In this mad, messy world, there’s no purer love than that of a dog

We didn’t own Huxley; he owned us. And that sweet, boofy creature didn’t stay long enough.

Janet Albrechtsen with her golden retriever, Huxley

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A while back, when Huxley was still alive, I recall listening to Robert Harrison, a professor of literature and all-round genius on philosophy at Stanford University. He was speaking about different kinds of love. He said the Greeks had eight different terms for eight different kinds of love. He talked about St Augustine’s amor mundi – love of the world – that Hannah Arendt revived for the modern century in her 1939 thesis to encourage us to take responsibility, in myriad ways, for the world we love.

Harrison, the host of Entitled Opinions, said that some forms of love go unacknowledged because we don’t have the right words to capture them. I waited for him to mention, as an example, the love for a dog.

I don’t mean to be picky but loving a dog surely deserves its own term.

With the federal election long over and the Days of Our Trumpian Lives not likely to end for some years, I admit freely that my best conversations are about dogs – or with dogs. Also, no one thinks you’re (fully) crazy if you’re talking to a dog.

There is a levelling power with dogs. You don’t have to know much or have much – just some time, a beating heart, a tennis ball and an old Ugg boot. No long sentences or big thoughts needed, either. Just come, sit, give and stay. Hux didn’t stay nearly long enough.

Once Huxley entered our lives, I found myself dividing up people into those who love dogs and those who really dislike them. The ones who don’t have a view one way or another didn’t concern me. Fence-sitters can be quite boring. When it comes to the dog-haters, I struggle to understand them.

Hux didn’t stay nearly long enough.

I found myself slicing and dicing further still between those who have, or had a dog, versus those who didn’t. It’s not that I mark down people for not having a dog. More that those with dogs know things. For example, we know that if you have a dog, you are guaranteed to smile and laugh multiple times before breakfast.

I say a dog entered our life because saying we own a dog isn’t proper use of the English language. I own a car and more than a wardrobe full of very nice shoes. I never owned Huxley. He owned us, just as he owned a few of my more expensive shoes. But not in the way cats own people.

My daughter, who has two cats, knows that cats are commonly bonkers in a way that few dogs are. Apparently, when one has two cats, it’s not unusual for one cat to think the other one, having returned from the vet with foreign smells, is evil – the feline equivalent of a terrorist. My daughter did her best impersonation of Bill Clinton at Camp David, over a series of days, moving between each cat in different rooms to ensure the psycho cat never set eyes on the terrorist cat.

If I brought a smelly stray dog into the house, Hux would be in heaven. His love for us was equally simple. It drove my family nuts that he’d stand, sit or lie down, watchful eyes following me, whenever I wandered inside the shop, or was swimming in the ocean. He would not budge, always watching out for me.

I shared a laugh with a blonde lady in the sea one day who was wearing the same yellow bikini as me. There was a big boofy almost two-year-old golden retriever watching over the both of us, I told her. No one ever said that cats are man’s best friends.

Huxley as a pup.

When Huxley arrived, a fat little polar bear of a pup, I learned about new kinds of friendships. I came to know people whose first names I will probably never know. But their dogs’ names would roll off my tongue.

The beautiful French woman and her two enormous dogs, Manon and Baillieu. Those majestic dogs followed her off lead with a discipline that bamboozled me. My free-roaming mutt took the ending of Born Free too seriously. The very fit woman with a black lab called Chloe who ran headfirst into a young Hux, sending him flying into the air and landing with a thud. He was fine; it wasn’t his first rodeo at the dog park. The gentle man who had the gentlest of dogs, a large german shepherd called Stanley, the lovely woman who belongs to a flirty golden called Lulu, the English chap whose dog Reggie became Hux’s best friend.

Our conversations with dogs, about dogs, laughing at their silliness, shouting at those who strayed too far, sharing dog tips, was the perfect way to start a day.

We never talked politics, or anything remotely heavy. During Covid, to be sure, there might have been an odd whine but that was us barking about Scott Morrison. Talking about dogs, and with them, is a form of therapy not to be sniffed at.

The official paperwork recorded that he was a full-bred retriever, but Huxley was not bound by genes. His retrieving skills were woeful. But his thieving skills ranked him high in the criminal gangs of dogs.

There are probably complicated dogs, but Hux wasn’t one of them.

If Hux were human, he’d be ostracised as a pervert for stealing lingerie. He left my red bra by the front door one night just as guests were due to arrive. I scooped it up before opening the door.

Hux did have respect for Katie, the magical dog whisperer who built a tremendous dog walking business from nothing. Though I take credit for training him to lie quietly at the end of my yoga mat, his patience expiring only at savasana, right at the end of a practice. I understood his dog logic. Why would someone need a meditative moment of calm in a day when you have a dog?

The thing about dogs is that one learns a form of simplicity and purity and calm that our thorny human lives don’t always offer, at least not day in, day out, without fail. There are probably complicated dogs, but Hux wasn’t one of them.

Just before Huxley turned two, the vet thought the shadow on a scan could have been a missing sock. When he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer – which stole him from us a month later in June 2023 – my friend Tom, who has a dog, went to his troublingly organised library, opened a book and sent me photos of pages from a column by Charles Kraut­hammer. It was written in June, 20 years earlier.

Krauthammer was famous for writing serious things, especially on American foreign policy and politics, during his time at The Washington Post. After Chester died, he wrote a short piece about his dog:

“The way I see it, dogs had this big meeting, oh, maybe 20,000 years ago. A huge meeting – an international convention with delegates from everywhere. And that’s when they decided that humans were the up-and-coming species and dogs were going to throw their lot in with them. The decision was obviously not unanimous. The wolves and dingoes walked out in protest.

“Cats had an even more negative reaction. When they heard the news, they called their own meeting – in Paris, of course – to denounce canine subservience to the human hyperpower … Cats, it must be said, have not done badly. Using guile and seduction, they managed to get humans to feed them, thus preserving their superciliousness without going hungry. A neat trick. Dogs, being guileless, signed and delivered. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Perhaps predicting the bristles of cynicism from some when writing about the death of his dog, Krauthammer wrote: “Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal – indeed, deeply human – to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty.

“Should we not be moved when it pro­duces a vision – a creature – of the purest sweetness?”

Tom’s dog, who arrived the same week Krauthammer died in 2018, is named after Krauthammer. To be clear, Tom’s dog is called Charlie.

I stopped walking my usual morning route, the one heading south along the coast from our home, after Huxley died. Too many dogs I knew, so I walked north instead.

I’m back on the southern coastal path. There’s a new dog in our home now. Another golden retriever because if I am honest about my slicing and dicing, I’m not sure about people who have little dogs, either. I haven’t worked out the point of them. To be fair, it’s possible I said that about children too, before one entered our lives.

Conversations with dogs, about dogs, have resumed, the rhythm broken only once, just over a month ago, when some teal spruikers ventured foolishly into the dog park trying to hand out political merch for their candidate. These are places where politics is not welcomed – even if churches and some yoga studios have gone over to the dark side proselytising politics.

Like Huxley, Claude is big, boofy, loving and loyal, and won’t win a medal for retrieving, either. The pure form of love we receive from our dogs, and give them so gratefully in return, is unique in an otherwise messy world.