Diary of a Dog-walker by Edward Stourton

Author:Edward Stourton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446487631
Publisher: Transworld

6

Mad Dogs, Hero Dogs and Your Health

I hope happiness hasn’t gone to the dogs

17 April 2010

KUDU DID A SPELL at boarding school while we spent a weekend in Scotland. His best friend, the boisterous Poodle, Teddy, was there too, and I know he felt at home because the headmistress told me he tried to climb on to her bed.

But his behaviour on his return suggested he had been delivered from the fires of hell. Whimpering with excitement, he found as many of his toys as he could and delivered them as sacrificial offerings. He made victory circuits of the garden, sprinted from the top of the house to the bottom of the basement stairs, and licked the cats until they dripped with slobber. It was only three days, for goodness’ sake!

It had been a brainy weekend. Our host, an art historian, was working on the definitive history of English collecting, and one of the other guests was editing a magazine supplement on the Far East. My wife held her own with her heavyweight television documentaries, but these were deep waters for a dog columnist. So I threw a question into the conversational pot that I felt had a bit of intellectual heft: why are dogs – black ones especially – associated with depression?

Churchill made the phrase ‘black dog’ famous. John Colville, his private secretary, traced it to the nursery. He reported that the great man’s doctor would sometimes call after breakfast: ‘Churchill, not especially pleased to see any visitor at such an hour, might excuse a certain early-morning surliness by saying, “I have got a black dog on my back today.” That was an expression much used by old-fashioned English nannies.’

Much academic energy has been poured into the search for the origins of the phrase, and most theories lead back to Dr Johnson, who used it just as Churchill did. ‘The black dog I hope always to resist,’ he wrote. ‘When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog wakes to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking …’

But all this etymology rather misses the point. A good-natured dog like Kudu inspires cheerfulness, not misery, and he usually lifts me out of low spirits rather than the reverse, so why did the association with depression arise in the first place?

It is true that dogs do not have a well-developed sense of humour. I have been reading a book of dog stories from the Spectator of the 1880s and 1890s. There are plenty of anecdotes about the canine ability to find home (including one, which I do not quite believe, about a dog that worked its way back to a farm near Gloucester from ‘the interior of Canada’), and there is a good story about a church-going dog that felt the vicar’s sermon was too long and took the collection plate round in its mouth to shut him up. But the offerings under ‘Dogs’ Sense of Humour’ are decidedly thin. One correspondent records a dog watching a man

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