Reluctant canines

One of the best things about having dogs is that they get you out of doors.

Wet or dry, cold or warm, calm or windy, the dogs have to go out. Like the US Postal Service, at least before Trump got hold of it, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night, stays” this dog walker from his appointed task.

There are a number of advantages to fulfilling this obligation. It gets me off the couch. It forces me to take some exercise. But, above all, it provides me with sights it would be a pity to miss and which are only available outside built-up areas.

The kind of sight reserved for dog walkers in all weathers

All in all, it’s no bad thing to have the obligation that dogs impose to get out of doors two or three times a day. In fact, it would be awkward if they stopped imposing it. That would be rather as though a pretext had been withdrawn from me.

Which, funnily enough, is rather what’s happened.

To be fair, the dogs – Luci in black, Toffee in toffee – are pretty small. Toy poodles, you know. Not big dogs.

Toffee and Luci in their place of choice

Well, not big dogs physically. Huge personalities. I’m always amused to see Toffee, approximately rabbit-sized (or is that squirrel? No, that’s not fair. She’s bigger than a squirrel) chasing after an Alsatian, approximately wolf-sized. She chases them with great gusto, running at full tilt, and barking loudly, at least at the yap level.

Until, that is, the Alsatian stops running away. Then you see Toffee applying the brakes with great firmness. A hard stop, you might say. She stands all aquiver, watching the larger dog intently and with, how shall I put this, a certain visible wariness. And, though I’m sure she’s barking massively internally, nothing comes to the surface any more.

Eventually, the large dog loses interest. “That little tyke,” she seems to say, “all bark and no bite. Time it got a life. Now, where did I leave my owners?”

When the Alsatian disappears, Toffee trots back to us, tail in the air, full of obvious self-satisfaction. “See how I saw her off?” she’s clearly saying. And, of course, we tell her what a good girl she is.

Luci, on the other hand, will have withdrawn discreetly into the undergrowth, keeping the whole scene under close scrutiny, but only reappearing when it’s clear the threat has receded. “Discretion,” she’s telling us, “as the bard so neatly puts it, is the better part of valour.”

Big personalities, as I said. But small legs. So walks represent an awful lot of steps for them. Recently, they seem to have developed a sense of not being particularly keen on going out. The couch, they appear to be saying, is much the preferable environment for them. 

Luci demonstrates that preference unambiguously to me, by growling every time I put her collar out. That’s all, I hasten to add – she never bites or even snaps. But she does express her dissatisfaction in completely unmistakeable terms.

And once they get out, Toffee has developed a neat new technique. “Carry me,” she says, completely unambiguously. Not in words, of course. She starts by rubbing her nose against the back of our legs. Generally, we – or at least I, the more soft-hearted of the two of us – give in and pick her up. But if we don’t, she just pulls on her lead. And if that doesn’t work, she just stops dead. Then, if we try to pull her, she splays her forepaws in front of her on the ground, with her head between them, generating all the resistance to forward motion that a toy poodle is capable of.

“Enough walking, already,  Pick me up now”

That’s all very well and fine when we’re actually out on the walk. But lately she’s pushed things rather further. She adopts the head-on-the-ground tactic right in front of our gate. It’s as though she were telling us that if we want her to go out at all, we can carry her from the outset.

That’s our gate in the background
“This is your walk, not mine. You want me on it?
Then pick me up.”

All very well and fine, I say. But just how far do I have to go to accommodate our dogs? And, frankly, it leaves me just a tad uneasy to discover that I’m keener on going for a walk than they are.

Ah, the dogs of today. None of the enthusiasm I remember from my youth. How things have gone downhill.