Coco discovers there may well be a Santa Paws after all

Our new puppy Coco stared back at me last Thursday, up to her chest in mud, tail wagging water in all directions. I don’t speak Norfolk, but the general gist seemed to be “Is the rest of my life going to be this much fun?” It was her second proper walk with the grown-ups, and after two days of rain our regular dog recreation area here in Dorvon* resembles the Somme circa 1916 after a major mortar attack. You can look every which way up and down a pedigree chart, but it’s all so much hokum compared to the dog that comes out the end of it.

She’s less keen on the lead, but then very few dogs are at first. She pulls against it like a stallion being broken in, and when that doesn’t work Coco bounces up and down as if this might have the rub-off effect of destabilising the Earth. The little lady is still at the I Am the Centre of the Universe stage of life all kids must transcend, so such a fantasy is entirely understandable.

But mud, eh? How good is that? It moves, it’s mucky, it makes a noise, it goes all over mum and dad’s jeans when you scratch at their legs. And grass….40,000 smells per square foot, from passing Dalmation circa 2009 to something only three minutes ago. She will come to identify this latter as ‘grey squirrel’, but in the meantime it’s all just a delicious cacophony of sniffs.

Later on, however, she had her first post-walk bath. I got the impression she hadn’t been expecting this as part of the deal. Rubbing her down with a towel afterwards, the look of resentment on that little face curdled my soul. Once let go, she hid under every bed upstairs. I’ve told Jan she’s got to do it next time: I’m damned if I’m going to be Bad Cop forever.

What do weezwin? Weezwin prizes! This much at least Coco is now beginning to understand: urinating outside good, pooing under the breakfast table bad. Weez outside earn treats. Sitting and waiting earn even more treats. Kitchen pooers are less lucky. In this way did Pavlov proceed, and it’s as reliable a method today as it was in 1910.

Less reliable is “OW!!” yelled at high volume when Coco bites my ear or nose. Baby teeth have a sharpness to them that nature never equals later in life, but for terrier puppies the noise of pain is something of a come-on rather than a ‘No’. After all, if you bite things and they squeak, I mean – isn’t that the idea? I understand the instincts behind all that, but there is a part of me that thinks our latest addition might be an undercover agent working on behalf of plastic surgeons.

Still, at least the name we chose – Coco – is amenable to the endless suffixes we all tend to invent for our dogs. Coco Cola, Coconut (that’s the real name), Coco Chanel, Coco Cobana, Coco Pops, Coco doodle-doo…the variations are endless. Trouble is, at the  moment she shows no sign at all of identifying herself with any of them. Our experience in the past has been that dogs do diminutives rather than silly expansions. So from here on I’m working on Coke, or Cokes. When all’s said and done, our middle dog Tiggywinkle became Tiggs, and the old Dowager Empress Foxglove became Fox. Canines tend to be monosyllabic, and we all need to remember that: food, treats, walk, sit and wait. There may well in fact be a gap for human-training classes, where animal behaviouralists explain to owners why Montmerency, Ezekiel, Methuselah and Sarkozy simply will not do as pet names.

*Dorvon is the soon-to-be UN recognised Independent Old People’s Republic of Dorset & Devon