ANYONE who has owned a dog — and, especially, if they’ve had to put one to sleep — won’t need to be convinced of the extraordinary bond that exists between humans and canines. It is a relationship revealed here to stretch way back into the mists of antiquity; a dogs’ history that proves to be a microcosm of the human world that they inhabit.
They have been a cheap form of labour: my heart lurched at the description of the 16th-century turnspit dogs, noted for their ugliness and menial purpose and put to sweltering kitchen work. Medieval society saw keeping a pet for pleasure as morally dubious, while 18th-century society personified them as loyal servants: “Poor Tray desires no other Reward for his Services than a little Food and that he may have the Pleasure of walking out sometimes with his Master or any Body in the Family.”
It is riveting history: a book stuffed with knowledge and quietly radiating affection for the author’s own dog, Cassie. But it is a narrative that doesn’t hesitate to expose dark aspects, which include the influence of the fear of rabies, and the elitism of dog-breeding, which regarded mongrel dogs as degenerate. Even eugenics came into play here.
Wellcome CollectionLouis Pasteur, inventor of the first rabies treatment, “is shown here subduing a rabid dog, thus easing rabies anxieties”, writes the author. From the book
There are the legends — oh, Greyfriars Bobby! cries my heart; the influential films Lady and the Tramp and Lassie Come Home; the rise of animal protectionists. Dog food became an edible symbol of the human-canine bond, after James Spratt, an American in London in 1860, spotted dogs eating ship’s biscuits, a sight that led him to invent pet food. Loving your dog meant feeding them Spratt’s biscuits, the author observes.
Cassie, a Bedlington-whippet cross, is a modern, Western, non-working dog, whose position in the author’s family is “emotional and companionable”. The collar says it all.
Collared: How we made the modern dog
Chris Pearson
Profile £18.99
(978-1-80081-641-1)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09
