Be More Dog by Hannah Betts

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Loyalty, consideration for others, living in the moment. There is much we can learn from our canine companions

Hannah Betts ► Hannah is a feature writer, interviewer, and columnist across a range of subjects for an array of British broadsheets and magazines, most notably The Times and The Telegraph.

Illustration ► Aurore de La Morinerie

HANNAH BETTS

Be more dog

George Bernard Shaw remarked “If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman’s pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.” Chief among

these pleasures will be his dog.

Noël Coward famously linked mad dogs with Englishmen. However, he might just as easily have sung that the Englishman is mad about dogs – along with the Scot, Irish and Welshman, for that matter. It is a passion that transcends the class system that divides us: the retired miner as mad about his lurcher as the duchess about her dachshund.

Dogs’ ability to make the stiff upper lip tremble is exhibited most strikingly by our menfolk, not least the kind of Establishment male packed off to school aged eight with the instruction not to sob. Compare Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, who had only ever read one book in his life, Jack London’s canine-narrated White Fang, declaring: “It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.”

Writer and sister to the PM, Rachel Johnson, has recalled sitting through a play in which various epic traumas were endured sans comment, until the death of a dog reduced her husband to “heaving sobs”. Jeremy Paxman confessed to falling apart at precisely the same moment. While journalist Max Hastings revealed that – in a 56-year career spanning over 60 countries and 11 wars – the article that provoked most reader reaction concerned whether to put his Labrador to sleep.

I say British men are more susceptible to this passion, but I myself am pretty bad. In my thirties, I slept with hot men. In my forties, I slept with the man of my dreams. At 50, I sleep with a warm dog. The man of my dreams remains in evidence, but my tenderest romance is with my hound: silky, soulful, devoted. Throughout adulthood, I yearned for a blue whippet called Pimlico, knowing my life would only be complete when she arrived. And here she is: reclining in my every bodily crook, letting out contented little groans.

She wasn’t supposed to share a bed with us. But, at six months, Pim nearly died of meningitis, which involved hugging her back to health. And, once we had discovered the primeval joy of human bedding down with hound, then how could we ever go back? Manolo Blahnik has observed: “When I am with my dogs, I sleep divinely.” The late critic Brian Sewell was so enamoured of said act, he penned an autobiography with that title. Other cultures may deem dogs unclean, banishing them to backyards. Brits bed down with them for primal pleasure.

If cynophilia (fondness for dogs) were already a national tendency, never has it been more obvious than after a year of lockdown. Britain’s canine population is estimated to have increased by at least 10 per cent during the pandemic to more than 11 million. A whacking 2.2 million mutts are believed to have been purchased between March and September alone. Forget the predicted baby boom, think pup-demonium.

And it is not merely that we have needed dogs themselves during this disaster. As we begin to emerge from global catastrophe, doesn’t homo sapiens need to be more canine in its behaviour? After months of misery and isolation in which the rampant individualism of Brexit and Trumpism were the prevailing political forces – we are surely all in need of heightened loyalty, companionship, consideration for the pack.

Humans – like hounds – are social animals, at their best when they appreciate that they thrive only as part of a greater whole. No man is an island, while recovery will require the most dogged determination. As we drag ourselves out of the Great Awfulness, shouldn’t we all be more dog?