Go gentle
Alexis Fleming almost died from Crohn’s disease but survived to help others to a happy death, establishing a unique hospice for animals
‘He’d wanted for so much – food, a bed, a home – but what he really wanted, what he longed for more than anything else, was love. For someone to notice him, to care about him, to massage his aching body, to hold him and make it better. He’d waited so long for a friend, and despite the years of sadness and loneliness, he was desperate to love someone back.”
This is Alexis Fleming, the force of nature behind The Maggie Fleming Animal Hospice and The Karass Sanctuary near Kirkcudbright, talking about George, an old labrador who had been kept alone in a shed for four years. Then a dog rescuer found him, put him on their website, Fleming collected him, cared for him, and loved him... but George was already dying and after 12 days, was gone.
“He’d been really happy,” she says. “He’d had 12 days of pottering, sniffing and friendship. Twelve nights in a warm bed, in a home with a door. I couldn’t change what he’d gone through before, but right at the end, he’d known 12 days of love,” she says.
George’s story is one of many told with unflinching honesty and humour in Fleming’s new book, No Life Too Small – Love and Loss at the World’s First Animal Hospice, written in the wee small hours while the animals snored. It’s the story of her journey to build up a place where animals and birds are safe and loved, those nearing the end of their life cared for, and those rescued given sanctuary.
George wasn’t the first unloved or abandoned dog Fleming had taken in. That was Maggie, after whom the hospice and sanctuary is named, a skinny, terrified bull mastiff bought on gut instinct on Christmas Eve from a man who didn’t want her. Maggie went on to live a happy life with Alexis and it was her death, unexpectedly at the very end after surgery in a veterinary hospital, that led Fleming to set up the first farmed and companion animal hospice in the world.
The Maggie Fleming Animal Hospice and The Karass Sanctuary at Ringliggate, five miles from Kirkcudbright, is now home to 146 animals and birds, many saved from pounds and slaughterhouses. “And seven more chicks arriving tomorrow,” says Fleming, chirpily.
“There are seven dogs – three are house dogs, Benny and Ri, who are my house dogs and not really part of the hospice and sanctuary, but are out there every day, and a wee mental ginger Staffie – two cats, four quail, four turkey, 46 cockerels, 68 hens, nine sheep, 10 lambs, six pigs and me and a black cat who lives in the house as well. It’s usually about 140. And then there's some folks that come and go, so you’re probably looking at 160-170.”
At a hospice, death is an everyday word, but with it comes its flip side, life, and Fleming’s tales teem with it. The story starts with Maggie, without whom the hospice would not exist, explains 40-year-old Fleming.
“It was a way of overcoming the guilt I felt because I had promised Maggie I would go back for her after the operation and I never did. I don't still feel like that. I know she knew I loved her and love disnae leave the room when you do, but that initially got me going, to do something to make it bearable and worthwhile.”
It’s clear from the start that with a book about an animal hospice there will be tears, but there are as many laughs as Fleming writes about the animals with whom she shares her adventures, setbacks and triumphs, her move from Aviemore to Galloway as her household increased, and her hopes for the future of the hospice and sanctuary. Not only does she capture their larger than life characters and personalities – Bran who loves to woof about his beloved CAR!, the piglets who stage Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in the kitchen, the inscrutable sheep at once so calm then randomly sprinting up a hill, or “Dickhead”, aka Charles, the violent turkey who lies in wait for Fleming. Her many conversations with them leap and bark off the page, but the more serious side of the relationships are there too, as they all face up to illness and death, about which Fleming writes with honesty and candour. She holds your hand and makes it OK.
She tells a good yarn, too, like the disastrous date when she arrived soaked to the skin because she stopped in a blizzard to rescue a dying lamb on a bridge en route. Her date’s response – “You should have just let it die” – killed any chance of a second meeting. Or the time a passerby saw a sheep, a dog and a chicken in her parked car and asked if she had the kitchen sink too – she did.
As we Zoom chat, in the background there are dogs, chickens, sheep, cats, turkeys outside the traditional farmhouse with its four and a half acres, but it’s surprisingly peaceful for such a populous place. There is, however, a swallow singing its heart out next door on the bathroom window ledge, not a resident but a visitor that drops by for a singsong of a morning and it sparks an image of Fleming as Snow White, surrounded by doting birds and animals, closely followed by another of Dr Dolittle, for Fleming does indeed talk to her animals. Often the chat is about stolen Hobnobs or who has been ripping the wallpaper off the kitchen walls (could be piglets, could be chickens), but there are times it takes a more serious turn, when animals are ill or dying. At those times Fleming falls back on the promise she has made to the animals when they arrive.
“When animals come in I say, ‘I promise when you tell me it’s time that you want to leave, I will listen, and we'll make it as nice as we can. And until then, let’s just do the love bit’. I don’t think they understand the words, any more than I know what ‘baa’ means, but it’s a feeling. And even if it doesn’t mean much to them at the time, by the time it’s time for them to die, it does, because by then they feel secure and safe and loved and are trusting me to listen. Then I can take away as much of the stress and trauma from them as I can and they can just say ‘I’m done’ and don’t have to worry about anything else.
“When it comes to the end we all want the same thing. Everyone wants to feel comfortable and safe and to feel that we’re not alone.”
Fleming knows what it’s like to be ill. Five years ago she was given six weeks to live – and before that she