Brenda Lee's Dog rescue...worth the trouble?

30^th December – I like dogs. All sorts. Don’t really have a downer on any particular breed although I can’t say a Chinese Crested would be my choice…or a Mexican Hairless; a Mexican Hairless dog would be the canine equivalent of the beverage the lady in front of me at the coffee shop asked for today. She asked for a skinny, soya, decaff latte; and I thought;

What’s the point?

Dogs in preference to cats too. Cats are also, to me, another what’s the point animal (I hear the snapping shut of laptops as I write). That’s not to say I think they shouldn’t be a pet for some folk, very happy that people find companionship and solace in them…just not for me. Apart from their aloof and ambiguous attitude, their lack of loyalty and their intemperate approach to life, I can never quite come to terms with their natural hunting instinct that sees them, a perfectly well catered for animal, buggering off into the undergrowth to retrieve shrews, moles, blue tits, greenfinches, butterflies…anything that attracts their hunting instincts, which is just about anything that’s smaller than they are, doesn’t fight back and moves. Mind you, I can say I have come across one or two cats that were worth their salt in the ratting department but it takes a special type of cat to want to forsake a pygmy shrew for a crack at a well-fettled rat. Adult rats take some sorting and it’s not often the feline assailant gets away without some form of injury; I’ve seen toms back off from adult, buck rats.

When I was keepering for Lord Hesketh we used to have two days ratting per year in the old pig sties where we used to keep our corn for feeding the pheasants. We’d use the biggest buck ferrets we could muster between us (3 keepers so around six to eight ferrets per posse) and turn them loose, shooting the rats they didn’t kill as they broke cover with .410’s. It was during these forays that the biggest buck ferrets could encounter a buck rat that was unprepared to give ground and a squabble of gargantuan proportions would break out. Never seen a ferret lose but I’ve seen some close calls. That’s the thing about cats, I suppose, they know their limitations whereas ferrets just want the fight. Dogs with rats are another thing entirely

Kept a couple of terriers back then and one, Teacup, the dog of the pair, was a past-master at rat killing. Best he ever did was 96 rats in 20 minutes, from an old manure pile in the pheasant laying pen. Sore mouth, bloody face, bitten chest at the end of it but a grin and tail wag that spoke volumes. Why Teacup? Well, when I got him as the runt of the litter, he fitted into one and was always small of stature even for a Jack Russell but he had the heart of a lion…and he didn’t like cats either.

Labradors were my other love. Had a fair few through my kennels over the years, all of them good, some of them superb. Working gundogs that would go ’til they dropped (literally in one case) and whose honesty when working was absolutely dependable; if they came back without the bird it wasn’t there…and they all, to a puppy, had an in-built dislike of cats. All of these dogs were very precious to me but I have to stop and consider fully whether I’d be willing to enter a burning building in order to save them. A cat…well, I figure they’re well able to look out for themselves so would find a way out of the conflagration;

I am the cat who walks by himself’

But dogs…? Dogs are more dependable on the human factor and have become more domesticated over the years and so slightly overdrawn in the natural instinct bank, so the question still remains; back into the flames to rescue either an animal that wouldn’t give you the time of day for doing it unless there was a saucer of milk at the end of it, or an animal that wouldn’t know it’d been rescued nor what the danger had been.

On this day in 1962 an 18-year-old Brenda Lee was sufficiently attached to her poodle, Cee Cee, to re-enter the raging inferno that was her house in order to save the pooch. I’m sorry to stereotypically brand any animal but there’re couple of pointers here. Firstly, it’s a poodle. There’s no explanation on whether it was a miniature or a toy but I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of pig-shit that it wasn’t a standard. That’d be a difficult bundle to carry out, particularly as they weigh as much as a well-grown, well-fed Labrador and my guess is Ms. Lee, who was renowned for the smallness of her stature, would have really struggled to bounce out the flames with 80 pounds of petrified dog in her 18-year-old arms. That means that it’s a toy or miniature and so a lap-type dog and so more than normally dependent on the humans in the household. To further that point of conjecture it would seem Ms. Lee had a great deal of affection for it which sort of points to its stature as being small, babyish almost, and so see it as a surrogate child or sister/brother and so her desire to rescue it would have been all the greater.

Thing is, you see, if it had been a cat, as soon as it was presented with the smoke/flame free environment of the front lawn, it would’ve sauntered off into the neighbourhood in search of food (live or dead) or a caterwauling partner with nary a backward glance. No thanks sought or given. A dog on the other hand would have either licked its rescuer to death or, as in the case of Ms. Lee’s poodle, shown its gratitude by dying of the effects of the smoke inhalation two days later leaving behind all the commensurate vet’s fees and heartbreak.