All dogs have a capacity to understand words and sounds. Moreover, they can detect and isolate the nuances in human language even though they can’t actually speak it the way we two-leggeds do. Scientists and ethologists call it the receptive language ability and it applies equally to canines as children. It is easiest to think of it in terms of how toddlers learn language: by hearing and understanding a word but without having developed the ability to speak it. A thirteen-month-old can point to a dog and know what it is, but will not be able to say ‘dog’, only some cute version thereof. As Stanley Coren points out in How To Speak Dog, humans would do well not to underestimate that same knack in dogs.
The average hound can understand between 110 and 200 spoken human words or signals, or a combination of both, but the really clever ones can be quite loquacious, in a silent sort of way. One German dog trainer boasted of teaching his dog 350 words and added that the dog was able to correctly pick out the individual instructional words from a longer sentence and do what he was required to do. Say ‘walkies’ and your dog knows what it’s been invited to do. Say ‘do you want to go for a walk in the park?’ and it will pick out the word ‘walk’ and greet you with a physical response that says, do I ever? if it hasn’t already beaten you to the front door.
Say the word ‘treat’ and your dog will react differently to an utterance of ‘no’, which, almost universally, will be met with a look of abject dejection if not an overt sigh of displeasure. (Dogs, Coren points out, actually do sigh and their sighs can have a range of meanings.) Compare ‘bath’ and ‘bone’, both short, sharp, strong B-words, and you’ll notice how ‘bone’ is understood as a good thing. Not so, ‘bath’. ‘Bone’ will probably result in your dog licking its chops and his ears standing at attention with greedy expectation. ‘Bath’ might turn a happy-go-lucky hound into a sullen, immovable block of a dog with the paw-brakes on, one who wants to remain smelling as doggie as possible. Or try saying ‘bad dog’ in as neutral a tone as possible, minus emotion and volume, and London to a brick your dog will still slink into its I’ve just been berated submissive pose, with its tail under its rear legs and ears flattened, just as it would if you really had said ‘bad dog’ and meant it.
A dog’s receptive language abilities, then, are limited by the time spent listening to its owner and what that human decides to teach his or her four-legged friend over and above the usual commands of sit, stay, down, come.
Sarbi and Rafi were blessed. They had five eager and devoted teachers and the pair proved to be very quick learners. Gemma knew the pups were beginning to understand English when she noticed how they chased and retrieved tennis balls with, well, the zeal of retrievers. The kids would say ‘tennis’ with a particular intonation and Sarbi and Rafi instantly stopped whatever they were doing and froze, stone-like.
Tennis.
Their ears pricked up, their eyes widened and they cocked their heads, quaking with anticipation.
‘They looked like little cartoons,’ Gemma says.
The children said the word again. ‘T-T-T-tennis’, emphasising the T.
The dogs quivered, practically levitating, as they fell over each other, crashing through the back door and tumbling down the steps to the backyard. Sarbi and Rafi had not only learnt the word ‘tennis’, but every variant of the consonant T.
‘We’d tease them by saying things like, “Anyone feel like a cup of Tea? Sounds very TempTing doesn’T iT?” emphasising all the Ts and watching the dogs salivate over the sound. If you played that game, though, you had to then go and throw the ball a few times. It was just too cruel not to.’
Sarbi was more obsessed with chasing the ball and retrieving it than Rafi. Her enthusiasm was boundless. She chased with a blind insistence that bordered on the obsessive. If she couldn’t find a ball, she picked up pebbles and dropped them at the children’s feet, her front paws splayed and ready to pounce, staring at the rocks with catatonic intensity as if the pile of pebbles was her sole purpose in life. Sarbi was impossible to distract or pat while a pile of pebbles or a tennis ball lay before her. She sidestepped any attempt at physical contact and peered more closely at the stones, more urgently and insistently, hoping someone would get the hint and throw.
Sarbi and Rafi were competitive and frequently fought in their pursuit, occasionally drawing blood while wrangling for the ball but Rafi usually tired of the effort after about 45 minutes. He signalled game over by collecting all the balls in front of him and guarding them proprietorially, deliberately denying Sarbi access.
When the dogs were left at home alone, Sarbi gathered rocks and stocked them in neat little piles on the steps leading to the house, where they couldn’t be missed if anyone wanted to cross the threshold. ‘When I arrived home from school she would have her head poking out from between the steps, staring ferociously at the day’s rock collection and dribbling all over it until I let her out and threw them for her,’ says Gemma.
Rafi, on the other paw, was obsessed with swimming, a legacy of the sweet-natured Newfoundland in him, and the dogs were introduced to the ocean at the start of summer, within months of arriving at Bowral. The neighbour’s property was also ideal. It had a duck pond and, better yet, live ducks that catered to the dogs’ instinct to chase. Sarbi and Rafi worked as a team. Rafi herded the ducks towards Sarbi, who chased with sheer determination, gathering speed with each thunderous gallop. Imagine an eighteen-wheeler perched at the top of a hill with the handbrake off and you’ll have an idea of her force and momentum. Neither dog was deterred by the electric fence around the pond. Sarbi and Rafi jumped over it or pushed through it, letting out a little yip of pain when they made contact. An electric shock could not stop two dogs hell bent on doing what dogs do naturally. Fortunately, Sarbi and Rafi were not fast enough to catch the ducks.
Rafi was a natural swimmer. With massive webbed paws as powerful as oars, he easily outswam the children. Once he leapt into the ocean and kept swimming until he was a dot on the horizon. Wendy quickly improvised and tied a long length of rope to his collar, fearing where he would end up if left to his own devices. Sarbi preferred to chase the whitewash of waves in the shallows, barking and snapping at the foam and delighting in the wake she threw up as she roared along the shore, her ears flopping up and down, her pink tongue hanging from the side of her mouth, drool flying everywhere.
Rafi and Sarbi had landed with their bums in the butter. They grew like Topsy, fast and strong, and within months resembled miniature Shetland ponies, forcing Gemma to give up carrying them down to the local shops in a basket. By now, the dogs were taking the kids on walks, dragging them along at breakneck speed. Even the boys’ father, Carlos, was taken for a walk instead of the other way around.
Sarbi and Rafi were afflicted with the Labrador’s innate obsession with food, like any member of the proud breed. Wendy bought a second refrigerator to accommodate the growing hounds, that were fed twice daily. Raw chicken necks by the kilogram; leftovers from the dining table. Family barbeques were a speciality. The cheeky pups sat obediently—for once!—gazes unflinching, begging to be tossed scraps, just as if they’d never been fed.
At six months, it became necessary to feed them separately. Rafi was fierce on the fang—put bluntly, a guts. As soon as he scarfed his food he pushed his snout into Sarbi’s bowl and stole her dinner. She responded with a snarl and snap more than once, occasionally drawing blood.
Rafi sneakily found other food sources, including a birthday cake from the family’s favourite French patisserie in Bowral, bought for Wendy’s birthday by her long-time friend, Anne. The cake was sealed in a box, resting safely on the back seat of Anne’s car when she arrived at the house. After being welcomed by the family, Anne reached in to get the cake. Instead, she found Rafi, taking up the entire back seat. He had snuck into the car with the dexterity of a cat burglar and his cake-covered face was as good as a guilty verdict.
‘In the time it took us to get through all the hugs and kisses he’d quietly demolished the entire thing,’ recalls Gemma.
Fortunately for Rafi, the family could only laugh. After all, our emotional connection to dogs is pure and primal. For the most part, our dogs mirror the connection. As the garden variety dog lover knows, dogs are highly social mammals and experience fear, happiness and love.
In 1872, the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin published his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he included hand-drawn illustrations of dogs (and cats) expressing fear, submission and aggression as well as some of the aforementioned emotions. The dogs’ expressions are remarkably similar to our own. Move forward 140 years and scientist Patricia McConnell sees it thus: ‘Emotions allow each of us, from an award-winning neurobiologist to a hungry bloodhound, to respond to the world in ways that allow us to keep growing.’
McConnell might have added ‘growing together’. Rafi and Sarbi had grown up with the children, marking every significant milestone with the family. Christmas, birthdays, holidays. They were not like the pitiful hounds whose existence is as good as forgotten as they languish alone and lonely in suburban backyards, after the novelty of puppy-hood has worn thin and Christmas gone cold. Sarbi and Rafi were family in the truest sense of the word and had free rein of the house. Wendy and Carlos saw how the dogs taught the children empathy and compassion, and helped tease out their natural kindness.
There was more to it, though. Whenever Nic and Marcelo were in trouble or sad, the dogs responded instinctively. Sarbi curled up next to Nic, and Rafi’s bulk crawled onto Marcelo’s tiny lap, obscuring him. Similarly, if Gemma needed bucking up, Rafi plopped a giant paw ever so softly on her face, leaving it there, almost as if he was patting the teenager. Sarbi, who was not a particularly cuddly canine (nothing unusual there—while we humans love hugging our dogs, dogs are not overly fond of it and see it as a display of social status), intuitively put her head in Gemma’s lap and looked up at her with those gorgeous liquid brown eyes. The kids and dogs seemed inseparable. And they were.
Which is why in mid-2005 Wendy and Carlos faced a family dilemma unlike any before.
Nic had won a place at the prestigious Sydney Con-servatorium of Music, a twice-daily, two-hour commute to and from Bowral. It was too much for the youngster and the family decided to move to Sydney. Unfortunately, the regional real estate market was in a slump and Wendy and Carlos were unable to find a buyer for their beautiful house. Without a sale, they couldn’t purchase a new home with a backyard big enough for Sarbi and Rafi. Despite a suburbs-wide search, they were unable to find a landlord who permitted two huge hounds as canine tenants. The only option was to find a new home for their beloved pets. It was a heartbreaking decision and one the family agonised over.
Wendy placed an ad in the classifieds section of the local newspaper. Ideally, she hoped a like-minded family in Bowral would take Sarbi and Rafi, so they could stay on familiar territory and continue their carefree lives. A couple of families visited but left without the dogs, confessing they were simply too big. Bottom line, they feared they could not handle them.
Wendy and Carlos were getting desperate. The kids, too, fretted over finding a suitable and loving new home for Sarbi and Rafi, one that would resemble their own. The prospect of losing their beloved mutts was bad enough but the added uncertainty was close to unbearable.