It’s a dog’s life for copycats

Human beings are astonishingly imitative creatures. If that were not so, marketing would be a poor truncated thing and the fashion industry would never have got started.

So much is self-evident, but the more one sees of copycat collective behaviour the more tempting it is to conclude that it is the single most determinant influence in society today. From laddishness to its twin horror feminism, from political correctness to counselling, from healthy eating to road rage, the many-headed beast lurches from fad to fad unimpeded by conscious mental process.

The compulsion to imitate is so deeply rooted that it must rank as second only to the urge to procreate in the defining of mankind. Indeed, so widespread is it and so pervasive, that it requires an act of will to observe it rather than just to accept it.

For instance, at the infants’ school around the corner from where I live, at 3pm every day from Monday to Friday scores of mothers arrive in the car park, or, failing that, in the surrounding streets. Nothing surprising there. But look more closely and you will see that every one of them is at the wheel of a four-wheel drive vehicle made for crossing rutted field and boundless desert.

Listen and you will hear the air reverberate to shrill cries of “No way”; still, years after its introduction from the US, the fashionable trope with which the imitative seek to assert their individuality but in truth confirm their unimaginative collectiveness. Without conscious effort these mothers have made themselves into a tribe, their cars and their voices as emblematic as the body paint of Papuan warriors.

Now let me take you down to the pub. This is instructive because it demonstrates that the herd instinct crosses, as BSE is said to from cow to human, the boundaries of age. Look along the bar and you will see not only young people drinking designer lagers direct from the bottle, for in an urban backwater that is still the cool thing to do, but also men in the Fifties wearing their shirts outside their trousers. Note, too, that of those middle-aged mimics who are not sporting baseball caps, the fashion is to compensate advancing baldness with greasy, grey ponytails. I would not go as far as the social commentator Richard Littlejohn, who proposes that such men should be clubbed to death, like baby seals, since that would be inhumane and messy. A lethal injection is better.

Talking of shirts and middle-aged men, what better example could one have of aping (apt word, that) than the custom of wearing the football kit of the team one follows? Children do this, in much the same way that an earlier generation dressed up as cowboys and Indians, to act out fantasies. But while the belief that to affect the raiment of your heroes might somehow invest you with their heroic virtues is forgivable when formed in the inchoate infant mind, it is plain bloody silly when adopted by a bald pated geezer with a ponytail. Pass the syringe.

Just as blind imitative behaviour seeps insidiously across age groups, so it crosses the class divides. Back to the pub, where in saloon and public bar alike you will overhear conversations peppered with expressions such as “bonding”, “peer group pressure”, “role models”, and “culture”. Thus jargon invented by the pseudo-science of sociology to disguise the simplicity of its propositions filters down through the social strata to become part of everyone’s everyday parroting. Sociologists call the process the “internalisation of norms”. I wonder why that one never caught on.

An area that has never been properly explored, perhaps because it has no obvious implications for either marketing or fashion, is the possibility that imitative behaviour is passed from humans to dogs. Though we are still light years from the evolutionary process that will allow a cocker spaniel to drive a four-wheel off-road vehicle, dress like a teenager, or speak in psychobabble, there is evidence, as yet unexplained, for believing that dogs copy each other, usually in disturbing ways, and possibly, given the distances involved, by means of telepathy.

Some years ago, an alsatian ravaged a child. Within days, alsatians across the country were dismembering the nation’s progeny. The papers were full of it. A decade or so on, the phenomenon was repeated, but this time the offenders were pit bull terriers and their crimes were so widespread that Parliament rushed through ill-considered legislation to halt the epidemic.

One assumes that in domesticating dogs, we have somehow imparted to them our own instinctive patterns of behaviour. We are, after all, the superior species. (Sometimes it is unavoidable to be judgmental.) But might not the reverse be the case – that we are becoming more like our pets? Dogs are pack animals and so are the people who, having suffered some hurt, setback, or inconvenience, blame someone else and sue in the hope of hitting a little jackpot.

Latest among these are the police sent to the Dunblane massacre, who are planning to seek damages from their own force for exposing them to psychological trauma, and idle former schoolchildren who are suing their schools for failing to give them a good education. Then again, seeing such behaviour, a self-respecting pit bull would get up and slowly walk away.