by Ros Asquith
PC Roberts was beginning to look rather impatient. “If no crime has been committed, we haven’t got all night, your ladyship,” he told her. “The pensioners at the Rose and Crown can get seriously out of order after dark, and the skateboarding in Tesco’s car park has become a major policing problem.”
Melchior laughed uproariously, then stopped when PC Roberts caught his eye.
“I quite understand, officer,” Lady G said, then turned to us. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is that you thought I didn’t want your puppies for pets, but for experiments, or for the fur trade, or both. By pretending to be traders yourselves, you got me here to trap me into admitting it. What you don’t know is that I detest the exploitation of animals. So, thanks to your very convincing performance, I invited the police here in order to trap YOU.”
“You m-mean you had no idea about it? But what about that clothing firm called Goodchild’s?” stuttered Chloe.
“That’s the family firm,” Lady G agreed. “But I have nothing to do with it. I’m a scientist.”
“Yes! That’s right!” put in Jolene. “She works at the laboratory at Mandleton and does horrible experiments on puppies!”
Lady Goodchild laughed.
“Sweetheart, Mandleton’s a physics laboratory. We’re looking for something called the Higgs boson. It’s nothing to do with animals.”
“What about the Dog Parts?” said Jolene, accusingly.
For a moment, we thought we had her. Then Lady G laughed. “Not Dog Parts! God Particle. The Higgs boson is known as the God Particle!”
Everyone in the room, except Chloe, looked blank, then laughed. And Jolene blushed.
I looked at my watch. It was seven twenty-five.
“We’re missing parents evening!” I wailed. “We’re supposed to do a thing about Furry Rights and we were going to show all of Bottomley how we’d exposed you!”
“I’m sorry I let you down. You’re very brave girls,” said Lady G, smiling. And, I find it hard to admit this, but she didn’t look anything like a hungry crocodile at all. She looked rather nice. Which only goes to prove that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. “Haven’t you got something else to show them?”
“We’ve got a magazine for animals by animals. And a poster and an insect survey,” I admitted. “We were also going to have a thing showing that animals are as clever as humans…but that didn’t quite work out either.”
“You have my sympathy,” Lady Goodchild said. “Things don’t always turn out as you want in life – or in science either. But what happens instead can sometimes be almost as good.”
Dinah and Chloe and Jolene and I charged off to the parents’ evening, leaving Lady Goodchild apologising to the policemen and Melchior offering them all free haircuts to help put things right.
Warty-Beak threw us a filthy look when we finally showed up at school. But not as filthy as the one Mum threw us when she saw us squeezing into our chairs on stage. Why does she look so deadly? I thought. Ah. She’s recognised her best suit. On Dinah. Whoops…
Warty hissed at me. “We’ve had to change the whole running order because of your lateness. You go on last. Sit up straight!”
Dennis and Sumil were just finishing their presentation, which was a plea for the Hoodies of Bottomley in rap form. Dennis was reciting the words, while Sumil bounced a football in the air on his knee and his toe in time to it.
“So next time you see a gang of kids in hoodies wiv nuffink to do / Show ’em dat you care about ’em, dey is yuman too!/ Give ’em a yoof centre to burn off all de energy! / Give ’em an adventure playground to destroy fings harmlessly!”
The rows of parents and teachers all laughed nervously.
“Hug a hoodie!” finished Dennis and Sumil together as they shuffled off to a big round of applause from the kids.
Sylvie and Marilyn did a thing about traffic flow in Bottomley, with a lot of graphs and diagrams projected off Marilyn’s laptop. Sometimes these came out upside down. but since Sylvie and Marilyn spoke very quietly and the subject was very boring, nobody knew what the graphs meant anyway, whichever way up they were. One of the visuals was a little blue square (a car) going down the High Street, sometimes getting stuck because a little yellow oblong (Mr Arkwright’s bus) was coming the other way. Occasionally a very exciting thing happened, which was a little red circle on a stick (the lollipop lady) stopping the traffic for a whole minute. At the end, everyone who hadn’t gone to sleep clapped politely.
Dennis and Sumil and a crowd of other boys at the back encouragingly shouted, “Keep it real!” and made hip-hop gestures, and Sylvie and Marilyn looked quite pleased.
Then me and Dinah and Chloe stumbled on.
“This is about the animals of Bottomley and how they deserve a better deal,” I mumbled.
“We were going to prove to you that here in Bottomley an illegal animal trade goes on, run by respected posh members of the community!” Dinah shouted enthusiastically. I frowned at her. “But it turned out not to be true…” she tailed off.
There was a mixture of sympathetic groans and sighs of relief from the audience.
“We were also going to show you some amazing animals that can do things proving they are just as clever as people!” Dinah announced, her tone defiant again.
“But that…er…isn’t quite ready yet,” Chloe said.
There was another sympathetic groan and one cry of, “Shame!”
“But it IS happening in other countries around the world and we can help stop it!” said Dinah bravely. “Because we believe Animals Are People Too and have as much right to a decent life as anyone else.”
“So, erm, we’ve made a magazine that you can see on the display table,” I struggled on. “Because we believe that Animals are Not Dumb and one day they will have rights just like us, including a right to an education. And then they will enjoy our magazine…”
By now the whole audience had got the giggles.
“Will they be allowed to vote?” shouted somebody in the front row.
“What about a pet’s National Health Service?” said someone else. “Will vets be free?”
Just then a strange buzz went round the room and people started craning their necks to look at something. Warty-Beak and Mrs Hedake got up, ready for action.
Dinah and Chloe and I realised then that we weren’t the only ones on the stage. We’d been joined by Melchior’s dog, George.
“That dog shouln’t be in here!” Warty-Beak shouted.
“Freedom!” shouted Dennis and Sumil and the hip-hop crew at the back.
Warty-Beak and Hedake began to advance towards us in a dog-catching crouch. George backed away, growling a bit, but his tail was wagging. Then he got up on his hind legs and waved his paws. There was a burst of applause. Warty-Beak and Hedake stopped.
George looked encouraged. He lay down, then rolled over and over across the stage, finally springing to all fours, turning his little behind round to the audience and wagging his tail. There was a much louder burst of applause and random shouts of “Wicked!”, “All right!” and “Excellent!” from the crowd.
Melchior appeared at the back and borrowed Sumil’s football. He lobbed it towards George, who flicked it neatly up in the air with his back legs and caught it on his nose. The applause from the crowd was deafening. Hedake smiled sheepishly and went back to her seat. Warty-Beak hovered, not knowing whether to stay angry or not.
Melchior was shrugging his shoulders and looking at us apologetically. Apparently, this interruption seemed to be all George’s idea.
As usual, Dinah was the first one to get her head round the situation. “We’d like to thank George for dropping in to help out with our presentation,” she said, nodding encouragingly at the little dog. He sat down, wagging his tail furiously, and nodded back.
“I hope it wasn’t too much bother for you, I know you’ve got a lot of other engagements,” she said to George, shaking her head this time. He shook his head too and pointed his ears out
sideways. Everyone erupted with laughter.
“But we know you feel the cause of Furry Rights is sadly neglected, and you and your friends are doing everything possible to remind us that Animals Are Human Too.”
She nodded very eagerly at George, who nodded back so hard it looked as if his ears would fall off, and he added a “Woof” for good measure.
“Well, thanks for coming out, George, and we hope we’ll see you here again sometime.” Dinah stretched her hand out to George, who hopped up on his back legs, tottered towards her and extended a paw, which she shook. Then he staggered over to Chloe and me, shook paws, dropped on to all fours and scampered off to Jolene, who greeted him with a big hug. The applause was almost loud enough to blow the walls out.
Everybody wanted to look at our table display after that. All the parents and teachers crowded round it, and lots of them came up and said, “Well done”.
In actual fact, though I say so myself, our magazine was definitely the best thing of the whole evening, apart from Hannah’s knitting and Sumil and Dennis’s Lego. Except for George, of course.
Here’s some of the magazine, not to boast, but just so you can see how good it is. I’m thinking of printing it out properly for pet owners, maybe turning it into a weekly magazine. Because even if the puppies can’t read it, everyone there really liked it.
Melchior came over to us once the parents were all standing round chatting to the teachers and enjoying lots of the cheap Parents’ Association drinks.
“Hope you didn’t mind George joining you,” he said to us out of the corner of his mouth. “Couldn’t stop him. He loves Jolene, follows her everywhere.”
“How does he DO all that?” I asked.
“Circus dog,” Melchior said. “Got him when I was a bouncer. His trainer gave me him in exchange for letting him into a posh club. Good, innit?”
“Totally awesome,” I said. “Saved the day.”
At the end of the evening, Miss Hedake had a little word with us. “Well done, girls,” she said. “I wouldn’t say a performing dog entirely proves your point about animals having minds of their own, but it was a very entertaining presentation just the same.”
“We thought so,” Dinah said, nudging me.
“Excellent,” Miss Hedake said, drifting off. Warty-Beak, standing nearby, smiled his sickly smile. He was about to come over, probably to tell us that he knew, in his devilish knowing-everything way, that it had all been an accident really, when his sickly smile turned into an even more nauseating one.
We looked round and saw Lady Goodchild there, smiling radiantly at us all, even Warty. She’d obviously been looking at our display very closely.
“I particularly like this letter to the Agony Ant,” Lady Goodchild said to me, pointing to the Puppies’ Plea for Freedom in my magazine. “But you know, puppies do grow up quicker than children and your puppies really are old enough to leave their mum. I believe animals deserve the respect to be free to be themselves, not like us, don’t you?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Which puppy do you love the most?”
“B-Bonzo.”
“How funny,” said Lady G. “He is just the very one I was thinking I should leave at home with you.”
I didn’t mean to, I don’t know how it happened. But I hugged her. All her redness seemed cosy now, like the puppies’ blanket. Not scary or dragonish at all. Not a bit.
I was still dreading the next day, when Lady G was coming to collect the puppies. I was Very Extremely happy about keeping Bonzo – especially as Mum had agreed – but I couldn’t bear to think how miserable Harpo would be the day her children left home.
We arranged that Dad would take Harpo out for a walk so she couldn’t see them go. We persuaded Tomato to go too. I thought his wailing might be just as bad as Harpo, but little kids have short attention spans and the promise of ice cream sorted him out.
I stayed home to make sure the puppies were OK when Lady Goodchild arrived. For the first time since I realised she was kind, I wondered why she really wanted so many puppies, so I asked her.
“Because I have four children. And another one on the way. Haven’t you noticed? But the baby will have to wait for a puppy. I’m not taking Bonzo.”
I blushed. Her huge, round stomach was a baby then.
I kissed all the puppies goodbye one by one and I didn’t even cry. Much. I was thinking more about Harpo. The puppies all kissed me back in their way, but I have to admit they seemed very happy to go off with nice kind Lady G, who said we could visit any time.
Me and Mum and Bonzo spent the next half hour waiting for Harpo to come home. We prepared a special meal of Pooch-de-luxe for her, which she never normally has as it’s so expensive. I stood by the window hugging Bonzo and waiting anxiously for her to appear.
When she did, she went straight to the puppies’ basket to look for them. Then she ran upstairs. She went all round the house looking for the puppies in every room. And then, just as I thought my heart would break, she ran all round the house again, wagging her tail! She was celebrating! She had obviously had enough of motherhood.
So Lady Goodchild was right. The puppies were ready to leave home. And Harpo was ready to let them.
Since then I’ve been thinking a lot.
Lady Goodchild told me that animals are concerned with different things than humans; they don’t want clothes or fame or money. She agreed that humans and animals have an equal right to freedom. But it is a different kind of freedom from ours.
I think animals and children have quite a lot in common. Children have to go to school and most of us don’t want to. We would much prefer to be out playing than cooped up in a class all day pretending to learn stuff. But the main difference is that when we grow up, we get a chance to be free, but pets and circus animals and animals in zoos or on farms will never be truly free.
I‘ve changed my mind about forcing them to do stuff they don’t want. Even George, who likes performing his tricks, is a lot happier now he’s out of the circus. At least, that’s what Jolene thinks. I think even if animals could learn to read, they wouldn’t want to. Just helping them to be as happy as possible is the best thing. I wish adults would see that that is all children really need too.
So the puppies finally went to a really nice new home of their own and that was a Happy Ending.
On the downside, Dora went ballistic about the CDs and the oil pastels and the Barbie AND the ridiculous shoes we’d “recycled”. The CDs were her favourite; she just hadn’t played them yet. James Blunt. I should have known she’d like him. The shoes were a pair she’d been saving up ages for, but wasn’t allowed to wear to school. The Barbie was apparently “in mint condition” cos she’d kept it in its wrapping since she was six and it was going to be worth a fortune one day. The oil pastels were a birthday present for her best friend.
“She never brings any friends home so how was I to know she had any?” muttered Dinah. “And only Dora would think about money when she was six years old.”
But the thing I felt worst about was the books. Dora had really loved those. They were her favourite books when she was little. She’d wanted to keep them for her own kids one day. I have favourite books I keep too, so I knew how she felt.
We put a poster up hoping they’d be returned, so maybe they will. Meanwhile all my pocket money goes into a Dora fund. And a digital-camera fund. Oh, yeah, and a dry-cleaning fund for Mum’s best suit.
I keep a bit of pocket money for Fidoburgers though, as I am responsible for feeding Bonzo.
It’s worth it to know I’ll always hear his soft sweet snore.
Acknowledgements
With Very Extremely special thanks to
Purrrrfect editor Stella Paskins and
Wooftastic designer Elorine Grant for turning my
ravings and doodles into a REAL BOOK.
If you enjoyed Trixie Fights for Furry Rights, check out these other great Ros Asquith titles.
Buy the ebook here
Also by Trixie (with help from Ros Asquith):
Trixie and the Amazing Doggy Yap Star
Trixie and the Dream Pony of Doom
Trixie Gets the witch Factor
Trixie’s Very Extremely Brilliant Guide to Everything
Copyright
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2007
Harper Collins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright © Ros Asquith 2007
Ros Asquith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author and the illustrator of the work.
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Source ISBN:9780007223596