Be mindful that a dog is not just for Christmas

A DOG is for life, not just for Christmas. That must be one of the all-time most successful slogans that has changed the way we think about our canine friends, writes Tom Gillespie.

It was thought up by Clarissa Baldwin, the former chief executive of Dogs Trust, 43 years ago.

When I was growing up nearly every family on Marian Row, Castlebar, had a pet dog. We knew them all by name and we regularly went ‘hunting’ with the local mutts.

‘Hunting’ was a misnomer. It was in fact a run around Bayne’s Field or The Rocks which were located at the back of Rockvale estate on the Rathbawn Road.

I don’t suppose we ever had a licence, not that I can remember. But dog wardens were a thing of the future.

We had a cocker spaniel named ‘Topper’, named after the popular comic of the time, a UK publication by D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd., that ran from February 7, 1953, to September 15, 1990, when it merged with The Beezer.

Unfortunately, Topper met a dreadful end when he was poisoned and died a horrific death.

I was in St. Gerald’s College then. At lunchtime my parents discovered that Topper as unwell. However, on returning from evening study, which ran from 5 to 7 p.m., Topper had passed away. It caused great distress in our family.

Topper was the ideal pet. He travelled everywhere with me. In summertime we cycled to Lough Lannagh for a swim at the diving board. He loved the water too.

I recall we brought him to Enniscrone when the family holidayed there in the 1960s. There is a high cliff above the beach where the Marine Ballroom used to be.

One day I was on the beach playing football and Topper was with my father up on the road in front of the ballroom.

On seeing me, Topper got over the protective fence and tried to get to me. But he slipped and fell down the cliff. Fortunately, he landed on his feet and wasn't injured.

After he died I had no inclination to replace him. So from that date on the Gillespie family were without a pet dog.

We did have a cat and the story of how the cat came back is for another day, and worth waiting for.

Now, with the approach of Christmas, parents get carried away with the idea of impressing their children with a gorgeous fluffy puppy on Christmas morning.

They ignore the fact that a dog lives for up to 15 years, takes up huge amounts of time and effort, and costs (over a lifetime) as much as a new small car.

So every November, in the run-up to Christmas, there is a huge increase in the number of pups being advertised for sale.

And in the new year, the switchboards of rescue charities are swamped with calls from people who cannot cope any more with a Christmas puppy that's become an exuberant, bouncy, hard-to-handle adolescent.

I cannot impress enough on parents the thought that should go in to investing in a puppy ‘for a lifetime’.

Children will, after a short time, grow disinterested in the puppy and its care will revert to the parents.

Undoubtedly, there are children, with an innate love of animals, who will devote every spare minute to the new pet. But unfortunately, more often than not, the opposite is the case.

I once had the unenviable task of having to have four beautiful retrievers ‘put down’.

They belonged to my late uncle, Denny Fahey, a blacksmith from Newantrim Street, Castlebar. Denny was a nature lover and his sport was fishing and shooting. He trained the dogs himself. They were his children.

However, at the end of July 1980, Denny passed away suddenly. I was tasked with looking after the dogs. But it became apparently evident they missed their master and the decision had to be taken to put them down.

I contacted veterinary surgeon George O’Malley, whose father had ‘docked’ Topper - cutting off his tail, a practice I believe no longer in vogue.

Before George came to Newantrim Street, I had dug four ‘graves’ up in the back garden.

One-by-one I took the dogs out to George in the backyard. He gently bound their mouths, cut off some fur in the front paw to locate a vein, and injected them with a lethal dose.

As each dog went to the big kennel in the sky, I removed them out of sight, so the next dog could not see the remains of the others.

When George departed I dragged them to the open graves. Today they rest beneath the foundations of SuperValu in Castlebar.

But getting back to the ‘dog is for life, not just for Christmas’ message, there are two strong, unarguable reasons as to what you should not do.

First, you should never get a dog on a whim as an easy way to keep the children happy on Christmas Day. You need to think very carefully about it, and the fact that it will be a Christmas gift can easily distort level-headed thinking.

Second, even if you have thought and planned carefully, Christmas Day is a bad time for a pet to arrive in a new home. There is too much going on, and the pup won't get the concentrated attention that it needs and deserves.

If you do decide that Christmas is the time you want to introduce a long-awaited new pup, change the way you do things.

On Christmas Day, give the family presents of a new dog bed, some dog toys, and other doggy paraphernalia. They will enjoy the fact that a dog is soon coming, and then in the days or weeks after Christmas, when the normal routine of life has resumed, you can pick up the new arrival from the rescue centre or breeder.

 

 

* Read Tom Gillespie's A Mayo Outlook column in our print edition, in shops every Tuesday