His Master’s Voice

One of the weirdest incidents I think I’ve ever dealt with, working for the Royal Dog Warden Association, happened a few years back in a little village near where I live.

A vicar phoned up, reporting a big dog in the graveyard near to his church who was trying to dig up one of the newly dug graves and, apparently, the vicar and his verger had tried shooing away the dog but it had started to become more aggressive and so the two of them, fearful of being bitten, had relented and called the RDWA.

I should say that this dog was a fair size; an Alsatian and so, understandably, anyone having to face a dog like that when it’s behaving aggressively would be quite terrified.

Anyway; when I got there, I tried all the usual methods like coaxing it away with food and trying to put a leash on the end of a stick round its head but the dog wasn’t having any of it and, though I’ve got special padding that I wear to protect me from dog bites, even with all the gear on, a dog that size can be quite powerful and I didn’t want to get into a fight with it so, in the end, I had to resort to using a tranquilizer dart gun because it just wouldn’t stop digging at this grave.

Then, when the dog was partly unconscious, the vicar came up to me and he was thanking me as people usually do.

“I can’t thank you enough. I don’t know what we’d have done if it had gotten into the coffin”, he’d said, “Or how we would have explained it to the family of the deceased”.

“That’s alright”, I told him, “It’s all part of the job but it’s still a puzzle as to why that dog wanted to dig up a grave in the first place”.

Then, suddenly, that’s when we heard, me and the vicar, this banging from inside the coffin that was lying in the grave this dog had dug up, you know.

It was the dog’s master. He suffered from a form of Catalepsy you see and he’d been declared dead by a coroner and buried alive by mistake. No one could hear him buried under the ground and who knows, he might well have died down there but the dog had heard him, thank god.

Man’s best friend, I should say so.