HEARING ABOUT A DOG

Waikato Independent, Volume XLIII, Issue 6035, 21 October 1946, Page 3

HEARING ABOUT A DOG

TWO CREDITED STORIES RELATED Two strange and unrelated do| stories have been told at the 8.8. C overseas microphone within recen weeks. In one case it was the dog that was strange; in the other it v</as the dog’s war experiences. The first was about a Basenji, “one of the most aristocratic breeds in the world,” claims the owner, Mr N. W Cutler. They existed as far back as the time of the Pharaohs, it seems—--6000 years ago. Extremely intelligent, their value was assessed by Ml Cutler in this way: “In the Belgian Congo, where two spears and an ordinary dog are considered fair exchange for a wife, .as many as 20 hunting spears have to be paid for a good Basenji.” He first came across the breed in the Sudan' while he was on his way to Abyssinia as a war correspondent during the ItvalianAbyssinian outbreak. He was trying to acquire one when he was sent off to cover the China-Japanese war. During the second world war he served in the Merchant Navy, but was later invalided out and went back to newspaper work. Then his wife became seriously ill, and she fretted about a dog she had lost. Hearing that three Basenji had been brought to England from the Belgian Sudan-Congo a few years before the war, he made some inquiries and within a few hours had one at his flat; and his wife soon recovered. Now they themselves have three of these dogs, and when they go out they attract a lot of notice, because they are not like any other dog seen in Britain, and that’s sayingsomething. In size and build they are like a fox terrier, but they have short, satiny coats, golden red in colour, and white feet and legs, and deep, wrinkles in their foreheads that make them look very thoughtful. At Crufts show a few years back, this breed made a sensation; and rumour got busy. The Basenji hooted, whistled, and mewed, it was said; which is sheer nonsense one gathered from Mr Cutler. They don’t bark, that’s all. But that, of course, makes them, the ideal dog for flats. Only when they’re particularly pleased do they make a sound—“between a chortle and a yodel.” They wash themselves like cats and when they go to' bed cover themselves with a blanket—that’s according to Mr Cutler. He also said that when the fire dies down, Chian—that’s the dog of the party—takes a piece of coal from the scuttle and stokes up. Kandy, his wife, can lift a plateful of food from a chair without spilling a ' morsel—but the interviewer stopped Mr Cutler before he got on to Gaiety, the puppy. Dog story number two- was quite different. It concerned Judy, a pointer bitch who’s been awarded the Dickin Medal for bravery—and .she’s been a prisoner of war, the only officially “registered” one. Her history began before her present owner knew her but he’d been able to piece some of it together. Born in Shanghai, she was bought by the ship’s company of 11.M.5. Gnat as a mascot. She met plenty of adventure with them, and nearly ended her life by falling overboard in the Yangtse. She was in Nanking when it fell to the Japs in the early years of their attack on China. Then she became the mascot of another ship, H.M.S. Grasshopper. Japanese aircraft wrecked that, and the survivors of the crew were stranded on an uninhabited island off Singapore, many of them wounded and Judy among them. Desperate searches failed to discover any drinkable water on the island until Judy took a turn. She waited for the tide to go out and then explored the sand which had been covered by seawater. All at once she began to drink —she had found a spring of fresh water bubbling up through the sand, but how she knew it was there is a dog secret. It saved the crew’s lives. It was when Mr Williams was sent as a prisoner to Medan, in Sumatra, that he first met Judy with some of the Grasshopper’s men. He shared his rice ration with her, and she showed her gratitude by special attachment to him. He persuaded the camp Commandant to register her as a prisoner-of-war. Throughout her 3ft years of captivity she refused to fraternise with the Japs, and many a time they threatened to shoot her. “We always managed to talk them out of it, though we got beaten up for our cheek,” Mr Williams said.

Judy was free to wander but she stuck to the camp. To relieve boredom she would chase monkevs and flying foxes in the jungle. Many a time she warned the prisoners of tigers, snakes, and scorpions in the neighbourhood. Once she was bitten by an alligator—another wound to add to her shrapnel ones. Then came perhaps her biggest moment —she found the shin bone of an elephant: It took her, her owner vowed, two hours to dig a hole big enough to bury it! But perhaps Judy’s strangest adventure was when the prisoners were shipped from Medan to Singapore. They were forbidden to take the dog with them; so Frank Williams smuggled her on to the ship in a rice sack strapped to his back. In his words, “she spent the best part of three hours upside down in that sack in blazing ironical heat; and she seemed to know that one wriggle would, have been he> - end.” Next day, in the Malacca Straits, the ship was fcnrnedoed. Through all the turmoil while the ship was going down Judy was as calm as though nothing had hanpened. She swam for two and a half hours before being picked up by a Japanese escort vessel.

The prisoners admit they owe a lot to her. For when they were on their lasi: legs, in the months before liberation. they often said: “Well, if the old bitch can hang on, we can make it too,” and, says her master, “it was she who kept our moral more than anything.