A friend was walking alone in her small village in Somerset recently when a concerned passer-by asked: “What’s happened to your dog?” My friend’s reply that she didn’t have one, and didn’t particularly like dogs, was met with blank incomprehension. How could one not have a dog in the country?
It’s not quite that bad around here in Kent, but there is a definite doggie fraternity along the lanes and footpaths. Perfect strangers who would otherwise have passed with the merest of nods or an embarrassed sotto voce “hello” will, if you both have dogs, stop and discuss anything from the weather to the state of the economy while the hounds sniff each other’s privates.
I know this because I have recently acquired a canine companion.
She’s called Myrtle – the litter was named after Harry Potter characters – and she was meant to be a Springer Spaniel. I quite wanted a Springer. I’d done a lot of research into breeds and the Springer – English or Welsh – seemed the right sort of size and to have the right sort of temperament. I was aware that she would need a lot of exercise (as a friend said, “the tail wags the dog’) but since part of the point was to get me out of the armchair and into the countryside, this seemed a positive benefit.
There was much discussion as to whether I shouldn’t take on a rescue dog rather buy from a breeder. But I was adamant. I wanted a puppy that I could train and whose temperament would be a known quantity. I knew it would cost a lot – £400 and up for a Kennel Club certified pedigree breed, but I thought if that were averaged out over 10 or 15 years it wasn’t a massive amount. My biggest problem was finding one without a docked tail. I’ve never understood docking, indeed I disapprove of it rather strongly. It’s always seemed a bit like foot-binding your daughter. Dogs use their tails to express themselves and mutilating them immediately after birth seems to me cruel and wholly unnecessary.
So the ad in the local paper for undocked Springer pups at £200 each seemed too good to be true. And disregarding my favourite adage with which I bore my son to death – that if a thing seems too good to be true it usually is – I went along to see the litter. Of course they were gorgeous – puppies are almost invariably cute. But what impressed me most was the mum, Billie (after Billie Piper). A stunningly attractive, perfectly proportioned, beautifully marked English Springer. The sage advice to look at the mother if you want to know what your girlfriend will look like when she’s older seemed pertinent. I was told Billie had been served by a pure Springer over in West Sussex, far enough away to ensure a clear gene pool, but neither dam nor sire had a KC pedigree hence the very reasonable price.
Now, at this stage I need to declare a certain amount of ignorance about dogs and puppies. We had a Fox Terrier when I was young, and my mother acquired a black mutt called Othello after I’d left home, but other than that my experience of dogs had been confined to petting other people’s pooches, and trying to keep them away from my cat/s. So I was certainly no expert on puppies. Myrtle was a loveable-looking ball of fur, mainly black with a white line up her nose, a white chest, and grey socks more pronounced on her fore paws than her hind legs. She was certainly a good deal darker and less mottled than her mum but her siblings were similar and I assumed that was normal and her characteristic Springer markings would emerge as she got older. So I paid my money and Myrtle came home, the excitement only slightly mitigated by her being violently sick in the car.
It was at puppy training classes a few weeks later that the experts took one look and said she couldn’t possibly be a pure Springer and seemed much more like a Collie. Had there been a Collie on the farm from where I’d bought her? Hmm… Actually I HAD seen a Collie lurking in a barn. But I’d been assured her sire was a Springer from West Sussex. Then another similar dog arrived for training and it transpired that it was Myrtle’s brother, Hagrid, from the same litter. But his owner said she’d been told from the start that Hagrid was a Springer/Collie cross, and that the breeder knew that the farm Collie had got to Billie, but had hoped that some at least in the litter would be pure Springer.
Well it was a bit of a blow. I was already fond of Myrtle and we’d worried about her at night and cleaned up her accidents and been to the vet and spent money on shots and posted her picture on Facebook. But I HAD wanted a Springer, and few of Billie’s features seemed to have made it through to Myrtle.
A carefully worded letter to the breeder elicited an immediate phone call in reply, full of profuse apologies, tales of how she’d guessed the others in the litter might possibly have been the Collie’s but how she’d hoped the West Sussex Springer had managed to impregnate at least one of Billie’s eggs.
And she offered to take Myrtle back.
But after just a moment’s reflection I realised it was too late. I’d fallen for her. So I took up the promise of a full refund and told Myrtie that I loved her anyway, despite her mixed parentage. And as she looked up at me I realised that at least one characteristic had been passed on from mum – those doleful Spaniel eyes.
To be continued …..
