THE AFGHAN HOUND: much more than a maiden aunt

I cannot get it out of my head that the dog in the photograph is like somebody’s elderly spinster aunt. A little untidy and badly in need of a hairtrim, but how gentle the eyes are, and the whole expression pleading for affection. A sweet old lady, providing crumpets for tea. Aunt Lavinia, who nourishes a secret passion for the Vicar. One needs to envisage the whole animal, standing 2ft 6in, silky-shaggy from head to tail, and wearing hairy trousers something like a cowboy’s chaps. The Afghans like to think that their dogs are indigenous, and of such antiquity that Noah took a couple into the Ark, but it seems more probable that the Arabian Saluki found its way to Afghanistan and that in the rigorous climate of that high mountainous land it developed the more protective coat.

Just as the Saluki is used for hunting gazelles, so is the Afghan used in the pursuit of small deer, often in the company of a hawk. It is even claimed for one of them that he tackled and killed a leopard. Swift and fearless when engaged in this his hereditary business, in private life away from his native home

he is said to be shy, and it is endearingly suggested that this timidity may be due to his inability to understand the conditions under which we live. There must, indeed, be a great difference between an English kennel or even an English garden, and the wild freedom of Central Asian hills. His powers of endurance are well adapted to

the life he is called upon to lead. A Mrs M Amps, who had kennels at Kabul, described how on trekking 20 to 30 miles daily at altitudes rising to 17,000ft on the way to Lesser Tibet, her dogs at the end of a long day would think nothing of dashing up the mountainside after marmots.

The Afghan has not long been in England, being exhibited for the first time in 1910 at Crufts, not even accorded the compliment of a name to himself, but relegated to the ‘foreign and other variety’ class. Zardin, the dog then shown, not unnaturally created a sensation, for nothing like him had ever been seen before. Even today, when we have more or less become accustomed to his extraordinary appearance, he is apt to look startlingly like a dog in a dream. Not in the very least like Aunt Lavinia. »