Our Cocker Spaniel and the Vegetable Patch

When we think of love, we rarely think beyond the human experience. 'Love' for us implies love for our children, parents, families, friends. Yet, those of us who have dogs or cats or a horse or any pet, we see love in the animal world that is just as compelling, if not more so.

It's the same with intelligence.

Intelligence in the animal world boggles my mind.

Our first dog was a mongrel, Vicky. He was a good boy, but we were too young (I was nine and my sister four) to know how to train a dog well. Plus, we had two alpha dogs on either side of our house (Rex, a German shepherd, and Robo, a mongrel) each of whom believed they owned the street, and were prepared to lose parts of their faces to prove it. We loved Vicky and were overprotective of him and were too young to assess his intelligence.

Our next dog was a black and white cocker spaniel, Jasper. Jasper had an intelligence that can only be described as astonishing and it was most on display with my parents, whom he loved to aggravate. It was the way he annoyed them that was the most revealing aspect of his personality. He never did this to me or my sister, although he got us in trouble often.

Let me explain.

This was back in the day when I lived in Ranchi, India, with my parents. I was seventeen, my sister was twelve. Jasper was a puppy, who my mother had carried to Ranchi on her lap, as she flew in from Calcutta.

We lived in a house with a large compound surrounded by walls, so Jasper had the 3/4 acre lot (or thereabouts) to frolic in. My mother's flower garden was in front of the house and my father's vegetable garden at the back. There was a big lawn in front and dozens of trees at the back (banana, tamarind, papaya, mango, and guava). Our house was filled with lots of people - most of whom loved dogs. He got attention from us, our neighbors, and friends.

In short, Jasper was a happy, well-socialized, well-adjusted, sweet-tempered puppy.

But he had another side to his personality.

Every morning, my father walked the narrow dividing paths of his vegetable garden with two people - his sister (who we loved, who lived next door) and our gardener - Ramu. Baba and Pishi (that's Bengali for 'aunt') loved their vegetable garden. Every morning, they discussed (with what I can only describe as reverence) the length of the squashes ('lou'), or the girth of pumpkins ('kumbro') or bulge of eggplants ('begoon'). It was very zen. Snow pea pods and the tips of their leaves were God's Food and Baba's love for spinach rivaled what he felt for his daughters. When it came to cauliflowers, he composed odes to them. Truly.

Enter Jasper.

Every morning, as Baba and Pishi walked the vegetable garden, Jasper, with eight-inch long ears and the saddest eyes anyone had ever seen would follow at their heels. He would walk through the vegetable plots with reckless abandon. He would bounce through the coriander and spinach, knock off the tomatoes, sniff too long at the carrots. Baba always worried that Jasper would raise his leg toward his cauliflowers and then life as he knew it would be over.

Every morning we woke up hearing Baba yelling at Jasper.

The strange thing was this - although Jasper never minded the walking paths and always ran rampant through the vegetable patches when Baba and Pishi were doing their rounds, when my sister and I went to the garden, he behaved differently. He waited by our side. He walked along the paths. He never romped, sniffed, and knocked off tomatoes. He never plundered a cauliflower or appeared as though he was about to pee at it. He never misbehaved when he was with us in Baba's vegetable garden (or my mother's flower garden for that matter).

He knew the rules. He only broke them to get a rise out of Baba.

With us, he was sweetness and light.

When we think of Jasper now, we feel enormous love of course, but we also think of his raw intelligence, his dedication to annoying my parents when and how he could, to the best of his ability (do the best you can with what you have and where you are) and obeying the two people he truly loved - that is me and my sister.

Love and intelligence, in short.

I've read countless examples by people who observe/study animals. Love and intelligence are abundant in the animal world, but unless we are in contact with them, we don't notice.

---