[Newspaper Column] Humans V Dogs

Each week the Romford Recorder and Ilford Recorder have the Steve N Allen column. If you're around East London and West Essex you can buy the newspaper every Thursday/Friday, or follow @mrstevenallen to see the columns on Twitter. You can also read the archive of past ones, which can be found here.

You can click the image to zoom in on the paper, or read the column below.


I like to keep my eye across scientific breakthrough because I am sure it makes me fun to be near during dinner parties, even though the invites seem to have dried up.

The trouble is science often comes out with headlines that are totally obvious. The latest research I think we could have guessed showed that people have more sympathy to dogs than humans.

In the experiment the researchers made an advert saying, "Would you give £5 to save Harrison from a slow, painful death?"

You see that ad and say, "I don't think the last Star Wars film was that bad."

But look a little closer and in some ads Harrison was a human child and in others he was a puppy. We humans have gave more for the dog than the homo sapiens.

Surely no one is surprised by that. If there's a dog on a train everyone stops what they're doing to look and enjoy it trying to not fall over. If there's a child on public transport in go the earphones to block the annoying cries.

People go online to look at pictures of dogs. Meanwhile people change their Facebook settings to hide that they're online so they don't have to look at their friends photos of their newborns.

I've met dogs and I have met humans and more humans have been a disappointment.

OK, sometimes if feels like a dog is only with you for the free meals but I've had relationships like that too. At least the canine doesn't argue, and if it does it doesn't make everything about it.

But most of all, we trust dogs more because dogs would never make up an appeal about some fictional character called Harrison just so it could see how we react.