What a demented dog teaches us about life

I met the late Darcy ten years ago, and wrote about him. I was 59 and he was 12. I was a Times columnist, and he was an Australian sheepdog. ‘Kelpies’ they call them: black and tan, in build and temper not unlike our border collies, energetic, intelligent, irrepressible but trainable, and occasionally neurotic. Darcy was not neurotic except in one pitiable respect, and I shall come to that. I studied him and wrote about him, but in the decade since have come to understand more deeply what his condition teaches about my own, and human, nature. I wrote about this dog as an oddity. I now see that Darcy was an illustration, not an aberration: an illustration of what can go wrong in the circuitry of the brain.

Here is Darcy’s story. The loving family whose pet he was had a weekend place in the Australian bush, isolated and wild.