I’ve been wondering about ancestral memory recently.

Take Alfie.  He’s my daughter’s little white dog.  She describes him as a bichon frise-something-or-other cross.  I call him a mongrel.

Alfie doesn’t mind.

He’s about 7 years old, although he’s rather guarded about his age.  Vanity, I suppose.

Anyroadup, Alfie does that timeless thing that all dogs have done since cavelady times.  (Setting out my woke credentials there, see?).  He lurks under the dinner table and weaves his way through diners’ and dining chairs’ legs, prowling in search of dropped tit-bits; or gazing up at you with big forlorn eyes hoping for some soft-headed idiot to give him something off their plate.

He’s also developed a remarkable sense of hearing which alerts him even in his deepest slumbers (which is Alfie’s other hobby) to the sound of the fridge door being opened.

But now here’s the thing.

We’ve never fed him at the table from stuff from off our plates.  So you’d think that in his 7 years of experience and conditioning that he might have learned this and realised he’s better off continuing to invest his twitching energies into his sleep.

But no.  He’s clearly never heard of Pavlov.  So the question is this: does he follow a wilder, more ancestral call from his forbears?

Or else is he incorrigibly optimistic, stupid and a greedy little bugger?