An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs
Mikita Brottman

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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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.

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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 lesser-known dogs. A lot has been said and written already about iconic, mediagenic dogs like Lassie, Old Yeller, and Rin Tin Tin. In An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs, I draw attention to dogs that inhabit the margins or lurk on the periphery, dogs that have been overlooked. As is so often the case, those who are allowed behind the scenes or on the sidelines (children, servants, janitors, busboys) often get to see and experience things that are normally kept from public view. Partly because they can’t speak but mainly because they don’t judge, dogs have unfettered access to the backstage of life. Imagine what Prince Albert’s dog Eos could have told us about Queen Victoria, or what Freud’s dog Yofi might have learned from his master’s patients. A dog in the room is a silent observer, a witness to the human drama: it sees all, smells all, and says nothing.

All the dogs described in this book are, like Grisby, exceptional. This obviously raises the question of what makes an exceptional dog. The answer is simple. What makes a dog exceptional is its owner. In other words, any dog can be exceptional if it’s loved enough. We see our dogs through human eyes; this is the transformative power of projection. In order to understand this process more fully, I don my psychoanalytic hat and, taking a cue from Freud (another late-life dog lover), I put the human-canine relationship on the couch (never mind the dog hair). The way we think about our dogs is infinitely revealing. Rich insights can be gained from observing how people name their dogs, create personalities for them, address them, speak on their behalf, even from the way they pick up after them. For some, a dog is an alter ego; for others, a substitute for a child; other people use their dogs to keep the world at bay, to heal wounds inflicted in infancy, or to recapture their playful, preverbal selves.

An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs is structured like a leisurely stroll in the park. We begin with Atma, the name given by the misanthropic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to his succession of standard poodles, and continue alphabetically until we arrive at Zémire, the adored pet of the French poet and intellectual Madame Antoinette Deshoulières. However, the path is not always direct. In this book, as on all our walks, Grisby sometimes leads us on sidetracks, following scents, sniffing out clues and connections, retracing our steps, taking us into the realms of folklore, semiotics, philosophy, and zoology. Sometimes he seems to be leading us astray, but as long as we’re together, we’ll never be lost. Everywhere, every day, he shows me how dog is the mirror of man.

[1]
ATMA

THE FAMOUSLY MISANTHROPIC German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spent twenty-seven years of his life living alone, averse to human company, but like other notorious malcontents, he was deeply attached to his dogs. Throughout his life, from his student days at Göttingen until his death at Frankfurt am Main, Schopenhauer owned a succession of standard poodles—a famously loyal, active, and intelligent breed. “To anyone who needs lively entertainment for the purpose of banishing the dreariness of solitude,” he wrote in 1851, “I recommend a dog, in whose moral and intellectual qualities he will almost always experience delight and satisfaction.”

Though he remained loyal to the standard poodle, the philosopher’s companions varied in color. The dog he owned in the 1840s was white, and the one he owned at his death—and for which he provided generously in his will—was brown. According to the few guests who visited his home, Schopenhauer was deeply attentive to these animals; though his daily routine was rigid, he always made sure his poodles got regular constitutionals. He even concerned himself with their daily amusements. One colleague recalled being in the middle of an earnest conversation with the philosopher at his home when they were interrupted by the music of a regimental band passing the window, at which point Schopenhauer got up and moved his poodle’s seat closer, to give him a better view of the procession.

The philosopher was ahead of his time in his concern for animal suffering. “When I see how man misuses the dog, his best friend; how he ties up this intelligent animal with a chain,” he wrote, “I feel the deepest sympathy with the brute and burning indignation against its master.” Yet curiously, while he respected his dogs as individuals, Schopenhauer gave every one of them the same name: Atma (though his last dog—the brown one—generally went by the nickname “Butz”). Atma is the Hindu word for the universal soul (or, as Schopenhauer interpreted it, the impersonal, primordial, eternally renewed force of nature). Historians of philosophy have suggested this naming habit may be connected to Schopenhauer’s theory of individuality, and his notion that a particular type of animal expresses the Platonic ideal of its kind.

It may, on the other hand, have been something more familiar: an attempt to forestall the pain of loss. This is why the authors Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas gave their new dog—also, coincidentally, a standard poodle—the same name as the dog they’d just lost: Basket. The first Basket was an elegant creature acquired by Toklas at a Parisian dog show, and so named because she immediately pictured him carrying a basket of flowers in his mouth (a skill he never fully mastered). The poodle was treated like a young prince, bathed daily in sulfur water for the benefit of his sensitive skin. Stein let him sit in her lap when she wrote (“on Mount Gertrude,” said Alice), and she claimed the rhythm of the dog’s breathing taught her the essential difference between sentences and paragraphs. When Basket died in 1937, the bereaved women, on the advice of a friend, acquired a similar-looking dog, and gave him the same name.

When the second Basket arrived in 1938, the couple were living in France. Despite widespread rationing, Basket II didn’t go hungry. The Nazis’ theory of racial purity extended even to pets; as long as a dog had a documented pedigree, it received a food allowance. Basket II lived fourteen years, six past the death of Stein herself, and when he died, Alice B. Toklas was left alone. “His going has stunned me,” she wrote to her friend Carl Van Vechten. “For some time I have realized how much I depended upon him and so it is the beginning of living for the rest of my days without anyone who is dependent on me for anything.” She was too old, she reasoned, to acquire a Basket III.

It’s natural that a bereaved pet owner should want to stave off the pain of loss by acquiring a second dog that resembles the original, and while I can understand the impulse to name a new dog after a beloved old one, the scheme has a major flaw. In my experience, whatever their breed, dogs are unique and as individual as humans, and you can’t make a gentle dog tough just by calling him Butch. Ideally, we should wait until we’ve gotten a sense of a dog’s personality before picking out a name, but puppy owners, like would-be parents, usually have a name in mind long before they lay eyes on their new arrival.

Grisby is the first and only dog I’ve ever owned, and I had his name picked out before he was even born. One evening, my partner, David, and I watched a French movie from 1954 called Touchez Pas au Grisbi (translation: Don’t Touch the Loot). The film is about a band of world-weary French gangsters who sit around in a bar planning a heist and mumbling about le grisbi (old-fashioned French criminal slang whose equivalent is something like “loot” or “booty”). As I recall, we both thought the word would be an appropriate name for the dog we were planning to acquire, not only because it is French (though we’ve Anglicized the spelling) but also because it’s a tough, macho way of saying “treasure,” perfect for a little French bulldog.

The first time I ever laid eyes on one of these creatures, I was walking through Greenwich Village, which of all areas in the United States contains perhaps the greatest concentration of the breed. I was immediately intrigued and enchanted by this odd little animal, with its flat snout and prominent ears. I wanted one so badly it hurt, though it would be another six years before I could fit a dog into my life. Then, when the time was right, I logged on to PuppyFind.com, and there was “Oliver”—a tiny dog with enormous ears and an endearingly inquisitive expression. He was, I thought, the sweetest-looking puppy I’d ever seen, and he’d be weaned by the middle of August, which was exactly when we’d be ready for him. I e-mailed David the photo, though it was a symbolic gesture only—I already knew he was the one. By the end of the day, our deposit to the breeders had been paid, and “Oliver”—all ears—was all ours.

As of the time of writing, Grisby is almost eight years old, and he tips the scales at thirty-two pounds. His color is officially designated “fawn piebald,” which means he has very pretty markings of light brown and white, about half of each. His fur is short and soft, and his large, expressive ears are light brown on the back, dark pink inside, and can seem almost translucent in the sunlight. He has a stocky, muscular body, no snout to speak of, and no tail. His eyes are deep brown, and one of them has a strabismus, meaning that it looks slightly to the left. His nose and mouth area are black, and like most bulldogs, he has a pronounced underbite. His mouth is wide and, when he’s trotting along with his pink tongue hanging out, forms a permanent smile. His face is joyful, his eyes bright, his expression either playful or craven.

I could never have imagined that Grisby’s name, chosen almost at random, would come to be so full of meaning for me. “You will likely call your dog’s name over 50,000 times,” advises the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog. “Pick a name you like!” In his book Bashan and I, the German writer Thomas Mann writes that of all the pleasures he shares with his dog, none is so great for him as addressing the creature over and over again by his name. “Bashan” is the only word that Mann’s devoted and playful setter seems to understand, and his master loves driving him into crazy fits of ecstasy reminding him that not only is his name Bashan but he is Bashan, a truth the dog never seems to tire of. Grisby feels the same way; he seems to love his special name as much as I love to say it. Of course, now that we’ve been together for eight years, I can’t separate the name from the animal it signifies, and I’m irritated when people who’ve known him for years still haven’t grasped it, calling him Grigsby, Bigsby, Gribley, or Grimsby.

We name our dogs the way we name our children; we name the child we imagine having—the child we want—rather than the child we get. Bearing this in mind, there’s a lot to learn about people from the names they give their dogs. Some prefer a name they’ve heard before; others pick something they consider unique, as I did. As with baby names, fashions in dog names go in cycles. In ancient Roman households, it was trendy to give Greek names to your hounds (and your slaves). The most popular Roman dog names were descriptive: Ferox (“Savage”), Melampus (“Blackfoot”), Patricius (“Noble”), and Skylax (“Puppy”). Greek dogs were rarely saddled with the polysyllabic names of their owners (Agamemnon, Olympiodorus). Xenophon, a Greek historian who wrote about hounds in the fourth century BC, maintained that the best names are short, consisting of no more than one or two syllables, so the dogs may be easily called. Popular names were those that expressed speed, courage, and strength, such as Aura (“Breeze”), Horme (“Eager”), Korax (“Raven”), and Labros (“Fierce”).

In the United States, until around fifty years ago, dogs were generally working animals rather than household pets, and their names reflected their tasks and talents: Hunter, Skipper, Pilot, Sailor, Shep. Simple, one-syllable names like Buck, Lad, Jack, and Pal are still popular for working dogs; they’re easy for the animals to learn, and the owners to yell. Grandiose names like Caesar, Nero, and Napoleon have always been in fashion among purebred pets (and people), and descriptive names—Patch, Jet, Domino, Ginger—are still sometimes heard, though not as much as they once were. Traditional dog names like Rover and Fido are also out of fashion; these days, dogs seldom rove, and few of us speak Latin.

Today, at least in Europe and the United States, very few dogs are kept as working animals. Most pooches live in the home and sleep in their owners’ beds; their only task is to provide affection and attention, and they succeed like never before. According to a recent survey, 15 percent of British dog owners consider their pet more important than their cousin, and 6 percent confessed they even preferred their pet to their own partner. Sixteen percent listed their dogs as household members in the 2011 British census, some listing a dog as their “son” on the official form. The deeper the bond we form with our dogs, it seems, the more we make them over in our own image; in keeping with their role as full family members, dogs are now commonly given human names. Today, for the first time in history, the same names turn up in top-ten lists for both babies and dogs: Chloe, Bella, and Sophie for girls; Charlie, Jack, and Max for boys. The same trend is common in Europe, except in the more strictly Catholic countries, where it’s considered sacrilegious to call “soulless animals” by human names.

One fashion that hasn’t changed over time is the tendency for macho guys to give their tough dogs fighting names. Popular names for male pit bull terriers include Tyson, Diesel, and Tank. Other common names include Chaos, Sherman, and Panzer. In Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, Heathcliff’s bulldogs, which he warns are “not kept for a pet,” are named Skulker and Throttler. It’s not surprising that he mistreats them, nor that he almost kills a spaniel, nor that a child raised in his home is seen “hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway.” Puppies that recover from such misfortunes are invariably named Lucky or Chance. Rocky is the most popular name for dogs that bite, according to San Francisco Health Department records, closely followed by Mugsy, Max, and Zeke.

We fall in love with individual dogs, but it’s difficult to separate the dog from the breed, and it’s not unusual, with dogs as with lovers, that we should fall repeatedly for the same kind. The standard poodle has always been popular with literary and philosophical types. In addition to Schopenhauer and Gertrude Stein, poodle lovers include Victor Hugo, Lillian Hellman, George Sand, Norman Mailer—who once got into a street brawl with a man who called his poodle “a queer”—and John Steinbeck, whose standard poodle Charley was his close companion for many years, and costar of his 1962 book Travels with Charley. However, outranking even the poodle among literary and artistic types is the dachshund (see LUMP and QUININE), breed of choice for Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Dorothy Parker, G. K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Picasso, and David Hockney, among others. Dachshunds are said to be complex, vulnerable, and fussy, and they’re often described as having an “artistic temperament.” Like dog, like master.

In light of my feelings for Grisby, I find it hard to imagine owning any breed other than the bulldog. As the only dog I’ve ever known, Grisby is my Atma, the universal soul of dog, the ideal essence, which, according to Schopenhauer’s Platonic notion of true forms, exists both before and after each imperfect manifestation. Plato would disagree; he’d claim that only the idea of the dog is real, and Grisby is a flawed copy of the unchangeable and original essence. But how could he know? As far as I’m aware, Plato didn’t have a warm bulldog on his lap, licking his knees as he wrote.

[2]
BULL’S-EYE

BULL’S-EYE IS THE dog belonging to Bill Sikes, the vicious thug in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The dog is often assumed to be a bull terrier (the 2007 Random House Vintage edition of Oliver Twist has a white bull terrier on the cover, and the current Wikipedia entry for Bill Sikes claims that “he owns a bull terrier named Bull’s Eye”). The source of the error is probably the 1968 musical film Oliver!, in which the role of Bull’s-eye was played by a barrel-bodied bull terrier named Butch. In the Dickens novel, however, no breed is mentioned; Bull’s-eye is described as “a white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty different places.” Early illustrators like George Cruikshank drew Sikes’s companion as a scrappy, underfed mongrel. Incidentally, the modern, long-faced bull terrier is a hybrid that didn’t exist in 1838, when Dickens was writing Oliver Twist.

In the novel, man and dog are bound together, both victims of a cruel upbringing, both unpredictably violent. The two brutes share more than similar-sounding names; Bull’s-eye has “faults of temper in common with his owner,” yet the pair are inseparable, and Bull’s-eye, who sleeps at Sikes’s feet or by his side, is always ready to obey his master’s whims. The Artful Dodger describes Bull’s-eye as the “downiest of the lot” in Fagin’s establishment, adding: “He wouldn’t so much as bark in a witness-box for fear of committing himself; no, not if you tied him up in one and left him there without wittles for a fortnight.” In return, Sikes constantly denigrates his dog, calling him a “stupid brute,” a “born devil.” He repays Bull’s-eye’s loyalty with ill-treatment, shaking him cruelly, even assaulting him with a hot poker and a clasp knife. In spite of all this, at a word or even a look from his master, Bull’s-eye is ready to serve him.

Most of the time, Bill Sikes treats his girlfriend, Nancy, the way he treats his dog. In the end, he murders her in a fit of rage, with Bull’s-eye as a mute witness to the crime (Bill fears the dog’s bloody paw prints will “carry out new evidences of the crime into the streets”). The creature becomes a dark reminder of his master’s guilt, and unable to shake the dog off his trail, Sikes attempts to drown him. Fortunately, the mutt has the sense to slink reproachfully away, eventually—and accidentally—leading the police to his master’s lair. While on the run from an angry mob Sikes hangs himself; it’s not clear whether his death is accidental or intentional. At the sight of his master hanging from a chimney top, in another ambiguous act of anger or possibly remorse, Bull’s-eye hurls himself at the dead man’s shoulders, and he, too, comes to a sorry end. Missing his aim, he lands in a ditch and, “striking his head against a stone, dashe[s] out his brains.” This is how loyalty is repaid.

Bull’s-eye may be the most long-suffering dog in Dickens, but he’s not the only one with a brutal master. In Little Dorrit, the indolent Henry Gowan goes nowhere without Lion, his enormous Newfoundland. Lion is gentle and affectionate. When he encountered Gowan’s fiancée, Pet Meagles, after a short absence, he “put his great paws on her arm and laid his head against her dear bosom.” After Pet and Gowan are married, however, Pet learns her new husband is not only lazy but also horribly cruel. When Lion caused undue alarm, his master “seized the dog with both hands by the collar,” then “felled him with a blow on the head, and standing over him, struck him many times severely with the heel of his boot, so that his mouth was presently bloody.” Poor Lion is “deeply ashamed of having caused them this alarm,” and in order to escape Gowan’s assault, he crawls along the ground “to the feet of his mistress,” but Gowan is unforgiving, kicking him over and over again until he’s dead.

Like his master, Bull’s-eye lives a harsh life, but that doesn’t mean he’s not happy. Contentment, for people as well as dogs, seems to depend largely on familiar relationships and their accustomed dynamics, however difficult they may be for outsiders to understand. We like what we know. Some dogs—at least in literature—do seem to be both deprived and content, such as the mangy dog belonging to Meursault’s elderly neighbor, Salamano, in Camus’s The Stranger. For eight years, this old man beats and insults his dog; then, every night before going to bed, rubs him tenderly with ointment for his skin disease. “He was bad-tempered,” Salamano tells Meursault when his dog goes missing. “We’d have a run-in every now and then. But he was a good dog just the same.”

In the case of Bill Sikes and Bull’s-eye, the dog stands as a kind of avatar for the man—a common literary conceit. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the first sign of Mr. Rochester’s presence is the sight of his faithful companion Pilot, a “great black and white long-haired dog” that Jane, encountering on a dark night, first mistakes for a Gytrash, “a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head.” At the end of the novel, Jane returns to find that Mr. Rochester has lost his sight in the fire that destroyed his home and can’t tell who she is—but Pilot pricks up his ears when she enters the room; “then he jumped up with a yelp and a whine, and bounded toward me.”

At other times, the master’s dog has a more subtle function. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Flossie, Oliver Mellors’s spaniel, always heralds her master’s approach. Before long, Lady Chatterley’s heart starts to flutter whenever she sees or hears the dog. Flossie is an indicator of Mellors’s presence, and stands guard during the lovers’ trysts. She’s a working sheepdog, a worthy companion, and such dogs, unlike the lady’s lapdog, are rarely dismissed as pets or playthings. According to the French author Colette Audry, “workmen are always ready to make rude jokes about poodles and basset hounds and their doting woman owners, but wolfhounds, Alsatians, and similar breeds they take very seriously indeed.”

English bulldogs are one of the breeds men take seriously, owing, presumably, to the breed’s apparent toughness and stamina. In 2012, according to a survey conducted by a British men’s grooming brand, the English bulldog was voted “the manliest dog on the planet.” It’s hardly surprising, then, that all kinds of macho objects and activities should be named after the sturdy-looking creature. There are Bulldog jeans and Bulldog knives; there’s Bulldog Gin, Bulldog Hot Sauce, and Bulldog Hardware. There are hundreds of sports teams named the Bulldogs. Vehicles named after the breed include a British fighter aircraft, a Royal Navy ship, an armored personnel carrier, and a German tractor. Could any dog be more butch?

Ironically, the English bulldog is a rather delicate beast, docile and affectionate, prone to health problems and easily tired. His small French cousin, on the other hand, although culturally coded as feminine (see ISSA), is muscular, dominant, and tough as a little tank, not to mention stubborn. Grisby was not the most obstinate dog in his obedience class—that dubious honor went to a terminally intractable terrier whom everyone, including his genteel owner, referred to as “the Nazi”—but he certainly placed a close second. Sometimes he did what was asked of him, but his “training” took only until we got home, whereupon he’d jump out of the car, barge rudely ahead, push through the front door, and run into the house. As our obedience instructor kept reminding us, going to class is the easy part; the hard part is reinforcing the lessons at home. She was, I thought, infinitely patient and, I was pleased to find, had no beef with affection and rewards. At first, I was worried she might endorse the techniques promoted by Cesar Millan, who insists that we assert dominance over our dogs instead of treating them like babies.

Personally, I don’t believe you need to act like an alpha dog at home, nor do I think badly trained dogs will always try to assert themselves over strangers. Still, I do understand the importance of consistency, and I realize Grisby is sometimes disobedient because, unable to bring myself to punish him, I’ve been unpredictable in my demands and rewards. In this respect, David has been—and continues to be—the better master. He’s firm, consistent, and not afraid to lay down the law. When—as sometimes happens—Grisby slips out of our apartment and runs into the hall, one strong word from David can make him skid to a halt, lower his ears, and submit to the leash. If I’m the one reprimanding him, however, he keeps still until I approach, then jumps up like a jack-in-the-box and runs off, throwing me a backward glance that says, “So long, sucker!”

In this way, perhaps, David’s relationship with Grisby is healthier than mine. With me, Grisby is enmeshed; with David, he knows his place. In other words, David has what most people would probably consider to be an appropriate kind of relationship with his dog. He loves Grisby, worries when he’s sick, enjoys having him around, but doesn’t miss him—doesn’t even think about him, doesn’t even really notice—when he’s not there. He has his own pet names for Grisby—Bright Eyes, Big Boy, Señor—that are affectionate but not infantilizing. It seems ridiculous for me to be jealous, but sometimes I wonder whether, as males, David and Grisby have a bond I’ll never share. It’s tempting to romanticize the man-dog connection, and to overlook the fact that it can be instrumental or exploitative, or that it usually involves questions of aggression and control.

These issues appear most overtly in the hypermale world of dogfighting, a practice that goes back to ancient times. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Babylonians all employed fighting dogs on the battlefield. During the Roman invasion of Britain, the conquering legions were impressed by what early historians referred to as the pugnaces britanniae: the fighting dogs of Britain. The specific breed of these ferocious, battle-ready beasts is unknown, but in light of an early reference to them as “broad-mouthed,” it’s widely believed they were remote ancestors of the modern-day mastiff.

Soon after their invasion, the Romans began to import British fighting dogs, even appointing an officer whose job was to select especially pugnacious animals to send abroad. Some were trained to fight in battle; others were turned into gladiators and pitted against bulls, bears, and wild elephants in the Colosseum, a precursor to modern bullfighting. Later, the pugnaces britanniae were used in bearbaiting, a “sport” that flourished in the sixteenth century and was especially popular among English noblemen (ironically, it’s the blue bloods who pursue blood sports most earnestly). By the early nineteenth century, the pastime had become less common, owing to the increasing scarcity and rising cost of bears (as well as growing concerns about cruelty to animals), and in 1835 bear- and bullbaiting were both outlawed by an Act of Parliament. Henceforth, these “sports” were replaced by the cheaper, legal alternative of dog-on-dog combat, and fighting breeds were crossbred to create agile and vicious creatures capable of brawling for hours at a time.

Shortly before the American Civil War, English fighting dogs were imported to the United States, where they were mated with native breeds. Dogfighting quickly became a popular spectator and betting sport in the United States, and the United Kennel Club created formal rules and sanctioned referees. Fights were held in taverns and halls, and railroads would sometimes offer special fares to passengers traveling to well-publicized events. The observer of a Brooklyn dogfight in 1876 described its spectators as a “villainous-looking set … more inhuman in appearance than the dogs … a crowd of brutal wretches whose conduct stamps them as beneath the struggling beasts.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most dogfighters were men in typically macho working-class professions: police officers, soldiers, and firefighters. When dogfighting became illegal in the 1930s and ’40s, it was driven underground, where it continues to thrive, despite its being classed as a felony in all fifty states.

“Let dogs delight to bark and bite,” begins a hymn by the English theologian Isaac Watts. This is the line usually taken by defenders of legalized dogfighting—that dogs naturally exult in their strength and are eager for combat; that fighting, in other words, is “in their nature.” I know there are fighting rings in Baltimore, and I sometimes worry Grisby might be stolen for use as bait. Pet theft is apparently on the rise in the city, though since it’s lumped in with other kinds of property theft, it’s difficult to know how widespread it really is.

Such theft is certainly not as common as it was in nineteenth-century London, when substantial ransoms would be asked for the animals’ safe return. The most notorious of these mercenary pet pilferers was a gang whose members called themselves “the Fancy.” Their modus operandi was to wait until the dog was momentarily unattended, lure the unsuspecting creature—usually with liver mixed with myrrh or opium, or sometimes with a bitch in heat—then shove the poor animal in a sack and disappear into the crowd. When the gang’s demands weren’t met, the dog’s paws or even its head would be delivered to its owner. Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, was kidnapped three times by the Fancy, and each time she unhesitatingly and immediately paid the ransom (see FLUSH). Who can blame her?

Still, when I asked an animal control officer whether I was taking a risk by leaving Grisby tied up outside a Starbucks, he looked amused. “No risk at all,” he assured me, condescendingly. “Anybody that’s involved in illegal activities is going to want to stay under the radar as much as possible. If they wanted dogs as bait, they’re not going to steal one off the street. For one thing, you can just go and get a mutt from the pound—this city’s full of people trying to get rid of dogs they can’t afford to keep. Another thing—if you steal a purebred, it’s probably going to have a microchip and it’s going to be worth some money, which bumps it up from a theft to a felony. Nobody’s going to take those kinds of risks for what’s at stake.”

I felt foolish. When you think about it, the idea of gangsters emerging from the ghetto to steal “our” innocent pets is really absurd; what’s more, it bespeaks all kinds of race and class anxieties. These sensitive issues also saturate the discourse around pit bull “rescue” campaigns, in which dogs are taken from young black men in the city’s run-down neighborhoods, inoculated, bathed, “altered,” given friendly names, adopted by middle-class families, and taken to live in the suburbs. We do to the dogs what we really want to do to the barbarians who breed them: make them submit.

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