MICHAEL WATTS: R.T.F.M !!

What is the first thing you do when you unwrap a new household appliance or the latest smartphone or whatever must have item you have been talked into buying? If you are like me you take all the plastic and the Styrofoam and the rest of the rubbish and chuck them in the bin. Being an environmentally aware sort of bloke, one who keeps a weather eye on his carbon footprint and so forth, all the cardboard and paper goes in the appropriate recycling bin, although from what I see if I am up early enough on bin day all our carefully sorted garbage is tipped into the same truck.

When I say all the paper, I am including whatever instruction leaflet or manual that had come concealed somewhere in the depths of the box. What do those guys know anyway? They only designed and built the thing after all. I am convinced that a combination of experience, common sense and blind optimism will be more than enough to equip me to install the thing and get it up and running. After all those years in veterinary practice sussing out the workings of a dishwasher should be a walk in the park, shouldn’t it? Yeah, right. Wait till I tell you. You should always read the manual.

I don’t have a smartphone, working on the principle that since I spend enough time at work fighting with computers, mostly unsuccessfully, once I finally escape from the office I don’t really want to take one of the blessed things home with me. Besides I neither need nor want Big Brother poking his interfering nose into my business. I do however text, no mean feat for one with fingers calloused after years of hard graft in all weathers. I was quietly beavering away at work and generally minding my own business when I received a message from one of The Usual Suspects asking if I was up for a share in a pup he was trying to syndicate.

I had been involved in such arrangements with him in the past, some successful, more of them less so. I was given to believe that he liked to have me on board because I coughed up in full on time and left him in peace to train the dogs as he pleased. Reading between the lines, what he was really saying on this occasion was that he liked the breeding of the dog, liked the look of him, thought he might be useful and wanted to train him but couldn’t raise the dough himself right there and then to close the deal. The sire had won the Derby in his day, although that was not today nor yesterday, but his progeny had not set the world alight thus far and he had not been getting that many bitches lately. It was the dam’s first litter but she had been consistently there or thereabouts throughout the two years of her racing career and her sire was a noted producer of decent brood bitches.

On paper it looks like a tough call but I didn’t have anything running at the time and had nothing in the pipeline so I was easy to tempt. Truth to tell, I didn’t have the time to be running around the countryside looking at pups and Yer Man had contacts who would open doors to him that would remain resolutely closed to me, and connections who would sell him dogs cheaper than I could ever buy them. So often in life the easiest thing is to go with the flow. Anyway you are a long time dead, and there are no pockets in a shroud, so I threw caution to the winds and gave Yer Man the thumbs up. Truth to tell right now I cannot recall the nuts and bolts of the deal but I do remember that it was phrased so that it looked like a bargain, at least on paper.

Either I was offered a free share in the dog if I paid for the training of him, or he was to be trained buckshee if I anted up a share of the purchase price. I was certainly offered something for nothing, which in my experience bodes ill for the future. Call me cynical if you will but I reckon you are far better to keep these matters strictly business and strictly cash and then there are no misunderstandings later. You know something? I should listen to myself and take some of my own advice sometimes.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first call promising. The first time out our muscular little bridle showed promise and ran reasonably well only to finish lame. At a real greyhound vet’s on the Monday morning the verdict was a tear in a fairly obscure muscle, one I hadn’t come across since leaving the anatomy dissecting rooms in the veterinary college as a teenager. A quick straw poll was taken among the syndicate members. Time was syndicate meetings used to take place in the back room in a bar in the town and involved pints of lager and something with chips on the side. Now it can all be done on mobile phones, handy for sure but since you never actually see the rest of the crew face to face, eyeball to eyeball you never actually hear them air their ten cents worth and have to take a lot on trust. Don’t talk to me about trust. I am such a trusting soul that I look both ways before I cross a one-way street.

When push came to shove all parties failed to agree on whether to persevere with the little guy or call it a day so I moved in with a pre-emptive strike. He could come to my place for as much R & R as it took to get him up and running again. Did I mention moolah? Funny you should ask. I never discussed who would pay for his keep and I didn’t hear anybody offering to stump up their share but such is life. The love of money is the root of all evil and like that. Anyway with about a dozen other retired greyhounds, waifs and strays already ensconced in the lap of moderate luxury at home, what would it cost to feed one more mouth? So it was that I collected the brindle dog at the track one night and a beautiful friendship began.

His one vice was a tendency at mealtimes to treat the place as if it was a cafeteria and to help himself out all the other dogs’ bowls. This soon unsurprisingly led to a spat with the Top Dog who didn’t see why he had to share his grub with anybody thank you very much. Thankfully there was no blood shed or leastways not enough to worry about at least and they kind of agreed to differ after that.

Now seeing as how I only owned something like two thirds of a leg of him I was a bit concerned as to what might happen if one door too many got left open in the kennels one day or if he should happen to slip the leash while out walking. It should not be forgotten that he was hardly in from the rearing farm and into training when he was injured so it remained to be seen how socialized he was.

Accordingly since I am generally a law-abiding sort of citizen I got his microchip changed into the address of my kennels so as to increase my chances of getting him back should he go A.W.O.L. Now the routine at my place is hardly the most strenuous but during his sojourn with me he was never lame so you would notice so when the best part of a year later talk turned to his big comeback I was happy enough to give it a go. Like the man said, you should try everything once, except Morris Dancing.

Now I hardly expected him to lose any weight while kicking his heels at my ranch but I was pleasantly surprised that despite having lived off the fat of the land all summer, the wee brindle weighed no more than he did when he started his furlough. Further surprises were to follow. First time out he won handily enough. It was hardly an open class performance but he stuck his nose in front when it mattered and finally started to bring home the bacon. Pride proverbially comes before a fall. Flushed with success we decided to put him out again sharpish in the hope that lightning would strike twice. For once he was uncharacteristically slowly into his stride and though he survived his first round heat he found one too good for him the next time. I got another text message from Yer Man a few days later. All bets were off.

Our brindle fellow had come home lame after his last effort and was back at the vet’s. He had torn a muscle again, a different one this time, and we were pretty much back at square one. Not to worry, I thought. His old kennel was lying empty ready for him whenever the vet gave him the thumbs up and the time came for another spell at the holiday camp.

It was not to be. After a period of deafening silence I was told he had been sold to a bloke from Manchester way. To say I was disgruntled would be the understatement of the year. I hadn’t been asked and the deal was already done behind my back. The dog, who basically had never stayed sound for more than a five minutes at a time, deserved better. In my book he deserved to be decently retired, not put back in training again. My Mancunian friend, who had just forked out a fair amount of his hard-earned for a dog who might not turn out to be good for much more than looking at, deserved better. I deserved better, if the syndicate meant anything more than a fanciful name on a race card. Aye, right.

A friend who is something in the engineering line of business tells me they have an expression for it in his trade. R.T.F.M., they say, read the (expletive deleted) manual. I definitely should have read the effing manual way back when before I started channelling my hopes and dreams into syndicated dogs. Track vets who for their sins interest themselves in greyhound welfare often express a wish that the members of each syndicate would appoint one of their number to accept legal responsibility for their dog. That way should it have the misfortune to be injured at the track decisions as to treatment and sadly euthanasia if need be, could be made trackside without delay, rather than every member of the group having to be located and his or her views sought. I’ll buy that one.

Now I, as I never tire of saying, am no lawyer. On the few occasions when I have had to turn up in court I have gained an indelible impression that there are almost as many dodgy customers walking around in suits and wigs as there are standing in the dock. In the circumstances my reading of the rules of the I.C.C. as they relate to syndicates may be wide of the mark, but it looks to me that a greyhound that races in the name of the syndicate is legally the property of the bloke who heads up the syndicate. That being the case there was actually no need for me to be consulted about the fate of our brindle guy because I just had a supporting role in the syndicate which amounted to little more than window dressing. Syndication is often advanced as a solution to the problem of declining greyhound ownership.

At first glance it allows small operators with limited funds to have a stake in the greyhound game. On closer inspection however, at least back home in the Black North, it offers potential syndicate members little more than a chance to dream, with few real responsibilities and few liabilities. Now that I have read the fine print, I for one will not be going down that road again. You can keep your syndicates. In the past all the greyhounds I owned entirely in my own right all finished up on easy street back in my kennels once they started drawing their pensions. The next dog I buy will be mine and mine alone, and will be joining the rest of the grey muzzled brigade back at the ranch when he has run for the last time.

And what became of “our” brindle dog? The beauty of having him fortuitously microchipped in my name is that I was able to trace his subsequent movements. It is a long story, too long to tell here and now, but it ends up with him being adopted as a pet by a nice couple from somewhere in the West Country and becoming the boon companion and partner in crime of their teenage lad. They all seem to have lived happily ever after.

Me, I am always a sucker for a happy ending.