Living With Dogs (2 page)

Lots of people declare themselves scared of me. Being President of the RSPCA, I believe I have to represent animals single-mindedly, without having to ingratiate myself with people, and I don’t make myself easy to know. A lot of the time I stand there like Tigger, staring down my nose at the end of the driveway and saying, ‘That’s my position. I won’t budge.’

In appearance, I’d say I resemble an Airedale — hairy, tweedy, and unkempt — but in attitude I’m like a Staffordshire Bull Terrier. They’re more of a buffoon than an English Bull Terrier, but they never back off in a fight. They’re not pretty to look at, but neither am I.

At Xavier College I had a friend whose father was a vet in the Victorian country town of Drouin in Gippsland. In the holidays I used to go down there to help him and carry his bag. An understanding developed that when I graduated I would go to work for him, so in 1964 I left Tigger and Rufus with my parents in Melbourne and went to live in the vet’s house in Drouin. He had his own dogs, including one cross breed called Whelan, who was a wrecker, so there was no room for my dogs.

The bread and butter of the practice was dairy cows, and we only looked at dogs at night. Today there wouldn’t be a rural practice in Australia which didn’t depend on companion animals for its income. There had only been a veterinary practice in Drouin for 12 years and we had to let people know the services we could perform for animals. For instance, there was widespread ignorance that infectious diseases like distemper could be prevented by a simple vaccination. We saw dog after dog that hadn’t been vaccinated.

I spent a lot of time treating the working dogs that rounded up the cows for milking twice a day. They weren’t particularly well-treated, and the owners sometimes neglected their diet or other aspects of animal husbandry such as flea control. It was frequently frustrating to see how little impact I had: often my instructions about care were ignored. I was young, and seen as no better than an academic nitwit. It was often said to me that I’d done all the book learning, but not enough practical work.

The farmers all had Ferguson tractors with a scissor mower attachment. In November they would start cutting the grass for hay and, inevitably, a working dog would run up to the tractor and the mower would cut a paw off. I’d be confronted with a bleeding dog without a paw. The only thing I could do was amputate the leg properly so that the dog could continue on three legs. At least it taught me that animals do reasonably well with a leg removed.

After amputation the dog would be left with a wound that needed to be kept clean, particularly from cow dung, so the last thing I expected was for the farmer to send it straight back to the paddock to resume work. The farmers would say, ‘Don’t you realise it’s a working dog?’ and I would reply, ‘Don’t you realise it’s had major surgery, and needs to be given a chance to recover?’

The owners used to get cross with me because I always came down on the side of the dogs. They thought, bloody Wirth has told me to lock up the dog for 10 days but he doesn’t realise it’s the only dog I have to bring in the cows. They weren’t deliberately cruel; it was due to thoughtlessness. So few humans sit down and think of a different way of doing something.

It was a lesson in animal behaviour. If you’re roaring round a paddock with a mower, of course a working dog like a Border Collie or a Kelpie will roar around too, trying to bite the wheels. Guess what happens if there’s a mower? How many times do I still have to repair animals’ feet and tails? It’s an expensive way of teaching people to lock up the dog if you’re mowing. Dog owners, like lots of people, don’t like hearing the truth. I get into trouble for telling owners their dogs are overweight. The dog doesn’t have a credit card at the supermarket, so who’s responsible for giving it the food?

I didn’t make myself popular at the nearby Ellinbank Dairy Research Unit, either. It was run by the Department of Agriculture, and was doing research on docking cows’ tails. They wanted me to cut the calves’ tails off and I refused, for the same reasons that I still get angry about docking the tails of dogs or cows. Why did God give them tails? It’s another case of people trying to make animals suit human needs, rather than our adjusting to their needs.

No one in Drouin had ever seen surgical procedures like desexing, which I introduced. The vet had never even performed a caesarean on a cow. I let him know that I felt my veterinary standards were going backwards, and protested that I seemed to be working all hours of the day and night. As I told him all this when I was only 12 months out of veterinary school and he had been practising for 40 years, he did not take it too well. I left after 18 months and took a locum’s position at the Balwyn veterinary practice, which had started in 1906. Because of ill health both vets, Phillip Kelynack and Nils Sjogren, retired within six months of my joining, and I took over the practice in 1965, at the age of 26.

Rufus the Irish Setter was 13 by that time and, as a vet, I recognised he had to be put down because of old age. I had to make the decision to put him down, but I wouldn’t do it myself. I brought him into the practice a couple of weeks after I’d started the locum, and asked the other vets to do it, but I wouldn’t let them do anything while I was on the premises. Rufus was the longest living dog I’d had, and it was very upsetting.

Whenever I lose a dog, I am left with a huge void. While I’ve been upset about the death of an animal, I don’t think I’ve mourned one very long. It’s right to mourn, but not to be maudlin. The dog you’ve lost is fixed in the memory and however cut up you are about the loss, there’s always another dog out there waiting for you. People say they could never replace the dog they’ve just lost, and they couldn’t go through the same grief again, but they’re the ones who miss out if they don’t get another dog. They would soon become attached to a new animal.

I bought another Irish Setter, Dhougal, to replace Rufus, and within a year he and Tigger were joined by a Gordon Setter pup called Fergus McPherson. A client had a Gordon Setter bitch and I went to see the dog after she’d had a litter of 13 pups. Gordon Setters were very scarce in those days. I was attracted to them straight away and decided to get one. Ever since then I’ve always had at least three dogs.

The vets at the Balwyn practice had done occasional work for the RSPCA, and I soon started doing public work for the organisation. In 1969 Noel Needham, the vet who was on the RSPCA council, resigned and I was nominated to replace him. I gave a lot of talks and, in 1972, the year after Tigger died, I went to the police academy at Glen Waverley to lecture on the Prevention of Cruelty Act and the handling of dogs and horses. I met a police sergeant there who taught law to the students and who had bought an Airedale. Soon after, he left the police force and went into a newsagency. One day he suddenly turned up in the surgery with the Airedale, saying he wanted to put it down because he couldn’t stand it any more. He wanted to buy a Rottweiler. I asked if I might have the dog and he said, ‘I don’t care who has it, so long as I don’t.’

There’s something about Airedales. They’re extremely loving and bond very closely, and they’re just that little bit different from other terriers. Kit came with me in the front seat to every case I attended. Whenever I gave a human a lift, the person had to go in the back seat while Kit sat regally in the passenger seat.

The Balwyn practice dealt primarily with companion animals. I found a much better appreciation of veterinary science there than in Drouin, but there was still much ignorance about dog behaviour and what we could do to help. People still clung to the old wives’ tales: that feeding milk to dogs caused worms; that raw meat caused distemper; and that the cure for dermatitis was to smear the skin with a mixture of lard and sulphur. In fact, sulphur was supposed to be good for most things wrong with dogs.

I was exposed to a large number of cases, and a large number of different owners. Apart from witnessing the strong bond between animal and owner, I also began to draw some conclusions about dog ownership. There was plenty of evidence to support the saying that dogs become like their owners, and it was equally obvious that people selected dogs as an extension of their personality, often to compensate in those areas where they considered themselves wanting. I found, for example, that law-enforcement officers liked large, powerful dogs.

I became increasingly fond of terriers and, after I had lost the two setters, Dhougal and Fergus, I bought Joshua, my first Cairn Terrier. I had grown to like the breed through my work at the practice, and I was later given a second Cairn, Jonah. When Kit died of cancer in 1987 I replaced her with a second Airedale, Kate. Sheelagh, the Irish Terrier, arrived in 1991.

Sheelagh was the first dog I’d ever had select me. I’d always wanted an Irish Terrier, and as soon as the breeder rang to tell me about the litter I went out to the farm to look at the five pups. Sheelagh kept coming back to sit on my foot. She’d decided to come home to Balwyn, and that made my mind up.

With four dogs, I now needed a car big enough to drive them around. Rufus was the only dog I’d ever owned who was car sick. Most dogs love the sense of movement in a car, and seeing things out of the window. The car becomes part of their extended territory and arouses their possessiveness. Some dogs are so obsessive about cars that they will jump in and wait for hours for it to go.

Dogs make cars dirty and I needed a clean conveyance for formal occasions, so my solution was to have two cars, one to take the dogs and one in which the dogs are forbidden. I decided to buy a utility with a cabin big enough for the dogs, and went off to a showroom to find something I liked. When I’d done that I told the salesman I’d buy the car provided the children approved.

I drove home, picked up the dogs and took them down to the garage. The salesman was horrified when he saw that the sale depended on the approval of four terriers. I spelled out the terms of the deal: ‘Either they get into the ute and show me they’re happy, or there’s no sale.’ Reluctantly the salesman let the dogs get in, and they immediately took up positions, ready to go. I told the salesman, ‘It looks like you’ve sold me a ute!’

The dogs always know when it’s Saturday morning and time to drive into Melbourne for my radio broadcast on 3LO (now 774 ABC Melbourne). I park next to the studios and leave the dogs in the car. One Saturday the ABC doorman came into the studio to tell me I’d left the radio on in the car. Of course I’d left the bloody radio on. Couldn’t he see that the dogs were listening?

So many problems of dog ownership, and the dumping of unwanted dogs, stem from the fact that people buy through the heart, not the head. When they see the eight-week-old puppy in the pet shop, they don’t consider how that dog will behave when it’s a year old. All puppies are beautiful, but they grow up with the characteristics of their breed, and often people don’t consider whether those characteristics will suit their personality and lifestyle.

The problem we face with companion animals is that humans need them for sanity, but because we’ve become heavily urbanised, we often don’t understand them. People have begun to understand the care of dogs, and the message ‘worm, groom, vaccinate’ has got through, but we haven’t had the same success with the message that people must train their dogs, and give careful thought to breed selection.

There are a million reasons people buy dogs, and most of them are the wrong ones. Few people consider whether the particular breed would complement their personality, and whether their lifestyle would allow them to spend time with the dog and walk it. Instead people say, ‘I must have a Basset Hound, because I saw one on television, and it looked cute.’ Or they see a magazine article on the latest fashionable dog breeds such as an Alaskan Malamute, Australian Shepherd, Bouvier Des Flandres, Shar Pei, Pyrenean Mountain Dog, or Australian Cattle Dog, and determine to buy a puppy to become the talk of the district without having any understanding of the chosen breed and its behavioural characteristics. Impulse buying is a major source of problems reflected in the number of currently fashionable breeds found in animal shelters and pounds.

People recognise that races have unique characteristics but, for some reason, don’t apply the same thinking to dogs. They believe all dogs will behave in exactly the same way. Before you buy, study the types of dog that would best suit you. Go to a library and read the latest books on dogs, and study the synopsis on each breed, and the reason the dog was originally bred. It will tell you exactly what to expect of the animal when it’s an adult dog.

For instance, if you buy a working dog, you must expect a dog with the potential to bite, because they nip cattle when they round them up. It will also have limitless energy and be willing to work all day long. People buy a cattle dog, put it on a quarter-acre block, walk it for an hour at the weekend and wonder why the dog is going bananas. Working dogs were bred to look after stock, and they’re energetic, highly intelligent, brain-active dogs.