Farewell to Jordan

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

Jordan, my beloved friend, is dead. The lines from Wordsworth are perhaps a little hyperbolic, but seem to fit. The insult of death, especially when it’s sudden, has a melodramatic aspect to it.

Jordan (a pseudonym) was the ginger-coloured spaniel of my elder sister and her family. Only seven years old, he had a tumour on the liver. It wasn’t diagnosed until a few days before his death – he'd stopped eating and had no energy. My brother-in-law rang me on the Tuesday night at about six pm and told me that Jordan was going to be put to sleep the following day. Would I like to come over and say goodbye?

When I got there an open fire was burning in the lounge room and a lamp cast a soft light. Jordan lay on a rug in front of the fire, surrounded by his immediate family along with another of my sisters and her two daughters. At the sight of me he lifted his head and his bushy tail wagged for a second or two. I sobbed into his fur. But he was not the playful puppy I loved. He was a very sick dog who was focused on the business of dying, and who had to be stroked carefully for fear of hurting him.

For the first few years of his life I walked him twice a week, usually in mid-morning, at the nearby Ainslie Park. This was the source of the intimacy we shared, when we revelled in the wind and the trees and the feeling of freedom. I wrote a few blog entries on our fun times and travails, and the ongoing conflict with my sister and her husband over their treatment of Jordan.

I taught him to heel and to stay, and unsuccessfully tried to teach him to return the ball. Whether he would do the latter was conditional on whether you had a treat ready to give him – he’d have ‘a bob both ways’, throwing the ball down with his mouth and then quickly nosing at my hand for the treat, then picking the ball up again if the hand was empty. ‘Jordan, the point to giving the ball back is that I can throw it again!’ But all my efforts were in vain. Still, he heeled and stayed like a true champ.

On one of our typical walks, we stagger along the picturesque walkway with its crunchy white gravel, cross narrow Ainslie Road and we’re at the park entrance, Jordan pulling at the leash and frantically sniffing any dogs arriving and departing (his heeling skills would manifest in inverse proportion to our closeness to the park). Passing under the winding avenue of large elm trees, I tell him we are nearing the oval, knowing that dogs understand some English (the average number of words is apparently 165).

When we get there I lean down and unclip the leash from his collar, feeling the little torso quiver in anticipation. ‘Free!’ I yell like a demented army sergeant, wanting to make the distinction clear between the discipline of the paths and the liberty of the oval. He dashes off for a while as if I’m his sworn enemy and then slows down and seems to lose focus. He is caught by the rich cocktail of smells locked in the grass. From now on he will alternate between a complete absorption in these messages and a focus on me and the other dogs.

He is always a little lost, a little confused, a bit ADD. I don’t think he’s dumb though – I think it’s a case of overstimulation. There are too many messages pinging across to those extraordinary olfactory nerves. One of his favourite things to do in the park is to roll on the grass, bathing himself in the scents of manure and whatever else he can smell (apparently wolves do this in order to bring information back to the pack). He always has a far-off, blissed-out expression when he does this.

Under my uneven supervision, Jordan cheated death a couple of times, disappearing in the direction of busy Wattle Road on one occasion, and dashing across the quiet street at the back of the park on the other, when there luckily happened to be no cars on it. (The risk I took in regularly walking someone else’s dog – I shudder at it. There were other incidents too – dogs, people and sometimes kids and babies make for scary combinations and I was out of my depth sometimes.)

The saddest thing – which I don’t want to write about but must – is that I had abandoned Jordan before his death; put the relationships with my sister and her husband in the too-hard basket, and therefore my friendship with him. It was part of my growing ‘maturity’, to accept that I wasn’t close to the family and therefore couldn’t hope to be close to their dog. (Meanwhile my interactions with the neglected puppies in the semi-detached next door were childishly passive-aggressive towards their owner.)

But it was true, I didn’t feel welcome at his house. And his life was sad; he told me as much the last time I took him to the park. I think it was January, I don’t remember exactly, when I decided on a whim to ring up and ask to take him on a walk and the answer was yes, of course. He wasn’t getting enough exercise at this point and by the age of about six had become portly, as well as stiff from a disc injury. We had a lovely roam that day, but at one point he grew sad and we sat on the grass and he looked pensive, slowly blinking those impossibly long eyelashes.

That walk was the last time I saw him well, as the Jordan I knew and loved. I found his life hard to witness; easier to stay away and whinge about the way our society treats dogs and congratulate myself on not having one myself.

How much did my early support make his loneliness harder to bear? Did he wonder when I was coming next? How much did he suffer and how much of that suffering was related to me? There are no answers to these questions.

Yet it’s not guilt I feel exactly, just regret. What this has taught me is that you cannot simply sever a connection of longstanding with someone just because they aren’t human. The connection remains. I have no doubt that Jordan remembered me and regretted my absence from his life.

My initial grief was quite bitter and full of despair for the loneliness of his life. But now, less than a week later, I’m able to take a more balanced view. His life wasn’t all sadness. There were family holidays to the New South Wales coast, walks with my sister, and pats in the evenings in front of TV. He had wormed his way inside the house from being an outside dog, and for the last six months of his life slept in my sister and her husband’s bedroom. Also, various renovations of my sister’s house have been going on for years, and the builders often brought their dogs along with them (tradies often seem to have strong bonds with their dogs). And even though he was alone too much, he lived in the moment, and could rise to puppy excitement as soon as the prospect of interaction presented itself.

One impediment to the grieving process is that no memorial service is planned. In the absence of that, my perfect funeral for him is played in my head, a mixture of inspiring songs and stories about his escapades.

I sit at my computer and play those songs on YouTube. The following have provided much comfort: ‘Short note’ by Matt Finish, ‘I sing the body electric’ from the film Fame, and ‘The valley’, soulfully sung by the inimitable KD. Leo Sayer in his early emo period has been helpful. The soppiest Barbara Streisand standards have been inevitable.

The absence of a funeral also sent me on a return visit to the park last weekend, to see what it was like without him and to understand. I sat alone on a bench at the edge of the oval in my sunglasses, melodramatic as a movie star. The dead leaves from the elm tree above me tinkled down a few at a time. The sky couldn’t decide what it was doing – there were long brushes of cirrus as well as bits of cumulus cloud. The light felt wrong – overcast and glare-y at the same time. The few dog owners and their dogs seemed a long way away; the dogs looked like yearlings, just overgrown puppies. I didn’t know any of them. None of the people I had got to know at the park were there. The sense of time having passed was excruciating. I realised that the park and Jordan and I had long finished – and I was mourning that period of my life for the first time.

It’s the very physicality of dogs that makes it harrowing to mourn them. Our relationships with them have less cerebral content than those we share with humans, and are based on the shared experience of the moment. I find it hard to picture Jordan’s face, and although I hadn’t seen him for ages until the night before he died, part of the reason for the lack of a mental image is the sense that his essence was expressed in motion rather than speech. Jordan's essence - that of a sometimes daffy 'people person' with a stubborn streak, who knew his own mind, was loyal to a fault and endlessly optimistic - is still with me and I hope always will be.

Farewell, my darling. Thanks for the happy times. Your aunty misses you so much, but she knows that you're no longer suffering and is endlessly grateful for your loving friendship.

PS: The photo above isn't of Jordan, but is an uncanny likeness of him as a puppy from the Dogs Trust website.

Tweet

Help End Puppy Farm Cruelty (Content warning: upsetting image & descriptions of animal welfare conditions)

Dogs and cats are sensitive, intelligent animals who feel pain, extreme temperatures, hunger and fear just like humans. Yet in Victoria’s puppy and kitten farms they exist in conditions we wouldn't condone for the most ruthless criminals. This is not the behaviour of a civilised society.

The Victorian Coalition government went to the last election promising drastic improvements to the laws governing puppy farms. But the government’s revised Code of Practice for the Operation of Breeding and Rearing Businesses actually reduces animal welfare standards.

If it becomes law it will lead to horrific conditions and appalling situations for dogs as well as cats. The RSPCA’s verdict is damning: ‘this code legalises some of the abhorrent conditions and practices regularly seen by our Inspectors at puppy factories’. (Ironically, Victoria’s premier, Dr Denis Napthine, is a veterinarian by profession.)

Recommendations in the revised code include the following: 

• If litters of puppies are included, the ratio of carers to animals could be as little as 1:500 outside business hours.
• Maximum litter numbers for females will be increased while males will have no maximum number.
• There will be no maximum breeding age or period that an animal could be bred from, so these animals could potentially spend their entire lifetime confined to farms.
• There will be no requirement to regulate temperatures, that is, to provide cooling and heating.
• The recommendations allow for ‘any method’ of euthanasia as long as it is ‘humane’, but ‘humane’ isn’t defined. In theory methods of death could include shooting or bashing, causing incredible suffering.
• Breeding between second-generation related animals will be acceptable.
• Tethering is allowed (except for some categories of breeding females). RSPCA Victoria advises against tethering.
• The code will allow working dogs to be housed in small raised pens with wire floors.
• Breeders, rather than vets, will be able to declare an animal fit for sale. Not only do breeders lack the appropriate qualifications to do this, but this may also mean that neither the animal nor the buyer will be protected from post-sale welfare or return issues.

The campaign for animal welfare standards in breeding farms is being spearheaded by RSPCA Victoria – more background can be found here.

The government is calling for feedback on the revised Code of Practice, and the deadline is 9 am on Wednesday 14 August.

I’ve created a campaign on this issue through GetUp! Please sign the petition and demand that the Victorian Minister for Agriculture, Peter Walsh, include in the code of practice the minimum animal welfare standards recommended by the RSPCA. (It would be great if you could sign before 14 August, but the campaign will continue after this date.)

Please also share the petition on Facebook and Twitter.

You can also write to the Minister directly and to the Premier, Dr Denis Napthine.

Ultimately puppy and kitten farms should be abolished, and this is the aim of the Oscar’s Law campaign (and RSPCA Victoria). I completely agree with this aim, and would like to see the selling of dogs and cats through pet shops become illegal.

But this is a humanitarian emergency: in the meantime breeding dogs and cats must be legally protected by meaningful animal welfare standards. The Victorian Government must stop giving breeders carte blanche to mistreat these animals, and shoulder their responsibility for the welfare of animals in Victoria.

Please share this far and wide using the social media buttons below.

Tweet

Dog Despair

Neurotic and self-obsessed as I am, minor physical problems can throw me into a tizz. I metaphorically shake my fist at the sky and am haunted by dark imaginings of future health nightmares: rosacea will scar my face horribly; tinnitus will sound like a crazed pizza deliverer who keeps knocking at the front door, never realising he's come to the wrong place; I'll get permanent brain damage from the black mould on the kitchen ceiling. And then I pick myself up and gradually learn to manage and adjust to the latest issue that life and ageing have imposed.

When other people in my life show signs of ill-health it’s even more dire. These people are not supposed to get sick. They are there to support me, aren’t they? (Well actually no, but that’s what I believe deep down.) When family members acquire conditions much more serious than whatever I’ve had to put up with physically speaking, it feels as if the universe is making a direct attack on my fragile support systems. Forget the people themselves.

The people may not necessarily be human.

So far I’ve taken three paragraphs to get around to the point of this blog entry: Jordan, the 99-per-cent-cocker-spaniel-one-per-cent-cute dog that belongs to the family of one my sisters and that I used to walk in the park twice a week, has a slipped disc.

As soon as I write this, it starts to sound trivial. Anything to do with dogs ultimately does. Their status is infinitely limited compared with humans. The ones who are truly cosseted are derided by society with the label ‘pooch’.

As with all non-human animals, part of the reason we trivialise their suffering is because they can’t tell us how they’re feeling. So we take the easy way out and assume they put up with suffering more easily than we do. We tell ourselves that animals are hardy creatures who live and die in the wild without doctors, artificial heating, or guarantees of a regular food source, and that with us as their carers they have it made. I wish that as a society we could start to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Jordan has his own chair in the lounge room because the family don’t like him sitting on their large modular couch. His old chair – a black swivel leather chair – was fine. But they didn’t like the look of it so they got him a new one and that’s when the trouble started. The new chair was too high for him and he slipped a disc when trying to jump up onto it.

I went around to my sister’s place last Friday to say hello to Jordan and sit with him for a while. I kind of invited myself, something I normally don't do, but I was anxious to see that he was okay and give him some time. My sister agreed to me dropping over at 4.30 that day, and I promised her she wouldn't have to stop and entertain me. The self-invitation turned out to be a perfectly predictable mistake. 

I found him worse than I’d wanted to believe. He greeted me at the front door so excited he was shivering compulsively, but when placed back in his previous position he lay there listlessly. He can walk around slowly but should be resting. Watching his attempt to simply sit on his haunches was pitiful: tentatively moving his bum towards the floor, then giving up; obviously too painful. He is, to put it bluntly, temporarily disabled. Someone who didn’t know what was wrong might assume he was an elderly dog with a terrible case of arthritis.

My sister has taken him to the vet and he is now on painkillers and will go back for a further check-up next week, with x-rays a possibility if he makes no progress. He is obviously in some pain even when still, but it is not so extreme that he is yelping, as he was before the painkillers. ‘It could be months ...’ I said to my sister, who is a nurse and understands the travails of recovery. She nodded. ‘I know,’ she said in her irritable way. When she lets herself stop and focus on Jordan, she has a reservoir of affection for him, calling him puppy even though he's now five years old, and insisting that he uses his long ginger-coloured eyelashes to communicate: 'Look, see how he blinks to tell you how he's feeling!'

But the spigot of her empathy is easily turned off. Since the onset of the condition Jordan is allowed to sit on the couch with a towel underneath, but apparently only during the day when my sister is not at work. ‘We need the couch to ourselves,’ she explained as she relegated him to a corner next to the television at around 5.30 pm. In this alternative position he lies on a doubled-over rug where he can’t see the television screen; not that he seems much interested in it, but it means he’s cut off from what the rest of the family is doing when they’re all sitting down together to watch it. Jordan’s haunted, unhappy eyes shone darkly from this lowly (and probably colder) position; I imagine this alternative spot is because my sister’s husband doesn’t like him being on the couch, and was due home any minute.

There's no one to blame for this mishap, and it wasn't foreseeable. But I can't help seeing a kind of metaphoric correlation between the family's lack of care and Jordan's current state. They seem obscurely to blame for not watching over him more closely. And assuming Jordan’s new chair was higher than the couch, the family’s subtle distancing of him (not allowing him on the couch in the first place) has inadvertently contributed. My sister is cosseting him somewhat, but not enough.

My tenuous relationship with him has become even more fragile, because I can only see him within the confines of the house, where I am soon made to feel unwelcome – ‘of course you can stay, sorry, could you get off the couch? I have to tidy up, I’m always like this on a Friday afternoon’ – and I am shooed out along with the dirt my sister is sweeping up from the living room floor in preparation for her husband’s return from work.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Dog Days.

Tweet

Progress report: diet, dogs and trying to meditate

I’ve been meaning to write something about the changes I’ve noticed since going on an incredibly strict food intolerance diet, and thought I'd combine a progress report with a couple of other ‘developments’.

I’m on a strict version of the Failsafe diet, which rules out all food additives as well as two groups of chemicals that occur naturally in foods: salicylates and amines. My diet is also gluten-free, dairy-free, yeast-free, fruit-free, and sugar-free (the first four of these additional restrictions are necessary for some Failsafers, but not all).

I’d been on a diet that had these four restrictions as their basis for many years (though with plenty of ‘lapses’) but never tried to avoid salicylates and amines (in no way am I suggesting that others should follow this diet, especially the extreme version I’m on!).

Researchers have found that not only does the Failsafe diet improve the symptoms of ADHD but it also improves behaviour and mood including depression. Food intolerance has also been linked with a number of other mental disorders.

So, even though an outbreak of hives drove me to this extreme rather than my mental ups and downs, I was curious as to what effect the diet would have on my overall mental and cognitive state now that I’ve been on it a couple of months.

So what changes have I noticed? My memory is definitely better. I’m retaining more of what I read. My thinking is sharper. My mood is also better, except on overcast days. I still get sad a lot, but it passes. I generally feel more positive.

I’m less angry. I noticed this when catching up with a friend recently. She’s a lovely person but a bit chaotic, and sometimes I’d get annoyed when she complained about her life. Last time I met up with her I was amazed at how calm I felt.

My concentration isn’t all that much better, though, mainly because my mind is less tired and quite ‘busy’. In fact, if anything I feel more concerned about particular activities that feel vitally important (for example, writing comments on political opinion sites!).

This feeling is quite compulsive – it’s been there for years in anything related to work or effort; but I think I’m just noticing it more because my thinking’s clearer, and it’s strengthened the sense that I may have a form of OCD, albeit not focused on things like germs and counting. The obsessiveness is also centred on what’s wrong with my body and mind – yet I’ve been less focused on my bodily imperfections lately, though winter could be the cause of this rather than the Failsafe diet.

I still have social phobia. However, there has been a small decrease in my physical anxiety.

The Failsafe diet dismisses sugar as a contributor to children’s behavioural and mood problems. Instead, it links hypoglycemic symptoms with salicylate intolerance. Failsafe also dismisses the scientifically controversial phenomenon of leaky gut, which some believe can cause and worsen food intolerances and an overgrowth of Candida, a type of yeast.

I still have low blood sugar, although I have to admit it seems to be less severe. I don’t know whether or not I have leaky gut but I still feel more tired, vaguer and quite depressed on overcast days, and I still get PMT during which my hypoglycemia is significantly worse. And, sad to say, I still have rosacea – being on an amazingly restricted diet hasn’t stopped me having red, rashy cheeks.

All the changes I’ve experienced are subtle – I don’t feel transformed, just a bit stronger, and I wouldn’t have the confidence to make a major change like applying for an in-house job.

My family and other animals

Sorry about the hackneyed heading, but it was just too relevant not to use! I have ongoing ‘difficulties’ with my family of origin, and these have deepened in recent years because two of my sisters acquired dogs and I wasn’t happy with the treatment of these unfortunate canines. I’m still not, but I wanted to report some progress on that front (I’ve changed everyone’s names).

There are two dogs in this saga. Jordan is a lively, mischievous, ginger-coloured, mostly-cocker-spaniel owned by my older sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. There’s been ongoing disagreement between me and Andrea and Richard over the treatment of Jordan, who I used to walk regularly.

Sarah is a quiet, chocolate-brown, rather resigned retriever–wolfhound(?) cross who nevertheless transforms into superdog when someone throws a ball in her direction. She’s owned by one of my younger sisters, Therese, and her husband, Tony.

A particular incident around Easter sparked the latest dog fight. Sarah was left alone in Therese’s backyard for the four-day break, with my father visiting and feeding (and playing with her briefly) twice a day. On one of those days she came to my parents’ backyard for most of the day (they live down the road from Therese) and I walked her, and along with my parents gave her some attention.

Sarah is a challenging dog. Loving and calm around children, she hates most other dogs, and anyone who walks her must carry a bottle of water to spray into her face if she becomes aggressive towards a passing dog.

I had never seen this side of her and, thinking it couldn’t really be that bad, didn’t bother with the water on the Easter walk I took her on. But then we passed two dogs and a cat, luckily safely behind the neighbour’s front fence. Sarah suddenly lunged towards them, barking furiously while I pulled desperately at the leash to maintain control – she’s very strong and whimpered angrily when I finally managed to restrain her.

Clearly Sarah suffers from a lack of socialisation – this had soon become apparent after my sister found her through a rehousing service (she was already at least five years old). She had also become quite overweight since I’d seen her last, and was constantly panting even when lying down. All this, combined with my sister leaving her in the backyard over Easter, gave me a sense of despair about her situation that left me wanting to distance myself from Therese.

Since the arrangements to stop walking Jordan ended just after Christmas my relationship with Andrea and Richard hadn’t really improved much (this is beginning to sound like Days of our Lives crossed with Animal Rescue).

Anyway, last weekend I finally caught up with the family, after not seeing some of them for almost two months, at Therese’s place for a Mothers Day gathering. And there were some tiny but significant miracles.

The first one was that after delivering the family to Therese’s place, Richard went back to his place and brought Jordan back with him. Smelling Sarah even before he got to the front door, Jordan skidded frantically through the house to the backyard. He spent the afternoon there with Sarah and occasionally some of the children, trying to steal Sarah’s ball (by some quirk of fate, Sarah actually doesn’t mind Jordan, although she got a bit aggro at one point when he grabbed the ball).

The second miracle was that Sarah herself was looking much better than when I’d seen her last – leaner and healthier. This was because my oldest niece, who’s 16, had been taking her along with her on her runs, and Sarah apparently is too distracted when she’s running to bother about other dogs.

Jordan hadn’t forgotten me. As soon as I went outside he dashed towards me and, as I stroked his head and scratched his chin, stayed by me with a look of relief on his face. Our reunion, after almost five months, was much less gruelling than I’d rather melodramatically anticipated, but I still felt a level of guilt at having abandoned him.

It was good to see him as his same old self, and he was happy and active. Also, I knew that since I’d stopped walking him, Andrea had been taking more responsibility for him. I know he doesn’t get walked enough, and she doesn’t like the whole social scene at the park and so avoids taking him there, as she’s told me. But he seems better integrated into the family. He also spends a fair bit of time inside, I’m told.

Sure, I wasn’t happy as it began to get dark and the two canine pals forlornly stood sentry at the back door, soulful eyes watching the fun inside, cold and lonely and wanting to be part of their human packs, with me going outside to pat and soothe every now and then. But I’m happy about the progress that’s been made, and I just hope it can continue.

Good morning, meditation

I also wanted to report on my recent experience of trying to meditate. When I look back over my adult life, it could be viewed as one long failed attempt to meditate. It seems that when I do start meditating regularly, every time something out of the ordinary happens – I get a cold, or a really difficult job comes up, or a major event looms – I give up meditating. I’m talking about 5 or 10 minutes a day here, not anything heroic like half an hour.

But in all my attempts I’ve come to realise some important things.

There is absolutely no point in me waiting to meditate till 6 pm, which I’ve tried to do in the last year or so. It’s not that I can’t find the time then; my brain just isn’t in the right state for it.

The only thing that works for me is to meditate just after I get up in the morning and before I leave the bedroom. As I’m a morning person this is the best time for my brain; I’m definitely at my freshest, even if I haven’t slept that well. But the other reason is that, because I know if I don’t meditate immediately I won’t be doing it later in the day, it’s much harder to put it off and make excuses. I also know that it’s good for me to start the day that way before I compulsively go to my office and turn my computer on.

Another thing I’ve realised is I don’t have to wait for meditation benefits. I get them right away. Yes they’re subtle, but meditation is like daily medicine.

And the best thing? All the times I’ve stopped and started mean that when I start to meditate again, my brain already has some skill that it’s retained from the last time. So all the stopping and starting hasn’t been a total waste of time.

So far, I’ve managed to meditate first thing in my bedroom, for 10 minutes at a time, for five days in a row. I know that sooner or later there’ll be some crisis that may threaten this, but now at least I can’t fool myself and say ‘I’ll do it later in the day’. It’s first thing or not at all.

(BTW, the picture above isn’t of Sarah, but it was too appropriate to resist.)

Tweet

Of wolves (and parrots) and men (and women): research and reflections on animal intelligence

For many years science and common sense were totally at odds when it came to the abilities of non-human animals. In recent years a slew of popular memoirs, not to mention philosophical texts, have testified to the deep bonds that can exist between us and our non-human friends (who hasn’t heard of Marley and Me, now a Hollywood film?).

Science has slowly caught up with the instinctive understanding of many that animals are sophisticated, intelligent beings with complex needs. It has destroyed one by one each treasured illusion about what humans alone are capable of; we’re not the only ones who can make tools, use language or think about the future, for instance. But its findings also pose a threat to our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation – if we’re not fundamentally different from other animals, who are we, and where exactly do we fit in the scheme of things?

Lupine philosophy

Research is showing that dogs, the ancestors of wolves, have complex inner lives, experience a range of emotions and possess a moral compass. The implications of this are beautifully explored in The Philosopher and the Wolf, a memoir-cum-philosophy text by Mark Rowlands.

For over a decade Rowlands, once one of those intellectuals who could abuse his body with impunity – he admits to having been drunk while writing his best-selling popular philosophy books, although he seems to have since calmed down – flitted from one philosophy post to another accompanied by his wolf hybrid, Brenin, purchased as a puppy.

Knowing Brenin would trash the place if left at home, Rowlands took his young wolf to his philosophy lectures. Brenin would lie quietly in a corner and snooze, but would sit up and start howling ‘when the lectures became particularly tedious’.

In what is now a well-established and almost cliched tradition, but one he injects with originality, Rowlands reflects on the close ‘brotherly’ relationship he shared with Brenin. He uses it as a basis for philosophising on humans’ attitudes towards and ethics regarding non-human animals; good and evil; and our obsession with finding happiness. There’s some autobiography thrown in but the focus is always on the central relationship. The book is very deliberately written for a general audience but the philosophising is original and although it’s mostly easy to understand, it doesn’t seem to be watered down.

I adored this book. The thing I liked most about it was that it explained to me why I am a bit dog-crazy. Rowlands has a beguiling theory about why so many of us love and need dogs. It apparently harks back to our being a species of ape. At some point in evolution, apes began to live in large and complex social groups. In order to survive in such groups, we developed a Machiavellian streak – the ability to hide our true feelings and motivations from the world, to scheme and dissemble to improve our social standing. Rowlands attacks the idea of the social contract, the theory that we submit to the rule of law to avoid chaos and bloodshed. He asserts that it simply reveals how calculating we apes are; it’s ‘a deliberate sacrifice for an anticipated gain’.

Wolves, in contrast, didn’t take the Machiavellian path, although they are just as dependent on the pack as we are on the clan. And it’s because of this inability to dissemble that we love dogs, the ancestors of wolves – we crave that lost simplicity, we long to escape from our evil ape selves, to be ‘the wolf we once were’ who ‘understands that happiness cannot be found in calculation’.

This makes perfect sense to me on many levels. We can’t be dogs, although we’d like to live in the present and not hold grudges like them. But it’s refreshing to be around that kind of honesty, to be in a world where the appearance matches the reality, and to experience that level of loyalty and affection. The beautiful and classic example of canine honesty is, of course, the dog’s involuntarily wagging tail.

We are frequently humbled by the noble qualities of dogs and other mammals. A few years ago animal researcher Marc Bekoff caused controversy when he claimed that in some respects animal morality might be ‘purer’ than that of humans.

This may be true. But perhaps humans, simply because we live in a world set up for our species, often have many more choices to make, and more freedom, when it comes to morality than do non-human animals. Well-socialised dogs (and wolves) may not have to work at being good in the way that John Ames did in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, for example.

Could the term ‘bird brain’ be a compliment?

Dogs are not the only ones who amaze, delight and nurture us. Alex was an African Grey parrot who revealed startling abilities during the course of 30 years working with researcher Irene Pepperberg, despite having ‘a brain the size of a walnut’ (Alex and Pepperberg are pictured above).

Pepperberg’s findings radically altered the scientific consensus on the intelligence of birds, and showed that the brains of birds are much more similar in structure to human brains than was previously thought. Her work also helped to challenge the long-held dominance of behaviourism in science, which assumed that animals were basically automatons. Pepperberg tells the story of her relationship with Alex in her touching memoir Alex and Me.

Pepperberg is a gifted scientist. She is a currently an adjunct professor of psychology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a lecturer at Harvard. With a PhD in chemistry, she came to animal communication belatedly and, hampered by gender as well as her then-controversial research area, struggled for years in cramped corners of university labs with tiny funding grants. But eventually she and Alex won through, and indeed he had become something of a celebrity before his sudden and unexpected death in 2007 at the age of 38. Pepperberg was still teaching him new skills at the time and remains convinced that he hadn’t yet reached his full potential.

Over his career, Alex learned ‘object labels (words), categories, concepts and numbers’. He could distinguish whether an object was the same as or different from another object in terms of colour, shape or material (‘matter’), a sophisticated cognitive task that was beyond what primates were being tested for at the time.

When presented with a tray showing objects of different shapes and colours, including blocks in more than one colour, he could say, for example, how many green blocks there were. He could also tell whether one object was bigger or smaller than another object. He learned to count, and could distinguish between a higher number and a larger object. He learned parts of words – phonemes – and, when presented with refrigerator letters in different colours, could tell what colour a particular sound was, and which sound was a particular colour.

Pepperberg is committed to the scientific project and that’s one thing that makes reading the book so worthwhile. It also means that the most stunning examples of Alex’s intelligence didn’t make it to the scientific literature because they sometimes got in the way of the experiment to establish intelligence; although the tests were effective, they were too reductive to limn every aspect of Alex’s abilities. Simply, he sometimes got bored with the experiments and joked around. Here’s a wonderful example, which occurred when Alex had already successfully passed many tests confirming his knowledge of colours, and had answered such questions ‘dozens of times’:

… we would ask him, “What color key?” and he would give every colour in his repertoire, skipping only the correct color …We were pretty certain he wasn’t making mistakes, because it was statistically near to impossible that he could list all but the correct answer. These observations are not science, but they tell you a lot about what was going on in his head …

Earlier, Pepperberg relates that Alex once made up a new word combination. He had just been given a piece of apple for the first time and been told the name of it. But he stubbornly refused to repeat the word apple, calling it ‘banerry’ instead because it reminded him of banana and looked like a large cherry. When Pepperberg didn’t at first get what he was trying to do, he patronisingly spelt it out to her in the way she carefully pronounced new words to him: ‘he said, very slowly and deliberately, “Ban-err-eee”’.

Let’s be clear, Alex didn’t merely copy phrases – he held conversations. However, Pepperberg wasn’t going to buy into what was then a controversy over whether animals were actually speaking, ie using language as humans do; she called her area of study animal communication. But her accounts of some of the conversations are incredible. This doesn’t mean that Alex necessarily knew the meaning of every word he used, but he understood the effect of the phrases.

One example is his use of ‘I’m sorry’. He frequently yelled it out when he’d been uncooperative and the researchers were angry with him. Pepperberg never knew whether he understood it only as a means of defusing others’ anger or whether he was actually sorry – probably the former. In that way he was very like a young child who seeks to restore favour with her parents. And indeed he was shown to have the intelligence of a five-year-old human (astoundingly, he also seems to have had greater numerical ability than chimpanzees).

During their years together, Pepperberg had tried to maintain scientific objectivity and so had not let herself get too close to Alex, but when he died she was engulfed by a powerful grief. She stills continues to work with African Greys, however, and Griffin, a Grey she now works with, also shows considerable ability.

Parrots and apes are not the only animals to possess high levels of intelligence. Dolphins are able to think about the future and crows have been shown to use ‘multiple tools in complex sequences’. These kinds of findings are leading some animal advocates to call for animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins to be given some rights that are equivalent to human rights.

Earth rules, okay?

For my own part I don’t find these testaments to the closeness between human and non-human animals either surprising or comfortable. I still eat free-range chicken because of an extremely limited diet due to allergies. I imagine that if I tended free-range chickens I would bond with them and come to know their separate personalities. It’s the brutality of the human world that is the subject of a book with a very different focus to those described above, John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.

Straw Dogs is a philosophical slap in the face to humanism. It seems to be advocating an extreme form of Darwinism mixed up with James Lovelock’s revolutionary concept of the earth as Gaia, a living, self-correcting organism.

Gray believes that humans have overrun the Earth and are set for ruin; that our lifestyle won’t destroy the Earth, but instead will ultimately lead to a vastly reduced human presence.

Gray mows down a number of cherished philosophical assumptions. For example, he disagrees with Richard Dawkins's belief that humans will ever be able to control science and technology and use them only for progress. Instead he insists that they will continue to be used to wage war and cause widespread destruction, death and suffering.

Mark Rowlands, the wolf-owning philosopher, believes that humans show true goodness only when we act morally towards ‘those who have no power’ (including animals), because only in that situation do we act without thinking of what we’ll get in return. Gray, in contrast, insists that we must accept the fact that humanity is essentially evil and self-serving, and that good will never prevail. For Gray, Humans are not just evil but foolish; they are in love with abstract thinking and always trying to seek a purpose in life. The only goal in life, he believes, should be ‘to see’.

It’s a curious argument, and indeed I found much to disagree with. What I was most impressed with, though, was Gray’s ability to dismiss human delusions about our superiority to nature, particularly in relation to animals. He’s very positive about hunter–gatherer societies, not because he romanticises them – they are capable of causing the extinction of particular species, for example – but because they do not populate to the extent that settler societies do, and they live more harmoniously with nature through sheer necessity.

Gray believes that the development of farming has caused all the current environmental problems we face, and he insists that we would have been better off if we’d never done it. Anyone reading Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River might agree: the main character, William Thornhill, an English settler in colonial New South Wales, decides that, unlike in Western society, Indigenous people live so well in their own environment that they are all ‘gentry’.

Gray’s daring thesis is despoiled and cheapened by his failure to even mention feminism – not once. If that theory doesn’t represent genuine social progress, what does? Sure, it’s progress for only a tiny percentage of the world’s population, but if its ideas were to spread, that would affect for the good the population explosion that is one of Gray’s central concerns (he talks about this in a disturbingly abstract way, as if it has nothing to do with actual female bodies that often have no choice but to reproduce).

This glaring omission doesn’t destroy his argument, although the inclusion of feminism would have added nuances and complexities that are missing. Nor does Gray bother with the research that shows that doing good (even if it’s done in a world in which evil prevails) leads to greater contentment. It’s as if Gray is ever so slightly succumbing to the modern requirement that opinion-makers be shocking and controversial, even when that means ignoring the inconvenient grey areas (no pun intended).

But what makes this book worth reading is its provocative challenge to humans’ assumption that we are the centre of the universe. Darwin’s daring theory of evolution remains as vulnerable to dangerously retrograde interpretations as any religion – look at eugenics – but it also provides the basis for a much greater respect for the natural world, and this is where the main strengths of Gray’s argument lie.

While these three books differ greatly from one another, they all come to the conclusion that, in Pepperberg’s words: ‘We are not superior to all other beings in nature. The idea of humans’ separateness from nature is no longer tenable.’

Tweet

Farewell to the park?

It’s been hard to write a blog entry lately because things have been in such a state of flux. A cold flattened me over Christmas, striking me down as a I struggled to finish editing a stubborn report (I always seem to get colds when I have big editing jobs to finish).

The cold was a convenient excuse for not worrying about not having enough social events to go to over Christmas. But it also presented an existential dilemma: I surveyed the coming year, and the perceived failures of the previous one, through a prism of exhaustion, which in turn made me feel helpless. Even present wrapping was tiring.

The cold took two weeks to work its way through my nasal passages, leaving me worrying about the state of my immune system. Thank God for the internet and Google – I’ve decided that the reason I get two colds a year is not because of lowered immunity but simply my plethora of nieces and nephews and our frequent family birthday celebrations (an excuse for seeing less of my family in 2010?).

A particular situation that’s been in my face for the last couple of weeks is still very much unresolved. For the moment I’m no longer walking Jordan, a mainly cocker spaniel who belongs to my elder sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. I’ve been doing this three times a week for the past two years and it’s come to a temporary halt, with the final outcome still unknown.

Richard and I were bound to clash sooner or later. We’re both equally bloody minded. I in my pursuit of animal (Jordan’s) welfare, and he in his determination to look after Jordan in his own way.

Never would I let Richard and Andrea forget that I thought they weren’t treating Jordan properly. Apart from the occasional walk down the street to the shops, or taking the kids to school (normally a drive) they’d virtually stopped taking him for walks, relying entirely on my thrice-weekly trips to the park.

He badly needed a clip and a bath, and had knots of hair on his bum that needed shaving. I’d even offered at one point to come around and bath him – I didn’t get to do that, but my home clipping job was certainly not the best. (Although you’d never know it, Richard is extremely wealthy and could easily afford professional grooming for Jordan, even if only, say, twice a year.)

The thing that I wouldn’t let up on – that I continued to nag them about – was that they wouldn’t bring Jordan to family gatherings at mum and dad’s. If I am perfectly honest about this, my normally kind dad is inexplicably hostile to dogs. A former secondary teacher, he seems to view them as juvenile delinquents so evil they’re beyond saving.

In contrast, my mum, despite her disabling osteoporosis and concern for the domestic environment, is okay with having Jordan around. And my sister Therese and her husband Tony sometimes bring their ridgeback-cross Sarah (also a neglected dog, but in a different way to Jordan) to family gatherings. But Andrea and Richard can’t be bothered taking him in the car with them, even at those times he’d have a playmate in Sarah to keep him out of mischief.

So every time I’d turn up at mum and dad’s to find Richard and Andrea in the kitchen and Sarah in the backyard slobbering contentedly, knowing that Jordan was stuck behind his wooden fence half a kilometre away, I’d call them on it. ‘Where’s Jordan?’ I’d ask. Each time, they dug their heels in even further. Recently, Richard had been fixing me with a rather malevolent stare he’s perfected and saying in a crisp tone: ‘I’ll look after Jordan. He’s ours. He’s not your problem’.

I’ve clashed with Richard a lot in recent years. It took me many years to realise he wasn’t the brother-in-law from heaven I’d originally thought he was. He’s a charming man with a sly, subtle sense of humour and excellent social skills, and the extended family think he’s great. But he can also be a bully – he’s been dominating Andrea for years – and I heard a story recently about him that shocked me.

On the day of the recent byelection in our electorate, Andrea was working and hadn’t voted in advance, so risked getting a $20 fine. Apparently Richard and Andrea asked one of my younger sisters, Therese, to fraudulently vote on Andrea’s behalf. Therese refused, and Richard tried to make her feel guilty. ‘We’d do the same for you if you asked’, he said. Therese was furious at him for trying to manipulate her into breaking the law, but she didn’t give in.

On Christmas Day, the predictable happened and Jordan wasn’t brought to the celebrations. I made my usual protests and Richard got predictably annoyed. But the next day when I rang to arrange the usual Monday walk, he answered the phone, and said in the same annoyed tone that he’d look after Jordan while he was on holidays.

At that point I think I realised what I was up against, and I stopped fighting. My arrangement with Jordan’s family has been based on the false assumption that I and they share enough common beliefs to maintain the regular contact that is inevitable when you walk someone else’s dog. But we don’t, and my differences with my family don't start with Richard -- they’re as old as the hills, and the basis of the majority of my problems. How did I think I could skate over them so easily?

I considered at that point that perhaps it was time to give up walking Jordan. Truth to tell, I needed some kind of break. In the last two years, seeing the reality of Jordan’s life up close and feeling helpless to improve it had led to periodic depressions characterised by a deep sense of sadness.

And my whole park venture seemed to be coming to a close anyway. Jordan was a skinny, shivery, smell-crazy puppy when I decided to start walking him regularly. This arrangement would be partly for Jordan’s benefit and partly for mine, to help me deal with my social anxiety.

It seemed to be working okay, despite the occasional social disaster. But increasingly there were periods when I’d be convinced that a quiet park meant people were staying away because of me. I know this is distorted thinking – a friend of mine, who has a lot of knowledge about anxious and depressed thought patterns, shouted down the idea and called it totally whacky. But I think my paranoia was based on a deeper truth – that I didn’t really fit in with the wealthy milieu of many of those who frequented the park, despite the fact that they were ‘dog people’, and mostly friendly.

Also, a couple of people who were my anchors and as addicted to the park as I was had had their elderly, statesman-like dogs die in the last year, and although I still saw them sometimes, their visits to the park were much less frequent.

At the moment, the future of my relationship with Jordan is still an open question. Perhaps I’ll be able to come to some arrangement with Andrea and Richard, and perhaps I won’t – time will tell. If I don’t, then it will probably be better if I don’t see Jordan at all, because I won’t want to be reminded of my abandonment of him.

Tweet

On the loneliness of dogs

It’s almost two years since I started walking my sister’s cocker spaniel, Jordan, three days a week. Predictably for someone with social anxiety, we stick to a rigid routine – 11.30 to about 12.15 Monday, Wednesday and Friday (going at other times, and encountering an unpredictable mix of people, would be traumatic, although very occasionally I do a Saturday instead).

I’ve mentioned before in this blog some of the ways Jordan has changed and helped me, not least by simply being a companion to take to the park. And he’s a great distraction when I’m chatting to someone – if an awkward social moment arises, he’s liable to do a pooh, sending me scrabbling for my trusty plastic bag.

But being Jordan’s friend is not without its own problems. Least of all the sadness I feel at his closed-in, often miserable little life.

I’ve complained in this blog previously about how little his family care about his emotional welfare, all too happily piling into the car without him and zooming off to some child- and in many cases dog-friendly destination. He’s left pining for hours on the front porch or, if the weather’s good, barking desperately at innocent strangers as they walk past. The family is too lazy to train him so when they have guests they simply tie up the poor little bugger.

It would be easy to query why my sister and her family, obviously not dog people, have a dog at all, and why they keep it, having discovered the effort involved. Wouldn’t it be better to relinquish it humanely, for example by placing the dog with a rehoming program, or trying to find a new owner among friends or family? But I think the answer isn’t that difficult.

For a start, that so many non-dog people do indeed have dogs illustrates just what joiners we humans are. Non-dog people who get dogs do so because other people, often their friends, have dogs. And because they are non-dog people in the first place, once they have the dog and have begun to neglect it, they don’t really care much about the effects of their neglect on the dog.

It’s therefore logical for them to keep it languishing, just as one holds onto an expensive designer dress one has bought on sale and never wears. (Of course I know that many people do abandon their dogs in cruel ways and this represents another level of callousness altogether.)

I’m being a bit unfair. There’s often, as in the case of Jordan’s owners, a great deal of affection for the dog. My nieces love Jordan, and he gets cuddles and inside-time at night, as well as some inside-time during the day when my sister’s not working, at home for a while and not too busy.

But it’s a selfish affection. Apart from the narrow obligations of providing food, a place to sleep and basic veterinary care, neither my sister nor my brother-in-law feels, or fosters in the children, a sense of responsibility towards Jordan. My nieces are never made to feed or play with him, for example. An opportunity to teach the children about reciprocal love is wasted: the dog gives love, and the family benefits from that love, but they’re not particularly interested in how their own lives and love could benefit the dog. This kind of love for a pet is ultimately narcissistic.

I see that narcissism in myself sometimes. I’m gratified by how much Jordan loves and needs me, by his refusal to judge me for coming by just three times a week, taking him to the park for a frolic and then effectively abandoning him to his loneliness. Truth is, I’ve had to learn to be callous to keep going on in my limited role. And often when my bucket of concern threatens to overflow to every chained-up, filthy mutt, every overweight, underloved pooch, every dog I see staring out with a mixture of gloom and wretched hope from behind a suburban front gate, I must empty it out for my own sanity.

But I’m not trying to make out I’m a saintlier person than my sister; perhaps I’m just more self-aware. Although I’m a dog person, I know myself too well to take on a pet full time.

I also know that, paradoxically, it is easy for me to spend time with a dog, whereas it’s more of an effort for non-dog people like my sister. Truth is, I could sometimes spend hours patting, comforting and playing Fetch with dogs. It’s so easy to make a connection with them: to see in their pining, eager eyes the simple language of need and love. And it’s not hard to make a dog happy, to answer that need, even if momentarily – all you have to do is scratch it under the chin, stroke its neck and tell it what a sweet and good boy or girl it is. Humans are so much more complex (although perhaps I am made momentarily happy by giving love to a dog).

Recently I wrote a letter to my sister detailing my concerns about Jordan. I was trying to make her understand that incorporating Jordan into her life (including giving the children some responsibility for him) was better than seeing him as a separate duty that she would get to when other priorities had been dealt with, and would actually help her and the family as a whole. All it would take to include Jordan in the family to a greater extent, I urged, was a little bit of planning.

It went down like a firecracker during a monsoon. In fact, there was no response to the letter at all until I broached the subject. This was when I went to pick up Jordan for his walk on the last day of the school holidays. He’d been playing with my nieces outside, but now they were off somewhere fun, and he’d be home alone as soon as the walk was over. We all stood in the backyard, Jordan already on the leash. My sister did not want to talk about the letter, except to say ‘please don’t do things like that’.

‘He’s clinically depressed!’ I yelled as she walked towards the car.

‘Aren’t we all’, she replied.

Dogs are a wonderful resource that our local communities could benefit from in ways that also assisted the dogs themselves. We don’t need more dogs, in fact we probably need fewer, but we should make better use of existing dogs. This is not simply being dog-centric: I think we’d become a more caring society as a whole. Just as retired people can do countless good in the community, lonely dogs could be utilised for many purposes.

So how could we improve the situations for dogs, and make things easier for their busy owners? Below are some suggestions for drastically reducing the amount of bored, unhappy, unhealthy dogs in our community (some a bit outlandish, I admit).

Some suggestions for a dog-friendly world
It should be much harder to own a dog than it is at present. In a screening process as is used in adoption, you should have to prove your suitability, that of your home, and that you are able to spend a certain percentage of time with the dog. If not able to spend enough time at home, prospective owners should have to guarantee the regular use of dog-minding or pet-walking services and prove they had the money to spend on such dog services.

To compensate for the difficulty of dog ownership, dogs could be seen as community assets, and moves made to share them among the community. A non-profit service could be established to link people who like dogs (including older people) but don’t want or can’t afford their own with people who can’t walk their dogs due to age, illness, disability or busyness. These would not simply be casual walkers but would have the opportunity to establish a relationship with the dog, eg playing with and walking it several times a week. For example, disadvantaged families without a parent at home during the day, such as single parents, could form a relationship with a dog that they took out on weekends.

Puppy farms should be banned and pet shops not allowed to sell animals.

All dog breeders should need to have a licence and their premises be subject to regular inspections.

A free service for new owners, rather like the maternal and child health nurse but ideally made up of volunteers, could be established. These trained volunteers would pay a once-off visit to the home to help the family adjust to the puppy or dog by offering expert advice and guidance. They would check that sleeping arrangements and diet were suitable for the size and breed of the dog, and offer advice and help with issues such as house training.

Governments could fund the use of dogs (and other pets) as therapy in prisons and aged care homes, with these institutions having their own in-house pets where possible.

I know some of these suggestions are a bit 'out there', but it's time to think outside the off-leash area of the park! The dog walking and day care industries would flourish if there were tougher rules about leaving dogs alone for hours, the dogs themselves would be happier, and so would the humans who love them.

Tweet

Attention!

Attend!
Pay attention!
Are you paying attention?

It seems that attention is what's missing in this society. But how important is it?

Lately a few things I've been hearing and observing have made me think about this scarce commodity, so hard to come by in our rushed, atomised, money-obsessed world.

But what does it mean? And why have I suddenly become fixated on it?

In the last few years, a few books relating to this idea have been published in Australia. A young Australian philosopher, Damon Young, wrote Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, about the prevalence of distraction in the modern world, ruefully admitting his addiction to his Blackberry even while on holiday. And Hugh Mackay wrote Why Don't People Listen?, a well-received book in which he urged readers to start really listening to others.

Both of these books' topics are related to attention. Distraction is attention's obvious opposite. Listening is impossible to do properly if you're not attending to someone. But attention has wider scope than listening. It's a focus on someone or something, sometimes an intense focus. Why does it matter?

I regularly take my sister's little cocker spaniel, Jordan, to the park for a romp. When we get back to his place, I usually play Fetch with him for a little while. Occasionally we play Fetch at the park but he's usually too distracted by his all-consuming sense of smell to keep focused on the game. With such succulent, wafting scents everywhere, it's almost impossible to get him to follow the track of the ball (Fetch!) let alone bring it to me (Come!) and drop it at my feet (Give!)

What I have noticed, though, is that he performs much better when I focus on him. When I look at him and am very aware of what I intend him to do, what I want him to do, he seems to sense it. If I'm half-hearted and distracted, so is he.

Attention seems to be to be related to love and bonding. I have a strong bond with Jordan, and when I 'activate' it through my attention, this no doubt helps him to keep focused on me as we play this game.

Children, as we all know, absolutely crave their parents' attention, and will act out mercilessly if they don't get it.

I'm hopelessly intolerant of my friends having their mobile phones on and answering them when I'm socialising with them one-on-one, because for those minutes they're on the phone they've let go of that attentiveness that I'm hungry for.

Journalist Rupert Isaacson is the father of an autistic boy, Rowan. The child was incontinent, constantly having tantrums and unable to relate to others when Isaacson and his wife, psychology professor Kristin Neff, decided to take him on a trip to Mongolia to be healed by shamans (horses were already playing a large role in his progress, so the trip also involved horses).

After the shamanic healings took place, miraculous changes occurred. Rowan became toilet trained, his tantrums virtually ended and he made his first friend. Isaacson wrote a book about the experience, Horse Boy, and a documentary has been made about the journey.

Isaacson can only speculate on what actually caused the changes. But could part of the shamans' powers have come from the intense focus they had on Rowan, and the inner healing powers they were able to summon up, during the healings, partly through that focus?

And could some of the trip's success have come about because Rowan's parents were so intensely focused on him and what they wanted for him, not in a grasping way but in their willingness to drop everything for him? (This is not to suggest, of course, that attention will cure everything, or that parents with disabled children who can't be helped are not giving enough attention.)

Recently a UK journalist, Simon Singh, along with coauthor Edzard Ernst, wrote the book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (I think this is too complex an area to have only one opinion on; homeopathics are nothing but water, yet herbs are clearly medicines that we still need to know much more about.)

Naturally Singh was down on homeopathics, and I don't blame him. But when western scientists and science writers such as Singh have discovered that people benefit from homeopathics anyway, I think they too easily dismiss the reasons. There's the placebo effect of course; that's the mind healing itself, which is highly significant and extremely worth exploring.

But it's also acknowledged that sitting down with a naturopath who listens to your problems, asks you questions about all aspects of your life and gives you the time and attention that so many GPs are just too busy to give may also help the healing process.

But, you might well ask, what about animals and children? How could they possibly benefit from homeopathics and get better as some seem to? Of course, the usual maxim applies that many would have got better anyway regardless of treatment. But perhaps the actual dispensing of the homeopathics, with the ritual involved and the attentiveness necessary, has something to do with it?

Too bad that kind of thing can't be measured, and too bad it can't be bottled and marketed and made it into a brand (I guess capitalism tries to do that, but I'm talking about real attention …).

What if all medical students, in addition to having good marks, had to demonstrate qualities such as empathy and compassion? Perhaps this is an essential aspect of healing, not just an add-on?

Attention is perhaps a kind of love, or perhaps love is not the word I'm looking for. I don't mean individualistic love or romantic love but the life force that flows through us. Perhaps when we give something or someone our attention we allow our minds to provide the beginnings of healing. That's one reason why truth and justice commissions are so important after terrible massacres. Sufferers need to be heard by other humans.

And that's why in naturopathic, but also psychotherapeutic, consulting rooms all over the world, people seek out and are willing to pay large sums of money to those who will listen to their stories, mobile phones and pagers turned off and no computer blinking in the background. That's one aspect of therapy I really miss – the quietness of the consulting room, and the sense that someone was giving me their complete, undivided, fully focused attention, even if only for 45 minutes a week.

Tweet

Depraved, deprived, deloused

Life is such a mixture of the routine and mundane, and the quietly revelatory. It's a force that shows me the aspects of its own nature that I need to understand. Every now and then an incident happens which seems to reveal to me something about myself or the world that I needed to know. But the information is not always welcome.

Yesterday, as I do every Wednesday, I took my sister’s golden cocker spaniel Jordan to the nearby Ainslie Park. We ambled along in the mild morning sunshine, Jordan stubbornly halting to read his pee-mails (and leave one or two) on the way.

We soon reached the park oval and after we’d been on it for a while another regular, Sarah, came up with her blue heeler cross, Rufus. He’s a sweet-tempered five-year-old with an obsession for the ball. He occasionally gets annoyed by Jordan’s persistent invitations to play, but this day they bounded around together like old drinking buddies as I watched in delight.

Sarah was polite but distant and, as is my socially phobic wont, I wondered if it was something I’d said or done last time. If I made a remark she responded but in the past she’d been much more open. The conversation just never got off the ground, although at no stage was she rude. I remembered that I’d seen her being cool and distant with someone else and wondered if she was like that with most people. Perhaps she was just preoccupied?

Suddenly Rufus raced across the oval, towards the water tap for dogs near the tennis courts. Jordan bounded after him and I went over to supervise while Sarah stayed on the oval. By this stage the two dogs were sniffing around the wide bushy garden beds that flank the sides of the park. Sarah started calling Rufus. I didn’t even think to grab him; he’s an older, usually obedient dog. Instead I grabbed Jordan’s collar so he wouldn’t lead Rufus further astray.

Sarah kept calling. Suddenly Rufus disappeared behind the tennis courts. There’s a long narrow path overhung with squashed-in trees that runs between the tennis courts and the side fence, and leads to the other end of the park. Sarah followed Rufus down the path and didn’t come back. I assumed they’d both gone home, and took Jordan back to the oval for another short play.

He sat himself down under the shade of a huge oak. I threw the old tennis ball and yelled ‘Fetch!’ He stood and stared for a second and then inexplicably turned and ran back towards the narrow pathway. In seconds he’d disappeared.

It didn’t make sense to me. It should have. He was running after Rufus, following his scent. And Rufus was on his way home, to a flat in the same nearby, busy street that my sister, Jordan’s owner, lives on.

If I’d worked this out much earlier things might have been less, well, hairy.

Instead, I slowly made my way down the narrow path, calling his name, sure he would have been waylaid by a juicy, overwhelming smell. But the air was thin and bleak with absence. By the time I got to the end of the park near the fenced-in play area the undulating lawns were bare of him. I ran around the front part of the park, up the white stony path, yelling his name. Despite the few kids playing on the plastic swings and slides the place felt chilly, empty, deserted.

Then I realised that the impossible had happened – he'd left the park.

Suddenly I was running along the path to the entrance. And then I saw him, trotting along the gravel walkway, across from Ainslie Road, that leads away from the park. He was walking steadily towards Wattle Road. He’d already crossed the quiet Ainslie Rd, still in search of Rufus. He is clueless when it comes to roads and cars. If he got as far as Wattle Road he'd be cactus.

I ran faster, screaming his name, not giving a shit how it looked, crossing Ainslie Rd at a clip. ‘Is it a dog or a kid?’ I heard a workman on a nearby house speculating. I got onto the walkway and screamed at him to come.

And he stopped. Miraculously, he stopped. He stood there, staring at me with that daffy smile on his face, mouth hanging open, his skinny, cute, overly long legs jutting out at not-quite-right angles from his little torso. He had that expression he adopts when he realises he’s gone too far: ‘Oh. How sweet. I guess I’ll humour you – you do sound a bit concerned.’

‘Come here!’ I yelled imperiously. ‘Come!’ And he trotted towards me although I was scowling and bearing down on him. He cowered when I went to put his leash on and I felt so sad for him: I wouldn’t have dreamed of smacking him. But I was furious. He’d scared the hell out of me. I wanted him to know that I was angry, to understand it. ‘Bad dog’, I scolded as I pulled him along. ‘Very bad to run away. I’m very angry’.

When we got to my sister’s place and inside the gate I took his leash off and he looked around and began to run in front of me, ready for me to throw the ball. But there would be no post-walk play today (and of course we’d left the ball at the park). ‘I don’t want to play with you. Bad dog. I’m very angry.’

I eventually stroked his hair and tried to explain to him what he’d done as if he was a kid and could understand, and then closed the front gate behind me. As I drove away he was staring at me through the slats of the fence.

I had mixed feelings. As usual I wanted to save him from the long lonely hours he’d be sitting out till my sister got home. I also wanted him to understand that he’d done something naughty, and suffer a little bit. But his loneliness is an unfair punishment for being alive that he must bear every day anyway. Why should I make him suffer more? And if his most loving aunty is cold to him, where is love to be found?

It would be clear to a tree stump that Jordan badly needs training, and that he’s undersocialised in both the human world and the dog world. I’ve written in this blog before of my concerns for his ‘welfare’ – he’s in a family who aren’t really ‘dog people’ and, as far as I’m concerned, emotionally neglect him. (In the words of one of the delinquents in West Side Story, he’s ‘depraved on account he’s deprived’.)

I don’t think he gets to the park much apart from our walks, certainly not when there’s a lot of dogs around who could knock him into shape and teach him what's what in the dog world. He ran after Rufus because he was starved of doggy energy. And if Jordan was a wild dog he’d be exercising his independence by now -- who could blame him for wanting a bit of freedom, a walk on the wild side?

But a domesticated dog is part of the human world and must, to some extent, put such notions aside. Jordan urgently needs training to know his role in this world, so different from the doggy world, not least for his own safety. Dogs give up the use of some of their instincts to be companions to us and Jordan is no exception. But if we don’t give them a ton of love in return they won’t want to make this sacrifice and won’t know how to even if they’re willing.

And this is where the idea of revelation comes in. No matter how much I plead with my sister, he’s not going to get the training he needs, and I can’t afford to pay for it. We do have a short training session the three times a week I walk him, but he’s not the brains trust and he really needs daily training.

I like to think of myself as Jordan’s mentor, and to believe I’m helping him. And I do help him somewhat just by being there. But I can’t transform his life as I’d like to; he’s going to stay emotionally immature for a long while. We’re both powerless in some areas of our lives, Jordan and I. All I can do is make the most of our time together.

I also need to stop kidding myself that he has any idea of what a park is, or what an oval is. All he knows is that we go to a joyful place of smelly, hairy friends; and that when they leave, it’s lonely.

Photo courtesy of Bigfoto (http://www.bigfoto.com/)

Tweet

Dog days

Three days a week -- Monday, Wednesday and Friday -- rain or shine, wind or hail, I drive the 8 minutes to my sisters' house, pick up her 99 per cent cocker spaniel (1 per cent cute) dog Jordan and walk him to the nearby park, a small park with a fenced play area for children and a large oval where dogs can frolic freely.

I've been carrying out this ritual for about 16 months. It is my self-administered social anxiety therapy. The whole thing, including a short training session when we get back (Jordan is hopeless at training once he gets to the park: too many smells) takes about an hour. Jordan and I hang around the oval, trying not to look needy. When our mutual neediness becomes too evident, I project mine onto him: 'He's cooped up all day -- it's great to get him out' (I am equally cooped up - I work from home and, like Jordan, sometimes don't have enough work to do).

But it's true, it's not 'all about me'. Especially at the beginning, I ached for Jordan, stuck in a family who had no idea what to do with him -- 'What's the point of him?' I often felt like asking them. The poor thing, still only a couple of months old and semi-housetrained, was shoved outside to sleep in a kennel pretty much for good after he poohed on the floor.

My two nieces soon tired of playing with him. 'He doesn't bring the ball back', one of them complained. That's true -- you have to train them to do that!

In those first weeks he spent outside, still a tiny baby, when I visited I would unlatch the gate and call and call. No response. Perhaps my sister had taken him somewhere? And then I would find him in the backyard, curled up on an old canvas deck chair he'd adopted, his chin on his paws, lost in a haze of loneliness and abandonment -- 'clinically depressed' would not have been inaccurate. This would send me into my own fog of sadness and I'd spend the rest of the day worrying about him.

Jordan does spend some time inside at night now (I am assured) but even when my sister's at home during the day he mainly sits in the front yard, waiting for someone to walk past and when they do, barking in a fake-angry way and chasing frantically back and forth behind the fence.

Anyhow, Jordan and I need each other, and my sister and I have learned to manage our mutual incomprehension (I am a dog person; she's not. She has a dog; I don't) on the fairly rare times she's home when I pick up my charge.

But it's not all beer and skittles once we get to the park. Sometimes I have to drag myself there even as I drag Jordan, who would happily spend the hour 'reading his pee-mails', as one astute writer called it, on the garden-flanked gravel walkway that leads to the park. Sometimes when we get to the park entrance I'm tempted to do a sharp right-turn away from it and just keep marching.

But the fact is, Jordan and the other dogs are my cover, my id running free and getting away with it, the best distraction in the world. I don't have to look at the people I'm speaking to for extended periods; I look at their dogs. Conversation is simple: what breed of dog is that? Yes, I can see the kelpie/poodle/labrador strain. What's its name? How old? It's got a lovely coat/smile/personality. And Jordan seems to sense when things are getting a bit strained and often does a runner at strategic moments, dashing to the other end of the park so I have to apologise and try to catch him before he gets onto the road.

It's still not easy and I think now that it never will be. There's always a twinge of panic when I see someone advancing from the other end of the park, their beastie bounding ahead or obediently trotting beside them. Do I know them? Do I know the dog? (Depending on the mood I'm in it's sometimes easier if I don't know them, if I can start from scratch.) Not everyone wants to talk of course; some do walking laps around the oval with their dogs following and scratching in the bushes, and some just walk through the park and keep going.

Sometimes there are lonely days when it's only the two of us on the pale yellow dead grass of the oval, bar a maintenance truck or two. Then Jordan will ignore me in the dizzying world of smells that envelop him until the minute he suddenly comes to, and looks at me as if to say: 'well -- are you going to throw the ball or aren't you?'

And sometimes there are bad days when I walk away cursing myself for something I've said, usually to someone I won't see again for weeks, that seems stupid or inappropriate.

And sometimes there are okay days when we meet a friend and have a chat, and say hello to someone else and their familiar pooch.

And sometimes there are magic days when the trees bow in a gentle wind and dapple the sunlight and a group of us gossip in a circle and the dogs run down the side of the tennis courts like naughty boys, stretch their elegant limbs as they charge around the oval or clutch each other and roll around and around on the grass.

On these days especially I leave with a sense of uplift, but even on boring or bad days I rarely regret going. Many times I leave with a spring in my step and the feeling that I have achieved something, made some small personal progress and given my cheeky little friend a small patch of joy in his dull life.

Photo courtesy of Bigfoto (www.bigfoto.com)

Tweet