An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs. Mikita Brottman

      An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs

      Mikita Brottman

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2014

      First published in Great Britain as The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs by William Collins in 2014

      First published in the United States by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2014

      Copyright © 2014 by Mikita Brottman

      Cover photograph © Tim Platt/Getty Images

      Illustrations by Davina “Psamophis” Falcão

      Mikita Brottman asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780007548057

      Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007548064

      Version: 2015-09-08

       A dog starv’d at his master’s gate

       Predicts the ruin of the state.

      —WILLIAM BLAKE,

      “Auguries of Innocence” (1803)

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Epigraph

       Introduction

      1. Atma

      2. Bull’s-eye

      3. Caesar III

      4. Douchka

      5. Eos

6. Flush

7. Giallo

8. Hachikō

       9. Issa

       10. Jip

       11. Kashtanka

       12. Lump

       13. Mathe

       14. Nero

       15. Ortipo

       16. Peritas

       17. Quinine

       18. Robber

       19. Shock

       20. Tulip

       21. Ulisses

       22. Venom

       23. Wessex

       24. Xolotl

       25. Yofi

       26. Zémire

       Postscript

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Also by Mikita Brottman

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      “UNABLE TO LOVE each other,” writes the British author J. R. Ackerley, “the English turn naturally to dogs.” I acquired my first dog when I was close to forty, and my eight-year love affair with this willful and charismatic animal has led me to wonder whether it’s true, as Ackerley suggests, that there’s something repressed and neurotic about those whose deepest feelings are for their dogs. Thinking about this question has led me not to an answer but to further questions. Is my relationship with Grisby nourishing or dysfunctional, commonplace or unique? Do we choose and train dogs in our own image? Why are some people drawn to poodles, some to bulldogs, and others to dachshunds? Can devotion to a dog become pathological? Why is a woman’s love for her lapdogs considered embarrassingly sentimental when men bond so proudly with their well-built hounds? Married women admit they sleep with their dogs, and married men deny it; someone’s not telling the truth, but who’s lying, and why? What drives some people to wash their hands obsessively after any canine contact while others are happy to share flatware with Fido? And why is “Fido” still used as the generic dog’s name when it’s been out of fashion for almost a hundred years?

      Each of this book’s twenty-six chapters is devoted to a particular human-canine bond. Some of these couplings are drawn from literature, where dogs are generally symbolic, often standing as their owners’ avatars, sharing similar characteristics or drawing attention to vital clues that the human characters have overlooked. Other pairings are drawn from history, art, folklore, and philosophy, and cover a broad span of history (320 BC to the 1970s) and geography (Rome, Russia, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Malta, Greece, the United States), but particular attention is paid to dog-and-owner pairs from Victorian Britain. According to authorities on the subject, late-nineteenth-century England saw the origins of modern dog breeding and pet keeping, which led to an increase in the depiction of dogs in art and literature, as well as their increase in everyday life, among all classes and age groups.

      Far apart as these human-dog stories may be in time and place, their themes are remarkably consistent. Exceptional dogs, it turns out, often have traits in common, and the most familiar of these is miraculous loyalty. History and folklore are full of dogs that won’t leave their owners’ dead or injured bodies; dogs that spend every night at their masters’ graves; dogs that drown themselves in grief, conceal themselves under their mistresses’ skirts as they’re led to the scaffold, or travel thousands of miles to make their way home. The fact that such tales have become folklore does not mean they are not also true. Dogs are remarkably faithful creatures. Upon further investigation, however, these miraculously loyal dogs often turn out to be rather less miraculous than their stories suggest, though no less interesting for that.

      Many of the dogs described in this book will be unfamiliar to the reader, and I’m especially interested in these