Goliath

Some phone calls stay with you for a very long time, don’t they? This one did. A quiet man called and said he had a Great Dane he could no longer really keep. Could we help him? He had simply too much on his plate for such a young male. But, as he added right away, the dog was “a bit odd”, even though the vet had said he was fine. It was not the dog’s fault, he explained – he had just jumped off the roof.

His words were clear, almost brisk, the way a practiced salesman talks. As usual, my partner took the call – his kind of human. It took only a few days until the man arrived. With a, well, slightly lanky, thin, a little crooked dog. Goliath. About a year old, young family, house under construction. In that situation, it is almost “logical” and terribly easy to see how and why he had managed to jump off somewhere.

And otherwise? He was one of those dogs where I still think, to this day, that it was not wrong for the family to decide against keeping him. They let him go knowing they could no longer do him justice.

Goli did it again some time later. What? He jumped out of a window – as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I stepped outside with the rubbish, just for a moment, with the window open. He followed me in one single leap from the first floor, as if I had asked him to, as if that was the whole reason I had gone out.

I had simply gone out without a dog – you would think that for twenty metres to the side of the house, you do not need a Great Dane. But for Goli, it was no big deal to jump. He landed without a scratch. This tall, crooked, lanky fellow constantly found obstacles no one had invited him to overcome – and yet he did it, perfectly, every time.

He did it again when a rather confused woman appeared at the door with a quite aggressive dog and announced that she could imagine moving in here. Goli jumped out of the window in exactly the same way, straight onto the woman’s car, as if he had to say: no, I do not like her, and you do not either – she is not staying.

The woman and her dog were, in fact, very strange. She had contacted us years before and had desperately wanted a puppy. Only a puppy. I refused. She spoke of her fears, of being afraid around other people, of standing in front of a divorce, of being treated badly by everyone. She said she needed protection and therefore a big dog.

I want to say this very clearly: that is a reason not to get a dog, but to get therapy. Dogs are not made for this. You cannot raise and handle dogs as emotional armour. They have no way to replace the deficits a human may carry. Please never, ever get a dog if you have such phobias or even suspect them. Great Danes are many things, but they are not guard dogs. They are not bred emotionally for that. They are beautiful cheats: huge bodies, very small sense of self, often almost no real self‑confidence. And as strange as it may sound, that is actually a good thing.

Goliath was a constant example of this. He eventually found a dream home. Why? Well… Goliath was my only Great Dane who cheerfully ate salad. Green salad, just plain leaves. Not only that, but also that. He moved into the home of a butcher in the middle of Cologne, who also ran a lunch counter. And as it should be, Goli always had schnitzel with salad prepared for him in small bites, because he sometimes had to wait at home until his people came back from work. Just little enough not to get fat, just enough not to be hungry.

He remains in my memory – not only because of his way of looking at you.