DOG DAYS

The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.

I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.

You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.

Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.

The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.

Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.

We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.

The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.

Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.

It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.

The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.

We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.

Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.

For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.

Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.

Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.

The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.

And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.

I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.

The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.

To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.

We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.

Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.