Santi is Unwell

Or: Can we ever love our dogs too much?

I lay in bed this morning listening to the news on Radio4. (That’s not me pictured, that’s a picture of my dog, Santi).

The headlines: lots of Trump-related dramas, to the point where I feel I’m in an abusive relationship, conditioned to passively reacting to someone else’s emotions rather than steering my own glorious future; something else about Ukraine; and then I stopped listening and I thought, “Why isn’t Santi’s forthcoming MRI scan on the News today?”

The fact that for a second this seemed like an entirely plausible news item to me might mark me down as something of a crazy-dog-lady, but dog lovers reading this will hopefully relate.

Santi rushed into the bathroom on Monday morning, and did her usual tap-dance of excitement at not having seen me since the night before. She’s not normally allowed into the bathroom, I hasten to add, but it was my birthday, and obviously she knew this and urgently needed to wish me well for the year ahead. As her nails rattled on the floor, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, she suddenly squealed, her back legs slipped out and collapsed underneath her. She let me pick her up, didn’t appear to be in any pain, and that was it. She now walks like a drunk dog, can hobble a few steps only, and the suspicion is she might have some kind of disc disease, where the discs in the spine compress to cause a neurological condition that means her back legs no longer walk. How permanent or not this is, we don’t know, and won’t know until she has an MRI scan, but in the mean time she is on sedatives, pain killers and anti-inflammatories, and been told to have crate rest.

Of course, there’s no need to put her in an actual crate, because she’s made her own “crate” under the sofa where she knows we can’t get to her easily. Santi is phobic about going to the vets. Last time one tried to put her on the examination table, she bit them, jumped off the table and hid in the corner, snarling at anyone who tried to tempt her out with a treat. We popped a muzzle on her and tried again, and she ripped off the muzzle and bit me.

This time round, I carried her in my arms to a local vet, where she panted intensely, did her little drunken hobble so they could see how her legs were affected, and let me carry her back home, where she scuttled back under the sofa to hide.

Listening to the news this morning and wondering why Santi isn’t up there with Trump’s possible talks with Hamas, I said to my boyfriend, “I need G’s level of empathy.” G is our neighbour, she has a beautiful white cat who is blind, or is it deaf, and has something else wrong with it, but is still living a very full life, tentatively exploring the locale and scaring Santi every time we go in and out of the house. Sure enough, when I take Santi out for a drunken-hobble of a pee this morning, I bump into G, whose eyes start welling up with tears, just like mine, when I explain what’s going on.

“She’s your baby” she says. “No wonder you’re so upset.”

The thing is, she’s not my baby. I have two babies, aged 25 and 23, and another bonus-baby, who isn’t mine as she has two incredible parents already and frankly what teenager needs an extra parent, but who I get to be around for half of every week, lucky me as she’s wonderful. But G is right - why is the emotion I’m feeling now, pretty close to what I felt that time the very tip of my daughter’s finger was ripped off in the playground in a fight over a toy pram? And I had to ring round and find a plastic surgeon, all the while bawling my eyes out? Or the anguish I felt when my son was bullied at school for a year, culminating in the little thug who like all bullies was very popular, telling everyone he was leaving because of my son, when in fact it was because his high-achieving mother was dissatisfied with the lack of homework being meted out?

I ask Jane Haynes what she thinks. Over the years, I have often asked Jane what she thinks, because she is a wise psychotherapist, who once helped me get through a difficult time. She is a kind soul, who also happens to love dogs.

Recently, her beloved Juno, was impaled on a branch while out with a walker, narrowly avoiding severe cardiac damage. Thankfully Juno survived. But the emotion Jane felt?

“Yikes. It was hell,” she says. “I love my dogs because unlike me, they are unconditional in their love, and that is very much a relief as I don’t believe in unconditional love in humans - our natural inclination to ambivalence gets in the way.”

Someone once told me that narcissists love dogs precisely because of this unconditional love, but this theory doesn’t stand up, according to Jane.

“Sadly the word “narcissist” is used randomly and unintelligently,” says Jane. “There is a spectrum. No, it does not make you a narcissist [to love and be loved by dogs]. Maybe in fact it is the opposite - seeing how reverential we can be to our pets, it might make us reflect and try and be just as patient and understanding with the annoying habits of our nearest and dearest”.

My son thinks I love Santi too much. There are definitely times when we all talk about her incessantly, much like a couple with a newborn baby. Don’t get me wrong, your baby is cute and everything, but it’s not my baby, and after a while, sorry to break this to you, but your baby can dominate the conversation and why don’t we talk about Santi instead? Santi has a whole backstory - she came from Santorini, rescued by a vet, Bruce Fogle, who was in Greece on a neutering and spaying mission. She was adopted by us to cheer up my daughter who was a teenager suffering from a broken heart and needed to be loved unconditionally. “I’ve always wanted a big dog,” she said, as we looked at Santi’s picture, her head and shoulders proud and strong, her ears pointing upwards, like a Doberman. In reality she was the size of a cat. It felt rude to say “no”, even if it was now starting to feel like we were in catfish territory. “Take her for the weekend,” they said. “If you don’t like her you can bring her back on Monday.”

I knew nothing about dogs, but that first evening, Santi, who was about six months old, sat on the sofa and stared at me for the longest time, before leaping into my arms. And that was that. We were inseparable. She’d come to work meetings and make everyone laugh by perching half on my shoulder, half on my arms, so she could have a good view of everyone. In Hyde Park, she would stalk squirrels, her body as straight as an arrow, one paw raised, looking every inch the killer hunter. Once people lined up, 20 in a row, to watch her… would she catch it? Very occasionally, but she never killed them. In her teenage years she was a delinquent, chasing after small children and their footballs, thinking they were playing. Once friends of mine were so impressed with her vaulting over a (not very high) fence they filmed her. It is still incredible to see her fly.

Is it crazy to love an animal this much? I have a whole backstory in my head for Santi, and a voice - yes she speaks back to me - although only in our most intimate circles. I asked my friend Kate Spicer, whose memoir Lost Dog elaborated on her own personal dog love story what was the craziest thing she’d ever done for her dogs, and she replied, with a list:

1. “The most batshit thing I have ever done is the chasing of Wolfy around London for days on end, even when people told me I had gone mad, actual mad, and that I had to just let him go. (Luckily she didn’t and she found him, hence the book).

2. “When he died I kept the water from his water bowl and drank a little bit every now and again.

3. “He never poo’d inside, but the only poo he did the day he died, left a stain in my study that has never completely gone away, and I love that stain.

4. “I did handstands in my office so I could see more clearly that there might be one or two of his golden hairs left somewhere.

5. “I sleep with both of my new dogs under the covers and they wedge either side of me so that I feel like a piece of wood in a vice.

6. “I light the fire for them sometimes, then go out.”

I’ve never lost a dog before, so I can’t say how that’s going to make me feel, and Santi doesn’t sleep with us, but number 6? Definitely done that many times.

My assistant Isabelle made her dog, Barney, a pancake on Shrove Tuesday.

Jane is a bit more rational with her dog-love.

“I have never done anything crazy because I am aware that my despite my obsessive love for dogs, they are not humans,” she says. “Unlike humans they can be replaced. With dogs we can grieve and then move on - circumstances permitting - to all the joys and terrors of a new pup or kitten.”

It helps that Jane is also allergic to sentimentality. "The closest to craziness is that being an escape artist, Juno can get out of almost every collar, and I have different collars for different times of the day for her. A collar wardrobe. Also I keep my phone on in therapy sessions with clients if Juno is out with the walkers.”

All sounds perfectly rational to me.

Wish us luck with the scan tomorrow.