How do you trust this dog again?

I’m a cat person. Anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time will know that I have a soft and smooshy heart for all things feline. One of the best things about being back in Joburg is getting to live with a cat again. (She still prefers my husband to me. Ah well.)

But I have dogs in my life too. In fact, there was a time when I liked dogs more than I liked cats. A very long time ago, granted, when I was around two years old and enjoyed barking at visitors who arrived at the front door. Later, my brother and I would scatter Epol across the kitchen floor and crawl around on all fours eating it, for fun. (Don’t ask. I like to think that we are both leading fairly normal adult lives now.)

Until today, one of my favourite dogs was my parents’ chow chow, Xian. My father spotted him at the Germiston SPCA some two years ago and brought him home. He was named after the historic Chinese city — which conveniently, is almost a homophone of the French chien — but we usually called him “Bozo”. From the moment he arrived, he turned my parents’ lives upside down. He ran away, he was impossible to train, he attacked the cats, the other dogs fought with him. On most days, parts of my parents’ house looked like a bomb had hit it, with bits of carpet and newspaper scattered everywhere. He even ate a copy of one of my books.

I had every reason to dislike Xian. I am not a dog person, and he was never a good dog. And yet I always liked him, despite his bad behaviour. It was impossible not to warm to him: such a happy animal, always doing things his own way, with a naughty glint in the eye that never failed to charm me. Built like a bear, with his weird straight legs and black tongue, he was unlike any other dog I have ever known. Even when I was running down the street yelling all sorts of threats at him — yet again, he’d managed to get out of the gate — when he jumped up and scratched my car, even when he bit me on the bum, I couldn’t be cross with him.

But today, I found myself looking sideways at him. Wondering whether I can trust him. Wondering, indeed, whether his life will be a short one after all. Because yesterday he bit the younger of my two brothers. A plumber arrived in a rattling old Landrover with a geyser on the back, and Xian was excited. He wanted to get to the people in the vehicle, who were understandably nervous about climbing out, and when my brother tried to pull him away in order to lock him inside the house, he attacked him. Growled, then bit him on the right wrist and slashed a finger on his left hand.

The doctor said the wounds were superficial and my brother is on antibiotics, but still. How do you trust this animal again? He has been in training for eighteen months, eighteen months of classes every Saturday afternoon, and he does this? He attacks a person he knows, a person he is supposed to protect, and out of sheer anger rather than fear?

My brother is furious. He says he will never have anything to do with “that dog” again. My mother is bitterly disappointed. “Xian had better watch out for the needle,” I said, flippantly, but you have to wonder. We are reaching for explanations for this behaviour, explanations that somehow excuse him. Perhaps he is sensitive in his neck area. He was hyped up, excited, he attacked instinctively. But now we know that, provoke him in just the wrong way, and he’ll bite, and because he is so strong, he can do some damage.

I think I’ll stick with cats.