After his first day of daycare, my long, stinky son Basil came home with a report card that said he’d been well-behaved but also needed to work on “appropriate play”. As a parent, I decided to take this constructive criticism normally.
Initially I was just relieved that Basil hadn’t murdered one of the other attenders of the daycare, which has put me in the weird position of having a lot of empathy for Dexter’s dad.
Basil is a dog, a rescue greyhound, trained to chase things for entertainment, and the fear that he might see a small, white, fluffy dog running and tear it to pieces is unfortunately real. Obviously I’d done my due diligence, training and testing him with other dogs in controlled environments before getting to this stage, but the fear persists. Plus, as a newly single dog-parent, I unfortunately didn’t have any other options – I had to go and work in an office so I could afford his expensive, single-protein diet food, sensitive-skin shampoo and anti-anxiety medication – which meant he had to go to daycare.
But after the initial relief that my son was not a psychopath, I began to worry that my beautiful dog might be engaged in “inappropriate” play, whatever that was. I imagined it might be something sexually deviant. Luckily the daycare – appropriately titled Barks and Recreation – puts footage of the hounds playing on their Instagram stories throughout the day, meaning that while I was meant to be listening carefully in morning meetings and meeting my deadlines, I was digital helicopter parenting, compulsively watching to see exactly what my beloved boy was inappropriately doing.
Instead of seeing him compulsively licking other dogs, or pissing on their heads, or gesturing at women to take out their earphones on public transport, I mostly watched Basil linger on the edges of all the frolicking dogs, ears perked up, tail wagging slowly, awkwardly trotting around, completely unable to understand the game. When other dogs came up to him, he either conspicuously ignored them or cavorted around them in a strange and off-putting way like a court jester, which inevitably drove them away. After a while, he would take himself off to a corner on his own while the party raged around him.
It both broke my heart and fanned the flames of my hatred against the greyhound racing industry – but also, while I looked up articles on “how to help my greyhound make friends”, I realised this must be what my own parents went through when I was at primary school. I too was an awkward weirdo, simultaneously a loner who got given a special “job” as a “library assistant” so I would be allowed to hide there at lunch, and the awkwardly intense kid who got in trouble for scaring his peers with a graphic tale about how a girl’s leg fell off in the school toilet. Like Basil, I loved adults, and remember making friends with a nice boy named Matthew and spending all my time with his mum, a tiny child gossiping about people I didn’t know and eating cucumber sandwiches, while Matthew kicked a ball around outside on his own.
My parents did their best to help me, my dad spending a night teaching me how to “walk normally”, or my mother giving a speech about standing up to bullies, which resulted in me hiding up a tree and throwing a cooked fish at a girl named Lauren. When they suggested I share my interests with the class, I somehow ended up with a regular teaching slot where I would lecture everyone on ancient Egypt while the teacher had a smoke, which was obviously very cool.
I was tempted to pull Basil out of daycare but I ultimately decided to give him more time with other dogs instead. I took him to a park where greyhound owners would surreptitiously let their hounds run around and experience stolen moments of pure joy (it’s illegal to have greyhounds off-leash in Victoria), took him on walks with my friends who have dogs, and booked him in for more daycare.
After a while, I noticed a change – normally a reticent dog, when Basil realised we were going to daycare he began jumping around and howling with joy. On Instagram, I watched him sometimes join in on games, running around with the other dogs like a giraffe with a herd of deer, or sleeping on beds with a pile of old crusty poodles around him. He became buds with another greyhound named Batman, and they liked to stand together in various places. I’d still occasionally check in to see that I’d spent a bunch of money so he could spend the day sleeping in a sandpit, or find out that he was in a grumpy mood and would sleep under a heater, in an area completely separate from every other dog, while they chased balls and played tug-a-war. But regardless of what weird thing he was doing, it was clear that, for the first time since I’d adopted him, he was blissfully happy.
Ultimately, as well-meaning as my parents were, they eventually realised I was happier just being a little freak, and so the biggest gift I can give Basil is the chance to be the same thing.
Patrick Lenton is a writer. His romcom, In Spite of Everything, comes out in May 2025
