About Dogs

The Kennel Club has announced that Alaskan malamutes are now among Britain’s most popular dog breeds and that their number has risen almost tenfold in the last decade.

Now and again we see a malemute while we walk our own dogs, and I got used to seeing these lovely animals when I once worked in Alaska where they were originally used by the Inuit as sled dogs. Indeed, in this country they are often harnessed to wheeled sleds and raced. One has only to see the impatience of these energetic animals to get going to appreciate how much they enjoy working.

Dogs are very personal things. What is loveable to one man is something to be detested by another. Some folk prefer their rescued mutts to pedigree animals, while others look to particular sizes and shapes of dog for their pets.

In Chateau MacDonald, we have two dogs with oodles of character; an elderly Yorkshire Terrier, Mickey, and a youngish Jack Russell, Ollie.

Mickey is most definitely my wife’s dog and, if she has to go out, will sit atop the armchair by the living room window waiting for her to return home. He cannot be deflected from this.

Mickey’s main ability is to understand the time, and we often wonder if he can read the clock in the living room. He is a terrible whiner and knows within a tolerance of ten to fifteen minutes when he is due for a treat or a saucer of chicken. How he does this is a complete mystery to us, but does it he does and, if we are late in delivering what he wants, he can be extremely vocal for such a titchy little animal.

In contrast to Mickey, Ollie is an extremely patient dog and seems to understand that treats and chicken come along at some time during the day and that there is no need to expend energy on chasing us up for them.

Ollie is my dog. Or, at least for some of the time.

If one of our granddaughters is in the house, for example, then Ollie cannot be separated from her. She will carry him around the house like a rag-doll with him having a silly look on his chops (yes, dogs do have expressions!). If either of our two sons happens to be at home, then he will gravitate to one of them. If we are watching the television in the evening, Ollie will either sit by the side of my mother or, alternatively, stretch out beside my wife on the sofa.

How then do I know that little Ollie is ‘my’ dog? It is because he will sometimes ignore everyone else and come to me for a cuddle. And, on the few occasions that I am unwell and have to return to bed, then Ollie is always there by my side ignoring whatever else is going on in the house.

Ollie is our third Jack Russell. They are dogs with immense character and can be very funny in some of their antics. They can also, like any other breed of dog, be very territorial.

As witness the Jack Russell, appropriately named Jack, who lives with his family in a farm in South Dakota. He recently discovered a 150lb cougar wandering around the property and was so aggressive in defending his territory, that he managed to chase it up a tree where it was later chased and shot by the farm’s owner.

Mickey and Ollie are cowards, but we used to have a cat that could have done that!
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Should Have Asked Mickey!

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Most owners will attest to the intelligence of their dogs, large or small. In our case, we have two small dogs - Ollie, a Jack Russell terrier, and Mickey, a Yorkshire terrier. Each has their own endearing personality and each of them know just how to manipulate us when they wish.

It is Mickey who is, perhaps, the most manipulative of our two pets. At the same time it seems to me that he operates rather as some sort of impatient automaton.

For example, when we return from our twice-daily walks, he will loudly demand his doggie treat. Midmorning when we have coffee, and midafternoon when we settle for a cuppa, he demands another one. At around five o’clock he gets very impatient and voluble for his evening supper of a saucer of chicken. And so on.

To attempt to deviate from the strict routine he has imposed on us turns him into a noisy impatient bundle of fur. For such a little dog, the noise that he can create in the house if his demands are not met has to be heard to be believed. The curious thing is that if he is offered a titbit at other times he will usually turn his nose up at them, so fixed is the routine in his mind.

Ollie, on the other hand, is possibly one of the most patient dogs we have had. He knows Mickey’s routine very well and merely waits quietly for the treats to be handed out. He is much less manipulative than Mickey, but even he knows that if he feels like a treat he has only to come to where I am sitting and stare quietly at me for something to be eventually offered.

Our sons say that our two dogs rule our house, and we have never sought to dispute this for clearly that is the situation. I guess that, despite television programmes such as The Dog Whisperer’ which exhort us to treat dogs as animals and not humans, most dog-owners are as soft as butter when it comes to their pets.

The routine of our two dogs was brought to mind this morning by a report from the University of South Australia in Adelaide which has shown that pet dogs are less intelligent than their forebears, the wolf, or of Australia’s wild dogs, the dingo.

The researchers set up a problem-solving test in which, to reach a bowl of food behind a fence, the animals had to move away from the food, pass through a swing door and then come back on themselves. The wolves and dingoes passed the test in twenty seconds. but the domestic dogs failed altogether. They just pawed uselessly at the the fence and barked out of frustration, thus proving that they were utterly reliant on humans.

They should have asked Mickey. When it comes to food, he’d have beaten the other animals hands down with Ollie closely following in his wake!
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You Can’t Beat A Dog’s Welcome!

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As the proud owner of (or should I say slave to?) a Jack Russell terrier, Ollie, I can testify that they are lovely little loyal dogs with bags of character.

One of the benefits of owing a dog is the wonderful welcome you get when you return home. Even if you’ve only popped round the corner for a newspaper, the welcome you get is as effusive as if you’d been away all day.

As a fugitive German man found out recently.

When police called at a house near Cologne to arrest a man, the door was opened by someone holding a Jack Russell terrier. When the dog was set down, it immediately led police to a cupboard where it stood expectantly outside with its tail wagging furiously. Of course, the man was inside and was swiftly detained.

You can’t beat a dog’s welcome!
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