The other day Tonio’s sister, the one who’s a bitch, was interrogating me about why I like dogs so much. I appear to like dogs so much because I spend a lot of time in the yard playing with Tonio’s dog, a big St. Bernard called Polly.
I think since one of the other sisters had previously asked me whether I liked children (my reply was “some children”), the subtext of the question might have been why I wasn’t spending this time playing with her two-year-old daughter instead.
She asked if I had any dogs myself and, as has a habit of happening still, I started to get a bit teary at the thought of my dear departed Poppy. You’d think this would have made her stop being a bitch but it didn’t.
It reminded me that since I was in a bad mood and thinking about my doggy anyway, I might as well try and finish off this post about Poppy which I started just after she died (April 2009, shortly before leaving for South America) but couldn’t quite bring myself to finish at the time or a few occasions since.
Poppy strayed onto our farm five years ago, just weeks after the death of our previous dog, Fiscus. We suspected someone had dumped her deliberately as she was just a puppy at the time. My parents quickly grew fond of her and began to feed her. They asked around the neighbours if anyone was missing a dog but nobody was [1] and so the de facto adoption was complete.
We’ve never been into training dogs to actually do useful things on the farm. The main useful job a dog could do would be retrieving cows and that would involve training the dog to open and close gates and electric fences, which would be quite a feat.
If a dog wasn’t an active hindrance to work getting done, that was generally good enough. If the dog could bark to alert us to the arrival of visitors or the escaping of animals, that was a bonus. This Poppy could manage without any problems.
In other ways she was hilariously unsuited to her role as a farm dog. She would observe mice and rats from a safe distance with a look of puzzlement and wonder on her face.
If there was commotion of some kind, usually involving a cow in a place where a cow shouldn’t be, she would come running over with her tail wagging and, again from a safe distance, whimper sympathetically but nothing more. The more serious the commotion, the louder the whimpering.
She was a very friendly and quiet dog, but had some issues with jealousy [2] that prevented her from getting on too well with other animals. In the milking parlour she would stand by the exit to the collecting yard and growl and snap at the cows if they tried to go the wrong way. Or indeed, if they tried to go the right way.
When I tried to bottle-feed the calves, or even moreso if I tried to rub them down, Poppy would hover nearby, snapping at their legs and tails until she was dispatched from the area with a rubber boot to the backside.
I think it was just over a year after her arrival on the farm, after my parents had wrongly been advised by the vet that there was no hurry in having her neutered, that Poppy had a son. My mother named him Leroy after the character in Alan Parker’s “Fame”, which I thoroughly approved of.
We’re not sure who Leroy’s father is but whoever he was, he wasn’t much of a looker. Leroy, with his mottled black and brown face, was deemed the nicest-looking of a very ugly litter [3].
Poppy was very much the brains of the new two-dog operation, with Leroy rarely seen to do anything that Poppy wasn’t already doing first. It was impossible to give any attention to Poppy if Leroy was in the vicinity without him bounding over to put himself in the way.
When Cool Vinny did certain jobs, such as filling sacks of animal feed, the dogs would always try to help. This led him to shut them out of the shed until he was finished but reward them at the end with a flurry of attention which he called “doggy time”. “Doggy time” involved dancing with Poppy and Leroy, by holding their front paws, while singing the doggy time song. I got involved too sometimes.
Poppy was mostly responsible for the rapid and almost terminal decline in the cat population on the farm. We used to have over a dozen at one point [4] whereas now we have just our Púiscín. Some of the adult cats Poppy drove away. Along with this, she developed a habit of sniffing out the cats’ nesting spots, picking up their kittens and dropping them off in different places.
If not found by their mothers they would perish from cold or hunger. Sometimes, more gruesomely, from the effects of being held too forcefully in Poppy’s jaws in the first place.
She had a rivalry with Púiscín that, to someone unaware of the above, would probably seem quite funny. Púiscín was rescued by my mother as a kitten from the last ever kitten nest, located on top of a straw bale where it was only a matter of time before Poppy would have found it.
Due to the imminent danger, she became our first ever totally indoor cat, which she remains today. However for twenty minutes or so each day after the morning milking, both Poppy and Púiscín were fed together in the porch where they were free to congregate under my mother’s supervision.
In Púiscín’s presence, Poppy would tremble with rage and make a special, low growling sound that seemed to be reserved solely for this purpose. Púiscín, meanwhile, would obliviously nuzzle against Poppy’s legs and lick her face, probably pleased to have some animal company.
There is a photo taken by my brother (a copy of which I believe is now in our living room) of me, Poppy and Leroy in the yard, with Púiscín visible in the background, looking on from behind the safety of the porch door.
Poppy’s absence from two consecutive milkings was the main thing that prompted us something might be wrong. It was unlike her to stray far from the action or to miss feeding time.
My mother and I searched around the house and sheds and eventually found her lying under one of the shrubs in the garden, taking unusually shallow and rapid breaths.
After the milking, we took her to the vet. It was the first time she had ever been in the car and she sat on my knee wrapped up in a blanket. She seemed to quite enjoy it.
The vet was quite open about not having any definite idea of what might be wrong. He prescribed antibiotics and advised us to return the next day if things hadn’t improved. By nighttime we thought things had but it was probably just wishful thinking.
The next morning Poppy was still breathing abnormally and we returned her to the vet’s, this time for x-rays to be taken and a more extensive examination to be conducted. For this we were told we should leave her and collect her later. The vet would phone to let us know how things went.
At dinnertime the phone rang and my mother went into the living room to answer it. It was the vet. My mother didn’t say much and I could tell she was receiving a lengthy explanation of something.
When my mother came back into the kitchen she was very upset and told us that the x-ray showed that poppy had a tumour of some kind that was pressing against her heart and that this was causing the rapid breathing. In the vet’s opinion [5] the tumour was inoperable and the best thing to do was to have Poppy put down. We could return this evening to have this done.
Nobody was expecting this and we all found ourselves shocked and upset about the suddenness of it. The only other time in my life I can remember seeing both my parents as upset about something, in fact in remarkably similar circumstances, is in 2003 when a district vet from the Dept. of Agriculture showed up unnnounced while we were having lunch to tell my father that one of our animals had BSE.
We went to the vet’s once more and were brought into a room where a few dazed-looking dogs lay in large cages. I had brought my camera as I wanted to get one last photo of Poppy – I wish I had taken more over the years – but when I saw her I decided not to.
It hadn’t crossed my mind that there was any reason why she should be looking any different to when I’d last seen her, but she did. I forgot that dogs had to be sedated to be given an x-ray and Poppy was still recovering from the effects of this sedation.
She was not in a cage, but lay on a blanket on the ground in the corner of the room. She had two patches shaved on her legs, had a drip still attached and her eyes were droopy and without their usual sparkle. She didn’t really seem like Poppy to me and I couldn’t say for sure if she recognised us.
The vet thankfully showed a bit more sensitivity than he generally did in his bovine work and gave us a few minutes alone to say goodbye. I must say, I found this very difficult, partly because it seemed like such an utterly shitty place for Poppy to end her short life and partly because of seeing how upset my mother was.
She had spent far more time with Poppy than I had (due to my time in England) and is every bit as much of an animal-lover as me, but in the more understated and unsentimental way that results from a career in farming.
I told the vet we were ready and he explained he was to put Poppy down by giving her an overdose of the same type of sedative as she had been given earlier and that she wouldn’t feel any pain. My mother didn’t want to look and said she would wait outside.
I held Poppy in my arms and my father stood over her as the vet gave her the overdose of barbiturates. As they quickly took effect, she gasped and her leg muscles spasmed for a moment. The vet disconnected the drip and gave me a pink blanket to wrap her in. We carried her out to the car and put her in the boot.
We drove home on the motorway in silence then had dinner and did the milking.
Poppy would always “help” with the milking and so her absence was especially noticeable. The cutest thing Poppy used to do was in the milking parlour, which contains a long pit about a metre deep. If someone stood in the pit next to the steps leading up to ground level while Poppy was nearby, she would run around and, taking advantage of the perfect difference in height, bury her head in their armpit.
Because Leroy didn’t like to be left out, he would sometimes come running over and stick his head under the other arm. You would then be left holding two nuzzling dogs in self-inflicted headlocks. This was something I had especially intended to get a photograph of before I left but I never thought there was any hurry. Like a lot of other things, Leroy no longer does it now that he doesn’t have Poppy to take the lead.
The next day, a clear and sunny day, my father and I took her to Horseleap, where we have a large field with very soft, sandy soil that and also happens to have the prettiest view of the flat midlands countryside.
In the middle of the field we quickly dug her a deep grave, beyond the reach of ploughs and rabbits. Pat took her out of the boot of the car. Her mouth was closed and her eyes almost closed as we laid her to rest. She looked just like she did when she used to lie outstretched in the yard, sunbathing.
Pat and I stood over her for a minute, neither of us wanting to throw the first shovel of soil on top of her.
Minutes later, the sod was placed back on top of the grave and we went home.
The surprising thing I have learnt from this is that I should find myself more upset about the unexpected death of a dearly beloved dog than I could imagine getting about some of the humans in my life whose deaths, to be frank, we have been anticipating for years now.
It is also surprising how many people react to the news that my dear Poppy has died in the same way as I might expect them to if I told them that, say, I had my wallet stolen.
The explanation for both of these things is of course that it’s a lot easier for a human to be an asshole than it is for a dog.
[1] Actually one of our neighbours was missing a dog, but it turned out not to be Poppy. Also, in May 2009, a few weeks after the events describedabove, another dog showed up unannounced and ended up moving in. This one, my parents found out, belonged to an old man who lived down the road who had recently died. I have not met her yet due to being in South America. This is the third time we have acquired a dog in this way.
[2] You may be thinking this is my unqualified armchair dog psychology, but it is in fact someone else’s fully qualified dog psychology. I have a relevant newspaper clipping.
[3] I didn’t ask what happened to the others but I think I know a Bruce Springsteen song that would explain it.
[4] They came for the free milk, they stayed for the lax attitude towards spaying.
[5] I should mention I always considered this vet (the owner of the practice, albeit not the one personally dealing with Poppy in this case) to be an asshole and on occasions begged my parents to get a different one. Why anyone who seems to hate animals so much should choose a career as a vet I don’t know.
