OUR DOGS

We have had three dogs and many more cats. The dogs had more vivid personalities, and I think I loved them more because of it. Our first dog was a lurcher whom we called Daisy. She had the most beautiful and kindly nature of any animal I’ve known. Once, when a friend of ours was terribly unhappy, she (the friend) was sitting on our sofa and she began to cry. Daisy came and laid her head on the friend’s knee in a gesture that could only mean deep sympathy.

We also had two pugs, a brother and sister. He, Hoagy, was black, and Nellie was fawn, the colour that most pugs are. Their hair felt different: hers was coarser than his, which was very soft, like cashmere.

I have never known such stupid creatures. They were absolutely untrainable. Whatever we tried to teach them to do, whether to sit, to come to us, to stand still, all they would do when we called was turn and look at us blankly, and then carry on with whatever they were doing.

But they bore out what I’ve noticed about human siblings: just because they were born to the same mother and father, that didn’t mean that they were similar in character. Hoagy was languid (idle, frankly) and perfectly genial. He would roll over on his back and allow himself to be tickled with no fear or hesitation. Nellie was the exact opposite. I don’t think she ever rolled over on her back in her entire life. What she thought was going to happen if she did, I don’t like to speculate, but she would squirm and wriggle and do anything to get away. You could feel a sort of nervous tension in all her muscles when you picked her up, whereas Hoagy would lie in your arms with no more animation than a beanbag.

We loved them all, of course, and did our best to keep them healthy. However, Hoagy got fatter and fatter, and we couldn’t work out why. Finally we saw him crawling back under the fence from the next door garden, and realized that he’d been visiting the students who lived there. When we asked them about it, they said, ‘Yes, he’s a great eater. He’ll eat anything except Marmite.’ They must have been feeding him for months.

The only thing that makes living with a dog less than an ideal relationship is that their lives are so much shorter than ours, and we have to arrange for their deaths when they get old and ill. That’s almost too painful to be borne, but we have to do it.

We haven’t got a dog at the moment, and I have to say that life is a lot easier: we can go away at a moment’s notice without having to find somewhere for the dog to stay. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we had another dog one day.

Philip Pullman