This is the season when, as thoughts turn south to Alpine sun, the owners of privileged dogs agonize about dog care. Most of the time Kudu’s friends enjoy a cheerful equality: the pleasures of park and common are open to all. But their lifestyles when the owners are away vary hugely: here lies the great divide between rich dogs and poor dogs.
The distinguished historian Leandra de Lisle tells me she treats the boarding arrangements for her dog as seriously as those she used to make for her children. She booked Fitz (a large Lab) into a local farm, and was interviewed housemaster-style by the owners: ‘As they worked through the questions,’ she says, ‘I found myself giving the kind of answers I would have despised had I heard them from anyone else.’ Asked whether Fitz barked or whined, she replied, ‘No, but he does talk a lot. He is very intelligent and communicative’ – meaning that he does indeed bark and whine, just in varying tones. When Fitz was returned to her the canny dog-hoteliers told her that he had behaved impeccably: ‘My sons never had such a good report – I burned with pride.’
In the United States dog-hotels really are like human hotels. At a dinner my wife found herself next to an American businesswoman who described in some detail the facilities then being enjoyed back home by her Schnauzer (‘my baby’). Each room in his dog-hotel was equipped with bed, miniature sofa, television set and a selection of DVDs. Kudu quite often watches television by mistake (by sitting on the remote control) but I do not think he enjoys it very much, and for some reason he always seems to pick a shopping channel. I cannot help wondering whether the Schnauzer’s system offered those ‘adult’ channels that all hotels now seem determined their guests should enjoy.
Dog-carers compete fiercely for this top-end business. A former BBC manager of my acquaintance has acquired one offering daily emails with up-to-the-minute news of her Labrador: ‘Fudge had a good walk today. I had him out a little longer just because he was having a great time. He really is getting fit, usually by the time we get to the common he just lies in the grass but now he gets involved in the other dogs’ games and loves exploring …’ It takes real literary talent to churn this stuff out day after day, but it is a brilliant business idea: this is just what you want on your BlackBerry to take the edge off any guilt you might feel about leaving Fudge behind while you cane the piste in Courchevel.
But what of the dogs at the other end of the economic spectrum? Walking through one of the underpasses by Waterloo Station, I spotted a homeless man asleep with his Alsatian. The man looked sad, sick and scruffy; the dog, curled up against his body, looked sleek and completely contented. Dogs do not really appreciate DVDs in smartly appointed hotel rooms – to be happy, they just need to be with us.
So if you have got the money, buy the chalet, and take him skiing too.
5
In Defence of Dogs
I AWOKE ONE MORNING to find my wife looking at me in a most alarming manner – alarming and, indeed, alarmed: it was almost as if she had found a stranger next to her in bed. ‘Did you sleep well?’ I enquired, in a tentative manner.
‘Actually, no,’ came the reply. ‘You were talking in your sleep … well, not so much talking. You were growling … and then you made little woofing noises.’
I have always taken specialist journalism very seriously. When I was appointed Washington correspondent for Channel 4 News I went straight out and bought a shelf-load of books about American foreign policy and constitutional theory. When I moved to Paris for the BBC I dutifully ploughed through biographies of François Mitterrand, who was then president. Taking on the diplomatic job at ITN, I did deep background by swotting up on Talleyrand. Being a dog specialist is, in its way, every bit as absorbing as any other discipline: I now have dozens of serious factual books with titles like If Dogs Could Talk: Exploring the canine mind, and lots of novels with the word ‘dog’ in the title – Alexander McCall Smith’s The Dog Who Came In From the Cold and Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog are two recent titles that immediately found their way on to our bookshelves.
And if the unsettling incident of doggy sleep-talking is anything to go by, I can be every bit as obsessive and Ancient Marinerish about dogs as I once was about Famous Filibusters in the United States Senate or the importance of the acquis communautaire in EU accession negotiations.
The Dog has a way of looking at me that makes me examine my conscience, and honesty compels me to admit that part of the pleasure of being a specialist in a subject is knowing more than other people do – and showing off about it. When it is your professional duty to flaunt your expertise on a regular basis, it of course makes the fun easier to enjoy. And most specialist journalism is a blokeish, nerdy thing – like stamp-collecting or re-building vintage cars. It is probably no accident that I keep my dog library in that most blokeish of environments: my garden shed. I have done most of my dog writing there too.
But it is also true that if you are trying to keep abreast of everything that is written in your field you are bound to spot the odd book or article that deserves to be noticed more widely. The book that forms the basis of this next column is an example.
A dog can sense if it’s in bad odour with you
20 March 2010
The BBC has provided me with a piece of kit that allows me to broadcast in studio quality from our basement. It is invaluable for programmes at antisocial hours, when I would rather not schlep across town to a studio. Last Friday, I was pulled off the subs bench to present Any Questions, and in the morning I nipped downstairs to read the regular live trail just before the 7.30 a.m. news summary.
Kudu was in the kitchen, happily bashing my stepdaughter with his paw in the hope of being scratched. When I boomed from the radio he leapt to attention, nose a-quiver, clearly discomforted by my disembodied voice.
Why so, when he has often heard me broadcasting in the past? I assume that if I have left the house, he tunes out of our relationship, and does not register that the voice on the radio is mine, whereas on this occasion he knew that I was still about the place. But I cannot know this with any certainty.
An American animal behaviourist, Alexandra Horowitz, has published a book to help those of us frustrated by the challenge of the canine mind. Inside of a Dog – What Dogs See, Smell and Know is based on a proposition from a certain Jacob von Uexküll, an early-twentieth-century German biologist: that to understand the way animals think, we must combine empirical scientific experiments with an imaginative effort to understand their Umwelt, or ‘self-world’.
Dr Horowitz is prepared to go to considerable lengths to think herself into a dog’s Umwelt. She recommends ‘spending an afternoon at the height of a dog’ where ‘the world is full of long skirts and trouser legs dancing with every footfall of their wearer’, and the environment ‘is a more odoriferous one, for smells loiter and fester in the ground’. I suspect she would disapprove of those owners now prettifying their dogs for next week’s Crufts. She argues that when we stick dogs in a bath, we deprive them of an important part of their identity: ‘The mildest fragrance that cleansers come in is still an olfactory insult to a dog.’
I first encountered Dr Horowitz when I interviewed her last year about an experiment into whether dogs really can distinguish between good and bad behaviour. She left the dogs alone in a room with a titbit that their owners had expressly forbidden them to eat. Some ate the titbit; the owner was told, and the dog was ticked off. On other occasions, the researchers removed it before the dog could eat it, yet still told the owner that their pet had been disobedient, provoking the predictable ticking-off.
How did the dogs behave? The innocents who had been deprived of the titbits were just as likely to look guilty (lowered eyes, slump in the gait, faint wagging of the tail) as those who had sinned. In other words, the dogs were simply reacting to their owners’ behaviour, and the guilty look had nothing to do with what they had or had not done.
Kudu is good at holding eye contact, and when he gazes at one of us in a soulful way, it feels very much
as if he is trying to communicate. After studying Dr Horowitz’s book, I am persuaded that he is in fact ‘reading’ us, working out how we expect him to behave so that he can use this to his advantage. And I suspect the reaction to my radio broadcast reflected his shock at behaviour he could not understand. If Dr Horowitz is right, dogs really do know us very well indeed. She writes eloquently about the information they gather by sniffing; they can tell whether you are afraid, whether you have cancer and ‘if you have had sex, smoked a cigarette (or done both of these things in succession), just had a snack, or just run a mile’. Most unsettling – but it is a very good book.
Here is another confession: I enjoy feeling indignant.
This is a late-flowering pleasure, as for most of my professional life I have had to keep such emotions firmly in check for the sake of the impartiality that is quite rightly expected from broadcasters. There are two sides to most stories, and I am so used to reporting both that I sometimes worry I might lose the ability to hold an opinion of my own.
Kudu has taught me that on the subject of dogs I do in fact have very strong views indeed, and, I suspect like most dog-owners, I suffer regular episodes of dog-rage when faced with the petty restrictions that modern life imposes on canine freedom. Why do taxi drivers look at you with such horror when your perfectly clean animal jumps into the back and sits placidly on the floor? Why are dogs banned from post offices, which do not sell any food and make their customers queue for so long that any dog left tied up outside might reasonably assume it had been abandoned? Why do some people press themselves against railings and shop fronts with comedy expressions of terror on their faces when you walk along the pavement with your perfectly friendly hound on a lead?
It is dogism, pure and simple.
Beware: dogism is sweeping the land
20 March 2010
Urban dog that he is, Kudu has developed reasonably good manners for dealing with other users of public spaces: he gives a polite sniff to members of his own species he encounters in parks or on commons, but never approaches a human without being invited (in the early days he did, it is true, once or twice use a trouser-leg as a lamppost, but he seems to have got over that).
Last weekend, while being walked by my wife, he scampered – nose down in the eternal quest for the next smell – within a couple of yards of two children playing on Clapham Common. It was a couple of yards too close for the liking of their father, who began abusing Kudu and tried quite hard to kick him. I have written before about cultures that are less dog-friendly than our own, and this man clearly came from one. He pursued my wife across the common, wagging an admonitory finger and berating ‘You English’ for keeping ‘killer dogs’, all of which, he shouted, should be killed themselves.
I blame the politicians. All the killer-dog talk from people who should know better has stirred up an ugly mood, and dogism is sweeping the country. Even our local borough newspaper, Lambeth Life, has jumped on the bandwagon: ‘Dogs collared in new policy’ is the splash headline in this week’s edition, and there is a terrifying photograph of a snarling brute being held at bay at the end of two steel poles.
The scapegoating of dogs can lead to some ugly places. The Roman habit of crucifying a dog annually is notorious – the city’s dogs were blamed for failing to raise the alarm when the Capitol was attacked by Gauls in 390 BC. Less well known are the show trials that were conducted against dogs and other animals from the Middle Ages right up until the beginning of the last century.
Many of the more curious cases in the seminal work The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals involve other species. Grasshoppers were tried in Lombardy in 1452, snails at Macon in 1487, and there was a long case brought against weevils by the wine-growers of St Julien in 1587. But a show trial of a dog called Porter near Chichester was recorded as late as 1771, and in 1906 in Switzerland a dog went on trial with two men (his owner and the owner’s son) for robbery and murder. The men got life, but the dog was held to have been the ring-leader and was executed.
The law is not quite sure what to make of dogs. Formally they are treated ‘like other personal and movable chattels’ and that, of course, makes nonsense of putting them on trial. But because we anthropomorphize them there is a tugging temptation for lawyers to treat them like humans.
Last week I talked to a couple of top family lawyers about a newspaper story that couples are drawing up ‘pre-pups’ to avoid a row over the dog should they divorce. I couldn’t get the story to stand up, but a leading QC mused, ‘I have often wondered whether any such dispute should be resolved by pure property law, or whether there is room for application of the principles arising under the Children Act – the first and paramount consideration is the best interest of the child (or dog?)?’
This could open up dangerous territory. Courts work on the premise that the best interests of a child in a divorce are usually served by giving custody to the mother; would they be willing to make a similar presumption, perhaps in favour of the man of the house, where a dog is concerned? I was once stopped on my bike outside the butcher by a fan of these columns who wanted to tell me that he recognized many of his own dog’s foibles in my Kudu stories. He waxed lyrical – at some length – about the fun the two of them had on their walks, and then his face fell. ‘Until, that is, the divorce,’ he said. ‘My ex-wife took him when we broke up …’ The poor chap was clearly much more upset about losing his dog than he was about the collapse of his marriage, and (without, of course, knowing the other side of the story) I could not help feeling he would have been a very good master.
The straightforward ‘dogs are property’ approach at least keeps responsibility for their behaviour firmly focused on the owners. Identifying killer breeds has always seemed flawed to me: I think you can make pretty much any dog into a killer if you try, and even the most terrifying breeds can be brought up nicely.
The problem with that theory is that Kudu proves it isn’t true. I have concluded that absolutely nothing could persuade him into aggression: his only response to trouble is lying on his back and offering you an eyeful of tummy and testicles.
When the fate of a dog tore a nation in two
3 April 2010
Battersea Park was a frenzy of spring mulching, mowing and planting. Siren invitations to linger at the café were being fired from the Chelsea yummy mummies, and Kudu received an indecent proposal from a gardener: his Springer bitch, the man politely explained, had been let down by a suitor at the last moment, and would Kudu care to pop round for the afternoon? He offered ‘a hundred quid or the pick of the litter’. It seemed a somewhat casual way for Kudu to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, and I declined on his behalf.
We sought refuge in the park’s quieter walks and, hidden away near the river, I found the Brown Dog Memorial. It is a life-size bronze of a terrier with an expressively cocked head and alert ears. A sentimental piece, but it carries a shocking inscription: ‘In memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured Vivisection extending over more than two months and having been handed from one Vivisector to another till death came to its Release … Men and Women of England, how long shall these things be?’
The Brown Dog Affair was one of the great political controversies of the day.
Public vivisection was – extraordinary though it may seem – a common, if highly controversial, practice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In 1902 the mongrel that came to be known as the Brown Dog was cut open before an audience of medical students by Professor Ernest Starling of University College (a scientist of real stature). The dog survived for another two months before Starling opened him up again, inspected the previous surgery, and then passed him on to two other scientists. They administered half an hour of electric shocks before the dog was killed.
The lecture had been infiltrated by two Swedish animal-rights activists, and they published a harrowing account – claiming the dog had not b
een anaesthetized and showed ‘the signs of intense suffering’. There was this gem of invective: ‘The lecturer, attired in the bloodstained surplice of the priest of vivisection, has tucked up his sleeves and is now comfortably smoking a pipe, whilst, with hands coloured crimson, he arranges the electrical circuit for the stimulation that will follow. Now and then, he makes a funny remark, which is appreciated by those around him.’
One of the scientists involved sued – and won. The World League Against Vivisection responded with a public subscription for a statue to commemorate the dog ‘done to death’ in the name of science – not the rather cute number in Battersea Park today but a great granite and bronze monument, standing seven foot six tall. It was erected at the Latchmere Estate, a housing project for the poor just opened by Battersea Council.
Battersea was most definitely not a place for the Chelsea yummy mummies in those days: it was full of slums and a hotbed of radicalism. But medical students from University College sent raiding parties over the river armed with crowbars to destroy the statue. They were repeatedly beaten back by the Battersea workers. An extraordinary coalition rallied to the Brown Dog cause – suffragettes, Sinn Fein activists, trade unionists and radical Liberals. Defending the statue became a symbol for radical causes in general. The ‘anti-doggers’ responded with riots in Trafalgar Square – on one occasion mounted police fought running battles with more than a thousand students.
Eventually – in March 1910 – Battersea Council gave in: the statue was quietly removed in a pre-dawn operation under the protection of 120 police officers. The new statue in the park, by the sculptor Nicola Hicks, was made in 1985.
Kudu became impatient when I lingered in front of it – pondering this remarkable and largely forgotten history. He scarcely gave it a sniff – in fact he did not even bother to pee on the plinth.
At about the time of the Brown Dog riots, French society was being torn apart by the traumatic saga of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the young Jewish artillery officer who was falsely accused of treason and sentenced to hard labour on Devil’s Island. The Dreyfus Affair raised painful questions about French and Jewish identity, inspired Zionism and thus led eventually to the foundation of Israel. It says something about this country that while all of that was going on across the Channel we were worrying about a dog. The Brown Dog Affair opens an intriguing window on to Edwardian Britain: it became a focus for all sorts of political and social currents that were swirling through the early years of the last century.
Diary of a Dog-walker Page 7