I SET OUT from Aviemore in my Land Rover, bumping along a narrow, icy track, pine forest closing around me, hoping I was going the right way. Eventually, when I was beginning to seriously wonder if this was the route, I came to my destination: the Cairngorm Sleddog Centre. The centre, the home of Alan and Fiona Stewart, feels about as remote as you can get in this crowded isle of ours. It’s five miles from Aviemore, but they’re a lonely five miles, with no other habitation around.
As soon as I realised I was in the right place, I paused to take in the landscape. The centre is in the foothills of the beautiful Cairngorm mountains, the highest, coldest and snowiest range in Britain. The Caledonian Forest, which used to extend over much of Scotland and stopped the Roman invaders in their tracks, may now be reduced to only 1 per cent of its original size, but it is still dense here. I was struck by how crisp and clean the air is, and how the intense wintry light sharpened the colours of the hills, the snow and the pines.
Alan Stewart came out to meet me; a friendly, energetic man whose life story is just as breath-taking as the scenery. He runs the centre, and he was going to take me on one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life, riding behind a team of 12 Alaskan huskies, being filmed for Countryfile.
Alan is, by anyone’s standards, a tough guy. He spent more than 18 years as a member of a deep-sea diving team, working all over the world as well as on the North Sea oil rigs, and he still works in the industry as a dive rep for an oil company, monitoring the dive teams working for them.
‘Working under the sea, you are at the sharp end,’ he said. ‘If you make a mistake, you are not coming back. You work at great pressure for four months of the year. So when you are back on land it can be boring, when you are used to that pressure and excitement. I am very lucky: I found something just as exciting and rewarding to fill the rest of my life.’
That something was dog racing with Alaskan huskies, an interest that consumes Alan, his wife Fiona and their son John. Alan has been running and breeding sled-dogs for 26 years, and he and Fiona have lived at their remote home for 18 years.
‘I was working in a deep saturation diving team, living at a depth of 500 feet in a pressurised container no bigger than a medium-sized van for 26 days at a time. I was reading about dogs, and luckily my superintendent was interested, and was happy to let me have blocks of time off to go to America to learn about it properly. I went over to Minnesota and worked at the kennels of a well-known sled-dog guy. It was unpaid work, but I got six or seven weeks’ training from him at a time.’
When he felt he really knew the sport, Alan started to buy his own team of dogs.
‘I’ve always bought from the best sled-dog racers, usually from one kennels in Montana, and I know the great, great grandfathers of most of my dogs.’
While he is away working, the job of looking after the dogs falls to Fiona. She is responsible for feeding them, supervising their medical care and taking care of the pups. She runs the admin for the centre, taking bookings and liaising with local hotels. She’s also, like Alan and John, a musher, and has competed at the top level in the UK. (‘Musher’ is the name given to sled-dog racers, and it’s believed to come from the French word ‘marche’, meaning ‘walk’, used by the original French settlers in the icy wilds of Canada, where travelling with sleds and dogs was a skill learnt from the indigenous people.)
Alan’s dogs are magnificent to look at, and I immediately fell in love with their wonderful thick coats and their intelligent eyes. The dogs live outside in kennels made from old whisky barrels.
‘They’re not domesticated. You can’t train them to walk on a lead or sit. They’re athletes, born to run,’ he says.
Alan’s dogs are all Alaskan huskies, descended from those dogs who were a vital form of transport in the wild and inaccessible terrain of North America and Canada, and who were used by the prospectors and miners in the Klondike gold rush days of the 1890s, a time which inspired Jack London’s famous novel, The Call of the Wild, about the tough life of a sled-dog.
The word ‘husky’ comes from ‘huskimos’, which was the name English sailors in the eighteenth century gave to all indigenous people in the far north (a corruption of the work ‘eskimo’), and by the early nineteenth century the name had transferred itself to the dogs.
Alaskan huskies are mongrels, bred specifically as sled-dogs, and first recorded in the late 1800s. They are a mix of Alaskan Malamutes and Siberian huskies, with genes from pointers and Salukis to increase speed, and a contribution from Anatolian shepherd dogs to give them a solid work ethic. Some may have greyhound blood, and some are part wolf. They are smaller and leaner than other sled-dog breeds, and because of their mixed heritage they come in different colours and with different markings. On the whole they are good with other dogs and gentle with people. They are now the fastest breed of sled-dogs, and the favourites for competitive sled-dog racing.
The first sled-dogs were Alaskan Malamutes, which probably evolved in Mongolia about 30,000 years ago, when humans migrated and trained them to pull sleds carrying their belongings. Malamutes are larger and stronger than Alaskan huskies, not bred for speed but for pulling strength. They were used in rural communities in Alaska, Canada, Lapland, Siberia, Norway, Finland and Greenland for mail deliveries, and for transporting supplies.
Other sled-dogs include the Canadian Eskimo dogs, used by the indigenous Thule people of Arctic Canada. They were used for pulling sleds, but also by the Inuits for hunting seal, musk ox and polar bears. Greenland dogs are another Eskimo breed that have high endurance, but are not noted for speed. Samoyeds, bred by the native Samoyede people of Siberia, are all-purpose dogs which haul sleds, herd reindeer and hunt. The Siberian husky is smaller than a Malamute, although there is a strong resemblance between the two breeds. They can pull large loads, but not for such long distances as the Malamutes.
The last mail delivery by dog sled was in 1963, because planes had taken over, highways had been built for trucks, and snowmobiles were being used for local transport. But the dogs live on in remote communities, and, of course, in the kennels of mushers like Alan, since dog-sled racing has become an international sport, and is particularly popular in Canada and the USA.
As well as racing dogs on snow, Alan’s dogs also pull wheeled carts, which is what I rode in. There simply isn’t enough snow to always run sleds, even in the Cairngorms.
Alan’s dogs run in teams of 12, and he changes around their positions, so that every dog gets the opportunity to lead. The worst position is to be the wheel dogs, close to the cart or the sled, and they need to be calm and steady and not worried about the wheels immediately behind them.
Travelling at great speed behind a team of dogs through the forest tracks was a peak experience for me, something I will never forget. We moved at an astonishing, bone-shaking speed, and it was inspiring to see these strong, willing dogs straining to run as fast as they could, working together as a team and clearly loving it as much as I did, confirming my oft-stated belief that dogs are happier when they have a real job to do.
Alan has raced dogs all over the world, competing at the highest level of the sport in the USA, Chile, Argentina and Europe. He was the first and only UK musher to take sled-dogs over the UK’s second highest mountain, Ben Macdui.
But the star of the family – and of all British sled-dog racing – is Alan and Fiona’s son, John, who has raced and trained dogs since he was six. As a junior he dominated all the British events, and travelled with Alan to major events all around the world, spending six weeks in the remote Chilean mountains at the age of ten. From the age of 18 he has lived and worked in the USA and Canada with the world’s greatest mushers. He and his wife Liz, also a professional musher, live in remote Wyoming. Prize money in the big events can be as high as $250,000, and John’s greatest success to date is coming second in the gruelling 700-mile Wyoming Open race. Like his dad, he is a commercial deep sea diver when not racing dog teams.
John has taken part in the most famous dog-sled race in the world: the legendary Iditarod. Alan suggested I might consider taking part in the race. I think I was tempted for a few seconds, then the reality of what it means hit home and I firmly shook my head. No thank you. It’s a gruelling endurance test that lasts for two weeks, covers 1,150 miles, and is known as ‘the last great race on earth’. Teams race through blizzards and gale-force winds that can bring the temperature down to minus 73 degrees Celsius. People have been known to veer off course, get lost and die in those conditions – not for me, thanks!
The race has been run every year since 1973, but its roots stretch back much further. The Iditarod Trail was used by indigenous people, and then by Russian fur traders, followed by gold-rush miners. Dog sleds were used all year round to deliver mail, firewood and supplies, because the seaports were closed for vicious winters which lasted from October to June.
Sled-dog racing became a popular winter sport, and in 1908 a man called ‘Scotty’ Allan started the All-Alaska Sweepstakes race, which covered 408 miles. Scotty is a great hero of Alan’s, and the Cairngorm Sleddog Centre includes a small museum dedicated to him. Scotty was a local lad – well, he was born in Dundee, only 60 miles away from Alan’s home – who was sent out to South Dakota in the early twentieth century by the local laird to deliver a valuable Clydesdale horse. Scotty saw an opportunity and stayed in the States running his own dog-sled transport business. He was an acclaimed musher, winning the race he established three times in the early 1900s, and setting up a famous breeding kennel for Alaskan huskies. He only returned to Europe to deliver dog teams to help carry supplies to the Allied troops fighting the Germans in the First World War. After the war, Scotty returned to the wilds of North America, where he became a successful businessman and politician, and never came back to Scotland.
‘We brought a bit of him home,’ said Alan. ‘To me, he is the founder of sled-dog racing, and I wanted him to be honoured in his home country.’
Sled-dogs were also used in the Second World War, transporting munitions and laying telephone wires. Teams of dogs also towed sleds to find survivors when planes went down. As a military historian said: ‘Dogs were eminently more economical than horses. Two dog teams could do the work of five horses in formidable terrain … Although it may seem that dog sleds are an obsolete mode of transport … sled dogs are still far superior to aircraft and track vehicles, a dog requires no repair shops or spare parts … In one of the most desolate and inhospitable regions on earth, the dog is still a man’s best friend.’
The most celebrated and moving story of mushing in Alaska, and one that is honoured every year when the Iditarod is run, is the Great Race of Mercy, one of the most gallant feats ever performed by dogs for their human masters. In the winter of 1924–25 the small town of Nome, in Alaska, was threatened with a diphtheria epidemic. The doctor, Curtis Welch, had placed an order for diphtheria antitoxin a few months earlier, but the shipment did not arrive before the port at Nome iced up and closed to shipping for the winter. In several weeks over the winter Dr Welch treated children for tonsillitis, four of whom died. He was increasingly convinced he could have a diphtheria epidemic on his hands, and when he had two confirmed cases in children, both of whom also died, the mayor of Nome arranged an emergency town meeting, and the whole town was quarantined, to prevent the epidemic spreading. Dr Welch sent radio telegrams to all other towns in Alaska, alerting them to the threat, and also to the US Public Health Service in Washington.
‘An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here. Stop. I am in urgent need of one million units of diphtheria antitoxin. Stop. Mail is the only form of transportation. Stop.’
When the serum was obtained from west coast hospitals it had to be shipped to Seattle and then on to Seward, before it could begin the journey across Alaska. But a smaller supply was at Anchorage hospital; not enough to defeat the epidemic but sufficient to hold it at bay until the larger shipment arrived. It was taken by train to Nenana, 674 miles from Nome.
Dr Welch calculated that the serum would only last for six days in the brutal winter conditions, with temperatures at an all-time low and snow drifts and high winds burying the route and making the going tough. The dog sleds would have to travel by night as well as day, and make record-breaking times to get there, on a route that offered no protection from blizzards, and included a 42-mile stretch across the shifting ice of the Bering Sea.
A relay of the best dog teams in Alaska set off. Most of the dog mushers were direct descendants of native Athabaskans, the indigenous people who were the original dog mushers, and who now worked for the mail delivery service.
It was a brutal run. One musher arrived with half of his face blackened by frostbite, having made a run of 52 miles – double the 25 that makes for ‘an extreme day’s mush’ and the third-longest leg of the relay. Another musher had to have hot water poured over his hands to get them off the sled’s handlebar. The teams travelled by day and night. One of the mushers had to take over pulling the sled himself after two of his dogs died.
The longest section was run by Leonhard Seppala with his lead dog Togo, and they travelled 91 miles into an oncoming storm with gale-force winds and a wind chill of minus 65 degrees. Twelve-year-old Togo led the team across the sea ice in the dark, using his sense of smell to keep them on course. After feeding the dogs and resting them for six hours, they set off again in the teeth of a blizzard, climbing 1,500 metres up Little McKinley Mountain, before passing the serum on to the next runner. The dogs were near collapse, and Togo was never able to race again.
The final stage was taken by a musher called Gunnar Kaasen with his lead dog Balto. When his sled flipped over in the storm he nearly lost the cylinder of serum, and had frostbitten hands through groping for it on his hands and knees in the dark. They ran a total of 53 miles, the second-longest leg.
When the serum was triumphantly delivered, not one vial was broken, and it was thawed and ready for Dr Welch to use about seven hours after arriving. The whole trip had taken five days and seven and a half hours, a world record achieved in ferociously bad conditions. Several dogs died during the trip, but the people of Nome were saved. The death toll was five or six, but Dr Welch estimated that as many as a hundred more died in the camps of indigenous people outside the town, where no medicine was available. A second run was made by many of the same mushers when the rest of the serum arrived, but the time pressure was not so acute, even though weather conditions were still appalling. Critics had argued that transportation by plane would have been better, but on this second delivery, when a plane was to be used to carry half the delivery, it failed to take off on two consecutive days because of the conditions, and even the greatest advocates of technology over dogs had to concede that the dogs were the only way the serum would have made it in time.
All the mushers received letters from the president and a gold medal. Balto became the greatest star, and there is a statue of him in New York’s Central Park, with the inscription ‘Endurance. Fidelity. Intelligence’. Among mushers, though, the greatest respect is given to Leonhard Seppala, who with Togo did the longest and most difficult leg of the run, and apparently Seppala died unhappy that Balto was getting the credit: ‘I never had a better dog than Togo. His loyalty, stamina and intelligence could not be improved on. He was the best dog that ever travelled the Alaska trail,’ he said.
The Iditarod Trail race today does not follow the route taken by the dogs delivering the serum, but the race commemorates the bravery of the men and dogs who saved the town. The Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award is given every year to the musher who provides the best care for his dogs during the race.
The modern Iditarod race was started to encourage the preservation of sled-dogs. The traditional Iditarod trail was becoming overgrown and forgotten, until a man called Joe Redington started clearing it to work as a hunting guide. He was depressed that the invention of the snowmobile had almost wiped out the role of the sled-dog in ten years. He and an associate, Dorothy Page, started a 25-mile race to encourage owners to keep and breed these fantastic dogs, and a few years later the race expanded, and mushers and their dog teams were running the full Iditarod.
I’m full of huge admiration for Alan’s son John who has done the race, and all the other mushers who face the unforgiving conditions of the trail each year. But I think I made the right decision to give it a miss …
When I visited Alan, as well as the huskies he had a German pointer, Buster, who used to run with the dog teams. Buster had another job: when Alan bred a litter of puppies, once they were weaned they were taken from their mothers (who went back into harness to pull sleds) and they roamed free, with the pointer rounding them up and keeping them safe. He even took them swimming in the river. Alan explains, ‘No husky puppy goes into harness until it is 18 months old, and they never go on a lead. With Buster with them, I always knew they were safe.’
Alan now has another dog who also has a vital role at the centre. Arnold is an Australian blue heeler, also known as an Australian cattle dog, a breed that is used for rounding up and driving cattle in the outback. Arnold has a different job from Buster: he takes the old huskies out for walks. There are four or five old ones, no longer able to join the sled teams, so Arnold rounds them up and, with a walkie-talkie round his neck so that Alan can communicate with him, trots off with them for a walk. As soon as the old dogs spot Arnold they are ready to go. ‘The walkie-talkie means I can keep my voice low, because you never raise your voice to huskies,’ Alan says. Alan told me he’d wanted a blue heeler because he’d seen them when he worked in Australia years before. I’d seen them, though I’d never worked with them, but I understood why he liked them. They are a tough, energetic breed, known for their incredible loyalty to their masters. Alan intended to import one from Australia, but then he found out about a breeder in Italy. He rang her while he was out on an oil rig, and she told him he could do her a great favour if he was prepared to take a heeler who had not worked out in its home in England because it was too excitable.
Now Arnold has definitely found his niche. He lives outside Alan and Fiona’s cottage, on a long line.
‘We need a guard dog because we are in the middle of nowhere, and he alerts us to trouble. There is an osprey nest near to us, and we have had thieves trying to steal the eggs.’
As well as the ospreys there are plenty of other rare breeds around Alan’s home: ‘The cottage we live in once belonged to the man who introduced reindeer to Britain,’ he says. The herd of reindeer in the Cairngorms is the only wild herd in the country.
The isolation of the life is normal for Alan and Fiona, and they both love it.
‘Not many people can understand why we do it. Even the ones who want to take up sled-dog racing find it harder than they imagined. Many of them go into it because they like the look of it, but 80 per cent of the people who take it up only last two or three years. I feel sorry for people who do it as a hobby, as they miss most of the pleasure of having dogs, and I feel sorry for the dogs, because they need to run. The courses we organise are meant to show people the reality of it, so they don’t go into it with romantic notions. It’s hard work.’
I know better than most people the amount of time and energy that you need to have working dogs, but Alan’s kennels are on a much bigger scale than anything I have ever dealt with. Because the centre is winding down, through lack of snow, Alan now has only 26 dogs, but there were 36 when I was there.
‘We knew global warming was happening, but we never expected it to come this quickly. I used to have my dogs in training mode for seven months of the year, and I could take clients out all that time. Now the season is down to four months. It was too warm to take the dogs out last Christmas Day, and even John, living in Wyoming, has had to take the dog teams up to Alaska to find snow. I used to be able to take a sled across the mountains, but I can’t now.’
I enjoyed my visit to Alan and Fiona so much that I seriously considered having one of their puppies. As well as the dog-sled teams, Alan showed me two-wheeled scooters that are pulled by one dog, and I loved the idea of being able to zoom about being towed by one of these beautiful animals.
When I got home I had a quick reality check. Life on a farm is always very busy, and when I add on my Countryfile filming, there is no spare time left. A sled dog requires regular running, and, unlike all my other dogs, it could not wander around the farm with me. I got in touch with Alan and told him that I wouldn’t be able to give the dog the life it deserved and needed.
It is very sad that Alan’s centre is winding down. But Alan is never going to put his feet up in front of the fire: he’s found himself another high-adrenalin sport, racing specialised off-road vehicles. And sled-dog racing is such a big sport in North America and Canada that the future of these fantastic dogs is assured, at least as long as there is enough snow.
I knew before I reached Alan’s remote centre that I was going to love his dogs. Not only is the breed beautiful to look at, but they are the sort of dogs I relate to: working dogs with a strong purpose in life.
But I have to admit I was very pleased when I met another breed, the Yorkshire terrier, to have my prejudices overturned. Yorkshire terriers are cute little things, with a reputation as handbag dogs, wearing ribbons in their hair and posing prettily with their little heads cocked to one side.
Not my type of dog, I thought. And then I met David Ward and his two little Yorkies, Sika and Turtle, when I was making a series of programmes for Countryfile on county breeds. In each county I went to, I met and found out about the animals that originate there. In Yorkshire I met Swaledale and Wensleydale sheep, a Cleveland Bay horse, large white pigs and, finally, Yorkshire terrier dogs.
I came away with a new respect for these tough little fellows. They were originally working dogs just as much as my sheepdogs or the Alaskan huskies, although nowadays far more are kept as companion dogs. I discovered they punch well above their weight in terms of ferocity, stamina and loyalty, and they’ve got a big attitude for such a little dog. What’s more, in a survey of dog owners, it’s apparently Yorkie owners who are the happiest, so the little fellas obviously bring a lot of pleasure with them.
They were bred for ratting in the textile and woollen mills of Yorkshire. They were small enough to get behind the large looms, and brave enough to corner and take on any rodent, shaking it to death.
‘They’re lightning quick, and they can get into all the nooks and crannies,’ David told me. ‘And they are not frightened of anything. They’re a big dog in a small body. They’ll tackle any dog that they think is threatening them – don’t be deceived by the ribbon in their hair.’
In the 1800s there was an influx of Scottish labourers into Yorkshire, looking for work. It was the time of the Industrial Revolution, and factories and mills were springing up all over the county. The labourers brought with them small terrier dogs of non-descript breeds, which were great hunters and ratters. They’d been used in Scotland for hunting animals that lived in burrows and dens, like badgers and foxes. The dogs were carried in the pockets of the hunters and then released into the dens of the wild animals, fighting fiercely with their cornered prey. They were encouraged to bark, so that the hunters would know where to dig to catch the quarry and retrieve their dogs. They were famous for standing their ground, and were so determined they would risk their lives in the struggle rather than give up.
They found a natural home in the mills, and also down the coal mines of Yorkshire. Cats were used for catching mice, but rats are often too large and vicious for a cat to handle. The dogs were also useful in the overcrowded slums that sprung up to house the millworkers, again keeping the rat population down. There are no records of what breeds these small dogs from Scotland were, but it is believed they were Clydesdale, Paisley and Skye terriers, which interbred with other small dogs. The dogs’ history and lineage was of little importance to the mill workers: all they wanted was a good ratting dog that they could take hunting as well. It wasn’t until 1874 that the breed was given the official name of Yorkshire terriers, affectionately known as Yorkies.
In the Victorian era they were adopted as pets, and became the pampered pooches that many people like me mistakenly thought was their true calling. It’s easy to see why they became so popular in the salons of Victorian England: they are small, cute, fond of attention and easy to train. As the breed has been bred to be even smaller, they don’t need very large amounts of exercise, which makes them an ideal town dog, but they are bright, and they definitely keep their owners on their toes if they don’t get enough mental stimulation. In Stanley Coren’s book, The Intelligence of Dogs, the Yorkie comes in at number 27, an ‘above average working dog’, and the highest ranked of all the terriers.
David, who converted me to them, uses his when he goes shooting, to stalk deer and rabbits. He showed me how they worked in the mills by taking them into a barn and turning them loose among some bales of hay, where they darted about, looking for rats or other vermin. I could see how useful they were, and how families must have relied on them to keep rats away from their homes. Unlike my soft-mouthed gundogs, the spaniels, Labradors and Vizslas that I am used to, these little fellas have a terrier instinct to shake anything they chase down, to stop the rat or other prey biting them. You can see this in the way they shake newspapers (I’ve got a friend whose terrier regularly shreds her daily paper and her post) or dog toys.
Now, whenever I see a Yorkie, even if it has a ribbon in its hair, I don’t dismiss it as a handbag dog, or an old lady’s petted pooch: I see it for the spirited little working dog that it really is.
It’s not only through Countryfile that I meet other breeds of dogs, and discover their histories. Just as I had never really given much thought to Yorkies before I met them, similarly I didn’t know much about whippets until they came into my life through some very good friends of ours. Now I know what wonderful dogs they are, and how they have also been bred for centuries to help out their owners, including in a very surprising way.
Whippets were a multi-purpose dog to their peasant owners in the north of England and Wales. They are sighthounds, the sort of dogs that hunt by keeping their prey in view, and then overpowering it with their great speed and agility. They were very useful for bringing in rabbits for the family pot. They are able to detect motion faster than many other breeds, so the slightest rustling in a hedgerow will send them off in pursuit before their owner or another dog would have spotted anything.
The name ‘whippet’ comes from an early seventeenth-century word meaning to ‘move briskly’, which we still use in the abbreviated form of ‘whip’. For example, we talk of the wind ‘whipping across the fields’. Whippets look like small greyhounds, and that’s exactly where they come from: when a greyhound pup was too small for the landowner to use for stag hunting, it was given back to the peasant who bred it. Sadly, the small pup was often maimed, by having a tendon in its leg cut or a toe removed, because under the forest law peasants could not own hunting dogs. The dogs defied their disabilities and were still used for poaching hares and rabbits, and ratting. When the forest law was repealed these small greyhounds became very popular, and by the time of the Industrial Revolution they were well established in northern parts of the country, where they were prized for their speed. From their basic use, providing food for the table, developed sports such as hare coursing and racing against other dogs, and a whole betting culture evolved around them. Race tracks were established and whippet racing was a very popular Sunday outing for the whole family. There is today a very well established whippet-racing calendar, all across the country.
But there was another use for whippets, which surprised and fascinated me. In the days before central heating, when bedrooms of peasant cottages or industrial slums were cold enough to have ice inside the windows, and poverty meant there were not always enough blankets to keep children warm, whippets became furry hot water bottles, put into the beds of toddlers and small children. They were perfect for the job, not shedding hair to trigger allergies, and being delighted to burrow under the covers.
It’s a great tribute to the gentle nature of whippets that parents trusted them with this vital job. It must have been a huge comfort to many a child to snuggle up to sleep with their own permanent source of heat. I can remember how much I loved sharing my bed with Nita (although she never came under the covers). For these children, there was not only the companionship of the dog, but the vital warmth of its body.
It’s possible the instinct to climb under the covers was bred into them, or it may simply be because they are naturally skinny, with no extra layer of fat, and their coat is thin with no soft underfur, so they enjoy the warmth of the bed covers and of the human being they are snuggled up against. It’s definitely something they still want to do, as any whippet owner will tell you.
My friend David Bridgwater and his wife Lucy have actually bought a bigger bed – going from double to king size – to allow room for their whippet Molly. Now there’s love for you.
David was a top horse jockey, riding over 500 winners, coming second in the Grand National and second in the jockey’s championship one year, and is now a successful race-horse trainer. He and Lucy have had whippets for over 20 years, often several at a time, but until his children grew up and moved out, the dogs shared their beds. Now that George is at university and Poppy is an apprentice jockey with Andrew Balding (brother of Clare), Molly has decided that she needs to sleep with David and Lucy.
‘She used to share Poppy’s bed, and if Poppy wasn’t around she slept with George. Now she snuggles under our duvet, right inside the bed.’
It was Lucy who originally chose whippets as a family pet, although David says: ‘They say owners choose dogs that look like them – well, I like to think that once upon a time I was a whippet …’
I came to know David and Lucy when Poppy and my daughter Ella became best friends when they were really young and at school together. It was in David’s yard that I first encountered whippets. He told me what great pets they make:
‘They are never aggressive, very placid. They’re easy to train, they don’t moult, they are great with children, other dogs and brilliant around horses and other animals.’
Molly and her predecessors spend their day in the farm yard at David’s stables, and he has found their gentle presence is a good, calming influence on the race horses he trains. He also has two Dobermans, Stan and Maud, who live in the yard, as guard dogs, and a collection of other free-range animals, including cats, chickens, two pygmy goats and my namesake, Adam the goat. Adam came originally from my farm, and David chose the name for that reason ‘and also because there is a slight ginger tint in his coat’.
I gave David the goat after one of his two pet sheep died.
‘When the children were toddlers I took them to see lambs being born at a nearby farm,’ he said. ‘The farmer moved one newborn lamb into a corner. When I asked why, he said there were too many for the ewe to feed, and they had too many to bottle-feed. So I thought it would be fun for the children if we took it home and bottle-fed it ourselves. A minute or two later another one was put in the corner, so we took that one, too. Then I left quickly before we ended up with any more …’
David found the sheep were great companions for the race horses, which can be highly strung. When one of the sheep died young, he asked me if I could provide a companion. That’s where Adam, a Boer cross goat from Cotswold Farm Park came in.
‘He’s very much part of the family, along with Libby and Lulu, the two pygmy goats. He’s quite an old man by now, but he’s not showing much sign of ageing. On a sunny day there’s a spot in the yard where all the animals go to sunbathe, and you see them all cuddled up together: goats, cats, dogs and even the chickens. Molly the whippet is always in the mix, she loves snuggling up to the others.’
Since I met David and Lucy’s whippets I have encountered another beautiful whippet. Doris Churchley is another family friend: she used to look after our children when Charlie and I were working, and now she moves in to look after our dogs and cats when we go away on holiday. She’s part of the family.
When Doris decided she wanted her own dog, she was tempted to have a Labrador: ‘That’s the breed I grew up with, but I wanted something smaller. I wanted a gentle, placid, loyal dog that likes other animals, because I work with horses. I didn’t think of whippets at first, but when I looked into them I realised they fitted the bill completely.’
I remember when Doris brought her puppy, Myrtle, to introduce her to us. She was tiny, and so lovely to look at, a beautiful slate-grey colour with blue eyes. I can easily understand why anyone falls in love with them.
Like David and Lucy, Doris has to share her bed with Myrtle: ‘She’s under my duvet at the first opportunity. She sleeps curled up by my back, or in the crook of my legs. And, unlike a hot water bottle, she is still warm in the morning. She also loves pregnant women: she lies across their bumps. She’s great with children, following them around devotedly. I can understand why they were used to keep children warm in bed, because they love children, and they give off a lot of heat.’
When Doris house-sits for us, Myrtle gets on well with our dogs. ‘Dolly, the old Vizsla, used to ignore her, but Boo really loves her. They run around together. She likes all other dogs except other whippets: she gets jealous if I show any attention or affection to another whippet.’
Using dogs for warmth is not confined to whippets: many of today’s lap dogs started life as ‘comforters’, or mobile hot water bottles. However cute dogs like Cavalier King Charles spaniels are, they were only partly chosen as fashion statements. They, and all the other small breeds, enjoyed a lot of popularity among the landed gentry, not only for keeping their owners warm, but also because it was believed they attracted fleas away from their human hosts, back in the days when hygiene wasn’t what it is today. Parasites were no respecter of titles or wealth: every seventeenth-century lord and lady had a problem with fleas and lice, and dogs were adopted as allies in the never-ending struggle against infestations, in the belief that the fleas would jump ship onto the dog.
It’s probably the most bizarre instance of a job for a dog that I’ve ever heard about. But it shows that even the smallest, cutest toy dog was, in its own weird way, a working dog. They also serve who only sit on a lap …