Getting TMR out of his New Year’s slumber (of all things) was this fantastic example of idiocy found by reader PP:

A dog owner whose pooch has separation anxiety has introduced a dummy to keep the little canine happy.

Marc Peralta’s dog Shorty “barks and cries and just cannot calm down” whenever he’s away, Vintage Pet Rescue wrote on Facebook last week.

…

Mr Peralta’s wife Kristen told The Dodo the dog won’t settle down even if he’s held by someone else.

“He just wants his dad,” Mrs Peralta told the publication.

She tried to calm the pooch by creating a figure of his likeness out of pillows and dressing the pile in his clothes but the dog saw right through it.

Mrs Peralta then decided to buy a life size dummy from a Halloween store and dress it in her husband’s clothes.

The dummy has a shirt, baseball cap and even fake sleeve tattoos for Mr Peralta’s likeness.

Wow! Isn’t that cool? Mr Sleeve Tattoos and his wife think so highly of their house that they would rather have a hideous lifesize dummy festooning their loungeroom than take the time and effort into training their dog. I can just imagine the swathe of Lemmings out there that must be positively itching to do the same thing.

Regrettably, the above kind of behaviour is rife in the world these days. Instead of remediating undesirable behaviour, people instead choose to reinforce it with an endless procession of ‘easy’ solutions that keep kicking the can – almost all of which end up with far more time and money being spent than otherwise would be the case if the situation was properly dealt with.

Child being difficult? Don’t even think about wasting your valuable time with them. Just put them in front of an electronic device and give them some more sugar.

Got federal budget problems? Don’t even dream of working hard – that’s for capitalist losers. Just print more money, tell people it’s all ‘free’ and hope that nobody notices.

As for Shorty the poor pug, his obvious anxiety issues aren’t even close to being resolved. Barring intervention by the Dog Whisperer, they never will be. In no more than a few weeks’ time, he’ll realise that the dummy is full of shit – before continuing on with his miserable existence wondering exactly what kind of rocks are occupying his owners’ heads.

Sound familiar?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we’re living in some sort of enlightened, modern age and that we know almost everything there is to know. The reality, of course, is that we still know bugger all – and that many people’s immediate ancestors were most definitely still swinging from the trees.