Posting days: Sunday and Wednesday and, sometimes, maybe, extra ‘news flashes’!

Sunday January 8th 2017

Hannah comes with baby Bella to bring us a Dogwatch calendar. I don’t know how Isis would react to a baby, so I put her in the back room (Isis, not the baby) and close the door. She scratches the door for a short time, after which we can hear dragging sounds and clonks. Hannah asks whether Isis is all right. I explain that she is fine and playing ‘deconstruct the cardboard boxes’. This remains her favourite way of entertaining herself, and we still take a large pile of boxes with us when she stays in Ray’s Holly Trees kennels so that she has something to occupy her.

She usually proceeds along these lines: she shakes a box until it surrenders and becomes flat, then she removes each section and perforates it all over with her sharp little teeth; finally, holding the section captive with a strong little front paw or two, she tears it into very small pieces. I know only too well how much mess she makes, but, as Tracey and Adam explain to Ray who watches in disbelief as they carry her week’s entertainment down to her kennel, “She’s special.”

It’s very kind of them.

Hannah and I have coffee and shortbread biscuits while baby Bella plays contentedly on the mat. Isis will be intrigued by the new people smells when she next enters the front room, we think.

The visitors leave.

I let an eager Isis into the front room. Yes, she is indeed interested. She shoots in, nose to the ground, and zig-zags over the mat to the chair where Hannah sat. How interesting dogs are, how sensitive to their environment, how responsive to human scents.

I watch her indulgently, marvelling at all the information she must be gathering. Now she has reached the coffee table. Oh no! It’s not the allure of the human scents to which she is responding. Too late I remember that we left one shortbread biscuit on a plate on the coffee table. I shoot out my hand to retrieve it.

Too late. The biscuit glides into Hairy One’s little pink mouth as though drawn by a powerful magnet. She carries it onto the mat. Crunch! Crunch!

She enjoys every last crumb.

Isis came from the Aeza cat and dog rescue and adoption centre in Aljezur, Portugal. For information about adopting an animal from the centre, contact kerry@aeza.org or  www.dogwatchuk.co.uk