We hadn’t been married a month when my husband started on about a guard dog. There had been a spate of break-ins near us. Eventually, I gave in, agreed to go to the rescue centre. When we arrived, I opened the car door to a cacophony of barks, howls and growls, swiftly followed by an unpleasant musky smell with accents of poo and dog pee.
I was all for heading home but Joe grabbed my hand, led me along the row of cages. He waxed lyrical about a massive Rottweiler with spit hanging from its jaws, a Weimaraner with ghostly eyes, a duplicitous Doberman slinking round the edges of the kennel and a panting German Shepherd with lolling tongue and sharp canines.
I put my foot down. ‘No way I could live with these dogs. They scare me more than burglars. How about a small dog who’d bark and wake us up? A spaniel or a poodle?’ He gave me the same look of horror as the day I bought him a turquoise shirt.
We compromised on a Cairn Terrier and Joe arranged to pick her up the next day. He arrived home with a German Shepherd called Czar. I wasn’t best pleased but what could I do? Drag the mutt three miles through the rain on the off chance the rescue centre took returns.
Joe left for the steelworks at 7am, six days a week, leaving me to manage the dog as best I could. I was relieved to find Czar wasn’t as scary as he looked, no snarling or growling, but he’d filch anything edible, rake through the bins, chew my sandals and slippers, plonk muddy paws on visitors’ chests and lick their faces. I had to drag him off by the collar. He was like Joe, meant well, but didn’t pay a blind bit of notice to anything I said.
I signed up for obedience classes at the Kennel Club. It was a long slog, two hours training every day but, after six months Czar was stellar. If I told him to sit and stay, he wouldn’t budge even when tempted by raw meat. Czar would climb ramps, follow a scent trail, jump through hoops of fire at a single command. We did well in competitions, won prizes for teamwork. At home, he’d sit by my chair, his head on the armrest, gazing up with the kind of adoration you never get from a husband. Joe became more and more disgruntled, said I’d ruined Czar as a guard dog, made him soft.
To prove his point, he dressed in black, put on a balaclava, crept out the kitchen door and climbed back in through the living room window while I was watching Strictly. I jumped up, spilt a mug of hot coffee down the front of my dress, let out a screech of pain. Czar just sat there with his tongue hanging out, wagging his tail. ‘Look, see what I mean, you’ve ruined that dog.’ Two years of marriage had taught me that making your husband feel like an idiot was a bad move, so I didn’t point out the fatal flaw in his reasoning.
Joe insisted on taking over Czar’s training, began with the attack command. First, he made a thick protective wad with a layer of fine metal mesh to cover his left hand and arm and took to breaking into the house at any time of the day or night, goading Czar, bumping his nose with the padded arm and shouting, ‘Attack’. Every time the dog latched on to the padding, he’d get a reward. Eventually, Czar would lock his jaws, hold on even if Joe yelled at him, yanked his arm around and hit him with a rolled-up newspaper. The plan was that Czar would seize hold of the burglar and not let go.
One night the cat tried to bury herself under my pillow. I opened my eyes, heard a strange noise in the next room and woke Joe. He picked up his baseball bat from under the bed and gestured for me to hide in the wardrobe. A couple of minutes later I heard Joe shout, ‘Attack’, followed by terrible screams, the sound of running feet. I ran through to the living room to find the burglar had already scarpered. Joe was splayed on the floor with Czar attached to his left arm. He was yelling blue murder, frantically hitting the dog with his free hand.
I was laughing so much it took me a few seconds to say ‘Drop’. Joe didn’t see the funny side for a week or two, complained at great length about the tetanus jab, cursed Czar every day until his arm healed. I gained insight into the way Joe’s mind worked – or didn’t work – and lowered my expectations. If he couldn’t see life from a dog’s point of view, it would take a while before he was able to see marriage from mine.
Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash
