Farewell My Lurcher...

...he came as a companion to the collie (not border but 'borderline', to use Jilly Cooper's fine phrase), both of them rescue dogs so full provenance unclear. Word on the street was he had been horridly mistreated then abandoned - bred, as a lurcher, to hunt but possibly too daffy to to please his itinerant masters. Certainly fast enough - in his prime could give a greyhound a flying start - but lacking maybe the full killer instinct. Go with the flow was his thing. Perhaps a natural Buddhist.

Not that he was easy going from the outset. Whatever had hurt him had deeply pained him. The pain led to fear, the fear to naked aggression. Funnily - miraculously rather - never towards the collie. But with any other dog it was war at first sight. We tried training classes - got thrown out after the second - we used a muzzle as ordered. Happy as larry in the house, a monster out. Had me off my feet twice trying to hold him back from attack.  Didn't care for visitors either. A knock at the door and the door was half chewed. Friends and neighbours began to draw back.

Animal shrinks scratched his and their heads and opined that perhaps he was merely trying to preserve what he had, and was simply being protective both of us and of his environs.  Whatever the cause, the outcome was deeply troublesome. Could he attack a human, a child maybe? Was he a 'dangerous dog'? It was a possibility and being a possibility was not one with which we could live. So with heavy hearts we sent him back after six months to the rescue centre from whence he came.

What then was to be his fate? Obvious really. No other sane bugger would have him, he would spend the rest of his life in a cage with occasional outings and he would hate every minute of it. Two months later we had to relent. If he was to have any quality of life we alone were the ones who could and would give it him. And what do you know? As if he knew that he had nearly blown it, from the moment he returned he was a reformed character.

All right, that is not strictly, fully true. For a year or two there was always that frisson that he might lose it; but he never did, eventually settling for the life that lurchers love best - a good daily run and then huge basketfuls of utter indolence. Did once burst through a fence in chase of a singularly unimpressed cow, which resulted in a busted then an amputated tail. Show, also, him a woodland and off at once in chase of largely phantom rabbits. All as nature intended.

As the years progressed, the gallop slowed to the canter, then to the gentle trot, finally the sedate and oft pausing to sniff the air walk. (Downwards transition they would say of a horse.) In the house too big for a lap-dog he would lean his head on my lap and - well yes - smile. He and the collie as near bum-chums as two spayed dogs can be - lots of deep ear-licking the nearest they came to full on loving. A happy boy for year upon happy year.

Then some encroaching unhappiness. First, two brushes with cancer that might have floored him but didn't. (Vets bills the size of a Sistine Chapel redec.) A back leg with a chunk missing and then half a lower jaw gone. Nothing though seemed to phase him. Eat, walk, sleep, snog the collie - an eternal cycle.

But not forever. He survived one gastric torsion last month. Emergency major surgery, stomach pinned to the body wall. That sort of thing. But not this second episode tonight. When a dog's belly is swollen like a barrage balloon, when his flesh and skin are tighter than any drum, when he is crying in unrelieved agony, when there is no hope from further surgery, then a loving, weeping owner has only one choice.

The syringe was large, but he was docile. He lay down as if to sleep, stretched out as ever he did and was gone. Farewell my lurcher - Spiral, Big Boy, the Colonel - the locals called him, Mr Cheese - God knows where that came from.

My dear friend.