My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley Read Free Book Online Page A

matter when she is in season, for on these occasions she has numerous callers who leave the marks of their attention round the front door. On her way in and out she reads, with her long black nose, these superimposed stains, and the care with which she studies them is so meticulous that she gives the impression of actually identifying her acquaintances and friends.
    She has two kinds of urination, Necessity and Social. Different stances are usually, though not invariably, adopted for each. In necessity she squats squarely and abruptly, right down on her shins, her hind legs forming a kind of dam against the stream that gushes out from behind; her tail curves up like a scimitar; her expression is complacent. For social urination, which is mostly preceded by the act of smelling, she seldom squats, but balances herself on one hind leg, the other being withdrawn or cocked up in the air. The reason for this seems obvious; she is watering some special thing and wishes to avoid touching it. It may also be that in this attitude she can more accurately bestow her drops. Often they are merely drops, a single token drop will do, for the social flow is less copious. The expression on her face is business-like, as though she were signing a check.
    She attends socially to a wide range of objects. The commonest group are the droppings, both liquid and solid, of other animals. Fresh horse dung has a special attraction for her and is always liberally sprayed. Then she sprinkles any food that has been thrown about—buns, bones, fish, bread, vomit—unless it is food she wishes to eat. Dead and decaying animals are carefully attended to. There are advanced stages of decay, when flesh turns into a kind of tallow, which affect her so deeply that urination appears to be an inadequate expression of her feelings. Try as she may she cannot lift her leg, and tottering round the object in a swooning way would prostrate herself upon it if the meddling voice of authority did not intervene. One day there was a human corpse, which had been fished out of the river, lying under a tarpaulin by the water’s edge awaiting an ambulance to take it away, and Tulip approached it with that air of shrinking curiosity that dogs often evince towards large, draped, motionless objects in the road, such as sacks or bundles. She had never seen a human corpse before, and I should have been interested to observe how she behaved to it, but there were other spectators standing by and I thought it wiser to call her off. Human beings are so arrogant. They think nothing of chopping off the head of some dead animal, a calf or a pig, twisting its features into a ludicrous grimace, so that it appears to be grinning, winking, or licking its cold lips, and displaying it in a shop window as a comic advertisement of its own flesh. But any supposed indignity to
their
dead would be a very different matter, though whatever statement Tulip had made on this occasion would at any rate have had the merit of being serious.
    She drips also upon drains, disinfectants and detergents (in a street of doorsteps it is generally the one most recently scoured that she selects), and pieces of newspaper. Once she spared a few drops for a heap of socks and shoes left on the foreshore of the river by some rowing men who had gone sculling. Following her antics with the utmost curiosity, I used to wonder what on earth she was up to. I saw that, excepting perhaps for the newspapers, unless something savory had been wrapped up in them or she was moved by printers’ ink, all these objects had a quality in common, smell; even so, why did she pee on them? It could not be because other dogs had done so before her, for that only pushed the question further back: who began, and why? Nor did I think she was staking a personal claim; nothing in her subsequent behavior suggested appropriation. I came to the conclusion that she was simply expressing an appreciative interest; she was endorsing these