This past Saturday, the poem Mercies by Don Patterson appeared in the Guardian Newspaper, it is a well constructed sonnet about having a dog ‘put down, as they say.

‘She might have had months left of her dog-years,
but to be who? She’d grown light as a nest…’

The relationship between humans and other animals is an interesting one, we come together, create partnerships and affections as powerful sometimes as we do with our own species. More often than not we find ourselves at time confronting what Nietzche coined as “nature’s will to power’. Meaning that life itself not only seeks to survive but also to dominate…