Well-qualified to help own a dog

Bandit the semi-spaniel gives the semblance of knowing the difference between a semitone and a...
Bandit the semi-spaniel gives the semblance of knowing the difference between a semitone and a semiquaver.
Where's Holly? Writer Roy Colbert dabbles with a satire of expressionist painters as portrays a...
Where's Holly? Writer Roy Colbert dabbles with a satire of expressionist painters as portrays a family pet.

My friend has just bought a dog. Actually my friend and her sister have just bought two dogs, brothers. Their houses are almost Siamesed together, so these dogs will be brothers in alms forever.

The dogs are called Yorkie Poos. I know nothing about dog breeding, but when I saw the words Bichon Frise and Shih Tzu, every cynical pore in my body bristled like magnesium ribbon.

The Shih Tzu will never be forgotten after the movie Best In Show, when this dollop of canine candy floss snuffled into the arena at the end of a two-metre lead dangled by its towering gay-striding dog-handler. And Bichon Frise has me in a restaurant staring at the dessert menu, wondering if it comes with cream.

The small dog does have its advantages. It fits neatly into a purse, and can slide under doors simply by relaxing its spine.

To exercise a dog like this, you need merely shift it around the cushion. But it will also eat a $1200 pair of shoes as quickly as a walnut, and think nothing of burning your house to the ground by chewing the computer cord to gum.

My friend sniffs at this empiricism. She assures me she will have the last word. I doubt it. I don't mean to be unkind, but I have helped own dogs twice, and I am fat with the experience.

Our family dog was Bandit, a loopy semi-spaniel, who turned feral if anyone entered the room he was eating in. Bandit was textbook schizoid - you never quite knew which Bandit would show up. He attempted to swallow posties whole, but would lick other uniformed visitors like a meringue bowl. He loved Mormons, possibly because of the smell of their shiny new Bibles, and could find golf-balls where even the army wouldn't go.

My father taught Bandit to play the piano, or more specifically, middle C. When his friends came round to try out the latest batch of home brew, he would shout "Bandit! Middle C!!" - and Bandit would roar into the room and leap at the middle of the piano, clomping his paws down roughly where middle C lay. Then he would get a biscuit.

While doing this, Bandit gradually scratched away a glob of wood on our Bechstein grand piano, so my Dad shifted him to our second piano, a Schiedmayer upright. He even took a photo of Bandit playing the Schiedmayer, which later won a national photography exhibition with a witty caption none of the family can remember.

Holly joined my current family in the late 1980s. We were on a farm in Omakau and were offered the pick of a litter of border collies. We took the quiet shy dog at the back, the only one that wasn't jumping around.

We didn't want one of those jumping-around dogs. We later realised Holly was at the back because she didn't know where the front was. A lovely dog, but no smarter than a pencil. Her owner later confessed to us she was savagely inbred and would have been no more use as an eye dog than a bowl of cashews.

When we took Holly to dog obedience training at Bethunes Gully, having grown tired of her metaphorically-raised middle finger, the problem wasn't so much getting her to obey commands as to not walk sideways. It was only when I walked sideways myself that we got her moving in a straight line.

Holly cost us thousands of dollars in fencing and dog ranger fees, but she could catch a frisbee at blinding speed years before lesser dogs turned up on Holmes doing it, and she could smell a beach from a thousand metres.

We do miss Holly. A painting of her in the manner of Wayne Seyb hangs in my office. I am looking at it now.

Maybe getting a dog is not such a silly thing.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

 

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