Diary of a Dog-walker (14 page)

Titian's dogs are usually portrayed in focused pursuit of their doggy interests, quite oblivious to the epic religious and mythical dramas unfolding on the canvas around them. In
The Last Supper
a dog gnaws contentedly at his bone under the table as an anguished Christ predicts his betrayal at the hands of Judas. In the
Bacchanal of the Andrians
there is a dog begging for titbits from a man at the back of the picture, not bothering even to glance at the wild orgy of binge-drinking and erotic indulgence in the foreground. In the wonderfully titled
Venus with
Cupid, Dog and a Partridge
, a small Spaniel with Kudu-ish colouring is trying to snaffle a bird off a window-ledge, unmoved to be sharing its couch with a disturbingly voluptuous nude with perfectly coiffed hair.

I have once or twice suspected Kudu of posing for effect, so I am reassured by Titian's idea that dogs go unselfconsciously about their business without worrying too much about the dramas of the humans around them. I am sure he is right, and if Kudu really were vain he surely would not show us his testicles quite so often.

Kudu memorably expressed his own aesthetic sensibility on a walk in Battersea Park. He ran ahead of me and dipped down out of sight, leaving the path to investigate the ducks on the lake. A passing jogger watched his progress and then pulled up, puffing, next to me. ‘I don't know whether your dog is trying to make a point,' she said, ‘but he has just crapped on the Barbara Hepworth.' I am rather fond of the huge, eye-shaped bronze sculpture that stands sentinel by the water's edge, but Kudu's gesture would find favour with a certain constituency of art lovers.

Before writing the column above, I researched the subject of dogs and art in the London Library. This venerable institution (it was founded by Thomas Carlyle) is in St James's Square, in the still handsome heart of London, and offers the sort of subtle pleasures that can only be enjoyed when you
have the time to linger over your task. All sorts of truly distinguished authors use it, so there is the thrill of wondering which literary hero you might see at work (everyone dresses with precisely the same degree of stylish dowdiness, mostly in tweed, so the celebs can sometimes be difficult to spot). You can search for your books among the stacks yourself, so there is sometimes the excitement of serendipitously spotting something that perfectly fits your needs. And there is – at least I suspect this – a discreet game of one-upmanship played between the members with the titles they stack at their desks in the Reading Room: the more obscure and erudite your pile looks the better, and you can catch people glancing slyly at their neighbours' choices while they try to work out the nature of their research.

My pile usually contains titles like
The World's Greatest Dog Stories
and
Dogs in Literature
– these may not be in quite the same league as
Structure and Function of the Genitalia of Some American Agelenid Spiders
or
Snorri Sturlson and the Edda; the conversion of cultural capital in medieval Scandinavia
(both real books, honestly) but the doggy theme does have 'em foxed, as it were.

I puzzled for a while over whether to start my research with Dogs or with Art – and was saved by one of those moments of serendipity: I spotted, quite by chance, a book called
Dogs in Painting
by William Secord. This took me down an avenue of enquiry that had absolutely nothing to do with the task in hand but proved intriguing none the less: there is a very close relationship between the development
of dog portraits as a distinctive art form and the abuses that provoked the Bateson Report on breeding (
see here
).

Before the nineteenth century the concept of a breed was a relaxed one. The idea that particular kinds of dogs were suited to particular tasks has, of course, been around since the earliest days of dog-time – there is a famous seventeenth-century picture called
The Sleeping Sportsman
, which includes a sporting dog that is a dead ringer for Kudu – but there were no codes laying down what an ideal member of a breed should look like, and no one was much fussed about doggy family trees. And when dogs featured in pre-nineteenth-century British and European art they were generally adjuncts to the main event – providing extra colour or, in the Titian and Veronese manner, a dramatic device.

Queen Victoria changed all that. She was famously devoted to animals; she became patron of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as a princess in 1835 (giving the organization its ‘R' prefix) and declared that ‘No civilization is complete which does not include the dumb and defenceless of God's creatures within the sphere of charity and mercy.' She was especially fond of dogs and kept extensive kennels in Windsor Great Park, where she also maintained a small house from which she could watch her numerous dogs being brought out to play by the kennel man.

A photograph of one of the rooms in what became known as ‘the Queen's Cottage' shows the walls completely covered with dog portraits. In 1836, just before Victoria's accession to
the throne, the artist Edwin Landseer was commissioned to paint a portrait of Dash, her black-and-white King Charles Spaniel, for her eighteenth birthday, and it was the beginning of a lifelong passion for dog portraits.

Victoria's love of her dogs set the tone for the nation's canine culture, and her enthusiasm for having them painted effectively established a new art form. Britain was becoming richer, and dog-owning for pleasure became more widespread with the growth of a newly leisured class. With that came a snobby new interest in breed purity: it was suddenly fashionable to have a dog with a pedigree, and the Victorian writer Gordon Stables (a popular author of improving boys' adventure stories and, towards the end of his career, of a book called
The Dog: From Puppyhood to Age
) remarked in 1877 that ‘Now nobody who is anybody can afford to be followed about with a mongrel dog.'

The first formal dog show took place in Newcastle in 1859. One of the judges was a certain Dr John Henry Walsh, the editor of the
Field
magazine, and a few years later he published his seminal work
The Dogs of the British Isles
, the first attempt to codify the ideal qualities of individual breeds. The Kennel Club was established in 1873 and produced its first official stud book a year later.

Charles Cruft was a key figure in the development of the Victorian canine culture. He began his dog career working as a clerk for James Spratt of Cincinnati, the first manufacturer of dog biscuits (when he opened a London branch, Spratt used Landseer pictures to promote his merchandise, and Victoria
granted his company a royal warrant) but soon moved on to establish his eponymous shows. His breakthrough came when he persuaded Queen Victoria to show some of her pedigrees (her Collie and six Pomeranians, called Fluffy, Nino, Mino, Beppo, Gilda and Lulu). Unsurprisingly, given the deferential culture of the day, they all won prizes – and the modern tradition of the pedigree dog show was truly up and running. And, of course, those who won in Mr Cruft's shows wanted to have their dogs immortalized in dog portraits – just like the Queen's champions.

Victoria would, one feels sure, have been horrified by the way subsequent generations of breeders pursued prizes at the expense of canine health in the way Professor Bateson so shockingly described in his 2010 report (though I fear she might not have been entirely sound in the matter of furkids). She was a genuine dog-lover, and withdrew her own dogs from competition because there was an outbreak of distemper in her kennels shortly after the Crufts outing. But the evidence that the worship of breed purity was damaging dogs began to emerge very early. In 1911 the Hon. Mrs Neville Lytton wrote a book called
Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors Including the History and Management of Toy Spaniels, Pekingese, Japanese and Pomeranians
in which she reflected on the way modern breeding was distorting natural selection:

Nature ruthlessly destroys the weaklings, the weeds, and the failures. The conditions of life are too uncompromising and they must die. The modern
man preserves them at infinite trouble and expense and offers prizes for them on the show bench. He breeds from individuals who would never naturally breed, which are too small, too feeble, or too deformed to propagate their species in a natural condition, and, moreover, often have a violent aversion in doing so. This is a grievous mistake.

Breeding must count for something: Mrs Lytton was the granddaughter of that other great dog fancier, Lord Byron.

I am getting the silent treatment – and couldn't be happier

26 June 2010

While I am reporting from abroad I treasure the odd fix of Kudu-news when I phone home: there is something soothing about his trivial triumphs and disasters, especially when I am working somewhere rough. But it turns out he does not reciprocate the sentiment.

I have recently returned from ten days in Kyrgyzstan. One of my stories was being broadcast on the
Today
programme while my wife was driving to Clapham Common for the daily walk, and she loyally waited in the car with the radio on until the piece was finished. Kudu would have none of it: he
gave the radio a head-butt and turned me off, demanding to be released for his run.

There is a famous story about the Russian actor Stanislavski, who used to keep his dog with him during rehearsals. It would sleep through the performance and only woke up when the actors were finished; Stanislavski claimed this showed the dog could tell when everyone had reverted to their ‘real' personas. Evidently on the radio I am not real enough to detain Kudu from the urgent business that demands his attention whenever he sees a patch of green.

Though miffed by this doggy indifference, I could not help reflecting on how much Kudu would have enjoyed Kyrgyzstan. The twelve-hour drive from the capital, Bishkek, to Osh, the scene of the recent violence, is a quite spectacular journey up high mountain passes and through deep gorges. Roughly halfway there is a vast, open plateau, a bigger expanse of green than a dog could ever dream of.

This is where the country's nomads migrate in the summer to graze their herds, living in their traditional
yurts
amid the wild flowers, with snow-covered peaks gleaming in the distance. I saw several
yurt
dogs, standing sternly, like sentries, at the entrances to these circular tents. There were dogs herding goats, cows and even horses, and I watched one trotting happily at the heels of his master's mount
as he rode high into rolling hills. What a doggy paradise. Even better, the usual human–animal relationship is reversed in these remote ranges: if a horse, a cow or a dog strays on to the road, the traffic gives way.

I spent several days in Osh just before the recent violence there erupted so dramatically, and was struck by the easy-going harmony between the city's human and canine populations (rather more harmonious than relations within the human population, as it now turns out). Most of Osh's dogs are feral, but they have developed good manners and are treated with respect in consequence. The balcony of my room looked down on a busy crossroads, and one evening I watched an elderly mongrel make its way purposefully across the street to the tree below me. It did its business discreetly under the branches – well away from the pavement – and then returned the way it had come.

A good book is essential on trips like this – there is always a certain amount of hanging around – and I took Andrew O'Hagan's jolly new novel
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and His Friend Marilyn Monroe
, which is written entirely from the perspective of a Maltese Terrier, or Bichon Maltais (Maf is short for Mafia, the name being a little joke about the fact that he is a present to Marilyn Monroe from Frank Sinatra).

I didn't like Maf very much. He has picked up a quite staggering level of erudition from a puppyhood association with the writer and critic Cyril Connolly at his first home in Sussex, and tends to flash his learning around in a vulgar manner. There is a very funny scene in which he takes against Lillian Hellman and Edmund Wilson at a Manhattan book launch, and bites them both because of their offensive views (on Trotsky and the British respectively). But biting is not a nice thing for a dog to do, even if he shows good taste in his victims.

But Maf is an extremely effective narrative technique. Marilyn Monroe takes him everywhere – to parties, to her shrink, to her bed – so he is able to report everything, including her private moments. And O'Hagan plays very perceptively with the idea that dogs somehow intuit certain things about the people around them, absorbing moods and thoughts even when they are unspoken. Certainly one of the pleasures of Kudu's company is his capacity to give the impression that he knows what sort of spirits I am in, and is happy to lie around giving silent support if they are low.

Maff is a yappy little thing, and reading his
Life and Opinions
brought home to me how lucky we are to have a dog that does not bark. We know Kudu can bark – he does it in his sleep from time to time – but it is a form of communication he simply does not
seem to favour. And here is an irony: the vuvuzelas, those droning bugles which drown out everything at World Cup matches, were, I am told, originally made from the horn of the kudu, the beast that gave our silent dog his name.

Dogs certainly change the dynamics of family relationships, but whether their influence on family life is entirely benign is a matter of some dispute. We made a quick checklist of pros and cons at supper one evening:

Pro-dog points

They stop arguments: it is absolutely impossible to raise your voice in front of most family dogs – they simply will not tolerate it. If you are really determined to have a domestic battle you have to do it in whispers.

They are a source of humour: Kudu has a gift for doing something silly with his ears at moments of tension.

They give you unconditional support after a hard day's work.