Diary of a Dog-walker by Edward Stourton Page B

global sweep. We were trying to do big-picture history to a news-style deadline, and the pace was frantic. At the same time I was working to the gentler but still insistent rhythm of these fortnightly columns.
    So I looked for material whenever and wherever I could find it: I read the papers in a different way, watched people in the streets in a different way, and talked to them differently too. Interviews for news and current affairs broadcasting are a quest for the essential: you dig your way through self-serving spin and drill down to a few diamonds of truly consequentialinformation. Dog-watching is the reverse: the inconsequential is everything. You are on the prowl for the odd and unexpected, a moment (like the banditry of the badly behaved street dog in the next column) that will spark an idea.
    And by the time I found what I wanted I had usually learnt to see the character and habits of a place in a new and fuller way. When you do not quite know what you are looking for you have to get your nose out of your notebook and watch the world go by – and that is when travel really does broaden the mind.
    Wish you were here – though not on the menu
    28 November 2009
    Ruijin Guesthouse
    Shanghai
    Dear Kudu,
    There was a picture in my
Shanghai Daily
this morning of a demobilized young Chinese soldier bidding farewell to his sniffer dog; it looked uncannily like you – with the soulful eyes and its human-like hugging – and the picture prompted me to write with an apology.
    The two things you hate most are cufflinks and suitcases: the cufflinks tell you I am going to work, and the suitcase means one of us is going away, a practice of which you heartily disapprove. I am sceptical about the Slough of Despond into which you sink, because I know what fun you have with the lady who walks you. But I concede that California, Bosnia, the Netherlands and China within a month is a bit much, and I have missed our walks.
    But you would be amazed by what is happening here. Take this headline in the
China Daily
: ‘Pet lovers save 800 cats from dinner table’. Do not pass this on to Ruff and Tumble – I know they are cats but we share the same household. And I have to tell you that in China people eat dogs too. I spotted a clever-looking mongrel pinching a lump of meat from a pavement grill, and, as it disappeared into the crowd amid curses, my Chinese assistant exclaimed, ‘I do hope it is not eating a relation.’
    The
China Daily
reported that a group of pet lovers had picketed the cat trader’s premises in Tianjin until he opened his rows and rows of iron cages. The trader said he had paid ten yuan (a pound) for each of them, and was quite open about the fact that they were to be ‘slaughtered and served as food’ in Guangzhou. Since there is no law against cat trading in China, the only weapon theconcerned citizens could deploy was moral suasion – and they won.
    Chairman Mao, Communist China’s founder, condemned pets as a decadent bourgeois distraction. And just as China’s citizens have had to live with its one-child policy, many Chinese cities now have a one-dog policy. The cost of a dog-licence can be exorbitant: in Shanghai it is as much as two hundred pounds a year if you want to keep a dog in the city centre.
    But as China has become richer, more of its people have turned to the pleasures of dog-ownership. Today there are a hundred and fifty thousand registered dogs in Shanghai alone – and, locals tell me, many more without a licence. This September a Tibetan Mastiff called Yangtze River Number Two became the most expensive dog in history – bought for £350,000 by a woman from Shaanxi.
    As you and I know – and the Tianjin cat trader discovered to his cost – pet-owners can organize when the call comes. Do you remember the day we found an elderly Dachshund loose in Battersea Park? Within minutes we had collected a posse of Chelsea ladies to catch the