Ezra Pound had it mostly right: when you reflect on the way dogs behave, you’re left in no doubt man is the superior animal; when you go on to reflect on human behaviour, you start to wonder. He might have added a coda that the real source of bafflement and disgust is to be found in human behaviour around dogs.

Take this week. Wanging round the internet has been a photograph of the BBC’s Emily Maitlis working on her laptop at a table on a GWR train with her pet whippet curled up peaceably on the seat beside her. “Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis slammed for letting dog sleep on seat of packed train” was the Daily Mirror’s pretty representative headline.

What’s really telling is the slight fudging of the question of why she’s being “slammed”. This is odd: your standard-issue tabloid attack headline does not usually hedge its bets. But it does here. The main emphasis is on the supposed rudeness of her taking up a seat on a crowded train, the implication being that Maitlis’s spoiled pooch left pregnant women and frail oldies standing in the aisle for thrombosis-threatening hours.

But the story doesn’t at all support that. The photo shows an empty seat in the row behind Maitlis, and a quoted witness couldn’t muster more than “some people chose to stand, as there were few spare seats”. And what sort of weirdo, instead of just saying: “Excuse me, but could you move your dog so I can sit down?” decides rather to photograph the sleeping dog, stand uncomfortably and resentfully all the way to their destination and then complain to the newspapers?

No: the reason the story was framed this way is that the paper didn’t dare baldly state the actual offence: which is that, no matter whether a train is full or empty, it’s pretty disgusting to put a dog on a seat for humans. This would risk appearing anti-dog. Safer to go with the “inconveniencing other passengers” line (as a nation we love nothing more than standing in an aisle tut-tutting at the lady with a handbag on the seat beside her) than risk inflaming canine sentimentalists by implying the whippet didn’t have as much right as any Newsnight presenter to be there.

Dogs are pretty revolting creatures, even the nice ones. All of them fart. Most of them shed. Most of them dribble. Most of them hump stuff that isn’t other dogs. Fleas, bum worms and God knows what else come as standard. And I’ve never met a dog that, given the chance to roll in a freshly laid cat poo or a bit of fox scat, wouldn’t leap on that chance with merry abandon. Who on earth wants to sit on a train seat after a dog? Not me. Not even after Emily Maitlis’s dog, which looks as immaculately groomed as his owner and barely more likely than Maitlis herself to roll in fox poo when nobody’s watching. Still, who knows? Best not take the chance with either of them.

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It’s a much-noticed effect of the modern digital environment that it makes us more horrible to humans. A peculiar and perhaps compensatory side-effect has been that we now sentimentalise animals – dogs especially – to a quite horrible degree. Dogs are becoming standard in many workplaces; not just the ones where dead pheasants and such are in need of retrieving. Grown people post pictures of what they insist on calling “doggos” – or, special yuk, “good big doggos” – on social media.

And when you meet their dogs in the flesh because, say, they gallop up to your picnic to eat your sausage rolls (“Sorry! Bless! He loves sausages!”) or hump your children (“There’s no need to be like that! He just wants to play!”) you’re expected to be charmed by them rather than revolted, angry or afraid. I find myself thinking wistfully of Michael Heseltine.

You will find few stauncher supporters of Maitlis than me. She is learned, savvy, sensible and funny – she gives excellent interviews and absolutely outstanding side-eye. But I’m afraid that with the dog-on-seat thing she has crossed a line and for her trespass must be immediately cancelled.

• Sam Leith is literary editor of the Spectator