"To his dog, every man is Napoleon," remarked Aldous Huxley. "Hence the constant popularity of dogs." But perhaps the rule applies to women too. How else do we interpret the news that former revolutionary Patty Hearst has become a champion canine-breeder - specialising in small French dogs to boot?
The newspaper heiress is best known for a series of bizarre events that happened 34 years ago, beginning with her kidnapping by the "Symbionese Liberation Army". Those self-styled urban guerrillas first sought the release of jailed members as her ransom, later amending this to a demand that would have involved her wealthy father distributing $70 worth of food to every poor person in California.
He donated some $6 million of food eventually, about $400 million less than what was required. But by then, his daughter had undergone a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome - or "brainwashing" as her defence lawyers would subsequently claim.
She joined the SLA, renamed herself "Tania", and helped to rob a bank before she was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail. Along the way, she also posed for an iconic urban-guerrilla photograph, complete with machine gun and beret and looking like a camp version of Che Guevara.
But that was then. The granddaughter of the real-life Citizen Kane is now a mature 54-year-old. And her wild days long behind, it appears that she is currently devoting herself to a gentler kind of revolution - the ongoing canine experiment known as the "French Bulldog".
Dubbed the "Frenchie" (remember when that meant something else in Ireland?) by enthusiasts, this is a downsized version of the better-known British bulldog. It probably owes its existence to 18th-century English workers who brought the fighting model to France and bred the aggression out of it. Thus, in her own small way, Patty Hearst could now be said to be working for world peace.
As a small down-payment, her dog Diva this week won the best bitch medal at the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York. Happy news indeed. And surely as stark a contrast as one can imagine to the moment in 1974 when Hearst held up the Hibernia Bank (founded by a man from Waterford, incidentally) in San Francisco and, pointing an assault rifle, told customers: "Up against the wall, mother******s!"
Her change of vocation is a turn-up, by any standards - because apart from anything else, I would have had her down as a cat person. Not just because she's a woman, and women are more likely to prefer cats to dogs (comments on a postcard, please). But her short-lived career as celebrity-guerrilla looked like the behaviour of a spoilt aristocrat, which is what any cats I know behave like too.
Feline fans will complain that this is the prejudice of a doggy man, and perhaps it is. Fortunately, the negative public image of their favoured species is not my problem. Never mind the rest of the rap-sheet normally levelled against it: the selfishness, lack of social skills, inability to return affection, etc. Until the day a cat learns to give me its paw when asked, I feel free to criticise.
Yes, I know the cat lobby's counter-arguments. Dogs are equally selfish, just better at pretending not to be. The undying loyalty they profess to you is the same as the undying loyalty they would profess to anyone else who fed them. Dogs' sociability is one side of a coin, the other side being a pack mentality. And their aptitude for learning new tricks is maintained at the expense of any dignity. These points are all familiar to me: I read Garfield too.
But there's no point in arguing with cat people, anyway. You might as well debate with those weirdos who always put the toilet-roll
on with the loose end over the top. It's just a personal choice, after all.
Mind you, on the canine-feline spectrum, Hearst's French bulldog would probably occupy the cross-over section in the middle. I note that, according to the London Times, she says her prize mutt has a "French attitude", disdaining other dogs in the park and demanding the highest standards of public hygiene. "Diva's attitude in New York was, 'Do I have to go out on those dirty streets?'" claimed her
proud owner.
Which, allowing for the dog enthusiast's natural inclination to read too much into a pet's feelings, sounds suspiciously like cat behaviour to me. You get the impression that if Diva were ever kidnapped by a bunch of feline radicals, she might emerge from captivity wearing a beret, refusing to give her paw, and purring when stroked. She wouldn't even have to change her name to sound the part.
Hearst herself would be sounder on the canine identity question, you suspect. Consider the evidence from her period of notoriety. Once kidnapped, she quickly transferred her loyalties to her new masters, affecting immediate and total sincerity. She proved spectacularly amenable to retraining, responding to a new name and learning to hold a machine-gun in an almost convincing manner. She ran with a pack. And although her new friends' ransom demands were initially political, all they wanted in the end - in true canine style - was food.
I take it all back. In retrospect, Hearst was clearly a doggy person all along.