What a demented dog teaches us about life

I met the late Darcy ten years ago, and wrote about him. I was 59 and he was 12. I was a Times columnist, and he was an Australian sheepdog. ‘Kelpies’ they call them: black and tan, in build and temper not unlike our border collies, energetic, intelligent, irrepressible but trainable, and occasionally neurotic. Darcy was not neurotic except in one pitiable respect, and I shall come to that. I studied him and wrote about him, but in the decade since have come to understand more deeply what his condition teaches about my own, and human, nature. I wrote about this dog as an oddity. I now see that Darcy was an illustration, not an aberration: an illustration of what can go wrong in the circuitry of the brain.

Here is Darcy’s story. The loving family whose pet he was had a weekend place in the Australian bush, isolated and wild. On Darcy’s first visit as a puppy he saw, on the other side of their fence, a dead sheep. The encounter stirred something atavistic within his kelpie soul. Fascinated, he kept rushing at the fence, yapping; and for the entire weekend nothing but force could tear him away. Next time he visited, the carcass had been cleared and there was no trace of it, but he made a beeline for the exact place, and started rushing the fence again, and barking.

This was to continue for the rest of his 14-year life. My friends tried everything: they took him to the far side of the fence but this seemed only to confuse and agitate him more — he wanted to be on the wrong side, rushing the fence, barking and snapping his teeth. This he would do all day, every day, from the moment of his arrival, unless restrained. He would do it until his paws bled, and the patch of ground he paced was worn down to its rock base.