I’m home for the week when Michael the Dog Whisperer arrives to look at Dougie. They eye each other across the very same carpet that he – Dougie, not Michael – shat on just hours before. My sister Caoimhe got Michael’s number from whichever friend it is that gives out numbers for Dog Whisperers – a term he doesn’t use himself. Partly because the titular TV personality is considered something of a crank, and partly because there isn’t much whispering involved. We are, after all, in Derry, where speech has the volume and speed of machine gun fire at the best of times.
And this is not the best of times. “I’d give him back if I could find the receipt,” Caoimhe wrote recently, under a carousel of images she’d sent us. Shards of ripped paper, shredded clothing, smashed plant pots and at least three grotesquely disfigured shoes.
This was in our family’s “Animals” WhatsApp, the sort of egregiously sentimental group chat I would never voluntarily acknowledge in a national newspaper. Usually, it features inexcusably toothsome photos of my siblings’ assorted pets, each being adorable in as many configurations as possible. Focus is often soft and, so help me God, small outfits are regularly worn. I love it. But Animals is no longer the safe space of cloying cuteness I enjoy. It’s now something like a gruesome FBI case file, documenting Dougie’s every misdeed.
Like his big sister Annie, Dougie is a large, rangy labrador, she jet black and he a beautiful chocolate brown – “all the better to hide the muck” to quote my dad.
The dogs we had during my childhood were the standard type for the Irish countryside – well-loved, but very much “outside” pets, apt to be dismissed with a curt yap from my father if they even so much as looked over the threshold.
Now, however, it is clear that a great softening of my father’s resolve has taken place. The melting we’ve witnessed toward his grandchildren has taken on an even greater expression with his furry family members. Where once his dogs might have known and respected him as Genghis Khan, he is now Dame Barbara Cartland, all but feeding them toast from his armchair. There is evidence of his largesse all around the floors and soft furnishings of his home, where they run around indoors, eat from plates and bark at things for no good reason.
The Dog Whisperer surveys this scene with silent judgment. He tells us they are working dogs who will be fine outside, even in the cold. Labradors are, after all, from Labrador, where their webbed paws break ice and they swim in freezing water. He subdues both dogs with stern commands and a raised hand. He paces slow circles around them, adjusting their movements with gentle movements of his leash. They quiet.
He says they need a tougher breed of love. “Dogs don’t mind authority, they’ll give it to another dog, even. It’s whoever’s fit for it.”
“No interview process?” says Caoimhe, betraying her commitment to workplace dynamics.
It’s unclear if this will sink in with my dad, who evinces mild scepticism, and a muted horror at dispatching them to the tundra outside. The pups might be ready for change, perhaps, but one old dog has a few new tricks to learn.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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