A dog's best friend
'I'm a total phoney,' said Donald Smith as we sat in the coffee shop of the Royal Park hotel in Sha Tin. Accustomed to his vivid philosophy I made polite, demurring noises as he continued. 'I'm not really a human. I'm a what, not a who. Yes, I could try and find out who I am but that would give me an identity within the parameter of only one species.'
A dog trainer for half a century, including 28 years in Hong Kong, Smith, 65, let out a smoky cough before lighting yet another cigarette. After four hours of jumbled conversation on an array of topics (Stalin's canine death-edict, The Omen, re-incarnation) we were finally approaching the heart of the matter. 'This is the crux,' said Smith. 'The dog has a hotline to the cosmos - that's what I'm searching for. I'm trying to get snatches of that. I'm a kind of interpreter over the species barrier but there's been a rapid degeneration on the human side and a rapid evolution on the canine side, so the level of analytical input with the dog is difficult. It's a linguistic quagmire.'
But Smith has come up with a solution: to live in the forests of Central Java, away from the English language and, possibly, find a dialect among the hundreds spoken in Indonesia that will improve his canine interpreting skills. In preparation, he's practising Bahasa in Yuen Long, where he lives with five dogs, and is contemplating learning Javanese because 'it's agriculture-based, it's got nothing whatsoever to do with the industrial revolution and it's like what the Blackfoot Amerindians speak'.
Smith described how a Blackfoot descendant who worked for the United States' consulate in Hong Kong some years ago had alerted him to the possibilities of a sentence construction that put nature rather than humans first. 'I'd love to go and live with the Blackfeet,' said Smith, wistfully, 'but I've no money. I wouldn't survive.'
How will he survive in Java? The answer is the salak, the 'snakeskin' fruit of Indonesia. A few years ago Smith was hired to train the five Indonesian maids of one client in dog handling. It is a reflection of modern Hong Kong that, nowadays, he is usually training domestic helpers to manage pets because the owners don't see why they should pay him $500 to $800 an hour to have to do the work themselves.
'Maid number five had really stepped out of the forest,' said Smith. 'I got to know her well. She'd left home at 12 when her father died and gone to work as a maid in Jakarta, nine hours away. She told her mother she was going to earn enough money to build a house in the kampong [village], and 22 years later she did. She'd worked her guts out. I don't have that kind of strength.'
But Smith had enough money to buy some land near the kampong, 19 kilometres from Solo, and plant it with a few thousand salak trees. Once they mature each tree should produce 10 kilograms of fruit a fortnight for the next 40 years. 'I want a place to hide away and do my thing, walk in the forest all day,' he said.
Just as I was imagining a rural, contemplative idyll, Smith added, 'I'm taking Dobermans, by the way. Well, would you feel safe as a white man in a Muslim country after Bali? That guy who did it lived about 20 kilometres from where I'm staying. And the Air Force uses Dobermans.'
This was the clincher. Smith, who was raised near England's Sherwood Forest and learned about dogs from a forest-dwelling recluse called Reuben, had joined the Royal Air Force in 1956 as a dog-handler. He spent 12 years in Germany, Malta, Saudi Arabia and Northern Ireland and says dogs saved his life on two occasions. 'As dog-handlers, we were the last line of defence,' he said. 'We were bums. No one liked us because we had too much power. In their dubious lore, they reckon a dog is worth five men but the boffins in Whitehall worked out that each dog is worth 30 men.'
Then in a low voice, Smith added, 'It's a bit dangerous, I don't know whether I can be quoted on this but ... I don't know if our species would have survived without an alliance with the dog.' When asked why he thought that a dangerous remark, he looked offended. 'Well, it's a hell of a statement.'
After he left the Air Force in 1968, Smith had 14 jobs in eight months, finally sticking with job 15 (a pay clerk) until 1976, when he met some Japanese men in the bar of the Dorchester hotel in London. The men wanted his dog-handling skills for an anti-kidnapping venture they were setting up in Caracas, Venezuela, and possibly in Colombia. He was given #2,000 (HK$27,000) and told to wait a year before starting. While waiting he decided to visit Hong Kong and he's been here ever since, training dogs and running kennels in Sai Kung for 15 years. As for the South American job? 'Well, I didn't get there but I don't like closing the door on anything. They followed my advice ... but they've gone off course. They ended up training killer dogs - the dogs are worse than the snatchers, right? They're too good, they can't put them on the streets.'
He sighed. Such examples of human degeneration make Smith's quest for the canine cosmos all the more pressing. 'At the end of the day, it's about dog-training. I do seriously have to get away from English, it's holding me back.'
In the meantime he can be contacted on 9604 1533. I have a feeling he'll be in Hong Kong a little longer, struggling with canine communication, while the forest waits.
