The Trials and Tribulations of Dog Sitting
Towards the end of lockdown, after enduring 45 minutes of my family’s sofa-related badinage, I ruefully opined that months of social inactivity had left the conversation well dry of all topics but the chronically mundane or quizzically cerebral. It was either sofas or Tolstoy, but mostly it was just dogs.
A lot of people find dog-chat mind-numbingly dull, but for those of us either terrified of or hopelessly drawn to small-talk (attributes usually possessed simultaneously) it remains an easy route out from the ditch of silence. Where my mum lives, in rural West Somerset, everyone has a dog, often they have several, and they’re always happy to talk.
Cave canem!
Watchdog from Casa di Paquius Proculus, Pompeii
Britain is a nation of dog lovers. It’s true, we simply love dogs. We love to talk about them, to talk to them, to stroke them, to spoil them. Often, we harbour more affection for these animals than for our fellow humans, but that’s a story for another day. The only country that loves dogs more than Britain is America.
Canophilia was codified here then, alongside capitalism, shipped across the Atlantic and sent into hyperdrive. Statistics have shown that the average American dog consumes more protein a day than the average African adult. In Manhattan, glassy pet malls loom over streets filled with rare breeds, fur expensively coiffed, teeth whiter than porcelain.
Unfortunately, it’s illegal for them to be outside without a lead, so these animals, originally bred for bull-baiting and fox-hunting, spend their lives straining on fine leather manacles as they follow their owners around the block for the millionth time. There’s a thin line between love and hate, as I’ve found out over the past two weeks.
Briton Rivière, Requiescat (Rest in peace), 1888
Just before lockdown, my mum drove from Somerset to Chichester to buy a puppy in a carpark for £150. A grey merle lurcher, one blue eye, one brown, Moose is a thing of beauty. He’s also a delinquent: chewing the corners of every cushion in the house; pissing on unhung paintings stacked against a wall; and eating anything he can get his snout on such as, half a kilo of Beaufort cheese, a whole rack of lamb and a saucepanful of ricotta, ad nauseum.
He’s forgiven any transgression. Cute dogs are… Did I mention how cute he is? My mum has another dog, a small black goggle-eyed rat terrier called Bobbi, the only member of the family immune to Moose’s charms. You can’t blame her. He’s six times her size but still wants to play, flipping her over with his long legs like a black pudding on the grill. Now, whenever he comes near, she growls like a demon pig.
I could delve deeper into the vagaries of their turbulent relationship, but I’ll spare you. Anyway, despite the bounty of stress inherent in their custodianship, I agreed to look after them while my mum and stepfather took a Covid holiday to Greece.
Gustave Courbet, Self-portrait with black spaniel dog, 1842
Dogsitting is supposed to be a doss, coming just above catsitting and below babysitting on the exertion scale. How wrong I was. Two hours before I arrived in Somerset, Moose scraped two inches of skin from one of his front legs. Gus, a neighbour’s Labrador, had arrived home and, as the door of his car swung open, Moose put his leg straight through it at the hinge.
Still, by the time we got there, he was sanguine enough to give my girlfriend and I his usual greeting: one paw on each shoulder, much licking of face. As we waved his owners off, we looked forward to two weeks of variety and leisure—cosy pubs, long walks, lie-ins, this kind of thing.
My mum lets her dogs sleep in her bed. I don’t agree with it but that’s what she does and, unless we wanted grief, that’s what we’d have to do too. That night, there was whining, but it was centimetres rather than metres away. Moose’s wound was smarting. We didn’t sleep a wink.
Mr Self’s own hounds, basking
The next day, we drove to the nearest vet in Dulverton, a small town that serves as the fulcrum for the local farming community. Most of the animals waiting to be seen—a few dogs and a couple of sheep—were ‘working’ pets. Next to them, Moose looked like a Victorian lady in a colliery, especially after he was given his shiny cone of shame.
You’ve probably seen them, these dunce ruffs, these halos of idiocy, the plastic cones worn by dogs to stop them aggravating their wounds. Moose cuts a forlorn figure, in his greasy, milk-spattered bonnet. The problem is, he can still reach his bandage, which he chews off every night, rendering it not so shameful at all.
Apparently, despite the idiom, it’s not a good thing for dogs to lick their wounds, so we’ve been on 24-hour Wound Watch. In the middle of the night, we argue over who should reapply the bandage, it’s almost never me. My girlfriend’s far more compassionate and caring—I advocate a low intervention approach to dogsitting, we argue over this too.
He wears the cone of Shame!
That’s not all. Alongside physically wounded Moose is emotionally wounded Bobbi, possibly the most neurotic dog on the planet. Bobbi can’t be alone, not even for a few minutes. She follows me to the toilet then spends the whole time I’m in there crying and scratching at the door. Any charm this carry-on might have had quickly wears thin.
Every morning, after rising from my crowded bed, I stagger downstairs, wall-eyed and grouchy, to make a cup of tea. This must be what parenthood is like. But it can’t be. No, this is worse. These creatures aren’t ours but they’re ruining our lives, even though it’s hard to begrudge things so cute and cuddly. Maybe this is what parenthood is like.
There is another, perhaps more straining, psychological aspect to this arrangement. The disorder of the house and the bad behaviour of the dogs brings back memories of my own chaotic childhood. Moose and Bobbi are walking, barking manifestations of my anima, emotional surrogates for my relationship with my mother. I’m exhausted and exasperated, I don’t even like dog-chat. But at least no one’s talking about sofas.
