The calling demands all sorts of indignities: I am writing this on assignment in Nigeria, and I have just spent half an hour in a down-at-heel Port Harcourt hotel hiding behind a curtain to re-create the right sound environment for a live broadcast. Worst of all, you lose control of your time because you live at the mercy of twin tyrants: deadlines and developments. And at the end of it all the fate of your material is decided by a programme editor back at base who may never have stirred beyond Shepherd’s Bush.
And yet, and yet … it is hard to beat the thrill of being there when history is made, or seeing something that very few of your audience will ever see. I still get a charge out of the light-bulb moment, when the dynamics of a story click into place and you realize you have something worth telling your audience about. There is no drug quite like raw contact with real news.
My trip to see cancer-sniffing dogs in Buckinghamshire was not quite like interviewing Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, or watching cruise missiles coming in over Baghdad, but it still had the wow factor every reporter hopes for when he or she sets out with notebook in hand.
Canines could be better value than quads and biopsies
7 August 2010
This newspaper recently reported the record price achieved by a sheepdog called Ron at Skipton Auction Mart: the fourteen-month-old Collie went for an astonishing 4,900 guineas (£5,145). ‘In demonstrations on a hillside next to the auction mart,’ the piece reported, ‘Ron impressed the crowd by carefully rounding up one sheep which seemed determined to break away.’ The Telegraph’s headline writer dubbed him ‘the Rooney of the sheepdog transfer market’; his breeder, with a sheep farmer’s canny calculations in mind, pointed out that buying a quad bike to do Ron’s job would cost even more.
Kudu’s record of crowd-pleasing performances is more varied. He recently played a blinder when a dog-curious family came to inspect him over Sunday lunch. The visit was sold to us by the father of the household on the basis that he and his wife were coming under pressure from Rachel, their eight-year-old daughter, to get a dog. It quickly became apparent that he was himself the main champion of the dog project (he is stepping down from a big job and will be at home more); Rachel was the one who needed convincing.
She had been biffed by a dog when younger and reacted nervously to Kudu’s rambunctiousness. But he quickly picked up on her mood, and when we suggested she might enjoy brushing him he was on his back almost before the brush was out of the cupboard. It was a hot day, and he was less enthusiastic about chasing his toys around the garden – whenever she threw one he tried to hide it under the table – but he played gamely through the afternoon, chased a tennis ball round the park for her and generally pitched his doggy charm so effectively that Rachel really was pushing for a dog by the time they left.
But two days later he let the side down badly on a photo-shoot in Richmond Park. The photographer Antoinette Eugster was trying to re-create a Wyeth painting of a young girl lying under a thunderous sky with a dog sitting in the background. My stepdaughter Rosy cheerfully modelled the girl, and the sky was obligingly thunderous … but the dog just would not sit where he was told. So no hope of a modelling contract for Ron-style money!
I met a similarly camera-shy fellow at the Cancer Bio-detection Dogs charity in Buckinghamshire. I had been invited to a fund-raising event because I had mentioned the charity’s research in an earlier column, and the organizers asked me, as the only journalist present, to take the obligatory photograph of smiling staff with one of those outsized cheques. Jake, a black Lab in training as a sniffing dog, was required to be part of the group; I hope he is better at sniffing than he is at posing.
But the dog we saw in sniffing action – a Springer also, confusingly, called Jake – turned in a stunning performance. There was a contraption like a steel spider in the centre of the lab, and a urine sample was placed in a grip at the end of each leg. Jake’s task was to identify which one came from a cancer patient – which he did every time and at great speed. His reward was a treat at the end of each round and tennis-ball fun with his handler at the end of the session.
Impressive, but could it ever be useful? Can we imagine cancer-sniffing centres staffed by Jake and his relations at NHS Trusts across the country? That, it seems, is not the point. Claire Guest, who runs the charity, explained they are using the dogs as researchers: if dogs can identify the smell associated with a cancer, she explained, humans can develop a mechanical system to detect it. That could mean a new screening system for, say, prostate cancer – the current test is notoriously unreliable and often involves an invasive and unnecessary biopsy. Whether this is good science I cannot say, but they are surely right that dogs know things we do not.
The demonstration by a companion dog for a diabetes patient was even more impressive – and his skills are more obviously useful. Rory, a Golden Retriever, sat in the middle of the lab at his handler’s feet as she opened a jar with a sample from someone with a high blood-sugar level. He immediately put his feet on her shoulders and licked her face. When she failed to respond he padded across the room and collected a medical bag. The handler has type-one diabetes herself, and assured us this was no party trick: Rory frequently wakes her in the night when her levels are wrong.
It costs ten thousand pounds to get a dog to Rory’s standard and settle him with a patient – but Claire Guest claims the NHS spends one million pounds per hour on diabetes-related cases. It is a bit like the quad-bike comparison from the breeder of ‘Ron the Rooney of the sheepdog transfer market’ at Skipton. And a dog is a lot more fun than a bike in the garage – or a doctor on call, come to that.
Seeing a really well-trained dog like Rory at work made me realize how remiss I have been about Kudu’s training. He is certainly not yobbish – he has a naturally gentlemanly disposition – but his manners can be a bit rough on occasion, especially where hygiene is concerned. During one weekend away with him we were given a bedroom directly above the kitchen, and while changing for dinner we overheard our hosts discussing him in most unflattering terms (he had moaned about being locked in the boot room to dry off after a muddy walk). Dog etiquette is tricky territory; no two households have precisely the same set of dog rules, so taking your dog out socially is fraught with danger.
Dogs are conservative in their habits, and if they have been permitted to do something at home it is very difficult to persuade them that they should behave differently somewhere else; if, for example, you allow your dog to sleep on the sofa in your living room (we very much do not, I should add), he will certainly expect to do the same elsewhere, no matter how elegant, delicate and pale-coloured the sofa in question. And making judgements about when and where your dog will be welcome is complicated by the fact that the doggiest people often have the strictest rules. Most of our country friends assume that if they invite us to stay for a weekend the dog comes too – dogs are so much part of country life that we scarcely need to ask. On the other hand, many of them would never dream of letting a dog upstairs: country dogs tend to sleep locked up in the boot room, or even in kennels outside. Kudu – I blush to confess – sleeps in our bedroom.
I have tried quite hard to teach Kudu table manners so that he can join us in a pub after a walk, or on the terrace for lunch at the club where we play tennis. He still has not quite got over the idea that this constitutes being ‘out’, and being out is about having fun, so if I tie him to a table leg he will try to run off with the table. We did once try tying him to a bench next to the tennis court while we played, but watching a ball being hit about the place and not being able to run after it was simply too much of a torture.
Man’s best friend can be a fiend, but I always defend him
21 August 2010
One of Kudu’s friends returned from kennels several pounds lighter than at the start of his owners’ summer break: exile so distressed him that he had gone on hunger strike. We are more indulgent. Kudu gets double-staffed while we are away – a dog-walker for the day and a house-s
itter to keep him company at night.
She is a regular, and before we left for our two weeks in Turkey she came for an evening drink to remind herself of the house’s plumbing eccentricities. Kudu had not seen her since last summer, but remembered her very well indeed: she got the usual frantic toy-offering ritual on her arrival, and once she was sitting he settled at her feet, muzzle on her knee and eyes fixed on her face in supplication.
For what? We allow him to sleep in our bedroom and she does not. My guess is that he was getting his pleading in early.
I can trust him as a good host in his own home while we are away. I feel much more nervous when we take him somewhere as a guest. There was a searing Christmas moment at my brother’s Hampshire house when he was young. The household rules included a ‘no dogs upstairs’ policy, which was being enforced with rigour because the house had just been decorated. After Midnight Mass, Kudu was shut in the scullery.
One of my sister’s Spaniels was on heat, and although she spent the night in the car (the bitch, not my sister), Kudu had caught a whiff of those scrumptious smells. Whether it was lust or fear (of spending the night alone) I cannot say, but by stocking-opening time the newly painted scullery door was a wreck.
Readers will note I blame everyone but Kudu; dog-owners are much worse in this respect than indulgent parents. I know a good mother who was incapable of disciplining her over-exuberant Tibetan Terrier. When he memorably crapped in the middle of a food-laden cloth spread on the lawn of a grand country house for a fête champêtre, she airily declared that Tibetan Terriers are the reincarnated souls of Buddhist monks – as if this was a perfectly adequate explanation for the desecration of the foie gras.
Dog-indulgence was turned into a high art form by a man called J. R. Ackerley, for many years the literary editor of that now, sadly, defunct BBC institution the Listener magazine. I bought his book My Dog Tulip as dog homework for the holiday, but found it so funny I finished it before we left.
Tulip, an Alsatian, was, in the words of someone who knew her, ‘quite frankly … a terror’. Ackerley’s friends drop away as she fouls their carpets and chases their cats, his social circle shrinking until his only regular human contact is with the vet – though he does enjoy a series of casual relationships with other dog-owners, whose pets might provide Tulip with sexual satisfaction. Ackerley is perplexed by his social impoverishment, puzzled that his friends seemed ‘to resent being challenged whenever they approached their own sitting or dining rooms’.
When Tulip upsets humans he always sides with her. He decides that it is safer for her to defecate on the pavement than in the road (the book was published in 1965, before the idea of ‘picking up’), and sketches a wonderful scene on Putney Embankment while she is about her business in the mist of an early winter morning:
… a cyclist shot round the corner of the Star and Garter Hotel towards us, pedalling rapidly … I don’t suppose I should have noticed this person at all if he had not addressed me as he flew past:
‘Try taking your dog off the sidewalk to mess!’
One should not lose one’s temper, I know, but the remark stung me.
‘What, to be run over by you? Try minding your own business!’
‘I am an’ all,’ he bawled over his shoulder. ‘What’s the bleeding street for?’
‘For turds like you!’ I retorted.
The cyclist is, of course, completely right, but dog-owners will surely cheer for Ackerley.
Tulip is especially badly behaved at the vet, and she is rejected by several. My favourite vignette is the Spaniel that greets Ackerley at the third surgery he approaches:
He was standing quietly on a table with a thermometer sticking out of his bottom, like a cigarette. And this humiliating spectacle was rendered all the more crushing by the fact that there was no one else there. Absolutely motionless, and with an air of deep absorption, the dog was standing upon the table in an empty room with a thermometer in his bottom, almost as though he had put it there himself.
‘Oh Tulip!’ I groaned. ‘If only you were like that!’
Yes, of course I have introduced that story in an Ackerley-ish way, because it reflects well on Spaniels. The vet appointment for the annual booster is as much part of our summer ritual as sun-seeking, and Kudu behaved immaculately. He even insisted on coming back with the cats to cheer them up when they went for their jabs a week later.
Angling for acceptance where East meets West
4 September 2010
I have a wonder to report: I have seen a dog catch a fish.
It was early evening in the small Turkish port of Kaş. It had been a stinking hot day, and two shaggy German Shepherds were standing on the slipway into the harbour, enjoying the cool sea on their tummies. One suddenly executed an amazing bash-and-flip movement with his front paw, and a good-sized strip of flashing silver was ejected on to the quayside. The dog watched his prize until it stopped struggling. Whether it was destined for his bowl or his master’s I do not know, because our own tummies rumbled and we were drawn to dinner.
Kudu suffered horribly during the London August heat. But that was as nothing to the high-summer furnace of south-east Turkey, and my heart went out to the dogs of Kaş. Most lay panting and immobile, piles of sweat-soaked fur on the pavements. The lucky few in shops cuddled their air-conditioning units as if they were radiators in winter.
Turkey famously mixes East and West. Its canine culture at first appears Middle Eastern: feral dogs roam the roads (I had two near misses in the hire car) and Western travellers who visited Istanbul in search of the exotic during the nineteenth century (like the French poets Lamartine and Nerval) remarked on the wild packs in the city’s streets. Mark Twain wrote: ‘I never saw such utterly wretched, starving, sad-visaged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life … I thought I was lazy, but I am a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog.’
Yet as the burning day cooled into evening in Kaş, a more English, even Home Counties doggy world was revealed. Well-dressed families with pedigrees on leads sauntered among the cafés around the mosque on the harbour front, and joggers with Labradors and Spaniels at their heels could be spotted sweating up the hill outside town.
It made me wonder whether Islam is as anti-dog as we assume.
There was a slew of press stories over the summer about dogs being turned off London buses because they might offend Muslims (no chance of Kudu suffering this indignity: he insists on being chauffeured and sits upright on the back seat in a plutocratic manner), and it was reported that even guide dogs had been treated in this way.
There is certainly a strand of scholarly Islamic opinion that regards dogs as ritually unclean. A dog-owning BBC colleague was astonished to find that a Muslim he had invited to lunch turned up with a spare suit: his guest said that he had been advised by his imam that the presence of even one dog-hair on his clothes would negate the power of his prayers.
But there is a dog story in the Koran that suggests the Prophet may have thought differently – and it is one of those intriguing texts that demonstrate how closely the great religions of Europe and the Middle East are related.
Its origins lie in a Christian legend. Around 250 AD, seven young noblemen in the ancient city of Ephesus – not so very far up the coast from our holiday port of Kaş – were accused of being Christians during the persecution by the Roman emperor Decius. Rather than deny their faith, they gave their money to the poor and retired to a cave in the mountains to pray. The emperor ruled that the mouth of the cave should be walled up, leaving them to die inside.
Three hundred years later – so the story goes – a local landowner broke down the wall so that he could use the cave as a cattle pen. The seven Christian heroes were still alive – they had apparently slept through the intervening three centuries, and were startled to find themselves in a world where their faith had become mainstream. After a brief but joyful re-entry to the land of the living they expired, and were later made famous throughout Europe in early
Christian writings.
Fast-forward three hundred years and we find the Prophet Muhammad being tested by the people of Mecca. The Jews of Medina have sent them a clever question: does Muhammad know about the Seven Sleepers? If he does, he is truly a prophet; if he does not, then he is a fraud. Muhammad duly produces Sura 18, The Cave, in which he tells the Seven Sleepers’ story.
But Muhammad’s version has a twist: he describes the Sleepers ‘with their dog stretching out its forelegs’ at the entrance to the cave, and the Sura is quite insistent about the dog’s presence as a key element in the story. This dog, Katmir, is said to have stayed awake for the full three centuries, watching over his charges, and some sources suggest it is one of the nine animals that will be allowed into Paradise. Ritually unclean? Surely not.
Kudu is certainly unclean in a more literal sense. Returning from baking Turkey to find London awash with rain delighted me for a while, but I very quickly tired of damp walks. Kudu, however, is absolutely jubilant that the dog-days of summer are over, and takes full advantage of every puddle available.
A month or so after writing the column above I was recording a Radio 4 programme in Istanbul, and managed to escape duty for a couple of hours to wander round the Grand Bazaar. I found a stall selling nineteenth-century illuminated pages from Ottoman story books; they were the most beautiful artefacts, but very expensive, and I was having terrible trouble deciding which one to buy until an illustration of the Seven Sleepers story emerged from the pile. The artist had painted Katmir in a style similar to that of a Snoopy cartoon, and he has a definite paunch in the picture. What is more he is, unlike the Katmir of the Koran, clearly asleep, which suggests an Ottoman playfulness in the treatment of the sacred texts. It was an irresistible buy.
The news that Kudu’s column in the Telegraph was being put to sleep reached me on return from our summer holiday in Turkey. Whenever I lose a contract or have a show canned it seems to happen in the most awkward and unlikely circumstances.
Diary of a Dog-walker Page 12
