"A dog is a man's best friend." In the transaction between humanity and an animal, dogs agreed to be loyal, subservient companions in exchange for warmth, shelter and food. Part of this agreement meant they would be called upon to perform unpleasant tasks. The most unpleasant and degrading of these would be to appear in commercials.

The world of advertising has entered a new phase, with an alarming increase in the number of animal-oriented ads. There have always been the Shirley Temple quadrupeds: "trained" animals bred to perform. Dogs and cats with shiny coats, good teeth and a carefree attitude to life. The kind of animals that, if they were human, would be in Coca-Cola ads. At least these creatures advertise products that have some impact on their lives: like chowing down on liver or begging to be wormed.

But these days all kinds of exotic mammals are working their asses off selling everything from cars to chocolate bars. We have polar bears swigging rum and acting like Westies, para-gliding three-toed sloths and camels who get off on funk and afros.

There are many reasons for the popularity of animals: they're cute, cuddly and tell the truth, as opposed to human beings, who are all liars. A panda would never mislead you about the interior comfort of a car, an elephant wouldn't swim for a drink unless it tasted great, and we all accept the fact that polar bears are party animals who dig foxy ladies, bad jazz and getting pissed. I cannot deny the popularity of animals, but I am concerned about the psychological strain a workload places on creatures of leisure - it could be the straw that breaks its back.

There are safeguards ensuring animals in ads are not physically mistreated, but what of their mental state? They're well fed and pampered now, but there may come a day when they're not needed anymore. What happens when the Daewoo dog has finished its hectic schedule of script-reading, shooting, performing and mall appearances? What then? What happens if a young pup comes along with more talent? After years of being the top Dog in sales, will he be happy to be put out to pasture like some stud bull? After the limousines, the late nights, the whining and dining, where does the Daewoo dog go? Will Peter Luck scout around dumps in search of our "Littlest Hobo" for Where Are They Now? Will he appear bloated or corpse-like on Oprah? (The Daewoo dog, not Peter Luck.) Will he end up as maggot-food and mulch like Skippy, Gentle Ben, Flipper, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and all the others?

We have all seen the terrible effect that fame and fortune can have on people. Just look at Shirley MacLaine and Marlon Brando. Will our Daewoo dog swell up to the size of a Zepplin, lose loved ones in a bizarre murder triangle and write best-selling books about self-realisation and reincarnation?

In the fast-livin', easy sex, hard drugs and "dog eat dog" world of advertising any creature could lose its innocence, despite a willingness to be exploited. Animals will continue to be used in advertising because they're cheaper than child labour, most of them work for peanuts, and they have no conscience. The final factor is most important: it means animals will sell anything, even if they don't believe in it.

This is one issue that has got my goat and where we have to take the bull by the horns and enter the lion's den. It's not too late, the horse hasn't bolted, and if we're eager beavers we won't end up flogging a dead one. We have to go cold turkey on the whole animals in ads thing. Animals are sitting ducks for unscrupulous merchants and if we don't take care of them they'll be as dead as dodos. So tomorrow, if it ever comes, I'm off to see a man about a dog. We have reduced their numbers, destroyed their habitats and now we force this final indignity upon them. How long will it be before that bear in the woods is using Sorbent?

Poisonous, venomous and ugly creatures that regularly eat children tend not to feature in ads. You may as well hire an actor. Which brings us to the second aspect of animals in ads (see last week's column): some of them are not animals at all. Some of the animals, noticeably the tap-dancing ones or the ones with a rudimentary grasp of English, are, in fact, human performers.

Due to the immense popularity of animals in film and TV, there is a hole in the market that must be filled from somewhere. Young, vibrant performers, many from our finest acting colleges, are sucked into this strange world and their dreams of playing hamlet are lost forever. Confined to the back end of a dancing cow or the animatronic skull of a dog, they become cynical and bitter. For these young people, "playing the Dane' has a completely different meaning.

Sadly, more and more performers are being called upon to play animals. Not just in Berfoff plays, but in shopping malls as tigers or Easter bunnies. Most of us cannot imagine what it's like to be trapped inside tons of rubber, fur and fake hair. We'll never have our feet turn into talons or know what it's like to be stuck inside a polar bear all day, and few of us want to find out.

My awareness of this terrible profession was raised when I met a man called Jack. Jack was up for a part in a new movie called Godzilla: a multi million-dollar epic from the subtle creative team that brought "Independence Day'. He was shortlisted to play the lead, but no-one would ever know it was him, as the anonymity of the animal actor is of paramount importance, No-one would notice him walking down the street and beg for his autograph. There would never be a buzz of murmurs in his local restaurant: "look over there! Isn't that... Godzilla?" He would remain unrecognised, but he could hold his head high, knowing he was a star.

Jack began his life as a beast working in china, where each day consisted of stomping over paper mache building and terrorising Tokyo. He cut his teeth on difficult characters such as a boxing kangaroo, a three-legged dog called "Kundo" and a dancing starfish.

He was true to his art and stayed in character on and off the screen. Stripped of his costume he maintained the mentality of the beast: he refused to talk (preferring to growl), slept on straw and had poor toilet habits. He lost friends but found professional acclaim. this was the cost of being the best. Jack excelled with his unique interpretations of these creatures but, like most actors, he longed for the classics. His chance came with a Chinese-European co-production of Ulysses. jack got his wish: he played the Hydra, Cyclops and Cerberus.

After 10 years along came Godzilla, the most coveted of all the monster roles. There was intense competition for the part. Out of hundreds of applicants they were down to the last three, possibly the finest creature performers in America if not the world. These were three men who knew how to think like animals and they weren't even involved in politics.

The moment of truth came when jack clambered inside the motorised rubber body. In that airless prison of PVC he felt at home and he brought Godzilla to life. With her mighty limbs he tore down buildings, breathed fire, crushed cars and menaced children, but at the end of the day he wasn't the one.

It was a painful rejection, an emotional upheaval that forced him out of the business. On contemplation, Jack found that staring through the nostrils of monsters gave him a limited vision of the future. With his head removed the world, once again, opened before him. Here was a real world that didn't crumple when he touched it, a world where men were men. These days jack is happier playing a comical father in a popular American sitcom - a father that moves with the grace and poise of a caged animal.

Sick, sick, sick. 'Tis the season for sickness, the season between season when sickness comes a'knocking. This is the time of year when you're most susceptible, the time you're weakest. A flu will strike now, before your body accustomed to winter. While you still brave autumnal days in a singlet, still dress in your flimsy summer wardrobe, sickness will give you a head-high tackle, stuff your nose, choke your throat and pop your eyes out on to your cheeks. Flu has never seemed a substantial enough word to me. Malignant tumour, cardiovascular meltdown, pulmonary failure: these are terms that have a certain weight and power. The flu sounds so depressingly domestic, so anemic in comparison. It may be a point of pride, but there is nothing common about my colds.

They are strikingly individual in the amount of suffering they can extract from me. My head aches, my back aches, my muscles ache. It all aches. I have a dry throat, not only dry, but rasping. Then again, it's not so much a rasp, as a tickle. And not tickling so much, as four bovver boys with steel-capped toes stomping on my windpipe with each breath.

I can't sit still. This bout of flu is the perfect opportunity to relax, but I feel there is something I must do. I yearn to be the sort of person who, when sentenced to the sick bed, gladly takes their punishment. The sort of person who makes a sanctuary between the sheets: fluffing up the pillows, drawing the doona around them, reading, watching Kerri-Anne or doing the crosswords. The victim who's content in their haven, as a healthy lackey brings them another steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup.

When you find them cocooned in their illness, they look happier and fitter than you. Surrounded by magazines, with half-drunk cups of tea and discarded pieces of toast, they're the masters of all they survey. The curtains are drawn and there is the odour of sickness. I would love to lie in bed for weeks on end, happily rearranging my bedsores. Just to have a sense of fulfilment at the end of the day. "Yesterday that boil was on my upper thigh, look at it now, Ma, look at it now!"

Fluids and semi-solids have two speeds leaving my nostrils: the 167kmh double-barrel shotgun of phlegm and the continual trickle. The trickle is more frustrating than any dripping tap. I need a little washer made of cartilage placed at the back of the frontal lobes. But the trickle is nothing compared to the sneeze. The sneeze is the ultimate destroyer. The thing that annoys me most about the sneeze is not the physical demands it makes on the body, it's the compulsion of someone to mention its similarity to the orgasm. When I first heard this cliché at the age of 12, I prayed it wasn't true. How could the mystery of life, the petite mort, be the equivalent of a lung oyster splattered out of your nasal passage? It created in my mind a very clumsy notion of copulation.

Yet every time I'm in the grip of some frightening paroxysm, some idiot chimes in with "sneeze - closest thing to an orgasm". Now, I'm not judging their orgasms, but mine bear no similarity to a sneeze. Where is the overwhelming sense of failure? Where is the feeling of immense shame? Where is the wonderful loss of dignity with the sneeze?

When I began writing about this illness. I thought, because I was so well acquainted with it, I would spit it out in one swift, cathartic movement. It would burst from my body, a fine spray of ideas, soaking into the paper, spreading out into the community. It was my way of sharing my flu with everyone, and in a way I believed writing about it would cure me. Three days later, I have discovered it has oozed out upon the page as a continuous draining trickle.

So here I sit: my eyes are sore, my body is tired, my brain is numb and yet the strangest aspect is, in writing this, I have also lost my voice.

There are some days when you wake up to find yourself out of step with the rest of the world. When an incident or circumstance places you in opposition to all around you. When you are forced to ask: "Is it me or is the world mad?"

Last Sunday I entered a small, crowded café and although it was four in the afternoon, for me, it felt like seven in the morning (something to do with a late night and several missing hours). I needed a pot of tea and some food to rejoin the land of the living. What I craved was something to nourish my flesh; what I got was something that sapped my soul.

A couple were sitting at a table just in front of me and, as I sat down, they started to kiss. They kissed long and they kissed hard and there were tongues involved. This was not an affectionate, dry kiss, this was a loud, wet public display of sexuality. I tried to look away but I felt self-conscious staring at the ceiling. I buried my head in the paper, but my eyes kept getting dragged back to the spectacle before me. The waitress took my order. This was my world too, why should I be embarrassed by their behavior? Why should I look somewhere else? I couldn't avoid it, I surrendered and decided to stare. By the time my food arrived they had still not come up for air.

They broke their mouth grip and I breathed a sigh of relief. But unexpectedly, something more nauseatingly saccharine than the kiss occurred - the meaningful stare. An inch apart, they stared into each other's eyes with a fevered intensity. In this way they avoided the pock-marked skin, sagging jowls and greasy hair of their partner and fell headlong into the iris. Their eyes remained locked together, their hands roamed freely, and then they kissed again.

It was like watching a car crash in slow motion: their faces colliding and absorbing the impact of each other, their tongues lolling obscenely out of their heads, their noses twisting and collapsing into their cheeks. This visual aspect was hideous enough but it was the aural dimension that managed to put me off my breakfast. They pulled apart with a slobbering smack, leaving their mouths glistening with saliva. It was an ugly, vulgar sound.

I wasn't the only voyeur; everyone was watching the show. This was their moment, a moment that had lasted over an hour. Another couple moved to a closer table to get a better view.

The nose-breathing lovers had put me off my breakfast, but it must have caused a mighty appetite in them because they jumped right into their tucker. This time the entire café was relieved, but it didn't last long. Unperturbed by the egg and Kransky sausage half-masticated in his mouth, she tore in for another kiss. She slammed her face into his, open-mouthed and panting. I'm not sure what she was eating, but after that, he would've had a fair idea. Kissing, chewing, chewing, kissing and, now, drinking and kissing.

I was confident my fellow diners would be equally disgusted but the opposite was true. The exhibitionists had a sickening, lovey-dovey domino effect on the other patrons. Every other couple (I was the only lone diner) in the place began to coo to each other. It was as if they were given permission to be amorous by the excessive display they'd seen. People were laughing, giggling, stroking each other's thighs. The whole place was canoodling, even the rational waiters and cooks were engaged in a bit of frottage. It was disgusting and I realised I didn't belong there. Maybe there was something in the coffee? Had some pagan deity sprinkled fairy dust in the food? Was I the only Jesuit at a Bacchanalian festival?

I left my untouched breakfast and returned to the safety of my home. This was a day when opinion had turned against me. I had been made all too aware of my solitude, not just within the coffee shop but within the world at large. These two people, who were desperately trying to be one, had left my feeling incredibly divided. I went back to bed. I have no idea if they did.