Now that we finally have a dog in the family, we find ourselves perforce with a dog’s eye view of the world.
Not the usual myth that says “dogs see everything in black and white”, which would be a convenient bit of psychic editing to tap into in our increasingly confusing “rainbow” way of viewing our confusing nation. It’s more about the kind of human beings who give dogs what must be an alarming perspective on how human beings see themselves, each other, and therefore the world — which includes dogs.
By which I mean to say, dogs see everything in ways that we do not.
Confused so far? So am I.
Let’s start again.
Now that we have a dog in our family, we are forced to see things from the perspective of the said dog who showed up on our doorstep, courtesy of a television programme called All You Need Is Love, but was otherwise uninvited. Which is not to say unloved.
The dog was a compromise solution to our youngest daughter’s demands (“I have to have a puppy! Like my friends!”) and her parents’ cautious fear, earned through long years of township breeding, here and elsewhere, of the dog as either evil scavenger or Third Force Agent.
We inherited this love-hate relationship with dogs from our parents, who inherited it from their parents. Dogs were generally bad news in those days — something that white people had in the suburbs for coddling and self-defence, and that black people had in the townships for bragging, kicking about and clearing up the scraps of pap and unpalatable sinews after a particularly elaborate funeral or wedding.
Dogs were for the dogs. You gave a dog a bad name and it stuck to it like mange. It made you feel better about yourself.
In exile in Zambia and Malawi, we called our dogs “Smith” or “Vorster” or “Verwoerd”. It made us feel good to see this abused animal limping around the compound in a sorry state. It made us feel empowered where we were not.
Further back, when I was a kid, way back in Orlando West Native Township, we got, or inherited, a dog which my father inventively christened “Bingo”. Bingo was a cur, but we loved him. He fulfilled our childish desires to have something or someone lower than ourselves at our beck and call. He died under mysterious circumstances.
The dog nowadays, now that we are a democracy, is a different kettle of fish. The dog has become a cross between the molly-coddled suburban plaything and the roaming, priapic township brak. The dog, like ourselves in our relations with former enemies, has to be dealt with in a completely new and unexpected way.
We now have to program ourselves into the new, liberated dog thing.
The dog, on the other hand, has its own demands. We have to respond to them, while taking into consideration the fact that it is just a dog. It was we, not he, who brought him into our confusing human world, after all. He, therefore, has to adapt himself to our unnatural patterns of human behaviour. And we have to find a way of adapting to his.
Which is how I find myself, with my puppy-loving daughter, at dog school on a regular basis on Sunday mornings these days on the rugby fields of Emmarentia, where they train dogs to be dogs from puppyhood to full-on mastiff level. And train people to be responsible dog owners, regardless of race.
“You don’t just get a dog,” the hectoring, English-counties lady’s voice had told me on the other end of the phone when I called to enquire. “You have to train it to become a good citizen. It will take you twenty weeks of genuine commitment. It will cost you six hundred and twenty seven rand.” Or thereabouts. So I did it.
You discover a whole new world out there — a world that Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela warned us we would have to get used to in order to survive in the new South Africa — only they didn’t tell us the details.
The high command and lower orders of the dog training world are populated by English and Afrikaans-speaking men and women of a certain pedigree. They are wrapped in an aura that can only be described as dog-like. One gets the impression that they live for nothing else, and that taking charge of dog class on a Sunday morning is the highlight of their week — especially since it gives them a chance to be several rungs higher than the poor ignorant adults and children they are there to instruct.
You go in there thinking that you love your dog and only want to do the best for him or her. They soon let you know that, in your ignorance, you are barely out of the starting blocks when it comes to canine love, and they proceed to prove it to you, to your intense embarrassment. (You’re exposed in front of small children, your own and other people’s, for heaven’s sake.)
The worst is when they tell you that the basically incompetent manner in which you talk to and generally treat your dog is a clear indication of how you probably treat your children in the home — this is spoken loudly in front of the very children in question.
It is one of those crosses you have to bear in the interests of giving backbone to the ever-widening constituency of good citizens of the rainbow nation. The days of Bingo-the-Downtrodden are definitely over. Enter Citizen Bingo.