You humans don’t notice the smell of anything until it’s practically overpowering. Take men’s aftershave. Or women’s perfume. Sometimes I’ve almost fainted when I’ve been around Mrs Lambert because of the strength of her eau de toilette. It makes your eyes water. If you’re a dog. If we take sheep, you probably can’t detect much difference in their odours. In fact, not only is there a world of difference between the smells of each individual sheep, some dogs, such as my friend Nipper, a Border collie who lives with the Herdwicks, can tell immediately from the change in the odour of the flock as a whole when one is missing –and Nipper knows which sheep is lost as well. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he can find the missing sheep, provided it’s still alive. What’s more, if the sheep’s been eaten by a fox he can smell it inside the fox’s stomach, and if the fox has already digested it he can identify traces of the sheep in the fox’s droppings. As if that were not enough –and here I must confess that my own olfactory sense would fail this particular test– he says that to the trained snout there is a distinct change in the odour of the actual fox, which contains hints of that of the sheep for at least a week after old Reynard has scoffed it. The same goes for any other animal and what it has eaten. So Nipper can deduce what you had for breakfast this morning simply from sniffing you. Even Sherlock Holmes wasn’t that good!

Having said that, I’ve always felt that, for all his bloodhoundesque ability to track down criminals, Holmes was more of a cat person anyway. Watson could have been a dog –a boxer, perhaps. But there was something inescapably feline about Holmes. He was the kind of individual you just can’t fathom, in the same way as you can’t pin down most cats. One thing you humans have got right is that we dogs don’t get on too well with our whiskered rivals –though I’ve nothing against Holmes.

“What’s wrong with cats?!” I hear some of you –those of you who, along with too many people in this village, such as our neighbours, the Newlyns (whom I have to say I wouldn’t be able to stand even if they didn’t live with a cat), voluntarily choose to abide with them– cry indignantly. I ask in return: “What have cats ever achieved? What was the first animal in space? Can a cat help a blind person cross the road? Say you’ve fallen down a ravine and broken your leg. You’ve been lying there for three days without food. Along comes… a cat. Do your hopes rise?”