Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

Fifteen Dogs

André Alexis

Two gods, Hermes & Apollo, wonder what animals would be like if granted human intelligence and language. They wager that they would be more unhappy than humans. They choose fifteen dogs housed in a nearby clinic. What follows is an intriguing fantasy which will tear at the heart strings of all dog lovers as things do not always go well.

Extract
Somewhere around midnight, Rosie, a German Shepherd, stopped as she was licking her vagina and wondered how long she would be in the place she found herself. She then wondered what had happened to the last litter she'd whelped. It suddenly seemed grossly unfair that one should go through the trouble of having pups only to lose track of them. She got up to have a drink of water and to sniff the hard pellets that had been left for her to eat. Nosing the food around in its shallow bowl, she was perplexed to discover that the bowl was not dark in the usual way but had, rather, a strange hue. The bowl was astonishing. It was only a kind of bubble-gum pink, but as Rosie had never seen the colour before, it looked beautiful.
Parallels
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
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Violence
Explicit sexual content