“Can a dog fly an airplane?” It’s a stupid question, sure, but is it stupid enough? That’s the query being posed by a new U.K. reality series optimistically titled Dogs Might Fly, in which rescue dogs—smart ones, we bet, from good families and top schools—undergo training in an attempt to get them to operate actual, non-imaginary planes, and then fail, because they’re dogs.
According to an ABC News write-up of the planned six(!)-part series, the dogs will first be tested for intelligence (and, presumably, previous plane-flying experience) and then moved into a mansion, long considered the optimal location for bored people with too much money to get up to something truly dumb. There, they’ll be tested to see if they can be conditioned to learn all the normal piloting skills—memory, pattern recognition, having hands or a brain larger than a grape—before the top subject is allowed into the cockpit for what the article refers to, apparently with a straight face, as “the ultimate test” for man’s best friend. (Another article written about the show, from The Independent, also cited the various contributions made by dogs to air and spaceflight over the years, a laudable sentiment that seems to have missed a few basic facts about the relationship between the canine test subjects and the exploding death traps into which they were forcibly strapped.)
Human beings will also be on hand for the flights, of course, to stop this mansion-and-midair-misadventures reality series from accidentally turning into Can We Turn A Dog Into JFK Jr. The show will start airing in the U.K. on February 28, presumably to be followed at a later date by the much shorter Cats Might Fly, which we’re guessing will end abruptly when every potential puss pilot immediately slams its plane into the nearest orphanage in a spiteful display of murderous self-destruction.