I won’t claim that we’re in a majority yet, however. There are still plenty of dog nuts (and nutty dogs) around.
Take Trinny Woodall. She is such a dyed-in-the-wool dog person that she’s not even aware visitors to this country might think her a little eccentric about Honey, a greyhound-alsatian mix she plucked from Battersea Dogs Home.
“I remember being totally panicked when I found out I was pregnant,” she says. “Honey had always been my big love and, as I said to my husband Johnny, how will I ever love anything as much?”
After giving birth to her daughter, Lila, she had Johnny take one of the infant’s Babygros home every evening from hospital to put in Honey’s basket in order to acclimatise her to the new baby’s smell.
Woodall says that when she came home from hospital she made sure that it was Johnny not her who brought Lila through the front door. Which is not to say there weren’t a few hairy moments, like when she was breastfeeding Lila in the sitting room with Honey at her feet, and the latter “suddenly jumped up and tried to latch onto my other nipple”.
Nicola Formby, partner of Adrian Gill, the Sunday Times writer, also has some of the symptoms shown by the barking mad — though she was resistant at first, having been brought up in South Africa where dogs know their place.
“When we were growing up, dogs lived in kennels outside and never ever came into the house with their muddy paws,” she says. “When I first came to London I had a massive problem with the way people would let their dogs have full run of their flats, let them sleep in their beds, be on first-name terms with the family butcher and so on . . .”
That is until she got one of her own soon after her father died, a terrier called Putu. “She had this kind of Mary Poppins effect, the way she helped me through that period. It annoyed me at first, just how fond I, as a human, could be of a dog but now I’m right in there. If I’m away from her for more than three hours I get terrible guilt.”
When Formby has to go away, Putu is checked into the Dog House in south-west Wales, a £25 a day canine “spa” which, along with a full anal gland squeezing service, provides heated chalets, customised doggie schedules (where it’s lights out and Bonios at 11pm), and even school “reports” to see how they’ve interacted with ducks and sheep and other dogs.
“They even come home with a bag of their own hair . . . to show you how you haven’t been grooming them properly,” says Formby.
Then there is Clare Staples, author of Everything I Know About Men I Learnt From My Dog. Her great dane and flatmate, Mr Big, has his own blog. “But then I won’t make any bones about it,” says Staples, the business partner of the hypnotist Paul McKenna, “he is completely and utterly my child substitute.”
As Kodo most definitely was for me. I come from a long line of dog bores. My dad still hasn’t got over our afghan, Sally, who died 43 years ago. My sister and I spent quite a sizeable part of our childhood in the back of my mum’s Mini while our subsequent dog, a labrador called Marky, lorded it up front.
I got Kodo for my 35th birthday. He became a child substitute almost immediately. I never got the hang of house-training him. Whenever I went out of the house for a second he’d pee all over the bed and — like the child in We Need To Talk About Kevin — he gave me a little sly “smile” if I ever caught him in the middle of doing it. But I insisted on taking him absolutely everywhere. To work. To the Ivy (where I’d have to check him in with my coat), to Harry’s Bar, whose dog-loving owner Mark Birley was happy to let him sit on a stool at the bar. And to people’s houses for dinner where he’d always make a beeline for the bedroom . . . and have a pee. For which I always defended him to the hilt.
As JR Ackerley so movingly put it in My Dog Tulip, the poignant story of his beloved german shepherd Queenie, Kodo was my “ideal friend”. And human ones? Well frankly, they came a poor second.
The thing is that, unlike a child, my child substitute didn’t exactly mature. Indeed, as the months went by, he became more and more feral. The farmer who managed the estate on which our weekend cottage was situated threatened to shoot him if he ever saw him again (Kodo having killed and eaten two sheep in the neighbouring field).
Friends begged me not to bring him round, so I sort of stopped going out. Well, I couldn’t leave him by himself because if I did he’d just evacuate everywhere and chew all the furniture. I couldn’t let him off the lead in the park because not only would he catch squirrels, he’d eat them — and violently attack all other dogs.
He wouldn’t come back, either. Ten hours, once, it took to get him back in the car after a walk in Richmond Park and that involved calling the police. Oh yes, and he got car-sick. But in the same vein as Ackerley, who recounted every one of Queenie’s urinary and anal experiences and fastidiously recorded the time she went on heat and couldn’t stop mounting him, nothing — nothing — Kodo did could put me off.
Like Woodall, I panicked when I found out I was pregnant. How could I possibly love a smelly, crying baby as much as a velvety biscuity pawed dog?
And then, five days after the baby was born, Kodo was out with his dog walker and got run over. It took a year or so, another baby down the line and a few devil-dog maulings for me to see the light. But, do you know what? Dogs now bore the pants off me. And that includes, I’m afraid, the very dear golden retriever we’ve got living with us now.
She’s old and will die soon and the children, the nanny, my other half and the entire branches of our extended families can hardly bear it. But why? I don’t mean to sound hard-hearted, but she’s only a bloody dog.
How dare I say such a thing? I can already hear the sharp intakes of breath. It’s a funny old country this. Where four children lived in faeces-strewn squalor with their parents and 22 dogs — conditions that were discovered last year only after one of them, an eight-year-old boy, began barking and growling at school. Where a woman calls the police because she thinks the chip to her car keys has been stolen and is told that because the dog’s eaten it the best solution is to have him sit in the front seat whenever she wants to drive anywhere.
Where a dog buckled in the front seat with its ears happily flaring in the wind while a brace of kids are squashed on top of each other in the back is a common tableau of modern British life.
Where else in the world would a television programme that revolved entirely around a man standing in the middle of field telling his dog how to chase sheep attract so many millions of viewers? Where else in the world would there be a reality show where a woman is told that in order to stay on the series she must learn how to pleasure a pig. (Would the pig get the sympathy vote?)
Where else in the world, too, does an unnatural obsession for dogs get you up the social ladder? Ask savvy expats the most efficient way to infiltrate London society and they’ll tell you it’s not through the right club or the right school, it’s through the right dog walker. The dog walker du jour, apparently, operates out of the W11 area and holds regular canine cocktail parties at the Orangerie in Holland Park.
Treating dogs the way you would humans, foreigners need to remember, is a true badge of Englishness. Or as a journalist at The Hindu, an Indian newspaper, helpfully advised readers planning a visit to London: “Try never to make disparaging remarks about any pet; you will be viewed with extreme suspicion. I have concluded that ill-treating a dog or any other pet in England is a crime far worse than uxoricide.”
It’s hard to pinpoint why this somewhat demented relationship with dogs exists. Why more often than not it’s not the Big Issue seller we want to help, it’s the Big Issue seller’s doggie; why our canine obsession is such an integral part of our culture, the key to understanding us as a nation.
What is it about the family who watch EastEnders on the floor while the dog sprawls on the sofa? Why does a grandmother refuse to see her grandchildren at Christmas because that would mean leaving the yorkshire terriers at home alone? And if the terriers are left alone, they’ll never speak to her again.
The answer perhaps is rooted in our emotional heritage. Perhaps because we are culturally hardwired not to relate, on an emotional level, to other human beings, to maintain in front of our peers a stiff upper lip, the only place we can look for solace without feeling embarrassed is to our dogs. In Britain the dog is the acceptable repository to vent all our passions, our grievances, our desires, our regrets.
Those who spurn this heritage risk a breach. Take the experience of this friend who says: “My mother is one of those typical Englishwomen who communicate better with dogs than with their fellow humans. She had dogs when she was a girl and she kept dogs at the centre of the family when she became a mother. I adored them, walked them in the woods every day, probably caught infections off them — she let them lick the plates and saucepans, and I was always throwing up — and wept when they died.
“As an adult I bought my own dog, but I realised that I was giving it a miserable life stuck at home while I was at work. Also, living in the city, I was more conscious of its poo. So I gave it to my mother, who was delighted. I meant to get another when I had children, but by then I had changed my attitude. My wife was working, so a dog would still be lonely, and I was more aware of the diseases children can catch from dogs.
“My mother still has a dog but when I visit her I worry about my children
eating off dog-licked plates and treading in the poo in the garden. She can’t understand what has happened to me. I’ve even bought a cat, which is of course scared of dogs. So last Christmas she stayed at home rather than visit us because she didn’t want to leave the dog behind. It’s caused quite a breach in the family.”
What about the dog lick and poo (which are just the same really when you consider where dogs put their tongues)? How dangerous are they?
There are said to be nearly 7m dogs in Britain, producing an estimated 900 tons of poo a day. This is not only stinky but also home to toxocara canis, a roundworm that can damage children’s eyesight. (Okay, cats can carry it too.) Apparently 50% of dogs in rural areas and 25% in urban areas are infected and shed eggs in their faeces. Vets in Somerset found that, of 60 dogs they examined, a quarter also had toxocara eggs in their fur.
I’ve read reports of toxocariasis causing blindness, but in fact doctors say transmission rates from dogs to people are low. Only children are affected.
Symptoms can include fever, coughing, wheezing, abdominal pain, reduced appetite and a rash that looks rather like hives. On rare occasions the condition can affect a child’s eyes and can cause severely reduced vision in one eye. This is likely to leave a squint once the inflammation dies down, rather than permanent blindness, and can be corrected by surgery.
What can worried parents do (short of shooting the neighbour’s dogs)? Well, it’s a question of basic hygiene: make sure their children wash their hands frequently. And they can tell recalcitrant owners to clean up.
Nothing is more embarrassing to an emotionally deficient dog-lover than to be addressed by a dogless fellow human — unless they’re Kylie Mead, a barmaid of Mountain Ash, south Wales, who was fined £150 with £250 costs last week for refusing to clean up the extensive piles of dog mess in her back garden. The smell during the long hot summer drove her neighbours indoors.
Not exactly Harry’s Bar, was it? But that’s the flipside of the canine conundrum. If the way a dog behaves is largely the result of how it’s brought up, the same is true of humans.
Come to think of it, what does that say about me and Kodo? When I shared a bar stool with him, I believed he was a mirror to my soul. But now . . . dogs, who needs them?
