To my friends this will not come as a surprise. I LOVE doughnuts. I especially love the traditional deep fried, well cooked, caster-sugared jammy ones. I recall as a very young child where and how it started. The local bakers- Marigolds – not only sold them, sometimes we’d sit down and eat them at the few tables they had in a corner of the shop while mum had a coffee. I can remember also when I learned you could enjoy doughnuts any time. It was my brother in law to be’s fault. Yes, you, Jim Crompton. Driving me to the airport having had a stay in the USA, we stopped at something like seven in the morning to buy an assortment of doughnuts. Who knew that was even possible? But my love affair with them has never really wavered and its with regret my weight says I have to limit my intake of them these days.  

So what has this to do with dogs?

Well – if tomorrow I were to experience a doughnut that was horrible, as in truly disgusting that it made me ill I’d know – because of my previous positive experiences of eating doughnuts – it would be the exception. That it was a one off. My experience of many sorts of doughnuts mean I prefer some over others and some are, to be frank, disappointing, but my faith in the pleasure and delight doughnuts normally brought me would be undented.  So if we have a dog that is attacked and harmed by another dog, but our dog has had heaps of great, positive experiences of all sorts of dogs before he met that one nasty one, with any luck he’ll write it off to being a ‘one off’. The exception. With any luck he’ll happily continue engaging with other dogs sociably, knowing that mostly they are a ‘good thing’.

If the very first doughnut I’d ever eaten had been horrible and so 100% of my doughnut eating experience had been a negative, nasty one and I decided to never eat another, well, that would have been a tragedy. I might never understand the delights of doughnut eating. I might have gone though life assuming doughnuts were a ‘bad thing’ instead of the ‘good thing’ they are. But no doubt I’d be a couple of stone lighter too.