King Solomon's Ring Page 12

  To me it is a strangely appealing and even elevating thought that the age-old covenant between man and dog was “signed” voluntarily and without obligation by each of the contracting parties. All other domestic animals, like some slaves of ancient times, became house-servants only after having served a term of true imprisonment, all, that is, with the exception of the cat; for the cat is not really a domesticated animal and his chief charm lies in the fact that, even to-day, he still walks by himself. Neither the dog nor the cat is a slave, but only the dog is a friend—granted, a submissive and servile friend. Very gradually, in the course of the centuries, it has become customary, in the “better families” of dogs, to choose, instead of another dog, a man as a leader of their pack. In many cases, this appears to have been the chief of a human tribe, and even dogs of to-day, particularly those of strong individual character, tend to consider the “paterfamilias” as their master. In huskies and other primitive breeds, a more complicated and less direct type of submission to man can often be observed. When many of these dogs are kept together, one of them stands out as leader, and the others are “faithful” and “respectful” only to him and it is only the leader himself who is, in a true sense, his master’s dog; the others are, strictly speaking, the leader’s dogs. Reading between the lines, one can tell from Jack London’s obviously true-to-life descriptions that in sledge-dog teams this type of relationship is the rule, and it is most probable that it also prevailed among the primitive jackal-dogs of the Stone age. In modern dogs, however, it is interesting to note that most of them do not seem content with a dog as master and actively seek for a man as leading dog.

  One of the most wonderful and puzzling phenomena is the choice of a master by a good dog. Quite suddenly, often within a few days, a bond is formed which is many times stronger than any tie that ever exists between us human beings. Wordsworth calls it:

  … that strength of feeling, great

  Above all human estimate.

  There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dog. Of all dogs which I have hitherto known, the most faithful are those in whose veins flows, beside that of the golden jackal (Canis aureus), a considerable stream of wolf’s blood. The northern wolf (Canis lupus) only figures in the ancestry of our present dog breeds through having been crossed with already domesticated Aureus dogs. Contrary to the wide-spread opinion that the wolf plays an essential role in the ancestry of the larger dog breeds, comparative research in behaviour has revealed the fact that all European dogs, including the largest ones, such as Great Danes and wolfhounds, are pure Aureus and contain, at the most, a minute amount of wolf’s blood. The purest wolf-dogs that exist are certain breeds of Arctic America, particularly the so-called malemuts, huskies etc. The Esquimaux dogs of Greenland also show but slight traces of Lapland Aureus characters, whereas the arctic breeds of the Old World, such as Lapland dogs, Russian lajkas, samoyedes and chow-chows certainly have more Aureus in their constitution. Nevertheless the latter breeds derive their character from the Lupus side of their ancestry and they all exhibit the high cheek bones, the slanting eyes and the slightly upward tilt of the nose which give its specific expression to the face of the wolf. On the other hand, the chow, in particular, bears unquestionably the stamp of his share of Aureus blood in the flaming red of his magnificent coat.

  The “sealing of the bond”, the final attachment of the dog to one master, is quite enigmatical. It takes place quite suddenly, within a few days, particularly in the case of puppies that come from a breeding kennel. The “susceptible period” for this most important occurrence in the whole of a dog’s life is, in Aureus dogs, between eight and eighteen months, and in Lupus dogs round about the sixth month.

  The really single-hearted devotion of a dog to its master has two quite different sources. On the one side, it is nothing else than the submissive attachment which every wild dog shows towards his pack leader, and which is transferred, without any considerable alteration in character, by the domestic dog to a human being. To this is added, in the more highly domesticated dogs, quite another form of affection. Many of the characteristics in which domestic animals differ from their wild ancestral form arise by virtue of the fact that properties of body structure and behaviour, which in the wild prototype are only marked by some transient stages of youth, are kept permanently by the domestic form. In dogs, short hair, curly tail, hanging ears, domed skulls and the short muzzle of many domestic breeds are features of this type. In behaviour, one of these juvenile characters which has become permanent in the domestic dog, expresses itself in the peculiar form of its attachment. The ardent affection which wild canine youngsters show for their mother and which in these disappears completely after they have reached maturity, is preserved as a permanent mental trait of all highly domesticated dogs. What originally was love for the mother is transformed into love for the human master.

  Thus the pack loyalty, in itself unaltered, but merely transferred to man, and the permanent child-like dependency resulting from domestication are two more or less independent springs of canine affection. One essential difference in the character of Lupus and Aureus dogs is attributable to the fact that these two springs flow with different strength in the two types. In the life of a wolf, the community of the pack plays a vastly more important role than in that of a jackal. While the latter is essentially a solitary hunter and confines himself to a limited territory, the wolf packs roam far and wide through the forests of the North as a sworn and very exclusive band which sticks together through thick and thin and whose members will defend each other to the very death. That the wolves of a pack will devour each other, as is frequently asserted, I have strong reason to doubt, since sledge dogs will not do so at any price, even when at the point of starvation, and this social inhibition has certainly not been instilled into them by man.

  The reticent exclusiveness and the mutual defence at any price are properties of the wolf which influence favourably the character of all strongly wolf-blooded dog breeds and distinguish them to their advantage from Aureus dogs, which are mostly “hail-fellow-well-met” with every man and will follow any one who holds the other end of the lead in his hand. A Lupus dog, on the contrary, who has once sworn allegiance to a certain man, is for ever a one-man dog and no stranger can win from him so much as a single wag of his bushy tail. Nobody who has once possessed the one-man love of a Lupus dog will ever be content with one of pure Aureus blood. Unfortunately this fine characteristic of the Lupus dog has against it various disadvantages which are indeed the immediate results of the one-man loyalty. That a mature Lupus dog can never become your dog, is a matter of course. But worse, if he is already yours and you are forced to leave him, the animal becomes literally mentally unbalanced, obeys neither your wife nor children, sinks morally, in his grief, to the level of an ownerless street cur, loses his restraint from killing and, committing misdeed upon misdeed, ravages the surrounding district.

  Besides this, a predominantly Lupus-blooded dog is, in spite of his boundless loyalty and affection, never quite sufficiently submissive. He is ready to die for you, but not to obey you: at least, I have never been able to extract implicit obedience from one of these dogs—perhaps a better dog trainer than I might be more successful. For this reason, it is seldom that you see, in a town, a chow without a lead and walking close beside his master. If you walk with a Lupus dog in the woods, you can never make him stay near you. All he will do is to keep in very loose contact with you and honour you with his companionship only now and again.

  Not so the Aureus dog; in him, as a result of his age-old domestication, that infantile affection has persisted which makes him a manageable and tractable companion. Instead of the proud, manly loyalty of the Lupus dog which is far removed from obedience, the Aureus dog will grant you that servitude which, day and night, by the hour and by the minute, awaits your command and even your slightest wish. When you take him for a walk, an Aureus dog of a more highly domesticated breed will, without p
revious training, always run with you, keeping the same radius whether he runs before, behind or beside you and adapting his speed to yours. He is naturally obedient, that is to say, he answers to his name not only when he wishes to and when you cajole him but also because he knows that he must come. The harder you shout, the more surely he will come, whereas a Lupus dog, in this case, comes not at all but seeks to appease you from a distance with friendly gestures.

  Opposed to these good and congenial properties of the Aureus dog are unfortunately some others which also arise from the permanent infantility of these animals and are less agreeable for an owner. Since young dogs under a certain age are, for members of their own species, “taboo”, that is, they must not under any circumstances be bitten, such big babies are often correspondingly trustful and importunate towards everybody. Like many spoilt human children who call every grown-up “uncle”, they pester people and animals alike with overtures to play. If this youthful property persists, to any appreciable extent, in the adult domestic dog, there arises a very unpleasant canine character, or rather the complete lack of such a commodity. The worst part of it lies in the literally “dog-like” submission that these animals, who see in every man an “uncle”, show towards anyone who treats them with the least sign of severity; the playful storm of affection is immediately transformed into a cringing state of humility. Everyone is acquainted with this kind of dog which knows no happy medium between perpetual exasperating “jumping up”, and fawningly turning upon its back, its paws waving in supplication. You shout, at the risk of offending your hostess, at the infuriating creature that is trampling all over your person and covering you from head to foot with hairs. Thereupon the dog falls beseechingly upon his back. You speak kindly to him, to conciliate your hostess and—splash—quickly leaping up, the brute has licked you right across the face and now continues unremittingly to bestrew your trousers with hairs.

  A dog of this kind, which is everybody’s dog, is easily led astray since he trusts every stranger who speaks kindly to him. But a dog that you can get so easily, well, so far as I am concerned, you can keep him! Even the many alluring and beautifully proportioned breeds of gun dog, whose “heads are hung with ears that sweep away the morning dew”, are uncongenial to my taste in that most of them are ready to follow any man with a gun. Admittedly, their usefulness as gun-dogs is based on this general acceptance of anyone as master and indeed, were this not so, one could never buy a ready-trained gun dog or have one’s dog schooled by a professional trainer. It is clear that a dog can only be trained by a man who commands his absolute obedience and trust. When you leave your dog with a trainer, you therefore imply, from the first, a breach of loyalty. The personal relationship between master and dog must necessarily be severely injured, even if the dog, on his return from the trainer, once more reverts to something of his former attachment to his owner.

  Should one do the same thing with a Lupus-blooded dog, he would either learn nothing at all, and, through stubborn shyness, if not by sheer aggressive ill-temper, drive his trainer to distraction or, if one sent the dog early enough to the school, before his fidelity had found an object on which to rest unshakeably, then, without doubt, the love of the animal would belong for good to his trainer. It is therefore out of the question to buy a Lupus dog as a fully trained animal. Separated from the master of his choice, the dog would show no signs of ever having been trained. The Lupus dog either accepts one master, unconditionally and for all time, or, if he does not find one or if he loses him, he becomes as independent and self-sufficient as a cat and lives alongside the human being without ever developing any heartfelt connection with him. In this condition most of the North American sledge dogs find themselves, whose deep qualities of soul are almost never awakened unless a Jack London recognizes and finds access to them. The same holds good for many of our Middle European chows who, for this reason, are despised by many dog lovers and disliked by most veterinary surgeons. Chows very often “turn cat”, in the manner described above, since their first true love often proves unsatisfactory and they are incapable of a second. Chows swear their irrevocable oath of fidelity particularly early. There is almost no Aureus dog, of however true and staunch a character, such as the Airedale terrier or the Alsatian, whose love may not still be won for a completely new master at the age of about a year. But if one wants to be certain of the fidelity of a chow, or any other Lupus-blooded dog, one must rear him oneself from a very early age. Judging from my long experience with chows, one should begin with one of these dogs at the age of four or at the most five months. This is no such great sacrifice as one might expect, for in Lupus dogs the tendency to become house-trained matures much earlier than in those of Aureus breeds. Indeed, the cat-like instinct for cleanliness is amongst the most agreeable qualities of the Lupus species.

  Yet my affections do not belong entirely to Lupus dogs, as the reader might conclude from this little canine characterology. No Lupus-blooded dog has so far offered his master such unquestioning obedience as our incomparable Alsatian (an Aureus dog). Admittedly, the noble qualities of the beast of prey possessed by the Lupus dog, his proud aloofness towards strangers, his boundless love for his master, and, at the same time, the reticence with which he demonstrates his really deep affection, are all character traits for which the Aureus dog has no counterpart. But both sets of qualities can be combined. It would, of course, be quite impossible for the dog-breeder to make the predominantly Lupus dog catch up, in one stride, with the Aureus dog which has been domesticated for a few thousand years longer, but there is another way.

  Some years ago my wife and I each possessed a dog, I the already-mentioned Alsatian bitch Tito, my wife the little chow bitch Pygi. Both were true types of their breed, classical representatives of the groups C. aureus and C. lupus, and they provoked, in their way, some marital strife. My wife disdained me, because Tito used joyfully to greet our family friends, because she would splash through any puddle and then, covered with mud, unconcernedly run through our best rooms; because, on the point of house manners, she left much to be desired if we forgot to let her out—and because of a hundred little sins that a Lupus dog would not commit at any price. Then, said my wife, the dog had no private life, she was just the soulless shadow of her master and it got on one’s nerves to see her lying, all day long, beside the desk and, with longing eyes, awaiting the next walk … Shadow! Soulless! Tito this soul of a dog! I replied, in kind, that as far as I was concerned, you could keep a dog that you could not take for a walk, for that was what a dog was for, to follow his master obediently, and Pygi, in, spite of her much-praised qualities as a one-man dog, immediately went off hunting—or had my wife ever once returned, accompanied by her dog, from a walk in the forest? You might as well, from the beginning, get a Siamese cat, which was still more aloof, still cleaner, and, above all, what she pretended to be … a cat. Pygi was not a dog. Nor was my Tito, would come the answer, or, at best, a sentimental figure out of a Victorian novel.

  This quarrel, in whose joking tone some earnest was intermixed, found the most natural compromise possible. A son of Tito’s, Booby by name, married the chow bitch Pygi. This happened quite against the will of my wife who, naturally enough, wanted to breed pure chows. But here we discovered, as an unexpected hindrance, a new property of Lupus dogs: the monogamous fidelity of the bitch to a certain dog. My wife travelled with her bitch to nearly all the chow dogs in Vienna, in the hope that one at least would find Pygi’s favour. In vain—Pygi snapped furiously at all her suitors; she only wanted her Booby and she got him in the end, or rather he got her by reducing a thick wooden door, behind which Pygi was confined, to its primary elements.

  And therewith began our chow-alsatian crossbred stud. The whole credit falls on the true love of Pygi for her enormous and good-natured Booby. The reader should grant me due approval for recording the proceedings faithfully. I might have been tempted to write: “After my intensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages inherent in the character of
Lupus and Aureus dogs, I decided that crossing experiments, with a view to combining the good qualities of both, were called for. These succeeded beyond all anticipation. Whereas, generally, crossbreds inherit the bad properties of both parent breeds, in this case the contrary proved true in a very definite measure …” As regards the success, this statement would be quite true, only I must admit that the whole thing took place without any preliminary planning.

  At the moment, our breed contains very little Alsatian blood, because my wife, during my absence in the war, twice crossed in pure chows; this was inevitable, for without so doing, we should have been dependent on inbreeding. As it is, the inheritance of Tito shows itself clearly in a psychological respect, for the dogs are far more affectionate and much easier to train than pure-blooded chows, although, from an external point of view, only a very expert eye can detect the element of Alsatian blood. I intend to develop further this mixed breed, now that it has happily survived the war, and to continue with my plan to evolve a dog of ideal character.