Poppy’s Tail
by Alan Stevenson

Poppy became part of our family within days of our moving to Greece in August 2003. Jane was walking back from the beach one evening when this dirty bedraggled smelly bundle staggered out of the undergrowth in front of her. Being Jane she picked it up and brought it home and, equally predictably, I said "Take it back". So, equally obviously, here was where she stayed.

My first impressions included one that the dog was blind as her eyes were so dull. She was infested with every type of parasite available in Greece – and Greece has won gold medals for its parasites. She was starving and she was about three months old. There seemed little likelihood that she would survive the night but we agreed that should she do so we would take her to a vet the next day, and if necessary have her put down.

She survived. The vet said that while she was malnourished and dirty and infested with parasites, she wasn’t suffering from any particular disease. So we brought her back home again, washed her and treated her for infestations and so welcomed a half poodle, half goat, wholly dependent puppy into the bosom of the family which included an elderly very English cat with decided views on the suitability of small black Greek dogs as household pets. We called her Poppy after Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, as she had clung to us so tightly in the vets and proven to be utterly faithful from the very start.

I suppose it was because she was so small, so helpless and so dependent that she soon came to rule the household with a rod of iron. We began to fashion our lives around her requirements: teaching her to walk on a lead, to sit and to ignore any command irrespective of the language in which it was phrased. (Mine were usually given just in "bad"). She had an extraordinarily affectionate nature and loved everybody she met whether they wanted her to or not. This could be embarrassing as many Greeks, especially in the country district where we live, don’t like dogs at all but she would always run up to anyone whom she saw, without exception, and insist on welcoming them into her world. It could also be amusing to see a full grown adult cowering in the face of an affectionate greeting from a small puppy. She was also a naturally fun-loving, playful and ebullient animal who loved nothing more than to fetch and carry the sticks which we threw for her. In short she became a substitute for our children who by then were grown up in England and had families of their own.

Just over a year later Gypsy, our old English cat, died and was replaced by a Greek kitten, Kit, who proved to be far more accommodating to Poppy’s desire to play cowboys and Indians in the garden and cops and robbers in the living room. We had Poppy spayed and for a week or so afterward we thought that we would lose her, but we nursed her like a child and she pulled through by sheer bloody-mindedness. When another year had passed we even took on another dog, a half Rottweiller and half rabbit, which some kind person had dumped outside the house. We called this latest addition "Kassiope", after a Greek demi-goddess, but never for one moment did Poppy relinquish her role as the Alpha female in the household, despite the fact that Kassi was twice her size and more. Over the years we adopted two more cats. But again neither ever threatened Poppy’s role.

On one occasion Poppy was bitten on the tongue by a venomous spider and again she hovered at death’s door for a while but, thanks to the devoted attention of the Greek vets, we managed to pull her through this crisis even after a large portion of her tongue had decayed and fallen off. She always was a little on the delicate side quite unlike Kassi whom we also had spayed but had come through the experience with no problems whatsoever and didn’t even seem to know what all the fuss was about.

Poppy would habitually sit with either Jane or myself. She considered the floor to be a place for other dogs such as Kassi or even for cats, but not for her. She had been in the family the longest and she was special. If Poppy was with Jane, Kassi would often sidle up to my chair and insinuate herself onto my knee. The look of raw, unabashed triumph that she wore when she succeeded and Poppy couldn’t oust her without giving up her place on Jane’s knee was a sight to behold. The look of pain on my face when I had sixty-six pounds of Rottweiller on my knee was indescribable.

January 2008 was a bad month. A good friend was very ill in a local hospital and Jane and I spent a lot of time visiting him as it is doubly difficult being seriously ill in a hospital where everyone else speaks a foreign language. One day at the end of January when our friend was clearly in the terminal stages of his illness and I was visiting him I had a call from Jane to say that Poppy had been poisoned while she had been walking the dogs on a track, near the house, which we regularly used for that purpose.

When I got back to the village I found that Poppy was semi-comatose. Jane had done all the right things. She had injected her with an emetic and with atropine but to no avail. We rushed her to the vet but she died on the operating table.

We will never know whether she would have survived had she had a stronger constitution, or whether the poison had not been quite so fresh. All we know is that she was poisoned with the herbicide "Roundup"? in which bait of some sort had been saturated. The shepherds put down these baits to kill foxes and martins which they believe take the new-born lambs. Poppy wouldn’t have hurt a fly. She really believed that everyone in the world was her best friend. She didn’t have a chance: neat Roundup is a powerful neuro-toxin which can kill in minutes, especially if it is fresh and hasn’t been diluted by rain. She died in agony, unnecessarily because if the shepherds had really cared for their flocks the young lambs and pregnant ewes would have been under cover or, at the very least, protected by their own, free-roving, sheep-dogs.

The purpose of my writing about Poppy is to try to make people understand that poison is indiscriminate in its effects. If you put poison down for rats you can’t complain when your cat dies in agony after having caught a poisoned rat. If you mis-use Roundup, as the locals do here, what do you say to the mother of a child who dies after handling the poisoned bait? This summer we found an Eagle-owl which had eaten a poisoned rat. It was dying, slowly, and in great pain. A truly noble animal, far from its normal habitat, and killed by a truly stupid person. For several weeks after Poppy died I would have given almost anything to have found out who had been responsible for the poison. Now I prefer not to know. I have come to understand that many people just don’t have the wit to realise the damage they cause nor have they had the education or opportunity to understand the cruelty of their actions. Hopefully, maybe one person who reads this will think twice before putting down poison. The illegal use here of Roundup as a poison continues unabated. Every week one hears of dogs poisoned in this way. Most dog lovers carry treatments with them when they walk their animals but poisoning can have a cumulative effect even if the animal survives a particular event.

We now never let our dogs leave the house without muzzles on so that they are unable to pick up anything which might be poisoned. We try to encourage our acquaintances to do the same. I tell people whom I meet when walking the dogs that the muzzle is a protection against poison but I think that many of them believe it is because the dogs are dangerous. Believe me: they are probably not half as dangerous as I would be if I ever caught someone putting down baited Roundup.