Your pampered pooch wouldn’t have lasted five minutes!
Gazing at his Bedlington whippet, Cassie, living her best life as an adored family pet in contemporary Britain, Chris Pearson, professor of environmental history at the University of Liverpool, wondered what kind of life she’d have lived if she’d been born 100 years earlier.
Brace yourself. Because the sum of historical canine misery that Pearson faced up to in his research is overwhelming. This book is not for the faint-hearted, nor for anyone who can’t bear to think of a dog suffering. There are an unsettlingly large number of entries under ‘cruelty’ in the index.
The harsh life of the Victorian Dog
Pearson surmises that Cassie would probably have been shivering in the dank woodland of 19th-century Cheshire after an exhausting day of poaching.
But it could have been much worse.
The dogs of history were crucified, hanged, shot or rounded up into dog pounds to be killed (‘culled’) in large batches. Cities such as London, Constantinople and Paris were overrun with emaciated strays feared by the population for their spreading of rabies. Drastic action was taken, hence the rounding-up and killing.
From the Middle Ages onwards, the luckier dogs – the ones kept as domestic animals – were put to work, turning spits all day in tavern kitchens, poaching, fetching game, or pulling heavy carts. Rather than being classified for how they looked, as dogs began to be when the Kennel Club was founded in 1873, they used to be classified simply by what useful work they could do.
Collared by Chris Pearson is available now from the Mail Bookshop
A medieval handbook instructed that dogs must be given meat only after a successful hunt. Anyone who kept a pet dog purely for pleasure was seen as morally dubious: the dog was consuming food while adding nothing of value to the household. ‘Nothing of value!’ the modern reader retorts. What nonsense! We know the inestimable ‘value’ that the loyalty and companionship of a dog brings to a household.
The medieval Archbishop of Rouen berated the nuns in his local convent for keeping pet dogs, and demanded their immediate removal. One can only imagine those nuns’ sorrow when they saw their dogs being taken away – let alone the desolation of the dogs.
Pearson is fascinating on the creepy way eugenicists justified their racist theories through dog evolution. In the 1870s, a surgeon called Jonathan Hutchinson said that just as modern Europeans were superior to ‘a Fiji’, the wolf was inferior to his ‘ennobled offspring’ the domesticated dog.
Eugenicists claimed that judicious selection was ‘paramount to maintaining and improving human and canine populations’.
His protege Karl Pearson claimed that his breeding of Pekingeses in his laboratory at University College London proved it was possible to transform a once-degenerate breed into a new one characterised by its white coat. He bred albino Pekes with dark-coated Pomeranians, proving that ‘dark imperial subjects could bemade white’. Dog snobbism went hand in hand with racism.
A guide to dog-keeping in India advised owners against letting their dogs ‘get into the habit of hanging around the servants’ quarters’. And people were always snooty about mongrels. Hooray for Frances Power Cobbe, who, in 1895, dared to stand up for them: ‘I rather resent the importance attached to the length of their tails and the precise angles of their noses,’ she said.
Reading this concise, well-researched book will make you gaze at your own dog with relief, when you think of the nasty, brutish and short life it could have been forced to live, and which its ancestors did live.