A lurcher is defined as follows: half-greyhound, half something else. The something else is most frequently a collie-type scruffy-coated dog, so the classic lurcher look inclines to the great unwashed. Lurchers are grunge. If you pause to notice you’ll see that they are the typical companions of street dwellers, who will often have one curled up next to the begging bowl. This tells you something about street dwellers – lurchers tend to take at least as much from their surroundings in the way of heat as they give out. But then they do have a specific talent which will be helpful if you are hungry and homeless: they are the poacher’s dog of choice. The combined speeding instinct of the greyhound coupled with the intelligent herding gene of the collie scruff produces a very fast animal that is agile, sharp, and expert at quick turns, and so is ideally suited to sighting and picking up rabbits. They are often bred by itinerants for the activities of hare-coursing and baiting, and for lamping (chasing rabbits and game at night, using lamplight.)
Beside the more common collie-type, there are other many other lurcher matings; Ollie’s non-greyhound side is Saluki. The pure Saluki, I discover, is of Arabic origin, by all accounts notoriously aloof, stand-offish and superior. The Saluki-greyhound, as it turns out, is a particularly specialised and perverse version of a lurcher.
But not only had I never heard of a Saluki when we picked Ollie up, neither did I know he had such a side; at that point he was just the aforementioned sliver of pup.
***
About a year after Ollie had arrived, I found myself being driven from Knock Airport in County Mayo down to Galway City, a taxi ride lasting the better part of two hours.
The driver, a stocky man called Shay, was a comic. As he took our bags, he warmed up with a spiel about the use of the word ‘International’ on the airport exterior, developed a routine centred on the quality of the coffee available to the waiting cabbie inside the terminal building, and hit his stride as he gave his opinion on the newly established ban on smoking in public environments that some idiots had introduced – in Ireland of all the feckin’ places – a law which meant he’d had to leave the International Airport building in order to drink the cup of anaemic piss while he lit a fag as he awaited the late arrival of our flight.
Before we left the International Airport carpark – where parking prices were absurd, a pure joke – Shay mentioned that his own place of work, as it happened, was an exemption to the laughable new smoking law, if that was okay. As he drove and smoked, he told lurid tales about the night girls of Galway City and other associated matters; Knock airport might not be so ‘International’, for instance, but it was this very aspect that made it such a convenient hub for the trading of narcotics.
As if to prove his point, two Garda roadblocks had been set up, at each of which it was established that there were no drug mules travelling in his car. Neither of these encounters with the coppers had any effect on Shay’s flouting of the smoking law.
As we moved south and the scenery became more verdant, I spotted some horses in a field. Shay had quit the drinking, and also, it emerged, the gambling, so the talk about the horses was brief and bitter but it led on to a conversation about dogs. This was happier territory. Shay told me that he was a lurcher breeder.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’ve got one of those.’
‘What cross?’ he asked, the insider’s question. When I said Saluki-greyhound, he rolled his enormous eyes, snorted, and began to tell me how he’d once been good enough to offer such an animal an opportunity to prove itself, but that the damn thing was so hopeless, troublesome and unsatisfactory in so many different ways that, after giving it more last chances than it deserved, he had been forced to take it down to the garden and shoot it.
About a year earlier I may have regarded this as a callous act of brutality; in the light of my recent experiences I could see his point only too well.
‘What do you do with yours, then?’ he asked, meaning, I imagined, was there any slight chance that Ollie was remotely adept at picking up rabbits and coursing for hares?
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Mostly he sits on his sofa in his sleeping bag, while I tickle him behind his ears and tell him that he’s a good boy.’
Shay was delighted with this. He laughed long and hard at the amateur concept of wasting your time by introducing fairy-tale ideas into the mind of a creature who deserves nothing better than what he’s got coming to him. As we parted company Shay gave me his number. One day I’m to phone him and he’ll teach me how to train a lurcher properly, in order that it can be useful and earn its keep. And one day I really do intend to make that call.
In the meantime: