In praise of small dogs

Recently I was given the sad news that a four legged acquaintance of mine had lost an argument with a car. Walter the miniature dachsund was a charming little dog, the sort that actually makes you want to own one. Unfortunately he wasn’t built for speed. Slow forward movement seemed to involve a fluid wiggle, anything faster meant a jog trot that required more concentration. If I greeted him as he was on his way past in a hurry he wouldn’t look directly at me but his eye would swivel round with a look that said “Awright? See ya!” With a slightly German accent, obviously.

I like dogs in general but there is something special about the ones that don’t come up to my knee. It isn’t that they are more cute or cuddled more easily, in fact it would be a mistake to assume that they are all sweet natured. I have a childhood memory of the neighbour’s tiny Yorkshire terrier, Percy, chasing two terrified German Shepherds, mother and son, back to their home round the corner (“What the hell was that?” “Who cares, shut up and run!”).

When I deliver leaflets for the local allotment association I always exercise caution at a particular address. I’ve only ever seen this dog from a distance but I’ve felt its hot breath on my fingers as it drags the hapless piece of paper through the letterbox (placed conveniently at ground level) and shreds it for its owner. I persist as there have been a couple of occasions when this hasn’t happened but I‘m glad I‘m not their postman. I’d be surprised if they ever see their birthday cards.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to see life at their level, to get a crick in the neck looking up at the person their world revolves around. I once found myself behind a man on a mobile phone, oblivious to the fact that the small dog he was walking (not his I suspect) could not keep up with him. At times he was dragging it along. Hell was made for people like that.

I expect there is also room down there for the idiots who have followed the example of celebrities like Paris Hilton, owner of several “teacup” Chihuahuas. Unfortunately for these airheads the Chihuahua is one of the longest lived of all dog breeds (they last even longer than Louis Vuitton dog carriers) and can develop expensive heath problems. Consequently dog shelters in the USA are now receiving more of these little dogs than they can cope with as many owners discover that they are less disposable than clothes. At least Paris keeps her excess dogs, she has around seventeen.

She is just following in the footsteps of other rich and famous people. Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour owned Papillons, and small dogs often peep out of portraits of royalty and the aristocracy. The tiny dog belonging to Mary Queen of Scots accompanied her to her death, emerging from beneath her skirts following her beheading. Some dogs were designed to be carried, such as the Goh-Khi of Tibet, a “sleeve dog”. For most of its history the Pekingese could only be owned by members of the Chinese Imperial court, the ultimate toy dog.

My personal experience of some of these breeds has not been a happy one, although I’m sure that not all are snappy and irritable. I suspect that, just like humans, they may get a little fed up as they get older. It's allowed. As a small child I played with my grandfather’s lovely Westie (highly appropriate for a Presbyterian minister) whose favourite game involved knocking down a set of plastic skittles. It was probably my grandfather who told me about Greyfriars Bobby, the most faithful of dogs, who stayed at or near, the grave of his master for fourteen years. He was a Skye terrier, a native breed now considered to be at risk.

If I was forced to choose a breed I would probably go for a Jack Russell. On the way home from work I have sometimes found myself behind one on his regular evening stroll and noticed that every few paces he would give a skip. I just had to ask his owner if he always does that and discovered that it is a characteristic of the breed. From behind it is a little like watching Morecambe and Wise dance off into the distance at the end of a show. I take these straightforward little dogs very seriously, having seen them at work killing off rats. It is easy to forget that many of these small breeds once played an important part in agricultural areas, hunting for vermin. So many residents of the White House have owned Scottish terriers (bred to fight badgers) that it is tempting to think of them as being good at herding US presidents. Alas, they cannot stop them from making stupid decisions.

For Raki, as a late birthday present.
My thanks to Alli and the waggylicious Hettie for posing and for not finding me at all weird for asking!

http://www.ericandern.co.uk/pages/songs.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby
http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/
http://www.rspca.org.uk/home

Goodbye Jones

Jones the cat (a.k.a. Smelly Bear, Thunderpaws, You With The Fur, Jellybelly, Destructotail, Jonesboy, Gingernuts, Mate, Circus Cat, Moggychops, etc. etc.) ran out of lives on the 9th of September 2008. As today would have been the day we regarded as his birthday, the anniversary of the day we brought him home, it seems an appropriate moment to write his obituary.

I had always wanted a cat but The Attached One wasn’t keen. He had grown up with pets and thought them a lot of effort but it was something I had longed to do. Even so I had been concerned that I wouldn’t get it right so put it off for several years until I saw a mug shot of a worried looking ginger cat called Jasper in the local paper. Cats Protection were looking for a home for him. We had established that the longed for cat had to be anything other than black following an unfortunate mix up involving two of this particular colour. Jasper needed a home with a garden but no children and, as he was anxious, he could not be left alone for long periods of time so someone who worked part time was essential.

The mug shot was shown to The Attached One. I made the phone call. We had a home visit to make sure that we weren’t making fur coats from local moggies and then the moment came. Armed with a larger than average pet carrier (we had been warned about his size) we set off for the cat hostel. We found ourselves in a terrace and, behind the door of a small house, around twenty cats.

When we first saw him he was stretched out on a bench, listless and bored. We were told that he was quite territorial so the shelter was his idea of hell. He had turned up on the doorstep, about a year old and an obvious stray. Twelve months later, unclaimed but housetrained, it was felt that he was ready to move on. He was paler than I though he would be, a creamy sandy colour rather than a marmalade cat. The lady who owned the shelter clearly wanted to make sure that we were the right kind of people and we spent some time getting to know the other tenants but Jasper ignored us until we tried to get him into the carrier. This achieved we said our goodbyes to the shelter owner (she was a little tearful by this stage), got Jasper into the car and The Attached One drove off.

We began to wonder if we were making a mistake. He miaowed loudly and desperately all the way home and when he wasn’t doing that he huffed. We came to know that this was his way of expressing irritation but at the time we were really worried. The Attached One’s knuckles were white for most of the journey as he clutched the steering wheel and tried to ignore all the noise. Once through the front door we explained that he was now called Jones, after the cat in the film “Alien”. Why does every ginger car need to be named after Jasper Carrot?

He worried for two days but I knew things were going to be fine when he began to wash. He had established that he had the house, and us, all to himself. When he insisted on getting into bed with us (so much for the “no pets on the bed” rule: Cats 1 - Humans 0) and let out a deep and contented purr The Attached One said “Well, we must be getting something right.” It didn’t take us long to realise that Jones was quite a special cat. He had a distinct personality, an unusual paw waggling habit and a real need to flump onto our feet. There were now three people in our household.

He had absolutely no difficulty in letting us know what he wanted. I had been out for the evening and when I got back the Attached One said that Jones had cornered him and subjected him to a long rambling miaowed conversation. He had made the right noises when he could get a word in. Jones had clearly wanted to know where I‘d gone. After that there was no stopping him, all you had to do to keep him going was to talk back. Or miaow back. “How do you know what he’s saying?” asked a bemused visitor following one exchange. “I just spend far too much time alone with him…”

And the fact was that I did spend a lot of time with him. Jones came along at the moment when agoraphobia and anxiety were beginning to take a firm and disabling hold on me. For the best part of two years I barely left the house and, until The Attached One came home at night, he was the only one I could talk to. He probably stopped me from going under completely by insisting on tummy rubbing sessions, nagging me for biscuits and providing me with an endless supply of (mostly) live critters that he had found in the garden. This became his territory, guarded fiercely from intruders. His first trophy was a frog. He was really excited and tried to tell me about it but it’s hard to talk with your mouth full of live amphibian. He longed to catch a bird but as far as I know never managed it. He had to make do with swearing at them through a window. “Akakak, huff huff.” He really had it in for pigeons.

Jones remained quite nervous of other people although he did have long chats with our elderly neighbours. At home he ruled the roost, adopting any fleeces and corners that he took a fancy to and largely ignoring the pet beds that we bought him. The Attached One’s desk chair was a favourite even if it was already occupied. I think he felt that if it smelt of us it was probably good, so the bed remained unmade for days and we compromised by flipping the duvet over the footboard to create a Jones cave. For a while he went through a “sleeping on heads” phase - he tried to be fair and share this honour by sleeping on one head and draping his smoke ringed tail across the neighbouring face. He was usually purring when he did this so our heads would be vibrating into the bargain. I spent a great many Sunday mornings curled up with Jones. “You must have been having some strange dreams” said The Attached One. “He was stroking your face with the side of his paw while you were asleep.”

He had found that careful, strategic turning, as well as bracing his legs against The Attached One’s back, would get him more room in bed. He would do this to the point where The Attached One fell out or came close to it. Sunday mornings usually began with his entering the bedroom, tail raised and the tip turned forward like an umbrella handle. It was all we could see of him as he walked around the bed. There would be a scuffling sound as he jumped onto the bedside table and then onto the windowsill where he would sit behind the curtain, his dangling tail flicking and twitching. Security concerns addressed he would then jump from the windowsill onto the bed, usually landing on The Attached One’s delicate bits. This could have quite a dramatic effect, especially if he carried out this manoeuvre at 4am. We came to the conclusion that he sometimes did this on purpose, just to remind us that he was there. If he got it just right The Attached One would even shout out loud.

There were a few things that the Cats Protection lady didn’t warn us about. One evening Jones had been sitting between us on the sofa for quite a while when he suddenly got up and left the room in a hurry. Within a few seconds we realised why. He had released a weapons grade fart. As we rushed to open windows and fan the door we wondered whether we should contact the Ministry of Defence and reveal our weapon of mass destruction. I could picture the scene. A British officer (with a clothes peg on his nose) holding Jones up to the enemy, stripy tail swishing gently from side to side, paws waggling lazily. Afghanistan? No problem. Iraq? Sorted. One sniff would lead to immediate surrender and a plea for gas masks. That boy’s farts were something else.

One night I thought I could hear someone carrying out late night DIY a few doors away. The droning was still going on as I turned off the television and I was a bit surprised to find that it was getting louder as I went up stairs. By the time I got to the bedroom the sound was truly awful and really loud. Jones and The Attached One were fast asleep but snoring. I don’t know how they didn’t wake each other up. Small quick cat snores combined with big slow human ones made a sound not unlike a drill. The neighbours must have been able to hear it through the wall. We found that we could often locate Jones by his snores.

And the fur, he must have shed mountains of it over the years. It turned up everywhere. For a time The Attached One was a warehouse supervisor and he was convinced that it was distributed far and wide, clinging to the polythene bags of clothing that he sent around the country. I found it on the windows I was trying to clean at work. It wove itself into the things I stitched, quilted and crocheted. It drifted onto The Attached One’s carefully painted models just as the paint began to dry. I stopped wearing so much black and resigned myself to the fact that fur probably represented at least 1% of what I was eating. However we would put up with it all over again just to have him back.

It was a shock to be told that he had a health problem because he seemed so fit and healthy. The vet had found a lump during a regular check up and prescribed medication for hyperthyroidism. He was optimistic about it but we knew that Jones would not be with us for much longer. For months we fed him pills and these brought him back from the brink more than once but they were not enough to stop him from slowing down. Over the months he became a dreamy little old man, still climbing into bed with us and lying back with his paws hooked over the edge of the duvet, still sanding my face down when he could reach it, but doing it all much more slowly. We gave him all the treats he wanted and let him sleep where he chose to, including the cool enamel bath in hot weather. We left the lawn uncut so that he could make Jones nests. On the day before he died I took him outside for an hour or so and he wandered about in the sunshine, surrounded by all the familiar noises of suburbia, birdsong, distant traffic, the sounds of everyday life. For a while he was his old confident self, dislodging a cricket from his back with a casual flick, and together we watched the insects and grass swaying in the breeze.

Two days after he died a rubber duck appeared in the middle of the lawn. The local foxes had probably left it there but it was a very Jones thing to have happened. It made us laugh.

We miss him so much. The house is too quiet without him. He was a one off, irreplaceable, and although we know that there are many cats out there looking for a home we can’t help feeling that it would be a betrayal to just slot another cat into his place. So, on his birthday, we want to say thanks mate for nine and a half years of love and friendship. You will always be our boy.

So long, and thanks for all the fleas, farts, shrews, mice, slow worms, frogs, fur…

Jones the cat, 1996ish to 2008.

“The Galloping Cat” by Stevie Smith
http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/jwhamilt/Smith%20Galloping%20Cat.htm