What's a Dog For? by John Homans

Author:John Homans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Mixing the Lab

The site of another of Stella’s beginnings, only a few centuries back, is a few hundred miles north of New York. On a flight to Europe, on the seat-back screen with the little pictogram of the plane making its way across the Atlantic, the last outpost marked on the North American map is a place called St. John’s Harbor, Newfoundland. St. John’s is the largest of countless little ports along Newfoundland’s rocky, forbidding coast, and it is where all Labrador retrievers are said to have originated—so it’s one of Stella’s ancestral homelands. She’s a mutt, but she’s indubitably part Labrador, jet-black—though in some seasons a reddish-brown undercoat peeks out on her ruff and haunches, a glorious, penumbral imperfection. She’s sweet-tempered and friendly to the point of obsequiousness, and focused on people, which is another Labrador hallmark.

Stella is fantastic—she’s my dog, as I tell her with nauseating frequency—but she’s also as common as they come. Labradors are the most popular dog—if you go by Kennel Club registrations—in the world. This is curious, considering the Lab’s inherent homeliness. As much as I like to praise Stella for her beauty, the Labrador’s calling card has always been, along with a can-do spirit, a certain plainness. They’ve never been particularly successful as show dogs—a Lab has never won best in show at Westminster. For one thing, they have nothing that needs grooming, really—it would be a bit like taking a comb and blow drier to a seal. But looks aren’t everything. The Labrador temperament and unassuming intelligence have made it the most popular service and working dog, for a wide array of tasks. They’re not as bright as collies, but the border collie can be like the know-it-all kid in class with his hand up; the Lab, to crudely generalize, can wait till called upon, which is a useful quality.

The legend of Stella’s nautical ancestry, what little I’d heard about it, appealed to me. Labs were used in the eighteenth-century fishing trade, when the shoals off Newfoundland were teeming with codfish, and they adapted to tough lives, their virtue born of hardship. Stella is a great swimmer, though not as determined as Putzi, her forebear, who once paddled after our little outboard in the Charles River for a mile or more. I imagined that her ancestors were plucked from Newfoundland, and their excellence was passed from generation to generation, more or less unchanged, until Stella arrived in my apartment.

But that’s not quite the way it happened. Stella’s story is as much about creation as discovery. Her reality on my rug owes much to the fantasy of the past. What happened to dogs in the nineteenth century, in a sense, was a melting pot in reverse: a loosely organized population was, in a matter of a few decades, thoroughly reimagined to correspond to this fantasy. Stella was, in some sense, created in the self-image of certain nineteenth-century Englishmen—her virtues reflect their virtues. Dogs in the Victorian age were not yet honorary humans, but

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