Tag Archives: longdogs

Lurchers for Beginners

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or Dog Herding the Hard Way

We have recently discovered that some people do not know what a lurcher is. Such people are not well, and must be helped. Therefore the entire greydogtales workforce has abandoned its occult writing duties in order to produce a brief introduction to these noble dogs.

lurchers for beginners
two of our heroes

THE BASICS

The most common question asked about lurchers is: Where has my dinner gone? The second most common question is: What is a lurcher, anyway? You cannot answer either of these, because your dog has mysteriously disappeared over the horizon.

Greydogtales is here to help. Put simply, a lurcher is a cross between:

i) a dog which runs too fast for you and chases everything (a sighthound), and
ii) a dog which runs slightly more slowly but still chases everything (a working dog).

A longdog is a cross between two sighthounds, which means you don’t have a chance. The lurcher combination produces healthy, lively dogs, and healthy, exhausted owners. The name is derived from two words:

Lurch – as in to leave someone in the lurch, ie. far behind and helpless, and
Er – as in where’s that bloody dog gone now?

heelTwo lurchers close at heel

GENERAL NATURE

Lurchers have two phases to their lives, the puppy and the adult. These are mostly indistinguishable, but we can note the key characteristics here:

Puppies

Very fast and quite mad, except when asleep
If you exercise them too much they will fall apart
If you exercise them too little your home will fall apart

Adults

See puppies above, but stronger, faster and more determined

Lurchers are very sociable with each other, and will soon form a pack, which exacerbates every aspect of the above. On the up side, after all this running, they do sleep a lot. Their preferred sleeping arrangements are:

  • On your bed when you’re very tired and want to get in
  • On the sofa and every chair when you have guests
  • On the floor in a doorway where you will trip over them

Lurchers sleep at interesting angles. This often involves strange, contorted positions with neck twisted round, legs bent like an orthopaedic case-study etc.

Important Note. If your lurcher is completely upside down with all four legs in the air and its eyes closed, it is rarely dead. It is just comfortable.

COMMANDS

Lurcher respond well to commands. They don’t usually obey them, but they do respond well, often with great amusement. Common commands include:

SIT is uncomfortable for a lurcher, and will be ignored.
STAY is boring and will be ignored.
DOWN will be obeyed immediately if the lurcher is tired and was already going for a sleep anyway.
HEEL will leave you tangled in three leads at once and unable to move.
COME will leave you clutching your impact injuries and unable to move.
FETCH is also boring and will be ignored, unless a squirrel is involved.
DROP is unreasonable. It’s their squirrel, after all.

Lurchers have excellent recall. They remember perfectly well that you want to them to come back, and will do so when they have finished what they are doing. Which is usually running in the other direction, or round and round in circles.

FEEDING

These dogs have very specific dietary requirements. The lurcher diet consists of four main food groups:

  • The nice meal you spent two hours preparing.
  • Every cushion, soft toy and stuffed item in your house.
  • The squirrel sixty foot up in that oak tree.
  • Everything left out on the kitchen counter.

If none of these are available, they will eat what is in the dog bowl, but this is a last resort.

chickenA chicken in its natural habitat

We at greydogtales do not insist on any specific diet. Commercial dog food is convenient and adequate, and supports the rice and ash growing industries, but is not much fun. The raw diet is well suited to those who like bloodstains on the carpets and a lot of bones to shift. It works particularly well if you are able to blackmail your local butcher on a regular basis. It is popular with the dogs, but not so popular with the chickens.

THE FAMILY

Lurchers make excellent family members, and are quite easy-going animals. Detailed planning is required, however, as you may not be able to afford both children and lurchers (see also below). Many people these days worry about aggressiveness in dogs. In general, you are more likely to bite your lurcher than it is to bite you.

The only notable exception to this is when they “play” together. This is why many lurcher owners have massive vet bills because their dogs have “had fun” by leaping ten feet in the air at each other, charging each other with teeth bared, and “amusingly” bitten each other’s noses/lips/ears during “fun” hour. The lurchers wonder what all the fuss is about. The owners wonder if they can take out a second mortgage.

IN CONCLUSION

You cannot afford to keep a lurcher, and you are not fit enough. Your home will be wrecked and you will have nowhere to sleep. You will have no food left. On the other hand…

Next time: Probably something ghostly or scary (but not more dogs yet).

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Longdogs versus Zombies

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Hey, are you an avid fan of zombie films and TV series? Do you love World War Z, and find yourself glued to The Walking Dead, or anything by George Romero?

I can’t say I do.

In fact, I could probably cope without ever tripping over another zombie for the rest of my life, in any medium you care to mention. Including my life, which is probably classed as a large rather than a medium, given my love of Pateley Bridge pork pies.

(I make one exception – the film Cockneys vs Zombies – because it features the slowest chase scene ever, where a stumbling zombie chases a pensioner with a zimmer frame. That bit is fun, believe me.)

So this entry isn’t about zombies.

It starts there, because of the way my mind works. The other day I finally remembered the title of the first zombie film I saw, White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi. I didn’t actually see it in 1932, before you ask.

My interest was aroused when I found out that it was based on The Magic Island, by William Seabrook (1884-1945). Seabrook was interested in voudou, and travelled extensively. More interesting to me was that he claimed to have tasted human flesh. Accounts vary. He originally said that he was given human flesh in West Africa, and then that he had to obtain a body from a French morgue. He described it thus:

It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. Jungle Ways

I read this, and thought a lot about mild, good meat. I was brought up in the Church of the Confirmed Carnivore, you see. It was a bit like the Plymouth Brethren, but you could fancy other men if no-one was looking.

My father was a firearms dealer. We didn’t eat any of the neighbours in our tiny village, sadly. Instead, he taught me to hunt. He also taught me how to cast my own bullets and load cartridges, and we went out on the wolds to shoot rabbit and pigeon (mostly).

Out there, in the winds off the North Sea, we scanned the gorse bushes and let loose the wonky, unevenly-powered bullets from Hell. I’m not sure I was very good at the ammunition bit. And we carried home flesh for mother, who usually forced a smile.

The rabbits were paunched in the field, leaving the innards on the grass for other hunters. The pigeons were de-cropped and plucked on the kitchen floor. As the sink was sometimes filled with live crabs, this was a messy business with little hand washing.

I don’t have a gun any more, but when we took on our latest lurchers, we found out that the female had once been used for hunting. Given the hillsides full of rabbits near us, we considered the matter. Were we going to let Chilli hunt, and catch us some free dinners? A Household Meeting (me rattling on while my partner read a book and mumbled uh-huh now and then) came up with three key issues:

– If we started her back on hunting, would that make her even more likely to chase and eat the neighbourhood cats?
– How many farmers did we know who would let us do it (none)?
– What were we going to do with all the hares/rabbits, given that I was the only one who would touch them with a Polish bargee?

I have a family which considers chicken breasts to be a pretty bloody affair, and likes to live off long-dead pasta and humanely-killed salad vegetables.

Well-trained lurchers or longdogs know what to do. They have to. They hunt and take down the species(s) you train them on. You do have to proof them against going after anything that moves, but they can be taught to wander through a flock of sheep, ignore chickens and so forth. So it might be possible to train, or re-train, Chilli to focus on rabbits alone (and perhaps cats with very long ears). I can’t speak on the squirrel issue – every lurcher we’ve had has gone into a frenzy over squirrels, regardless of what we’ve told them.

Cand 8bDjango and Chilli enraged with bloodlust

Was it worth it? Even if we dealt with the first two issues, I would still be left living alone in the garage with lots of rabbit corpses. In the end we decided against the hunting, although Chilli didn’t get a vote. Perhaps that will teach her not to interfere in Labour Party leadership elections.

And today we were up at Pateley Bridge, and I had to walk the poor dog past half a dozen fenced fields full of lively bunnies. It was the Torment of Tantalus, rabbits offered but always out of reach. I was thinking, Mmm, pies; Chilli was thinking, Why wait for pies? My partner, who is a kindly soul when kept off the coffee, was thinking, Oh, they’re cute.

So my only recourse is to write to the Tory Party and ask if they want Chilli and me to hunt down some of these immigrants that are worrying them. Presumably not those who are building our houses, keeping our hospitals running and staffing our care homes. And not the ones who are half-drowned from crossing the Mediterranean.

It’s a complex issue, and I want to know – is it OK to hunt down totally unskilled, clueless immigrants with lurchers, paunch them in the car park and take them home for supper? Would William Seabrook have approved, and would they make good pork pies?

Politics, eh? Give me longdogs any time.

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Rawhead and Bloody Bones

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I had two grandfathers (I though it was neater that way). One was a quiet East Yorkshire house-builder whose regiment was virtually wiped out in the Great War. I would have said decimated, but if you follow the Roman way, that only means one in ten being killed, which would have been quite light. Grandpa’s lot suffered more like nine in ten losses – wounded, missing or killed – and I think they had to be dispersed or disbanded afterwards.

Grandpa2The author and his grandfather (I’m the smaller of the two)

He was supposed to be a very nice man. Apart from a few details of that action, lodged in the family vaults, I have some letters from a German POW camp, and then a picture of him in the uniform of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. I have no idea why he re-enlisted, and Grandma must have been very annoyed, having to build brick walls on her own for years.

My other grandfather was a master-butcher in North Yorkshire.

So I was in one of the local shops a while back, saying I could bone the joint myself, why didn’t more people sell proper mutton instead of lamb, and could they lend me any more sausage skins? And I told them at length about Grandpa Two, in case his background added to my credentials. We had to befriend a butcher, you see, because of the longdogs.

There are times when the house looks like an abattoir. I don’t say this lightly. We can have huge pans of liver on the stove, bowls of raw chicken and chicken carcasses on the floor, and fresh bones all over the carpet, which is distinctly blood-stained in parts. During these times I might also be shoving Django away and trying to dismember a sheep’s back leg.

I was a vegetarian once, and so was my partner. Yes, we’re lapsed, but we still like meat-free breaks. The dogs don’t.

When we took on our two longdogs, we found out that they’d been brought up on bones and raw food for some time. It’s also called the BARF diet, which is what some people might do when they see it. Our previous lurcher had been on standard fare and a lot of scraps. But we wanted the longdogs to be at home, and so we decided to try converting our aged chocolate labrador to BARF as well. We half-expected rampant diarrhoea, choking dogs, problems keeping the new arrivals fed properly and so on.

The actual result was that we became acolytes of the raw food diet. Our old dog loved her new meals, becoming more lively and alert. She queued up for her minced flesh with a distinct drool. Instead of toilet problems, we had three dogs who did compact, low-odour dry poos which you could kick around the room like golfballs. If you were quite bored. I even considered putting the poos in paper bags and offering them to the next lot of Hallowe’en callers. I consider children fair game. Can’t live with ’em, can’t mince ’em up for the dogs. Bah.

I looked at the success of the experiment. I read the labels on canned dog-food and saw how little meat there was in there. I considered the general pointlessness of kibble, which seemed to be mostly ash. And that was that.

So I beg bones from the butcher in quantities which I can barely carry and we lug them back for the pack. Django, the worst offender, eats a large sheep femur in about one and half minutes. In addition we have 40+ kilos of raw minced chicken carcass sent to us every few weeks. It’s like a serial killer version of Interflora. Add a bit of shredded carrot, apple, mushy peas, and there you are. BARF.

We don’t proselytize or preach the raw diet, but it certainly can be done, and can work.

And to end this tale of dismemberment, I’ll mention that Yorkshire is also one of the earliest locations for the Rawhead and Bloody Bones legend. No, I didn’t choose my title at random. I love collecting old legends, especially if I can nick the idea for a story. The best legends are really obscure ones, like local oddities which you can borrow without readers even knowing. The readers, when they finally find out, call it “Not making your own stuff up like a proper writer”. I call it introducing fascinating myths to a new and vibrant audience…

Rawhead and Bloody Bones has a long history. He may be one monster, sometimes two. The story of a bloody creature which lurks ready for unpleasant or misbehaving children seems to have been common in the North of England, and transferred long ago to parts of the United States. It dates back to at least the sixteenth century.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.

(I was also pleased when I came upon across biographical notes on Sir Thomas Lunsford, a Royalist commander during the English Civil War. Present at the sieges of Parliamentarian Hull (1642/43), he was sometimes known as Bloodybones Lunsford. His opponents and detractors claimed that he was a cannibal, and ate children.)

Anyway, back to Rawhead. This charming humanoid fellow may be found hiding under the stairs, gristle and raw flesh hanging from his bare skull, waiting for little miscreants to tear apart. His long pale hands reach up and grab them. Game Over. Sometimes he dwells in dank pools or other haunted places, crouching on a heap of human and animal bones, but he’s always waiting for the children. And I thoroughly approve. If Rawhead had occupied our house, then our son might be a lot better at hanging up wet towels, washing-up and paying over his housekeeping.

But life is not so kind, and alas for poor Rawhead, let’s be honest. The longdogs would surely have eaten him by now.

Crunch.

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The Long View and the Long Dog

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A break from fiction this time, due to recent headlines about artificial intelligences taking over. Yes, I’m easily distracted.

Apparently (I read too many media summaries) AIs will replace the human race in the near future, and we should all be very worried. Even “normal” newspapers have been printing this sort of stuff.

Why? We can already produce kids who want to ruin us and make us feel irrelevant (if you’re reading this, nothing personal, dear). Shouldn’t The Times be running articles on how our children will take over from us and destroy our culture, instead of all this panic about android antics? Work on artificial intelligence might be our one chance for a legacy which has some real value. I imagine that the apes banged their heads against trees when they worked out what they had produced.

FIRST APE: I’m a bit worried about this artificial intelligence idea, and these robot brain things taking over the planet… ooh, look, a tick <scrunch>.
SECOND APE: Hey, I was saving that! Anyway, what difference would it make?
FIRST APE: Dunno. I suppose these AIs might hunt us and destroy our homes, enslave us, dissect us, just not care about our survival at all… oh. I see.
SECOND APE: Welcome to evolution, mate.

If humanity’s one lasting achievement was to create soaring intellects who were self-conscious and fit to meet the Mind of God, I think I’d be quite pleased.

As to why they would want to destroy us, I’m not sure. They might find us annoying, I’ll grant you, but would they really be that interested in us, once they got going? There are much larger cosmological questions than why people follow the Kardashians (a form of artificial life which turned out to be an evolutionary dead end, I believe). If I was an AI, the only worry I’d have would be someone turning me off, and I think I’d have made contingency plans by then.

Isn’t it more likely that they’ll take us on as a pet project? You know, the way you’d teach your cat to avoid being run over, lock the cat-flap after it and that sort of thing. That might be quite helpful.

But of course we don’t know, so just to help you out in the meantime, here is my easy guide to:

WHAT TO SAY ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WHEN ASKED

Pick one or more of the following. Do not turn over the page.

The Religious – God made human beings to be the next best thing after aberrant angels, and to have dominion over things. He didn’t make AIdam and Eve 2.1, so there.
The Scientist – Hey, someone’s going to do it eventually so we might as well crack on. These AIs could turn out to be really cool.
The Religious Scientist – God created us so that we could create artificial intelligences, but it was a bit too complicated to explain to the tribes at the time.
The Atheist – It’ll happen if it it happens,  and I’ll be dead then anyway.
The Optimist – Hurrah, we’re going to give birth to something new and wonderful which will enhance our experiences and give us someone else to talk to.
The Pessimist – The planet’s buggered and we keep killing each other, so why not let the AIs have the lot?
The Newspaper Editor – Watch out as AIs increase mortgage rates and encourage unwanted immigrants, putting your house at risk.
The Magazine Editor – Would you look good in a hardened ceramic shell with ninety terabyte/second access ports this summer? See our fashion guide on Page Twenty Seven.

And finally…

The Pessimistic Religious Scientist – The concept of AIs was introduced into our minds by a vengeful God who wants us all to be shot to pieces by Skynet. Frankly, we deserve everything we get.

(Incidentally, I began the draft of this entry by abbreviating the term “artificial intelligence”, but every time I typed AI, my computer changed it to Ai and then highlighted it as a mistake. That worried me for a while…)

I do have one candidate who won’t be taking over the world any time soon. Django, our male longdog.

Thousand of years of evolution, and the purposeful, scientific breeding programmes of humanity, have produced a dog who runs into trees. And wheelbarrows. And me.

I can’t speak for the trees, but I can tell you that 35 kilos of muscle moving at 40 miles an hour really hurts when it hits a human bean. He has the target-identification ability of a state-of-the art missile, but the navigational skills of Sub-Lieutenant Philips in the Navy Lark (you have to be old for that one). He can see what he’s after from about five miles (sighthound crossbreed, after all) but not, apparently, the obstacles in between.

Django has ADD – Accidental Damage Disorder. He’s twice been bitten by our alpha female after jumping on her by mistake, dead-legged me in the middle of an empty playing field, got a lamb-bone stuck on his canine so that he walked round looking like a dentally-challenged walrus… the list is quite long.  One of our most urgent action items, in order for us to reach pensionable age, is not to protect ourselves from artificial intelligences.

It’s to insure the bloody dog.

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