Cave Canum - The Dingo of Doom.

"You looking at me, pal?"


Awww! How cute. Butter wouldn't melt, eh? Dont' you bloody believe it! Behold, I bring you THE Devil Dog - a licky Lucifer, the canine anti-Christ, a barking Beelzebub.
The photograph above is of one of my dogs, Caty. I actually Christened her Cato, after the martial arts-trained, sudden-attack sidekick of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. Like her big screen namesake, she quickly developed a habit of hiding and then leaping out and attacking you without warning. The name eventually morphed into Caty but all her old bad habits remain and she has nurtured a host of new ones besides.
Caty is a rescue dog. She was dropped off at Pither Towers two years ago by a taxi driver who knew I took in strays and other sad cases (see previous blogs on my relationships with women!). To be honest, I should have smelled a rat on that fateful day. I remember the driver seemed to be in a great hurry. He hastily got the dog out, told me she was six months old and "a kelpie", and, with that, got back into his car, there was a screech of tyres, a loud "vroom" and he was off!
Funny, I thought. I suspected, at the time, that the driver had a rush job on. Now I know why he was anxious to get away while I was still holding the proverbial baby. I thought kelpie was a type of seaweed and so looked the breed up on the internet. My source said a kelpie was an Australian cattle dog, bred specifically by farmers in the Outback to herd and generally help out. So far so good. Then came the bombshell. "The kelpie is a cross between a collie and.........a dingo," it said. A DINGO!!! A BLOODY DINGO!!!!! Oh my God! It was then that I began to realise I might have made a teeny mistakette in agreeing to take her on. The only other snippets of information I can recall from that initial research are that it said kelpies would "use their paws like hands", "herd other pets" and that they had "boundless energy".
Saying Caty is energetic is like saying Keith Moon on acid would not have made an ideal librarian! She has single-handedly trashed Pither Towers since her arrival. To date she has ripped out and chewed up THREE phones, eaten countless shoes, torn the wallpaper off the wall on the landing, noshed on a briefcase, initialled almost every door with a trail of scratch marks, chewed holes in the settee and left more maps of Ireland about the place than there are in the average Eireann Tourist Information shop. Things were bad enough when she was a pup but now she has joined "the terrible twos club" - of which I am sure parents of toddlers are well aware - she has to be at the peak of her destructive powers. Even when she takes a momentary break from her ADD antics to sit right in front of you and attempt to stare you out you can almost hear the mantra going through her mind - "bored, bored, bored, bored, bored!"
Caty's real triumph has been in the back garden. I am very proud of my garden - or rather I was - but this furry atomic bomb's on-going project is to turn it into something resembling The Somme battlefield. My soon-to-be ex-wife's theory is that Caty's obsession with digging is merely a sub-conscious determination to get back down to the land of her fathers. She also races around the lawn and flower beds in ever-decreasing circles, either chasing the other dogs or just her tail. She can stop on a sixpence and then accelerate up to maximum speed in the blinking of an eye which, in dry weather, produces pretty devastating results on the turf and beds. In the sodden winter months her racetrack ravings turn the place into a sea of mud.
I hit on the idea of buying some chickenwire and putting a corale around one particularly badly affected area with a view to keeping her out so that I could re-seed it. Given a break from the tornado toddler the grass would at least get a chance to take hold again, I thought. Did it keep her out? Did it bollocks! It, in fact, made the problem worse!

The Not-So-Ok Corale.

The first time I let her out to be confronted by the chickenwire she looked back briefly in gratitude and delight and proceeded to neatly showjump it about ten times. I could almost hear her: "Thanks dad, this is brill!" Caty sees the corale as an obstacle course and loves to leap over it and back, over and back, over and back, often from just a sitting-start. She also sees it as her den, because the other dogs cannot scale the wire, and so uses it to store all the things which are precious to her - bits of chewed up wood, an artistic collection of dog pooh, old shoes, flowerheads, my hosepipe, stones she has taken a fancy to, the odd tree branch, snail shells and bits of cardboard. That really improves the overall look of the place!
Who will rid me of this turbulent toddler? I have never given up on a rescue dog yet and I don't intend to start now but that won't help to patch up my tattered nerves. I shall have to satisfy myself with some schadenfreude instead. Henceforth, all OTHER dingos shall be sent to Grantham. I would like to think the townsfolk are suffering as much as I am.