The Writers' Circle

Dogs are pretty smart animals. They know that if they lay on the floor and put their legs in the air, sooner or later someone will come along and tickle their belly. They may even get a biscuit out of it as well.
Whenever Mrs Johnson at number 36 lays on her back and puts her legs in the air, her husband just turns on the TV and starts to watch the sports channel.
Yes dogs have got it made. They sleep when they want, eat regular meals and do no work. OK, you may say. What about guard dogs. They work.
No they don't. What they do is lounge about and bark occasionally. It's not exactly putting in an 8 hour shift at the local uranium mine is it!
Over the last few thousand years, dogs have cleverly managed to train people to provide them with all of life's comforts without any of the stress.
They have taught people to feed them, house them, pet them and throw balls for them without having to give anything in return. Incredibly, people were quite happy with this arrangement until their banjos started to disappear.

You know when you put your banjo down, you can never find the damn thing again.
 It's not like guitars. When you put your guitar down it always stays in the same place, but not  your banjo. This is because it's been taken by a dog, and you are unlikely to ever see your instrument again, as a result you are forced to go and buy another one.
Insurance firms know this of course.
As the idea of insurance is to give your money to the company rather than the other way round. You will see thousands of advertisements for insuring your house, car, life etc, but I bet that you have never seen an insurance company offering to insure your banjo. They know that it is not worth the risk, and if you press them on it, they will look at the floor and mumble something about specialist markets, and the waywardness of G strings.

Prior to 1928 dogs had not realized that they were musical, for the very good reason that they are not.
Dogs simply find it impossible to carry a tune. Even if you were to put it in a bucket and hang it around their necks for them they would not be able to do it. And so the sudden canine interest in 1928 for banjos is a bit of a mystery.
No-one knows why dogs are so attracted to banjos rather than something else. Trombones for instance.
Various theories have been put about, but none have come up with a satisfactory answer.

As dogs were unlikely to go to the trouble of learning to play a musical instrument, it came as no great surprise to find that the cacophony of sound from a banjo playing dog could be best likened to that of the noise made by a traumatised cat being dragged through a combine harvester.
People started to lock their dogs out of their homes, and the dogs realized that if they wanted to keep their cushy number, they would have to restrict their banjo playing to times when there was no-one else around.

As they were no longer being seen playing banjos, in time people forgot that their dogs had a secret obsession. Occasionally people would come home early from work and catch their pet destroying stairway to heaven on their missing banjo, but when they told others about it they would not be believed.

Because so many banjos kept going missing, people could not practice with them, and so spent more time playing the guitar instead. Had it not been for the fact that John Lennon had a dog named Trixie, popular music may well not have changed course in the way that it did.
As yesterday's fashion dictates what tomorrows will be, sales of guitars increased and banjo based music declined. Although the sales of banjos were not greatly affected, as each musician would have to buy a large number of banjos during their lifetime to replace those that had been stolen by their pets.
Once a dog had it's paws on a banjo it would not tune or maintain the instrument, and would attempt to play the thing until the strings broke before burying it in the garden before going to look for another one.

The dogs found themselves in an awkward position. If they came out and admitted their love of the banjo, it would be likely that the people who feed and care for them would try and make them play the things properly. This would involve hours of work each day for no extra comfort or better quality food. They had spent years conditioning people to do all the work for them, and could see no reason why they should now have to start working for a living. So to this day they have pretended to have no interest in musical instruments of any kind.

So the next time that you walk past an open window, and the music from it sounds as though someone's dog is trying to play the banjo. Don't worry, because that is probably exactly what's happening.