MORE THAN JUST a PET

Fargo our Great Dane died yesterday at the age of eleven years and exactly two months, a remarkable span for a giant breed. His likeness has been and will remain my on-line avatar. But the gap he leaves in our lives can never be filled. He was our first pet – we dutifully waited many years until we had the space and the routines to allow a dog to live with us happily.

I suspect that the vast majority of pet dogs (much more so than relatively self-sufficient cats) pass lives of unrelieved misery – bored, neglected and lonely. The central fact to understand about dogs is that they are pack animals. As soon as they join a household, they accept that they are in a pack, even if the pack consists of no more than a lap dog and an elderly housebound human. But dogs need to be in packs and so, if they are abandoned for hours on end by the rest of the pack, they become distressed, anxious, fearful, neurotic, destructive. How many dogs are made yet more miserable by being punished for expressing that misery?

Photograph: Barbra Flinder

Well, we gave Fargo a very happy life and he repaid us in full. We both work from home so were always around and, when he was two, we introduced a second dog into the pack, one too small to make any but a token challenge to Fargo’s status. The pair rubbed along pretty well and it meant that we could go out – though never for longer than three hours – and know they were company for each other.

Fargo was born in Wootton Bassett in the week of the 9/11 attacks. His kennels had military connections: the kennel name of his sire was Toscade Desert Storm, but happily his own name was the more benign Toscade Tigerfeet. Between first meeting him and then bringing him home, we decided to name him after a movie over which we both enthused. When we collected him, the breeder’s mother was there and she asked what we would call the dog. We told her. “Oh yes?” she asked. “Is that like Welsh Fargo?”

Though the runt of a litter of eleven, he grew into a ten-stone dog whose head loomed above mine when I (just below six feet) stood upright and he had his front paws on my shoulders. If I had £10 from everyone who jovially compared him with a horse, I should be very comfortably off.

When one keeps pets, one can easily become sentimental about them. My partner David and I dearly loved our two dogs, though not in anything like the way or to the degree that we love each other. I doubt that the dogs have loved us in any way or to any degree at all. That they are living on velvet they take for granted while having no sense of an alternative life.

They do not bite the hands that feed. They respond to physical contact but it is idle to imagine that licking or nuzzling is an earnest of anything so human as affection. In our moments when the mystic threatens to intrude, we like to pretend that there is something more profound than routine pet-keeping in the bonding between us and them. But the temptation to characterize a Great Dane as soulful, wise and a bit spiritual is strong. It’s also nonsense, of course. He was just an animal. But an unusually even-tempered one.

Photograph: Barbra Flinder

Dogs are perfectly capable of learning things, even relatively complex and sophisticated things. Fargo knew that the appearance of any kind of luggage meant that the pack was about to be deprived of a human member and he got depressed by this. I have watched him go up to a small travelling case, sniff it and then sit back on his haunches and emit a resounding sigh. One spring, we were leaving in a flurry of delay and panic to rush to Heathrow for a flight at some appalling hour on a Sunday morning and foolishly allowed Fargo to see the bags coming downstairs. He promptly threw back his head and howled. It pierced the heart of course. And it was impossible to inform him that the house-sitters (whom he adored) would be there by day-light.

Fed all his life on the BARF diet (bones and raw food – always uncooked bones, of course), Fargo maintained fitness and relative energy into old age, never remotely likely to suffer dysplasia and other joint and bone conditions common in big dogs. In his last months, though, arthritis set in and his legs began to fail him until he could barely stand. At this point, he made clear his desire for release by refusing food. What a boon it is that we are able to give our pets what they want and, thanks to the sensitive vet whom Fargo trusted from puppyhood, to do it so simply and with so little anxiety.

All his long life, it was his gentle and friendly disposition that endeared Fargo to everyone. When we first took him to obedience classes, a group of the women owners referred to him darkly as “the beast”. But they soon learned otherwise so that, when there were exercises that required us to swap dogs, there was always a clamour for Fargo’s leash.

He could tap into his lupine origins, however. On holiday in Cornwall, I was walking him off the lead through a sloping wood when he suddenly stiffened as he gazed ahead. There was a cow grazing on the track. It looked up, saw Fargo and, discretion being the better part of valour, carefully turned and started to head down through the trees. Fargo wasn’t having that. Of course, his running towards it made the cow run. And I already knew that I had no control over events. There were other cows further off. The cow that Fargo was pursuing turned and ran back. When it regained the track, it turned and galloped towards me. Fargo was now snapping at its heels, then going for its throat, tumbling under its hooves and, undaunted, pressing on.

I grabbed at Fargo’s collar as the pair thundered past but couldn’t hold him. The cow swerved uphill and then I saw that there were several more ahead, charging up through the trees. I gave chase but within moments all the animals were out of sight. The going was rough. I came across trampled barbed wire, then a cleft in the ground, about four feet deep, at the bottom of which was spattered blood. This was a nightmare. At last the trees abruptly ended and there was a huge grass field, breasting a steep hill. No cattle or dogs were in sight.

As I toiled up the hill, I suddenly saw horns rising on the horizon and then a cow, then several, then a large herd came ambling towards me. Soon they surrounded me, sniffing amiably. I asked if they had seen a Great Dane but they gave no answer.

Scanning the wooded area back below me, I spotted Fargo slinking through the trees. I yelled and whistled but he moved out of sight. I tramped back towards where I had seen him, then descended the long wooded slope. By the time I got back to the track, the light was going. I arranged two large branches in a cross shape on the track to indicate where I thought the herd and the dog had left it. Then I headed back to our rented cottage, calling Fargo’s name. As I got close to the cottage, I heard David’s voice: “he’s here”.

David had responded to a whining at the door and found the dog, muddy and covered in cuts and scratches. He had feared that something terrible had befallen me and was just setting out to find me when he heard my call. Fargo was none the worse for wear and no doubt feeling thrilled by his long chase. What he couldn’t know was that any farmer who had spotted him charging his herd would have been fully entitled to shoot him dead.

But most of the time, Fargo was as dignified and sedate as an old colonel relaxing at his club. With the breed’s characteristic habit of leaning gently into the legs of those they accept and his own particular curiosity to discover what everyone might have been eating by examining their mouths at close quarters, Fargo won over every human who met him, not least those hitherto indifferent to or even fearful of big dogs.

That he found the happy knack of looming without seeming in any way threatening may have been the secret of his unexpected charm. Whatever it was, he never failed to disarm. He was truly a poster-boy, both for the breed in particular and for dogdom in general. Our hearts ache.