One day my mother went to pick up my 10-year-old brother from school. She arrived with a big brown doberman. “Whose dog is that?” he asked.
“Ours,” she replied. “He’s called Moon.”
This was how Moon arrived in our lives. As the eldest sibling, I had an inkling this might happen. Mum had said she was going to see a family about a young dog they were struggling with. When she got there, she fell in love with Moon (their choice of name, but a good one). And so he came home with her.
In 1984, labradors and collies were the norm for middle-class, home counties types like our family. How we ended up with a doberman is as follows: Dad liked the look of them; Mum said she thought the more usual black and tan dobermans (which featured as guard dogs in Magnum PI and second world war films) seemed very fierce. Brown ones looked softer, so a brown doberman it was.
To look at, Moon was impressive. He was on the large side, lean and well muscled. He had a serious pedigree and, in profile, was almost regal. And he had a lovely nature that belied the breed’s reputation. But he didn’t have a great intellect. We never managed to teach him much beyond “come” and “sit”, and he considered “come” as very much optional.
Moon’s idea of a walk was: “You take me out for 30 minutes, then I run off for the rest of the day chasing the local muntjac deer, before coming home after dark, covered in mud, with cuts all over my face from brambles.” I spent a fair chunk of my teens wandering around the local common shouting: “Moon!” Once he disappeared for 12 hours. Eventually we called the local police station. “Do you have a brown doberman?” we asked.
“Is he beautiful, but really soppy and stupid?” the woman replied. Moon became a semi-regular at the local nick.
Growing up, we were a house full of kids and Moon was very much one of the boys. He covered the back lawn with sticks, which he collected, like a sort of hobby. He was incredibly strong. You could put him on a lead and he’d pull you along on a skateboard. He once pulled my grandmother off her feet. He ate only tripe, which was utterly disgusting.
Everyone had a favourite Moon story: Moon greeting us at the door with a kilo of cheese in his mouth. Moon trying to run between trees two metres apart – with a three-metre-long stick in his mouth. Moon backing into a coffee table, his testicles dipping into a cup of scalding tea. Moon appearing halfway through a Christmas Eve walk with a quarter of a turkey in his mouth.
While writing this piece, I read that dobermans are considered one of the most intelligent breeds of dog. Not in my experience. Moon may have been handsome and athletic, but when it came to brains, he was Homer Simpson. Even now, 30 years later, whenever I see a smart, well-trained dog, I think: “Not like Moon.”
