By Simon Garfield
Published by Weidenfeld
When Simon Garfield’s labrador was barred from a Discover Dogs exhibition in east London — family pets were not allowed — he did what any indulgent dog lover would do. He treated 12-year-old Ludo to a dog-friendly cinema screening of Rocketman, where the elderly dog “had his own seat next to mine, with a blanket and ‘pupcorn’ treats”. The lights were kept brighter during the film “so as not to distress” the canine customers.
In this, his 20th nonfiction book, Garfield asks: “With what degree of quiet acquiescence did humans roll over and accept that our domestic lives — our work hours, the cleanliness of our rugs, our holiday choices — were henceforth to be determined by the demands of an animal that used to live outside and fend for itself?”
This is a writer who has form when it comes to historical tomes, so expect granularity about how humans have been domesticating dogs for at least 15,000 years, training them to be herders, healers, fighters, finders, racers and, more recently, fashion accessories.
Along the way the author retells well-worn stories about dogs in art, fiction and literature, all of which can be easily accessed in their designated Wikipedia pages. The reader is forgiving, mostly because Garfield himself exudes a puppyish persona, his prose is bouncy and his dog facts digestible: almost one billion dogs inhabit Earth, 80 per cent “breed of their own volition”; the greyhound is the second-fastest mammal, after the cheetah; in the first four days of the Second World War 400,000 domestic dogs and cats were put down by their owners in London, because pets weren’t allowed in bomb shelters; the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea will clone your dog for £75,000; and my favourite — dogs find listening to soft rock calming. Motown? Not so much.
One of the most revealing titbits is that dogs have more than 200 million olfactory receptors, compared with a human’s five million. They inhale through their nostrils and exhale through side vents, often in a continuous stream, and each nostril can cleverly work independently — “stereo rather than mono”.
It is why they can “hear for the deaf, see for the blind, detect the living beneath collapsed buildings, soothe those in severe distress, and sniff for explosives, drugs and tumours and possibly detect Covid-19”.
Some are brainier than others. Check out Chaser the border collie on YouTube — she learnt 1,022 objects by name and could divide them into three groups. After her death in 2019 aged 15, Paris Match called her “the smartest and most beautiful dog in the world”.
Here’s another morsel to chew over, though: the ethologist Stephen Budiansky is quoted as saying: “The amount of energy dogs expend in barking is phenomenal, totally out of proportion to any benefit they can possibly derive from the activity.” Not so clever after all, then. Certainly beware the jackapoo — a poodle crossed with a Jack Russell terrier — which gets a five-star noise rating from the International Designer Canine Registry.
And yet even incessant yappers can be more appealing than their owners. The book’s most amusing character is the redoubtable Susan Close, a “master” dog trainer who launched Dog Hub for Camden council in London in 2008. A modern-day Barbara Woodhouse, she tells Garfield: “I do not believe that a dog can be cured by a psychiatrist, but I think some owners could be helped by one.” Indeed.
Which begs the question: are humans really a dog’s best friend, as the title of this book suggests?
The popular performing-dog shows of the 20th century often required unconscionable levels of cruelty for even the most innocuous of tricks. Garfield describes one where a dog tumbles over on its side like a drunken man. How is this achieved? “By training the dog with a belt of pins upon its stomach, and a punishment involving pellets from an air rifle.” Now more than ever we buy, sell, steal and discard dogs like commodities, instead of the companions they long us to be. Cross bred into more than 600 shapes — labradoodles, yorkiepoos, spanadors and frugs — designer dogs harbour so many hereditary defects that all are denied pedigree certificates by the UK’s formidable Kennel Club. The anthropomorphic beagle Snoopy, whose cartoon strip was once syndicated to more than 2,500 newspapers, doubtless spoke for all dogs when he said: “Why do I have to suffer such indignities?”
An equally plausible question, one Garfield asks, is, “Do we need another book on dogs?” given that the first publication devoted entirely to them appeared in 1576.
He admits his old dog Ludo would show little interest in his ruminations. “He is still best at being the thing he was 10,000 years ago, despite all that has befallen his species, despite everything we have done to make him more like us. He is best at being a dog.”
And if dogs aren’t the focus of your “unconditional and unfettered devotion”, this canine compilation may not be for you either.