A friend of mine entered a hospice last week. I shall not see him again. I knew he was very ill the moment he told me he’d given his horse and dog away. For the past 35 years, dogs have been a major focus in his life. In fact, they rather saved him from what I might call wanderlust, a life that was drifting somewhat. But then, he encountered a fellow who was about to shoot his dog because it had become too much trouble. One time he locked it in his car so he could join some mates for a prolonged encounter in the pub. When he eventually emerged, the inside of his car was shredded. In confinement dog had panicked. Some weeks later, the dog needed veterinary treatment which required overnight confinement in a dog crate within the clinic. In the morning, the vet found the dog sitting on one of the clinic’s benches surrounded by a scene of mayhem, allegedly, multiple thousands of dollars worth of mayhem. That was enough. In the owner’s mind the dog had to go, and a shot to the head would do the deed.
My friend Dave intervened. “I’ll take it off your hands,” he said, and this young, black german short-haired pointer, this pedigree GSP, had a new human companion.
Dave had a long history of work in the outdoors including short stints in wildlife and conservation projects. It was an interest he’d had from his teenage years. He knew the value of dogs as bird-hunters’ companions and as a finder of rabbits and of nesting quail and pheasants, but I dont think he’d ever owned a dog. Commitment was something of a challenge to Dave. But as he later told me, “I saw something in this dog immediately. Yeah, I thought maybe I could make something of it, although, as I later found out, I sort of imagined that the wrong way around.”
It took six months before the dog came to trust Dave, to feel at ease in his company, and not cower in the expectation of another beating. And it took almost two years before Dave could see for real the “something” that he thought was there on day one. With persistence, kindness, and help from a couple of dog trainers, Dave soon had a bird detection dog of obvious ability. As Dave said, “Every day, when I took him out for a run in the hills, or along the shoreline, he kept showing me things from his world, things that I had no idea were there.”
It was about then that I got to hear of the dog’s skills. I knew Dave vaguely, but other friends who knew him kept waxing lyrical about his dog’s scenting skills and his performance as a pointer. Well, I needed just such a dog to assist me with some wildlife research on a flightless duck at the Auckland Islands. On the strength of friends’ enthusiasms, Dave and dog ‒ Bob by name although his pedigree papers recorded his name as ‘The Asin of Spindrift’ ‒ and I set sail for two months on this southern archipelago, although not before an unholy row with Head Office conservation bureaucrats about taking a dog there in the first place. On arrival, we piled our ship’s dingy high with the first load of supplies, and off went Dave and Bob ashore. Before the dingy returned for a second load, the radio crackled. ”It lays four eggs, nests under Hebe bushes, so what else do you want to know.” Bob had found a nest within 30 seconds of landing, now the third nest known to science. Before a month was out, 49 more were found, 48 by Bob and one by me. That dog was as described, only more so.
A year later I was doing similar wildlife research in the Bay of Islands, chasing another very rare duck, the pateke or brown teal. Once more I needed Bob’s skills. For three summers Bob and Dave, by now his gifted handler, wandered the creeks, fields and estuaries in the Far North. So skilful was this dog, and so good was the man and dog partnership, that TV1 devoted an entire episode of Country Calendar to them. ‘The Barker brothers’ they called it – yes, that was Dave’s clearly appropriate surname ‒ and TV3 followed up with an episode of its Animals and Us programme. This engaging pair gained quite a following inside and outside of the conservation world.
Bob’s prowess as a detector dog later saw him hunting a lost kakapo on Mana Island, tracing kakapo recently released onto islands in Fiordland, tracking and capturing all the brown teal on Kapiti Island ahead of the rats being poisoned and eradicated, searching for blue ducks up and down rivers in Westland and north-west Nelson, and for a bit of leisure, following partridges and quail in the Wither Hills. When aged 9, and with arthritis developing, Bob was put to stud, siring progeny that, over two further generations and decades, were to carry on his legacy detecting rare ducks and snipe on both Campbell and Auckland Islands, and rare ground birds and their predators in forests, grasslands, rivers, wetlands and on islands, all around New Zealand.
So outstanding was Bob as a detector dog that dogs as tools for rare species conservation started to gain acceptance, and eventually, the DoC would establish a programme to train and employ detector dogs to find not just birds, but wildlife of all forms, and some rare plants like Dactylanthus (the wood rose) and fungi too. Bob was the acknowledged foundational exemplar. Some legacy, some journey from a destroyed vet’s clinic. But so too was Dave’s, and in other’s hands, Bob’s prowess might never have come to the fore. Undeniably they were a partnership, and so too were Dave’s field years with Bob’s descendants.
So why am I telling you this dog and Dave story. Well, I am a regular for coffee at the Beach Road Deli. There with my long black I like to sit outside and turn my eyes across the rail line towards the highway. There’s a railway’s cabinet sitting trackside with two dogs’ heads painted on its front. The left face, the one showing obvious greying of the dog’s muzzle is, to my aging mind, a dead ringer of Bob’s. I look at it and, in addition to reminiscing about my experiences with Bob, I hear Dave’s voice repeating what he said on both of the TV episodes. “When I took on Bob, I promised him three things – that I’d give him plenty of exercise, that I’d give him proper nutritious food, and that I’d treat him like a dog.”
Treat him like a dog eh! And look what that dog gave him back. Entry to its world, the experience of a profound mutual commitment, and a focus to his life he’d not had before.
Some days there are dogs galore around the Deli’s tables and those of the adjacent cafés. All sizes and breeds, many rather overweight, mostly leashed around the neck ready to be hauled back and reminded that they serve as surrogate humans. I wonder how many of their idiosyncratic human companions ever allow their dogs to show them their world. There’s a lot waiting to be experienced.
