Yes, I'm a convert!

(following on from my previous post .....)

Another child (a daughter this time) and couple of house moves later and we'd acquired another cat. Well, he was dumped on us by friends emmigrating to Australia, so relieved to have housed him they didn't even kill the engine when they dropped him off in the car. Life went on. We acquired a black lab (HtW) and another spaniel (me), boys this time, again for shooting, so we continued with the medium to large dog thing. I'd never really got small dogs. They were ankle biters, tripper-uppers, yappy, pointless.

We moved some more, got divorced, got older and when it became time to find the next resident, I no longer had inclination or energy to chase spaniels, or running pheasants and realised I'd developed a philosophy against having a working breed that couldn't work. Not so controversial really, because only my choice, for me, but watching the body language of a spaniel on the hunt, the way their rudders change according to the prize they've identified in the undergrowth - the sheer joy they clearly feel in their work .... I couldn't deprive a dog of that. Besides, we'd downsized hugely and I'd felt guilty enough that the lab had to make three-point turns to navigate our small terraced house.

No longer being part of an unthinking, smug-married couple, my life had changed too - I'd become greener, more thoughtful, careful about the resources I used, so I decided to go down the rescue dog route, get something smaller, perhaps a small(ish) spikey mongrel type, like you see in the ads. (OK, so you can be greenish and still be a pretentious airhead).

So, the Digging Dog arrived. Actually, the persona arrived later. To begin with she was a nightmare. A skinny, lookalike, black springer spanial, with a white bib, the size of a rat, a climber and the most destructive, messy individual I'd ever met. She had the run of the kitchen at night and used it as her own personal gym. She found the daughter's school pencil case on the table and demolished the contents, she ate onions from the vegetable rack and handles of kitchen knives from the block on the worktop. One morning I came down and found her with brown sellotape wrapped round her nose - except it was the only film we'd taken of her as a pup and undeveloped. She regularly raided the bin, but not in a subtle way - it was obviously more fun to spread it round the kitchen.

For some reason it never occurred to me to put a house dog in a cage at night. ....And in retrospect perhaps, despite everything, that was a good thing. Matters only improved when a wiser friend, son of a world-famous horse vet, who'd missed his own true vocation by not wanting to be 'son of..', worked out that she was claustrophobic. I should have mentioned that she'd been found, with six siblings, probably about 4 weeks old, zipped in a holdall in the men's loo of a motorway service station..... We put in a dog door, so she could come and go and things improved dramatically. Having said that, until I finally got a Brabantia bin, her obsession with rubbish continued - perhaps the rescue dog code of 'you never know where your next meal's going to come from' - though in more devious ways than before. That time I noticed a chive plant was looking rather sad and found part of a loaf of mouldy bread, still in it's bag, buried underneath it, for instance. With a more careful look at the borders round the courtyard, I found two more stashes, completely hidden in the earth, the only evidence, slight peaks on the surface. It must have taken her hours, but there was absolutely no evidence either on her nose or her paws. What else can I say, but ... Respect!

She changed her act almost overnight in the end, though: I had to go to the States on business, so she was banged up in the nick for a week. When I fetched her, she was perched on top of the wooden wall against the bars, bossing the other inmates around. She'd had a fantastic time, but the dog that came back to us was different. As if she'd made a connection between hooliganism and prison, from the day I liberated her she was ours in every sense.

The first dog shared, the DD's personality is a hybrid of her individual relationships with each of us: with my son she learned to expect games and energetic walks when he was home; with my daughter, less scarey games and going on exercise with the horse; me, she regarded as the main boundary setter, food supplier and the person to relax with on the sofa on Sunday afternoons. ... and the person who needed nagging on Wednesday evenings when it looked as if I'd forgotten that it was her class night. We'd discovered a local dog agility class - aimed at fun (if you wanted to start getting competitive you had to go elsewhere) and she turned out to be a natural - quick to learn, fast and accurate. Her behaviour on those evenings was quite different from any other night. She'd sit on the bend in the stairs, sighing and theatrically tapping the metaphorical watch on her wrist until I got my boots. She loved it. In fact they all loved it ..... and the behavioural problems in the gang that were sorted out along the way were startling. I learned something else too..... that she and I would have to start working like a well-oiled machine or I'd be permanently out of puff .... and after a while, bless her, it was possible to stand in the middle of the course and point where I wanted her to go and she'd do it. .....Except, of course, for the times when she'd already memorised the route and got there before I had time to tell her.

Everywhere I go, she comes too. In the early days that was the office, but for the last 7 years she's been a gardener's dog - the Digging Dog. The soubriquet was earned - that early skill was no fluke. When a difficult shrub needs to come out, I make initial inroads and then call her in for the intricate work round tangled roots. Digging precisely where asked, she's helped to extract countless shrubs in far better condition than would otherwise be expected. The rest of the time she finds the most comfortable spot near where I'm working and with one eye on the action, snoozes the time away.


With more time to concentrate on a dog than ever before the bond is incredibly close. She's 9 now and I sometimes wonder if I'll ever have the same relationship again. I mean, I've loved them all, equally but for different reasons and times marches and sometimes I dread the inevitable.... So much so, that about 5 years ago I began saying I needed to get another dog, so that the DD could pass on some of her wisdom. Because she is wise. I'd thought 8 would be a good age - she'd be young enough not to be too fussed by a puppy and old enough not to be too bothered by the competition.

To cut an increasingly rambling story short, I was bullied by a friend into following up one of the ads in our local free sheet I'd read aloud ad nauseam and with one look at four tiny, hairy mites, I fell in love all over again.

Eighteen months and one week ago the Gremlin arrived. One quarter Scottie and three quarters Westie, she was unlike anything I'd ever known, or knew I'd wanted to know, if you like, before. Even smaller than the DD, and - apart from the black coat and white bib, bearing no other resemblance - she burst onto our lives like a small, demented clockwork toy.

This time I'd got wise. I'd watched, counselled and sympathised with my sister, a dog-owning virgin, who'd got her first Cairn in London a couple of years before..... and learned a lot from the experience. She was wise. She swiftly got kitted out with sleep cage and play pen and apart from the time she returned to her flat to see her puppy strolling along the window ledge outside her first floor flat, had made a fairly smooth transition to organised veteran in no time at all.

It worked. The Gremlin was clean overnight in a matter of days and turned out to have no destructive tendencies at all. Perhaps it was the length of her legs (lack of inches multiplying any exercise exponentially), but after days of frenetic activity, she climbed into the bed in her cage and was asleep before I'd let the covers down over her. Dangling wires held no attractions for her. She was far more interested in the cat, who'd stretch out temptingly in the middle of the floor and play dead, while keeping one lazy eye on her antics as she danced about trying to find a vulnerable point. When she did nerve herself to close in, Cat (who could have dropped her with a flick) simply waved a lanquid paw in her direction, causing sufficient breeze to knock her back. Other than that, when toys bored her, she'd find stuff to do .... like spend ages trying to scale anything above her head, which was practially everything.

She hasn't displaced DD in my affections in any way, but said determination combined with self-possession, habitual cheerfulness, loyalty, affection and a peculiarly individual take on life, not to mention how hilarious those radar ears look from behind, have given me more joy and knicker-wetting laughter since she arrived in our midst than I can possibly thank her for.

More about the menagerie another time perhaps, but in the meantime .... Yes, I'm a convert. Small dogs rule!

Do dogs grow on you?

I've lived with dogs pretty much all my life. My mother had a weakness for Dandie Dinmonts and Border terriers, because they were funny and then family dogs from childhood morphed into the Married Dog - the Husband-that-Was was a shooter and got himself a Springer when we still lived in London, which then had a litter of puppies. Another addition to the chaos of two working adults, MD and cat in small terraced house in Lavender Hill? Are you mad? Shortly after that a liver and white scrap became My Own First Dog.

I loved MOFD from the moment she became an individual among the mass of squirming, squeaking, snoozing guinea pigs. Some time on her fifth day she lay in the palm of my hand, eyes still closed, little murmurs and yawns stirring her tiny, silky body, helpless and adorable .... and that was it.

I took her everywhere I could. While I worked she went with her mother, to the minders two doors up, except when they were on holiday, or doing their duty as stand-in caretakers of one of the embassies in Kensington. On those days I took her to work with me. She travelled on buses and tubes and took the Drain to the City. She came to the merchant bank with me, the law firm and the video facilities house in Soho. In between we worked on all the theories I'd developed on dog training and and came to mutually acceptable conclusions. I explained that it was impolite to take sandwiches from coffee tables without being invited and she opened my eyes to the joys and dodges of beating on shoots. I pointed out that trying to crash out of the snoopy house at the same time as her mother led to them getting stuck in the door -  she taught me how to take a bird from her mouth without dropping it. We learned to tolerate each other's mistakes. We were a team and something must have been right because we were in demand. And I liked that she was a proper sized, grown-up, working dog.

Then we moved to Somerset and the Husband-that-Was had to travel quite a lot and it occurred to me that, out in the middle of nowhere (actually a small village outside Frome) spaniels that snored so loudly from their straw-choked kennel would never hear any invaders. I wanted a house dog and Zigi the Rottweiler arrived .... although, bizarrely, I had to go back to London to get her.

Most puppies are pretty and Zig was no exception, with perfect, symmetrical, deep golden patches and huge brown eyes. She arrived when our son was at toddler stage, so fitted into the heirarchy somewhere on a level with him: below me as pack leader and (in her opinion) above the HtW and the spaniels. The cat, as all cats do, carried on doing his own thing, superior to all of us. 

She brought another dimension to the household, particularly in the brain department. She was the first dog I'd known that could make you understand the degree of urgency about going outside. She was exceptionally precise (hoovering up individual crumbs that the spaniels had stamped in in their scrambly way) and gentle in the mouth department and the only thing she chewed was her wicker bed which ended up in two neat pieces - the wall discarded, leaving the base to lie on, splayed on her back like some sort of exotic offering on a plate. Oh, and her own nails. When I tried to trim them for her she insisted on eating the evidence - a throwback to survival tactics - like jumping away from any spot where she'd peed, but really she preferred to do her own. When it became necessary to stop the toddler pestering her, she simply nudged him to the ground with a subtle movement of her back end - and then sat on his legs, until someone came and sorted him out. When my mother came to stay and got out whatever W.I. knitting project she was on, Zig would sit next to her, bum perched on the sofa, front feet crossed on the floor .... and laugh.

A pattern seemed to be emerging. Our dogs, from medium size, were getting bigger......