30 Days – Day 6 – “Hope to Never”

Another biggie, so it’s after the jump. Enjoy.

Something you hope you never have to do.

Leave the house with my dog one day and come home alone. Simple as that. Obviously the big one would be if she ever got injured or was old and sick and I had to have her put down, but I can’t see that happening until a long time in the future. My more immediate worry would be if she ran off when I was out walking her, or if she fell over the side of a steep hill down to the bottom, or even decided to jump in the river without checking and got swept away. I couldn’t stand being that guy standing on a hillside asking walkers if they’d seen my dog. As for having to eventually turn up back at my house without her… it’s why I resisted the urge to do the “one man and his dog” thing, wandering over the countryside with my faithful hound at my side.

My dog is the family’s dog. She’s a yellow labrador and she turned five only three days ago. Another little reminder of how much time has passed, I can still remember when she was small enough that you could comfortably hold her in one hand. We (me and my two little brothers) had brought up the idea of getting a dog in the months before we got her, but always in a half joking way and were always told no: that my brothers weren’t old enough and there wasn’t the time to train one. Mostly we did it to annoy my dad, who was never keen on the idea, and my mum thought she’d end up looking after her. I had thoughts of getting the biggest dog breeds around, but always with the intelligence to match. That’s why I thought of Irish Wolfhounds and Rottweilers before I put any consideration into the likes of Mastiffs or Great Danes. I was attracted to the so-called “devil dogs” less out of the machismo-by-proxy and more for the fact that I wanted to show that they could easily be fantastic dogs, they just needed the right owner. To this day I’ve had a higher proportion of Collies cause me trouble than I have Dobermanns and Staffies. There was never any chance of getting a giant breed.

Sadly German Shepherds were out of the question too after the last one my mum and dad had when I was still a baby. My mum had owned a few before and they’d all apparently been great dogs, but when my mum and dad went to get this particular nutter as a puppy it’s mother was crazy, literally leaping at the window. The puppy itself was a noisy, hyperactive thing as well, and (it was my mum that was telling the story) she didn’t want to go through with buying it but my dad had fallen in love, so they took the dog home. It grew up to be a healthy, largely friendly, uncontrollable dog that they never felt comfortable leaving me with and had a tendency to tear up the house. It was left alone for most of the day while my parents went out to work, but those were the days where doing something like that wasn’t seen as being as irresponsible as it is now. While I’m told that they never had serious worries about it turning on me (I tried to find a picture of me as a very young baby with it standing guard, mane like a lion, but it’s went walkabout) it was too boisterous and on one occasion jumped on the plastic play tunnel my cousin was in, sinking it’s teeth through and leaving a red mark on her arm. There were a whole catalogue of other incidents as well, it was a nice enough dog but became a misery to live with rather than a pet with a few annoying traits. They took it to a vet and were told it pretty much wasn’t right in the head. Thanks to a mixture of nature and nurture it was put down. My mum said that when her other dogs were put to sleep she was a wreck afterwards, when that dog got put down her and my dad went out and bought a curry. And so that was the last dog that I would share a house with until I was seventeen.

There were other mutts in my life as I grew up: my auntie and uncle’s lab that was born a couple of months after me, and that in my childish way obviously saw as my canine sibling. She would take the hand off you for a biscuit and was the one responsible for decapitating one of my Captain Scarlett toys that my mum (a nurse) had fed a ward full of geriatrics nothing but Rice Krispies for about a month so there’d be enough box tops to send away for them. Still, that was my favourite dog growing up. Even though my uncle did convince me that her heartbeat was in fact the older brother I didn’t know about knocking to get out because the dog had eaten him for pulling her tail, so I’d better not bloody do it! That little story I pass onto the next generation whenever I can, using my own soft-as-shite mutt as the scary brother-eater. Another auntie used to babysit us when my mum was working, she had a huge black German Shepherd that was so tame it had not only been rejected from the police and army, but also let a pair of thieves into the garden to steal my auntie’s car. Over time it became protective of my two brothers, going back to round them up if they fell behind in the park. More than once my youngest brother fell asleep on top of the dog, stroking her coat like it was a blanket. My auntie was a debt collector, and she used to take the dog with her in the car to ward off any prospective thieves. When I was a child I couldn’t connect the two things up, how could that big adorable lump be scary to anyone? Looking at pictures now I can see it fairly easily.

Not all dog’s were as nice having said that. I got my first bite when I wasn’t long into primary school. My next door neighbour was a nice old lady that owned an unsocialised piece of shite that passed for a terrier, as nice old lady’s are wont to have. I can’t remember how exactly it happened, but I know that it ended up with me crying my eyes out with a chunk of flesh torn out from the join between my index finger and thumb. A nice soft chewy bit, I can see why the little shite went for there. The next came a few years later when I was around ten and a big black dog about the size of a horse (to a boy) took exception to me riding my bike and chased after me. All it did was bark but the fact it kept on following me and there was nothing but a flimsy bike between me and it scared me shitless. For the first and so far only time in my life my legs shook with fear and I could hardly walk. Thankfully the guy who drove the ice cream van chased it off and I cycled home at fucking warp factor three, simultaneously relieved and ashamed that I wasn’t the master of all things great and small like I should have been. Those were the only “bad” dogs I came across growing up aside from a Jack Russell that another auntie had. This little chappie was more of an oddity though. He’d been mistreated when he was younger, repeatedly kicked up the rear and as a result didn’t like anyone going near it or approaching from behind without warning. I learned how to play him like an instrument. Clapping his head he was fine with, but the further you went down his back the different the tone of his growling. I swear I almost got a complete rendition of Auld Lang Syne before he had enough and fucked off in a mood.

To get back on track: we really weren’t expecting a dog. Christmas day rolled around and we were none the wiser. We were all up early in the morning like was custom when the door went and it was my auntie and uncle standing there (I’ve got a big family, all the aunties and uncles I’ve mentioned so far are different people) saying that my uncle wasn’t long finished work so they figured they’d come and wish us merry Christmas. Unusual, but I was half asleep and didn’t think too much about it. They said they’d brought a present for my brothers and me, and produced a large wrapped box with a big bow on the top. We had no idea what it was, took it into the living room and opened it… and there was our dog. Tiny, silent, and wondering what in fuck’s good name was going on. For the only time in our lives all three of us were silent, it was definitely a surprise present, but we loved her immediately.

For the next month she never got further than the back garden until she’d had all of her vaccinations and all that pish. It was the day I got home from having my operation that she could finally go out, so I never managed to go on the first walk with her, but I had plenty of time to do it over the coming months. As she grew I was recovering, so she would tire herself out on a short walk the same as I would. As I got better and she got older we could both go for longer walks each day. I met a lot of other dog walkers over that time, and during the summer unofficial little meetups would take place where there’d be up to a dozen dogs running free and playing together.

I took her training seriously. I wasn’t looking for a dog that could do tricks, I just wanted a friendly, obedient mutt that I didn’t have to keep on a lead every time we went out or had to worry about knocking over kids. And that’s exactly what I got. Eventually. There was the time where she stole a Barbie from a little girl and ran around with it dangling by the hair before dropping it in a puddle. Then the next day she saw the same little girl only this time there was no doll, so my dog decided that her shoes would do just as well, so took off with them instead. A toddler found his rusk being ever so delicately snatched out of his hand and eaten in front of him, along with a few picnickers that found they didn’t need to worry about leftovers once they were done. At times like those it pays to have a cute Andrex puppy looking dog, if it were any other breed I doubt people would have been so forgiving, or laughed so much.

She turned out to be an absolutely great animal. She didn’t fight with other dogs, gentle around kids, and didn’t wander out onto the roads. When she was around three she also proved herself to be a good protector as well on two separate occasions. They both occurred during winter when we were walking in the park in the dark. The football had been on and there was a drunk guy coming towards us singing the usual Rangers songs, as he got closer and saw us he became more aggressive when I didn’t join in with a rousing chorus of Fuck the Pope and the IRA. My dog’s hackles were already up by this point and I was ready to start scrapping if push came to shove when he decided to grab my “wee Fenian” dog on either side of the head and nearly paid for it with a bite in the face. I heard her teeth snap together as her mouth slammed shut, and the steamer fell backwards and lay sprawled on the ground looking shocked at what had happened. So was I to be honest, I’d always wondered what she’d do if I got into trouble, being a labrador after all. If she wasn’t on the lead it could’ve been far worse. The second incident came a few months later almost in the same spot and time of evening. The dog was wandering through the bushes enjoying all the scents to be had and I was walking along the path listening to the jingle her collar makes to know that she was still around when three guys around my age came up and started mouthing off. I said a few choice words in the French language and they squared up to me. I called on the dog and she came barreling out of the bushes, covered in mud and snarling like Cujo with toothache. They scarpered sharpish and I was over the moon at how she had acted. As I fed her every biscuit I had on me she seemed more relieved than I was that she didn’t have to bite anyone. To this day she never has, hopefully never will, but I can be confident that if I ever get jumped I’ve got a set of teeth on legs to back me up. You don’t need to train your dog to guard or attack on command, they do it naturally when it’s needed. All you have to do is raise a confident, happy dog, they’ll do the rest.

Now she’s five, and settled down a lot. She doesn’t have the same puppy madness to her that she used to, and when she meets other dogs she’s grown up with they act as old friends rather than play fighting all the time. She’s part of the family in a way I never realised until last year when everyone was away on holiday and the dog stayed at (yet another) auntie and uncle’s house for the week as I was working during the day. The were a hundred little things that made the place a lot emptier without her being there. Her bed was gone for starters, leaving a big plain area on the floor where it used to be. When I got up in the morning there wasn’t the drum beat as she lay down but her tail battered the bottom of her bed to say hello. There wasn’t any of the snoring that had become background noise and made the place almost silent in its absence. There was no need for dog bowls or walking or a hundred other things. Yeah, I fucking love my dog. I don’t buy her presents or dress her up or any of that bollocks, she’s an animal and she gets treated like one, but the day I come home without her, I’m almost certain to shed one singular manly as all fuck tear.