In praise of noodle dogs

Someone recently said to me that they didn't know I had a greyhound and it got me to recalling the first grey I ever met.

It was 1992. I was going to night school, studying Biological Techniques at technical college and I was unemployed at the time. When I went to start classes in the new year, one of my teachers offered me a six month position preparing resources for practical classes. As a student my activities were limited to the lower 3 or 4 floors of the building but when I was working there I sometimes had reason to go up to the roof.

As an aside, I went to the roof to get cane toads for classes. The toads were in a large glass tank and i would have to put my hand in the tank and grab the requisite number of toads while the others jumped everywhere. I still can't believe I did it.

The top level was used by the vet nursing course. The woman who worked there had long plaits and wore overalls and I don't remember her name.  She had three rescue greyhounds who lived in the building. I'm not sure if they ever went home with her or anything like that but they roamed freely around the area. In those days there were no schemes for rehoming retired racers and most were shot or killed in other brutal ways when their racing career finished. Nobody ever saw a greyhound except on the track. Anyway, one of these dogs on the 8th floor of a city building was a fawn brindle girl who followed the woman everywhere. I was enchanted with her gentle nature and never forgot how special she was.

When greyhounds became more widely available, I hoped I might have one but it took time before it was possible. We had a labrador mix at the time and after he died we fostered a "spoodle" for a good long time while his owner was locked up.

Eventually, we were a household in need of a dog and Liam went and got Harry. Harry was a huge 39kg sweetheart who went straight from racing kennels to the RSPCA kennels and then to us. He hadn't been a pet before and we hadn't cared for a dog like him. It was stressful at the start but we trained him and he trained us and though he was always officially Liam's dog he was deeply loved by us all until his death in 2022. 

A few months after Harry died, Milly (racing name Midnight Minueva) was in need of a home and at almost 11 years old, it wasn't going to be easy for her to find one so I went and picked her up. My first greyhound. She's a sweet old thing, gentle and quiet and just a little bit quirky. She is arthritic and she has a tremor when she stands up for more than a couple of minutes so she doesn't follow me around like the one I fell in love with so long ago but she is just as lovely. 

I think every dog breed has it's own following but greyhounds inspire a cult like devotion and they are so very deserving of it.