I Am Your Dog

For most of the years this website was online, the page people wrote to us about most was not about Porcia, or Ray, or any of our own dogs at all. It was a short piece written in a dog's voice, addressed to the person sitting at the keyboard, and it opened with the dog asking to whisper something in your ear. Somebody forwarded it to us in the late nineteen-nineties. We put it up. So, eventually, did half the dog websites on the internet.

We are not reprinting it here. The reason is dull but honest: nobody knows who wrote it. Every copy we ever saw was credited "author unknown", ours included, and in the years since it has been attributed to a dozen different people, none of them convincingly. We cannot establish who owns it, so we are not in a position to republish it. What follows is a page about the piece rather than the piece itself.

What it says

The essay is one long address from a dog to the human it lives with. The dog observes, without a great deal of sympathy, how busy people are — work, children, running here and there, not noticing much. Then it asks for your attention: "Look down at me now, while you sit there at your computer." That line, and the one below, are quotations from an anonymous piece of unknown authorship; we are quoting them, not claiming them. The dog's eyes have gone slightly cloudy. Grey hairs are beginning to ring the muzzle.

From there it makes its one real argument. It asks not to be met as an owner, an alpha or a trainer, but as one living thing sitting on the floor beside another. It points out, without fuss, that it may not be here next week. And it lands on four words that are the whole of it: "we have now together."

Why it traveled so far

It is worth remembering what the web was like when this thing was moving. There was no social media. There were mailing lists, newsgroups, guestbooks, webrings and an enormous quantity of forwarded email, and a piece of text that made people cry got forwarded until the headers fell off it and nobody could say where it came from any more. By the time it reached us it was already anonymous folk material, which is precisely how folk material behaves, and also why the authorship is now unrecoverable.

Plenty of people find it too sentimental, and we understand that. It survived anyway, because the thing underneath the sentiment is simply true and stated plainly: dogs do not live very long, you already know that, and knowing it does not stop it ambushing you.

Why it stayed on our site

We first put it up while Porcia was still with us, when it read as a mild nudge to get off the computer and go and sit with the dog. Porcia died on 22 September 2003. Ray died on 26 August 2005. After that the page read differently, and we left it up anyway. You can read about both of them on Porcia's page and on Ray's page. A good many of the pictures in our photo album were taken in the last couple of years of their lives, largely because the essay had made its point.

Our own version of it

Here is ours, for what it is worth, and it is shorter.

A retired racing Greyhound does not arrive as a puppy. Porcia was born in August 1992, raced until December 1995, went through two adoptive homes before she reached ours, and came to us in May 1999 at nearly seven years old. She was with us a little over four years. That is an ordinary length of time for a retired racer, and it means the arithmetic is different from the start. You are not signing up for fifteen years. You are signing up for whatever is left, and it is your job to make that count. Anybody thinking about adopting should know it going in — there is more on the breed on our Greyhound facts page, and more on the dogs who passed through on their way elsewhere on the foster dogs page.

The grey comes to the muzzle first, and on a fawn dog you hardly notice it until one day you look at an old photograph and cannot believe the difference. The eyes cloud slowly, so slowly you only see it in pictures. The long sighthound legs get slower to fold and slower to unfold, and the dog who used to explode off the couch at the sound of a leash starts taking a moment to think about it first.

What we would say to anyone reading this on the same sort of page in the same sort of mood is only this: sit on the floor. Not on the couch above the dog — on the floor, at dog height, where the ears are within reach. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes, and it is the one piece of the anonymous essay's advice we can promise is worth taking. We did not do it nearly enough. Nobody ever does.