Greyhound

A Greyhound exceeds the speed limit in a Polish town by twenty kilometres an hour. Cars are allowed fifty there, it runs at seventy, so a speed camera would take its picture. For comparison: the fastest human in history reached just under forty-five in the hundred metres. The Greyhound is the fastest dog in the world, and it manages this without spikes, without a coach and without a warm-up.

It is also a very old design. In the hill fort at Chotěbuz near Český Těšín, just across the Polish border, archaeologists found the bones of a dog from the eighth or ninth century: seventy centimetres at the withers, slender, and in a genetic study almost identical to the modern Greyhound. In twelve hundred years everything has changed: borders, languages and ways of travelling. This dog has not. Evidently nobody found anything in it to improve.

Small wonder, because this body was built around one thing. At the gallop a Greyhound lifts all four feet off the ground twice in every stride and spends up to three quarters of a run in the air; strictly speaking it is flight, with pauses to push off. Its heart is larger than that of other dogs its size, its blood thicker with red cells, and it carries half as much fat. A vet seeing its test results for the first time reaches for the phone: too many red cells, too few platelets, a thyroid reading like a sick dog's. In a Greyhound that is normal, and a good vet knows it.

And now the surprise: this dog hardly ever runs. Half a minute of flat-out gallop in a fenced area, two half-hour walks, and its day is done. The rest of the time it walks slowly, stands for a long while and lies down for longer still. At the command "sit" it looks embarrassed, and rightly so: with thigh muscles that developed, sitting is simply uncomfortable for most Greyhounds, so they either stand or lie down. They lie down superbly, as it happens. At home the Greyhound is quiet and hardly ever barks, and in a large American study it came out as one of the least aggressive breeds: towards strangers, towards owners and towards other dogs. You will not get a photo of it running anyway, because all that comes out is a blur. Greyhound owners have hundreds of pictures of their dogs on their phones, and in nearly all of them the dog is asleep.

There is something in this worth learning from it. It can do seventy and almost never does. We are the other way round: our top speed is a dash for a departing tram, and we hurry from the alarm clock until evening. We eat on the run, reply on the run, even rest against the clock. The Greyhound watches all this from its bed with the calm of someone who knows what it knows: if it ever really matters, it will be there first. That is why it does not need to be on the move all day. It is the slow who hurry. The fast have time.

A body built for that speed has one consequence: there is nothing in it in reserve. No fat, no undercoat, no padding between bone and floor. Everything unnecessary was stripped away to make it faster. So the Greyhound gets from you, day by day, what other dogs carry on themselves: warmth when the wind blows, something soft under its elbows, and food measured with care, because it has nothing to lose weight from and ought not to gain any. A dog that puts nothing by relies on you afresh every day.

In the evening it will come over, stand side on and lean its whole weight against your legs. This is what Greyhounds do when they trust someone. You cannot go anywhere then; you have to stand. Thirty kilos of the fastest dog in the world stands propped against you, in no hurry to be anywhere.

For that moment, neither are you.