Nat Locke: the expert diagnosis of my dog’s behaviour is that he’s a weirdo. Medically speaking, of course

I’m a compassionate person. And while I don’t have kids myself, I feel for my friends who have kids because every five minutes an expert will pop up with a different opinion or a new theory that says everything that was perfectly fine last week is now the direst thing possible for your kids and will condemn them to a lifetime of misery and anxiety and they’ll surely talk about you in therapy. It’s a constant maelstrom of confusion. I know PRECISELY how this feels, of course, because the same thing happens to dog owners. Yes, it’s exactly the same. Don’t fight me on this. There was an article the other week in which Dr Chris Brown informed us that we shouldn’t be throwing a tennis ball to our dogs. Not only do dogs that fetch balls have early onset arthritis, but also the fuzziness on the tennis ball wears down their teeth. Now, this is solid veterinary advice and I’m not about to dispute the good doctor, but have you tried explaining this to a border collie? My current dog — a 12-year-old bearded collie, and the best-looking dog of all time — is not overly concerned with playing fetch. Partly, this is due to the fact that in his formative years, my other dog was a border collie who, I kid you not, wouldn’t let him play fetch. The border collie would snap at him if he showed any interest in a ball at all. For what it’s worth, the border collie needed knee surgery by the time he was nine, and the beardie is trotting around footloose and fancy-free at 12. So maybe Dr Chris Brown is onto something. As for the impact on their teeth, it’s hard to tell. The border collie had great teeth. The beardie broke his, eating the fence. Don’t ask. Another animal expert made the news this week because he posted a TikTok explaining that we shouldn’t be exercising our dogs immediately after they’ve eaten. I hadn’t heard anything quite so alarmist since my Mum told us we couldn’t go swimming for 30 minutes after eating our picnic lunch. I was certain I was going to drown if I dared to go paddling after only 27 minutes. I’m not sure how she would explain how those people swimming to Rottnest are able to eat a banana while they’re swimming and not die, but I guess it’s just another of life’s great mysteries. Still, back to the dog expert. I’m not sure why you would feed your dog a big meal then take him to the park, but I guess it’s possible. But I have a bigger issue. My dog eats WHILE he’s at the park. You see, he likes to pull up the grass from the oval and eat the dirt underneath it. I yell at him to stop of course, but he’s going deaf in his old age, so instead of ignoring me like he used to, he legitimately can’t hear me now. So I have to physically stop him, which makes him double down and chow down on that sweet dirt with an impressive gusto. Mostly, he has the good grace to do it outside the field of play on the football oval, but I do find myself having to stomp the divots after our walk, like it’s half-time at a polo match. I asked the vet about this behaviour, concerned that it might be putting him at risk of intestinal obstruction or something, or that it was symptomatic of some sort of dietary insufficiency. The vet basically diagnosed him with being a weirdo. The same vet also provided a diagnosis after I was concerned about the fact that he was peeing on the couch and the spare bed from time to time. I was worried that he had some sort of medical incontinence issue, so they did a bunch of tests and the vet called me with the results. The good news, she said, was that there was no medical reason for his urination. He was just a bad dog. Medically. I was glad of two things. One, that he didn’t have a medical issue. And two, that my couch covers and cushions are fully washable. These days there are mattress protectors in place and as you would expect from a bad dog, he hasn’t done it in ages. He may just be lulling me into a false sense of security though. Trust is fleeting. So you see parents, dog ownership is also fraught with concern for their health and mental wellbeing. And the experts are constantly moving the goalposts. But, like my dog, you can probably just assume your kid’s a bit of a weirdo. Medically, of course.