And they call it PUPPY LOVE...
From the Queen’s corgi named Rozavel Lucky Strike to Donald Trump being terrorised by a poodle... this love letter to our four-legged friends is a dog-lover’s delight
Dog’s Best Friend Simon Garfield W&N £16.99
Simon Garfield is clearly aware that his latest book is something of a dog’s dinner. ‘Perhaps one could regard this book as a dog discovering the world around it: irregular noises, a rapidly changing environment and an increasingly large amount of attention from complete strangers,’ he writes.
A peek at the index is enough to show how much this little book tries to pack in. Under ‘T’, you will find, along with a great many other things: Tail- Waggers Club; talking dogs; taxidermy; teacup dogs; Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs; theories, dog; therapy dogs; Tintin ( Snowy’s sidekick); toy poodles; training methods; troubled dogs; Trump, Donald; Twain, Mark; Twitter; and Two Gentlemen of Verona.
What, you may ask, is Donald Trump doing popping up in a book about dogs? It turns out that he was the first US President in over a century not to have a pet dog in the White House. An enjoyable footnote in a book jampacked with footnotes reveals that Donald’s first wife Ivana wrote in a memoir of how her poodle Chappy never liked him. Apparently, Chappy would ‘bark at him territorially’ whenever Donald approached.
Garfield then sifts through Trump’s references to dogs, and finds them consistently derogatory: he said that his one-time strategist Steve Bannon was ‘dumped like a dog by almost everyone’ and that most of his enemies had been ‘fired like a dog’. Additionally, when Trump announced the death of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, he said he ‘died like a dog’.
The author is the exact opposite: he is the most dogged of dog-lovers. His own dog, a 13-year-old labrador called Ludo, merits a lengthy entry in the index, with numerous subheadings – ‘ aristocrat, bark, character, coping with lockdown…’ and so on. The book begins and ends with Ludo, and much of the rest is a barely disguised love letter to him. ‘Why do I love him so much?’ Garfield asks on the first page, and by the time he gets to the last page, he is still going on about him: ‘He gets very excited about the prospect of lunch, or any food really, and he usually comes running when I call him, and we’re always impossibly happy when we’re together.’
Much as I like dogs, or at least most dogs, I find other people talking about their dogs almost as trance-inducing as other people talking about their dreams. But Garfield is too canny a writer not to realise this. In one of many comical passages, he paraphrases a typical conversation between owners at Crufts: ‘You have a dog? I have a dog! What sort of dog is she? She’s a really good dog and I bet you have a really good dog too…’
Though Garfield keeps letting his book off the leash to watch it sniff around in all sorts of random areas, he often tries to call it back, hoping to pursue his central theme: why are human beings so devoted to dogs?
Perversely, we like to think that they are devoted to us, and this is why we relish historic tales of dogs who stood by their masters through thick and thin.
In Tokyo, two statues commemorate a dog called Hachi, who used to meet his master off the train every day in the 1920s. One day, his master died at work. The faithful Hachi went down to the station every day for seven years before he was adopted as a national hero. Since then, he has been commemorated on stamps and in school musicals. In 1994, a recording of Hachi barking was played on the radio: many listeners stood still for the broadcast. Even today, hundreds of thousands of people pass his bronze statue in Shibuya Station, and touch its feet for good luck.
As a child, I used to love reading a book about Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye terrier who sat devotedly beside his master’s grave in Edinburgh for 14 years in the 19th Century. Sadly, Garfield pours cold water on this touching legend.
‘ Experts have wondered whether there weren’t actually several Bobbys, or Bobbies, and several owners,’ he writes, ‘and whether those concerned with the wellbeing of the Greyfriars tourist trade weren’t responsible for a bit of hokum over the years.’
Ever since we began keeping dogs as pets, more than 8,000 years ago, there have been those who viewed them as human. Garfield disapproves of this temptation while regularly succumbing to it. On one page he will insist that the glory of dogs lies not in their humanity but in their dogginess, and on the next he will be reminiscing about conversations he has had with Ludo or Ludo’s pals Truffle, Herbert, Geoffrey and Pepper.
Our tendency to treat dogs like children has reached fever pitch in recent years. No longer do we call them by doggy names like Fido or Spot: these days, the most popular puppy names are eerily similar to the most popular names for babies. In the UK, the most popular names for puppies are Alfie, Charlie, Max and Oscar, and for females Poppy, Bella, Molly and Daisy.
Garfield interviews an old- school dogtrainer called Susan Close, who says she has found that more and more dogs in her classes – pugs and French bulldogs in particular – have been chosen because they look like babies. She never makes judgments on dogs, but she has reservations about many of their owners. ‘I find some of them quite vulgar. Someone will arrive with their
poochon and seem to think they have this very expensive magical thing in front of them and they lose sight of the fact that it’s a dog. I would say, “Get that bow out of its hair and we’ll talk.” ’
At Crufts, he finds tins of dog food on the market that seem closer to items on the menu of a gastropub: lamb hot-pot with red cabbage, parsnip and apple, and tiered birthday cakes, as well as a seasonal pack of Turkey Christmas Dinner with turkey crown, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and cranberries, not to mention doggy snacks called Yakers ‘made from Himalayan yak milk’.
Small wonder that talking dogs feature in so many cartoons, cock-eyed versions of human beings at our best and worst. The most famous i s probably Snoopy, who appeared i n 17,897 different Peanuts strips, dubbed ‘the longest-running meditation on loneliness, defeat and alienation ever in popular American art’. But let’s not forget Tintin’s valiant little dog Snowy. Garfield – whose own comic-book namesake is, alas, not a dog but a cat – beadily points out that after the first eight Tintin books, Captain Haddock takes over as the wisecracker, and Snowy’s role diminishes.
Though Garfield doesn’t dwell on the darker side of dogs, he doesn’t ignore it, either. Last year in the UK, 2,600 postmen were attacked by dogs. Nor have dogs always been keen on books. Left alone one night, John Steinbeck’s dog, Toby, chewed through the manuscript of Of Mice And Men. ‘ There was no other draft,’ he told his agent. ‘I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.’ Every page of this book yields interesting bits and pieces, though some of the bits are more interesting than others. At one point, the author mentions that ‘the most notable thing about the Queen’s corgis is that I have never met anyone who knows any of their names’. The most likely explanation is that no one is interested, but that proves no deterrent to Garfield: he goes on to list all their names, from Rozavel Lucky Strike to Willow, giving us the chance to forget them all over again. Over the years, Simon Garfield has produced a huge variety of books. Everything he writes is interesting. My favourites include The Nation’s Favourite, a wonderfully funny study of the rise and fall of the disc jockey, and In Miniature, about little things like model railways, dolls’ houses and souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower. Dog’s Best Friend is perhaps not up there with the best. For my taste, it is packed a little too tightly, and sometimes makes you feel as though you are drowning i n doggynuggets. But there is a good joke, an intriguing tale or a fascinating s t at i s t i c on every page – if you tried to mark each item of interest, your copy would end up hopelessly dog-eared.