LYRIC – FECIMUS HEAR NO EVIL August 2019 – January 2024
It’s said that dogs come into our lives for a reason – and this feels particularly true when I think about Lyric. January 2025 marks a year since I had to say goodbye to her, and it’s taken this long to be able to write this without dissolving into a tearful mess before finishing each paragraph.
I’ve loved and shared my life with setters for many years now, but always had a wish to add a spaniel; but I didn’t want a spaniel that was on the go all the time. I like the fact that setters are super-lively but, as long as their needs are met, happy to snooze on a sofa too.
Gradually, I became aware of the Field Spaniel, a vulnerable native breed (and I do like an unusual breed) that was reputed to be less hyper than your average cocker or springer.
I did a lot of research and went to shows to meet some, and eventually, in 2019, Lyric joined the family.
She was very sweet and I was besotted – but even at a very early age, she showed signs of a nervousness that I hadn’t come across before. She growled at me, at the vet and at someone saying hello to her.
Then, at twelve weeks old, she fractured the growth plate in her hind leg – waking up from sedation with a thoroughly-bandaged leg terrified her and she ran the length of the back yard trying to escape it. Lyric’s fears of the vet, of having anything put on her (even being towel-dried) and of being handled were now confirmed in her little mind as things to be avoided at all costs.
Thanks to the vet’s expert intervention, the bandaging was successful and she didn’t need surgery – her leg recovered well and never caused her any problems once healed. I took her to puppy classes and generally she was fine, but there was a lack of confidence in her that I’d never experienced in previous dogs.
Despite this, Lyric grew into a generally-happy young dog and we enjoyed further classes including Hoopers, Scentwork and Agility; she was a great have-a-go dog who loved training and was pretty good at anything we tried.
You could see her face light up when any training equipment came out and she was impatient, throwing behaviours at me if I was too slow to make clear what I was asking her.
I’d had in mind to show her too, having enjoyed showing years before, but that was a non-starter as she absolutely hated being groomed and trimmed. There was no way I was going to be able to get her to show condition, and this reached a crisis point when I was trimming her feet one day and persevering despite her (now) obvious signals that she wasn’t tolerating it – a determined air-snap finally convinced me that I’d rather not lose my face, and she ended up with one foot untrimmed.
Around this time, a few odd behaviours also started to emerge – her second Hoopers course ended abruptly when she suddenly showed extreme fear of the training field and made desperate attempts to escape under the fence. Subsequent trips to that location had her shaking at the back of the car boot and refusing to get out; this extended to other locations including pet food stores and secure fields.
She began to resource-guard spaces, and to show obsessive behaviour with balls, barking non-stop until the next throw, which usually meant the end of that trip up the garden for everyone.
I was desperate to find ways of helping Lyric – and completely out of my depth. I consulted vets and two well-respected behaviour consultants over the course of 2021; Lyric was spayed to eliminate likely hormone-related issues as phantom pregnancy made her particularly sensitive, we tried behaviour medication and I carried out the advice given. Much of it certainly helped and some of the problem behaviours reduced, but there was no miracle solution. The meds were a relatively short-term trial – the only way I can describe the effect on Lyric’s character is that she seemed depressed and withdrawn, and she lost interest in food until she was barely eating.
By 2022, I began to notice that at times Lyric had an odd gait, not quite a limp but not as even as it had been when she was very young. She began to trip when chasing her ball, and on a few occasions yelped loudly when another dog came too close (even though they hadn’t made contact with her) – the worst moment was when she lost her footing at the top of the stairs and fell to the bottom. I knew something had to be seriously wrong.
In December 2022, a referral to a specialist veterinary hospital and an MRI confirmed what I was dreading; Lyric had a brain tumour, with metastases already on her spine.
Suddenly, everything made sense. Although I can’t be certain, it’s possible that the tumour had been there, quietly growing, since puppyhood, causing many of the issues that I’d thought were behavioural. An emotional wait while she recovered from the anaesthetic and a chat with the neurology-specialist vet, and I knew there was no chance of beating this.
Chemotherapy would have meant weekly visits to the vet, causing her immense stress, with only a 50% chance of making a difference, so I opted for palliative care with steroids and pain relief. Fortunately, this made enough of a difference for her to live for more than a year from her diagnosis and for us to make some great memories. Her love of balls, especially the spiky ones, and water, meant regular trips to the beach, and she continued to adore training any kind of trick.
It took me two years to desensitise her to grooming, using gentle, slow consent-based methods, and although she never really liked being brushed or trimmed, she grew to love the overall experience and would happily jump up to get onto the grooming table when it came out. Although she would never be show-standard, I managed to keep her reasonably clean and tidy.
She continued to generally avoid unknown dogs, most likely due to anticipation of pain even though she was pain-free for much of the time. The steroids slowed the growth of the tumour sufficiently for us to enjoy life, although they also made her constantly hungry, so she would eat anything she deemed edible on a walk (and we often disagreed on her definition of edible!)
While all this was going on, I was realising that I now had the opportunity to fulfil a lifelong dream and work with dogs. I had taken early retirement from teaching and worked for a while in an office, but one of the very few benefits of the 2020 lockdown meant that I could work from home – when I went back, I hated the idea of paying someone else to look after my dogs while I sat in an office. I’d started to learn so much about canine training and behaviour while trying to help Lyric, the idea of Homefield Canine Training started initially as a remote admin support for dog-related businesses but soon changed to become my own training company. I have Lyric to thank for that, probably more than any other dog; she taught me so much about dogs, myself, reward-based learning, the pitfalls of punishment and how to slow down and observe.
Lyric changed in appearance over the last two years of her life – partly due to the spay (as owners of setters and spaniels will be aware, neutering doesn’t do coats a lot of favours), but also due the medication she had to take to keep the cancer at bay. Her shape changed, she gained hair in some places and lost it in others, strange whiskery hair on her face but bald on her belly. However, with the pain subdued, she was able to enjoy all the things she loved and we made some wonderful memories.
Finally, in January 2024, the vet felt that the prolonged steroid use was starting to cause side effects and that Lyric was struggling in that brave way that dogs do when they don’t want you to see that they’ve had enough. I booked the appointment for the following day then took her to the sea for a walk with her favourite ball. That ball is still in my car a year later – I can’t quite bring myself to move it yet. She had some of her top-favourite food for dinner and as many cuddles as she would allow. The next morning, I said one of the hardest goodbyes I’ve ever had to as she fell asleep on my lap.
I still feel the loss of her, more keenly than any other dog I’ve ever loved and lost, perhaps because she was so young (she was four when she died), and even writing this leaves me an emotional wreck! If you’ve read this far, you’ll be of the same mindset as me – they’re not ‘just dogs’. I don’t consider myself a particularly fluffy guardian (‘furbaby’ is a pet hate of mine – sorry!!) but the dogs we share our lives with are part of our family and life looks very different when one isn’t there.
Lyric’s legacy is Homefield – my dream job, the chance to work with dogs and their people, and to try and understand how best to help each one, canine and human. I am blessed to have shared my life with such a special dog for those few years.
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