ON OUR last late run-out the other night, we stood, all ears cocked to the sounds of a dog in the wood three fields away.

Cesar was whining, pulling and looking at me for an answer. We both knew that this wasn’t the howl of a hungry chasse dog, chained and miserable.

Nor a forgotten housedog begging for entry.

No, it was the mournful cry of a lost dog, far from whatever comfort he was used to and hoping someone would hear and rescue him.

Soft as I am where beasts are concerned, there was little point, on a crescent-mooned night, in overcoming my own night fears, climbing into the car and calling from the nearest single-tracked roads.

Reluctantly, if wisely, we turned into the house, pulling hard the last shutters and blocking out all night sounds.

In the morning I winced as I heard a faint, feeble echo of that midnight yelp, and this time I took the car and headed towards the sound.

I called and called and rattled food in a bowl but each time the sound grew fainter. And then it ceased.

Looking at the bank of brambles and the dark interior I accepted my inadequacies in saving any creature and ultimately turned away.

Several calls to mayors and vets elicited no plaintive reports of lost dogs and as the calls faded and stopped I kidded myself he/she had found a way home.

But after all these years in France I know better. July and August – the holiday months – are when dogs and cats are abandoned to their fate by owners not prepared to pay boarding costs.

A little has changed since I first arrived and animals are now deemed to be sentient beings not the inanimate they were deemed under law beforehand. Objects with as much rights or feelings as a table or chair.

Now, fines for cruelty and abandonment are harsh and often enforced. So it is a big step forward.

However, and I will never get to grips with this, the deeper one is in rural France, the crueller life seems.

Of course I understand that there can be no sentimentality in animal husbandry when it is one’s livelihood; and that we, with our pampered pets are guilty of the most awful anthropomorphism – often to the animals’ cost.

But there is a middle path.

Last year in France, thousands of pets were dumped when their owners’ took off on holiday.

Many were cats left to fend for themselves by what they could hunt. But the rest were bewildered dogs often left on the motorway roadside, tipped out of the family car.

Each year, according to the papers, the numbers rise.

Some owners, I suppose, hope that when they return from their couple of weeks, their pets will bound out of the undergrowth, miraculously healthy and gleaming and life will continue.

Well, over my time here I’ve passed too many rib-showing, tongue-dragging dogs pounding along the road to nowhere.

And I’ve spent too much time pulling them into my car and offloading them at the local rescue centre knowing they’d be put down if no one claimed them.

I’ve had to harden my heart and accept that my neighbours drown kittens and puppies as a delayed form of birth control.

Learned to accept that bitches in season are left out in the gardens for any old hound to impregnate them time after time.

Learned to accept that it is somehow demeaning to take one’s dogs to be castrated or spayed when it’s easier to just stick the offspring in bucket of water.

Of course I haven’t really accepted it. I have somehow, in the last few years, deliberately avoided it. To my shame.

I avert my eyes, often, as I pass fields where ‘new’ horses graze and then disappear.

I cannot ask if they are destined for the market. The French do not eat quite as much horsemeat as they did, nor so openly, but, believe me, there is still a demand, and it is met.

I turn away from the trotting horses in their stud farms knowing their proud strut will last four years if that.

A friend of mine – English – in a nearby village has grown used to the sounds of a dog permanently chained all day when his owner is out at work.

Grown used to chasing his own dog who leaps a high fence to get at a neighbouring in-season bitch who’s allowed to roam.

He has spoken to both owners who give him a quizzical stare and shrug. Basically saying "So?"

"It’s as if I’m suggesting something really bizarre when I suggest a solution: ie Let him loose in your fenced garden and walk him or spay her."

So we sit and shake our heads. We know there is little we can do. It’s just the way it is.

One of my most sophisticated French friends routinely drowns unwanted dog and cat offspring and finds my shock both comic and rather over the top.

I once saw her take two small newborn pups and plunge them in a bucket.

She has never understood my utter disgust.