Diary of a Dog-walker

by Edward Stourton

  Now that is what I call real dog writing! The passage ends with the two of them taking happy summer swims in the Danube.

  The Bristol experiment prompted a leader in the Guardian, which argued that some dogs ‘feel hounded’ (ho ho) because of what the paper called ‘a dismissive language of analogy’ – by which it meant expressions like ‘dog-eared’, ‘dog-tired’ and ‘sick as a dog’. The leader writer was clearly not a dog-lover: to me the negative connotations of all those expressions are mitigated by the dog-tag. When a book is dog-eared it is not just scruffy and torn – it is well-worn through being much handled with affection, like an old family pet which has dutifully put up with years of friendly rough-and-tumble from the children. To be dog-tired evokes Kudu after a good country ramble: if he is really exhausted he can pass from hyperactive hedgerow-sniffing mode into total oblivion by the fireside within seconds; this is exactly the condition of glowing physical collapse I so much enjoy after a good day’s skiing, and very different from the troubled, nervous tiredness that comes from working too hard. And while I would obviously rather not be sick as a dog, the phrase is never used to describe a really serious condition – like cancer, for example: to me it suggests over-indulgence at Christmas lunch, the consequence of accepting another slice of Christmas pudding and another glass of port rather than heading out for the sort of bracing walk that might make you dog-tired instead.

  Dogs can be both brave and brazen

  1 May 2010

  Just before I went on air with Radio 4’s Sunday programme the broadcast assistant (or BA), who has the job of making sure everyone is where they should be at the right moment, told me she had been woken that morning by a nightmare; she had dreamt that I had decided to come to work by tram (the programme is broadcast from Manchester, so this is not entirely fanciful) and arrived late for my own show.

  Dreams about live broadcasting are common. When I presented the lunchtime television news I worried much more about getting stuck in the lavatory at the last moment than I did about fluffing my lines. And in my days as a Washington correspondent in the 1980s I had a recurring nightmare that, in the middle of some earnest discussion of Ronald Reagan’s latest arms initiative, I would be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable impulse to take my trousers down. But this is the first time anyone has had an anxiety dream on my behalf, and must surely be counted a tribute to the BA’s sense of corporate responsibility.

  And, lo, on the train home after the programme I found a story about a BBC man who really had missed his slot – because of a dog.

  I was reading a 1948 essay on the role of dogs during the Second World War. In the description of their value in guarding VPs (Vulnerable Points), I came across the following illustration of canine efficiency:

  Another incident worth repeating was when a V.P. dog was with his handler, patrolling the perimeter of a Broadcasting Station. It was a very sultry evening and an announcer, who had a break in the programme for a few minutes, came out into the night air for relaxation. The dog, however, caught his scent and the handler, after releasing the dog, suddenly heard a scream. On going forward … he found the announcer half-way up a Pylon with the dog sitting threateningly below. The BBC apologized later for a ‘technical hitch’.

  My interest in warrior dogs had been aroused when Kudu and I visited the memorial to Animals in War on the central reservation of Park Lane – we had been tempted to Hyde Park for our daily walk by the spring sunshine, and until now I had only really seen the memorial when stuck in heavy traffic.

  It definitely ‘vaut le détour’. The experience of war is represented by a sixty-foot wall of Portland stone. A column of animals is making its way through a gap at its centre, and there is a magnificent bronze dog at the head of the column, its bearing suggesting a confident survivor striding into a better future.

  But I do wonder about the inscription; ‘Animals and War’, it reads, and, in smaller lettering, ‘They had no choice.’ Of course, the horses (eight million of them died in the First World War), mules and dogs who served on the front line had no choice about being sent to war, but neither did most of the humans they fought alongside. They did, however, have a choice about the way they acted – and the fact (also recorded on the memorial) that there is a medal for those animals that show valour recognizes it. You have to make a choice to be brave.

  My views about the canine capacity for making moral choices have been heavily influenced by the recent discovery that Kudu is capable of grave moral turpitude. Not generally a greedy beast, he does have a weakness for cat food, and we long ago realized that the cats’ bowls had to be kept on a windowsill out of his reach (at least, so we thought).

  Usually he goes to bed when we do, but while my wife was away on business recently he took to roaming late around the house … and when he did come to bed he smelt suspiciously of fish – like a boozer with telltale breath returning from a bender. An inspection of the cats’ bowls confirmed our suspicions – they were cleaned out. And he must know this is wrong, because he never tries it in our presence.

  Would he be any good in a war? On my last Afghanistan trip I was shown Springer sniffing skills at Camp Bastion (we were sworn not to reveal the treat the dogs were given when they found explosives, and it is probably the only genuine military secret I have ever been privy to). But I searched the list of mine-detecting dogs used during the Second World War for any mention of his breed in vain.

  The explanation lay in the training and selection process: successful applicants had to be ‘battle inoculated’, and that involved a rigorous regime of tests: all sorts of ‘noises off’ such as Bren guns, heavy explosions at close range and swooping aircraft had to be inculcated into the training, every sort of distraction was introduced – pinioned rabbits, sheep, game, lumps of meat and even ‘in season bitches’ were used as deterrents.

  The bangs would not have bothered him in the least – he has good gun-dog genes. But when it comes to game and bitches, distraction is his middle name.

  After the column above appeared I received a very nice letter from an organization called the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals, enclosing a pamphlet by Louise Clark titled Animals in War, which records an impressive list of individual acts of canine courage and devotion. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 a terrier called Prince managed to find its way from Hammersmith to the French town of Armentières, where it joined its master on the front line. Another star of the trenches was Stubby, a Bull Terrier mix, who woke up sleeping soldiers during a gas attack and bought them vital time to put on their masks, and in the Second World War a Collie known simply as War Dog No. 471/322 became adept at helping commandos in Italy and North Africa by quietly licking them awake when danger threatened. On the home front there was Irma the Blitz Dog: she was trained to sniff out people buried alive beneath rubble and is said to have located more than twenty people, including two small girls, who were dug out after Irma repeatedly returned to an area that rescue workers had already searched. Louise Clark’s pamphlet also reports the shocking use of dogs as suicide bombers: ‘The worst task befell the dogs in the Russian army,’ she writes, ‘which used dogs as living explosives to run under tanks carrying a bomb.’

  The pamphlet came out in 2010 (the Society that published it was only established in 2000) and the monument to Animals in War, which Kudu and I visited near Hyde Park, was only opened in 2004. Interest in war service as a discreet area of animal welfare seems to be a very modern phenomenon. There is now a charity called Nowzad Dogs, dedicated to looking after strays that have been caught up in the Afghan conflict.

  And the way armies use dogs is definitely more appealing than it used to be. Dogs were once primarily employed to fight. Hammurabi, the King of Babylonia (in around 2100 BC), sent his warriors into battle accompanied by huge hounds; Babylonian bas-reliefs of the period portray them as powerful Mastiff-like creatures. The Roman philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius is shown with dogs clad in armour on his memorial column. And Henry VIII s
ent hundreds of war dogs to help Charles V of Spain to fight the French – they were reported to have acquitted themselves with great credit at the siege of Valencia.

  But in modern warfare dogs have more usually been used as guards, messengers or rescue workers. I particularly enjoy the story of the dogs that went into action with the stretcher-bearers of Airborne Divisions during the Second World War. They came down on their own parachutes and were then ordered to ‘quarter the ground much in the same manner that a Spaniel hunts through rough cover’, looking for injured paratroopers. So much more suitable for a nicely brought-up dog than ripping people’s throats out!

  A maudlin dog after reading Hardy

  15 May 2010

  A dog-walking social life offers plenty of opportunity for variety. Every dog-walking circle has its regular hours: if I go to Battersea Park early I usually meet MPs’ wives and the Chelsea set; around nine the park is full of dog-owning parents from the school outside the park gates, and by half past I can be sure of finding my Stockwell neighbours gossiping in the lakeside café.

  But south London is plagued by road works, and the Dog and I have had to break with routine, going at all sorts of times to all sorts of places to avoid the traffic. On a late outing to Clapham Common we met Kudu’s regular dog-walker exercising her charges.

  Kudu sniffed hello to his muckers and I went to investigate the silver bundle she carried in her arms. It was, she thought, a Collie crossed with a German Shepherd, still too young for its second jab and so not yet able to mix with the other dogs. She had acquired it from a dog-rescue worker who had brought it back from Ireland; discovered by a postman, it had been tethered in a river, left to die there at the age of five weeks.

  Wanting an animal to die but lacking the courage to kill it is a uniquely human failing. And it is difficult to understand the mind of someone who can feel enough for a dog to look after it for several weeks, then leave it to face starvation or drowning. Perhaps whoever was responsible eased their conscience with faith in the Providence that guides passing posties.

  There is a chilling poem on this subject by Thomas Hardy, called ‘The Mongrel’. It tells the story of a man who wants to drown his dog because he cannot pay his tax bill (a slightly unlikely premise, but there we are), so he throws a stick into the sea for the dog to retrieve when he knows the tide will carry it away. As the mongrel battles furiously to stay afloat,

  The loving eyes of the dog inclined

  To the man he held as a god enshrined,

  With no suspicion in his mind

  That this had all been meant.

  But at the last moment, as he is drowning, the poor creature realizes he has been had.

  The faith that had shone in that mongrel’s eyes

  That his owner would save him by and by

  Turned to much like a curse as he sank to die,

  And a loathing of mankind.

  I have always found Hardy a depressing writer: his novels reveal a quite astonishing capacity for imagining the very worst that can happen in any given situation, and the unforgiving Fate, which is such a feature of his books, seems to have afflicted his own non-fictional dog life too. Hardy liked to show people round the graves of his pets when they called at his home; his fellow novelist E. M. Forster remarked on how many of them had died violently (sliced in two under the wheels of a train and so on). ‘I don’t know how it is …’ said Hardy, ‘… but of course we have only buried those pets whose bodies were recovered. Many were never seen again.’ Forster reported later that he could scarcely keep a straight face because ‘it was so like one of Hardy’s novels or poems’.

  Virginia Woolf, by contrast, becomes an altogether more cheerful writer when she deals with dogs. Just after completing The Waves (generally considered her masterpiece, but not the easiest read) she produced a witty biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Spaniel, Flush, which became an instant bestseller. She also wrote about human treachery towards dogs, but with a light touch.

  Her short story ‘Gipsy, the Mongrel’ begins with a farmer who, like the Irish postie, finds a ‘little scrap of a dog’ tied up in a wicker basket in a snowy hedgerow. The gypsies who abandoned it had left a hunk of bread, ‘which shows,’ says one of the characters, ‘that they hadn’t the heart to kill her’. The farmer prepares to drown the dog in a water butt, but just as he is about to do the deed she smiles at him. ‘You can’t drown a puppy who grins in the face of death,’ declares the farmer.

  Gipsy the Mongrel survives to live a rackety life of dog crime (killing a favourite cat, giving birth to a bastard puppy under the table during a dinner party, pinching a leg of mutton, etc.) but every time she is threatened with the ultimate punishment she pulls off the grinning trick. Eventually she disappears on another snowy night, answering a mysterious whistle, and leaving the reader wondering whether she ever died at all.

  I am not sure whether this is in any way relevant, but Kudu has become a terrible affection addict recently – endlessly resting his head on our knees and bashing us with a paw if we do not stroke him. Perhaps on those nocturnal rambles I mentioned in my last column he has been sneaking Hardy’s poems from the bookshelf. I must wean him on to Virginia Woolf instead.

  Hardy’s near contemporary Rudyard Kipling was famously skilled at writing about animals (witness The Jungle Book, The Just So Stories and Thy Servant A Dog) and he has left us an even sadder dog poem than the one above. Earlier I quoted Jerome K. Jerome’s verdict on the foolishness of dogs’ love for us – Kipling points to our foolishness in loving them. The first three stanzas of ‘The Power of the Dog’ will give you the general drift:

  There is sorrow enough in the natural way

  From men and women to fill our day;

  But when we are certain of sorrow in store,

  Why do we always arrange for more?

  Brothers and sisters, I beg you beware

  Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

  Buy a pup and your money will buy

  Love unflinching that cannot lie –

  Perfect passion and worship fed

  By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.

  Nevertheless it is hardly fair

  To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

  When the fourteen years which Nature permits

  Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,

  And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs

  To lethal chambers or loaded guns,

  Then you’ll find – it’s your own affair

  But … you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

  If Kudu makes it to twenty – Springers often live rather longer than Kipling’s ‘fourteen years which nature permits’ – I shall have got beyond my allotted three score years and ten before he goes and will be into extra time. So I have not worried too much about his death. But a surprising number of people have said to me that they will not get a dog because they know they will have to watch it die.

  Grief for a dead dog is something that can only really be understood by other dog-owners – civilians, of course, will say how sorry they are but will not really understand. Two dogs I knew have died while I have been putting together this book. One was a Jack Russell called Button, who passed away peacefully in his sleep at boarding kennels while his owners were away; the other was a cheerful mongrel, one of the earliest friends Kudu made in the local park, who succumbed after an operation on her leg (she had been bitten by a brute during her afternoon walk). They came from very different backgrounds: Button’s tycoon master buried him in a grand cru claret box in the pet cemetery in the grounds of his country pile, while the mongrel’s owner – a freelance IT consultant in south London – retreated into his flat to mourn alone. But in their grief the two men were equals.

  Dogs can make you healthier

  29 May 2010

  A dog-owning acquaintance was despatched to Battersea Park by his wife on a tummy-reducing mission – only to return home with a wifely secret unveiled. She had chivvied
him with stories of health benefits from her walks with the family dog, so he took their terrier on his jog. When he opened the car door the dog sprinted to the park café and lay down, clearly expecting a prolonged coffee-and-gossip session.

  I am ever more convinced that dogs are good for you. My sixteen-year-old stepdaughter is in the middle of her GCSEs; on revision days she insists – in a most un-teenage manner – on being woken for the morning Kudu walk, kick-starting body and brain for a day’s hard slog with the textbooks. For good health we are all supposed to take at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week; Kudu would be delighted for me to hit the entire week’s target in a pre-breakfast walk every day, and would cover double my distance without breaking his high-paced sniff-and-sprint.

  Is there any hard evidence on the relationship between dogs and health? I asked a dog-owning GP, and was startled by the passion my question unleashed. So strongly does she feel that the health benefits of dog-ownership are under-estimated that she is considering a letter-writing campaign to the newspapers (under the nom de plume Dr Kay Nein) and she keeps her Spaniel in her surgery during consultations to push the point with her patients.

  Lower cholesterol and blood-pressure, a reduced chance of your child suffering from asthma, better recovery prospects after a heart attack, lower stress levels and a stronger immune system: all this and more can be yours if you own a dog.

  The Dogs Trust has ordered these benefits into a Canine Charter for Human Health, and the body of research they quote as supporting evidence is huge; if you follow the footnote trail you can only admire the inventiveness and dedication of some scientists. Imagine devoting your best years to a dissertation on ‘Environmental influences on the expression of aggressive behaviour in the English Cocker Spaniel’ (and who has ever heard of an aggressive Spaniel anyway?). And what can have inspired someone to investigate ‘Animal companions and one year survival of patients after discharge from a coronary care unit’?