Zoose (né Zeus) Nightshade

We hadn’t had Zoose even a week when he ate a dead pigeon in St Kentigern’s Cemetery. He was on a lead and there were two of us; we never stood a chance.

(Me, to Cleodhna, trying to pull the pigeon out of Zoose’s mouth: “Rip the wings off, maybe that will help”; Zoose: “Oh thanks, swallowing this bird whole is a lot easier now”. Not my finest hour.)

We observed him with trepidation over the next few days, fearing for the worst, but nothing happened. His digestive system stood up to the challenge his mouth had given it, and not a single feather, foot scale or beak fragment emerged in any recognisable form from the mighty husky’s innards.

Our attempts to train him met a similar fate. What you think you’re teaching a dog isn’t necessarily the lesson they decide to learn, especially if they’re smart and really determined.

Zoose liked to eat white things on the ground, like tissues or discarded bread products, or on one memorable occasion a brick-shaped portion of sausage meat, wrapped in plastic; and we wanted him not to. At best we achieved “OK, pick the white thing off the ground, and then put it down again”. But if he really wanted to eat the thing, he got cunning.

If the human has fished something out of your mouth and thrown it to the side, for instance, then if they didn’t throw it far enough then it’s fair game to lunge for it and eat it again. If they haven’t spotted that you’ve got something in your mouth, then maybe tilt your head away from them so they can’t see you chewing. (Sadly for Zoose, a human can feel this unusual body movement through the leash.) And failing that, eat the thing really fast.

Fortunately, Zoose rarely used his powers for evil. If kids have a favourite dog breed it’s nearly always huskies; a bewildering variety of neighbours knew him from when his previous owners would walk him, and would recognise him in the street and say hello. He loved them all back, as well as random strangers that he would approach with a cheerful and welcoming attitude hoping they’d stop and give him a stroke. It would have been unnecessarily confusing to change his name, even though in our eyes he was definitely not Father of the Gods material, especially after we had his balls off, so we compromised by changing the spelling, and briefly entertaining Dr Seuss (Soose?) mantras like “Do not hang Zoose from the neck until dead: no noose is good Zoose!”.

He didn’t always get on with other dogs, but this was somewhat justified: a staffie attacked him when he was just a puppy, which left him with a slightly wonky ear, and meant he never really knew how to interact with other dogs. So “the husky is rude”, we’d say, if someone had a puppy that Ella wanted to play with and that we didn’t want Zoose to traumatise; or “his standard way of interacting with anything is to try to put it in his mouth, and that includes your dog”.

But puppy Zoose and young Ella loved each other when they first met, and they rekindled the friendship immediately three years later when Zoose’s owners realised during the first lockdown that their extra time commitments meant that they couldn’t give him the care and attention he needed. It turned out that while Ella was happy being an only dog, she was even happier with a dog of her size that she could play with: she lost weight, put on muscle, and I had to regularly mute myself during Tuesday evening online roleplaying sessions because of the unwanted sound of 80 kilos of dog tap dancing in the room next door.

We hadn’t been certain about taking on a husky: would we have the time to walk him, and would he be as crazy as the breed can get? Intact Zoose would freak out at the scent of a bitch in heat, but neutered Zoose was almost a model patient, vets told us; and while when he was young he would think nothing of a walk along the canal to Bishopbriggs and back, he soon settled down into a more manageable routine. And we got to know an awesome dog.

He would sit not just near you, but actually on your feet when you were cooking, or even just making a sandwich, his gaze laser-focused on what you probably erroneously thought of as your intended food. (“Oh hey”, one of us would volunteer on his behalf. “You know”, they would add: “I’m right here.” “You should make me a sandwich”, the sadly-mono-logue would continue. “For my mouth!” was the final desperation ploy.) Cleodhna would be slicing courgettes and would occasionally offer him “a cookie”, which he probably thought as a bonus rather than something that she’d already budgeted into his food.

None of our previous dogs managed to get tangled up in his leash as much as Zoose (“How did you do that‽“, we would ask, and the answer was “Aplomb!”), but once we were outside, he forged ahead with great enthusiasm (“Yyyesss!”; “Husky in front!”). Rather than eating individual blades of grass, he would rip up the entire plant. Especially in the early days when he wanted to roam further and faster than Ella did, a triumphant husky returning from his excursions with great delight was a very welcome commonplace; and while we have a number of good Zoose photos, my one remaining regret is that we don’t have any good examples of “Happy husky face”.

He had a health scare a couple of years ago when a growth appeared on his foot, and the Vet School decided he needed a toe off, which highlighted the problems with husky smarts: he had enough intelligence to get past both the doughnut and the lampshade to gnaw on his foot, twice, but not the wisdom to realise that this just meant that he’d have to be on antibiotics, and the better course of action would have been to leave it alone already and let it heal quicker. There wasn’t much in the way of snow that winter or the next so we didn’t get much in the way of cool footprint photos; and while “nine-toed Zoose” would be a great nickname, we quickly realised it should have been “nineteen-toed Zoose”, which is somehow far less impressive. But those were minor concerns for a benign condition that he made a full recovery from.

Then at the end of last year he collapsed in a really weird way, and by the time we’d used up all of that year’s insurance money trying to work out what was wrong with him, the answer was apparently “too many things”. He had a weird pulmonary artery thing; the scan showed marks on his liver and spleen; we’d thought he was a huge wuss but apparently he had regular back pain linked to his back legs; and more importantly, lung cancer. “Three months, more or less” was the prognosis.

We took a leaf out of the “When Doctors Die” books and went full-on palliative care, rather than trying for medical interventions which wouldn’t have done any net good. Ella would go on longer walks, and meet Zoose on his shorter walk; when we could no longer trick Zoose into eating kibbles as rewards for tricks, he got to eat extra haddock fillets, fishcakes, fish sticks, hand-cooked steak mince burgers, sausages, hot dogs, even cake. Steroids and painkillers kept his condition under control, but it became obvious last Friday that he’d reached the end: we took him to see Joe the fish guy and he was having no fun at all, not even poking his nose into the van. It was time to make the call, before the weather got hot again and he struggled to breathe.

When Ella went up to a little girl in the street, licked her in the face, and she complained that her family had a dog they were trying to rehome, we had no right to hope for a dog as ridiculous, as kind, as amazing as Zoose.

Goodbye, my handsome boy.