“If I could walk with the animals and talk with the animals Grunt, squeak, and squawk with the animals, and lord, they could talk to me!”
…so go the lyrics of ‘Talk to the animals’ by crooning rat-packer Sammy Davis Jnr. But now, thanks to the help of ‘Dog Whisperer’, Johnny Morris OBE, the dead Welsh television presenter best known for talking to animals on BBC kids’ show, Animal Magic, we can!
Suffolk Canal and River Trust campaign
Morris, who, as reported in the Suffolk Gazette earlier this month, came back from the dead to help police unstick Larry the Cat from the road outside No.10 Downing Street, has returned from the nether world once more. This time, to help the Suffolk Canal and River Trust dissuade dogs from fouling on their footpaths.
Spiderman, Spiderman…
Avuncular corpse, Morris, 106, speaks several animal languages including: bird, terrapin, orangutan, and most recently, dog. He developed his skills in the 1950s and 60s when his wife and he stopped engaging in interesting conversation with one another. After befriending a talkative spider who lived beneath the Morris’s kitchen sink, the bored TV presenter set up a lonely hearts club for multi-lingual animals and humans called ‘The Tail & Chin Waggers’ whose members included a number of high profile animals including: Blue Peter’s ‘Shep’, Rainbow’s ‘Bungle’, and Keith Harris’s alter-ego ‘Orville’. Human members stalled at Morris and a young Jeremy Paxman – being the only two known Britons who can talk to members of the animal kingdom in their own tongue.
Erect signage
After seeing the new signage erected alongside the River Blyth in East Suffolk, we conducted a séance at the offices of the Suffolk Gazette to ask Morris what the words ‘grrrrr’, ‘bark’, and ‘woof’ meant in dog. Using the Ouija board that we had hastily fashioned out of the office Monopoly game and a cut-up Toblerone box, we made contact with the undead miniature railway enthusiast who told us “G R R R R R = S T O P. B A R K = T A L K I N G. W O O F = S H I T.” We asked Morris if the message would be understood by dogs. His reply was “N O T D O G S. P A X M A N.”
