Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what the consciousness of humans consists of, let alone that of animals.

Percy wakes me (fourteen)Percy wakes me and I am not ready.He has slept all night under the covers.Now he__ eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter Where he is not supposed to be. How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you Needed me, To wake me. He thought he would a lecture and deeply His eyes begin to shine.He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.He squirms and squeals: he has done something That he needed And now he hears that it is okay. I scratch his ears. I turn him over And touch him everywhere. He isWild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then He has breakfast, and he is happy.This is a poem about Percy.This is a poem about more than Percy.Think about it.

Books allow us to escape from the pressures of modern life. By far, the best vehicles of escape are Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy genre allowing us to lose ourselves in worlds far away from the reality we know. This escapism works because we totally immerse ourselves and:-We become the hero or heroine. We are the ones who thwart evil. We laugh as we socialise with characters we have never met but feel they are as close as our family. We cry when we lose a good friend.

And one day when you wake up, you happen to realise that your battle isn__ with the man you had got into a brawl with the other day, it isn__ with a friend turned foe, it isn__ with those parents who chose to give up on you, it isn__ with the bus driver for not having waited until you got in, it isn__ with the employer who cancelled the application to your leave, it isn__ with the examiner who resolved into failing you, it isn__ with the woman who did not reciprocate your feelings, it isn__ with child who dropped his ice-cream cone on you, it isn__ with your ill fate and it isn__ with that superior being above you. Your battle, your fight isn__ against the world but against yourself and the only way to come through all of it and beyond, to win, is improvement, self-improvement which needs to be gradual and progressive with the transverse of each day.

Fate," Bizzy said, "adjusts quicker 'n a hungery dog can lick a dish.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.