Tails of a High Maintenance Mutt

Life with Strauss was proving to be even more costly than I had envisaged.

Initial health problems and obligatory puppy jabs aside, I reckon I spent more money as a direct result of his scrapes and misdemeanours during that first year, than my parents spent on any of our pure-breed family dogs during their entire lifetimes.

There was the time he shot out between my legs as I struggled into the flat with a bottle of butane gas.

I immediately shot out after him, but it was a windy day.

One slammed front door later, and I could be seen tramping the streets – puppy thrashing wildly in my arms, as the dog lead was locked in my apartment – waiting for a solution to pop into my head and save the day.

Because, despite having once had the most uncharacteristic brainwave of exchanging keys with my closest neighbour, on this, the one and only occasion on which my uncharacteristic brainwave would have born fruit, my key-swap neighbour was at work and unable to come to my rescue.

Of course, I could have used her spare key to gain access to her apartment to get my spare key, had it not been for the fact that her spare key was locked in my apartment with my main key.

Having mentally run through and discarded all the possibilities promised but not delivered, by the aforementioned and uncharacteristic brainwave, I suddenly remembered the existence of a friendly locksmith on the next street. So off we headed.

Sadly it was lunchtime, so the shop was closed. There was an emergency number, which I couldn’t call because my mobile was locked in my apartment. So I trotted back to our friendly local shop to ask Jorge (hor-hay) the shopkeeper if he wouldn’t mind ringing it for me.

Which he didn’t. Mind, that is. So he did. Ring.

When at last the locksmith arrived, and after he had stopped laughing at my barefoot predicament (my shoes also being on the wrong side of the door), he got my front door open in a matter of seconds, before charging me an eye-watering sum for interrupting his postprandial siesta.

On another occasion, Strauss and I were were wandering happily along the beach towards Puerto Banús.

It was a Sunday morning, and we were already about two kilometres out of Marbella when I noticed Strauss chewing on something down near the tide line.

More alarmingly, the ‘something’ appeared to be attached to a long piece of string, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be fishing line. I tugged at it tentatively, only to discover, to my horror, that the something was well and truly wedged somewhere down the puppy’s gullet.

Within seconds I had scooped him into my arms and we were racing (slight exaggeration – we were alternating between laborious jogging and a loud, wheezing, walk) back the way we had come.

Being Sunday, I had to then ring around most of the vets along the coast in order to find which was holding the emergency clinic. An hour and a half later, I found myself gazing aghast at an x-ray of Strauss’s thorax: sinister metal fishing hook lodged some way down his digestive tract, the vet shaking his head sombrely beside me.

‘Tendré que operar.’

Oh crap. Way down in the very core of my being, a moral tussle took place: love the dog, really do; very sweet and cuddly and all the rest, but an operation? Veterinary surgery leads to almost immediate pet-owner penury, everyone knows that…

Oh who was I trying to kid. I would have sold both my grandmothers and thrown a grandpa in for free. So I signed the form, and the vet started preparing my little man for the procedure.

Strauss was injected with a tranquilliser, before being left for a few minutes for the drug to exert its calming affect, but before the main anaesthetic could be administered, Strauss heaved once, twice and then a third time: depositing a steaming pile of vomit onto the pristine stainless steel of the examination table.

The vet and I, both having instinctively reared away to avoid any splash-back, stepped forward again as one. Because there – perched on top of that morning’s soggy dog biscuits, a piece of stick, quite a lot of sand, a couple of pebbles and an extremely stinky morsel of long-dead squid – was the offending fish hook.

So although the day had become rather more expensive than I had budgeted for, actual penury was postponed for another time. Phew.

Unfortunately, the beach held more dangers than just smelly fishermen’s tackle. The beach was also home to acres and acres of sand.

Sand? I hear you ask. How on earth can sand be a problem?

Well, sand only really became a problem because of the stone-licking, which had become a problem because of the stone-throwing I foolishly started to indulge in in order to distract Strauss from baited fish hooks abandoned on the shoreline and human turds abandoned in the undergrowth.

Having failed to interest him in sticks or balls, despite hours spent on the endeavour, with one unwise throw I managed to get my dog absolutely hooked on rocks. He hunted them down, carried them about, dug holes around them, barked at them, and, most of all, licked them. It would go on for hours, and after one particularly intensive session, he began walking a little strangely.

On closer inspection, I noticed his tummy was distended, and he moaned quite miserably when I attempted to touch it. So it was off to the vet, who poked him and prodded him and came to the conclusion that a quite astronomical amount of sand had been ingested. The solution was to give the dog as many spoonfuls of olive oil as I could force into him, and wait for the now lubricated mass to follow its current trajectory to the logical exit.

So that is exactly what I did; and then watched as Strauss extruded pointy little sandcastles up and down the streets of Marbella until his intestines declared themselves back to normal.

After the gut problem, came the leg problem.

One day, whilst careering along the beach (oh yes, ’twas that pesky beach again) the puppy appeared to twist a leg.

I am perfectly sure the subsequent howling could have been heard across the water in North Africa, such was his distress. After I had calmed him down with ten minutes of hugs, pats, kisses and leg massages, he eventually struggled to his feet and rushed off as if nothing had happened. So naturally I thought no more of it, until it happened again.

And then again.

Always the same; Strauss would collapse to the floor howling, I would cajole him back into the land of living, and off he would hare.

After some weeks of this I started to get worried, so I paid another visit to the vet who had a thorough look and proclaimed nothing at all to be wrong. But the howling continued at least once or twice every week until I retraced my steps, and demanded an x-ray of the problem leg.

The x-ray only confirmed the vet’s diagnosis that nothing sinister was going on. But the intermittent howling continued until I was a nervous wreck, embarrassed to leave the house on dog walks in case some conscientious passer-by decided to out me as a puppy beater, at which point the good doctor offered some surprising advice:

 ‘You think I should ignore him?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Sí. Lo hace para tirar la atención.’

So, having shelled out for three vet appointments and an x-ray, it appeared that all I had on my hands was an attention-seeking dog. And sure enough, after playing dumb for a couple of howling sessions, they stopped as suddenly as they had started.

One consequence of the costly drama known as Strauss, was evermore frequent interaction with our delightful local vet…