Emma Jane Davies

Dog but not forgotten: Holly the hellishly hungry hound

The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part III

Holly had serious problems right from the start. She was just not normal. We bought her from a family who lived somewhere around Ilkeston or Long Eaton that had had a litter of puppies. We saw her mother – a loveable but insane Tricolour who ran around and around the room over and under the furniture like a mad thing, with Holly in tow like a dingy tied to a motorboat. We took her home and she sat in my lap on the way back and as I stroked her I noticed that her fur was full of bits. The bits bothered me. That evening I was still bothered about the bits and as I stroked her I took a closer look, and discovered they had legs – Holly was covered in lice. Thus began an intensive disinfecting and cleansing routine to remove the offending creatures, which she didn’t really like much and whined and cried throughout.

We bought Holly while Muffin was still alive and well. My first experience of Holly’s appetite was being told to make sure Holly didn’t eat Muffin’s food while my parents were out. I swear I saw Muffin eating her own food, but when my parents came back, Holly was discovered rolling around on her back unable to move with a belly the size of a whale and some serious indigestion. We just couldn’t understand it: when Annie and Muffin were full, they simply turned their nose up at what they were given. Holly, on the other hand, had real appetite control problems.

Holly was a very stupid dog in general, but sly when it came to food. She eventually learned how to jump onto the dining chairs without skidding off the other side (with her size and weight, she had a lot of momentum), and from there she would jump onto the table and gobble anything and everything that remained on there. We could not leave crockery on the dining table, and we could not leave the chairs pushed out from the table.

She was a nuisance at meal times – obsessed by every opportunity. Unlike sweet, polite Muffin, elephantine Holly would bark gruffly and thunder around the table, so heavy she rattled the china in the sideboard, plonking herself down at the side of someone and looking up expectantly as if she was brandishing a written legal right to demand food. When that didn’t work, she’d thunder around the table again and pick on the next person. The funny thing was, she had an obsession about going around the table anticlockwise. If the person clockwise from her position called her, she’d thunder anticlockwise all the way around the table again to get to them. Her brain was one dimensional, it didn’t work backwards.

Holly rapidly outgrew the full-grown Muffin, dominating and bullying her at one and a half times her size. Holly had a lot of aggression when it came to food. She would snap for Muffin’s biscuit, so eventually the only way we could give Muffin a biscuit was to throw one for Holly half way across the room and hope Muffin crunched hers down before Holly thundered back and swallowed it whole.

Holly’s first piece of legislation was “Toilet Tax.” The dog biscuits were kept on a shelf in the downstairs toilet. Holly’s trick was to listen out for when people used the toilet and go and stand in front of the door and block the way out. Believe me, she was big enough to manage this quite effectively. The only way to get her out of the door was to give her a biscuit, thus, “Toilet Tax.” It’s a wonder the peasants never revolted.

Hunger was not limited to proper foodstuffs either. She used to make me wretch by dragging snotty tissues out of the bin in the living room and eating them. We soon replaced the bin with a closed-lid affair, which she would manage to tip over and break into like a fox raiding a dustbin. We used to chase her into the dining room, where she would hold out, growling and barking and guarding her disgusting theft, suddenly able to run both ways around the table in order to escape from us. If ever she threw up (which she did frequently, from eating inappropriate things), she would growl and guard it and manage to gobble it back up before we could get to clear it away.

She was such a dumb dog. We always knew when she was up to mischief, because she’d go quiet and we’d call her name, at which point she’d growl guiltily and ferociously, pinpointing her location and incriminating herself in one fell swoop. She was usually in the dining room, having either got onto the table or was somewhere underneath it eating tissues or other disgusting items from the garden.

Maybe Holly was brain damaged. During her first Christmas I made the mistake of leaving my presents box unguarded. Holly clambered in and rooted out my two hundred gram bar of Bournville chocolate. Half dog, half pig, she scoffed the lot, foil and all, and we only caught on when we found tiny bits of debris left in the living room. That much chocolate should kill an Alsatian, and Cadbury’s is barely fit for human consumption, let alone hound. However it had very little effect on Holly who didn’t even appear to get ill. But I’m certain it contributed to her general state of mental retardation.

When she was a puppy she was stupid enough to eat a stick and get it stuck in her throat – Darwinism in action. Evolution would have wiped her out for the good of the Cavalier race, but the vet saved her with a surgical operation. For weeks on end she had stitches in her throat, which she scratched and managed to unpick, spewing cascades of clear body fluids from her wound all over the floor. Her bulging neck eventually healed, leaving her even more hungry and obsessed than before. I guess the throat operation could have damaged her thyroid, which would probably explain everything. It would explain her immense size, immense hunger, and even her stupidity.

We did manage to teach her a few tricks though. My horse-obsessed little sister taught her to jump over an obstacle course in the back garden. Holly panted so much I thought she would keel over, but she didn’t seem to mind it too much. Undoubtedly she got a biscuit or two out of the deal.

Then I did something wicked. I taught Holly to growl. She would sometimes do it by accident at the table or if there was food on the off. One night I was alone in the house, and the devil got in me, so I encouraged her. It only took that one evening to teach Holly to growl for food, which she did from that night on with great gusto. She didn’t mean it in an aggressive way, just in a hungry way, but it scared the willies out of guests. What a hoot.

In later life Holly developed bowel problems. Unsurprising really, considering a lifetime of eating tissues, plastic wrappers, garbage, chocolate and wheat biscuits. I guess that’s karma for you. The vet put her on a chicken and rice diet, but it didn’t seem to do much good. I believe she developed ulcerative colitis, or something equally nasty like Crohn’s. She had a very painful couple of months. One day I found her collapsed in the kitchen doorway, breathing badly, and couldn’t get her inside out of the cold. She was just exhausted. The parents took her to the vets a couple of days later. In spite of her many flaws, we loved her dearly, and we cried for her.