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An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs
Mikita Brottman
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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
Copyright
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
“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,
