I now live here in the same house as a dog. She’s called Duna and is a Springer Spaniel, age eighteen months, female. I always knew dogs have different lives outside the UK and that this could prove to be a challenge to my decision to have an open and uncritical attitude in this new country. And so it is!

Walking in the countryside there are many empty houses where the owners only come at weekends or for holidays. For security they often have two or more dogs who live there alone being fed by some custodian, sleeping outside or in a kennel and having as their main stimulation each day those moments when someone walks past the fence. Then there is a cacophony of barking and huge excitement as they race up and down alongside your path. They sound fierce but in a life of great boredom it must be the highlight of their day.

Duna came here from a family home where she lived for her first year, I don’t know how much time she spend indoors but it is very likely she slept outside and spent most of the day alone as the parents were at work and the children at school. All credit to them, the family decided they couldn’t give her the life she deserved so she came here. She was not house trained but had been taught some fairly useless tricks such as giving a paw on command and lying down to play dead. She is very willing to learn and has a very gentle nature. When we take her out for walks in the countryside she loves rummaging in the woods and looking for mushroomsWe live in a town. It is a big house and has a roof terrace and a half enclosed patio but no garden. When she first arrived she slept on the patio and used this for her toilet. It has taken a long time for her to learn bladder and bowel control and to wait until we take her out for a walk.
As the weather got colder last autumn I started to campaign for her to sleep indoors. It is hard to explain to UK dog owners how totally weird this seems to Catalan people. Here it is normal for dogs to be outside and any suggestion that it is too cold for her is met by wide eyed disbelief. I might as well be saying she should be given a chair at the table and a knife and fork to eat with! But the problem of her using the patio as a toilet made it easier to convince others that an indoor life would make it easier to know when she needs to be taken out. However, toilet training here is also of the old school variety – accidents happen and then she is made to put her nose in the puddle or pile and then summarily banned outdoors again. I knew it would be a challenge and it is definitely the hardest thing I have battled with since coming here. Last night I looked up web sites on dog training and found a mountain of information in English but very little in Catalan(which I knew would be more convincing than anything written by us softies who treat our dogs like babies!)It is interesting for me to have found my bottom line – most things like eating, speaking, house cleaning, socialising, time keeping, shopping I can happily adapt to and try to accommodate. But I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut when it comes to the lives of dogs.
However, Duna’s life is hugely better than it was before and a million times better than many dogs who live outside all their lives, with little human contact and no opportunities to explore the outside world. Or those who live in apartments in Barcelona who stay at home alone all day until that late evening hour when all the streets are full of dogs and their owners out for a stroll.
Duna has been to the seasideto the Costa Bravato France, on a skiing holiday, for a weekend camping and many times to the mountains and the woods and she is very lovedShe knows how to drink from the ubiquitous drinking fountainsI have to admit too that she is better behaved than my own dogs – she sleeps patiently most of the day, she only barks when the shop opposite opens or closes its shutters and she can be safely left tied to a lamppost while I am shopping without fear than she will bite passing children.