A lifetime with dogs, and still they amaze me

We did what we could to repair the damage and for the next few weeks she was the main luggage in my knapsack, but on the day of the great storm we had to leave her and return to London. I shall never forget the peculiar anguish of that parting. Some weeks later I brought her back, and for 13 years she was the most devoted, protective, intuitive, wise and indivisibly one-man dog that I ever had. She lies now under a black pine in my garden, a tree with which I have many a silent conversation.

Mop's injury was serious but so obvious and mechanical that with some small knowledge it was possible to right the shoulder and splint the breaks. But 20 years on, I have failed another dog, Nusch, my ancient fluffy mongrel. Over the weekend she developed a swelling on the left side of her face but as she did not shrink from my touch or yelp with pain, I attributed it to an insect bite. I was wrong. The swelling increased. Early Monday morning the vet diagnosed an abscess behind the eye and opined that teeth would have to be drawn. On Wednesday evening I retrieved a bewildered old dog and two big back teeth were pressed into my palm; she is now her bossy old self again.

By chance, later still on Wednesday evening I was back at the vet's with Jack, my whippet, who had come in from the garden dragging both hind legs, her back as bent as the hook of a coat-hanger. "Spine," I thought, recognising a possibly devastating injury - and spine it proved to be, yet not a whimper did she utter.

What is it with dogs that they yelp only at the moment that sharp pain is inflicted but then tolerate in silence the lasting, chronic, pain that nags? How is it that they can express so clearly not only their anticipation and enjoyment of their simple pleasures but the more complex responses of affection, anxiety and grief and the even more unfathomable business of responding sensitively to a human need, be it emotional or physical? How can they do all this and yet not tell us that they are in pain?

A lifetime with dogs convinces me that they have some means of extrasensory perception they expect of us, and in our primeval years we may have had it, too. We speak, we read, we write and reason, but without these intellectual mechanisms we do not communicate. Dogs do. Dogs transmit but we do not receive.