My recently acquired acquisition, a female Irish Setter, I have discovered is a floozy. She is also a scarlet woman because she is a red setter. She's the sort of dog who, if she was human, would wear micro bikinis to the beach, mini-skirts on public transport, and wet T-shirts everywhere else. (The last being because she'd enhance everything worth enhancing with surgery if she could.) I said she was a dog; actually, she's a bitch. I'm sure she'd like a designer chihuahua.

The other night I caught her lying on top of InstantJim on the couch - licking him! InstantJim the confirmed Dog-Hater! InstantJim the Cat Person! And she just looked up at me with her brown boudoir eyes and sent me a telepathic message: "Nyair nyair!" I sent her one back: "I'll get you - home-wrecker!" and I did, too, by eating that cold organic chicken sausage in the fridge myself!

But animals are like that, aren't they? Free-loading parasites who get fed better than your own children and end up having the best chair in the house. But what do they do to deserve any of this? Puppy dog eyes? It's not like they can look at you with iguana eyes, is it, so I don't count that. Same goes for the cute factor - unless they rehearse a series of tricks and perform them in front of you just to have a tummy-rub with a steel capped boot or a crumb of your tofu sandwich (in which case that would be sort of worthy). But mine are usually sleeping, eating, pooing or waiting around the front door to come inside and supplant me. Sponge dogs.

Well, floozy girl had better watch herself. She's messing with a being of Superior Intellect here! A being with an Opposable Thumb! She may look like she's related to orangutans but I have far more in common with them! Oh, .. er ... you know what I mean.

Cunningly, I will use my opposable thumb and, with a fine pincer motion guided by my enormous brain, I will turn on the West Coast Eagles versus the Dockers match on the telly! She can't compete with that. Even in a wet Tshirt.