Diary of a Dog-walker (11 page)

I find Bobby's story shockingly sad. There is a narrow line dividing doggy fidelity and canine monomania, and Bobby had definitely crossed it. I have met one or two Labradors who have become monomaniac in their devotion to tennis balls: they show almost no interest in anything but fetching and will continue to offer you a ball to throw for as long as you are prepared to do it. Bobby's fixation with his master's grave was a similarly unhealthy narrowing of his life's focus.

But he has, of course, been widely celebrated as a model of fidelity, and his story has inspired books and films. The most famous of them is Eleanor Atkinson's sentimental novel
Greyfriars Bobby
, first published in 1912 and reincarnated as a Disney film
in 1961. Ms Atkinson was born in the American Midwest and never visited Edinburgh, but that did not stop her giving her imagination full rein when it came to evoking ‘Scottishness': John Gray, Bobby's master, becomes ‘Auld Jock', and some of Atkinson's renditions of the local dialect are completely impenetrable. Here is the graveyard caretaker, Mr Brown, explaining why he enjoys Bobby's visits to his sickbed: ‘Ilka morn he fetches 'is bane up, thinkin' it a braw giftie for an ill man. An' syne he veesits me twa times i' the day, juist bidin' a wee on the hearthstane, lollin' 'is tongue an' waggin' 'is tail, cheerfu' like. Bobby has mair gude sense in 'is heid than mony a man wha comes ben the house, wi lang face, to let me ken I'm gangin to dee.' No? Me neither. But the book is considered a classic.

Of course, the really bonkers behaviour is not Bobby's, it is that of his fans. There is now a red granite headstone erected in his memory, and people put sticks there for him to chase.

6

Mad Dogs, Hero Dogs and Your Health

I hope happiness hasn't gone to the dogs

17 April 2010

KUDU DID A SPELL
at boarding school while we spent a weekend in Scotland. His best friend, the boisterous Poodle, Teddy, was there too, and I know he felt at home because the headmistress told me he tried to climb on to her bed.

But his behaviour on his return suggested he had been delivered from the fires of hell. Whimpering with excitement, he found as many of his toys as he could and delivered them as sacrificial offerings. He
made victory circuits of the garden, sprinted from the top of the house to the bottom of the basement stairs, and licked the cats until they dripped with slobber. It was only three days, for goodness' sake!

It had been a brainy weekend. Our host, an art historian, was working on the definitive history of English collecting, and one of the other guests was editing a magazine supplement on the Far East. My wife held her own with her heavyweight television documentaries, but these were deep waters for a dog columnist. So I threw a question into the conversational pot that I felt had a bit of intellectual heft: why are dogs – black ones especially – associated with depression?

Churchill made the phrase ‘black dog' famous. John Colville, his private secretary, traced it to the nursery. He reported that the great man's doctor would sometimes call after breakfast: ‘Churchill, not especially pleased to see any visitor at such an hour, might excuse a certain early-morning surliness by saying, “I have got a black dog on my back today.” That was an expression much used by old-fashioned English nannies.'

Much academic energy has been poured into the search for the origins of the phrase, and most theories lead back to Dr Johnson, who used it just as Churchill did. ‘The black dog I hope always to resist,' he wrote. ‘When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the
black dog wakes to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking …'

But all this etymology rather misses the point. A good-natured dog like Kudu inspires cheerfulness, not misery, and he usually lifts me out of low spirits rather than the reverse, so why did the association with depression arise in the first place?

It is true that dogs do not have a well-developed sense of humour. I have been reading a book of dog stories from the
Spectator
of the 1880s and 1890s. There are plenty of anecdotes about the canine ability to find home (including one, which I do not quite believe, about a dog that worked its way back to a farm near Gloucester from ‘the interior of Canada'), and there is a good story about a church-going dog that felt the vicar's sermon was too long and took the collection plate round in its mouth to shut him up. But the offerings under ‘Dogs' Sense of Humour' are decidedly thin. One correspondent records a dog watching a man with a serious limp struggling down some stairs: ‘When the invalid was nearly at the foot of the stairs the dog began to follow, limping on three legs in humorous imitation of our poor afflicted friend …' Hmm.

But the fact that dogs are not great wits does not mean they make you want to slit your wrists.

The clue to the conundrum was provided by our scholarly weekend host, who pointed me towards a
book called
Saturn and Melancholy
, written by three German academics in the 1930s. To explain why dogs are associated with melancholia, they quote an early-sixteenth-century German translation of a fifth-century Greek treatise (stay with me) on Egyptian hieroglyphics, which states that ‘The dog, more gifted and sensitive than other beasts, has a very serious nature and can fall victim to madness, and like deep thinkers is inclined to be always on the hunt, smelling things out …' And there is this in the seventeenth-century English work
The Anatomy of Melancholy
: ‘Of all other animals, dogs are most subject to this malady. I could relate many stories of dogs that have dyed of grief, and pined away for loss of their masters …'

So it is not that dogs make us depressed, it is the fact that they get depressed themselves that has given rise to the association. And here is a terrible thought that flows in consequence: perhaps those doe-eyes that Kudu gives me when I leave him are not put on for show – perhaps, indeed, the absurd pantomime when we were reunited after our weekend apart represented genuine relief. Is it possible that when we are away he is, like a ‘deep thinker', a prey to dark existential uncertainties?

My wife recently took him to visit her sister, and left him in the house while the two of them went out for a couple of hours. On her return he leapt into the
car and refused all inducements to come out – even when offered the chance to chase a fox. If I allow myself to think that each time he is left alone he really does wonder whether we shall ever return, I may stop going out altogether.

This column proved prophetic: a few months after it appeared, a team at Bristol University published a paper which suggested that some dogs do indeed think they have been permanently abandoned every time their owners leave the house. Quite a lot of dogs, in fact, apparently think this way, and that is why so many owners come home to find lumps of upholstery scattered all over the floor: ‘About half the dogs in Britain may at some point perform separation-related behaviours, barking and destroying objects around the house, when they are apart from their owners,' said Professor Mike Mendel, of the university's animal welfare department, who led the research team.

Working with a group of twenty-four rescue dogs, the researchers trained them to know that when a bowl was placed in a certain position it would contain food, and that when it was placed at another location it would be empty. They then moved the bowl to a position somewhere between the ‘positive' and ‘negative' locations. Those dogs which ‘ran fast to these ambiguous locations as if expecting the positive food reward' were classed as optimists; those that did not were classed as pessimists – and these were the dogs most likely to exhibit extreme forms of separation anxiety.

I worry about what experiments of this kind do to the mental equilibrium of the dogs involved. More than anything else, dogs need to be able to trust their owners – there is an especially terrible example of the breaking of this bond in the Hardy poem I quote
here
. The dogs in the Bristol experiment had to learn to accept what must have seemed a somewhat eccentric feeding routine from their human handlers – only to find it broken in an apparently capricious way. That must surely be enough to make any dog – especially one from a re-homing centre – wonder about the Meaning of Life.

Kudu has, mercifully, never been a great chewer: if we leave the bedroom door open when we are out, he collects a small pile of our clothes into the centre of the bed and sleeps on them, but he has never taken revenge for our absences by destroying the furniture.

His suitcase obsession has, however, become pathological. When my wife and I were preparing for a rare weekend away together, his reaction to our packing was so extreme that we felt guilty all the way to the airport. He cried – I mean really cried, so that his cheeks were wet with tears. He then climbed into the suitcase and refused to move until sternly spoken to.

But I take this as a reassuring indication of his intelligence, and therefore of his ability to distinguish between the likely duration of separations. If he knows that a packed suitcase means a member of the household will be away for several days, he presumably also knows that watching me potter off on my bicycle means something less dramatic.

I also wonder whether the suitcase thing is related to my daughter's departure to live in her own flat. She is only a few streets away, and she often pops back to see him, but the firmly shut door of what used to be Eleanor's bedroom is a reminder of the terrible fact that all dogs must confront at some stage: people do sometimes leave. While Kudu was boarding with his dog-walker for a long weekend Eleanor took him down to the Sussex coast for a day by the sea; the dog-walker reported that after Eleanor dropped him back he lay by the door whimpering for hours.

The most extreme example of separation anxiety I have found is the account given by the German zoologist and animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz of his relationship with his Alsatian/Chow cross – it is so extreme that, were it not for his eminent reputation as a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, I would suspect him of telling porkies.

Stasi was born in his house in 1940 (this was obviously before the foundation of the German Democratic Republic, so I assume there was no sinister connection between her name and the notorious East German secret police) and quickly responded to training. In his book
Man Meets Dog
, Lorenz writes, ‘She learnt the rudiments of canine education, walking on the lead, walking to heel, “lying down”, astonishingly quickly. She was more or less spontaneously house-clean and safe with poultry …'

In September that year Lorenz had to leave home to take up a university post at Königsberg, and on returning for Christmas he got the sort of frenzied welcome that is one of the
universal pleasures of dog-ownership. But when he prepared to leave again things took a distressing turn: ‘When the trunks were packed and my departure became imminent, the misery of poor Stasi waxed to the point of desperation, almost to a neurosis. She would not eat and her breathing became abnormal, very shallow and punctuated now and then by deep sighs.' Stasi followed him to the station and made her last desperate attempt to stay at her master's side as the train pulled away: ‘She suddenly shot forward, rushing alongside the train, and leaping on to it, three carriages in front of the one on which I was standing in order to prevent her jumping on to it.' Lorenz caught her scruff and tipped her off.

Stasi returned home but underwent a profound change in her personality. She began killing chickens and fouling the house, became disobedient and aggressive, and committed a long list of crimes, including ‘the burglary of a rabbit hutch, with much ensuing bloodshed, and finally the tearing of the postman's trousers'. Eventually she had to be expelled from the house and was kept locked in the back yard.

Lorenz's description of what happened when he came home for the summer holidays is a
tour de force
. At first Stasi did not recognize him, and when he approached the area where she was confined she rushed ferociously in his direction. Then she caught his scent on the wind:

What now took place I shall never forget. In the midst of a heated onrush, she stopped abruptly and stiffened into a statue. Her mane was still ruffled, her
tail down and her ears flat, but her nostrils were wide, wide open, inhaling greedily the message carried on the wind. Now the raised crest subsided, a shiver ran through her body and she pricked up her ears. I had expected her to throw herself at me in a burst of joy, but she did not. The mental suffering which had been so severe as to alter the dog's whole personality, causing this most tractable of creatures to forget manners, laws and order for months, could not fade into nothingness in a second. Her hind legs gave way, her nose was directed skywards, something happened in her throat, and then the mental torture of months found outlet in the hair-raising yet beautiful tones of a wolf's howl. For a long time, perhaps half a minute, she howled, then, like a thunderbolt, she was upon me. I was enveloped in a whirlwind of ecstatic canine joy …