Diary of a Dog-walker (10 page)

It is dogism, pure and simple.

Beware: dogism is sweeping the land

20 March 2010

Urban dog that he is, Kudu has developed reasonably good manners for dealing with other users of public spaces: he gives a polite sniff to members of his own species he encounters in parks or on commons, but never approaches a human without being invited (in the early days he did, it is true, once or twice use a trouser-leg as a lamppost, but he seems to have got over that).

Last weekend, while being walked by my wife, he scampered – nose down in the eternal quest for the next smell – within a couple of yards of two children playing on Clapham Common. It was a couple of yards too close for the liking of their father, who began abusing Kudu and tried quite hard to kick him. I have written before about cultures that are less dog-friendly than our own, and this man clearly came from one. He pursued my wife across the common, wagging an admonitory finger and berating ‘You English' for keeping ‘killer dogs', all of which, he shouted, should be killed themselves.

I blame the politicians. All the killer-dog talk from people who should know better has stirred up an ugly mood, and dogism is sweeping the country. Even our local borough newspaper,
Lambeth Life
, has jumped on the bandwagon: ‘Dogs collared in new
policy' is the splash headline in this week's edition, and there is a terrifying photograph of a snarling brute being held at bay at the end of two steel poles.

The scapegoating of dogs can lead to some ugly places. The Roman habit of crucifying a dog annually is notorious – the city's dogs were blamed for failing to raise the alarm when the Capitol was attacked by Gauls in 390
BC
. Less well known are the show trials that were conducted against dogs and other animals from the Middle Ages right up until the beginning of the last century.

Many of the more curious cases in the seminal work
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
involve other species. Grasshoppers were tried in Lombardy in 1452, snails at Macon in 1487, and there was a long case brought against weevils by the wine-growers of St Julien in 1587. But a show trial of a dog called Porter near Chichester was recorded as late as 1771, and in 1906 in Switzerland a dog went on trial with two men (his owner and the owner's son) for robbery and murder. The men got life, but the dog was held to have been the ring-leader and was executed.

The law is not quite sure what to make of dogs. Formally they are treated ‘like other personal and movable chattels' and that, of course, makes nonsense of putting them on trial. But because we anthropomorphize them there is a tugging
temptation for lawyers to treat them like humans.

Last week I talked to a couple of top family lawyers about a newspaper story that couples are drawing up ‘pre-pups' to avoid a row over the dog should they divorce. I couldn't get the story to stand up, but a leading QC mused, ‘I have often wondered whether any such dispute should be resolved by pure property law, or whether there is room for application of the principles arising under the Children Act – the first and paramount consideration is the best interest of the child (or dog?)?'

This could open up dangerous territory. Courts work on the premise that the best interests of a child in a divorce are usually served by giving custody to the mother; would they be willing to make a similar presumption, perhaps in favour of the man of the house, where a dog is concerned? I was once stopped on my bike outside the butcher by a fan of these columns who wanted to tell me that he recognized many of his own dog's foibles in my Kudu stories. He waxed lyrical – at some length – about the fun the two of them had on their walks, and then his face fell. ‘Until, that is, the divorce,' he said. ‘My ex-wife took him when we broke up …' The poor chap was clearly much more upset about losing his dog than he was about the collapse of his marriage, and (without, of course, knowing the other side of the story) I could not help feeling he would have been a very good master.

The straightforward ‘dogs are property' approach at least keeps responsibility for their behaviour firmly focused on the owners. Identifying killer breeds has always seemed flawed to me: I think you can make pretty much any dog into a killer if you try, and even the most terrifying breeds can be brought up nicely.

The problem with that theory is that Kudu proves it isn't true. I have concluded that absolutely nothing could persuade him into aggression: his only response to trouble is lying on his back and offering you an eyeful of tummy and testicles.

When the fate of a dog tore a nation in two

3 April 2010

Battersea Park was a frenzy of spring mulching, mowing and planting. Siren invitations to linger at the café were being fired from the Chelsea yummy mummies, and Kudu received an indecent proposal from a gardener: his Springer bitch, the man politely explained, had been let down by a suitor at the last moment, and would Kudu care to pop round for the afternoon? He offered ‘a hundred quid or the pick of the litter'. It seemed a somewhat casual way for Kudu to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, and I declined on his behalf.

We sought refuge in the park's quieter walks and, hidden away near the river, I found the Brown Dog Memorial. It is a life-size bronze of a terrier with an expressively cocked head and alert ears. A sentimental piece, but it carries a shocking inscription: ‘In memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured Vivisection extending over more than two months and having been handed from one Vivisector to another till death came to its Release … Men and Women of England, how long shall these things be?'

The Brown Dog Affair was one of the great political controversies of the day.

Public vivisection was – extraordinary though it may seem – a common, if highly controversial, practice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In 1902 the mongrel that came to be known as the Brown Dog was cut open before an audience of medical students by Professor Ernest Starling of University College (a scientist of real stature). The dog survived for another two months before Starling opened him up again, inspected the previous surgery, and then passed him on to two other scientists. They administered half an hour of electric shocks before the dog was killed.

The lecture had been infiltrated by two Swedish animal-rights activists, and they published a
harrowing account – claiming the dog had not been anaesthetized and showed ‘the signs of intense suffering'. There was this gem of invective: ‘The lecturer, attired in the bloodstained surplice of the priest of vivisection, has tucked up his sleeves and is now comfortably smoking a pipe, whilst, with hands coloured crimson, he arranges the electrical circuit for the stimulation that will follow. Now and then, he makes a funny remark, which is appreciated by those around him.'

One of the scientists involved sued – and won. The World League Against Vivisection responded with a public subscription for a statue to commemorate the dog ‘done to death' in the name of science – not the rather cute number in Battersea Park today but a great granite and bronze monument, standing seven foot six tall. It was erected at the Latchmere Estate, a housing project for the poor just opened by Battersea Council.

Battersea was most definitely not a place for the Chelsea yummy mummies in those days: it was full of slums and a hotbed of radicalism. But medical students from University College sent raiding parties over the river armed with crowbars to destroy the statue. They were repeatedly beaten back by the Battersea workers. An extraordinary coalition rallied to the Brown Dog cause – suffragettes, Sinn Fein activists, trade unionists and radical Liberals.
Defending the statue became a symbol for radical causes in general. The ‘anti-doggers' responded with riots in Trafalgar Square – on one occasion mounted police fought running battles with more than a thousand students.

Eventually – in March 1910 – Battersea Council gave in: the statue was quietly removed in a pre-dawn operation under the protection of 120 police officers. The new statue in the park, by the sculptor Nicola Hicks, was made in 1985.

Kudu became impatient when I lingered in front of it – pondering this remarkable and largely forgotten history. He scarcely gave it a sniff – in fact he did not even bother to pee on the plinth.

At about the time of the Brown Dog riots, French society was being torn apart by the traumatic saga of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the young Jewish artillery officer who was falsely accused of treason and sentenced to hard labour on Devil's Island. The Dreyfus Affair raised painful questions about French and Jewish identity, inspired Zionism and thus led eventually to the foundation of Israel. It says something about this country that while all of that was going on across the Channel we were worrying about a dog. The Brown Dog Affair opens an intriguing window on to Edwardian Britain: it became a focus for all sorts of political and social currents that were swirling through the early years of the last century.

The list of
dramatis personae
is impressive in itself. Ernest
Starling, the University College professor who led the vivisection of the Brown Dog, was the man who discovered hormones – largely through his vivisection experiments. In the libel case that inspired the Brown Dog statue, the pro-dog lawyer – whose diatribes against canine mistreatment make my own episodes of dog-rage look positively insipid – was Stephen Coleridge, a son of the former Chief Justice Lord Coleridge (and great-great-nephew of the poet), who went on to help found the NSPCC. George Bernard Shaw turned up to see the statue unveiled and John Archer, a Battersea councillor who championed its preservation, was Britain's first elected official of African descent.

Anyone worried about the way modern students behave would do well to read the accounts of what was apparently considered normal student protest at the time: the Brown Dog Riots were exactly that, riots, not peaceful demonstrations that went wrong. The students wore dog masks (one Cambridge undergraduate who joined in was arrested for ‘barking like a dog') and chanted this piece of ‘doggerel' (forgive me – an irresistible pun):

As we go walking after dark,

We turn our steps to Latchmere Park

And there we see, to our surprise,

A little brown dog that stands and lies

Ha ha ha, he he he,

Little brown dog how we hate thee.

On the day the riots reached a climax, 10 December 1907, the students fought the police for several hours. When they were eventually driven off the streets a local doctor told a newspaper that their failure to hold out for longer reflected the ‘utter degeneration' of the youth of the day – which suggests their cause had support from a class of person who should have known better.

That may reflect a reaction against the way the Brown Dog cause became – rather weirdly – identified with the suffragette movement. The late actress and academic Coral Lansbury, who wrote a rich account of the affair and the cultural forces behind it, argued that ‘Women were the most fervent supporters of anti-vivisection, not simply for reasons of humanity, but because the vivisected animal stood for the vivisected woman: the woman strapped to the gynaecologist's table; the woman strapped and bound in the pornographic fiction of the period.' Warming to her theme later in the book, she writes that ‘Woman's suffrage had very little in common with anti-vivisection, but the two become confusedly entwined through the accident of circumstance: the image of the vivisected dog blurred and became one with the militant suffragette being force-fed in Brixton Prison.'

Coral Lansbury admits (boasts?) that ‘many people will be puzzled and disturbed' by her book, and I am never quite sure whether it makes sense to impose the language of late-twentieth-century radical academic discourse on the past, but it is certainly true that many suffragettes were prominent pro-doggers. Opponents of women's suffrage recognized the
connection between the two protest movements by making barking noises when they disrupted suffragette meetings.

It is also striking that the Brown Dog was one of the few causes that succeeded in uniting what we might broadly call ‘the forces of the Left' of the early twentieth century; the socialist culture of a working-class area like Battersea was very male, and its leaders were not especially well disposed towards brainy middle-class women living in Chelsea across the river (Sylvia Pankhurst has a blue plaque in Cheyne Row, just up from Battersea Bridge). But both groups were moved by the Brown Dog's story, and both saw their enemy in the bullying yahoos from the medical profession, who seemed to represent all that was worst about the moneyed male Establishment. One modern writer has argued that the Brown Dog's mongrel nature was a reflection of the political coalition he inspired.

Of the Brown Dog's character, we of course know nothing at all; he is, as it were, all symbol, a universal Platonic Idea of Dog rather than an individual creature you can imagine thumping its tail when you open the front door. And in the voluminous literature this dog has generated there is a tendency to give him qualities that reflect political agendas. One radical writer has, for example, criticized the modern statue that inspired my column on the grounds that it is too twee and ‘heritage', and not as defiant as the original.

I find the Brown Dog a much richer and more intriguing subject than the tale of another dog commemorated by public monument – Greyfriars Bobby. We know much more about
Bobby's character than we do about the Brown Dog's, and he seems pretty bonkers to me.

Bobby's story is well known. A Skye Terrier, he belonged to a certain John Gray, who worked as a constable and night-watchman for the Edinburgh police. Gray died of tuberculosis in 1858, just two years after acquiring Bobby, and was buried in Greyfriars churchyard. For the next fourteen years, until his own death in 1872, Bobby watched over his master's grave. He was nearly destroyed as a feral dog in 1867, but the Lord Provost of Edinburgh personally paid his dog-licence and gave him a collar. When he died Angela Burdett Coutts (the immensely rich Victorian philanthropist who, in a twist that brings together the Brown Dog and Greyfriars Bobby stories, was very much involved in establishing the NSPCC alongside the lawyer Stephen Coleridge) commissioned a statue to stand at the end of the George IV Bridge in his memory.