The Power of the Dog

The gaze of dogs who don’t understand and who don’t know that they might be right not to understand.

—Italo Calvino

A few days ago, while I was out strolling harmlessly near home, a savagely snarling cattle-dog sprang at my hand. His mistress had him on a short, stout lead, and no harm was done.

She was embarrassed: “I’m so sorry! He’s such a good dog at home. He just does this occasionally when we’re out.”

Apart from startling me momentarily, the encounter had not upset me in the slightest, but it called up an astonishingly sharp and swift recollection of a similar occurrence over eighty years earlier, when I was three or four. I should have liked to chat a little longer, and offered an inconsequential opening: “Your dog’s a red kelpie, isn’t he?”

“A red kelpie cross.”

“Yes, I could see he was cross.”

“Er … I beg your pardon?”

Well—no harm in trying.

The earlier incident, about 1927, happened while returning with my mother from a visit to the local shops. Suddenly, a barking fox terrier rushed out a gate and grabbed me firmly by the left forearm. I can still remember the way his weight dragged me off balance to one side. The couple who owned him had him back under control in a moment, and stood sheepishly through my mother’s prim homily on the civic duties of persons who harboured dangerous animals.

Then to inspection of the damage: my thick overcoat—it was winter—was slipped off my left arm and my shirt sleeve rolled up. No blood, no bruise, no broken skin. If you looked hard enough you could just discern a faint reddening of the skin where the foxie’s jaws had gripped through the garments. I don’t suggest for a moment that my mother would have been pleased to see her firstborn actually wounded; nevertheless, was there just a shadow of disappointment that such a drama should end in such anticlimax?

For many months afterwards Mum lost no opportunity to introduce me to safe and friendly dogs and (with due precautions) to let me pat them. She didn’t want some phobia deriving from our recent mishap to mar my later enjoyment of canine company. There was never the faintest chance of that happening! (Can you hear me, Mum?)

In all the years between 1927 and now I had only one interaction with dogs that was not wholly friendly, and even that amounted to nothing much in the end. In 1943 I was, over several weeks, hunted by Japanese army patrols in the New Guinea mountains. My friends among the native villages told me that the enemy had recently added tracker dogs to their resources—bloodhounds, I guessed, from their descriptions. Perhaps these would be my undoing, and would accomplish on four legs what the Japanese had so far been unable to manage on two. This would be a sad ending to my lifelong romance with dogs, and the very thought redoubled the speed of my flight; they did not get near enough even for me to hear them baying in the distance. As I wasted little time on washing and had no change of clothing, I concluded that the reputed olfactory power of bloodhounds has been overstated.

In both the 1927 and the 2008 “attacks” I had felt hurt by a sense of “injustice” on the part of the two dogs involved. I had never teased or harmed them; they were entirely unprovoked, so their actions seemed “immoral” as well as merely disagreeable. Is this pure nonsense? Could there be a corner of the moral world shared by both humans and “dumb creatures”? I suspect that there may be, but this is not the place to argue such profundities. (Anyway, we can always ask Professor Peter Singer.)

Our television news editors are keenly alive to the latent warmth between people and dogs—indeed, not only dogs but animals in general. Obliged as they are, night after night to showcase the tawdry banalities of human cheapness, they leap eagerly upon any welcome news item showing warmth, fidelity, geniality and dignity; it will probably be about an animal.

No doubt many readers saw the recent story of the gallant little dog which stood by a litter of kittens when his house caught fire. The mother cat and a larger dog had run to safety. The little fellow was still at his post when the firemen arrived and revived him from smoke inhalation with a human oxygen mask, just in time. His first act was to count his kittens and comfort them with a lick: an example to all of us?

When I write an “animal piece” for this column—usually about one of my own dogs or horses—it pleases me immensely to find how many readers seem to have enjoyed it. And it was certainly a pleasure and a surprise to receive in the mail recently a cheque for a comforting number of US dollars as copyright fee for reprinting such a Quadrant article. (I doubt whether even Patrick White had the excitement of seeing his work printed in the Journal of the Draft Horse Society of North America.)

Of course there are curmudgeonly exceptions to our near-universal human esteem for dogs. We all recall the sour American actor W.C. Fields: “Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.” (We don’t really know what Fields’ true sentiments were; those lines were written for him by humorist Leo Rosten.)

It was said that French story writer Guy de Maupassant so hated dogs that he habitually carried a heavy stick or cane to beat them away. Years ago, in the English Spectator, journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote that he was setting up a de Maupassant Society, whose members would be recognised by the heavy stick they carried for similar purpose. Doubtless this was no more than an overheated lunchtime conceit among the journos at El Vino’s, and in any case unnecessary: what well-bred English dog would go anywhere near Wheatcroft?

No nation dotes on its dogs like the English. I noticed the other day that the editors of the current Oxford Dictionary of Quotations had roughly halved the space formerly provided for entries drawn from Rudyard Kipling. But their wisdom has retained the lines from his “The Power of the Dog”:

Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware

Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

In a long life singularly blessed with good fortune, I rejoice in the memory that, during most of my twenty-six years service with Melbourne University Press, and my fifteen years at the Supreme Court of Victoria, my dog always came with me to the office. They were border collies of the most gentle and sagacious kind. So unobtrusive were they that visitors might call and leave again without realising that there had been three persons in the room, not just two, as they had supposed.

Dusty was the dog who saw me through many years at MUP. His rare interventions were always tactful. One day I was discussing a prospective new book with well-known author Stephen Murray-Smith, with whom I had served in hard days in wartime New Guinea. Stephen was the kindest and most generous of men, but given just occasionally to outbursts of furious indignation. Such a seizure gripped him on the day in question. He was on his feet, shouting: “Look here, Ryan! You’re being an absolute bastard! Unless we can …”

Dusty appeared from his snoozing spot beside the office safe, advanced slowly towards Stephen, and stood regarding him with puzzled gaze. Head cocked slightly to one side, he seemed to be asking: “What’s the matter, old chap? Not feeling too good today?” The spectacle of this canine solicitude was so droll that Stephen and I fell back into our chairs laughing, and then walked over to Dan Curtain’s hotel for a relaxing beer.

At the Supreme Court, my four-legged associate was Doctor Samuel Johnson—shortened to “Johnson”. With his black coat and white ruff he toned in pretty well with the barristers. In an otherwise blameless legal career, he was once accused of what I thought a very trivial indiscretion. Nevertheless, in the way trifles can, a complaint escalated its way right up to the Chief Justice. Johnson and I were quite frank with each other in discussing the pickle he was in. He seemed reassured when I told him: “Look here, old chap. If we lose here, I promise to take it all the way up to the High Court.”

A few days later, on his way home from court, the Chief popped into my room unannounced. He was well acquainted with Johnson, and gave him a pat. Then: “What about leaving Johnson home for a week or so, and then bring him back to duty—under a probation order, of course.”

That judgment, so far as I know, is not printed in the Victorian Law Reports. But it was wiser and less wordy than many which are.

The more we deal decently with the natural creatures, the better people we become ourselves: wiser, more reflective and humane. The second Lord Rothschild, one of the world’s outstanding zoologists and naturalists, believed the animals are there to offer us an education. On his tombstone is carved the wonderful passage from the Old Testament:

“Ask of the beasts and they will tell thee, and the birds of the air will declare unto thee.”

I think we have just proved Kipling’s “power of the dog”, but bedtime draws near, and I don’t believe a hair of the dog would hurt me a bit.