Dogs Rough It in Rural Umbria

Guest Post – Justine van der Leun

In rural Umbria, dogs don’t get fluffy beds or rawhide treats. Nobody cleans their ardent faces or scratches their floppy ears. They don’t eat organic kibble or wear bright collars. They are not welcome in the bed, on the couch, on the rug, or on the floor. They’re not welcome in the home. In rural Umbria, dogs are beasts: Le bestie.

The area is a stunning panorama of rolling golden hills and thick swathes of green, bursting with gracious, humble people who will invite a stranger into their homes and feed him the best meal of his life. Their treatment of dogs, however, is a dark spot in this otherwise bright corner of the world.

I lived there for a year, working and trying to make a relationship with a village gardener work (shocking Marcus of Umbria spoiler alert: It didn’t). That’s when I met the dog that would change my life. She was a young black-and-white spotted hunting dog, barely surviving in a pen at the back of a farm. She didn’t have a name but she did have an owner who was eager to pass on the responsibility of the dog to me. That dog was a drain on his finances, so if I wanted it—which he knew I did, since I was standing in his kitchen, shrieking, “Who left that dog back there? I want it!”—I could have it.

The dog looked like a little British gentleman, so I named it Marcus. When I saw that the dog was…well…a lady, it was too late. The name had stuck. Oh well—what did Marcus care about gender stereotypes?

Marcus was a typical local pup when I found her: Dusty from living in a dirty pen, sporting an eye infection, an ear infection, and a raging case of worms. Her sister had just been shot in the backwoods. She was sick, the folks said, so they shot her rather than take her to the vet. They’d loaded Marcus into the car, too, but in a last minute pardon, they decided to let her live.

The Umbrian village and its neighboring towns were teeming with such doomed hunting dogs. These setters, pointers, and spaniels were widely considered useful for setting and pointing and flushing, and that’s all. They weren’t companions, friends, or household pets. They lived outdoors in the beating sun and the bitter cold. Some were better off than others, with more food, fresher water, an owner who took them on a journey for birds or wild boar every weekend. But for most dogs, life involved a quotidian meal of cheap chow thrown into a pen and, if they were lucky, a monthly run. When I balked, they shrugged: This approach made sense to them.

This was how it had always been done. In a place that had faced severe poverty for hundreds of years, dogs were like farm animals: A mode of survival for a people accustomed to living off the land. When children are starving, as they had been after World War II, people don’t feed the dogs a raw-bison diet. When people have their teeth pulled out by the local barber, they’re not going to then take their pets to the vet. Though the villagers over the past generation had become comfortable—prosperous, even—old Italian habits are hard to break.

Small wonder, then, that they thought I was totally pazza when I took Marcus into my home and fed her a steady diet of lamb and spaghetti. During that year, my skinny pointer became a gorgeous purebred huntress, ever-loyal. She was my companion and my stability as my romantic endeavors failed. She was my closest friend in a foreign land.  By day, I accompanied her on her walks through the vast forests and by night, when my boyfriend played cards at the town bar, she sat with me on the couch as I read. I had rescued her, and then, like most rescue dogs, she had rescued me right back.

When I left Italy, I passed by the village dogs one final time—the old labs, the chained shepherds, the mushroom-finding mongrels, and the too-thin gun dogs. I wanted to take them all with me. But in the end, I could only take one.

Animal mistreatment happens everywhere. To help American hunting dogs in need, visit the excellent Illinois Bird Dog Rescue .

Justine van der Leun is author of the book Marcus of Umbria to be released Tuesday, June 8. I asked her to offer observations on the lives of dogs in this ancient Italian village to give us a sense of how modernity can be shut out of areas even in modern countries. Many thanks to van der Leun for sharing her experience of the lives of dogs outside our own cultural box.