Looking after my boss’s dog has ended in tragedy

Trudy Tyler says goodbye to her boss’s hungry cockapoo – but it’s not the only animal that’ll be leaving her. By Christine Manby

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

No good deed goes unpunished. My fortnight in charge of my boss Bella’s cockapoo, Bear, ended in tragedy when the dog knocked my hamster’s cage off the kitchen table and gobbled the little ball of fluff up. At least, I think that’s what happened. I came into the kitchen to find the cage on the floor, its door burst open by the impact of hitting the tiles. Minky the hamster was nowhere to be seen and Bear was looking exceptionally guilty.

I prised open Bear’s jaws but found no fluff. There were no traces of blood either. If I had stumbled on a murder scene, it was a clean one and Bear’s guilty expression soon wore off. Still worried, I called my bestie Liz, who lives in the countryside, and explained the situation.

“That’s nature for you,” she said. “Red in tooth and claw.” She proceeded to describe how, while she and her husband were walking their dog a couple of days earlier, a bird of prey, startled out of a tree, had swooped low over their heads and dropped a rabbit right in front of them.

“A dead rabbit?”

“Not quite. The dog got hold of it. Fred had to prise it out of his jaws and finish it off with a stick.”

Maybe I didn’t want to move to the countryside after all.

“Look, perhaps it’s for the best,” said Liz. “You were worried about your hamster’s mental health stuck in that cage.”

“I don’t suppose it helped her stress levels to be eaten by an enormous cockapoo. Do you think I need to take Bear to the vet and get him X-rayed to see if he really did swallow her whole?”

“I think it’s probably too late for the hamster.”

All the same, I watched Bear closely for any signs of gastric torment. I knew that dogs weren’t supposed to eat chicken bones but were hamster bones a similar hazard? For the remaining two days of his stay with me, Bear didn’t appear unduly distressed. He certainly didn’t lose his appetite. He got into my wardrobe and ate one of my favourite Jimmy Choos. Not that I can envisage wearing high heels ever again after 18 months of working from home in fluffy Birkenstocks. My feet look like they should be attached to something that lives under a bridge and eats billy-goats.

When Bella came to pick her dog up at the end of her holiday – bearing a box of industrial fudge for me - she didn’t look particularly rested. Her trip to Cornwall had coincided with that spell of bad weather. She told me she and her husband had spent most of their time in Padstow trying to break into the locked cabinet that hid the extraordinarily expensive holiday rental’s thermostat. The heating was set to “off”. There was a wood burner but no wood. In the end, they’d burned a couple of deckchairs and a decorative trug and left £50 to cover the loss. It did not cover the loss. It didn’t even cover the trug. The holiday home’s owners were keeping a £500 security deposit on top of the £3,000 a week rental (I’d done some online snooping to see how much Bella paid for three bedrooms with “glimpses” of the Camel Estuary). Bella was planning to sue.

With Bear and Minky gone, the house felt very quiet and empty. I decided to fill the void with Netflix, Porcupine Ridge sauvignon and Kettle Chips. Having dismissed an endless succession of true crime documentaries, I settled on My Octopus Teacher. Six months later than everyone else, I know.

By the end of the film, I was a puddle. I’d cried enough tears to fill an aquarium. The struggles of that brave octopus as she lived her short and heroic life. The heartwarming story of the tortured cameraman who was healed by her tentacled presence. Yes, I agreed with him. The animal kingdom can teach us so much about how to live our human lives.

What had Minky the hamster tried to teach me in our short time together, I wondered. What had I failed to learn, by not being fully present to focus on the twitchy-whiskered way she filled her days?

Snorting back tears, I went into the kitchen to make myself a cuppa. As the kettle boiled, I considered Minky’s brief life and the lesson therein. Was it “seize every opportunity for pleasure”, as represented by the way she stuffed her cheeks with nuts? That I should “use it or lose it”, as represented by the way she religiously did daily cardio on her wheel? That I should make sure, if I ever escaped the cage of my humdrum London life, that I wasn’t actually running straight into the mouth of an enormous hungry dog?

What a way to go. Still, at least it was quick, unlike the tragic end of the star of My Octopus Teacher, pecked apart by sinister-looking fish. I gazed out into the garden, wondering what wisdom I could glean from next door’s cat, who was sitting on the boundary fence illuminated by the light from my kitchen.

“Focus,” I decided. “I should focus like next door’s cat watching its prey, rather than allow my attention to be scattered with endless faffing on my phone.”

I was rather pleased with this piece of learning until I followed the cat’s eyes in the direction of my patio and saw what she was stalking.

“Minky!”

Somehow, Minky had escaped Bear’s hungry maw and made it to the outside world. She was underneath the patio table, contentedly eating the crumbs I must have dropped when I ate my lunchtime sandwich outside. I hammered on the kitchen window to scare next door’s cat away. The cat turned her eyes on me with disdain but I had drawn her attention for just long enough.

By the time I got outside, Minky was gone again but she was alive. She was surviving in the wild. There had to be a lesson in that.