Going To The Dogs.

Getting a job can be frightening when you're young, especially when you associate it with stuffy offices, and balding fat men barking orders at submissive employees, all with a haunted look in their eyes, and a lacklustre forced smile of acquiescence. But there comes a time when every mother starts nagging, and for me that time had come, a whining voice that seemed to follow me around no matter where I tried to hide in our detached isolated house, no matter what volume I turned Jerry Springer up to. So coupled with the fact that my wardrobe was in serious need of a make over, and the moths fluttering around in my wallet, I gave in, and decided to let the sofa resemble somebody else's posterior while I trudged off to join the proverbial rat-race.

In hindsight, perhaps my experience was a predictable one. People often say to me when I talk about it ‘Well what did you expect to do working at a dog kennel?' I expected a number of things really, most of which seem naive now. I expected to play with dogs all day long, and feed them their pedigree chum in shiny new bowls, and be rewarded with a wagging tail and a lick on the cheek. I expected spacious clean pens, and balls to throw for the animals, treats to give them when they did tricks. And of course, I also expected a lot of money in return. To me it seemed inevitable that I'd find the job rewarding, and I looked forward to learning more about how to care for dogs, perhaps even how to train them. If only I could have foreseen the truth.

My first day was spent tagging along nervously after a blonde haired employee, apparently given the task of showing me the ropes. I didn't see any ropes as far as I recall, insomuch as a few rows of rusty old kennels, the tiny interiors of which held the occasional whimpering canine. The first time I heard the dogs all howl in unison made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, but what worried me more was that by the end of the day I was completely oblivious to them. Their food was given to them in dented metal bowls, after being mixed by hand in a large bucket, and mixed with water, which I'm sure had some useful purpose, other than turning dog food into unrecognisable grey sludge. By the end of the day I was as cold and miserable as the dogs themselves, and probably just as lonely for those I knew and I loved, but I was given my first taste of earned money. Unlike the dogs, on the following morning I was there by choice.

Being the trusting person that I am, I had assumed that my first day had shown me all the tasks and procedures I was expected to carry out. My surprise at being handed a bucket of green water and two shovels soon gave way to complete shock, and then a kind of numb horror, when I realised what I was expected to do. When dogs have spent the night in an enclosed space, the first thing they do when let out into the fresh air is to promptly squat down and rid themselves of the previous day's meals. As carer of the animals my job was then to pick up these predigested coils of offence between two small metal shovels, and drop them into the turgid green water without getting splashed with it. The splashing was something they left me to discover of my own accord. And so aside from feeding grey sludge and picking up brown deposits, I also had the privilege of gathering up urine soaked newspaper from the kennel floors, brushing smelly long haired knots from mangy coats of fur, and walking the owners three large dogs. The fact that these three Labradors belonged to the owners themselves did nothing for their behaviour, and after being knocked down and pulled and tangled in lead wires, even the most patient employee might have used the expletives I put to use.

Of course the job also had it's memorable moments, such as the first time I was introduced to the cats which they kept hidden away in a back room. Having grown up around cats I'm one of the curious breed of people who'll look at a hissing ball of fur and declare myself gifted with animals, and suggest that I try and calm it. Luckily for me it seems to hold true, and the cat that no one had been able to get within a metre of for the duration of time it had been there happily let me scratch behind it's ears and tickle it's underbelly. The incredulous looks on their faces at having been outdone by a new employee was worth every scratch and bite that came afterwards. Or perhaps I can say it was worth every bite that came afterwards except for one, that being the bite I received from a large Alsatian while trying to give it a bowl of grey sludge. Nobody had thought it important to let me know that this particular Alsatian had been sentenced to the kennels due to attacking at will in the prison it had been trained to work in, and so my ‘way with animals' was promptly undermined, and my trust in the people I worked with took a nosedive.

When I look back on those three months I find it hard to believe I persevered for so long. Six days a week of nine to five workdays, and a meagre one hundred and twenty pounds at the end of each ordeal. My wardrobe hardly grew in size, rather it declined due to all the items I threw away once they had been soiled with unmentionable substances and peppered with an array of dog hair. My wallet still housed the occasional moth or two, especially a few days after it had it been refilled, and though the nagging voice of my mother didn't persist on the subject of earning my keep, Jerry Springer still soared to new volumes when she obligingly found other things to pester me about. I didn't learn anything new about the animals I worked with, I always knew that dogs were smelly and annoying. I always knew that a cat locked in a cage which totals no more than a foot in diameter will leap and scratch at the first hand that attempts to fumble around for their half eaten meat. What I didn't always know , but now do, is that people will do anything for money. It used to be a cliche, the sort of phrase to which I'd roll my eyes, and feign a yawn, and declare myself above. But I carried out duties in the canine prison establishment that still make my stomach turn to recall, and so I know... I was one of those people. Working with animals is not big, nor is it clever, and nor is it worth the pittance or mental stress untaken with the job, often passed off as the job's ‘rewards'. When you can't close your eyes without hearing the anguished howls of forty dogs, and your own groans at the thought of returning to the reality, you know it's time to move on...