My dogs are very special, just as your dogs must be very special. They show affection, they are interesting, and they are amusing. They are not amazing, for they are just regular companion dogs. For amazing dogs, consult _Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities_ (Cornell University Press) by Jan Bondeson. I bet your dogs do not, as the dogs here do, make a show of multiplying numbers or playing dominoes. I bet your dogs do not play musical instruments, roast meat, converse by speaking German, or travel the railways as the wanderlust strikes them. I bet your dogs have never saved anyone's life, nor have they been the source of legends. It's OK, my dogs have done none of this, either, and are still fine dogs, but not amazing. Bondeson, a medical doctor who has written frequently about oddities like the two-headed boy and the efforts of our forebears to avoid the horrors of being buried alive, has done wonderful research to bring us these amazing dogs, and includes many period illustrations. Repeatedly the most amazing thing about these dogs is how ready humans are to believe their dogs capable of incredible feats.
Take, for instance, the story of Greyfriars Bobby. There really was a Skye terrier named Bobby in the 1860s in the Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh. Far from refusing to leave his graveside post, though, he would knock off his graveyard shift to grab lunch at a nearby inn every day; some less romantic viewers said he was loyal not to the master's grave, but to the daily free lunch. As for the master's grave, there seems to have been no such thing, just a dog with a comfortable churchyard home. As Bondeson shows, the strongest argument against the dog keeping a grave watch, an activity that is truly undoglike and unlikely to allow the dog to prosper, is that the "Dog on the Master's Grave" story is a legend that turns up in Ancient Greece and Rome, in France, in Norway, and all over the world in many eras. The legend just happened to have the sentimental appeal prized by the Victorians. There is no debunking the legend of Railway Jack, a fox terrier who lived at the railway station at Lewes, for Jack's adventures are well documented. He lived at Lewes, but he called the entire rail system his home, hopping trains as his fancy took him. He might even go to Paris or Dieppe for a weekend. "Jack knew all the local railway stations, and the principal London ones; he had friends everywhere. There was the Brown Dog, who had no real presence until he died in 1903. He had been dissected while he was alive, and the medical staff who did so said he was under full anesthesia, but the antivivisectionists said he was not, and brought the doctors to court. The doctors won the case, but the Brown Dog inspired the antivivisectionists, who put up a statue of the dog in a park in radical Battersea. This brought on the Brown Dog riots in Trafalgar Square, with hundreds of medical students battling hundreds of police. Bondeson's amazing chapter on the "sport" of rat-killing features a few champion dogs, like Billy, a bulldog-terrier cross, who in 1822 was wagered at the Westminster ratting pit to dispatch a hundred rats in ten minutes. Billy won his bet, killing the one hundred rats in the pit in which he had been placed just eight and three quarter minutes before, a world record at the time and one which would stand until he beat it himself. There were strictly enforced rules in this sport because the sums wagered could be high. A sample of rats would be examined before a match, for instance, to ensure that laudanum had not been used to make them easy catches, and since rats sometimes played dead, rules had to be made about how many rats were allowed to "come back to life" after a match.
There is a chapter here on turnspits, a breed now extinct because their niche of existence is gone. They were used to power a wheel (like a gigantic version of those in hamster cages) that would turn the spit on which was a slab of beef before the fire. Mechanical spits eventually took over, and the dogs had no work. "The only use for a turnspit dog," writes Bondeson, "was in the kitchen dog-wheel, since their ugly looks and morose temperaments made them unattractive pets," so now they are gone forever. There is a chapter on Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, but it is outshown by a splendid chapter on dogs on the stage. Shakespeare wrote the most famous part for a dog, Crab, in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, but the Victorians enjoyed dog stars who would appear in plays written especially for them. The most famous of the stage dogs was Carlo, who would rescue drowning children, attack villains, and so on if he kept to the script; but being a temperamental and attention-seeking Newfoundland, Carlo would adlib, and sometimes people showed up at sequential performances to see what naughtiness he would next perform. Another chapter tells of how the Nazis experimented with dogs that could communicate by tapping out words with their paws or by imitating human speech, by which the dogs could, if the plans were not foolish, have been turned against Britain. There was a cult to venerate St. Guinefort, who, the story goes, was a dog martyred in France in the 13th century; the Catholic Church preferred human saints, and suppressed the cult, although some still honored the dog saint seven hundred years later. The dogs are amazing, one chapter after another, but most amazing of all is all the roles in which we cast them, and how cheerfully they go along with our often peculiar plans.
