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INTRODUCTION

A Breed Apart

If you love dogs – the idea of dogs, the reality of dogs, the imaginary dog you will have one day, the beloved dog you had as a child or the dog(s) you already own – then this book is for you. This book loves you, because this book believes that dog people are just kind of … not better, exactly, but a breed apart, let’s say. A special pod. Chosen. (I totally mean ‘better’ – I’m just trying to be tactful.) This is because we are privileged enough to know dogs, to have them in our lives and to experience first-hand the joy – the great and infinite heart-soaring joy – that they bring.

I am demented about our dog, Brodie.* I am crazed with love for him. He is my favourite person-that-isn’t-actually-a-person. It’s like a joke, how much I love him. I think about him all the time. On the rare instances where I’m away from him, I pine and look at photographs of him on my phone, as if I were twelve and he were dog-Zoella, except it’s so much more special than that. I feel such tenderness for him. He moves me deeply.

I was not always in the special pod. I liked dogs well enough as a child – my dad, with whom we did not live, always had them. There was a chipper dachshund called Felix, whom I think I probably only remember from photographs, and a fairly simple-minded Dalmatian called Sophie, who used to chase me round and round the dining table when I visited.

My father found the chasing hilarious. Later he had a girlfriend called Christine who had two Dobermanns, whom I used to take for walks. I don’t think these Dobermanns were very nice – my blurry memory remembers that this Christine, who was, improbably, a very rich horse vet (it doesn’t sound quite right, does it? I don’t think I’m remembering that bit properly), lived in isolated splendour in the middle of nowhere, with security alarms and electric fences everywhere and these two canine guards, who, as my father cheerily pointed out, were trained to kill (maybe she was in fact an arms dealer, I’m thinking). Anyway, I liked going on walks with them because they were so incredibly obedient. I was quite a young child at this stage – seven or eight – and, well, imagine anyone sending a child off for walks with trained-to-kill Dobermanns now. My father had great faith in the goodness of dogs, though perhaps in a different sense to mine.

I got my first dog, Otis, sort of by accident. I had two little boys and a very new boyfriend, and I’d vaguely wondered – aloud – whether it mightn’t be nice to have a dog. The boys, of course, started jumping up and down at the idea and saying, ‘Please, please can we have a dog? Pleeeeeease.’ We bought a dog breeds book and got as far as identifying a likely breed, and then one day this boyfriend appeared with a puppy. Just like that. It turned out his dad bred this very breed, the divine Soft-Coated Wheaten terrier, and there we suddenly were, with a dog. Called, following a hastily convened Saturday morning family conference in my bed, Otis.

Now, this is a bad thing to say in my Introduction, but I didn’t really love Otis. I was very, very fond of him, but mostly he got on my nerves. I was a single mother, nominally at least, of two very boisterous little boys; I didn’t have a huge amount of money, I had even less time and I was working constantly. I was permanently knackered. I longed for sleep – that kind of sleep where you dream, almost erotically, about sleep and lie-ins. My little boys loved Otis, but they were little boys: they also loved Spiderman and Bionicles and football. Otis had pressing needs of his own, quite aside from being walked, stroked, trained and fed: dogs just do, and it’s absolutely fair enough – it is a dog’s right. But I hadn’t really understood this, and as the years went by I became more and more aware that I wasn’t really meeting Otis’s needs. I’d walk him for about an hour a day: he really needed double that, at least. He was only trained in the most basic sense – he was a very nice dog – but it must have been annoying for him to never have his considerable intelligence challenged. He was the least important person in the house, because he wasn’t a person, he was a dog. And I think he suffered for it. I certainly suffer to remember it.

Don’t get me wrong: he had everything a dog could want, except the occasional undivided attention of someone who really, purely loved him and was wholly focused on him. By the time I’d worked all of this out, I was a knot of Otis-guilt, plus I had a new baby who took up all my time and attention. It makes me so sad to think of it now. Good old Otis, so loving and forgiving and noble, and so permanently in the way. In the end he went to live with my children’s grandmother, in the countryside, where he was properly loved and very happy (something else to bear in mind: he developed serious health problems as a result of having been bred from a problematically small gene pool – but I’ll get back to this in Chapter Two).

I was not a bad owner to Otis, and in the later years I delegated the love. I just believed, as my then-boyfriend believed, and as people have believed for decades on end, that dogs were – well, just dogs. More demanding than cats, but mostly there for your amusement and convenience: the least important member of the family. We believed – and people still believe this – that it was perfectly normal to leave dogs alone for periods of time; that dogs who chewed your stuff up while they were left alone were being ‘naughty’; that dogs were pack animals who had to ‘be taught’ that you, the owner, was the ‘alpha’. If a dog weed in the hallway, we’d say things like, ‘I swear he does it on purpose,’ as if the fault were the dog’s rather than our abject failure to take him for a walk in time, or a manifestation of anxiety or stress on the dog’s part.

We belonged to the generation – generations, plural – that thought that a dog who’d fouled a corner of the sitting room ‘needed’ to ‘have his nose rubbed in it’, ‘to be taught a lesson’, and it didn’t occur to us that this was both disgusting and unkind (well, actually, it did – it’s not a thing I’ve ever done, thank God). We didn’t think that it might be absolutely baffling for the dog, for reasons I’ll explain later, or that that bafflement might turn itself into various unhappy behaviours and anxieties. That sort of approach was very much the norm. It amazes and saddens me that, in some quarters, it still is: only the other day I was talking to a friend about her mother’s dog, who was visiting. This dog peed everywhere. ‘Poor dog,’ I said. The Otis-era me would have said, ‘Ugh, what a nightmare.’ When the friend said the thing about rubbing the dog’s nose in the pee, I felt genuinely incensed and upset on the dog’s behalf; I was so cross that I actually made my excuses and left.

But we didn’t know back then that any of this was already old-fashioned thinking, and that people who raised happy dogs no longer did any of these things and instead based their training methods on kindness and rewards. We were stuck with a parent- or even grandparent-inherited Barbara Woodhouse type of thinking about dogs. We never lifted a finger to Otis, obviously, but we knew people who ‘disciplined’ their dogs, just as we knew people who smacked their children. It wasn’t our cup of tea, but we were perhaps in the minority, dog-wise. In fact, we thought we were really evolved. We never hit our dog, we fed him what we thought was the best food for him, we never put him in kennels … we thought we were great owners. And, in our limited way, we were. But we could have been so much better.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and my new partner and I (I, mostly, which is ironic because I’m not the one who walks into a room and bellows, ‘WHERE IS THE BEST DOG IN THE WORLD? WHERE IS THE KING OF PUPS?’) started wanting a dog again. The children were now young men, and their sister, who’d come along in the intervening period, was nearly ten – not a needy, demanding toddler or a human-dynamo five-year-old, crucially. My partner’s children were a couple of years older and very keen on the idea too. Everybody slept through the night those days; we had a bit more money; I worked from home; and at the time we lived in London next to two big parks … So we started doing our research again, gingerly. I wanted another Wheaten – they are such lovely dogs, both inside and out, and, being super-sociable, brilliant with big families. We talked to various breeders, identified one, sat back and waited … and on 1 April 2013, a litter was born. We went to visit it, in Sheffield, a few weeks later. We both knew which puppy was ‘ours’ within seconds – it really was love at first sight. That love, pretty powerful in the first place, has now, three years later, reached, as I was saying, almost demented levels. It grows and grows.

Of course, I could detour here about child substitutes, but I’ll leave it until Chapter Nine. I am repulsed by the idea of ‘fur babies’ – a phrase that sets my teeth on edge: aside from the fact that dogs are dogs, anthropomorphizing and infantilizing animals to this extent is really unhelpful to everybody, not least the poor dog-baby (I mean, which is it? Stick him in a bonnet, why don’t you?). Having said that, our dog was – and remains – very much ours: he is a physical, living consequence of our relationship. We love each other, and him. We also love our five children (and they him: my eldest son is twenty-three and when he comes home, after saying hello to whoever’s around, he says, ‘Where’s Brodie?’). No, what has changed since the days of Otis is the way in which people think about dogs. It seems to me to be quite a seismic change. If you can remember the 1970s, you’ll remember things like the fact that dogs were always milling about on their own; sometimes you’d see them meeting up with their dog mates and hanging out in dog posses. You’d ‘let the dog out’ and he would wander about for a bit and come back. Dogs really did steal sausages from butcher’s shops (and almost every high street really did have a butcher). They were mostly fed scraps from the table, rather than luxury dog food with artisanal ingredients (they mostly lived longer too). They were robust. They were dogs. This isn’t a nostalgic lament – they also got run over all the time and, as I was saying, people didn’t necessarily treat them with the greatest kindness.

But there’s been this huge dog-change in the intervening decades, and I think it’s left us confused about some things. Dogs have become humanized, if you will – not in the ‘my baby’ sense but in what we have learned about canine behaviour and psychology. We know so much more than we used to about what dogs are really like. One example (many more will follow): that whole pack animal/showing him who’s alpha thing. So yes, dogs are descended from wolves. But wolves, it now turns out, operate as cooperatives. The alpha, where he exists – he isn’t a given – organizes the troops to ensure that everyone has the help they need. Far from leaving the poor delta and epsilon wolves out in the cold, the pack helps them to achieve success. It’s a collective effort. They all help each other, with the alpha taking the lead. The alpha isn’t, therefore, some mean-ass macho brute who wishes to leave the lesser wolves broken and cowering, but rather a kind, intelligent creature who makes sure no one’s left behind. He’s not the bad boy, snarling and eating all the steak, but more kind of like a wolf special needs coordinator. Compare this with the idea that we need to ‘teach our dogs who’s boss’ and you start seeing how old-fashioned that kind of thinking seems. (The other – heartbreaking – thing we now know is that dogs are so desperate to please their beloved owners that they would rather be mistreated and hurt than ignored. This is why those harsh training methods work – because of the good and loving character of the dog, even if the dog is frightened and has no clue what’s going on. It’s got nothing to do with the effectiveness of the method.)

As well as celebrating the goodness of dogs, I want to unravel all of this stuff in this book. Should you get a dog? It’s a really serious commitment. And if you were to get a dog, how would you go about it? What breed should you pick? Pedigree or mutt? What should you feed him, how should you train him? And if you already have a dog, or dogs, how can you make your existing dog or dogs happier? There are dozens of questions to be answered. I don’t seek to answer them as anything other than a lay person who happens to be crazed with dog-love. If you want books by academics, vets and animal behaviourists, you’ll find a useful list at the back of this book. I’ve read those books, and they’re great, but they can be quite dry and boffiny.

Think of the book you’re holding as a friendly manual, or a repository of useful dog facts. It’s a book – both compendium and memoir – about how to be a happy person who owns a happy dog. I really like people. I just also really like dogs.

Because the salient fact is this: dogs are made of joy. They are happiness with four legs and a tail, and when they’re happy it isn’t just the tail that wags, but the whole bottom half of the body. It’s fantastically endearing and completely life-enhancing. Proximity to happy dogs makes your life a thousand times better (and proximity to sad dogs is no good for man nor beast). Onward, then, to dog nirvana, or as close as any of us are likely to get. And three joyous yaps for the goodness of dogs.

India Knight

THE GOODNESS OF DOGS

The Human’s Guide to Choosing, Buying, Training, Feeding, Living with and Caring for Your Dog

Illustrated by Sally Muir

FIG TREE

Contents

THE BEGINNING

INTRODUCTION

A Breed Apart