Diary of a Dog-walker (8 page)

But there seems no doubt about Byron's grief for Boatswain. Another friend recorded that ‘He more than once, with his bare hand, wiped away the slather from the dog's lips during the paroxysms.' And Byron wrote that his dog died, ‘retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the end, never attempting to do the least injury to anyone near him'.

Byron's affection for animals in general and dogs in particular is one of the most unexpected leitmotivs of his life. His famous acquisition of a bear at Trinity College, Cambridge, arose from an argument over his bulldog, Smut: informed that the rules allowed no
dogs in college, he bought the bear (not covered by the rules) to taunt the Fellows.

When Shelley visited Byron in Ravenna in 1821 he found ‘eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon' roaming Byron's house. And when Byron's body was shipped home after his death in Greece, Hobhouse found another faithful Newfoundland lying at the foot of the coffin.

Why this sentimentality in a man who was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know'? The question is pertinent at this season because, when the snow blows and the wind howls, all dog-owners must ask why they submit themselves to the discipline of the daily walk. The complaint ‘Doggies are a bore, they never close the door' rings especially true when open doors let in freezing blasts.

The answer surely lies in the uncomplicated nature of dog emotions: the simplicity of their pleasures, the transparency of their transgressions (we caught Kudu begging under the table, and the briefest grunt sent him slinking off in embarrassment). The more complicated the life, the more appealing this simplicity becomes – and Byron's life was nothing if not complicated.

Last weekend I watched Kudu putting up pheasants, utterly absorbed in what his genes were telling him, delighting in the exercise of nose and limbs. It
had been a complicated week of deadlines and juggled appointments; not quite the same as a Homeric orgy, but I think – in a phrase the poet would never have used – I know where Byron was coming from.

Dogs were still a source of controversy at Trinity College when I came up as an undergraduate 170 years after Byron bought his bear. The Master was R. A. B. Butler, the famously clever and grand Tory politician who should – he thought, anyway – have been prime minister, but was stitched up by Macmillan. His formidable wife Mollie brought a small terrier with her when they moved into the Master's Lodge, and Lady Butler was not someone accustomed to being told she was not allowed to do things.

Rather than rewriting the ancient anti-dog statutes, the college authorities decided to reassign her pet's species. An undergraduate who spotted the terrier in Great Court rather cheekily brought it to the attention of one of the college porters (never without their intimidating bowler hats, the porters were responsible for enforcing college discipline). ‘That, sir,' he was told, ‘is not a dog – College Regulations do not permit that. That is a cat.'

Trust the good book to give a dog a bad name

9 January 2010

Jerusalem is not a doggy city; when I return there next week (on Radio 4 duties) I do not expect Spaniels in the throng at Damascus Gate.

There have been doggy episodes in its long past. The Crusaders brought their hunting hounds (think of the stone dogs on Crusader tombs), and dog stories feature in accounts of the British Mandate period. But the city has its alchemy for managing foreign cultures: it absorbs the bits that suit it, and shakes off those that sit uneasily with its soul. Its doglessness is true to its Biblical roots.

Dogs get a bad press in the Bible. Brewer (of
Phrase and Fable
) notes that ‘There is no expression in the Bible of the fidelity, love and watchful care of the dog, so highly honoured by ourselves.' Instead dogs are represented as debased and worthless creatures.

In the First Book of Kings, dogs are used to curse Jeroboam, the errant leader of the Israelites who persuades his people to worship two golden calves. Jeroboam receives this prophetic warning: ‘Thus says the Lord … I will … consume the house of Jeroboam, just as one burns up dung until it is all gone. Anyone belonging to Jeroboam who dies in the city the dogs shall eat.'

It is the same in the New Testament. The Second Letter of Peter explicitly links dogs with that most unclean of animals, the pig. Of apostates the writer declares, ‘It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “The dog turns back to its own vomit,” and “The sow is washed only to wallow in the mud”.'

The post-walk towelling of Kudu this winter has left me puzzled by this Biblical view of dogs as unclean. The goats in Bedouin settlements outside Jerusalem may be a little dusty, but the writers of 1 Kings and 2 Peter surely never encountered anything remotely like a Spaniel back from a ramble in the English countryside.

Kudu has recently been walked in North Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and on the Surrey Downs. The pattern is always the same. First he gets wet and looks bedraggled. Then he acquires a long bramble in his bottom fur, and races around like one of those military jeeps with floppy aerials waving wildly from the rear end. Then he finds a fetid puddle and sinks his legs and tummy down as far as they will go. Then we (my wife usually, if I am honest) rub him down in an affectionate way, as if all this is somehow endearing.

Surely we, not those who gave us the Bible, should be hurling imprecations at this wilful wallowing in filth.

The clue to this conundrum may lie in the writings of St Paul. There is a famous passage where Paul condemns the practice of circumcision – it is controversial as well as famous because it is cited as a foundation of Christian anti-Semitism. ‘Beware of the dogs,' writes the Apostle to the Gentiles, ‘beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh.'

Paul is using ‘dogs' as a metaphor for false teachers who are preaching a perverted Christian message. He has taken the very thing we modern British dog-walkers value – the human-like qualities of our pets – and turned them into something sinister. We look at dogs and see the best of ourselves reflected back (those dogs on Crusader tombs were an artistic shorthand for fidelity to God) while the writers of the Bible seem to have seen something witch-like: ‘Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters,' declares the Book of Revelation.

Enough of this speculative persiflage. Here is a practical question by way of a postscript. Kudu's fur has a remarkable self-cleaning quality. Leave him in the kitchen for a while, and, no matter how mired in filth he has been, his coat restores itself to its lustrous chocolate and milk. Can any reader explain how this happens?

The Bible is, notoriously, one of those subjects that ‘gets them going'. This column was picked up by an American ‘ideas website' as a news story, and it produced a gratifyingly heavy level of traffic. There were anti-religious dog-lovers (‘Screw the Bible and all those who hate dogs!'), and anti-dog religious enthusiasts (‘I can't wait for a heaven with no dogs barking and no dog sh*t on the pavement'). But there were also good Bible-believing Christians who loved dogs, and tried to persuade me I had got it wrong.

Some of them quoted the story of the Woman of Canaan, who approaches Jesus asking him to cast a devil out of her daughter. He initially turns her away because she is a Gentile: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the lands of Israel,' he says, in the Matthew version of the story, and when she persists he delivers a punchy one-liner: ‘It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.' But she comes back, quick as a flash: ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the food that falls from their masters' table.' Jesus is so impressed with this riposte that he grants her wish.

This is an attractive story because it shows Jesus reacting well to a clever woman, not, it would appear, in the least put out by her cheek. But quite how you can use it to suggest that he was a dog-lover I fail to see: he plainly uses the ‘dogs' as an insult, in keeping with the great Biblical tradition.

I do not want to make too much of the story of Sandy the Afghan mongrel, but her sad fate does seem to me symptomatic of the difficulty we Brits have in understanding Afghan culture.

And not long after this next column was published we were given a sharp reminder that, no matter how regular the battles in Afghanistan, they can never really be ‘routine' for those involved. Andrew, my source for Afghan dog stories, was seriously injured when his armoured vehicle overturned while chasing a suspect car in the desert; he was thrown clear but damaged his spine and crushed a knee on impact. At the time of writing he is walking again (which did not seem at all certain when we first saw him in Selly Oak Hospital nine months ago) but still has a long way to go.

Unhappy ending for one dog of war

23 January 2010

I reported recently the story of Sandy, a mongrel adopted by British troops training the Afghan National Army in Helmand; heavily pregnant, she was rescued from a battlefield by a unit under the command of my daughter's boyfriend, and although she miscarried – not unnaturally, in the circumstances – she survived the fire-fight.

Sandy subsequently surprised everyone by giving birth to one healthy puppy, and I had hopes that the story would have a happy ending. I have just heard that she has been shot by an Afghan soldier – for reasons that are unclear, since her reputation for amiability was unblemished – and that
her puppy was sold in the market as a fighting-dog.

It is a story that brings home how lucky we are to live in a benign canine culture. But last week's report on dog-breeding from Professor Sir Patrick Bateson, a Cambridge zoologist, was a sobering reminder that we, too, tolerate a casual cruelty towards these animals that give us so much pleasure.

Professor Bateson's inquiry was commissioned by the Kennel Club after a television documentary that presented harrowing evidence about the impact of pedigree breeding. The distressing images of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels in fitting spasms, because their skulls were too small for their brains, will remain with me for ever.

Sir Patrick has written up his findings with luminous clarity, and I would recommend the report to any dog-owner: you will discover, for example, that humans have been taking pleasure in the company of dogs for at least sixteen thousand years. But Sir Patrick is a scientist, and not a philosopher: he left some uncomfortable ethical questions unanswered.

Kudu has taken to producing a growl when the wonderful dog-walker who looks after him during busy days clips on his lead. It is a duty growl, really, as if he feels obliged to protest about leaving his house with someone other than his owners. When I witnessed it on Tuesday, I apologized to the dog-walker. ‘He is,' she demurred, ‘the least aggressive dog I have
ever known. You should breed from him. He is very handsome.'

Breeding from Kudu so that his kindness is passed down to future generations seems a good thing to do. Breeding from him for the sake of perpetuating that good-looking profile seems frivolous and wrong. But is there, in ethical terms, any difference between the two? And what separates either of these things from the breeder who wants his Cavalier King Charles to have a small head to win prizes?

The simple answer is to distinguish between dogs bred for a practical purpose, and those bred for show.

Kudu is designed for rough shooting. Springers are so-named not because of their Zebedee-like enthusiasm for life, but because they ‘spring' birds, putting them up for the guns by snouting around in the bushes. If you want a dog to herd sheep (Collies, for example) or retrieve game (Labradors, and Kudu if he does not get distracted by intriguing smells
en passant
), or to hunt beasts that lurk in burrows (Dachshunds), you need it to be healthy, so genetic engineering in these breeds is likely to promote traits that are in the interests of dog welfare.

If, on the other hand, you want a dog simply as a fashion accessory, you will encourage breeding practices that are almost certainly damaging to your
dog's welfare. ‘It seems scarcely credible,' Sir Patrick writes, ‘that one of the tiny toy breeds, weighing two kilos or less and fitting inside a woman's handbag, could be derived from a wolf.'

Sir Patrick is very tactful, and his affection for dogs is transparent. But the logic of what he says is that toy dogs are as much of an abomination as fighting-dogs and (gulp) should be controlled like Pit Bulls. Oh dear. Such complexities are a world away from the simple moral universe of that Afghan soldier who killed Sandy just because he wanted to.

Why dogs are streets ahead of their owners

6 February 2010

There is nothing more humiliating than a public display of doggy disobedience.

When Kudu is launched from a car directly into a green space he is as biddable as can be: no matter how far he roams, he always returns if called. But when he is walked along a street he is an incorrigible puller on the lead. I can just about hold him, but younger, lighter family members almost hit take-off speed as they are dragged in his wake.

I first put down this panting eagerness to the attractions of the scruffy square of grass where he
takes his afternoon turn – it is a gritty, urban dog haven, and the daily offering of olfactory messages is no doubt varied and enticing. But I am now convinced there is a more complicated dynamic at work: these outings are a test of which of us is in charge.

I am training him into road-sense (essential for a city dog), so on the return journey I leave him off the lead and try to walk him to heel. Fat chance. Not once have I persuaded him to walk behind me. He will, if I repeat, ‘Stay with me,' in increasingly growly tones, keep to the pavement, and he has got the point about junctions, but he always stays just ahead. He gently pushes up the speed: once I caught myself trotting to keep up, and I am sure he smirked. It is a ritual game of Grandmother's Footsteps, which I can never win, and, after spotting two of my neighbours shaking with laughter by the roadside, I realized it is also a source of local merriment.