Dogs are Gods

DOGS ARE GODS

I was always a happy and kind dog by nature, as most Labradors are.
Black in colour and medium in size, my behaviour is generally quite docile, content if only to meet each day without worrying about where my next meal might come from. I display spurts of joyful energy when there was a good atmosphere in the house, especially when my owners’ three little children were excited about something.
Unhappily, those spurts are hard-pushed with the almost constant fighting between my owners.
I’ve tried everything in my power to make them stop but it’s only got worse.
My male owner would say something nasty or swear to my female owner and her behaviour would become ugly.
I would then try to calm things down by acting playful at their feet as they threw words at each other with venom. This, I thought, would help them to see the funny side of things and make them stop bickering.
‘Come on,’ I’d say to them, slapping my tail on the wooden floor to snap them out of their anger. ‘Look at me! I’m funny! I can make you laugh!’
My male owner would look down at me with a crooked sneer, unable to wipe it from his face.
That wouldn’t get me down, though, so I’d carry on being playful at their feet, not one to give up hope easily. I’d try pawing my male owner’s foot but he wouldn’t play.
With this, I’d lay down with my paws to the front and my eyes up, waiting to be played with in silence, praying for them to stop and think for a second.
They would normally start fighting over who did the most in the kitchen, but the quarrel would soon spill over into other domains, where each felt at an unfair loss with the other.
Just as I’d start to give up hope, there would be a silence between my owners. At this time, I’d slap my tail on the floor lazily, hoping for them to snap out of it, but they would be deaf and blind to me.
The quarrel would normally end with my male owner storming off into the study and my female owner going into the kitchen.
I’d elect to go and see my male owner, seeing as it was he who put the food in my bowl every day.
So I’d pick myself up and make my way slowly towards the door of the study, where I’d see my male owner smoking furiously at the desk with a phone in his hand.
‘Why is he doing this to himself?’ I’d think. ‘Right! I’m going to cheer this man up once and for all!’
So I’d go up to him and wag my whole body at him like a beckoning canine belly dancer. My eyes, if only the man could see through to them, would be awash with ecstacy and joy; the two things sadly lacking in my owners’ lives.
The man would catch a glimpse of me and smile briefly, albeit with pursed lips and sadness. He’d be quick to return his glass-eyed gaze to somewhere without movement.
Believing his master’s smile to be a sign of recovery, I’d become excited, thinking that the man was snapping out of his conscious nightmare.
But the man would try to grasp what the man on the other end of the phone was saying (he couldn’t concentrate for all the anger in his mind), and he’d become frustrated, coughing and spluttering between puffs on a cigarette.
My owner would put the phone down and sit slumped for a good ten seconds.
‘This is my chance to make him happy!’ I’d think, and so I’d spring up and place my two paws onto the man’s knees, beckoning the man to look at the love in my eyes with a slight scratch of paw.
The man would remain in his dark world full of traps, unable to get out, and when he felt my scratch, ever so slightly, he’d react as if it had bothered him, jerking his knees outwards to rid my paws.
‘Nero,’ he’d say, accusingly. ‘Go away, will you?’
So I’d walk off slowly, and that was the way things panned out for us.
In terms of food, I have always been well fed by my owners, although, being a Labrador, I’m a terrible gourmand and would eat almost anything from anywhere.
Two meals a day were never enough for me, but that’s what I’m given. My owners know how Labs inevitably turn obese if we’re allowed to.
My male owner never quite came to terms with the fact that if food was left out, I’d have it. From the outset he made a resolution to get me to acknowledge my errors.
One time, when I was caught at a cat bowl, again, my male owner smacked me on the nose. Then, when I overturned the bin and ate what I could find, my female owner kicked me in the groin
It hadn’t worked on me, though, because I’d wet myself every time.
Asking me to go outside was just as difficult because I’d pee himself on the way out, especially if I was dragged.
Either way, I’d eat whenever the possibility presented itself.
If my owners had gone out and forgotten to take the dustbin bags with them, I’d convince myself that they’d left them out for me and devour the contents during an afternoon.
They’d return to a garden with plastic wrappers and tins strewn all over the grass, at which time my male owner would give me a smack.
But it had never helped.
Having had a nice afternoon, the children would watch in dismay from the front door as their father slapped me on the nose.
‘You mustn’t do that!’ he’d say, vehemently.
‘I thought you left it out for me,’ I’d always wanted to say.
My male owner had become weary about leaving uneaten cat food and bins out by this time, and tried drumming it into me that I must be good in his serious tone.
‘If you go there and eat that food, Nero,’ he’d say. ‘You’re not being fed for a whole day. Understood?’
I hadn’t understood for a long time, lying to myself that my owners were actually telling me to eat it, such were my cravings for food, but I never really understood how to come to terms with the rules. The lying to myself had to stop.
At about this time, I wondered whether I’d be better off running away and taking my chances on the road.
In Loupiac, where I’d met my owners during their long stay at a gite, I’d played my way into the family like a true professional.
The owner of the gite had told the family that I’d been left at the roadside by my previous owners. If they wanted me, I was theirs.
The family took me in with pride, but, for all the love in the world, they couldn’t get me to let go of my past.
I’d always peed myself when I’m shouted at. The first occasion I did it with the family was when I swiped a whole chicken from the table and the male owner smacked me.
I cowered and slid off with a trail of pee following me all the way out. This was a double blow for the male owner, who saw this as rubbing salt into the wound, or pissing on the chicken.
While the male owner may have been right in assuming that I’d been beaten badly by my previous owner, he had completely erased the fact that he was on the way to doing the exact same thing.
Even if the extent to which he had physically hurt me was fractional compared to the lengthy beatings I’d suffered before, the cause, effect and outcome had been unchanged.
As far as I’m concerned, Man does this to dogs; they beat them. No matter what anyone tries to tell me would convince me otherwise.
It was a sad fact of life that could never be changed.
If, as I thought, my insatiable appetite to gorge on forbidden food was to be dealt with by a few smacks, it was a small price to pay for the pleasure. I’d take the beatings. They were worth it.
One day came along, though, when all the dustbin bags in the world couldn’t have kept me from running.
It was one of those bright April mornings when anything seemed possible and worthy. I sniffed the sweet aroma of Spring and decided that it was high time I took my chances on the road once and for all.
The children wouldn’t miss me. They’d adopted seven dogs on their Nintendo ADS consoles and they seemed much happier scratching a screen with a plastic pen and talking to imaginary dogs made up of ones and noughts than playing with a real dog. I’d often tried to play with them but it hadn’t worked, all because of those machines.
I felt pretty useless when I realised just how little they thought of me in the grand scheme of things. The kids never once walked me.
My male owner hadn’t shown me much in the way of love during Winter, a little pat and a nod a day and a telling-off if I’d eaten from someone else’s plate the usual quota.
He’d stopped hitting or smacking me, mostly out of defeatism, and I’d almost learnt not to thieve food, out of compassion for my male owner, but with the game of eating forbidden food dead in the water, I felt at a loss with life.
I’d lived the life of a stray on the outside lane before, and I was sure I could do it again.
At four years of age, still slim and with a good, oily coat, I decided that sweet April morning that I wouldn’t be missed, and headed out along the driveway for what I resolved to be the last time.
My owners hadn’t noticed me gone until it was too late, but I was sure they wouldn’t miss me anyway.
I did well to keep out of too much trouble for the first week, but, holed up in a forest only a few kilometres from the house, where I’d decided to bide his time, I’d bored of being second to a chipmunk and the rabbits were too quick to catch now that I was unfit.
Contrary to when I’d been stray before, I was now an old dog in a young dog’s world, and all prey seemed to elude me.
The dustbins at the foot of the forest had been invaluable for titbits of an evening, but the wildlife factor was few and far between.
One time, I’d chased a fox that had shown me a rabbit lair, only to be cheated out of the spoils once I’d agreed to bark down the hole with the fox waiting at the other end.
The fox ran off and ate the rabbit alone in another hole, leaving me dejected and angry.
‘Next time I see that fox, I’ll rip his throat out,’ I wagered to himself, quickly realising that the fox would probably beat me in a fight, especially with my dire lack of fitness.
Meanwhile, back at the house, my male and female owner had put posters up at every boulangerie and tabac in a ten-mile radius, and the three little children had started praying for me to come back every night before bed-time.
The house seemed quiet without me, almost spooky.
Those long nails on my feet had ceased to sound with every lazy stroll I’d taken from room to room, making sure everyone was happy.
My female owner had gone out every night at dusk in the car, scouring different sections of the near vicinity like a hawk, hoping I’d be hungry enough to poke my face out from wherever I was and go back home with her.
‘Nero’s our dog and we’ll find him and bring him back!’ she’d announced to the crying children.
She’d been true enough going out there in search of me, and my face was a major feature in the lives of everyone in the area thanks to the posters, but it seemed that nothing would bring me back as the second week of my disappearance lapsed. Even the girls’ prayers for my return, which I’d heard but not believed, seemed to escape me.
On a moonlit evening, I was beaten up by a man who had become sick of clearing up after me at the dustbins, so I hobbled back into the forest with a badly bruised leg and ribs.
The fox laughed when he saw my face.
‘Don’t look at me, Nero,’ said the fox. ‘I’m not feeding you. I’ve got enough on my plate without worrying about you. You’re just a housedog.’ The fox walked around me slowly, surveying the damage to my leg. ‘Looks bad, brother. Why don’t you get on back where you belong, housedog. The wild’s not the place for you.’
I tried to lunge but it was pathetic.
‘So long, housedog,’ said the fox, strolling off.
I lay down and sighed one of my sighs.
I thought about the sigh and suddenly realised that I used to sigh like that at the house, when I’d blamed it all on my lack of freedom.
‘I’m sighing twice as heavily as when I was at home,’ I thought to myself, again realising that I’d played tricks on myself that hadn’t made me wiser or happier.
‘This isn’t freedom,’ I said to myself, feeling my front leg start to pulsate with pain.
‘I’d best get back home.’
It took me till dawn to hobble back to the house. The moon had lit the path kindly, and as I lay down at the foot of the front door, not wanting to wake the family unnecessarily, I sighed a sigh full of happiness and slumped into a ball to get some sleep on the doormat.
‘Now that’s a sigh,’ I thought to myself.
It was my female owner that found me there, still curled up but shaking the pain away.
She tried picking me up but quickly realised I was hurt when I let out a feeble yelp, and she brought my basket and gave me a blanket.
She went upstairs and told the children and the male owner to come downstairs to see what was down there.
There was joy on the faces of the entire family. The children kissed me on the nose and forehead.
The vet came over and bandaged me up around the chest and at the knee.
‘Another night out there and he’d have been dead,’ he said on leaving.
Ever since I’ve been back, I’ve tried really hard not to steal food but I just can’t resist on certain occasions.