Dino the dirty dog (in more ways than one) (France)

“Dino is an ugly dog.”  

Those were Colette’s first words to me about him, poor boy!  

He doesn’t look anything like the other dogs on the farm, which are all hunting dogs, numbering at least half a dozen at any one time. 

The hunting dogs are brown, short-legged, short-haired, extremely sociable and get on with everyone else, both four-legged and two-, looking you straight in the eye each time.  

There is one that bares its teeth as it waddles up to you, wagging its backside, which Colette said is meant to be a smile — the baring of teeth, that is, not the wagging of backside. 

Dino, on the other hand, stands out for miles: scruffy.  His matted, tangled fur always has clumps of something embedded, and he is always scratching.  

He is of an indeterminable shade of black and dark grey, has shifty eyes, and wears a perpetual sheepish and apologetic look as if he’s just done something bad (which you have yet to discover).  

He’ll get up and shuffle away as soon as you approach, whether you’re going up to him or just passing by, as if he’s afraid of being targeted.  The just in case approach.  He must’ve been beaten a lot, probably for no reason, which might explain the perpetual sheepish look — he’s come to think he is always in the wrong.  (Reminds me of Billy — see blog entry Bung Deetle Bung Deetle.)

He’d come to the farm as an orphan.  His owner had died in a house fire, which had destroyed everything else but Dino. 

Right from the start, Dino failed to fit in, by rubbing the other dogs up the wrong way — more specifically, up the wrong end by sniffing their underparts.  They took umbrage at this newcomer taking such an over-familiar approach, and warned him off with a few growls at the back of the throat and some rising hackles.  

Which should’ve been clear to Dino, except that he doesn’t seem to read body language messages too well, and went ahead with his never-say-die way of doing things.  

The growls would grow in volume and duration, then turn into bites, but still he’d go back for more.  If one dog didn’t like his bum sniffed at, Dino would move on to the next, undeterred.  Colette called it sexual harassment.

Dino then teamed up with the loner hen for company when farm mistress Jeanette gave up on putting her back into the poultry pen after several breakouts.  They’d go for walks together, exploring various parts of the farm: Dino in front, followed by the hen (she does have much shorter legs, after all...).  

Until the loner hen got eaten one day — by one of the hunting dogs.  

So Dino went back to bum-sniffing, which eventually erupted in a massive retaliation one day, when the other dogs sank their teeth into him and rolled him about in the mud.  So that’s where he got his matted fur from!

Jeanette, is a real sweetie with people, very good-natured and easy-going, but you’d hear her constantly barking at Dino, many times a day.  Without looking out of the window, I’ll know from Jeanette’s ticking off that he’s either been doing some sniffing, or stealing some dog’s food. 

He’s not perpetually hungry, though.  One day I found him sitting down with a bun on the ground right in front of him.  As soon as he saw me coming out of the house, he picked it up between his teeth and walked away from me.  Fair enough, he thought I might want to take it from him.  This happened every time I went anywhere near him.  However, hours later, that bun was still uneaten.  So he was just guarding it for the sake of stopping anyone from taking it from him.  Strange dog.

On my way back to London, as the plane was landing, I heard a hoarse raspy sound, a throaty sort of woof woof that was Dino’s bark.  He had stowed away and was following me back!  

It turned out to be the speed brakes of the plane rasping.

Caught a bus from where the airport bus dropped me.  As it approached South Kensington Tube station, lo and behold, right ahead was a huge sign that I’d never noticed before, which said:

DINO’s [Italian restaurant]  

No escape from the ball of scruff even back in London.

(France, September 2010)


Update (October 2011):  Coming back on Monday 03 October from my visit to the farm this summer, I took the same bus via South Kensington as last year, and found that Dino's has now become Muriel's Kitchen.  Wonder if it's because they'd read this blog entry and didn't want to be associated with a ball of scruff...?