Now, I can barely lift him. It is impossible to walk him without people commenting on his size. He has been compared to a yeti, a Shetland pony, a fluffy great Dane, a polar bear, Chewbacca, a horse, a cow, a yak, a magical beast. Recently someone asked: ‘What kind of animal is that — is it a sheep?’ A stranger tried to buy him from me. Tourists take selfies with him. Some just point and laugh while saying, ‘He’s massive!’
And he is still growing.
But as the months passed, his sweetness and goofiness became more and more apparent, and he finally mastered toilet-training. Every day while walking him we laughed as he gambolled along patches of grass, often falling on his face or stumbling into bushes. Every morning, he woke cheerful and thrilled to see us. As I watched my son play hide-and-seek with him, sneaking into cupboards and concealing himself under rugs before calling Charlie’s name, then shrieking as this enormous beast sat on top of him and licked his face, something reluctantly shifted in me. Now I can’t imagine life without him. Even though he still regularly eats and excretes socks of all sizes, which is truly gross.
I WISH NOW THAT I had adopted a dog years ago. They give us so much more than we give them. Research shows dogs can prevent us from getting ill, help us heal faster when we are sick, calm children and, according to British researcher Deborah Wells, ‘even serve as an early warning system for certain types of underlying ailment including cancer, oncoming seizures and hypoglycaemia’..
As with social connection, there is some evidence that dogs not only improve our health in the present but can protect it in the future as well. A study of 34,202 Swedes found dogs lowered mortality and risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Australian researchers interviewed 5741 people who were being screened for CVD in Melbourne and found that those who owned pets had a significantly lower risk of becoming ill, especially men. They also found the impact of owning dogs on risk could not be explained by other variables, like ‘cigarette smoking, diet, body mass index or socioeconomic profile.’ This is often called ‘The Lassie Effect’.
The positive impact of dog ownership is almost immediate. One seminal study by Professor James Serpell at the University of Pennsylvania monitored the health of people for ten months after they adopted dogs or cats from rescue shelters and found a ‘highly significant reduction in minor health problems’, such as colds and headaches. (The dog owners reported that the benefits were mainly due to an increase in exercise. A 2010 study found that eighty per cent of regular dog walkers were likely to meet the recommended 150 minutes of physical activity per week.)
Professor Erika Friedmann from the University of Maryland found that a year after a heart attack, people who owned pets were significantly more likely to be alive than those who didn’t, and it was especially the case with dog owners. There are many possible reasons for this: the company, the long walks, the physical affection and the loyal, cheerful presence all lower stress.
Dogs may even help us work, just by slumbering nearby. Gertrude Stein had a succession of three white poodles, all called Basket. One of them, ‘a large unwieldy poodle’, sat on her lap as she wrote. She said that ‘listening to the rhythm of his water-drinking’ made her ‘recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not.’
And, of course, there’s their devotion. Which is why we forgive them for minor transgressions and major shortcomings, just as they forgive ours. When left alone one night, John Steinbeck’s setter puppy, Toby, destroyed the first and only draft of Of Mice and Men, making ‘confetti of’ two months of work. Steinbeck wrote: ‘I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically . . . I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a MS I’m not sure is good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter. But there’s the work to do over from the start.’
When I was growing up, our first family dog was a Maltese terrier called Susie. My grandmother Bonnie also had a Maltese called Mitsy. She took her to all family functions, and she would hold Mitsy firmly in her lap as she drank champagne too quickly and winked at me from the other end of the table. Unfortunately, in her old age, Mitsy became unable to retract her tongue, and black blisters formed on it. She would try to lick you with the good part and the crusty parts would then whip against your skin. We all tolerated it until one day my then boyfriend said, ‘What is wrong with that dog’s tongue?’ and we laughed until we cried.
Our next dog was a Lhasa Apso called Isaac, who, one day, while in an amorous embrace with our neighbours’ bulldog, got stuck. I looked out the window to see a small crowd gathered at the bottom of our driveway, scratching their heads. It took hours to separate the dogs. To this day, Isaac is referred to as a kind of imaginary family friend with a dirty mind and a double life, who, for some reason, has an interest in both tennis and theology. In our imaginations, Isaac has been to the Vatican, Wimbledon, organised the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day and marched in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I can’t explain it, but the mere mention of Isaac still makes us all laugh.
THE BEST THINGS ABOUT PETS, after all, are their quirks and eccentricities, some of which mirror our own. Florence Nightingale adopted an owl, Charles Dickens a raven, Lord Byron a bear. As American essayist E.B. White wrote of his Scottish terrier, Daisy, after she was run over by a cab in 1932, ‘Her life was full of incident but not of accomplishment. Persons who knew her only slightly regarded her as an opinionated little bitch, and said so; but she had a small circle of friends who saw through her, cost what it did.’ However poorly he may have treated his wives, Ernest Hemingway adored his cats, referring to them as ‘purr factories’ and ‘love sponges’. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his 1976 novel Slapstick, ‘I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.’ Photos of him running along a beach behind his dog Pumpkin show two faces stretched with joy. And yet we, bafflingly, feel all this for animals that destroy our gardens, chew our furniture, pee in the wrong spots, and create domestic chaos. It’s an irrational affection.
William S. Burroughs called his cats ‘psychic companions’, and the last words he entered in his journal were: ‘Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any fucking thing. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for [his cats] Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love.’
Best of all, dogs love unconditionally. US poet Mary Oliver writes exquisitely about this, about being out at night, staring at a full moon as her dog stares at her, gazing up into her face, admiring her as if she was the moon.
WHEN I WAS RECOVERING from my last surgery, I walked Charlie along the coastline, up hills, past lagoons and beaches and through parks. Sometimes, due to his now substantial size, I had to pull hard to make sure he wasn’t walking me. Whenever I could, I took him off the leash to let him bound and chase, race and turn circles, his thick silky mane flowing in the wind.
One day, as he leapt alongside me, untethered, I noticed a woman walking towards us carrying a tray of food. I grabbed his collar to stop him from dashing over to her, but his significant weight pulled me over: we tumbled-turned up a small hill. I saw sky, fur, grass, sky, fur, grass, sky, fur — then thud. And a furry face loomed over mine, panting, and licked my cheek.