Everyone needs a dog - mine SAVED my life
Can there be a lovelier sight than a dog jumping to greet his owner, the person who’s quite evidently the centre of his universe? Well, imagine multiplying that by seven. The scenes in our photo studio today – where seven dogs and their adoring owners have gathered – are certainly quite chaotic. The obedience class at Crufts this is not.
The noise – from both dogs and owners – is deafening, a mixture of yelps, shrieks and belly laughs. But there’s a calmness that comes out of the chaos. Everyone leaves our photoshoot exhausted but happy, rather supporting the theory that having a dog around makes life somehow better.
‘It’s not theory, it’s scientific fact,’ says Chris Packham, the wildlife presenter and the man in charge today. ‘It’s why dogs are being used in old people’s homes as therapy. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about the relationship between dogs and people. It’s one of the most special things there is.’
All the dogs and owners are contestants in the BBC’s new feelgood show Me And My Dog: The Ultimate Contest, which is being called a Bake Off for animal lovers. Over the course of four weeks, eight pairs have to perform a series of challenges to see how well they work together. These include a slalom course that they must complete while tethered together and a challenge where they have to navigate a woodland course in order for their dogs to sniff out concealed boxes of cheese.
It is not, Chris points out, another show about amazing dogs. None of these dogs has a Hollywood career beckoning, like Britain’s Got Talent’s Pudsey. Chris shudders at the idea. ‘I have a problem with dogs that are trained for entertainment,’ he says.
Chris’s status as a controversial and complicated celebrity (he’s forever on a high horse about something, gaining friends and enemies in equal measure) becomes immediately apparent. Isn’t the relationship we have with our dogs just the most delightful thing you can witness, I ask him. Yes and no, he says.
He tells me a trip to Battersea Dogs Home the previous day. ‘I was surprised to see lots of cutesy Chihuahua-type dogs. Handbag dogs. People have bought them, then their dog has peed in their Chanel bag and they’ve thought, “Oh, I don’t want a dog after all.” So no, we haven’t got it right.’
Chris is a poodle man himself. Yes, really. The loves of his life have long been Itchy and Scratchy, the black poodles he welcomed into his home 14 years ago and to whom he owes ‘absolutely everything’.
Why poodles? ‘They’re very characterful, constantly challenging. I like that. I don’t like boring kids or boring dogs. They have enormous energy so you’re never given a minute. Churchill might be associated with bulldogs but he had poodles,’ adds Chris triumphantly. ‘Livingstone, the explorer, had a poodle. Schopenhauer the philosopher had poodles. Elvis – the King – had a poodle. We can’t all be wrong.’
Now, as he points out, everyone thinks their relationship with their dog is special. Yet how many of us can say we owe our lives to our dogs? Chris Packham can. One of the most astonishing revelations he made in his recent autobiography was that he once came very close to taking his own life (‘to the point where I was counting out the pills,’ he says today).
Diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, he’s been prone to depressive episodes but on one occasion back in 2003 he reached the place few pull back from. Why did he? ‘Because I opened my eyes and saw my two
‘I opened my eyes and saw my poodles in front of me and I knew I couldn’t go through with it’
poodles sitting on the floor in front of me, and I knew that I could not.
‘Having an intense relationship with an animal is very common with people on the autistic spectrum. I have closer relationships with my dogs than I do with people. It’s a trust thing, a comfort thing. My dogs love me and I love them. There’s no interruption, no complication, no potential failure. It’s totally unconditional. When I get home tonight I will receive the warmest greeting I’ve ever received, just as I do every time I get home.’ On screen you might mistake Chris for yet another cheery telly type but he’s anything but. For many years he was portrayed as something of an eccentric. With a degree in zoology and an unswerving passion for his subject, however, his foibles were embraced. He was the archetypical mad telly scientist, albeit one with a penchant for punk fashion and Prada suits.
In his thirties, however, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s, which put all these ‘quirks’ into context. It’s immediately apparent, when you meet him, that there’s something very different about this man. The most obvious sign of his autism is that he rarely makes eye contact. For 90% of our interview he looks off to the side as he talks, or at his hands.
It’s not a reluctance to engage (in fact he pours his heart out), but when he does meet my eyes the action is forced. ‘I make myself do it, yes. It’s not instinctive,’ he says. ‘I’ve had to learn to do it with the TV camera. In terms of working with people, well, I’m an analytic person, so I can analyse what is and isn’t working, then I can work towards making it more functional.’
Dealing with people sounds like hard work for him. Relationships have been fraught in the past. His relationship with Jo, the mother of his 22-yearold stepdaughter Megan, floundered when Megan was 12, but somehow she has stayed in his life and he is, in everything but biology, her father. He talks proudly of the fact she’s on course to get a first-class degree in zoology, about how she’s the child he never dared have. (‘I never wanted to. I never liked myself enough. I could have created a monster,’ he says, starkly.)
His relationship with Megan is perhaps his least complicated human one but it’s still quite complex. ‘We don’t cuddle. I did when she was a kid – I realised that sort of contact was important.’
So you made yourself cuddle her? ‘I did. I sort of got used to it. She teases me all the time when I say goodbye and I go to shake her hand. She thinks it’s mad. But she’s tolerant. She’s grown up with it.’
Ditto his relationship with Charlotte Corney, who runs a zoo on the Isle of Wight. They don’t live together, mostly ‘because Charlotte has to live on the island’ but partly, you sense, because it suits Chris.
‘I like my own space. In previous relationships I didn’t fully know myself, not enough to sustain a relationship. Things are much better with Charlotte. She understands that it’s not always a joy but at least she knows the reason. It’s difficult living with me sometimes. I’m not terribly sociable.’
Yet he also talks of how he needs the human contact he gets with Charlotte and Megan, and others including his sister, the dress designer Jenny Packham.
‘You have to learn to look after yourself. When people let you down it hurts. So you have a conscious decision: do I give all again, or do I withdraw and take that aspect of my life away? I’ve never turned my back on human contact.’
One of the big misapprehensions about Asperger’s is that people with it lack emotion.
‘It’s the opposite,’ he says. ‘You have a polarised view of things which leads to obsessional attachments. That’s why it’s such a dangerous thing with humans and a delightful thing with dogs.’
He always had more intense relationships with animals than others seemed to. If there was a defining relationship from his childhood it was with the kestrel chick he stole from a nest when he was 14. He nursed the bird, perhaps obsessed over it. When it died, he physically lost the power of speech for a time. ‘I was 15 then. I’m now 55 and it was like it happened yesterday, and it happened in widescreen HD and Imax and it’s recorded so I can play it again and again.’
The suicidal episode came after the death of a dog. He reveals that he had counselling afterwards ‘because I never wanted to end up in that place again’.
Sadly, he’s been severely tested since. He tells me, haltingly, that one of his beloved poodles (he won’t, can’t, say which one) passed away just weeks ago. His voice, it seems, has simply gone again. ‘I can’t talk about it. I just can’t.’
He tells me he’s agreed to make a documentary for the BBC exploring what it feels like to live like this. There’s a sense he’s still working it out himself: ‘I’ve had such a euphoric sense of joy brought on by something so simple as my dogs running across a hill and I’ve thought, “Do other people feel like I feel?” Equally, when it’s gone, the place it’s going to take me to will be a lot darker than some of the places they might have been to.’
‘I want people in the position I was in to be able to access help, so they’re not dependent on two poodles when they’re thinking about taking their life. Because the poodles may not be there.’
Our time is up. He makes himself look at me again and shakes my hand. Now he’s heading home – to a four-legged welcome rather than an eight-legged one but one that will still make everything better, you hope.
‘I’m closer to my dogs than I am to people. That’s common for people with Asperger’s’