• Living With Freddie by Anna Heyward (Virago £22, 288pp) is available now from the Mail Bookshop

When Anna Heyward and her partner adopted an eight-year-old Italian greyhound called Freddie, she congratulated herself that she had now ticked all the right boxes for a proper adult life: ‘a dog, a boyfriend, a job, a sense of purpose’.

The dog rescue centre had vaguely mentioned that Freddie had some behavioural issues but having grown up with dogs, Heyward, who was born in Australia but lived in New York, had no doubt she would have no trouble.

Italian greyhounds are small, elegant dogs who have been bred to be focused on humans, a charming trait that also means they hate being alone.

Freddie was so focused on his humans that if he was left alone in their flat for even the shortest time, he would scream, chase himself in a circle and claw desperately at the front door.

Paired: Anna with Freddie on a walk

Dogs such as Freddie who have separation anxiety have been known to chew through walls, break down doors and jump through glass. Even with the help of a trainer, Heyward found the longest she could leave Freddie without his becoming severely distressed was two and a half minutes.

Naturally, this impinged enormously on her life. At times her boyfriend, Aaron, reluctantly agreed to stay at home with the dog. At other times she was able to take him to the art gallery where she worked.

Sometimes he went to a hugely expensive doggie day care, where he skulked miserably until pick-up. Heyward – left, with Freddie – came to understand that he would never be under her control because ‘the inside of him would always be a little bit out of my reach’.

Her social life suffered, and Aaron resented both her intense focus on the dog and the money she spent on him.

Perhaps, too, he sensed that ‘I found my dog a far livelier source of interest than the man I planned to marry’. One day he walked out, saying he would only return if she got rid of the dog.

The subtitle of this book, ‘how a dog taught me to be human’, suggests it’s a warm and fuzzy account of how a damaged animal transforms its owner’s life. In fact, the tone is more downbeat and – be warned – parts of this book are quite upsetting.

Her experience with Freddie inspired Heyward to go back to university to study animal behaviour. Her view on how confused dogs are by our attempts to ‘train’ them, and how little effort we make to see things from their point of view, instead branding them ‘disobedient’, ‘bad’ or ‘dangerous’, makes for uncomfortable reading.

Heyward discovers something that most pet owners eventually all understand: ‘heartbreak is a thing that’s almost always part of living with an animal’.