Bob Knows a Sheep When He Smells One
Bob is a sensitive dog.
Not sensitive in the delicate, easily offended sense. Sensitive in the something has been here and I need to know exactly what sense.
If a cat has been underneath my car, Bob knows.
He’ll walk straight over to it, nose working furiously around the wheels, investigating an animal that disappeared twenty minutes earlier as though he’s been assigned the case.
The other day, Steve was walking Bob and Gus down the road while I was at a friend’s house nearby. My car was parked outside.
Bob found it.
Out of all the cars along the road, he picked mine out while walking with Daddy.
His nose seems to contain information the rest of us simply aren’t privy to.
And then there are sheep.
We live somewhere sheep are just part of the scenery.
They wander down the road. They appear outside the front door. They stand on neighbours’ lawns eating things they haven’t been invited to eat.
Sometimes you hear John across the road discovering them in his garden.
“Get off, you little bastard!”
And off they trot, entirely untroubled by the altercation.
They come right up alongside our back gate too, baaing away on the other side while Bob stands in the garden looking as though national security has been breached.
He does not like sheep.
Nobody is entirely sure what the sheep have done to Bob.
Perhaps they have history.
Perhaps somewhere deep within his genetic memory there is a centuries-old grievance between dog and livestock.
Whatever the reason, if there are sheep nearby, Bob knows about it.
Which brings me to my new jumper.
Today I treated myself to a proper one.
One hundred per cent wool.
I took it out of the bag, pulled it over my head and stood admiring it for approximately three seconds before Bob came flying into the room.
He launched himself at me.
Not me, exactly.
The jumper.
He started biting it.
I tried to push him away.
He came back.
Gus, apparently concluding that his mother was under attack, threw himself into the situation to save me.
Bob shoved Gus out of the way.
Then came back for the jumper again.
Jumping.
Biting.
Utterly appalled by whatever I had chosen to put on my body.
For a few seconds none of us understood what on earth had happened.
And then it dawned on us.
The jumper.
One hundred per cent wool.
Sheep.
Somehow, despite the spinning and washing and dyeing and knitting and packaging and posting and all the other things that had happened between a sheep standing in a field and this jumper arriving at my house…
Bob apparently still knew.
I find that extraordinary.
We move through the world mostly experiencing what is immediately available to us. What we can see. What we can hear. What we can understand.
Meanwhile Bob is living inside an entirely different version of the same place.
A cat passed underneath this car.
Mum has been here.
There are sheep beyond the gate.
And apparently:
Mum has just put one on.
The jumper is going back.
Partly because I’m not sure I can wear it without being tackled in my own living room.
And partly because, when a dog with Bob’s nose tells you you’ve brought a sheep into the house, perhaps you listen.
