For the love of old dogs
Greying muzzles, lifelong loyalty — an ode to ageing dogs, including a 30-year-old kelpie
My ancient puppy, Tex, just had his 13th birthday. I wasn’t confident he would even see double digits; every moment with him since then has felt like a gift. You see, Tex is not in the best of health. In fact, he has a laundry list of ailments as long as his feather-duster fluffy tail.
Tex has arthritis, an anxiety disorder, hypothyroidism, leukaemia, epilepsy and an incurable lung disease called bronchiectasis. The arthritis makes him limp; the anxiety makes him worry and whine; the hypothyroidism causes him to gain weight and makes him more susceptible to other conditions like dermatitis; the leukaemia makes his blood do crazy things; the epilepsy causes violent seizures, almost always in the middle of the night; and the bronchiectasis makes him cough constantly. He has also become deaf in recent years. On any given day, Tex takes at least 12 pills – more if he’s dealing with other issues, which frequently crop up. The medication ensures he’s not in pain and doesn’t feel unwell and I know he still enjoys life because I know him.
He hasn’t been an easy dog, but he has been a perfect dog – a constant joy, and now I feel an entirely new depth of love for him. I realise that some people would see caring for an ailing and elderly dog as a burden rather than a reward. But somebody who has never known the love of an elderly canine has wilfully forfeited the velvety soft touch of a greying muzzle, the sound of plodding paws in the hall, the occasional mad burst of puppy-like energy, the beatific expression on an old dog’s face as she finds the perfect sunny spot in the garden to while away the afternoon. Imagine choosing to miss out on those sublime moments.
When Maggie passed away on her owner Brian McLaren’s dairy farm in Woolsthorpe, southern Victoria, in April 2016, he believes she was at least 30 years old. He can no longer prove exactly how old she was but officially speaking or not, her astonishingly lengthy life probably makes Maggie the longest-lived dog in the world. One way Brian knows for sure that Maggie lived to be at least 30 is that his youngest son, Liam, wasn’t yet at school when she joined the family, so he can’t have been more than four years old; Brian actually thinks he may have been even younger. When Maggie passed away in 2016, Liam was 34.
Maggie was a shining example of her kelpie breed. She had instinct in spades, and being both gentle and highly intelligent she was able to herd cattle with almost no guidance from Brian. She was fastidious about her work, refusing to knock off for the day until every cow was accounted for. “If she missed a couple and it was still daylight, I could send her out again and she’d get the ones she missed.”
It wasn’t just cows whose occasional tardiness frustrated Maggie. If her boys – Joe, Chris and Liam – weren’t home from school on time, she would vent her spleen to anyone within earshot. “She knew the kids got home off the school bus at 10 past four every afternoon. You could set your watch by her: every day at 4.10pm she’d go out the front and wait,” says Brian. “If they weren’t on time, she’d bark until they arrived.”
With such an eager and unflagging colleague by his side, Brian never thought much about Maggie’s advancing years. She was always there, tail wagging, in the wee hours of every morning. Age, it seemed, had not wearied her.
As a general rule, the smaller the dog, the longer its life. The list of the world’s 10 longest-living breeds is a roll call of petite pooches that includes the Chihuahua, Maltese, toy poodle, Jack Russell terrier and Shih tzu. But there are, of course, exceptions to every rule. According to Guinness World Records, the official oldest dog in the world was none other than a humble Australian kelpie. His name was Bluey and, like Maggie, he hailed from rural Victoria. He lived with farmer Les Hall and died in November 1939, aged 29 years and five months.
The average lifespan for the breed is 12 to 15 years, but there is a wealth of anecdotes about kelpies that have pushed on until closer to 20. Brian hadn’t registered that Maggie was getting on a bit until son Joe remarked one evening that she hadn’t really been working for the past 10 years. When Brian thought about it, he realised his son was right. Because she was still always by his side he hadn’t paid much attention, but Maggie had been winding down right before his eyes.
“It had been a gradual thing. Maggie stopped trying to beat the motorbike and was happy to get on the back of it instead,” he says. Soon her begrudging acceptance of trips on the motorcycle dwindled too until she didn’t want to go at all. Brian figured she had to be somewhere in the region of 29 years old. The boys started joking that Maggie deserved a medal for sticking around so long. “It started out as a bit of fun. Joe said we should get Maggie in Guinness World Records. I’d never thought about it until he mentioned it, but suddenly I thought, ‘Wow, maybe she is pretty old’.”
He thought the story of his lovely old cattle dog might make a nice little snippet for his local newspaper. “I knew a girl who worked at The Weekly Times, so I rang her and said, ‘I’ve got a dog that might be 30 years old’. They turned up to take some photos of Maggie and me, and ended up doing a two-page spread.” The ink was barely dry when Brian received another phone call, this time from a television journalist at Seven News. Next came interview requests from the northern hemisphere. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says.
By the summer of 2016, Maggie’s age was noticeably catching up with her. Her lovely face was completely grey and she had become deaf. She stuck close to the farm office, napping in her basket. On April 18, she ambled from the office to the dairy and back again as usual. She growled at her feline foes, as was her custom. It seemed Maggie, the little kelpie that could, would keep on chugging for a little while yet.
But the next day, Brian could tell something wasn’t quite right. Maggie usually snoozed the day away but was constantly up and down out of her basket. At day’s end, Brian helped her to settle and wished her good night. “She seemed a little bit agitated, so I put her back in her basket and gave her a pat,” he says. The day after she didn’t get up to greet him. Maggie had passed away during the night.
Just as her first foray into the media had made headlines around the world, so too did news of her passing. Major Australian and international news outlets posted tributes to Maggie, the unofficial oldest dog who ever lived. But her death didn’t make Brian feel any need to make the title official. “It’s not something I’m interested in. I loved my dog because she was my dog, not because she was a certain age or had a pedigree.”
Edited extract from Extraordinary Old Dogs by Laura Greaves (Michael Joseph, $34.99), out December 1.