Diary of a Dog-walker (16 page)

8

A Dog's-Eye View

STUDIO LIFE IS
seductive. You broadcast without stirring from a comfortable chair, and there is a small army of eager producers and skilled technicians on hand to support you. Some of the younger ones seem to admire you – unsettling at first, but you very quickly get used to the luxury. Taxis are booked to bring you in and take you home, and grumpy moods are tolerated. Best of all, no one can cut you off or meddle with your material: once the microphone goes live, the airtime is yours.

Reporting, by contrast, can be hard pounding, and is very much a young person's game. It means cramped planes and long flights, epic journeys in elderly and unsafe cars, endless, often grim, hotels; it means missing precious family moments and learning to love waking early and working late; it means
long hours in the antechambers of those who think themselves mighty, and interviews doggedly pursued in the near-certain knowledge of disappointment.

The calling demands all sorts of indignities: I am writing this on assignment in Nigeria, and I have just spent half an hour in a down-at-heel Port Harcourt hotel hiding behind a curtain to re-create the right sound environment for a live broadcast. Worst of all, you lose control of your time because you live at the mercy of twin tyrants: deadlines and developments. And at the end of it all the fate of your material is decided by a programme editor back at base who may never have stirred beyond Shepherd's Bush.

And yet, and yet … it is hard to beat the thrill of being there when history is made, or seeing something that very few of your audience will ever see. I still get a charge out of the light-bulb moment, when the dynamics of a story click into place and you realize you have something worth telling your audience about. There is no drug quite like raw contact with real news.

My trip to see cancer-sniffing dogs in Buckinghamshire was not quite like interviewing Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, or watching cruise missiles coming in over Baghdad, but it still had the wow factor every reporter hopes for when he or she sets out with notebook in hand.

Canines could be better value than quads and biopsies

7 August 2010

This newspaper recently reported the record price achieved by a sheepdog called Ron at Skipton Auction Mart: the fourteen-month-old Collie went for an astonishing 4,900 guineas (£5,145). ‘In demonstrations on a hillside next to the auction mart,' the piece reported, ‘Ron impressed the crowd by carefully rounding up one sheep which seemed determined to break away.' The
Telegraph
's headline writer dubbed him ‘the Rooney of the sheepdog transfer market'; his breeder, with a sheep farmer's canny calculations in mind, pointed out that buying a quad bike to do Ron's job would cost even more.

Kudu's record of crowd-pleasing performances is more varied. He recently played a blinder when a dog-curious family came to inspect him over Sunday lunch. The visit was sold to us by the father of the household on the basis that he and his wife were coming under pressure from Rachel, their eight-year-old daughter, to get a dog. It quickly became apparent that he was himself the main champion of the dog project (he is stepping down from a big job and will be at home more); Rachel was the one who needed convincing.

She had been biffed by a dog when younger and
reacted nervously to Kudu's rambunctiousness. But he quickly picked up on her mood, and when we suggested she might enjoy brushing him he was on his back almost before the brush was out of the cupboard. It was a hot day, and he was less enthusiastic about chasing his toys around the garden – whenever she threw one he tried to hide it under the table – but he played gamely through the afternoon, chased a tennis ball round the park for her and generally pitched his doggy charm so effectively that Rachel really was pushing for a dog by the time they left.

But two days later he let the side down badly on a photo-shoot in Richmond Park. The photographer Antoinette Eugster was trying to re-create a Wyeth painting of a young girl lying under a thunderous sky with a dog sitting in the background. My stepdaughter Rosy cheerfully modelled the girl, and the sky was obligingly thunderous … but the dog just would not sit where he was told. So no hope of a modelling contract for Ron-style money!

I met a similarly camera-shy fellow at the Cancer Bio-detection Dogs charity in Buckinghamshire. I had been invited to a fund-raising event because I had mentioned the charity's research in an earlier column, and the organizers asked me, as the only journalist present, to take the obligatory photograph of smiling staff with one of those outsized cheques.
Jake, a black Lab in training as a sniffing dog, was required to be part of the group; I hope he is better at sniffing than he is at posing.

But the dog we saw in sniffing action – a Springer also, confusingly, called Jake – turned in a stunning performance. There was a contraption like a steel spider in the centre of the lab, and a urine sample was placed in a grip at the end of each leg. Jake's task was to identify which one came from a cancer patient – which he did every time and at great speed. His reward was a treat at the end of each round and tennis-ball fun with his handler at the end of the session.

Impressive, but could it ever be useful? Can we imagine cancer-sniffing centres staffed by Jake and his relations at NHS Trusts across the country? That, it seems, is not the point. Claire Guest, who runs the charity, explained they are using the dogs as researchers: if dogs can identify the smell associated with a cancer, she explained, humans can develop a mechanical system to detect it. That could mean a new screening system for, say, prostate cancer – the current test is notoriously unreliable and often involves an invasive and unnecessary biopsy. Whether this is good science I cannot say, but they are surely right that dogs know things we do not.

The demonstration by a companion dog for a diabetes patient was even more impressive – and his
skills are more obviously useful. Rory, a Golden Retriever, sat in the middle of the lab at his handler's feet as she opened a jar with a sample from someone with a high blood-sugar level. He immediately put his feet on her shoulders and licked her face. When she failed to respond he padded across the room and collected a medical bag. The handler has type-one diabetes herself, and assured us this was no party trick: Rory frequently wakes her in the night when her levels are wrong.

It costs ten thousand pounds to get a dog to Rory's standard and settle him with a patient – but Claire Guest claims the NHS spends one million pounds per hour on diabetes-related cases. It is a bit like the quad-bike comparison from the breeder of ‘Ron the Rooney of the sheepdog transfer market' at Skipton. And a dog is a lot more fun than a bike in the garage – or a doctor on call, come to that.

Seeing a really well-trained dog like Rory at work made me realize how remiss I have been about Kudu's training. He is certainly not yobbish – he has a naturally gentlemanly disposition – but his manners can be a bit rough on occasion, especially where hygiene is concerned. During one weekend away with him we were given a bedroom directly above the kitchen, and while changing for dinner we overheard our hosts discussing him in most unflattering terms (he had moaned about being locked in
the boot room to dry off after a muddy walk). Dog etiquette is tricky territory; no two households have precisely the same set of dog rules, so taking your dog out socially is fraught with danger.

Dogs are conservative in their habits, and if they have been permitted to do something at home it is very difficult to persuade them that they should behave differently somewhere else; if, for example, you allow your dog to sleep on the sofa in your living room (we very much do not, I should add), he will certainly expect to do the same elsewhere, no matter how elegant, delicate and pale-coloured the sofa in question. And making judgements about when and where your dog will be welcome is complicated by the fact that the doggiest people often have the strictest rules. Most of our country friends assume that if they invite us to stay for a weekend the dog comes too – dogs are so much part of country life that we scarcely need to ask. On the other hand, many of them would never dream of letting a dog upstairs: country dogs tend to sleep locked up in the boot room, or even in kennels outside. Kudu – I blush to confess – sleeps in our bedroom.

I have tried quite hard to teach Kudu table manners so that he can join us in a pub after a walk, or on the terrace for lunch at the club where we play tennis. He still has not quite got over the idea that this constitutes being ‘out', and being out is about
having fun, so if I tie him to a table leg he will try to run off with the table. We did once try tying him to a bench next to the tennis court while we played, but watching a ball being hit about the place and not being able to run after it was simply too much of a torture.

Man's best friend can be a fiend, but I always defend him

21 August 2010

One of Kudu's friends returned from kennels several pounds lighter than at the start of his owners' summer break: exile so distressed him that he had gone on hunger strike. We are more indulgent. Kudu gets double-staffed while we are away – a dog-walker for the day and a house-sitter to keep him company at night.

She is a regular, and before we left for our two weeks in Turkey she came for an evening drink to remind herself of the house's plumbing eccentricities. Kudu had not seen her since last summer, but remembered her very well indeed: she got the usual frantic toy-offering ritual on her arrival, and once she was sitting he settled at her feet, muzzle on her knee and eyes fixed on her face in supplication.

For what? We allow him to sleep in our bedroom
and she does not. My guess is that he was getting his pleading in early.

I can trust him as a good host in his own home while we are away. I feel much more nervous when we take him somewhere as a guest. There was a searing Christmas moment at my brother's Hampshire house when he was young. The household rules included a ‘no dogs upstairs' policy, which was being enforced with rigour because the house had just been decorated. After Midnight Mass, Kudu was shut in the scullery.

One of my sister's Spaniels was on heat, and although she spent the night in the car (the bitch, not my sister), Kudu had caught a whiff of those scrumptious smells. Whether it was lust or fear (of spending the night alone) I cannot say, but by stocking-opening time the newly painted scullery door was a wreck.

Readers will note I blame everyone but Kudu; dog-owners are much worse in this respect than indulgent parents. I know a good mother who was incapable of disciplining her over-exuberant Tibetan Terrier. When he memorably crapped in the middle of a food-laden cloth spread on the lawn of a grand country house for a
fête champêtre
, she airily declared that Tibetan Terriers are the reincarnated souls of Buddhist monks – as if this was a perfectly adequate explanation for the desecration of the
foie gras
.

Dog-indulgence was turned into a high art form
by a man called J. R. Ackerley, for many years the literary editor of that now, sadly, defunct BBC institution the
Listener
magazine. I bought his book
My Dog Tulip
as dog homework for the holiday, but found it so funny I finished it before we left.

Tulip, an Alsatian, was, in the words of someone who knew her, ‘quite frankly … a terror'. Ackerley's friends drop away as she fouls their carpets and chases their cats, his social circle shrinking until his only regular human contact is with the vet – though he does enjoy a series of casual relationships with other dog-owners, whose pets might provide Tulip with sexual satisfaction. Ackerley is perplexed by his social impoverishment, puzzled that his friends seemed ‘to resent being challenged whenever they approached their own sitting or dining rooms'.

When Tulip upsets humans he always sides with her. He decides that it is safer for her to defecate on the pavement than in the road (the book was published in 1965, before the idea of ‘picking up'), and sketches a wonderful scene on Putney Embankment while she is about her business in the mist of an early winter morning:

… a cyclist shot round the corner of the Star and Garter Hotel towards us, pedalling rapidly … I don't suppose I should have noticed this person at all if he had not addressed me as he flew past:

‘Try taking your dog off the sidewalk to mess!'

One should not lose one's temper, I know, but the remark stung me.

‘What, to be run over by you? Try minding your own business!'

‘I am an' all,' he bawled over his shoulder. ‘What's the bleeding street for?'

‘For turds like you!' I retorted.

The cyclist is, of course, completely right, but dog-owners will surely cheer for Ackerley.

Tulip is especially badly behaved at the vet, and she is rejected by several. My favourite vignette is the Spaniel that greets Ackerley at the third surgery he approaches:

He was standing quietly on a table with a thermometer sticking out of his bottom, like a cigarette. And this humiliating spectacle was rendered all the more crushing by the fact that there was no one else there. Absolutely motionless, and with an air of deep absorption, the dog was standing upon the table in an empty room with a thermometer in his bottom, almost as though he had put it there himself.

‘Oh Tulip!' I groaned. ‘If only you were like that!'

Yes, of course I have introduced that story in an Ackerley-ish way, because it reflects well on Spaniels.
The vet appointment for the annual booster is as much part of our summer ritual as sun-seeking, and Kudu behaved immaculately. He even insisted on coming back with the cats to cheer them up when they went for their jabs a week later.

Angling for acceptance where East meets West

4 September 2010

I have a wonder to report: I have seen a dog catch a fish.

It was early evening in the small Turkish port of Ka
ş
. It had been a stinking hot day, and two shaggy German Shepherds were standing on the slipway into the harbour, enjoying the cool sea on their tummies. One suddenly executed an amazing bash-and-flip movement with his front paw, and a good-sized strip of flashing silver was ejected on to the quayside. The dog watched his prize until it stopped struggling. Whether it was destined for his bowl or his master's I do not know, because our own tummies rumbled and we were drawn to dinner.