were gone, after the holiday, I threw the stupid toy in the bin. And the house sank back into that cold, lifeless emptiness I found so dispiriting.
All alone, I read about dogs and was delighted to spend an hour with a marvellous Horizon programme on BBC television called ‘The Secret Life of Dogs’. It began to explain some of the reasons why I might be feeling so bereft and so full of longing. Researchers have found that we respond to the face of a dog in much the same warm way as we respond to small babies. Experiments placed human beings into a brain scanner and found that the same area of the brain lights up when shown a picture of a human baby as is illuminated when a dog’s face is shown. It doesn’t happen if the picture is of an adult human. And indeed there are noteworthy similarities in the faces of babies and dogs – a high forehead, sweet little button nose and big, innocent eyes.
Most remarkably, researchers trying to understand why the dog has become man’s (or woman’s) best friend have learned how the dog was domesticated by conducting experiments with wolves and, separately, with silver foxes. First they tried to raise wolf cubs in a domestic environment in exactly the same way as tiny puppies. The wolves showed absolutely no inclination to behave in an acceptable manner. If the fridge door opened they simply dived in and took whatever they wanted, regardless of being told ‘No’. They remained wild and independent. As one of the researchers who had cuddled, slept with and nurtured a wolf cub said rather ruefully as hers jumped up and took her meal from the table, tearing down the tablecloth and everything on it in the process, ‘He just doesn’t care.’ Eventually the wolves in the experiment were returned to the sanctuary to be with their own kind as it was thought to be too dangerous to keep them at home. Conclusion? They couldn’t be domesticated without a careful breeding programme.
My son Ed had close experience of this phenomenon when, during his year between school and university, he spent time at a wolf sanctuary in the mountains of Colorado. It was set up to rescue wolves who had mistakenly been bought as pets and had created havoc as they became fully grown. The most alarming animals he came across – indeed the only ones he felt presented any real danger to the people who cared for them – were the ones where, foolishly, an Alsatian had been crossed with a wolf. A wolf, he says, will never attack a human being unless it feels threatened. It will simply slink off in fear and seek its prey among sheep or cattle. A wolf dog is dangerous. It has the wolf ’s wild nature and the dog’s total lack of fear of the human being.
Yet all dogs, I learned from the programme, owe their genetic inheritance to the wolf. The process of domestication has been researched in Russia at a university in Siberia in Novosibirsk. There, over a 50-year period, silver foxes, a naturally wild and potentially aggressive animal, have been bred based on their temperament. Only the least aggressive have been allowed to breed and, during the 50 years, the researchers have found each new generation becoming progressively more tame and changing their physical characteristics. Sometimes the colour has altered. In some cases the tail has become curly. They are, it seems, becoming dogs, and the conclusion is that a similar selective process was used to change the appearance and the temperament of the wolf.
The most incredible experiments involved a complex bit of recording equipment which shows the scientists which way we look at faces. For some reason we humans don’t look straight at each other. We always look to our left when gazing at another person’s face, which means we’re looking at the right side of our subject. It apparently makes us easier to read. And, amazingly, the dog is the only animal to do exactly the same thing. It so wants to please us it has learned how to read our facial expression, our tone of voice, our vocabulary (most dogs at least know ‘sit’, ‘bed’, ‘ball’, ‘fetch’ or ‘walkies’) and one dog in the programme understood 300 words. Again, uniquely among animals, the dog can even follow our gestures, something not even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, can do.
When a chimp was offered treats hidden under cups it ignored the researcher’s finger pointing towards the one that contained the morsel of food and simply went its own way. Dogs, even the youngest eight-week-old puppies, followed the finger and succeeded every time.
It’s also been found that close physical contact with a dog produces the hormone oxytocin in both the owner and the dog. It’s the same hormone that’s produced when a woman gives birth and breastfeeds her baby. The French obstetrician, Michel Odent, calls it ‘the love hormone’. It’s been found to produce feelings of contentment and relaxation.
It doesn’t surprise me to discover that people who have a close and affectionate relationship with a dog suffer less stress, are less likely to suffer a heart attack and, if they do, are more likely to recover. I’m not sure whether that’s a result of the calming effect of the oxytocin and the frequent cuddles you get with a creature that offers and receives unconditional love or whether it’s the fact that dog owners get out more because they have to be involved in more physical exercise than the non-dog owner who doesn’t have to do ‘walkies’ three times a day, but the evidence is compelling. And it must be noted that during my years of dog ownership I never ailed a thing.
So, my arguments in favour of having another dog were bolstered by the science. There were other slightly alarming nuggets of information in the programme which I thought it might be profitable not to share with the partner I call, in less affectionate moments, ‘him indoors’. There are 8 million dogs in the UK alone, which is an awful lot of unwanted waste matter on pavements and in parks.
I have always held to being a responsible owner and never leave anything behind, remembering ghastly times when the children were young and we lived in London near Clapham Common. They would run, somersault, play football and cycle and inevitably bring home something unpleasant on their shoes or trousers. Horrid. The other truly scary statistic informs me the average dog owner invests £20,000 in their animal over its lifetime. That’s the initial cost of the dog, insurance, vets bills, food, toys, beds and other paraphernalia. It’s an amount I shall choose to ignore.
But all the stuff about the health-giving properties of dog ownership – now that was really useful. David had been the most attentive of carers during my nasty brush with those unwanted cancer cells. He stood by me manfully through discussions with the surgeon that no man should ever have to witness – a cold and matter-of-fact analysis of how best to remove a part of his partner’s body of which both he and she are particularly fond. He was at my bedside when I was taken to theatre and still there when my morphine-addled brain began to come round and talk nonsense.
He brought me home and tucked me up. He was there for the chemotherapy sessions and held the bucket by my bed when the nausea kicked in. He had, I knew, had quite enough of caring and would do anything to make me take better care of myself than had been my habit in the past.
I needed to develop a strategy. It involved appearing rather depressed and down in the mouth. It was not, after all I’d been through, entirely a performance, although I confess now to playing it up a bit. I became reluctant to go out much. I developed a passion for a lie-in in the morning, a bit of a nap in the afternoon and then an early night. He was clearly worried that I was not as well in the hours spent at home as I appeared to be when I was trotting off to London to go to work, or seemed when he heard me coming out of the radio. I was obviously, I think he realised, short of something to occupy my time.
Eventually, he asked me what he could do to help me feel better. Bingo! I shamelessly played the cancer card. I told him I hoped to live for many more years – an aspiration he seemed to share. Fifteen to twenty, at least. I discussed my oncologist’s assurance that, after the type of breast cancer I’d had and the subsequent treatment, my prognosis seemed to be good. A dog, with luck and good husbandry, would share most of those fifteen to twenty years, especially a Chihuahua, known for their longevity. A bright little dog would give me a reason to get up in the morning. It would force me to go out for walks and get the exercise I so desperately needed.
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