Bastard Dog

We’ve got a bloody dog now.

 

I’ve never had a dog before, never wanted one; and I’d effectively stonewalled all attempts by my family to talk me into getting one.  Until this summer.  Now we’ve got one, a rescue dog from the local RSPCA and they all love him to bits.

 

But I don’t.

 

It’s been a total culture shock allowing an animal of significant size to inhabit my living space and it is this learning experience that I would like to share with you now, so that you can either laugh with me or at me, depending on where you stand on the Dog-Love Spectrum.  Personally, I’m somewhere in between “indifferent” and “irritated”.

 

His name is Harry and this is one of three words that he definitely understands, the others being “sit” (which he is capable of complying with if he isn’t distracted by another dog or a leaf moving in the wind) and “paw” (which prompts his only trick as such, that of lifting a paw.)  My family believe that he also understands all of our names, “dinner”, “walk” and “do you want to go outside for poos and wees”.  I’m not convinced.  Nothing in his expression or reaction to these words suggests to me that his brain capacity is coping with that amount of data.  What I do know is that he certainly does not understand the words “Bad dog”, “Piss off” or “Don’t lick the fucking carpet!”

 

Nursing an expression of limited cerebral processing ability, Harry’s main hobby is standing or lying in doorways when people are moving around.  That is, once he has recovered from the excitement of human movement.  I’ve stopped talking to him as I walk around, as this tends to induce an erroneous assumption that (a) I like him and (b) I’m going to play with him.  I don’t want to let him down, so I even avoid eye-contact. No, I tell a lie – it’s not about letting him down, It’s just that I can’t stand the stupid and needy look on his face as he starts to breathe heavily and blocks my passage with his fat knuckle head, his tail beating against the walls and doors in unrequited adoration. (As a nice aside, he actually injured his tail within a week of living with us, because he was so unused to wagging it so much.  We laughed about how we’d “broke the dog by making him too happy”, but then I discovered the £100 excess we had to pay the vet and the tale lost some of its charm.)

 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I completely neglect him, though.  Now and again he gets my attention in an affectionate way for a minute or two; and I do walk him.  Picking up dog poo is obviously new to me (well, not totally new, as I used to pick it up as a kid – on the end of a stick, of course – and throw it at friends) but I haven’t found the experience as distasteful as I’d feared.  In cold weather, there’s something comforting about handling a freshly delivered hot one.  In cold weather, the ones he leaves in the garden solidify and subsequently become a joy to pick up.  The only times that this job becomes truly distasteful is when he does a soft one in long grass.  That takes a bit of effort.  So, no, overall I don’t mind picking up his poo, but I think I might need to start doing so using a plastic bag in future, like everyone else does.

 

Here’s a dog-characteristic that I’ll never get used to:  I have a deep-seated personal problem with the noise that people make while eating.  I’m sure I’ve moaned before about noisy bastards in the cinema, slurping their 2-litre cokes and chewing open-mouthed through their bin-bag sized packets of crisps.  Those sounds are like aural water-boarding to me.  So you can imagine how I react to the dog.  For my own sanity I stay clear of the kitchen when he’s eating in there, but then he’ll come into the lounge and spend five minutes licking his jowls, while I tear at the wallpaper until my fingernails bleed and make howling noises in a desperate attempt to escape – something you’d expect the dog to do, but never does.

 

On first getting him, someone quoted one of those meaningless and absurd nuggets of statistical nonsense which purported to claim that owning a dog makes people “70%” happier”.  Well, Harry has had that effect on the rest of the family – or approximately at least, given that I don’t have a fucking “Happiness thermometer” to measure it.  But as far as I’m concerned, the bloody mutt has given me just one thing of significance:  a reason to write a blog again after all this time.