I seem to have had a great many dogs...

It seems to me, in the manner of so many things remembered from when I was young, that myself and my siblings spent a great deal of time asking the father if he would appropriate a dog.

It didn’t have to be a particular kind of dog; as with all small children, we weren’t picky. The most scabrous and mangy of dogs would have been welcomed with open arms, but alas, ours was a house surrounded by “cat people” – just the kind of environment that would have little or no effect on a dog, but which would deliver noticeable recoil to a dog owner.

Not willing to draw the ire of our neighbours, my father was good enough to acquire from our Aunt (Waa, as previously mentioned) a cat that any would-be dog owner should have been happy to own. He lacked a cat’s natural skittishness, being possessed instead of a very canine will to scavenge and beg for attention. In truth though, he was an odd-eyed (one green, one blue) and scatter-brained thing, and when his death eventually found him, it would prove to be kidney failure, caused by a rat bite.

His wasn’t a death we felt keenly, by then bored with his essentially feline nature, we had paid him little enough attention that, when he eventually died, we noticed not because he hadn’t been home in some time, but because a neighbour informed us he had (kindly) dealt with the remains.

My father, in a fit we would later come to recognise as the pattern reasserted itself, named him Basil, with just a little less deliberation than he would later employ in the naming of his iPod (it’s Angela). We would remain petless then for some years before the siblings found a border-collie pup while on holiday and managed to wrangle enough sentiment from the father that he let us keep it. Again the father’s will to name things leapt to the fore and we were gifted with a dog named Raptor. He was named, not after a dinosaur or jet, but after a firewall in the father’s workplace.

Raptor was well loved though, and while his incessant and shrill barking had seemed initially to mark him a potentially short-lived addition to the family, our love for him overcame a series of potentially fatal flaws. He took a destructive dislike to strangers, children, furniture, deer and other dogs. At this point, worried that our dog might be bored, and thrilled with ourselves over the success of raising a puppy which had yet to destroy anything but furniture, we introduced a second collie, who was promptly named Wendy. She came to us through my sister Jane, who then worked in a pound.

It would however soon come to light that Wendy was addled by some strange malaise. She had spent some time as a stray dog, and, while picking the ticks from her fur (at great length), the brother would find large black lumps, each the size of half a golf ball, all along her abdomen. Within two months of adopting her, a vet would confirm that somehow, miraculously, she had cancer of pretty much every organ a dog needs to live. As an act of mercy, we had her put to sleep.

Soon afterward, Jane found another puppy, a soft brown and with darker lines around her eyes that gave her a perpetually disappointed look, we named her Fran. At this point though, Raptor’s slow boil aggression had turned him from a relatively hospitable animal into one that would eventually snap at one of the sisters on her return from a trip, and so he too would be put to sleep.

While the brother was the one to walk him to the pound, it would be Jane who had the last two interactions with him. Working in the pound often necessitated actions it would prove a little hard to justify allowing a sixteen year old girl to carry out. In this line were the two last times Jane saw our dog. The first was when a vet asked if she would help shave and restrain a dog that was to be put down, which would turn out to be Raptor – a task to which Jane was uniquely suited.

Stranger still, there were times, in the height of summer, when collections for “organic waste” were so few and far between that it became necessary to store the corpses of disposed-of dogs in a shed designed to act as a meat locker. I’d been told that on the hottest of days, blood would trickle from beneath the walls of the shed, as the mass of collected dogs within began to defrost. While decanting dogs from out-building to shed, Jane chanced to come across Raptor’s chilled and stiff self – an experience I find singularly unsettling.

And now, sadly, we find ourselves entering the same phase with Fran. Fran has been, by and large, the best of our dogs. She’s lacked Wendy’s general cancer-patient status and neatly avoided Raptor’s steadily growing aggression, but she’s just as neatly avoided any semblance of house training. Indeed, years after her adoption she’s still prone to just plain peeing all over the place for attention.

Part of the problem this time though, is that in as many ways as we managed to train Raptor and Wendy (indeed, in as many ways as I failed to train Fran) Fran has managed to train me. For every command she doesn’t quite understand, there’s a behaviour in me that’s become second nature, without any apparent effort on her part.

The problem is that I know now that when my house is no longer occupied by the sound of her scrabbling against the walls, chasing whatever it is dogs chase when they’re alone, I will still spend time making sure every door in the house is closed and sealed before I leave, for fear she’ll sleep in someone else’s bed. I know I’ll still leave the thick crust from the end of a loaf of bread behind. I know I’ll set aside the crisps from a bag that fall just short of edible, and saddest of all I know that I’ll keep doing these things long after it sinks in that she won’t be around.

I’ve been trained so well by this dog that, even when I don’t expect her to be there, I tense my stomach on entering a room, wary of exuberant introductions. I may, in every meaningful way, have failed spectacularly to train her to do, or not to do, anything and simultaneously, she’s trained me to behave in ways most conducive to her. In many ways, it’s like a bad marriage. Every time she decides to go a bit “rock star” and turn the room upside down for attention, I sit there and take it… like an abused spouse, I love the poor girl despite her little episodes.

Of course, what all of this boils down to is, I’m not sure I make the best of dog owners. I’ve yet to had a dog last more than three years before overwhelming evidence has presented itself that the dog really would be better off far away from me (at the very least), and while I can’t take sole responsibility, it’s hard to deny the mounting evidence that there’s a very good case for me not to be given sole dominion over anything’s life.

I suppose the saddest part of all of this is that soon there will be another collar nailed to the wall beside Raptor’s, bearing mute testament to the fact that, for some reason, even the dog I’ve loved the most has ended up so irrevocably broken by the experience of being my dog that she too is now gone.

I either need to get some kind of dog-caring lessons, or I need to think about keeping fish.