Westies
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: None.
Description: An overdue tribute to a breed of dogs also called Rosneath terriers. I was brought up on the Rosneath peninsula.
_____________________________________________________________________
Lincolnshire is hoaching with West Highland White terriers, universally known as ‘Westies’. It makes a kind of sense to suppress their proper name: they do look white against grass but you would need considerable amounts of Payne’s grey on your palette to paint them on a snowy field. Furthermore, the Westies around here rarely stray more than a mile or two west of the Meridian and the only high land they see are the wrinkles in the earth’s crust dignified by the name ‘Wolds’.
We have owned Westies more than any other breed or half-breed of dogs. They have all been called ‘Cluny’, the hereditary title of the chief of the Clan McPherson. Within the family, the same dog is sometimes called ‘Clunie’ but we also spell our surname Macpherson and MacPherson according to individual taste. We are a West Highland family and living proof that Carl Jung was on to something when he proposed the existence of a racial memory.
I was born in the Scottish lowlands but I am as much a teuchter at heart as my ancestors born within smelling distance of the reek of burning peat. What is true in people is equally true in dogs: Westies have West Highland temperaments even if they have been born and bred in Lincolnshire for fifty generations. Both dogs and humans are easy-going and more or less law-abiding but they do not acknowledge either mastery or servility.
A true Highlander never becomes the leader. His role is to stand beside the leader with a crafty smile, poorly concealed, making anarchic suggestions. He is no better at being a member of a team since he accurately assesses the failings of his boss; he does not think less of him for having these character flaws but it makes it hard to take his orders seriously.
I think there may be Highland blood in film directors because I often notice that they give the hero and heroine time for a chat and a snog even when the planet is about to explode or implode unless the hero saves it with a Kirby-grip borrowed from his fiancé. The West Highlander always has time to stop and chat although public kissing would be thought to be in poor taste. Air kissing would simply be taken to mean that a visit to Specsavers was long overdue.
Westies have exactly the same outlook as Highland men and women. They are considered hard to train but it is only because they cannot see the point in most of the commands impatiently shouted at them by the guy who feeds them. Why would anyone in his right senses want a Westie to sit beside his heel when there is an interesting smell just a few feet away?
Cluny has no objection to me walking but he can see little value in exercise for its own sake: the purpose of going outdoors is to explore smells and to cover them with your own. How else can you keep up with the news except by sniffing? He considers that humans are easily bored because they change the route from time to time. New smells are overrated; it is clearly much more important to keep up to date with what is happening in your own territory.
They quite like people in a rather condescending way. In their opinion we are badly designed and barely fit for purpose. It is beyond their understanding why we cannot get up, scratch and go out. Putting on clothes and especially shoes that only ruin our grip is ridiculous. As for our sense of Smell!!
In a list of dog intelligence the Border collie comes out on top with the Yorkshire terrier at number twenty-seven, first amongst the terriers. I do not know if you are familiar with ‘Yorkies’ but they are yappy and over-excitable. They think that they are the best dogs around, a delusion shared by humans from the same county. Both dogs and people never tire of showing you how smart and superior they are.
The West Highlander, on the other hand, likes to deceive you into believing that he is a clumsy yokel, slow thinking and a push-over for any ambitious conman. Westies share the human urge to hide their true talents with such success that they are rated forty-seventh on the dog intelligence list. A Yorkie smarter than a Westie? You cannot be serious?
Both breeds were developed to hunt and kill rats, the difference is that the Yorkie thinks everything is a rat until it proves otherwise while the Westie assumes that rats will know better than to show up when he is around. I had an awful experience with a previous Cluny. We were out together when a cat jumped out from behind a wall. It had taken less than two strides when Cluny caught it and broke its neck with one shake of his head. I knew the cat and had to try to explain the assassination to the distraught owner.
The present Cluny is fairly content using his ears to satisfy most of the needs that are not met by sniffing. When I come home he listens to my progress through the house making no move unless I do something unaccountable. He will generally lie in my bedroom until I eventually visit him there. If he is in a good mood and I have not been out for too long he might give a desultory wag of his tail.
He is not lazy, just not prepared to stir himself unless something interesting is on offer. He can be sound asleep at the other end of the house when I put on my gardening shoes but he will be standing wagging at the door before I have tied the laces. He has only one thing to do before he dies: he wants to catch a squirrel. The only reason that he has a better chance of fulfilling his longing than I have of winning the lottery is because I do not do the lottery!
The Westies we have housed have all been fairly laid back: sleeping and snuggling play a large part in their lives. They are serious minded dogs for the most part although they will participate in games if you persevere. One of the old Clunys took pleasure in chasing hens but none of the others have gone much beyond balls.
You may have seen dogs chasing after a ball and bringing it back to the feet of its master. Westies do not do that. When you throw a ball for a Westie it runs after it then sits down, takes the ball between its front paws and tears it to pieces with its teeth. Any attempt by the owner to continue with the throwing game is sternly discouraged. At first the dog will carry the ball off to a new, more distant location; further attempts at interference will be met with a menacing growl.
Give a Westie a bone and he will gnaw it till his teeth ache, then he will bury it until it develops a greenish, slimy appearance. The present Cluny loves to bury bones but he has little liking for the clay soil in my back garden; in winter it is gluey and in summer as hard as concrete. He solved this problem by burying his bones in the plant pots on the patio.
The Cluny that chased hens did an even smarter piece of figuring. He knew that we disapproved of his hobby but he could not stop himself making the hens attempt vertical lift-off. The trouble is that it diverted them from laying eggs so the humans decided that action must be taken. I took Cluny to a neighbouring farm where we entered an enclosure housing hundreds of hens. His eyes lit up and I had to be stern to stop him indulging himself to satiation. After I had given him a few yells he got the message so he lay down at my feet. You would not have known there were hens all around him if he could have stopped his ears twitching. It was all going so well that I left him in there while I watched from just outside the enclosure. Cluny continued to look bored.
When I got home, I left him outside while I went in to tell the family that he was cured. The commotion amongst the hens alerted me to the fact that Cluny had resumed his pastime. Every time I took him to the farm he lay looking bored and every time I took him home he chased our hens with his accustomed vigour. As usual with a Westie, the humans gave up and started buying their eggs from the grocer.
There are some common myths about dogs. One of them is that they can only see in three dimensions, so they cannot make sense of television images. The present Cluny reacts badly when dogs appear on television: they are invading his home and he grumbles at the intrusion. He does not need the sound on to identify two dimensional images of dogs. He has even growled, rather tentatively I admit, at a cartoon dog.
The other myth is that dogs are pack animals looking for a pack leader that they identify with their human owner. Nobody owns a Westie: they happily and fondly share their lives with you but they have no thought of treating you as their leader. Cluny makes it clear that he thinks I am OK but a bit slow to understand the obvious. If he could offer an opinion it would be that I am amiable, good with children but very hard to train.
Swearwords: None.
Description: An overdue tribute to a breed of dogs also called Rosneath terriers. I was brought up on the Rosneath peninsula.
_____________________________________________________________________
Lincolnshire is hoaching with West Highland White terriers, universally known as ‘Westies’. It makes a kind of sense to suppress their proper name: they do look white against grass but you would need considerable amounts of Payne’s grey on your palette to paint them on a snowy field. Furthermore, the Westies around here rarely stray more than a mile or two west of the Meridian and the only high land they see are the wrinkles in the earth’s crust dignified by the name ‘Wolds’.
We have owned Westies more than any other breed or half-breed of dogs. They have all been called ‘Cluny’, the hereditary title of the chief of the Clan McPherson. Within the family, the same dog is sometimes called ‘Clunie’ but we also spell our surname Macpherson and MacPherson according to individual taste. We are a West Highland family and living proof that Carl Jung was on to something when he proposed the existence of a racial memory.
I was born in the Scottish lowlands but I am as much a teuchter at heart as my ancestors born within smelling distance of the reek of burning peat. What is true in people is equally true in dogs: Westies have West Highland temperaments even if they have been born and bred in Lincolnshire for fifty generations. Both dogs and humans are easy-going and more or less law-abiding but they do not acknowledge either mastery or servility.
A true Highlander never becomes the leader. His role is to stand beside the leader with a crafty smile, poorly concealed, making anarchic suggestions. He is no better at being a member of a team since he accurately assesses the failings of his boss; he does not think less of him for having these character flaws but it makes it hard to take his orders seriously.
I think there may be Highland blood in film directors because I often notice that they give the hero and heroine time for a chat and a snog even when the planet is about to explode or implode unless the hero saves it with a Kirby-grip borrowed from his fiancé. The West Highlander always has time to stop and chat although public kissing would be thought to be in poor taste. Air kissing would simply be taken to mean that a visit to Specsavers was long overdue.
Westies have exactly the same outlook as Highland men and women. They are considered hard to train but it is only because they cannot see the point in most of the commands impatiently shouted at them by the guy who feeds them. Why would anyone in his right senses want a Westie to sit beside his heel when there is an interesting smell just a few feet away?
Cluny has no objection to me walking but he can see little value in exercise for its own sake: the purpose of going outdoors is to explore smells and to cover them with your own. How else can you keep up with the news except by sniffing? He considers that humans are easily bored because they change the route from time to time. New smells are overrated; it is clearly much more important to keep up to date with what is happening in your own territory.
They quite like people in a rather condescending way. In their opinion we are badly designed and barely fit for purpose. It is beyond their understanding why we cannot get up, scratch and go out. Putting on clothes and especially shoes that only ruin our grip is ridiculous. As for our sense of Smell!!
In a list of dog intelligence the Border collie comes out on top with the Yorkshire terrier at number twenty-seven, first amongst the terriers. I do not know if you are familiar with ‘Yorkies’ but they are yappy and over-excitable. They think that they are the best dogs around, a delusion shared by humans from the same county. Both dogs and people never tire of showing you how smart and superior they are.
The West Highlander, on the other hand, likes to deceive you into believing that he is a clumsy yokel, slow thinking and a push-over for any ambitious conman. Westies share the human urge to hide their true talents with such success that they are rated forty-seventh on the dog intelligence list. A Yorkie smarter than a Westie? You cannot be serious?
Both breeds were developed to hunt and kill rats, the difference is that the Yorkie thinks everything is a rat until it proves otherwise while the Westie assumes that rats will know better than to show up when he is around. I had an awful experience with a previous Cluny. We were out together when a cat jumped out from behind a wall. It had taken less than two strides when Cluny caught it and broke its neck with one shake of his head. I knew the cat and had to try to explain the assassination to the distraught owner.
The present Cluny is fairly content using his ears to satisfy most of the needs that are not met by sniffing. When I come home he listens to my progress through the house making no move unless I do something unaccountable. He will generally lie in my bedroom until I eventually visit him there. If he is in a good mood and I have not been out for too long he might give a desultory wag of his tail.
He is not lazy, just not prepared to stir himself unless something interesting is on offer. He can be sound asleep at the other end of the house when I put on my gardening shoes but he will be standing wagging at the door before I have tied the laces. He has only one thing to do before he dies: he wants to catch a squirrel. The only reason that he has a better chance of fulfilling his longing than I have of winning the lottery is because I do not do the lottery!
The Westies we have housed have all been fairly laid back: sleeping and snuggling play a large part in their lives. They are serious minded dogs for the most part although they will participate in games if you persevere. One of the old Clunys took pleasure in chasing hens but none of the others have gone much beyond balls.
You may have seen dogs chasing after a ball and bringing it back to the feet of its master. Westies do not do that. When you throw a ball for a Westie it runs after it then sits down, takes the ball between its front paws and tears it to pieces with its teeth. Any attempt by the owner to continue with the throwing game is sternly discouraged. At first the dog will carry the ball off to a new, more distant location; further attempts at interference will be met with a menacing growl.
Give a Westie a bone and he will gnaw it till his teeth ache, then he will bury it until it develops a greenish, slimy appearance. The present Cluny loves to bury bones but he has little liking for the clay soil in my back garden; in winter it is gluey and in summer as hard as concrete. He solved this problem by burying his bones in the plant pots on the patio.
The Cluny that chased hens did an even smarter piece of figuring. He knew that we disapproved of his hobby but he could not stop himself making the hens attempt vertical lift-off. The trouble is that it diverted them from laying eggs so the humans decided that action must be taken. I took Cluny to a neighbouring farm where we entered an enclosure housing hundreds of hens. His eyes lit up and I had to be stern to stop him indulging himself to satiation. After I had given him a few yells he got the message so he lay down at my feet. You would not have known there were hens all around him if he could have stopped his ears twitching. It was all going so well that I left him in there while I watched from just outside the enclosure. Cluny continued to look bored.
When I got home, I left him outside while I went in to tell the family that he was cured. The commotion amongst the hens alerted me to the fact that Cluny had resumed his pastime. Every time I took him to the farm he lay looking bored and every time I took him home he chased our hens with his accustomed vigour. As usual with a Westie, the humans gave up and started buying their eggs from the grocer.
There are some common myths about dogs. One of them is that they can only see in three dimensions, so they cannot make sense of television images. The present Cluny reacts badly when dogs appear on television: they are invading his home and he grumbles at the intrusion. He does not need the sound on to identify two dimensional images of dogs. He has even growled, rather tentatively I admit, at a cartoon dog.
The other myth is that dogs are pack animals looking for a pack leader that they identify with their human owner. Nobody owns a Westie: they happily and fondly share their lives with you but they have no thought of treating you as their leader. Cluny makes it clear that he thinks I am OK but a bit slow to understand the obvious. If he could offer an opinion it would be that I am amiable, good with children but very hard to train.
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned five novels and many short stories. His two latest novels, The Island and Pilgrimage of Grace, are McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned five novels and many short stories. His two latest novels, The Island and Pilgrimage of Grace, are McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.