HARRY HUMPHERY RIP

It was love at first bite!  I tell a lie.   ‘Galgos’ (Spanish Greyhounds) do not bite, neither do they bark, nor do they smell, nor do they fight.   They are the dogs from Heaven.  Designer dogs - long snouts, long legs and streamlined chassis.  To watch them run in is pure joy.   As someone remarked when Harry was running like the wind on the West Meadow at Kenwood ‘many people would pay good money to watch that’.   I considered  him to be ‘lead candy’ because every single day of the six and a half years we had him, someone would stop to exclaim ‘what a handsome dog’!  He was our pride and joy and, now that he’s no longer with us, we are devastated.   It’s a month today that he went ‘long walkies’ and it seems like a year.     

Our previous dog, a Lakeland Terrier bitch, drove us crazy.   She used to lick the skirting boards, doors and furniture when she was anxious which was 24/7 and,   when she was put down at the age of fourteen, it took us six years to recover before even thinking of a replacement.

Then we met actress Charlotte Cornwell (John le Carre’s sister) on the Heath with her three rescued greyhounds and she told us about the plight of this breed.   Dumped from racetracks at the age of four in this country and strung up with piano wire in Spain after their first season’s hunting because the owners don’t want to feed them till the next season and are too mean to use a bullet.    Then they get new ones next season and do the same thing to them.

Shortly after our encounter with Charlotte a friend sent me a cutting about Nurse Anne Finch who was rescuing ‘galgos’ from Spain and rehoming them in more animal-friendly countries.   I sent a donation and a few months later my husband, Martin, said that if we were ever to get another dog, we should get one before we got any older.   There and then I rang Anne and asked if she had any coming out of quarantine.   ‘Three on Thursday’ she replied.   That focussed the mind and we rushed up to the kennels the following weekend.   There we met Pip, Squeak and Wilfred.   A brindle and two blacks    Martin turned round and said ‘It’s the brindle job or nothing’.   Pip jumped into the car and never looked back.   By the time we were back in Hampstead, his name was Harry, and our six-and-a-half-year big love affair had begun.   Princess Diana complained that there were ‘three of us in this marriage’ and ours was no different.

Harry had many endearing traits, perhaps the most endearing was that he divided his affection equally between us.   Lucy, the Lakeland Terrorist, wouldn’t let me sit next to Martin to watch TV.   She’d growl if I got too close whereas Harry would come and greet Martin and then come and greet me, too, offering a paw and staring at me with those doleful eyes.   His speciality was ‘working the room’.   If we had friends here, he would move around clockwise greeting each friend individually.   If I stopped to speak to friends while out on walk on the Heath he would stand leaning against them so that they’d stroke him.   If they stopped, he’d bump them with his rump.

Perhaps his funniest trick was moving his bed around.   He’d get his fleece blanket out of his basket with his front legs and drag it over to the radiator or move it into the sunshine.   His pet hates were flies in the summer and fireworks in the winter.  After his shoulder surgery when he was not allowed off the lead, let alone to run or to jump, we came home to find the plant pots on the kitchen windowsill broken and marks from his snout at the top of the window.   A fly had got into the kitchen and he’d jumped into the sink to get it and then out again, apparently with no dire results.

With some physiotherapy we got him walking almost without a limp.   We put him in kennels for a week and the day we were due to collect him, they rang to say he was screaming with pain, his back was twisted and he couldn’t walk properly.   As The Royal Vet College was nearby I got an emergency appointment and we rushed him straight there.    They kept him in for a couple of days, did a muscle activity test, found nothing and told us to bring him home for five days while waiting for an MRI scan.   I slept on the floor next to him but he deteriorated until he could just about stumble into the kitchen to eat  - which he did voraciously indicating that the painkillers were doing their job.

While sleeping off the anaesthetic from the scan, his consultant rang to say that his condition was untreatable (thickening of tissue in the shoulder was pressing on nerves to the spinal cord) so we had no alternative but to make sure that he went on sleeping - forever.

A month today we go back to the very same quarantine kennels where we chose Harry all those years ago, to collect his clone – a three year-old brindle male who was found caught in a fox-trap in Spain.   When he arrived five months earlier he was unable to walk from his injuries and, although those have now healed, he is still a very, very timid boy.   We hope with TLC and time, we’ll win him round.     We shall call him Humfry but Harry will be a hard act to follow.

                                                  Angela and Martin Humphery