Bruno's Blog – a complete animal at work

The old man was sitting reading an article in the Veterinary Record the other day. I was just far enough from his feet to be able to see his face, and was giving him the adoring I’m-staring-deep-into-your-eyes bit. I mean, I was hungry, and I wanted to go for a walk.

“Hey Bruno, who’s a good boy?” he says.

You fool, I think. This is not the Oh-my-god-you’re-so-amazing look. You don’t get that one from me so much these days, now I’ve got you properly figured out. Our relationship is a bit like most marriages – we had hilarious fun at the start but now I mostly find him a bit dull and embarrassing and he struggles to put up with me.

This is the Hey-you-feed-me-something-edible-and-now-please look. Easily distinguishable by any halfbrain I’d have thought. Ok, so I’d added a light nuance of Actually-I’d also-like-to-go-for-a-walk, just for gentle amusement to see if he’d get it.

He didn’t, of course. Although he did get the hint about the food a bit later, so maybe he’s not quite so dumb after all. You see this food thing is all about quality ingredients. Good, honest, quality ingredients, lovingly prepared. And I don’t mind telling you that he’s got into some pretty lousy habits recently. Oh yes, I know he’s working hard, no time to rush off to the supermarket (excuse me, that’s actually pronounced butcher. Not supermarket. Butcher. Practice saying it, it’s easy. Boo chah. Easy. See?).

But the end result of all this ‘hard work’ and ‘long hours’ has been me having to put up with ‘dog food’ out of a bag. This is hardly appropriate.

“Ooh, yum” he says, as if I’m some sort of slow child ”are you a hungry boy, then?”

Of course I’m sodding hungry, I haven’t eaten since last night and it’s now 10 o’clock at night the next day. I’m bloody starving. Then as he opens the pack:

“Yummy Royal Science Nutri Yukkynubby Burnt Canine! Who’s a lucky boy, then!”

Erm, well, at this specific moment, not me I can’t help reflecting. I’m not quite sure what else I need to do to make it plain to old soft brains that I don’t DO ‘dog food’.

Malnutrition (which sets in quite early in my case) drives me to eat it if I have to, but I’ve heard the spiel he gives his clients about Bones And Raw Food feeding, the benefits of raw meat, raw meaty bones, natural feeding, liquidised vegetables, and then he goes into the ’if your dog was out hunting he’d eat the..’ blah blah routine.

Music to my ears every time – apart from the bit about vegetables: that always strikes me as completely irrelevant in any discussion about real food.

My favourite client response was when one girl looked at him after the hunting lecture, looked over at her King Charles Cavalier sitting all regal and dignified by the door waiting for the footman to open it, then looked back at soft brains and said

“Hunting? What are you talking about? This dog’s been sat on a velvet cushion for the last 400 years.”

Spot on. I’m a dog, not a savage. I don’t hunt or kill, I have a little man that does it for me. It’s just that the old man, the big guy, twatty vet, old soft brains reading the Vet Record as if he understands a word that’s written in it, doesn’t always ensure that the supply chain remains unbroken.

Hence the bags of garbage that tastes of cardboard and looks like squirrel poop that sit in the cupboard in the kitchen. Emergency supplies, he calls them. Well I can tell you there’s been a very long emergency in this house recently. It’s called my stomach.

And then he has the nerve to say to people

“You know my dog doesn’t really eat much. Ho ho, at least he’s cheap to run”

Ha bloody ha.

But to be fair, he did go and actually buy some proper FOOD today. We’re talking raw chicken wings. Oh yes. Wings. Real food. H-hmm. Oh yes. Wings. Mmmm. Chicken. Raw. We ate. Out on the lawn. God was in his heaven once again.

Unbeknown to old soft brains, I’d actually considered leaving home on the basis of the recent poor table. I’d given him discrete hints such as running away whilst out on a walk, having bouts of deafness when called, going the opposite way when let out of the front door, that sort of thing, but as we’ve already established, he’s as thick as two short planks, so no progress on that front. But supplies are back in, so I’ve signed up for another term.

Now I started off saying that the old man was reading an article in the Veterinary Record (you still with me? paragraph 1, up at the top if you’re not sure). The reason I’d shown it to him – he has a tendency to skim articles if they’ve not been highlighted for him – was that it was all about physiotherapy for dogs.

This great discovery that needed publishing in a cutting edge journal said that dogs with osteoarthritis had a greater range of pain-free movement and general ease of mobility if they were given some gentle physiotherapy to keep them supple.

What is up with these people? Are all vets as thick as the old man? Of COURSE we function better with massage and physiotherapy. Maybe now he’s seen it in print in the – hush now - Veterinary Record, he’ll get up off his butt and finish writing that book for dog owners telling them how to do the whole massage therapy thing.

I think I’ll go to sleep now and try to figure out a new facial expression (one that he might finally understand) to tell him to go get on with it.

I’ll keep you posted

Told you. The bastards. Sent me to kennels. Even took a photo of me being loaded into the van to go ‘down to the country’, whatever that means. Loads of the old man’s posh clients talk about ‘going down to the country for the weekend’ or for Jason’s half term or something like that. What do they do there? Michael talks about going hunting but I thought that was illegal. Does that mean he’ll go to prison? He seems perfectly nice most of the time, I can’t believe it’d be very good for him or for Polly (remember her? The Pointer? Wakey, wakey) if he got banged up for chasing foxes.

ULP!! Just had a thought. I chase foxes all the time (if you actually see them – Ed). Does that mean I’ll have to go to prison if they catch me? I mean I’m a dog, and I thought the law said it was illegal to hunt foxes with dogs…therefore….

So maybe that’s what this weekend was all about. There was me thinking I’d been sent to kennels so that they could swan off somewhere WITHOUT me (as if that’d be any fun), whereas what was actually going on was I’d been sent to prison for hunting (well, chasing, actually) a fox the other night. Oops. That makes me a certified criminal. A con. An old lag. I done chokey. Well ‘ard, I am, so wotchit, you lot.

Anyway, I’m back. we had a wonderful walk in the park tonight – all warm and full of fragrance, back with the old man again, the heady perfumes of spring blossoms wafting across the grassy knolls (well ‘ard, as you said, Bruno – Ed). And then the fresh scent of foxes sending me screaming and yipping around through the bushes and woodland.

All quite exhausting for an old lag.

Bit of respect if you don’t mind

Something’s going on, I know it is. The woman appears to have given up smoking for a start. And that always means things get a bit weird for a while. I tend to go for the easy option and hide under the bed more, but the old man and the kids get it in the neck quite a bit.

Strange thing is, that normally by now (4 days and counting) she’s back on the weed and we can all breathe again. Apart from the smoke, that is, which is revolting. Oh, and her, of course, who starts coughing again and sitting on her own in the kitchen with the window open, pretending that that way you can’t smell it through the rest of the house.

And I am a creature with an extraordinarily highly developed sense of smell, as you know, so I do know what I’m talking about here (no you don’t, you plonker, you gaily trotted along the pavement last night while a fox nipped round the other side of a parked car and watched you go by from about ten feet away and you didn’t notice a thing – Ed).

Really? I mean I was working on my new theory of complex transformation in sub-spatial resonance, so maybe I might have missed a small detail. Such as a fox… Low, base creatures that they are.

But that is not what this is about. Something is going on, and I’m not sure that I’m completely in the loop on this one. When the man from the kennels came to the clinic on Monday, I distinctly heard the old man say something to him about have you got any more room at Easter, and then he did mention my name in the next sentence, but as I say, I have been very pre-occupied with my new spectral theorem recently, so I can’t be relied on to concentrate on the outside world 100% of the time. My inner dog, however, is always vibrant, eclectic, intuitive, focussed and all that sort of thing.

So I’m keeping a very close eye on developments, because I have a sneaking suspicion that they might be about to shove off for the weekend and dump me in that unspeakable boot camp of a kennels to shiver and starve my way through the ‘holiday’. Don’t you dare tell them what a blast I had last time. Much more fun than hanging around at home with a heavy smoker going cold turkey, the boy glued to the playstation, the girl going all teenager and hormonal and the old man, well, working, I think he calls it.

Mustn’t forget my toothbrush. And a deeply gloomy look on my face.