In Bark, Larissa Macfarquhar reviews Stanley Coren’s latest dog book, The Pawprints of History, and shares some dog anecdotes — some grisly, some touching:
Take Columbus, for example. Columbus believed that for fighting Indians one dog was worth fifty soldiers, so when he advanced into America he took a pack of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mastiffs with him. In one industrious battle in 1495, these mastiffs leaped upon and disembowelled more than a hundred Indians apiece. (This figure was reported by an observer of the fight, Bartolomé de las Casas, who, realizing that it was difficult to credit, went on to explain that the dogs were used to disembowelling deer and boars, and so found the soft and hairless skin of Indians quite easy to bite into.)
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In the early years of the last century, Hachiko, an Akita with a well-developed sense of time, got into the habit of meeting his master, Professor Eisaburo Ueno, of Tokyo University, every day when he arrived from work at the Shibuya subway station. Ueno died in 1925, but Hachiko continued to meet his train every day for nine years, until he himself died, in 1934. The world’s most famous Skye terrier, Greyfriars Bobby, remained by his master’s grave in Edinburgh for fourteen years, until his own death, in 1872. There are dogs who have committed voluntary suttee. It goes without saying that a human being who attempted to behave in any of these ways would be urged to stop and, with some hand-wringing, be hospitalized. But dogs are permitted to love unrequited and to excess. Dogs who love too much, codependent dogs, or clingy, pathetic dogs are not reproved. Love and altruism are never pathological in a dog.