Village life in Andalucia

Dogs. The season of arse sniffing slowly gives way to group shagging as spring dawns

The Cat will mew, and Dog will have his day (Hamlet 1602 Shakespeare)

Let us bang these dogs of Sevil, These children of the devil! For I never turned my back upon Dog or devil yet! (“The revenge”, 1878 Tennyson)

When I was a child we weren’t allowed a dog. Every so often I’d suggest one. Mum would look at me and say ” A dog? It’d be a five minute wonder. You’d get tired of it and  ” Muggins here” (indicating herself) would be taking it for walks. You can have a mouse. Or a goldfish. They aren’t so much trouble”.

So I did and they weren’t. Although mum really wanted a cat. She preferred cats to dogs. To her, dogs were male, and she didn’t much like men. “Dirty buggers” she would mutter under her breath.

She thought of cats as female though – when she was in labour, our cat brought kittens in one by one in her mouth and made a nest out of her pullovers in the bottom of the wardrobe by the birth bed.  They were, according to her “hembras empáticas” –  sympathetic females. Well she didn’t actually say that, I made it up.  Also, we had a grocers shop and cats kept down the rats. At least the females did. “Toms are lazy buggers” muttered our mother. So we didn’t have one of those.

Mum would want to let our current female cat have one litter before “having it done”.  However our cats didn’t live much longer than a goldfish because the shop was on a road junction and a passing lorry had usually flattened it before it produced. We would bury it and shed a sincere tear before bombing off to get another one and thus we were never overrun by kittens so everything worked out fine.

I had hardly met a dog until I came to Spain. Well, there was Auntie Dolly’s dog “Dinkey-Poos”, a Yorkshire terrier who masturbated on our carpet or on my leg if I let it. I’m not counting her. I’m not even thinking about her.

I first met committed “dog lovers” when I used to do a daily run over the park at Clapton and along the river Lea. They were out petitioning for their “human right” to allow their dogs to run and shit – it was in the days before pooper scooping – on council Park lands.  Hackney Council pointed out that a playing child falling into dog shit and wiping it into his eyes would go blind. It was no surprise that dog owners promoted the rights of dogs over the health of children. Some yapping slathering piece of vermin would  stop me in my tracks, throwing itself at my crotch while its under exercised owner would waddle up behind it waving a petition and wheezing “Don’t mind him, he’s only barking” or “Look at him! He just wants  to play!” .  Let him play with his owner I thought or with himself if he can acquire Dinky poos’s dexterity.

Three dogs fuck each other while another two stand around uselessly and bark

When we first came out to Spain I was told that a love of dogs and a love of football were  two things that united the English and the Spanish and I could see the connection, football being a game you can teach a dog.

It seems that everyone in Spain has a “house” dog. Why? What on earth are they for?  They don’t lay eggs, you can’t eat them and they don’t work. On the other hand they eat meat – not affordable by most of the world’s human beings. They shit everywhere and there is no pooper scooping tradition in the village so I don’t even get a laugh from watching some ugly expat going on about immigrants in the middle of the road with a copy of the Daily Mail in one hand and a pile of dog shit in the other.

During the long exquisite silence of an Andalucian summer evening, cantan los perros. The dogs “sing” to each other according to our Spanish neighbours. In other words they bark all bloody night long.

This is a seasonal blog. I’m writing in May when the sap begins to rise in un-neutered dogs. It’s the month when dogs take their noses out of each others arseholes and plug in at the other end, sometimes in bunches of five or more – where on earth do they find suitable orifices? My mother would have thrown a bucket of cold water over them, as did her mother before her, but both women lived in a pre scientific age and were forced to rely on this ineffective folk remedy. It is now well known that the penis of a male dog swells in the vagina of a female during coitus. It cannot be extracted until ejaculation, so it is utterly pointless and painful for the dogs incidentally, to try to pull them apart. Pointless yes, but hugely pleasurable to watch them after a couple of buckets, pogoing around until they trip and begin to slowly roll down the precipitous narrow concrete street, finally disappearing from sight. At least for a short while.

Am I sounding a bit ratty? A couple of years ago our neighbourhood suddenly became inundated with dogs. Our cottage is down a little ally and I had previously managed to keep the odd strays at bay by collecting my urine and splashing it across the top of the road to disconcert those marking territories. Of course our place smelt like a nineteenth century French “Pissoir” , but believe me that was nothing to the Stench of Summer Spanish dogShite. Oh God, I’ve started to alliterate.

Our Spanish neighbours got a couple of tiny dogs of indeterminate breed that would screech uncontrollably at anyone who passed by. One looked like an unsuccessful firework with brown hair spurtling out of it. The other was bald, white with black blots. They could never be let out in case any normal sized dog took them for rats and killed them. Then our lovely neighbours moved back to England. I introduced myself to the new incomers “if there’s anything we can do” and so on, as you do. The bloke treated me as though I were something he’d trodden in and believe me he’d know all about treading in stuff. They had six dogs. Yes six. Five white poodles and a black thing called Bastard. Well, perhaps it was Buster? I don’t hear too well. Then the Mayor moved in next to them with what my grandmother would have called his “fancy woman”. He has a dog like a runt Alsatian with scrofula. It’s a wild and terrified thing. I had a small flock of guinea fowl I had reared from keets (chicks). Just as they were a year old and at point of lay, the damned thing tore them all to bits. The stench of dog shit in the street was suffocating, not that the “dog lovers” noticed of course because that was how their houses smelt. The street was strewn with torn up rubbish created by the Mayor’s mad dog.  Every time I stepped out of my house the deafening yap of dogs made me feel unwelcome in a community I’d lived in a lot longer than they had. There is something about the servility of dogs that makes them irresistible to their owners, who sometimes fail to distinguish them from children. This excessive protectiveness unfortunately does not induce the owner to take responsibility for “the loved one”.

Of course I am aware that there are many dog owners who are good and decent despite their dogs. Take my brother in law and his wife for example. Neither of them like dogs but they are kind folk so have ended up with three. They found one tied to a lorry and took it home. Then a “dog lover” threw a puppy over their wall, then a third dog they were looking after “wanted to stay”. Now they can’t go away, or into shops or eating places or any house that doesn’t already stink of dog, my brother in law spends every morning of his life picking dog shit out of the drive gravel and if they do by chance manage to slip away without the dogs they do nothing but go on about “having to get back” to them.

We British are famous throughout the world for our love of dogs. Almost as famous as we are for our hatred of children. Go to Nerja market any Sunday and try to find a single Brit stall that supports children. Then count those that support dogs and add those that will claim to in order to sell you something. I except the Lyons club of Nerja whose Spanish and Scandinavian members organise the market. The Lyons have a grown up perspective on life. Their projects bring succour to the poor.

Finally, may I apologise to those who searched “dogging” not expecting to find an article on dogs. Here is an off colour cartoon for you. Better luck next time.