I can put it like this, in hindsight, as if it were a joke. At the time I was feeling sick, hyper-ventilating; sometimes I didn’t even want to enter my own home, where, inside, a skinny animal was dictating the atmosphere. What sort of madness was this? And I was as keen to have a animal psychologist come round – and to pay money for it – as I’d have been to visit a quack on my own account. Where I come from we don’t do shrinks, where I come from you have a hard life and you get on with it, you kick the dog on your way in from work, not just to keep him in his place, but to make you feel better, too. (This may be myth, ergo it contains the grain of truth.)
Attila was a kindly looking man, originally from the former Czechoslovakia. He came into the house in a quiet, unobtrusive way and watched Ollie from the corner of his eye as he stood and asked us questions. We ran him through the situation. He rolled nuggets of dry food across the floor towards Ollie. Ollie would step from his basket to pick up the food ever so cautiously, then retreat. Attila had a little clicker in his hand which he said could be helpful: click it every time he gets the food, and this he will come to understand as a signal of a good thing. Click, food, click, food.
‘Food is a dog’s primary motivation,’ he said. Make food fun, hide it, throw it for him to find, it can be a game. A dog in the wild will go for a week without eating, then raid a dustbin, then go another few days, catch a rabbit, finish that off, and so on. They don’t have meal times, like us; we impose such a routine upon them.
‘Ah ha’, we said, wondering exactly how this would help with Ollie’s fucked up mind.
Attila addressed me directly. ‘Only you,’ he said, ‘Must feed him. Not Trezza. If you become his sole supply of food, he will have to come to you. Use the clicker,’ he said, ‘Because he may already have bad associations connected to the sound of your voice. It might remind him of another person’s voice, a person who was unkind to him, as well as the negative associations he has already formed.’
I’d confessed about the smack. Attila didn’t seem to think it was too much of a crime. He was certain that a dog ought to be able to get over such a thing. ‘Buy a whistle for calling him when you’re outdoors,’ he said. ‘Train him with food treats first, indoors, so he will associate the whistle with food, too: it will help control him. In time, he will develop trust in you.’
‘But why has he become frightened in the first place?’ I asked, ‘I mean, he was more or less okay at the beginning.’
‘Who knows?’ Attila said, ‘Rescue dogs can be strange, you can only guess what they have been through. The thing to do is to correct the behaviour, and food is the key.’
So. This seemed simple enough. There was no hypnotism or acupuncture, no gizmos, no couch. All that had been laid out was a plausible assessment of canine motivation, a new regime recommended, and a clicker supplied.
Trezza mentioned that Ollie was not so friendly in the specific sense that he seldom wagged his tail.
‘We can teach that,’ Attila said, ‘if you want.’ He clicked the clicker a few more times in a rhythm. ‘Once trust has been established, the clicker can be used for more advanced commands. It’s how you get dolphins to jump out of the pool for the fish,’ he said. ‘They hear it click once, they jump to a certain height for the reward. They hear it click twice, it’s a better reward, they jump higher. And so on.’
All this was news to me. I wasn’t entirely happy with it, either. We were talking circus now – more elevated than a farce maybe, but only about par with a musical. I also found something sinister in the suggestion of wag-training; it would be like teaching an unhappy child to smile to order.
I asked Attila what else he did with dogs, to deflect the conversation away from Ollie’s tail, to relax into generalities. He ran socialisation classes, he said. Ah yes, we had plans to get round to those, once Ollie was fit to take along, as it were. Not much chance of us starting group therapy while it was still a possibility he might piss himself at the sight of me.
‘And agility,’ he said.
Jumping over hurdles and so on, I’d seen that once. It looked good, an element of the steeplechase.
‘And dancing,’ he said.
I’d seen that too, on Crufts, where ladies in jog pants spin ribbons on sticks and shake their booty alongside Fifi. This was the moment to thank Attila and show him out. Whatever our problems, I felt it safe to say they would never involve Ollie and I hiring tuxedos and performing a tango.
***
If Attila’s advice was quite straightforward, Ollie didn’t hear it. I became his sole feeder, and he would consume his meal, eventually, but only after I’d left the room, because eating, like shitting, was ideally a private activity for him. He always (still) shoots glances over his shoulders as he bolts his mouthfuls as fast as he possibly can. Nothing bad ever happens at mealtimes, no one ever comes to steal his food from him, but his method never changes. It’s a legacy of the forest that he simply cannot shake. We’d forgotten to mention this characteristic to Attila. When Ollie first came home his eating rate was so fast that we were worried and questioned the vet about it. The vet asked us to time him. It took him under a minute to consume a regular portion, a speed the vet described as ‘technically, starvation-rate’.
We gave him regular, smaller dishes in the hope that he’d slow down a bit, but there was only so much food he could get into himself in a day, otherwise it came out of both ends. So even as we were embarked on the feed-bonding programme, his stomach was an unsettled area. Anything can start him off. I once made the mistake of giving him a bone from a leg of lamb which precipitated weeks of diarrhoea (in between his regular loads).
As time went on, I became obsessed with the quality of his turds, and in this I am not alone. Watch dog-walkers: the animal stoops, craps, clears the area. Depending on where, when, and type of owner, this may be followed by the picking-up. But say we’re in a copse (all owners leave it behind in a copse) – observe the pause and the slight lean forward as an inspection is made for consistency, shape, colour, quality and quantity. Excrement, for the dog owner, is as the tealeaf to the clairvoyant – a rule-of-thumb barometer to health, fortune and well-being.
I have a friend from the north, Peter Kadic, a Ridgeback owner, who is the antidote to the friends who thought I was a weirdo for getting a dog. Kadic is a committed dog-lover, a man who took his beloved Bruce to be cremated when he passed away, and insisted on going to watch because he didn’t want the crematorium people, ‘Fobbing me off wi’ t’ bones of any old Fido.’
Kadic phones me much more often since Ollie arrived because Ollie was the signal that I had finally become a proper (northern) man. And of course, I was now equipped to talk the dog talk. As we were talking shit on one occasion, Kadic came up with the perfect definition for the ideal in stools. ‘Foster’, he said, ‘You want to be able to trip over ‘em, not slide in ‘em.’
Incidentally, Ollie clears the crapping area very fast indeed – he generally celebrates the deposit with a 50 metre sprint of joy. I’ve heard it said that if you ever see a greyhound take a dump before a race, it’s a good bet; I’d say that was sound advice.
His eating rate did slow down a little during this time, but that was about it so far as any improvement went. Between meals I hand-fed him warm chicken and all the rest of his favourites, which he’d take timorously, in a tremble, as if it might be poison – his eyes crazed and fearful. He repeatedly looked to his mum. What had he done to upset her? Why wasn’t she looking after him?
I wondered about this program. I could see how it could fail disastrously: he might develop a secondary fear to go alongside the one he’d already got, he might become afraid of Trezza, too.
***
There was the other problem to deal with, the not coming back. Attila had suggested that I recall him and put him on the lead at odd points during the walk – using the clicker or the whistle – when he wouldn’t expect it, so he’d get used to my handling and come to accept it. We began an experimental pe
riod whereby the three of us went out walking together – I needed Trezza with me for back up. At the odd points it worked, after a fashion. I used Cheddar and the whistle; there was something creepy about the clicker that I did not like. Though Ollie was still as wary as a lamb, had to be whistled many times, flirted away, and remained wholly distrustful, he would, finally, and with a flinch, allow me to take hold of him. If this didn’t look too promising, it wasn’t: at the end of the walk there was no improvement at all.
Trezza stood by as he flitted about. Yes, it was all very frustrating, she could see that, but it was no reason to send him back to the kennels, was it, opening the way for who knows what kind of evil deviant to pick him up, take him away, and batter and mistreat him, the poor little mite.
Had I even mentioned returning him?
‘Yes, last week.’
After about fifteen minutes of driving me insane, Trezza shouted at him and he sat down and allowed himself to be taken hold of – by her – the poor little mite. I was supposed to use a whistle to call him in case my voice frightened him, but Trezza only had to give him the old fishwife treatment to make him behave. There had been a couple of moments in my life when I’d been more hacked off than this but on those occasions I’d told the boss to go fuck himself and collected my cards. This was not an option I had in this instance.
***
Though it was happening in minute and reversible increments, invisible to the naked eye – and no casual observer would think we were getting anywhere – there were some days that were better than others. With just the two of us out walking again (it had to be done), I began to put the whistle-training we’d been practising at home into the service of calling him off some of his friends among the rest of the world’s dog population.
The whistle was a slim, silver, specialist instrument purchased from a ‘country man’ shop with a finely-calibrated thread in order that it could be set to different pitches for different commands (ha ha – for use with Border collie-crosses only). I wore it on a silver chain round my neck, which, besides introducing the note of bling, made me feel more of a professional. By now I had noted that certain other owners were giving Ollie a very wide berth, and not without cause. The time had come for me to demonstrate my guru methodologies in public. Instead of hiding behind trees I could walk along tooting. After a while, Ollie got the hang of this. He would raise his head, look around, glance my way.
‘Who, me? You’re kidding aren’t you?’ the glance said.
He’d carry on with his game – taunting his friend, Perkins the Jack Russell, with his superior speed before flipping him on his nose like a seal with a ball, going fifteen rounds with some far-away border terrier – until he was done. As he finally came back to a distance that I could vaguely regard as being within my orbit, I’d give an extra long blast.
‘Good boy,’ I’d say, ‘Well done.’
That showed them.
***
The most tolerant of other owners were the other rescuers, and most specifically the rescue-lurcher owners, who were a help. Though Ollie was an extreme example, they understood what it was like, and their own dogs gave very good chase. Some lurcher owners claimed that their animals were pretty smart, but others were more honest and stated the obvious – one of the problems with them is that, in many cases, they don’t have too much going on between their ears. This reinforced the view that I’d been coming to, namely that Ollie was quite a stupid animal, what with his general untrainability (he was still not clean in the house at night time), his multiple warinesses, and his inability to get beyond ‘Sit’ so far as a command was concerned.
All the same, he was certainly smart enough to second-guess me when it came to the end of playtime. In the absence of Trezza, his backsliding was impressive. He could sense the turning point in a walk whatever route I took; as soon as we entered the second half I could see his guard go up and his distance increase. I would have made my life a lot easier by never ever letting him off the lead, of course, but since I’d identified that his vocation (running) was also his principal joy in life, I couldn’t do that to him. I’d vary entry points, parking north, south, east and west of the campus in order to confuse him, which would work for a short while, say, day one. But as soon as he was familiar with the route, say, day two, the recall situation began to recur.
***
As a break from the university-walk stress, I’d sometimes drive to the Norfolk coast which, at the nearest point, is only twenty miles away. He didn’t know where he was when we got there, a disorientation that helped. At the beach he could indulge in a major workout – he adored the sand which contained great hidden treasures like seagull guano, and dead fish. Most days at the university he rolls in fox shit. The shit of the fox has a musky, unpleasant smell, though I prefer it to that of the seagull; out here he found a decomposing fish to roll in, which was the worst smell yet, until he found the dream combination of a decomposing fish that a seagull had shat on, a combination of aromas to make a grown man retch. The received wisdom is that the instinct which impels them to engage in this repellent activity is ‘scent-masking,’ to disguise their own aroma when they’re on the hunt. My own view, based on the observation that Ollie has never caught a rabbit, or anything else, is that he does it because he likes it.
Shay, the Galway City taxi driver, explained to me that he never would catch a rabbit either, by the way. This was because I had made some fundamental errors of omission in his early life. At about six months you need to coach your lurcher in the art of stealth, see: the animal doesn’t have it naturally. How you do it is you edge him in close to the prey, quiet like, along the bushes, restraining him on a cord held tight through the ring of his collar. As you get to within a few feet of the rabbit he will be pulling hard, straining at the leash, desperate. Now you give a little signal, let go, and Wallop! He’s got his boy and there you have it: four lucky feet, one lucky tail and a meal ready for the pot. Without this tuition the dog will always go too early, alerting the prey, allowing the window of opportunity for it to escape.
By the time I knew about all this, of course, it was too late. So far as Ollie is concerned, rabbits puzzle him. Sometimes he gets close to an especially young or dense one, stops, and watches in incomprehension as it shuffles sideways towards its warren pretending to be invisible. What is its problem? Why won’t it come and play? He continues to chase them through the dunes, hoping one day to come across a sociable example.
Once he’s finished with that, the beach affords much more in the way of getting down with his bad self: digging to Australia, eating seagull feathers, seaweed and live crabs, hurdling the groynes, sliding in the sand, jumping back from the scary waves, and conducting long staring matches with the seals that bob out of the shallows. He still shows zero inclination to return to me, but all this activity is tiring and works up an enormous appetite. His stomach lures him in. Eventually.
Sighting one of those shy rabbits
The wild dunes behind the beach out at Winterton, a bleak, beautiful stretch a few miles to the north of Yarmouth – deserted most of the year, with the exception of dog-walkers – was our favourite spot. Even here I’d come across people taking their animals for walks on leads. More often than not I’d have to make my way over to them, to field Ollie out of their way.
I’d look at them curiously. They’d sometimes respond to the curious look, typically claiming one of two stories: either their dog was ‘a bit funny’, a euphemism for ‘attacks other animals’, or else it had once been attacked itself, most often when it was young, and since then it had always been withdrawn and nervy. Whichever type of leash-bound dog they had, here they were, a part of that weird brand of person, the dog owner, out in all foul weathers, evidently devoted to the animal in question and just as evidently unhappy, trapped in mutual dependency at either end of a three-foot strap.
I noticed that some of these people looked at me as if I were lucky, having a dog that could be trusted to roam free, that didn
’t attack others, that would come back, that seemed, on the face of things, quite content – boisterous, assured, just a little bit scatty. ‘If only you could see him at home,’ I said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ I’d trot out my new catch phrase: Jekyll and Hyde.
I began to feel sorry for dog owners. If I hadn’t been so consumed by trying to resolve our relationship I might better have been able to see how like them I was becoming, and I could have spent a moment feeling sorry for myself, or at least attempt a dispassionate assessment of my condition: by now, in devoting myself to getting Ollie to function as an acceptable pet, I was losing three to four hours a day.
It’s difficult to make a case for this, but I managed it. One of the old truisms of writing is that most of it consists of waiting, waiting for the muse to strike and so on. I latched onto this conceit and I held it dear; I could at least look at all these hours as time I’d only be spending doing nothing anyway, as a normal part of the job description.
At the conclusion of beach walks, in the back of the knackered estate, I’d feed and water Ollie, and after he was done I’d give him a couple of extra treats and tickle him under the chin. Even as spent as he was, torso relaxed, dead on his feet, he’d still back off and look at me as if to say, ‘Please don’t do that.’
***
On our return home, as I’d mentioned to the beach walkers, it was a different dog that skulked into the house. He had quickly recognised that he only received his food from me: he’s very swift to understand a pattern – in fact, once he’s established a routine, he’s extremely loathe to deviate from it. Trezza describes him as autistic, and his behaviour is consistent with the particular strand of autism where-by if a certain activity doesn’t happen in the same way and at the same time every day – the first walk, the first poo, the first meal; the second walk, the second poo, the second meal – it freaks him all the more. You can trace the tension in his muscles as he fidgets neurotically like a tiger in a zoo, waiting, waiting. He hardly ever barks (because barking scares him and makes him run away from himself); his responses are mostly mute, physical. (On those rare occasions when he does give voice we can be sure something serious is occurring; he is being rounded on by three other dogs at once, he is cornered and is about to lose a battle.)
Walking Ollie Page 7