you're barking. So he and so many other of his party ran a listening campaign, where they'd go into shelters and schools and just listen while the beings with problems told them the problems that they experienced. They'd just listen, not offering solutions, not arguing, just listening. Sometimes the problem-havers would come up with their own solutions on the spot that didn't even require intervention, just speaking out loud and having their problems heard allowed them to conceive of solutions. Other times, the constituents would come in with solutions in mind, and whether they were feasible or not, they would be heard. The dogs, these dogs, these dogs who had fought so hard, struggled for the majority of their short lives for the right to vote, took note, and changed the way our city is run.
I nominate @princegazardiel and @stinawog to make a new funny post for comedy open mic