It’s a tiny bit lazy, if you ask me. There’s a growing market, as reported by a Sunday newspaper, for ‘pre-trained’ puppies. These are puppies aged six months and upwards, which will arrive at your house with ‘100 per cent perfect recall’, won’t tug on the lead, won’t chase sheep or chickens and will lie quietly at your feet in a pub or restaurant. The only catch? One of these robo-puppies will set you back £15,000.
It doesn’t remotely surprise me that a couple of businesses have sprung up offering such a service, given not only my experience of training Dennis, but the dog population boom. The training of Dennis, obviously, is an ongoing process (does anyone really ever train a terrier?), but those reading this with a dog, or those reading this who’ve spent even five minutes in a municipal park in the past year or so, will also know that we have problems out there. You may think the same regarding small children if you visit a Pizza Express at the weekend.
Because, guess what, it’s hard work training a puppy. I grew up with dogs, a succession of vizslas, terriers, labradors and a very gentlemanly collie-poodle cross called Basil.
I also lived, for a spell as a teenager, at a hunt kennels, which meant hounds outside and hound puppies inside. Every table leg was punctured with hundreds of little tooth marks, and the bottom foot or so of the kitchen door had no paint because it had been scratched away by eager little paws. I knew, therefore, that puppies were very much not a picnic.
I read the books too. ‘Puppies are hard work,’ the books warn. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I thought, ‘I know.’ ‘No, but they’re really hard work,’ they stress, and yet still I scoffed.
Then Dennis arrived and ruined my life. Within three months, my boyfriend had left, my carpets were trashed and my social life demolished. (‘Can’t make it, so sorry, because I’m living with a tiny fascist who mustn’t be left alone for more than two hours. Bring him? Ha, no, no, you’ve just had that lovely runner put down, haven’t you?’)
And my goodness, the expense. Before committing to Dennis, I’d spoken to a friend with a dachshund to discuss the likely monthly cost of a dog, and she’d reassured me that it was all manageable. Too late, I remembered that this friend had been a colleague at Tatler, a workplace not renowned for its mathematical or financial prowess. After one shoot, the fashion director Isabella Blow filed an expense claim for £50,000, ‘for a very small ruin that really was a must’. The vet bills, food bills and biscuit bills in the first year of Dennis’s life, plus 483 bottles of carpet cleaner, came close.
Carefree ‘sure, I’ll jump on a plane to Casablanca for the weekend’ life ended for me in June 2024, when I picked him up from a little farm steading just outside Birmingham. A mere £15,000 to avoid the next few months of sleeplessness and devastation? Cheap at the price.
‘Puppies are hard work,’ the books warn. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I thought, ‘I know’
Except if you don’t go through that period, if you outsource it, if you miss the midnight trips to the garden, and the 2 a.m. trips to the garden, and the 4 a.m. trips to the garden, and the endless mopping of damp patches on the floor, and all those boring, repetitive training exercises you can now find on the internet that promise (promise!) to result in perfect recall and somehow never do, then you miss out on all that joy too. Because there is joy amid the burning wreckage. Dennis chewed shards of Biro, ate my foam earplugs and left little booby traps for my bare feet (very hard to spot a small turd on a Persian carpet). He rifled through bathroom bins for used tampons which, on one occasion, when I dared to take him with me for a friend’s birthday in Dorset, resulted in a bleak scene on a rainy beach at 6 a.m. as I tried to pull one of these items out of his bottom while juggling a Wild Bean coffee in my other hand. I did most of this heartbroken because the boyfriend had gone. Little wonder, you might think.
But there was joy every evening when, having destroyed the entire day, he’d come and seek me out on the sofa, flopping down against my leg with a contented little sigh. ‘You are mine,’ he was saying, and slowly, if reluctantly at first, I decided the same.
It feels like cheating to miss out on all of this, to drop tens of thousands on a labrador called Digby or Hector from the Trained Dog Co. in Bramley (according to its website, those are the two they currently have available). It feels like AI, actually, to outsource the slog and simply choose the easiest way to the solution without giving it a go first. Some may say the same about parents who dispatch their children to boarding school, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
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