Dogs And Dog Lovers

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Title:     Dogs And Dog Lovers
Author: Francis Darwin [More Titles by Darwin]

"The more I see of men, the more I like dogs."—ARCHBISHOP WHATELY. {219}

Why is it that some people do not like dogs? There are those who dislike other people's dogs just as they dislike strange children. This is a point of view which is comprehensible though unattractive. Still, in comparison with those who do not like dogs at all this class seem positively amiable. I knew a lady with the most perfect understanding of the qualities of human beings, whether bad or good, yet she had no sympathy with dogs. She would be kind to them, as an external duty to all living things, but a dog had absolutely no place in her heart. What made this blindness seem all the more incomprehensible was the fact that she could love a bullfinch; she could not therefore plead that she loved humanity so much that she had no love left for beings of another sort. After all, it may be that not to care for dogs is no more a blemish than a lack of musical ear, which is not a sign of general dullness of artistic perception since it is found in some poets. We must accordingly allow that not to love dogs is not a sign of a black heart or a debased nature. A dog lover will grant this to be an unavoidable intellectual conclusion, but in the secret corners of his mind he will feel something more hostile than mere Christian pity for these emotionally deformed people. If he holds Erewhonian doctrines he would like to send for the family straightener, and bear with fortitude the punishment inflicted on his friends and relations.

I fear that we, the dog lovers, are, by those who do not share our tastes, held to be unbalanced persons, who intrude their passions on the reasonable and well bred. They object to us as victims of perverted instincts, who talk unknown dog-language in and out of season. It is not clear to me why we care so much for dogs. Is it, in truth, an exaggeration, or an offshoot of that love of the helpless young of our own kind which natural selection develops in social animals? This is not necessarily maternal, as we see in the story of the heroic male baboon, who risked his life in saving a young one from a pack of baying hounds. {220a} Or is it an instinct developed in a hunting tribe—a blind tendency to take good care of the food-providers (at the expense of starving aunts and grandmothers), such as we see among the Fuegians, who explained that, "Doggies catch otters—old women no." {220b}

However this may be, it is I think certain that the love of dogs is an unreasoning passion, having all the force of an instinct. In a story by Miss Wilkins we see how the love even of a cat may come to be regarded as a human right or need. The old woman who had lost her cat (he afterwards emerged half starved from the cellar), rebelled against the will of God. She allowed that the happiness of husband and children was possibly not to be expected by everyone, but "there was cats enough to go all round."

I think it impossible to account for the especial affection that we bear to certain dogs. Dogs are, as I have said, in a degree like our children; they come to us and they have to be tended, fed, and guarded, and in these services we learn to love them. And when our affection is reflected back to us from the thing we love, it gains an especially touching quality. In the case of dogs our affection is certainly not a response to any inherent charm obvious to all the world—and here again they resemble children. The dog I loved best was an inferior Irish terrier, who gave me much trouble and anxiety. He was constantly fighting; he barked fiercely at innocent visitors. He killed chickens, and for this I had to beat him cruelly, tie him up and leave him trembling with a dead victim round his neck, a punishment for which I still feel remorse, though it saved him from being shot as a criminal, and cured him of his murderous tendency for many years. Pat was not a clever dog, and when striving to learn certain simple tricks he used to fall into abysses of miserable stupidity, and give up all hope of winning the biscuit earned by his fellow-dog, a Scotch terrier, with all the intelligent certainty of his nation. Pat had one attractive physical quality; he was perfectly sweet and clean; indeed his adoring family compared his scent to that of new mown hay; he had also a smooth head, which was compared, by one enthusiastic admirer, to a putting-green. He had the attractive and not very common quality of grinning—tucking up his lips and showing the teeth, but producing the effect of a smile, and expressing a shy and apologetic frame of mind.

Pat lived with a bad tempered Scotch terrier called Whisk, whom I liked for his strong character and intellectual acquirements, but I had no great affection for him. He could not bear being spoken to or even looked at while he ate his dinner, and would growl with his mouth full, in a terrific manner, if so disturbed. In the same ferocious spirit he would growl and snap if his basket was accidentally kicked when he was dozing in the evening, and however much we apologised he would take each expression of regret as a fresh insult, and answer them all with growls, which gradually died away in sleep.

We only once had a big dog, and he was not a success though he was an agreeable person. We bought him and his brother, two very fat mastiff puppies, at North Berwick, and brought them south. The one pleasant incident in the journey was the question of a German in Edinburgh station: "Madam, who are these dogs?" We gave away one and kept the other, who bore the magnificent name of Tantallon, soon abbreviated into Tan. He had many friendly habits, but they were on too large a scale for domestic life. He had, for instance, a way of placing a dirty paw on the table cloth at meals, and he knocked down street children by trying to lick their faces and (so rumour said) by wagging his tail. He frightened cab horses into hysterics, and their drivers fell off and claimed damages. He ate with enjoyment the embroidered perambulator-cushion of a neighbour, who was discovered looking on while Tan tore strips off the cushion with that powerful upward movement of the head and neck which few cushions can withstand. Finally poor Tan had to be given away, and was lost sight of.

These rough outlines of the characters of some of our dogs are meant to show that the reasons for loving dogs are not patent, and that we cannot complain if the words, used by a little girl in Punch towards a couple of earwigs, should be applied to us and our dogs, "Nasty creatures! I cannot think how they can care for each other."

Stevenson's essay {223} on The Character of Dogs is not entirely satisfactory. It is surely a one-sided view of the dog that "he is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth." It is hardly possible that he should be vainer than man; and in the dog, vanity is a far simpler and more lovable thing than the complex and offensive passion in his master. His greed for notice and his jealousy are part of his great love for his master. I do not remember that Stevenson ever speaks of the passionate love (not for mankind, but for one special person) which burns in the heart of a dog. It is a singular omission—and I cannot but think it intentional. If so he was wise, for it certainly does not lend itself to the manner which Stevenson adopts towards dogs. No doubt I may be led into sentimentality and general wearifulness in attempting to describe what seems to me the most striking characteristic of dogs—their great and enduring power of loving. It may be that "the day of an intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and laborious communication of falsehood." But he does not lie when he says quite plainly how greatly he loves his master. Nor do I agree that a small spoiled dog would prate interminably, and still about himself. I think he would say, "I love you" rather often, but that bears repetition. I know a Schipperke whose main interest in life is his dinner, but when his mistress was ill he had only two desires, to lie on her bed and to bite the doctor for approaching her. He had to be dragged out for a walk instead of eagerly begging for one. Was this an elaborate falsehood? Was it pretence? Was it conventionality?

A dog can hardly be expected to plead guilty when detected in crime. He jumps off the forbidden bed when he hears someone coming, and, being unaware that the warm place on the counterpane will betray him, he assumes a calm and happy air. But this is a lie so natural that I for one cannot blame the liar.

In my life with dogs I have felt much more clearly their desire to speak, and to speak truth, than the wish to deceive. I had an old Scotch terrier, who in his youth, before I knew him, had been called Nigel, no doubt because he was black and small, but as he grew up he somehow acquired the uncouth name of Scrubbins. At one stage of his career he was condemned to death for eczema. I begged him off, and he lived some five years with me, and was cured of his eczema by the devoted care of a servant. He was a dog of large heart, who, while he cared for others, was especially devoted to me. In his old age his eyes became dim and his limbs stiff. He had a pathetic way of standing staring into my eyes, or with difficulty getting his paws on to my knees to ask to have his head rubbed, an attention of which he never wearied. No one could doubt that this was his expression of the mutual love that bound us to each other. This was the indestructible impression produced, and it is useless to tell me that he may have been striving to conceal some crime, or at least some base and worldly point of view. When sentiment is applied to facts, rational conclusions are apt to be rare—but without a share of sentiment there might have been no facts to record.

There are innumerable cases proving the devotion of dogs—a passion surviving the master's death, and prolonged until the dog himself dies. Such is the story of the heroic dog seen to watch his master's dead body in South America, keeping the vultures off it, and only allowing himself an occasional rush to the river for water, until he too died. What is there here but a passion of love? We may call it instinct, but what is the love of a human mother?

A dog differs from his master in not taking offence; you may tread on his tail and he will only apologise for being in your way. But I have known a dog bite his mistress when she interfered with him in a fight, while he was beside himself with anger. In the same way an unhappy dog caught in a trap may be so maddened with pain as to attempt to bite those who seek to free him, but these are extreme cases. It is again part of this same lovable quality of dogs that they are not given to moods. They are always ready to welcome us and to wag tails when we notice them.

M. Anatole France shows in some ways a sympathy with dogs, and a sensitiveness to their mental attitudes, finer and more true than anything in Stevenson's essay. The misery of Riquet {226} over the démenagement of his master, M. Bergeret, is admirably drawn. Riquet begins by barking fiercely when "des hommes inconnus, mal vêtus, injurieux et farouches" invade his beloved house, and ends in being lifted in silent misery and shut up in a portmanteau. Riquet soon becomes too human, but he does at least show his adoration of M. Bergeret, in mourning over the desecration and removal of "ton fauteuil profond—le fauteuil où nous reposions tous les soirs, et bien souvent le matin, à côté l'un de l'autre."

No. XII. of the Pensées de Riquet does not bear on the love that subsists between dog and man; it goes deeper however, for it shows that men as well as dogs are dominated by instinctive night fears which unite them by a most ancient and enduring bond. Riquet says: "À la tombée de la nuit des puissances malfaisantes rôdent autour de la maison," a fact obvious to all children. There is (No. XII.)an admirable comic prayer to his master beginning, "O mon maître Bergeret, dieu de carnage, je t'adore." But it seems to me to miss the true flavour of doggishness.

Professor A. C. Bradley {227} strives to show that Shakespeare "did not care for dogs." His opinion is worthy of respect, and all the more that he seems to be a dog lover himself. At least, so I interpret what he says of Shakespeare: "To all that he loved most in men he was blind in dogs, and then we call him universal!" "What is significant," he says, "is the absence of sympathic allusion to the characteristic virtues of dogs, and the abundance of allusions of an insulting kind."

I had always imagined that the description of the hounds in "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" was written by one who liked dogs as individuals, not merely as a picturesque piece of hunting apparatus. But Professor Bradley's contrary opinion is probably the sounder. In the same way I think that the passage in "Lear," "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart," etc., could only have been written by one who understood the shock which the little dogs' behaviour gave the King. On the other hand, I agree that Shakespeare does not sympathise with the admirable conduct of Launce, who sat in the stocks to save his dog from execution for theft.

Scott was a genuine dog lover. It is on record that he excused himself for not keeping an engagement on the score of the death of an old friend, that friend being his bulldog Camp. His deerhounds Bran and Maida are, like the Duke of Wellington's horse Copenhagen, known to all the world. I am glad to think that Scott's dogs are preserved in several of his portraits. In his books there are two types of dogs, Dandie Dinmonts' Pepper and Mustard who have given their master's name to a breed and are real dogs of flesh and blood. Or again, Harry Bertram's Wasp, who helps to save Dandie from the thieves. But there is also the theatrical dog, Roswal, in The Talisman, who springs at the throat of Conrad of Montserrat and saves his master's honour. Between these come Gurth's dog, Fangs, slightly tinged by the "tushery" of Ivanhoe, but still striking and pathetic. I keep still my sympathy with Gurth, who swears "by S. Edmund, S. Dunstan, S. Withold and S. Edward," that he will never forgive Cedric for having attempted to kill his dog, "the only living creature that ever showed me kindness."

But apart from his love of dogs Scott shows that he can use them with splendid dramatic effect; for instance, when Dugald Dalgetty and the Child of the Mist are escaping from the Duke of Argyll's prison, how we thrill as the distant baying of those deadly trackers, the bloodhounds, strikes on the ear of the fugitives.

I am not clear as to what was Dickens' personal attitude towards dogs, but he certainly understood the passion of the dog lover.

The man who ousted David Copperfield from the box-seat in the London Coach {229a} remarked, "'Orses and dorgs is some men's fancy. They're wittles and drink to me—lodging, wife and children, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic—snuff, tobacker, and sleep." Probably we should have felt, as Mr. Pickwick did on a similar occasion, {229b} that it would have been well if horses and dogs had been 'washing' also. I doubt, in fact, whether we should have enjoyed his company, or even whether we should have felt him a dog lover of our own sort—but we should not be too nice, and must allow some merit to his form of the passion.

Another of Dickens's characters, Mr. Sleary, {229c} of "the Horse Riding," has a much more attractive way of caring for animals. His theory of how a dog he has lost found him again always pleases me. The dog is believed to set on foot inquiries among his friends. "You don't happen to know a person of the name of Sleary, do you? Person of the name of Sleary in the Horse-Riding way—stout man—game eye?" The inquiries were successful; and I like, too, the frankly sentimental account of the appearance of the clown's dog after his master's death, and the dog's search for the clown's little girl:—

"We was getting up our Children in the Wood one morning, when there comes into our Ring by the stage door a dog. He had travelled a long way, he was in very bad condition, he was lame, and pretty well blind. He went round to our children, one after another, as if he was a-seeking for a child he knowd; and then he come to me, and throwed himself up behind, and stood on his two forelegs, weak as he was, and then wagged his tail and died."

I might doubtless give other instances of well-known men who were lovers of dogs, {230a} but I shall refrain from further quotation. The instincts of man are being purged of the brutality by which they are too often characterised, and what are clumsily called dumb animals have benefited side by side with human beings. It is not yet true that even a merciful man is merciful to his beast, but in England, at any rate, it is recognised that actual cruelty to animals is wrong, but even this is not always the case among other nations. My father used to tell us how, when his horse was exhausted, he lagged behind his S. American companion who shouted, "Spur him! Don Carlos, spur him! he is my horse," and simply could not understand my father's motive. But I am glad to remember that even among rough people, in uncivilised ages, a sense of humanity to animals was not unknown. Busbecquius {230b} records that in Constantinople an angry crowd assembled before a shop in which was exhibited a living bird with its mouth forcibly opened to show its huge gape.

Cruelty is often said to be the outcome of ignorance and stupidity rather than of innate brutality. I wish I could believe this: in any case it is an evil which must be not merely held in check but rooted out. All lovers of animals owe a debt of gratitude to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, not only for their great organisation for the prevention and punishment of brutalities, but also, and perhaps especially, for their guidance of public opinion.

 

NOTES:

{219} Quoted by Professor A. C. Bradley in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 1909, p. 341.

{220a} Descent of Man, 1871, Vol. 1., p. 75.

{220b} Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches, etc., ed. 1860, p. 214.

{223} Memories and Portraits.

{226} Crainquebille, Riquet, etc., (n.d.)

{227} Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 1909, pp. 340, 341.

{229a} David Copperfield, Chap. xix.

{229b} "Its board and lodging to me, is smoke." Pickwick, Chap. xx.

{229c} In Hard Times, Chap. viii. I have ventured to omit the elaborate lisp with which Mr. "Thleary" speaks in the original.

{230a} See for instance the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol 1, p. 113.

{230b} C. T. Forster's Life and letters of Ogier de Busbecq, 1881.

[The end]
Francis Darwin's essay: Dogs And Dog Lovers

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