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Authors: Edward Stourton

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And Kudu gave me a new way of getting under the skin (or should that be the coat?) of new places.

The autumn of 2009 was another period of intense travel: I was working on a radio series about the decade of the ‘noughties', and we had ambitiously set ourselves the task of telling the story with a global sweep. We were trying to do big-picture history to a news-style deadline, and the pace was frantic. At the same time I was working to the gentler but still insistent rhythm of these fortnightly columns.

So I looked for material whenever and wherever I could find it: I read the papers in a different way, watched people in the streets in a different way, and talked to them differently too. Interviews for news and current affairs broadcasting are a quest for the essential: you dig your way through self-serving spin and drill down to a few diamonds of truly consequential
information. Dog-watching is the reverse: the inconsequential is everything. You are on the prowl for the odd and unexpected, a moment (like the banditry of the badly behaved street dog in the next column) that will spark an idea.

And by the time I found what I wanted I had usually learnt to see the character and habits of a place in a new and fuller way. When you do not quite know what you are looking for you have to get your nose out of your notebook and watch the world go by – and that is when travel really does broaden the mind.

Wish you were here – though not on the menu

28 November 2009

Ruijin Guesthouse

Shanghai

Dear Kudu,

There was a picture in my
Shanghai Daily
this morning of a demobilized young Chinese soldier bidding farewell to his sniffer dog; it looked uncannily like you – with the soulful eyes and its human-like hugging – and the picture prompted me to write with an apology.

The two things you hate most are cufflinks and suitcases: the cufflinks tell you I am going to work, and the suitcase means one of us is going away, a practice of which you heartily disapprove. I am sceptical about the Slough of Despond into which you sink, because I know what fun you have with the lady who walks you. But I concede that California, Bosnia, the Netherlands and China within a month is a bit much, and I have missed our walks.

But you would be amazed by what is happening here. Take this headline in the
China Daily
: ‘Pet lovers save 800 cats from dinner table'. Do not pass this on to Ruff and Tumble – I know they are cats but we share the same household. And I have to tell you that in China people eat dogs too. I spotted a clever-looking mongrel pinching a lump of meat from a pavement grill, and, as it disappeared into the crowd amid curses, my Chinese assistant exclaimed, ‘I do hope it is not eating a relation.'

The
China Daily
reported that a group of pet lovers had picketed the cat trader's premises in Tianjin until he opened his rows and rows of iron cages. The trader said he had paid ten yuan (a pound) for each of them, and was quite open about the fact that they were to be ‘slaughtered and served as food' in Guangzhou. Since there is no law against cat trading in China, the only weapon the
concerned citizens could deploy was moral suasion – and they won.

Chairman Mao, Communist China's founder, condemned pets as a decadent bourgeois distraction. And just as China's citizens have had to live with its one-child policy, many Chinese cities now have a one-dog policy. The cost of a dog-licence can be exorbitant: in Shanghai it is as much as two hundred pounds a year if you want to keep a dog in the city centre.

But as China has become richer, more of its people have turned to the pleasures of dog-ownership. Today there are a hundred and fifty thousand registered dogs in Shanghai alone – and, locals tell me, many more without a licence. This September a Tibetan Mastiff called Yangtze River Number Two became the most expensive dog in history – bought for £350,000 by a woman from Shaanxi.

As you and I know – and the Tianjin cat trader discovered to his cost – pet-owners can organize when the call comes. Do you remember the day we found an elderly Dachshund loose in Battersea Park? Within minutes we had collected a posse of Chelsea ladies to catch the poor fellow and deliver him to the Parks Police. There was a thrilling sense of shared purpose that made us all friends for a while – indeed, one lady took things rather too far
by telling me about the ghastliness of her sister-in-law (‘the sort of woman who couldn't manage a wet dog').

China's dog-owners are being inspired to action in just the same way. This summer, lawmakers in Shanghai debated a draconian new code to ban dogs from city centre public places and even from lifts – a significant step in a city of skyscrapers. The proposals provoked furious public debate – of a kind you do not often see here. And peaceful non-political protest like this – an association of citizens sharing a common purpose – can be the most serious of threats to an authoritarian regime.

So Mao was right, Kudu, you are a manifestation of bourgeois decadence. But hurrah for that, I say.

Home soon,

Your Master

4

The Dogginess of Dogs

MY DAUGHTER'S BOYFRIEND
, Andrew, came back from Afghanistan on leave in late November 2009, and his description of his duties in the Musa Qaleh district of Helmand Province was hair-raising.

He was commanding a forward reconnaissance unit, which meant (this is my very un-military gloss on his explanation) taking his men into an unclaimed piece of desert and waiting for a few days to see whether anyone shot at them. Quite often they did – unsurprisingly, really, given that the Taliban had been harassing troops around Musa Qaleh ever since it was retaken by the British in December 2007. The dog story he told me was, of course, a gift for the dog column, but it was also a revealing insight into the fighting in Afghanistan.

By this stage of the war we had already become – sadly –
all too familiar with the scenes of those coffins draped with the Union Flag arriving at RAF Lyneham, and being driven in dignified silence through crowded streets in the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett. But the degree to which bullets and bombs had become almost routine in the lives of front-line soldiers in Afghanistan still had not come fully home to people in Britain.

Those doing the front-line fighting are often shockingly young. I did a reporting stint in Helmand in 2008, and a couple of my eldest son's school contemporaries introduced themselves to me in the British base at Lashkar Gah; my first instinct – imagining with horror my son being entrusted with an offensive weapon – was to tell them they were far too young to be playing with guns, and could they please put them down at once. They were, in fact, twenty-five, and therefore already veterans with – to me – dauntingly heavy responsibilities.

The Afghan campaign has done something very odd to the make-up of the armed forces. The senior officers – of my age – joined up in the more peaceful days of Cold War soldiering, and some of them have reached the top with relatively little or no experience of what it feels like to be shot at. The majority of those at the bottom, however, know that feeling all too well: there is now a whole generation of service personnel who have been through combat, often of a very bloody kind.

Andrew's dog story brings some of that home. Had it not been for the dog factor, it would simply have been another day in the routine of fighting – ‘kinetic activity', as soldiers like to call it – and would never have been considered worthy of note in a national newspaper. The story also evokes the cheeriness
these young troops somehow manage to maintain in such high-stress circumstances. Andrew later told me that he read the piece to his men, which I found moving.

Derring-do of our Afghan hounds

12 December 2009

Kudu has recently been failing in his main contribution to the happiness of the household: offering extravagant welcome to family and favoured friends.

When I got home late this week he did no more than poke his nose round the kitchen door, then slipped off to settle back to sleep – on my side of the bed, if you please. Worse still, he let me down during a media opportunity. The
Today
programme is preparing a Christmas report on that endlessly intriguing question of whether dogs can sense when people are coming home, and the desk sent an ace reporter down to wait with me for the moment when my stepdaughter would arrive back from school. Kudu stiffened and stared at the front door in a promising way – and then got so caught up in a love-in with one of the cats that he missed the critical moment altogether.

But I am happy to say that he laid on the full works – frantic racing around the hall, offering of a well-chewed sock in lieu of dead pheasant, etc. –
when my daughter's boyfriend came to see us on leave from serving in Afghanistan. This was just as well, as the daughter's boyfriend (DB, as I shall call him for reasons of operational security) had been sticking up for Kudu's species in very difficult circumstances.

DB's unit employs an explosives sniffer dog – an English Springer like Kudu. He tested its effectiveness by burying a hand grenade in the sand, and in no time at all Kudu's cousin (I am sure, since all the decent ones are related) was stock still on his haunches with his nose quivering in the right direction. DB also uses the dog to break the ice with Afghans he meets: he is often operating in areas where people have never encountered foreign troops before, and they are fascinated by the relationship between a well-trained dog and its handlers.

He described to us a joint operation he had conducted with a group of British troops from what is known as the OMLeT – more properly, the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team, who are training the Afghan National Army. While DB's armoured vehicles were struggling across a ploughed field, they ran into an ambush and came under fire from the Taliban. They managed to reach a commanding position on a ridge, and once they had suppressed the fire against them, the OMLeT and their Afghan comrades withdrew.

But the terrain dictated that the only way out for DB's unit was to re-cross the area where they had come under attack (a.k.a. ‘the kill zone'). Halfway over the field one of the vehicles got bogged down in the mud, and as they were trying to tow it out they came under Taliban fire again. It was at this point that a message came across the radio from the OMLeT: they had had their pregnant pet dog with them and it had got lost in the withdrawal; would DB and his troops very much mind rescuing her?

Amazingly, they managed to find her: Sandy (not her real name, operational security again) was whimpering (unsurprisingly) in the middle of the battlefield, so they scooped her up and took her home. But the poor thing was so traumatized that she miscarried in the armoured vehicle. When they delivered her back, the Afghan troops thought the whole episode richly and darkly comic; the Brits in the OMLeT, by contrast, were upset about losing the puppies.

We are lucky to live well enough to keep dogs for pleasure. Life in a place like Helmand does not allow the indulgences of our dog culture; there you own a dog to guard your property and protect your person. Our soldiers are trying to fight and offer an example at the same time, and, in the words of Immanuel Kant (not a man much read in Taliban circles, I suspect), ‘We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.'

We should take our lead from Lord Byron

Boxing Day 2009

Kudu is spending part of the holidays near Newstead Abbey, the old home of the Byron family. Newstead now belongs to the Nottingham Corporation and (the poet would not have approved) can be hired for corporate events. But the gaunt remains of the twelfth-century Augustinian priory still stand, and the vast grounds, with their woods and lakes, are as romantic as ever. What better Christmas present for a dog than a few wet walks in wild weather?

We will visit the memorial to Boatswain, Lord Byron's famously gentle Newfoundland, who died of rabies in 1808. This impressive structure – topped with a marble urn – is inscribed with perhaps the best dog epitaph ever written.

Near this spot

Are deposited the Remains of one

Who possessed Beauty without Vanity

Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferocity

And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.

This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery

If inscribed over human ashes,

Is but a just tribute to the Memory of

BOATSWAIN, a Dog.

Though widely attributed to Byron himself, it now seems these lines were written by his Cambridge friend John Hobhouse. Hobhouse might have been trying to tease the poet, who had Vanity, Insolence, Ferocity and Vices in spades.

Boatswain died when Byron was in his most Gothic phase. He had the skull of a long-dead monk mounted as a drinking cup (‘In me behold the only skull/From which, unlike a living head/Whatever flows is never dull', read the inscription), and one nineteenth-century memoir records that ‘He invited his friends to orgies, where he had an ox in imitation of the ancient Homeric banquets, where he made libations of wine as in Asiatic festivals, where they wrestled and fought like Roman gladiators, concluding with scenes of riot and debauchery.'

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